Any successful crook doesn’t fess up until they’re confronted with evidence and even then maybe not. The rest of us tend to confess prematurely. For example, when walking down the stairs tonight I ran across a newer neighbor in the stairwell. She had two dogs. Before I could register who she was, she apologized for apparently having a second dog.…
Did you want to do what you did?
When is the last time you realized that you didn’t decide to do what you just spent two hours doing? For example, when you want to find some numbers in an old email and instead find yourself half an hour later responding to yet another unrelated email. Or, you open Facebook while riding the subway only to miss your stop…
Means before ends?
Establishing ends before means affords creative solutions. Establishing means before ends affords creative justifications.
My email quizzes me daily…
… and I’m not taking about the latest personality quiz. A while back I found a little gmail add on that’s just fantastic. It’s called boomerang, and it does just that. You can say “send this back to me” and fill in the blank for when. I put all my reminders into it too so I have one system for alerting…
Expectations have to change too
When making changes to how we do things, sometimes the net effect feels wrong and so we implicitly assume it’s wrong, and won’t work, and we abandon change that could’ve been for the better. For example, maybe you’re used to revising emails four or five times to make them “perfect.” Nevermind it takes you twenty minutes–no joke–to compose a simple…
Pick up pal
Bad things happen, for example dropping a birthday cake that you just spent 2 hours crafting. If you’re another person in the room, step up and offer to bake the next cake, or offer to go out and buy a cake, or just clean up the mess while they get started on the next cake. It’s amazing how nice it…
Beating yourself up is a step in the right direction
Knowing that there are things that you want to change about your own behavior is the first step toward affecting change. Beating yourself up about undesirable things is a good first step. So contrary to the cliche, you should beat yourself up. Long enough to do something about it. And eventually long enough to learn to identify undesirable behavior without…
Importance is attention
We all place a great deal of importance upon that which captivates. Is what captivates you what you want to be important?
Don’t organize, search
Organization is often a waste of time, especially if you don’t know how–let alone if–you’ll ever come back to something. For example emails, don’t put them in carefully crafted folders, just hit archive and then search when you need to find something. How much time do you waste organizing things unnecessarily?
What do you want to see
Jonathan downloaded an app that tells us when there’s a crime happening nearby. At first it was interesting to hear about the crazy things that happen, like a report of someone being hit with a clock. How that works, I’m not sure. Yesterday we were at the park walking Pax, she was looking for squirrels but sadly found none. Nonetheless…