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Maximise the ERM – the Emotional One.

12 Tuesday Nov 2019

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“ Income appears to buy happiness, but the exchange rate isn’t great.” Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener

Let’s gloss over the standard personal development book example of the multi-millionaire who isn’t happy despite his riches. That’s a bit cliché these days. Particularly if you conclude that it’s nice to arrive at your depression in a nicer car.

I am in many respects a lucky man. I’m not ‘rich’ in financial terms. But I have a paid-for home, and I have enough money, insurance and income to cover most potential challenges, along with a complete psychological resistance to spending any of it. (That’s probably the result of not having any for such a long time.) I also have a lovely family.

(Which is not to say that sponsorship so that I can take up motor-racing would not be gratefully received and wisely invested. 🙂 )

The challenge is that we all, I suggest, want more. That is a ‘good thing’. That is a ‘good thing’ because if we didn’t, many businesses would grind to a halt, people would starve because we weren’t paying them for those things we want.

Imagine Apple if no-one wanted the new iPad-that-looks-just-like-the-old-iPad 6 months after we got that old iPad? (And isn’t it interesting how spellcheckers recognise iPad?)

We all want more for another reason, and that is because we are, as a species, goal-oriented. Unlike my dog, who will sit there all day until I say ‘Tatters’ or move towards the cupboard where we keep her lead, we all want to do something. We want to get somewhere or something, or we want to be doing what floats our boat. Unfortunately, for many of us, that can only be achieved through getting the money to pay for it.

Which demonstrates that having money is not the objective. The objective is what we can get with that money. And it is completion of that objective that makes us happy – not the money, nor the work we do to get it.

Which in turn means that finding ways to be happy that don’t cost money is as valid and valuable a pastime as any other. (And such happiness, ironically, saves us the money we can spend on other things. Mind-numbing.)

Therefore ‘Being happy’ is the Ultimate Objective for our management of time and everything we do, we do towards that end. So it means that in order to spend as much of our time doing the things that make us happy, we need to minimise the time we spend on the support functions to happiness.

Which means maximising the productivity we are capable of in that minimum time spent being productive, so that we can maximise happy time.

(Read that again, or maybe three times – I had to.)

Time costs nothing. We all have exactly the same number of hours in a day. Bill Gates can’t buy any more than I have.

But he spends his time better than most of us, doesn’t he?

There’s the lesson for today.

Maximise the value of the time you have ‘making money’, so that the things that don’t cost money – love and happiness – can have lots of time spent on them.

“You want me to do what? With who? WHY!?”

11 Monday Nov 2019

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I am engaged in a newish hobby. In early 2018, my mate said, “Do you fancy coming on the Cheltenham Sportive with Mark Cavendish?”

I had no idea what a Sportive was, and (sorry) I had no idea who Mark Cavendish was. Turned out he is a Tour de France rider with a nice turn of speed. And a Sportive was an event where thousands of cyclists clogged up open roads and annoyed motorists. My mate went on.

“It’s £45, but if we book now it’s 10% off, so £4.50.” Note that at this point I had no bike, nor had I ridden one for quite a while.

“Go on then,” I said.

(In the event, Mark set off at the head of our peloton and we never saw him again until the end, when I had my picture taken with him. Which I will not reproduce here due to an unfortunate belly- gap in my Lycra.)

Cycling has since cost me about £3,000 in terms of bike, kit, other events and hotel stays, a near-death experience, neck- and bum-pain, hours of painful sweating – and a severe values problem.

I value my friends. I value health and fitness. I like spending time with my mates and I like feeling comfortable.

But, by heck, I find it really hard to cycle. I hate getting ready, I hate how much of the day it takes up when we ride 40+ miles. I’m not overly find of hills, particularly 1-in-14 slopes (‘That’s a cliff, mate’.) And now it’s winter (again), it’s even harder.

But I do it. I’ve committed to it, although it has become evident that I need a little bit more commitment if I am to find it less agonising – after the long rides, my day is gone because I have no strength available whatsoever to do anything meaningful.

I have to discipline myself so that, as Gary Keller and Jay Papasan say in their book, ‘The ONE Thing’, that discipline turns into habit, which is easier.

