Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the category “Time Management”

18 Aug 2008

Strange Bedfellows: The Relationship between Mood and Time Management

Cumulus 4 by Marcin Rybarczyk

Again, it must be where my mind is at the moment. The challenges of time management and personal effectiveness all seem to be appearing in the shadows and the greyness conscious, rational, systematic approaches to the problem.

I think I need to start to believe the statement made in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s excellent Fooled by Randomness

‘We will see that we are not genetically fit to be rational and act rationally’ – there is a divorce between those who have ideas and those who carry then out in practice

(Here is the link to the string of posts on the impact that Fooled by Randomness has had on me)

I make this observation as I monitor myself into a next phase of effectiveness. I am getting a lot more focused on My3Things for each of my areas of accountability/ personal vision and goals (I have extended out my own use of the term My3Things from its use within Madgex for 360 degree feedback – just a useful way of managing a ‘dashboard’ of top 3 priority actions over seven areas of accountability/ vision & goals)

Our Simple Minds: Mind Tricks

Sorry that I’m struggling to shake the simplicity theme that underpinned the Play/ Game posts earlier in the

Person at Desk by Sigurd Decroos

week. I feel this will be a recurring theme throughout my exploration of conscious vs. other-than-consciousness as it is at the heart of our self-management.

The whole idea about tricking or ‘blatantly’ nudging yourself into change is a strange one when you consider the supposed power of the intellectual conscious. Back to the ‘remembering to take something to work’ example that I have mentioned before and that David Allen uses so well: how could such an intelligent human animal really rely on leaving something by the front door in order to remember to take it into work the next day. Why is NLP and hypnotherapy so effective in enabling self-change when analysed, it is clearly so simple: all about beliefs and mental associations.

I was struck this morning how we can trick ourselves into working. How we can fool ourselves into addressing challenging tasks just by being a bit dumb about it.

Put simply: if we remove the conscious barriers or layers between identification of the need for the action, and the action itself, then it appears that we get more done with less resistance. I sometimes think that Forest Gump is an ideal role model for all busy people who want to achieve more in their lives.

The Social and Information Web Drug II

So, continuing my splurge:

7. Is there an element of voyeurism? Particularly when you consider things like the FriendFeed stream to the right, and when you consider the post I mentioned yesterday on the Future of Blogging on ReadWriteWeb showing the ability to run your FriendFeed through a blog.

8. Less ominously, and extending point 2. yesterday about ‘Connection’, social interaction is an obvious driver of the fascination

9. Within Belbin’s later additions to his preferred team role profiles (which came from data feedback on a cluster of interests he hadn’t originally seen) is the ‘Specialist’ role. Those who want to know all there is about a subject. Is there an alignment between the preferences of those who find the time to fully absorb themselves in social media, or the tracking of certain streams of information, and this ‘type’?

10. The original draw of ‘surfing the net’: the random exploration of links and connections. The revelling in the depth and breadth of human interest and endeavour (to wax lyrically about it)

11. The experimentation with a set of tools by a keen and passionate group of followers. These tools likely to have the ability to significantly shift some elements of our future histories

You can tell I’m still splurging……..