Essentials vs. Baggage

As you move along in life, you need focus to succeed and thrive. The notion of a packing list for your life’s journey could apply not only to your professional life, but to other parts of your life as well. Business thinker Brian Tolle outlines the essentials, reblogged below.  

To stretch the metaphor—we’d ask you to think about the difference between your essentials and your unnecessary baggage? What do you really need and what can you leave behind? Let us know in comments!

Photo by Charles O'Rear, 1941, © National Archives and Records Administration via Wikipedia Commons

What to Pack for Raising Your Game

by Brian Tolle for Huffington Post, Feb. 29, 2012

I was working with a client last week that is two months into an organizational effort to “raise their game.” The leadership team is working on setting a clear vision for the five-year plan; holding people accountable to higher performance and new roles; and focusing its effort on a limited number of high priority projects. The organization is clearly on a journey and so I thought it best to remind them of what to pack to make the trip highly successful. Your company may be on a similar journey so here are my travel tips.

Sense of humor
Like a great pair of versatile travel pants, you will use your sense of humor in many different situations. A sense of humor is indispensable in adding a degree of levity to those inevitable crucial conversations. It also helps us keep things in perspective since very few businesses deal in life-and-death situations. It helps us avoid dwelling on the negative and opens our minds to possibilities. Don’t leave home without it.

A clear and compelling picture in your mind of your future
Yes, you need a vision but don’t confuse with this a goal. Goals are left-brain, a vision is right-brain. The more compelling your vision is to you, the greater the chance it will pull you through a lot of the b.s. and obstacles headed your way. If your vision is more like a hope or emotional stirring, you will find out the hard way how useless those versions are to you when you come up against the looming brick walls.

Fierce time management
There are people who steal your time. You know who they are. And they think nothing of it. They are thieves. Worse than thieves, they are murderers of your time because once they take your time, you can never get it back. Is that acceptable to you? If so, re-visit your vision because it’s sounding more like a wish if you’re willing to let others mess with your time. (I hope I’m making you angry.) If you’ve had enough, the first step in raising your game is to set boundaries and expectations with those who slay your time. Maintain a sharp focus on your vision, prioritize all the demands others place on your time, and learn to say “no” (or at least negotiate) when new demands appear.

Low tolerance for b.s. and high drive to do something about it
When you are highly motivated to raise the game of your organization, you will find you don’t have the time to put up with the usual b.s. that some people are very good at generating. When we’re happy with the status quo, we usually tolerate more b.s. because we suspect dealing with it with prove troublesome to maintaining the peace. But when you’re looking to raise your game, ignoring the b.s. is a luxury you can no longer afford. You hear yourself saying, “I don’t have time for this” and find yourself addressing the issue sooner than later. When once you may have ignored it, now you’re honest with yourself and admit, “it won’t go away until I deal with it.”

What else would you add to the packing list?

* * *

Brian Tolle is a partner at The Re-Wired Group, an innovation incubator that practices the Jobs-to-be-done approach to business modeling. Brian has also written a leadership guide called Shortcut, for managers and directors who are looking to become leaders in their marketplace and in their careers. Brian also runs a Facebook page for Shortcut, where business leaders and director-level managers exchange advice on finding leadership in their work.

Follow Brian Tolle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BrianTolle

Focus Your Brain

We’ve been thinking a lot about the brain lately, and we’re not the only ones. Big Think blogger Megan Erickson interviewed Margaret Moore, founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital for the piece “Life’s Messy. Train Your Brain to Adapt.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“…we can all learn to be better focused and more organized. “When you can focus all of your brain on one thing, that’s when you’re at your best,
she says. “You’re integrating all your brain. But it also consumes a huge amount of resources. You get tired. That’s really how the brain learns—when the brain is learning, it’s laying down new networks. The brain is changing when we focus. It takes a lot of energy, and when it’s depleted it isn’t able to manage the emotional brain. When your pre frontal cortex is depleted, your emotions rule all day. ”

Megan says, “Organization is achieved through future-oriented thinking: the ability to monitor one’s emotional response (i.e. ‘I want to watch TV now!’) and redirect attention towards the activities that will help us achieve our goals (i.e. ‘if I spend 30 minutes doing the dishes now, I will wake up to a clean home tomorrow’).”

What do you think?

See the full article at:  http://bigthink.com/ideas/42522

Related posts at Simplify:

• Train Your Brain
• Multitasking Is Dangerous to Your Health

Arianna Huffington Admits Addiction…to Blackberry

Blackberry by De-okin via Wikimedia Commons

That’s not really a surprise is it? But more importantly, while Arianna admits it, she also thinks her addiction is not the greatest thing ever. Some of her thoughts:

“At the end of Fashion Week, my thoughts turn to one of modern life’s great paradoxes: how, in our hyper-connected lives, do we pull the plug on our hyper-connectivity, disconnect from our devices and reconnect with ourselves?”

