Mindfulness | Just Seven Things

Archive for the category “Mindfulness”

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.

Posted in Action Orientation, Communication, Conscious and Unconscious, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Mindfulness and tagged Conscious vs Unconscious, Deliberate Practice, Process Engineering, Simplicity

03 Sep 2008

How Does ‘Just Doing It’ Help with Prioritisation and Make You Happier?

I wrote a couple of days ago about how the only way you’ll get better at managing your time and productivity is to ‘just do it’. Just take the time and do the task. Don’t prevaricate or procrastinate. Just start and do what you can in the time.

I am noticing other things about this approach:

1. It focuses you on what you have to do ‘aid’ the removal of prevarication. There are the obvious things which I have written about before: making a shallow on-ramp to the task by thinking about the required very next steps when you accept the task/ project (a key element from David Allen’s GTD system – see Blogroll). Using game play to lighten the weight/ onerousness of the task etc. etc.

2. At a more general level it requires you to assess the types of things that you’re interested/ passionate about doing. Because you get into your momentum of ‘just doing it’; be they back to back 5 minute, or 30 minute slots, you start to focus on the things that slide through the easiest.

When I was taking notes today, I ended up using phrases like ‘lubricating’ the tasks. Reducing the resistance. It’s all about achieving a flow of activity tied bound by the way in which it makes you feel. It’s the opposite of feeling resistance to task after task. Obviously, you then have the practical challenge of clearing as efficiently as possible the things that you don’t enjoy (of which we know there are lots in your average day). However, taking this approach you get a bit into the mode that you do before going on holiday. Suddenly you crank through things because you are positively drawn to getting them out of the way so that you can get stuck into your back to back low resistant, well-lubricated enjoyables…

3. It significantly aids your prioritisation. I think a number of things are at work here:

– in an obvious sense, the more you do the more you are able to see what’s important. When you sit there with a list you’ve not got into anything to see where a lot of common actions may be bound (e.g. the thing that’s going wrong in the process/ the major project that hasn’t been done)

– It cuts through the crap. The achievement of outputting and actioning and starting different activity going shifts the weighting on a flat/ static to do list. You want more of the big impact things to increase this feeling of achievement

– Your decision-making is improved. You know what is giving you relief/ payback and start to find the red herrings. The things which until you get into them seem important, but aren’t.

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Game Playing, Habits and Routines, Happiness, Learning, Mindfulness and tagged Action Orientation, Deliberate Practice, Happiness, Prioritisation, Time Management | Leave a comment

01 Sep 2008

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What Do the Secrets of Greatness mean for Time Management and Productivity?

Pierogi by Anna Moderska

Following my last post, I’ve been thinking about what the secrets of greatness mean for time management and the impact this has on personal productivity?

I think that there is a scarily simple answer: just do it.

To explain: the core of the ‘secret’ of greatness was deliberate practice. Practice defined as being the focused attention at getting better at doing whatever it is that you’re doing.

Therefore, the only way you’ll get better at managing your time and productivity is ‘just do it’. Just take the time and do the task. Don’t prevaricate or procrastinate. Just start and do what you can in the time. Lowest unit of time? Assuming everything is to hand (i.e. brain/ pen/ paper) then five minutes? Try and do this as many times in a twenty four hour period as possible.

So this gives you the ‘practice’. When it comes to the deliberate improvement activity:

1. Try and get better at just starting and doing

2. Try and maintain mindfulness on the best way of squeezing the task in hand, and the quality required, into the time you are so ruthlessly managing

3. ….and repeat

There was a TV programme about a dumpling factory in China. The most productive dumpling maker was interviewed. When asked what she thought about all day when making dumplings, she replied ‘how to make them faster and better’

Dumplings or decisions: the deliberate practice is the same.