Firstly I have to express my delight at how well Arianna articulated my major gripe with the news media – so called “balanced” reporting. As Arianna said, things either are, or are not.
Just think of the resources that the major news channels have at their disposal: the staff, the satellite technology, transport, news feeds, syndication etc. Yet when the hard work of a journalist is summarised and prepared for transmission, we often have to listen to some half-baked “balanced” alternative that clearly is often hastily put together at the last minute in order to fulfil this pointless approach to news broadcasting.
Take yesterday morning for example: a national radio station in England was bringing a report in their morning show about childhood and teenage obesity. The British government are currently targeting the 8 to 15 age group because doctors have noticed a new obesity problem there. A member of the government team that is formulating a national campaign to tackle this problem came on the air for interview. The first thing the host said to him was that surely 8 to 15 year olds have the same right to a burger and fries as anyone else? I was hugely impressed by the restraint of the interviewee who managed to hold his temper in the face of such a remark.
That is the standard approach to all news stories on that station. I am not exaggerating when I say that if an astronomer came into the studio to report on the latest discovery in stellar observation, he would be asked if he thought it was right that all this money should be wasted on looking at stars while people were starving?
To put it another way, are the news channels saying to us: “We have state of the art communications, special access privileges, unlimited transport, access to an army of media personnel …. but in the end, hey, we’re not going to tell you anything. You have to make up your own minds about what is going on in the world.”
In terms of the specifics of work, a remark of Arianna’s set me off on a fruitful tangent of thought – she said that when she is trying to stay focused on a piece of work, she does not take phone calls, even though she wants to.
She evoked that scenario so well: a piece of work in front of me on the desk, a deadline starting to ripen, yet I feel that it is absolutely normal to constantly break away to take phone calls, or to tell something to someone in the department upstairs “in case I forget to later” etc. by “normalising” my self interruptions this way I can justify it by saying “well that’s office life”.
Arianna reminded me that better practices will feel “abnormal” and counter-intuitive when first applied. You can’t hurl yourself into a new way of doing things all in one go; it really has to be managed moment by moment.
I encountered the idea of minute-by-minute management a couple of times recently. Firstly, I realised that decisiveness applied moment-by-moment could make me a very purposeful and productive person. In work I continually have dozens of small-scale decisions jostling for closure in my head.
For example, “should I be doing this, or should I delegate it? It’s more difficult work that I usually delegate, but maybe if I took time out to explain it … but it’s needed by tomorrow afternoon, and if my assistant gets it wrong there’s no time to redo it. How much detail should I go into in this report? Do I really need this excel worksheet, or should I just supply ballpark values? Should I type it myself or should I give this handwritten sheet to a secretary to type? Should I us blue or black pen? What about fountain pen – the paper is a little to absorbent, but I work more freely in fountain pen ...but then again fountain pen is not compatible with tippex. What is the trade off between the intensity of effort I am putting into this and the value to my employer and the value to the client?”
Etc, etc, etc …..
If I could turn off this endless inner indecision and replaced it with minute to minute decisiveness I would save oceans of mental energy, and be a hell of a lot happier too.
Another take on the concept of short term self management is what David Allen said recently about visioning: up to then I had regarded visioning as the first stage in planning: imagine wild success, and then work out how to get there. But recently he said try to imagine how you would like to be in ten minutes time, and start trying to make that a reality. For me, that means how do I get back to a mental state of unbridled productivity (i.e. focused) quickly?
Certainty through the jettisoning of all other distracting alternatives is a great state of mind to find oneself in. I think we have to get there minute by minute, or even moment by moment, trying to turn off the endless chatter and re-evaluations that fill our minds. Doing the thinking up front is clearly a major component in getting there.
As for the mind dump, I can’t say enough good things about it. I feel that the mind (mine anyway) is a knot of assumptions, automatic reactions, and some terrible habitual thought patterns. I read somewhere recently that up to 80% of our daily actions and reactions are habit and routine driven. If we want to change behaviour we have to dismantle an awful lot of mental infrastructure.
Over the last few weeks I have been carrying a small notebook in my pocket. I experience immense amounts of stress in work, largely, I believe, self generated. Now, in the heat of battle, I take notes, and I have grabbed some key insights into how to make things better.
Several times David has remarked how quickly we can forget a light bulb moment despite the fact that we are convinced that its brilliance makes it unforgettable. Recording a string of self-observations over a period of time yields amazing information: just compare it to keeping that knot of stress and uncertainty clenched in the front of the mind. Cognition can be distributed along the time line as well as across a mind map.
