Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the category “Focus”

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):

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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……’

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Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Habits and Routines, Learning, Psychology, Time Management and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
10 Sep 2008
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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.

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Posted in Action Orientation, Communication, Conscious and Unconscious, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Mindfulness and tagged , , ,
05 Sep 2008

The Holy Grail of Deliberate Practice

Following a particularly busy productive week, I am hugely struck by something that is probably screamingly obvious to a large section of the population. Those who:

1.    Do not consider that they have any need for time management, personal effectiveness or personal ‘action system’ (e.g. GTD etc.) training

2.    Just get on with stuff

3.    Don’t worry about the stuff they’re not doing when they’re doing the stuff they’re doing

They may be effectively prioritising on the fly based on importance/ time/ energy etc. But I’m not sure whether they may gravitate to ‘noise’ or most apparent urgent/importance

Maybe it is some form of evolutionary curve, but striving for increased personal effectiveness has led me to: Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Deliberate Practice, Focus and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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