That’s a GREAT philosophy – applying discipline to something to the extent that it eventually becomes Habit. I write on this precise philosophy in my book ‘The Three Resolutions’, and support the idea that discipline gets easier as time passes. Which is why I bemoan the fact that I wasn’t told this when discipline was applied to me in HM Forces or the early Policing period. That imposed discipline, if accepted and applied, serves self-discipline, which in turn serves us.

And I am not talking about discipline applied to something you LOVE to do – that isn’t true discipline in the sense that you do something you otherwise would not do. True discipline means doing something you otherwise hate, because you know that doing so serves YOU.

And those you love, in terms of being a role-model of discipline to the degree that they don’t see it as (pause for Remembrance Day 2-minute silence*) discipline, just as ‘normal’.

So like many of you, I will do something (cycling) I am ‘not overly fond of’ because it shows respect for my friends, will (eventually) make me healthier and fitter, and gets me out of the house at least once a week.

What do you do, that you detest, that makes you better?

 

*Ironically, one of the ‘other events’ I mentioned was a cycling tour of WW1 battlefields and cemeteries. How coincidental I should write about this just as the world remembered the fallen.)

Time’s STILL passing.

08 Friday Nov 2019

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A blog from 2015……………………

“You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again.” Benjamin Franklin

I chose this quote from the ‘father’ of time management to reflect how much I recognise that procrastination can be an obstacle to my success, although I don’t do it as much as I think I do. I put procrastination off whenever I can.

I was recently at an event run by John Grant, the founder of the YB12 – Your Best Year Ever brand, the brand of which I am proud to be a part (see HERE) and as he was speaking I made the following note on my course workbook:

“I don’t have time to wait to be the best I can possibly be.”

I am 53, with a birthday next month. Optimistically, that’s only 4 years older than Stephen Covey was when he published The Seven Habits. Realistically, I am 35 years older than Jenson Button was when he entered F1, so that’s a dream that isn’t going to happen.

Back to my point. We all have futures, most of us plan for them. Some have detailed plans, others have an ‘idea’ of where they want to go and will get there. Some have no idea. (Some of those wear sports clothes but never break into a sweat unless running from the Law.)

For so many, me included, the recognition that we have a future, and accidents and illness aside a fairly lengthy one, means that we also subconsciously perceive that we can put things off ‘just a bit’, as if we’ll still have the same amount of time left to complete that action as we had when we put it off! A day here and there doesn’t matter, after all. Or does it?

In our culture, a day frequently becomes a week – something we put off on Monday was “better done on a Monday so I’ll do it next Monday.” A diet starts on the first day of the month, so that’ll be next month.” Or a birthday. Or “It’s November the 1st today. Year’s almost over, and Christmas is around the corner, lots of planning to be done, etc. etc. so I’ll set some New Year’s Resolutions and start on Jan 1st.” Except we also know that Jan 1st means coping with the feelings, chocolates and booze left over from the night before and the 1st becomes the 2nd, and in no time at all – “Where has the year GONE?”

The likes of Bill Gates†, Steve Jobs, Gandhi, Franklin, Lincoln, Churchill and so on (pick your own) didn’t procrastinate. They took action. They took action and achieved more than most of us ever will, in some cases with no computers, no Internet, and no electric light . They maximised their use of time through planning and by NOT putting things off.

We all have a future. For some it will be longer than for others, so there’s no equality there.

But we all have NOW.

Use it better. ‘Cos it just passed you by at infinity times the speed of light. Another one went while you read that. And that. Ad infinitum.

 

† I like it when personal development writers use Gates and Jobs as examples of people who succeeded without a degree. Pause. They were at Ivy League colleges. Clue: not cheap places, having money and connections helps, and they had to have passed seriously hard exams and processes to get in. The degree was a given, if they’d stayed.

Be like Elsa. Even you boys.

07 Thursday Nov 2019

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An interesting email from professional speaker Michael Heppell, this afternoon, described how leaves fall from trees. It was all scientific and stuff, and repeating the detail would be cheating, but the content made me think – “How much clutter do I possess?”, which in turn made me decide to ask you the same thing.

How much clutter do you possess?

As I sit in my office (third bedroom, annexed in a familial putsch which resulted in the inability of vagrant children to return home more than one at a time – which they have done, in shifts), I can see a pen holder chock-a-block with pens, letter trays full of stuff, chargers for various devices and a myriad of relevant files.

