I recently did a personal inventory that I do periodically and was amused to discover that the segment of my life I had the most sorted out was my exercise regime. I shouldn’t have been surprised given how much effort I’ve put into that aspect of my life over the last year but it is contrary to the image I (and others) have of me.
I’ve worked very hard to get the results I’m seeing in that aspect of my life and it is so rational, easy to see, how the effort leads to results. The activity is intrinsically rewarded with increased energy and endorphins. It is also directly tied to very powerful drives. That is how you build a machine, or personal program, that works.
So how do I link together other pieces of my life to form similarly powerful mechanism? My writing, not book production but the writing itself, is organized in a similar fashion with the coffeeshop, notebooks, word tracking, blog and blog stats. I’m gathering the pieces to build another one with the toastmasters, NLP and consulting components. Once I have them I’ll need to be on the lookout for other components, arrangements, drives, rewards and rituals which are needed to construct a machine out of it.
You can take aspects of your life and with slight adjustment of how you do them and how you fit the peices together, you can build them into accomplishment machines as well.
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Edward E. Wilson 
Interesting note on machinic thinking. I catch a hint of Gilles Deleuze’s desiring-machines and it takes me on a trip back through some heavy philosophy reading I did years back. Have you waded through any of Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus before? They’re both extraordinarily dense and difficult reading, but also can be quite rewarding for the effort.
By: khephret on December 21, 2008
at 10:20 am
I tltoaly agree! WAY TOO LONG, NO ACTION! It felt as though she had the outline of the story but had to add a lot of fillers to make the book as long as the previous ones. I definitely agree that I too should’ve been one of the ones to stop reading after Twilight, cause that book was perfect & the others have been such let downs. Definitely no longer a comparison with Harry Potter, in my oppinion.
By: Bhoz on February 9, 2012
at 5:51 am
Good catch there. Yes, I’ve read quite a bit of Deleuze and Guattari including both of those books. They certainly were substantial undertakings.
I’ve written more directly about their work in the past. Here’s a couple of examples:
Introduction to Deleuze and Guattari part one
and
How A Thousand Plateaus is produced.
By: Edward on December 22, 2008
at 1:20 am