Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the month “October, 2008”

31 Oct 2008

Does Ruthless Focus and Time Management Require you to Care Less?

After a week’s holiday relaxing, thinking and practicing my knowledge management, I think I’ve come to a conclusion; albeit one I’ve reached before.

I’ve always had moments of clarity in my productivity when I’ve felt like I had the meaning of life (in a productivity sense :-) at my fingertips.

These moments mainly occur when a project or task which is primarily very important suddenly becomes more urgent. At these points in time I find I am very clear about what I should be spending my time on.

The reasons for this are clear. You are given some set of priorities by external events that you internally agree with (Covey’s Important and Urgent align).

What is very interesting is how my relationship changes with the other ‘previously-prioritized’ items in my life. Firstly, their importance fades away. So far: so obvious. But here’s the fascinating observation to me. It’s as though they never were important. The clarity I have is remarkable in that I see the other non-important items for what they are. Their true lack of importance or lower priority is suddenly obvious.

So what happens when this isn’t the case? When there isn’t a sudden important/urgent. I personally find that the noise of tasks and actions all merges into one. The general stress of ‘to-do’ completion drowns some of my ability to prioritize more subtley. But more importantly, my barriers to the entry of the tasks that I’m not due to be focussing on at that point in time seem so much lower.

The working solution for me? I’m going to trial out a bit of bloody-minded ignorance. Let me act as if I were always in those moments of transparency, and see where that gets me……

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Posted in Action Orientation, Focus, Habits and Routines, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , | Leave a comment
26 Oct 2008

See /Do /Tag for Happiness in the Moment

So I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. I’m pretty certain that I haven’t because it feels like it contradicts a lot of the things I’m constantly striving to achieve: focus, planning, constancy.

First, an attempt to define something. I’ve referred in previous posts to the feelings of resistance to task completion. Particularly those tasks that are either poorly defined, difficult, overly time consuming, unknown/new etc. I personally feel this resistance in the middle chest/ upper gut as a kind of heaviness.

I have posted on a number of occasions about my attempts to overcome this. Normally the approaches/ techniques I have explored have in most ways been medium/ longer term in the sense that they involve planning/ mental approaches/ chunking down the steps for the task completion etc.

What I have begun to explore more recently is whether there is a certain category of resistance that this approach does not work for. Let’s call it ‘in the flow’ resistance.

There appear to be certain thoughts, tasks or actions, usually relatively minor in nature, that my other-than-conscious throws to the surface of consciousness for my attention. Often I can immediately tag these for later action in a task list. These thoughts(actions) behave like most other non-planned-for creativity: as soon as they’re captured in a trusted system they go away from my mind, and don’t weigh on my chest to be handled.

However, there are certain actions that appear to sit there on my chest and refuse to budge. They create this ‘in the flow’ resistance. It feels like someone else has made a decision that, regardless what else I was consciously planning – or, indeed, regardless of what my initial conscious response is to the action raised – this is the thing I should do. Right here, right now.

The interesting things are:
1. If I don’t do them immediately, the resistance that I can sometimes get (as described above) is felt – often very intensely – even though it is not something I had consciously raised
2. If I do take the action, it feels as though I get disproportionate reward. As though I didn’t realize how important it was to me internally until it was done
3. The actions are very often things (for me) which relate to commitments. To myself and others. As though my other-than-conscious is reminding, but refusing to go ‘on to snooze’

Posted in Action Orientation, Conscious and Unconscious, Focus, Happiness, Psychology, Stress and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
19 Oct 2008

Trial Run to Overcome Your Procrastination

Back looking at Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind and I’ve hit a brilliant point where our belief system is explored:

‘We possess a whole variety of beliefs, many of which are themselves unconscious or unarticulated, which specify, more or less rigidly, and in more or less detail, our character and our psychology. They define what kind of person we are, our personality or ‘self image’, and even how our minds are supposed to work.’

He goes on to query whether our beliefs about ability, and needs to protect self-esteem can also lead us to become more mentally clumsy when faced with a challenge that increases our vulnerability.

Back to the game playing psychology that I have explored many times here (see tags in sidebar to right), we can trick ourselves into activity.

By starting work on something as a ‘practice’ or trial run, we both overcome the procrastination build-up against starting actually do something ‘that we may not be good at/ may not be actually able to do’. But we also ‘open ourselves to the undermind’ and the creativity latent within us.

So the key is to just start. Have a bash. Act as if you can do it.

Posted in Action Orientation, Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing and tagged , , | Leave a comment

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