And that’s just the stuff I have to keep – the remainder of years of decluttering. I have two bookcases full of (mainly) my Seven Habits ‘collection’ that includes three autographed books and most, if not all their audio products and course workbooks (thanks, E-Bay), which is actually a testament to the hundreds of other books I have returned to charity over the years.

You see, my office is a relatively full, but nevertheless tidy reflection of my attempt at adherence to organised, principle-centred living.

But the rest of the house is testament to my spouse’s inability/unwillingness/stubborn refusal to get rid of the memories. Or tat. It’s subjective.

But my computer is full of e-clutter that I have to dispose of. So that’s tomorrow’s house-clearing task.

Anyway – is your home or workspace the same?

Have you kept everything you’ve ever recorded, completed, built, bought, written and read?

There is a theory that when we hoard clutter – and if we are honest a lot of what we retain is clutter – then we don’t own it.

It owns us.

My computer, for example, contains a hoard of old, written Personal Mission Statements and Value Statements. I have had terrible difficulty disposing of these and (probably) will only move them all to a memory stick when they ‘go’, tomorrow.

But they are holding me back because I keep rewriting them, only to find they haven’t really changed in tone or content since 2013. And because they are all there, I keep switching between them. It’s a silly, wasteful pastime and a small example of how retention of the ‘old’ can have an impact on the ‘now’ while also preventing, or at least hampering, the ‘next’.

A lot of the things we keep are ‘incompletes’, as many coaches call them. Things we intended to do but never did, but retain just in case we get back to them – where the reality is that we fear losing them, or at least fear the loss of time we’d have to expend if we DID, suddenly, decide that those three pages of the book we intended to write had to be rewritten from memory.

Look. All that tat? It’s like a password for an account we haven’t accessed since 2010. We haven’t needed it for 9 years, so its loss won’t be that much of a challenge. So as far as all that clutter is concerned, be like Elsa.

Let.

It.

Go.

The Philosophy of Armitage-Shanks.

06 Wednesday Nov 2019

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In my ‘smallest room’, I like to keep a book handy for those longer visits where I can fill my mind while emptying other parts. As you may have surmised from the tone and content of my posts, I don’t like wasting time, and as my income and laziness have not yet stretched to having a door-mounted TV in there, reading is a great substitute.

Today, rather self-indulgently, I selected an old copy of The Seven Habits Workbook, something I buy from time to time to reinvigorate myself with some self-analysis. (I never seem to get to the bit on interpersonal communication, for some reason. Maybe that’s why I never listen.)

In the first pages, the book asks the reader to explore an event where their paradigms were changed because their first impressions were realigned when new information came to their notice.

My favourite example was the day I challenged some kids for throwing litter. Local shops suffered from youths ‘hanging around’ which resulted in repeated calls to police, which in that capacity I used to attend. Off duty one day, I was walking past a small group of teens when I heard a can hit the floor. I challenged the youths to pick it, probably quite brusquely, and they declined the offer. It was only as I stood there facing them down that I realised that the nearby litter bin was overflowing, and it was exceptionally windy.

They hadn’t dropped the can. Nature had.

I realised then, in my own AHA moment, what a paradigm is and how it affects our thinking. It is the way we see things, the lens through which we see and interpret what is happening. And like many lenses, it alters our vision. A lens can correct our vision, or warp it.

Yesterday, a politician was challenged for ‘something he said’. The reports outlined how he had insulted people who died in the Grenfell Tower disaster as ‘lacking common sense’. The funny thing was, he didn’t say that. People with an interest in challenging the politician – and the media, who can never let a fact get in the way of a good story – decided that ‘lacking common sense’ was what he meant.

You can see what he actually said, here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT2z-TtgElU

(You can also look up a previous post from 2016 about The Donald on this site.)

The aim of today’s post is not to tell you what to think. It is to remind you that we ‘think’ through a lens created by our history, our references and our values. And, importantly,  so do others.

Which means that when we are told something by someone else they, too, are telling us through their paradigm of the way they see things – which means that what they are saying may – emphasis may – be based on a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation, or even on mischief.

It’s not always easy to spot, and if you consider that adding our lens to their lens may warp things even further, perhaps the lesson here is to be really careful when starting to espouse your opinions on ‘what just happened’, too.

The other thing I felt about this incident was how our ‘enlightenment’ on matters which should be dealt with ‘sensitively’ (i.e. less than truthfully?) has resulted in a massive increase in tolerance.