David
Just think of the resources that the major news channels have at their disposal: the staff, the satellite technology, transport, news feeds, syndication etc. Yet when the hard work of a journalist is summarised and prepared for transmission, we often have to listen to some half-baked “balanced” alternative that clearly is often hastily put together at the last minute in order to fulfil this pointless approach to news broadcasting.
Take yesterday morning for example: a national radio station in England was bringing a report in their morning show about childhood and teenage obesity. The British government are currently targeting the 8 to 15 age group because doctors have noticed a new obesity problem there. A member of the government team that is formulating a national campaign to tackle this problem came on the air for interview. The first thing the host said to him was that surely 8 to 15 year olds have the same right to a burger and fries as anyone else? I was hugely impressed by the restraint of the interviewee who managed to hold his temper in the face of such a remark.
That is the standard approach to all news stories on that station. I am not exaggerating when I say that if an astronomer came into the studio to report on the latest discovery in stellar observation, he would be asked if he thought it was right that all this money should be wasted on looking at stars while people were starving?
To put it another way, are the news channels saying to us: “We have state of the art communications, special access privileges, unlimited transport, access to an army of media personnel …. but in the end, hey, we’re not going to tell you anything. You have to make up your own minds about what is going on in the world.”
In terms of the specifics of work, a remark of Arianna’s set me off on a fruitful tangent of thought – she said that when she is trying to stay focused on a piece of work, she does not take phone calls, even though she wants to.
She evoked that scenario so well: a piece of work in front of me on the desk, a deadline starting to ripen, yet I feel that it is absolutely normal to constantly break away to take phone calls, or to tell something to someone in the department upstairs “in case I forget to later” etc. by “normalising” my self interruptions this way I can justify it by saying “well that’s office life”.
Arianna reminded me that better practices will feel “abnormal” and counter-intuitive when first applied. You can’t hurl yourself into a new way of doing things all in one go; it really has to be managed moment by moment.
I encountered the idea of minute-by-minute management a couple of times recently. Firstly, I realised that decisiveness applied moment-by-moment could make me a very purposeful and productive person. In work I continually have dozens of small-scale decisions jostling for closure in my head.
For example, “should I be doing this, or should I delegate it? It’s more difficult work that I usually delegate, but maybe if I took time out to explain it … but it’s needed by tomorrow afternoon, and if my assistant gets it wrong there’s no time to redo it. How much detail should I go into in this report? Do I really need this excel worksheet, or should I just supply ballpark values? Should I type it myself or should I give this handwritten sheet to a secretary to type? Should I us blue or black pen? What about fountain pen – the paper is a little to absorbent, but I work more freely in fountain pen ...but then again fountain pen is not compatible with tippex. What is the trade off between the intensity of effort I am putting into this and the value to my employer and the value to the client?”
Etc, etc, etc …..
If I could turn off this endless inner indecision and replaced it with minute to minute decisiveness I would save oceans of mental energy, and be a hell of a lot happier too.
Another take on the concept of short term self management is what David Allen said recently about visioning: up to then I had regarded visioning as the first stage in planning: imagine wild success, and then work out how to get there. But recently he said try to imagine how you would like to be in ten minutes time, and start trying to make that a reality. For me, that means how do I get back to a mental state of unbridled productivity (i.e. focused) quickly?
Certainty through the jettisoning of all other distracting alternatives is a great state of mind to find oneself in. I think we have to get there minute by minute, or even moment by moment, trying to turn off the endless chatter and re-evaluations that fill our minds. Doing the thinking up front is clearly a major component in getting there.
As for the mind dump, I can’t say enough good things about it. I feel that the mind (mine anyway) is a knot of assumptions, automatic reactions, and some terrible habitual thought patterns. I read somewhere recently that up to 80% of our daily actions and reactions are habit and routine driven. If we want to change behaviour we have to dismantle an awful lot of mental infrastructure.
Over the last few weeks I have been carrying a small notebook in my pocket. I experience immense amounts of stress in work, largely, I believe, self generated. Now, in the heat of battle, I take notes, and I have grabbed some key insights into how to make things better.
Several times David has remarked how quickly we can forget a light bulb moment despite the fact that we are convinced that its brilliance makes it unforgettable. Recording a string of self-observations over a period of time yields amazing information: just compare it to keeping that knot of stress and uncertainty clenched in the front of the mind. Cognition can be distributed along the time line as well as across a mind map.
David