Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the category “Action Orientation”

15 Sep 2008

Time Management Progress in Action

I was prompted by a comment on one of my posts from June (J7T was just 19 days old) about how hard time management was. It made me stand back and evaluate how far I’ve come in just over three months (and particularly after a 7/10 level day in terms of stress and task bittiness as I travelled between appointments):

I feel more relaxed control (and a clearly ring-fenced idea of where there is a diminishing pile of ‘stuff’ to clear through the GTD system
I am significantly better at locking down my focus to a task in hand. To switch and give it my full thinking attention. Ironically, writing this blog (with the aim of posting at least 5/7 days a week) has improved this ability
I have a more flexible approach to prioritisation based on trust of my systems and reaction to a gut response. This opposed to the constant prioritising and re-prioritising trap that it is sometimes easy to get into
My sense of ‘someday/maybe’ or just ‘ruthless task deletion’ has improved. I feel like I know myself better and cull those things that will just sit for years on front-of-mind task lists and create noise.
I (as posted on recently) am a lot better at just doing the action. Just getting on and starting without messing around.

And the main area for improvement?

As WorkLoadMaster states in his comment to my post on the ‘Stress of Time Management’ above: it’s all about keeping on top of the system. I feel like my report card would say:

‘Si has shown much improvement over the term. With continuing effort and focus he should continue to improve……’

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Habits and Routines, Learning, Psychology, Time Management and tagged Focus, Getting Things Done, GTD, Switching, Time Management | Leave a comment

13 Sep 2008

1 Comment

The Referred Pain of Procrastination

Medicine 2 by Sergio Roberto

My watching of a favourite American TV show about a cantankerous Dr House, and a 121 chat with a colleague at Madgex started me thinking about why we sometimes find it hard to change something that it appears we could consciously address.

It often appears to me that one of the frustrations with change is that we think we know so clearly what we have to do to make the change happen. Our conscious intellect has applied weighting (prioritisation) and a set of justifications to the most likely drivers for change. We think that we can start to get up early in the morning and get loads of work done/ start that book/ do that reading if only we could respond to the alarm clock. We obviously think/ justify that we need more sleep to do this, so we go to bed earlier. But this doesn’t seem to work, so we re-tag ourselves as ‘being one of those people that…..’ and continue not to get up early. Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing, Psychology and tagged Action Orientation, Chaining, Conscious vs Unconscious, Game Playing, Referred Pain

10 Sep 2008

3 Comments

Does Everything Come Back to Simplicity (and are Our Minds Hardwired to Fight This?)

A midnight thought from Chicago where I’ve been at the Global Online Recruitment Conference talking for Madgex over the last few days.

My talk was about user experience. I found in my practice and then delivery of the presentation that the main focus of the points I was making was all around simplicity. I had to make lots of references to us not fooling ourselves into thinking we know what’s right for others without a lot of deep thought. To the need to stand back and really consider whether steps are necessary vs. an alternative with fewer steps or stages.

The crux of the thought for this post, wider that online recruitment is as follows: do we trick ourselves into thinking that complex is good. Do we effectively have an in-built bias to believe that sophisticated is good?

Even if we remove the loaded word of ‘good’, can we assert that the conscious intellect defaults to an assumption that because we can handle complexity and multiple steps, that this is something that may be factored without cost.

There are obviously many references in our language to the beauty of simplicity, and we are often told to strive for simplicity. However I think that really living the dictum of continually reviewing and evaluating (in effect engaging in deliberate practice in all that you undertake), rather than reaching a lowest common denominator, you in effect achieve the maximum of simplicity with the minimum of dumbing down.