“You should be more sensitive, you ignorant fascist bastard!” Irony.

Isn’t it amazing just how thoughtful you become after reading a book when sat with your trousers around your ankles?

And on that image, I’ll let you go. Another toilet metaphor. I could go all day……..

48 years. Same tune, different words. Still true.

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

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As an enthusiastic student of The Seven Habits® , and having shaken the hand of the great man himself, one of my pastimes has been to explore Stephen R. Covey’s earlier works and compare them to those with which many leaders and businesspeople will be more familiar.

I’d gamble most of you would be aware of the first Habit, ‘Be Proactive’, which uses the ‘you are the programmer’ computer metaphor to describe how individuals have control over how they live their lives – to a greater extent than they may otherwise have thought – because they have the ability to choose their response to what happens to them.

In 1971, I suggest, ‘proactivity’ the term was yet to be invented by Stephen Covey. But the idea of humans having ‘choice’ was not, and although the terminology has changed and become part of the business lexicon (like ‘journey’, which is now grossly over-used, so stop it), the concept remains valid.

In his work ‘How to Succeed with People’ (Deseret Books, 1971), a 2½ page chapter referred to how there is a gap between our knowledge about things, and our ability to act on that knowledge. He calls the chapter “Three Processes – Knowing, Choosing and Doing”.

He suggests that many of us fail in our efforts to be better despite the fact that we know what we should do, because there is a disconnect between that knowledge and our ability, or perhaps our willingness, to act on that knowledge. Put simply, our failures lie in how we choose, or fail to choose, to act.

Here’s a direct lift.

“Choosing means to pause and stand back for perspective, to think deeply, and then decide our own actions and reactions. Choosing means to accept responsibility for ourselves and our attitudes, to refuse to blame others or circumstances.

Choosing, then, means to commit ourselves strongly to that which we decide to do. This committing process often involves a real internal struggle, ultimately between competing motives or between conflicting concepts of ourselves.”

He goes on to suggest that making the better choice can break the binding power of habit, and it is habit that tends to keep us where we already are, and away from where we want to be. Moreover, habit teaches us ‘you’ve failed before, you’ll fail again’. As Covey also put it – ‘Private Defeats precede Public Defeats. Choice can over come the pull of habit.

Choice, therefore, creates an important link between the engine of knowing and the gearbox of drive.

The best leaders have the ability to choose well. Their better choices overcome the largesse and stasis created by habit, and habit is the enemy of change for the better. (While a great servant, habit is a poor master. Occasionally.)

Stephen Covey said that principles endure. The principle of choice – whether you use the expression ‘Knowing, Choosing, Doing’ or ‘Be Proactive’ – endures.

It’s fun finding that out by reading older works. Makes me feel all scholarly.

Monday. An opportunity, not a curse.

04 Monday Nov 2019

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The most well-known time management thought-leaders recommend that the personal and professional planning process should be undertaken on a weekly basis, at a set time that you decide suits you best.

During that procedure, be it on Friday afternoon at the end of the past week, the Sunday morning when you’re at your spiritual best, or on Monday morning when you walk into a bucket-load of new ‘stuff’, the objective is to identify all the things you need to get done in that week and schedule when you are going to do them.

This is ‘great’ and ‘ideal’, and for many, completely inefficient. I’ll tell you why.

When I got up this morning I had three things I wanted to do, planned last week. I wanted to write this blog (done), start an amusing speech ready for an event in three weeks’ time, and clean my bike gear (done). By the time I’d finished breakfast I’d added several more things, and you can bet your bottom Euro that by the time I’ve finished this blog there’ll be a dozen more things on my mind.

Is that your experience?

Of course it is.

But does that mean that the weekly planning approach is wrong? No, it does not.

The purpose of planning a week in advance is to address those priorities which you have identified MUST be done, the vital stuff which is on your mind when you do that planning. Your planning will inevitably address all the incompletes from the previous week which were themselves priorities when they came into being, and which are bound to play on your mind when something comes to your notice to remind you about them.

What arises in the moment will be, almost without exception, things which can be done in a moment, or which can be planned far enough away to avoid their having an impact on the important stuff you’re doing this morning. They are either two-minute jobs which will fit into a gap in your day, or longer jobs which you can plan into larger time-periods in that day, or the next.

