by Matt Perman
Mike Anderson has a good post from a while back on how email intervals can save you from insanity. He gives good advice with some unique twists. Also, his statement of the problem is great:
Problem: Email is unrelenting, and when you tend to your inbox—people just reply back to you more quickly. Email will take over your life if you let it. Here’s how I fought back.
by Matt Perman
Another Fast Company column by Gina Trapani. Here are the first two paragraphs:
In an interruption-driven culture, it’s too easy to let everyone else decide where your attention goes and how to spend your next 10 minutes. If you jump every time your phone rings, a new email arrives, your Blackberry buzzes, or someone stops by your desk, you’re undermining your most important work and costing your company money. A recent study shows that unnecessary interruptions costs the U.S. economy $650 billion dollars in lost productivity per year.
Being available to your boss and co-workers is part of your job. But the most creative and important work you do requires total focus and attention for an extended period of time. Your brain needs at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted time to dive in, concentrate on one thing, and get into the zone where you’re truly focused and doing your best work. Time blocking is a technique that sets the stage for that to happen.
by Matt Perman
Gina Trapani, founding editor of Lifehacker, has a recent column in Fast Company on multitasking.
by Matt Perman
From an article I’ve been reading on leadership and solitude:
That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
by Matt Perman
The three categories are:
Every email or piece of paper is either an action item (to be done or delegated), information, or trash.
by Matt Perman
Often, some of the best ideas come from just hearing how other people do things. So I found it illuminating to read about the categories that Churchill divided his incoming paperwork into in Churchill on Leadership.
Seeing this illustrates how it can be helpful to pre-sort things before tackling them (whether electronic or physical). Here are his categories:
by Matt Perman
“Every great accomplishment of mankind has been preceded by an extended period, often over many years, of concentrated effort.”
– Earl Nightingale
by Matt Perman
A short, quick overview of some of the concepts.
by Matt Perman
Good thoughts from Josh Sowin.
by Matt Perman
Most people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions because they don’t translate them into their schedule.
It’s that simple.
If you make a resolution, but don’t plan time to actually accomplish it, it usually won’t happen. It won’t happen because it remains merely an intention. And intentions that aren’t specifically translated to “actionable zones” tend to be treated by your mind as “nice to do, but not necessary to do” items.
The result is a hit-and-miss approach. Some days you remember and follow through, and others you don’t.
Think of an Olympic athlete. They don’t simply say “my goal is to win the gold medal.” Instead, they adhere to a workout schedule. Without that concrete mechanism of action, the goal would simply be wishful thinking.
Now, what about those more intangible aims such as “lose 10 pounds”? How do you schedule that? Obviously you can schedule the exercise portion of that goal. But what about the “eating less” portion? Speaking from experience, it’s easy to get to the dinner table and forget (or deliberately neglect?) all intentions of eating healthy.
This is where reviewing your goals comes in. Mindsets that need to be more or less continuous (like “eat less”) tend to be kept in mind through regular review until they become second nature. The weekly review helps accomplish this; for things that tend to fall out of mind easily (like “eat less”), just pausing at the beginning of your work day to remember your aims can be helpful.
Which leads to one last thing: you have to keep your number of resolutions small. It’s not possible to create actionable mechanisms for or keep in mind a large number of new (or renewed) aims.
If you find it helpful to make new year’s resolutions (and they are a good thing — see John Piper’s article on resolutions, as well as his article on what to do when you fail), make just a few that really count, and then create simple, actionable mechanisms to make them happen.