Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the tag “Simplicity”

The Power of Less: Babauta’s tips

I was struck by some productivity principles in the heart of Leo Babauta’s book, ‘The Power of Less’:

– Slow down and enjoy every task. Pay attention to it and be in the moment to enjoy it.
– Do one thing at a time and do it well.
– Find the stressors in your life and ways to eliminate them.
– Create time for solitude. It’s important to just have some time for yourself.
– Do nothing. Don’t afraid to be lazy.
– Know what your simple pleasures are, and put a few of them in each day.
– Practice being in the moment at any time during the day.

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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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

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.

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