Or next week, when you plan that one.

The bit of guru-sourced advice which is rarely emphasised is that having done that weekly planning, start your day with a mini-planning session.

  • Look at all the tings you planned to do.
  • Add the new tasks to that list.
  • Then adapt your original plan if necessary to take in any IMPORTANT new stuff, and do any taskettes that are easily shoved into the gaps when an opportunity arises, but be prepared to drop them through those gaps until another day.

You have to decide for yourself whether doing the taskettes before you dig into the real work is better for you, if only because getting rid of them will clear your mid for better things, but that is a personal preference. Just don’t fall into the trap of ending the day with umpteen two-minute tasks done and no real work accomplished.

I know it’s Monday and you’ve already started. But think about this tomorrow when you get into work. Or today, when you get home, because stuff happens off-duty, too.

And you don’t want to get stuck in two-minute taskettes when your children want you to engage with them.

Because childhood happens once. The work will come again.

To summarise, then, a new motto for you.

Plan the ideal, weekly. Adapt to the inevitable, daily. Then focus on the important. Always.

You’ll discover that the opportunity created by planning overcomes that feeling of the accursed Monday.

We’re all too similar to criminals.

01 Friday Nov 2019

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Another potentially controversial entry, today. It may not seem obvious at the outset but it does have a time management dimension, if you stick with it.

Listening to the radio and surfing LinkedIn while otherwise disengaged from the world, two reports outlined a modern phenomenon which I suspect is a consequence of the psychology of modern life.

One report was of a man whose child is being detained in an institution. I know little more, and I suspect that if I were in his position (Circle of Concern) I, too, might be angry. His complaint, which may be perfectly valid, I don’t know, is that his daughter is not receiving the care he believes she deserves. (I’m being careful, he might be absolutely right – we only get the snapshot that he and the BBC want to give us, after all.)

The second is how a Coroner is criticising MI5 for not preventing the London Bridge attack. Again, Circle of Concern stuff – I’m 180 miles and several months away from what happened. But the Coroner is probably not an ex-anti-spy, and probably knows nothing about how big MI5 is and how much it is trying to do with what it has.

Now, I am not saying either party is wrong in their assessment. However, there is one glaring issue arising.

The assumption by the critics is that ‘those responsible’ could have, should have, and must have done better.

Let me go off on a tangent for a minute. When I was a police officer, I would frequently find myself in the custody unit when some under-informed, ill-educated, rights-aware-but-responsibilities-deficient miscreant would be brought in, yelling and screaming. The common statement made by all was

“I wants moi solicitor, now!!”

First of all, he assumed we knew who his solicitor was. Second, he assumed that the Transporter Room facilities were in full working order, and that his solicitor was happy to be beamed away from his bed into the unit, ‘NOW!’

At the same time, we frequently hear about people having to wait for ambulances for an inordinate amount of time.

Well, guess what?

We don’t have a staff of ambulance personnel, legal teams, anti-spies, nurses and doctors available to each of us. There is a finite number of each available at any one time, and they must be available to all of us. And when they are dealing with one of us, the others of us have to wait unless and until we are able and willing to engage such staff out of our own pocket, or ‘our’ emergency trumps ‘theirs’.

But in our world of immediacy brought about by instant news and communication by a phone in our pocket and a car each (as opposed to the ‘old days’ of reliance on public transport and the re kiosk at the end of the road that required cash input), we have unconsciously drifted into an expectation that the world must revolve around us, and NOW and MINE and AVAILABLE are demanded, despite all three not, necessarily, being possible.

(If you think I am wrong, ask yourself how often you’ve been talking to someone and a third party wanders up and starts talking to the second party without even an “excuse me”. That, my friend, is how mobile phones work.)

I think it’s about time we gave ‘other people’ the same respect we expect them to give us when they demand something of us NOW – which is ‘ I’ll get to you as soon as I can’.

If you manage your time well, you can serve more people. But you still can’t serve everyone simultaneously, and you don’t belong to them even if (as some will insist) ‘I pays your wages!’

So remember, when you are sat somewhere demanding something of someone, consider how you feel towards someone who demands that of you – and give the people from whom you seek a service the same respect for what they are trying to do with their resources, that you would expect from them as you utilise your own.

If you have time and resource challenges, so do they.