Does that sound familiar? Have you ever felt this way? She goes on:

“It’s a paradox I often ponder privately, and speak about publicly. But my decision to blog about it today was prompted by two recent pieces, on Styleite and The Stir, which included several photos of me looking at my BlackBerry during Fashion Week shows.

“As I looked at myself looking at my BlackBerry during the fashion shows, I remembered that this was not the first time I had missed something important because of my BlackBerry addiction.”

And please don’t get us wrong. We love Arianna. If she, of all people has misgivings and concerns about staying connected and not distanced by her technology, then it gives us hope that we share the same feelings.

See her full post at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/caught-redhanded-with-a-b_b_1285794.html

Limit Dashboard Distractions

Does your car’s dashboard look like an aircraft cockpit?  

 

How much stuff do you really need to do while you’re driving? Answer a phone call? Get directions? Eat a sandwich, watch a movie, reply to a text—maybe all at once? No problem! <-sarcasm.

We’ve written about this before and finally, it is dawning on car makers that all these distractions might be a bad thing.

Let’s see what happens to dashboards after a multi-million-dollar lawsuit when someone claims that car makers have liability for an accident or injury caused by a distracted driver.  Anyone know if that’s happened in your city or state? Let us know in comments!

Carmakers Urged to Limit Dashboard Distractions

By MATT RICHTEL, February 16, 2012

A federal traffic agency formally urged carmakers on Thursday to stop equipping automobiles with entertainment and navigation systems that can distract drivers.

The agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said that its proposed voluntary guidelines were not intended to reduce the sale of popular features like navigation systems. Rather, the agency wants to encourage companies to design them to be safer.

Studies have shown that the risk of crashing increases markedly when drivers take their eyes off the road for even two seconds, particularly the faster they go. Carmakers, however, are building increasingly complicated devices — called “infotainment” systems — that control music, navigation, phone systems, even Internet searches and social media updates.

See the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/us/carmakers-urged-to-curb-dashboard-distractions.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=dashboard&st=cse

Related posts at Simplify:

• Distracted Driver Almost Kills Me
• Distracted Pedestrians as Bad as Distracted Drivers?

 

Overload!

Still shot from "The Man Who Fell to Earth", 1976 film by Nicholas Roeg

The latest coping strategy for multitaskers is featured in Matt Richtel’s ongoing series for the New York Times about digital distractions:

In Data Deluge, Multitaskers Go to Multiscreens

Published: February 7, 2012

Workers in the digital era can feel at times as if they are playing a video game, battling the barrage of e-mails and instant messages, juggling documents, Web sites and online calendars. To cope, people have become swift with the mouse, toggling among dozens of overlapping windows on a single monitor.

But there is a growing new tactic for countering the data assault: the addition of a second computer screen. Or a third.

This proliferation of displays is the latest workplace upgrade, and it is responsible for the new look at companies and home offices — they are starting to resemble mission control.

(…there’s more at the link above)

Really?

I mean, you could do this at any office, but it does seem to be a strategy only for people who must  research THERE and write HERE.

Reminds me of a scene from “Man Who Fell to Earth” where David Bowie’s alien character watches a dozen TVs at once. It’s cool, but then again, you are not an alien—or are you?

Overeating Reduces Memory, Focus

QUADRUPLE BYPASS BURGER® Four of everything: Patties, Cheese, Onion, and Tomatos; All housed on a grilled bun. 2 pounds of meat, 8,000 calorie

Overeating is not only bad for your body below the neck, it’s also bad for your brain. How many times have you faced the food-induced  “after-lunch coma”?

Want to improve mental focus? Cut the calories!

Older people who consumed more than 2,143 calories a day had more than double the risk of a type of memory loss called mild cognitive impairment compared to those who ate fewer than 1,500 calories a day, according to a study being released Sunday by the American Academy of Neurology on its website (aan.com) by Yonas Geda, lead author of the study and a neuropsychiatrist at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz.

This was reported at USA Today, WebMD and many other pubs, see a full article at http://yourlife.usatoday.com/fitness-food/diet-nutrition/story/2012-02-12/High-calorie-intake-linked-to-mild-memory-loss-in-elderly/53058776/1

Your Better Brain — Exercise!

The Human Brain - in color!

New studies show the benefit of exercise to maintain and increase focus, memory and general cognitive function, as reported by James S. Fell, Special to the Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2012, here’s an excerpt:

In-Your-Face Fitness: Dumbbells can make you brainy

A growing body of evidence shows that regular exercise — be it resistance training or aerobic — helps ward off a host of cognitive impairments and enhances brainpower all life long.

“Aerobic exercise improves ability to coordinate multiple things, long-term planning and your ability to stay on task for extended periods,” [says Michelle Voss, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Iowa], “Resistance training, which is much less studied than the aerobic side of things, “improves your ability to focus amid distracters.”

This makes sense to me: Aerobic exercise such as running involves staying on task for a long time, and if you’re training to get better, you need to stick to a plan. Weightlifting requires ignoring the spandex and lousy gym music and focusing enough to prevent the barbell from crushing your trachea during bench press. Perhaps honing the discipline for aerobic exercise and/or learning to tune out gym distractions reaps benefits for the other, non-athletic parts of your life.