Time is finite. Resources are finite. Unfortunately, hindsight is infinite. But hindsight is a poor and harsh critic.

So don’t surrender to it. It just might be true that NOW isn’t possible. Now go to your cell and shut up……..

Why you choose not to manage time better.

31 Thursday Oct 2019

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What is your attitude to ‘Time Management’?

When I ask that question, I am not referring to how you ‘see’ time management as a method, or technique, or as a great big pile of ‘new stuff to learn’. In my book I cover that in a chapter entitled ‘Why NOT Time Management’.

No, what I intend to address here is more about your attitude towards the things that have an effect on how they manage their time or, more specifically, whether you want to (learn to) manage your time.

Another question is “Why is it people don’t think they need to, or even can manage their time?” – rather than “Why they don’t want to?”

The truth is, everyone needs to manage their time better, but many just don’t want to be told that. The suggestion that they need instruction in time management openly implies that they possess an inability to do what in their minds ‘should come naturally’ and they don’t like that. They are happy to be trained in their job, how to cook, or how to drive a car, but to many people time management is seen as an innate skill, even an instinct, and “I won’t / don’t need to be told how to do that!”

Your ability – or inability – to manage your time is affected by a plethora of circumstances, but if we were to identify specific situations where people find time management challenging, we would discover that they all come under one or more of five headings.

  1. Some of them are outside your control and you accept that;
  2. Some are controllable, but you simply won’t try because you think they can’t be controlled;
  3. Some aren’t controllable, but you mistakenly try, anyway, and your failure teaches you to stop trying at all;
  4. Some are within your ability to control them, and you know it, but nevertheless you don’t even try;
  5. But most of all you love the ones you think you can control, and you are controlling them.

The objective of my book is to increase the number you can and do control (bring 2 and 4 under 5); to manage your attitude and response to the ones you can’t (improve your understanding of 1 and 3); and to stop wasting your time trying to control the impossible.

I encourage you to think about that, deeply. I firmly believe what you are about to read applies to everything in your life. There are two reasons for this.

First of all, we don’t live compartmental lives any more, thanks to the smartphone, but we nevertheless still insist on thinking that we do. But the main reason I think it applies across the work/personal divide is because of the choices we make.

We choose our work – we apply for a job, fill out the form, complete silly answers to odd questions, maybe do a presentation, certainly undergo the ordeal of an interview, and then we get it. And then the job changes, things happen we didn’t expect, systems change, people change, laws and practices change, the work gets harder and more prolific, we aren’t retrained and we get fed up with what we used to love.

Everything in our lives – what we do, how we get what we have, how we behave – can have time management principles applied to it if we are to be at our most effective. And as personal time management can be affected by many criteria, it means our whole lives are affected by the same criteria.

What are those criteria, then?

  • Expectation – we have duties but we also make personal commitments which give rise to expectations in others, just as we expect others to do what we require of them.
  • Communication and miscommunication – how and what we communicate affects our ability to perform, just as it affects others’ ability to perform for us.
  • Interruptions (phone people) – the immediacy of the mobile phone has inadvertently enabled people to think it’s okay to interrupt other peoples’ conversations.
  • Priorities – we have priorities, those around us have priorities, and no-one thinks that everything being a priority means that nothing is a priority.
  • New systems, protocols and procedures – when you change a system, the training and changes to the old system have a time impact that is rarely taken into account.
  • Expanding responsibilities – the more you take on, imposed or elective, requires improved ability to manage everything.
  • Lack of practical training – a lot of what people need to know is now just ‘expected’. For example, is your ability use a computer now just assumed?
  • Lack of meaningful support – other peoples’ busy-ness means that they aren’t available to help as much as they used to be.
  • Values misalignment – what you think is important and requires passion, may not be approached in the same way by someone whose interests and focus lie elsewhere.
  • Unexpected responsibilities – surprise, you have a new role (no training, support, extra time or money available, sorry).

The challenge is not that these things shouldn’t happen. It is that they are facts of life. A lot of what we think is an annoying obstacle to our lovely and peaceful existence is, in fact, perfectly normal, and it is our response to it rather than the event itself that causes our stress. We think we can’t manage things, but the truth is, as indicated in the first paragraphs of this section, we choose not to manage things when we could, or we fail to learn how to manage things because we don’t want to or don’t know how to.

Proactivity and Time Management Methods are the answer. Or an effective part of it, anyway.

Go learn.

Is a To-Do List on Your To-Do List?

30 Wednesday Oct 2019

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Everyone who has ever worked in any capacity knows how a To-Do List works.

  • You start by dutifully making a detailed list of the things you want to have achieved by the end of whatever period applies. Easy bit.
  • You then start by doing the easiest ones on the list – the ones that take no physical or mental effort. Those 2-minute tasks which, once ticked off on the list, make that list look as though you’ve been really busy, even though you really haven’t.
  • Then, as you inevitably find yourself doing something that ‘comes to mind’ or is additionally and annoyingly tasked to you as the day goes along, you add it to the list after you completed it and you simultaneously cross it off, adding to that impression of effectiveness and making you feel grrreeeaaat.
  • At the end of the day you smile smugly as you look at all those crossed off items and think ‘Haven’t I been good?’ Then you look at the items that remain uncompleted and think, ‘No, not really. I haven’t done the big’
  • You also add tomorrow’s to-dos and realise that for all that apparent busy-ness and dedicated productivity, the list has got longer, not shorter!

‘Twas ever thus, and any time management book worth its salt will tell you that.

Nevertheless, I am happy to suggest that while this is the fashion in which To-Do Lists are routinely executed, they still remain a core practice for most of us and, despite my evident criticism of the usual way in which they are utilised, they can be an excellent way of achieving stuff. But obviously not if they are used in the fashion I have just described.

Effective time management through list-making can be effective. It just takes some higher level of thinking and disciplined application. (But not too much discipline.)

So why do to-do lists work? Science.

I pride myself on a good memory, or more precisely a good working memory. Which does not mean I never forget anything, I assure you. If I can’t remember ‘a fact’, I know how to use my memory to rediscover the fact I seek. In my mind’s eye, I believe that the reason I can do this is the same reason that a properly formulated To-Do List works. And uninteresting as it may initially sound when I finish this sentence, it is all down to science.

Psychologists seem to be agreed on the ability of the human sub-conscious to ascertain what the conscious mind has at some time considered to be important, and then remind the brain when something is happening that relates to that. Here is an idiot’s guide to how that works.

Have you ever been in the enviable position to buy the car you really wanted?

I have. In 2005 I was able to buy a black Toyota MR2, a reliably Japanese Ferrari look-alike which was just fast enough to be quick but frugal enough to be affordable. I saw it the morning I bought it, and if you were to ask me even now I would swear to you that prior to that morning I had only seen red, blue and white ones. It took a while to organise a visit to the vendor, to test-drive it, haggle on a price and pay the cash over. Then I had to insure it to drive it home, and the whole process between see and drive home took about 6 hours. Then I went for a 5-mile run.

And on a 2 mile stretch of road I saw three, yes THREE black Toyota MR2s.

Years later I decided I wanted a Ford Mondeo ST, and I wanted it so much that months before I got it, I could spot an ST out of the corner of my eye 400 yards away. I would not see any other model – only STs and their distinctive wheel design. From miles away.

That is how the mind works. It is called the Reticular Activating System and it is the mind’s way of telling you what you told it, was important. It used to be used to avoid sharp teeth and other dangers, but now it shows you cars. Or books, or jewellery, or clothes or shoes. “You want it?” says the brain. “Here it is.”

Let’s transfer this new knowledge to the simple To-Do List.

When you write something on your list you do so because in some way you have decided it is important enough to make a note about it. This has two effects.

As you wrote it, you further anchored it in your mind. At the same time, you also transferred responsibility for its completion from your mind onto the piece of paper or digital device. What happened next is an indication of how effectively your mind works! Either you remembered to do it simply because you noted it, or you remembered to do it because you looked at the list. I would suggest that if you consciously abandoned responsibility to your List, your successful completion of the task is directly related to your frequency of referral to that List. If you unconsciously abandoned that responsibility, your success is related to how important the task was to your subconscious – unless you look at the list anyway.

Either way, having the list was important the moment you made it. It is important to have made the list because you made the action important in your head when you wrote it, which may not have happened if you hadn’t made the list. Or it is important because you have the list as a tangible reminder.

No list = no subconscious or conscious support for getting things done. Your memory can’t be jogged unless there is something done, or created, that does that.

Next time you write a to-do list, bear all that in mind and it will improve the effectiveness of that list – and your own.