In the Brain

The details of what’s going on inside the skull are fascinating. Voss explained that MRIs of people in their 60s showed increases in gray and white matter after just six months of exercise. This happens in the prefrontal and temporal lobes, sites that usually diminish with age. With exercise, Voss says, they grow.

Voss also explained that the hippocampus area of the brain, key for memory formation, shrinks 1% to 2% per year in those older than 60, but when people in this age group begin fitness regimens, it grows by 1% to 2% instead.

Beyond growing one’s brain, exercise improves the ability of different parts of the brain to work together, Voss says. It talks to itself better, but not in a multiple-personality kind of way.

Columbia University researchers published a study of 1,238 elderly people in the journal Neurology last year, reporting that the 25% who were the most physically active were nearly half as likely to suffer these brain lesions compared with their inactive counterparts.

See the title link for the full article. And get your brain into the gym, pool, track, golf course or wherever you can exercise.

(I take may brain with me everywhere!)

Sesame Street kills Multitasking

As Mr. Hoots schools Ernie in this old Sesame street clip: “You gotta put down the duckie if you wants to play the saxophone.”

You know it’s the truth…

Poor Pooh Bear, the Multitasker

Here’s an excerpt from great piece by Maria Konnikova posted in Scientific American:  What Can Winnie-the-Pooh Teach Us About Media Multitasking?

I’d say more, but the piece speaks for itself and, dear reader, to say more would just be preaching to the choir.

Credit: Crabchick, Creative Commons.

In the very first paragraph of the very first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne uses Edward Bear—newly dubbed Winnie-the-Pooh—to illustrate a concept that is no less (and perhaps far more) relevant now than it was back in the days of Christopher Robin’s childhood: we can’t think straight when our head is busy doing something else. Milne writes:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

Oh, the perils of multitasking for proper thought. Pooh would like to think of a better way to travel down stairs—but he can’t, not as long as his thought process keeps being interrupted by the next stair. And what are those bump-bump-bumps but the exact kind of taxing interruption that we place on our own minds, of our own choice? We don’t need Christopher Robin to drag us down a set of stairs. We are very capable of doing it to ourselves, thank you very much.

Think of each step as one more thing that keeps getting in the way of what you’d originally meant to be thinking—in Pooh’s world, how to get down stairs; in yours, anything that you were trying to accomplish. Each new input—an email, a phone call, a chat message that pops up on your screen, a beep from your phone that reminds you of something you were supposed to do—serves as a bump that, quite literally, interrupts the thought process in a physical way. And when you resume it? You have to try to recreate your brain’s path, retrace your steps, take a moment to gather your mental resources – all at an incredible cost to both quality and speed.

Just like Pooh’s mind isn’t meant to think when it is bouncing down steps, ours aren’t meant to multitask. We are horrible at it. Good multitaskers? They don’t exist. Even the self-proclaimed best of the best perform far worse at just about anything when they are multitasking than when they focus on one thing at a time. In one study, those people who defined themselves as successful heavy media multitaskers, consuming multiple content streams at once with ease, were actually more susceptible to both irrelevant environmental stimuli and irrelevant representations in memory. As a result, they were far more likely to get distracted and became worse instead of better at task-switching. And isn’t task-switching just where you’d expect good multitaskers to excel?

See the full article at:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2011/12/21/what-can-winnie-the-pooh-teach-us-about-media-multitasking/?mid=55

Exercising SelfControl (C) to Avoid Interruptions

There are many ways to stop intrusions into your focused time. Turn off the cell phone. Leave the computer. Shut the office door, if you have one.

I close the door and hang up a “Do Not Disturb” sign to signal that I am immersed in some project, on a conference call or an important phone call.

When it’s a less serious project, like some research reading I have to catch up on, but not terrifically time-sensitive, I have one that says “Please Knock.” With this one, if people really need me, they will knock, or if it’s a trivial matter, they just wait until I come up for air. These signs have worked pretty well for me.

If you’re working on the computer, avoiding distractions might not be so easy. By now, most people have learned to turn off pop-ups to limit distractions as they work online. That stops popups from coming to you, but what about the distractions that you initiate?

We understand: You’re trying to work, but distractions are sooo tempting–just take a peek at personal email, or look at Facebook or Twitter for “just a minute”–and the next thing you know it’s an hour later.

A student at Columbia University in New York has taken it one step further, creating an app that blocks your own access to distractions while you work on your computer.

It’s very clever–called SelfControl. See below. Let us know what you think and if you install it–what your experience with it is.

SelfControl

Because sometimes you don’t have any.

Are your favorite websites or your emails a distraction? SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to mail servers or websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, Facebook, and Twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out.

The main SelfControl page is here. Or download the application here.

SelfControl was developed by Charlie Stigler for Steve Lambert, a fellow at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. SelfControl is free and open-source software, released under the GPL. The source code is available at Github.

Note: SelfControl (c) is not a product of, or affiliated with Simplify.