I have been a big fan of Leo Babauta for several years now and have said so on this blog.  I think his book THE POWER OF LESS is fantastic.  He was a big inspiration to me and I think he was a very wise man. He probably still is, but I am beginning to wonder.  Lately he has been saying some things that make me go “huh?”.

His latest blog article is a perfect example.  If you cut out just a few sentences, you will have a very wise and reasoned position that I almost completely agree with.  However, he just takes it over the edge by saying some ridiculous things (in my opinion) and ruins his credibility.  I don’t believe he is the superhuman he makes himself out to be.  He is thousands of times more successful than I am.  I’m a pipsqueak and he’s the creator of one of the most successful blogs out there.  I grant all of that for the record.

I’m going to quote extensively from his article, but please read it all here.  He says:

I’ve notice that in the past, like many people, I was always wishing I was doing something different, thinking about what I would do in the future, making plans for my life to come, reading (with jealousy) about cool things other people were doing.

It’s a fool’s game.

Many of us do this, but if you get into the mindset of thinking about what you *could* be doing, you’ll never be happy doing what you actually *are* doing. You’ll compare what you’re doing with what other people (on Facebook and Twitter, perhaps?) are doing. You’ll wish your life were better. You’ll never be satisfied, because there’s *always* something better to do.

Amen brother Leo!

Washing dishes can be as great as anything else, if you decide to see it that way. You’re in solitude, which is a beautiful thing. If you do it mindfully, washing dishes can be pleasant as you feel the suds and water in your hands, pay attention to the dish and its texture, notice your breathing and thoughts. It’s meditation, it’s quiet, it’s lovely.

Well maybe not “as great as anything else”, but we get the point.  Make something good out of it since you are doing it anyway.  You can make it “pleasant”.

You can say the same of anything. Driving to work? Enjoy the solitude, the chance to be alone with your thoughts, or to listen to music you love, to see the world around you. In a meeting with co-workers? Pay attention to how people talk and interact, learn about the human mind, see yourself in everyone around you, learn to love anyone no matter who they are, practice giving up expectations of who people should be or what this meeting should be like.

Make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in. Learn something positive from every thing you do.  Give up expectations, etc.  Sure good advice when you find yourself doing something that actually isn’t “as great as anything else”.

Life will suck if you are always wishing you’re doing something else.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’m always where I want to be, doing what I want to be doing.

I don’t believe that for one second.

Instead, I’ve adopted the mindset that whatever I’m doing right now is perfect.

I call bullshit on that.

There’s nothing I’m ever doing that isn’t the most incredible thing on Earth.

Bullshit to the power of 10.

If everything was the most incredible thing you wouldn’t know it because you wouldn’t have anything to compare it to that was less than “the most incredible thing on earth”.  Think about it.

There is wisdom in this article if you just leave out the hyperbole about everything is always perfect.

Dear Leo,

Sometimes life does suck and it’s OK.  You don’t have to dwell on it.  You can experience the suckiness and then quickly move on.  You can try to draw a lesson  out of it.  Life is messier than you pretend.  I say “pretend” in all seriousness because I frankly don’t believe what you say. I believe you believe it sort of, but what you are doing and what you are saying aren’t the same thing.  Get real Leo, it’s OK.  You’re a human being and your life isn’t perfect or the most incredible thing on earth – even to you.  You can admit that sometimes what happens and what you are doing sucks. Please give us the good stuff in the future and leave out the nonsense.

Best Regards from a long-time admirer,

Stephen

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OK, I admit it.  I created that title just to get you to read this article.  The amount of anxiety that goes into most decisions is ridiculous.  Further, the amount of time people spend making decisions, even the most trivial ones, is a life-wasting shame.  See  your typical company meeting for endless examples of how to torture people with trivial decision making.

I watch in amazement as some of my friends stew over what to select from the absurdly long lunch menu at a restaurant.  They are afraid they aren’t going to make the “ideal” choice.  Later in the evening when you are remembering the wonderful lunch you had with your friends, do you have serious regret over what you ordered?   If you do, I suggest you get a life; you missed the point of the lunch.

In a very real sense you shouldn’t ever live with the consequences of your decisions.  Because if you do, it means you have stopped living and started existing.  Any one decision is just a step on your path and no matter where it led you, you can take another step.  If you don’t like the previous step take one in a different direction next time.  It really is as simple as that.

Here is my bottom line on making decisions.  If the decision seems easy you already know the answer.  If the decision seems difficult that’s an indication that it is too complicated for you to figure it out in advance anyway.  In that case all you are doing is guessing, so just make a choice and move on and you can see what happens.  Very few people really accept that, but it is my opinion and I’m sticking with it.

The most profound idea I have ever heard about decision making was the following by Michael Neill.  If you can truly understand this, then your life will be a lot easier and better.  I suggest you reflect deeply on it.

What you decide will never impact your life as much as how you handle the consequences of that decision.

Six Things to Keep in Mind About Decision Making

1. Accept that there is no right or wrong decision.  There are only choices and the consequences of those choices.  The consequences are neither good or bad, they simply are.  My favorite article that goes deeper into this is my own You Cannot Choose the Wrong Path.
2. Get comfortable with the fact that you cannot possibly know in advance what’s going to happen; life is too damn complicated.  Get over yourself.  You are not perfect and life is not a mathematical equation you can solve. Just choose something and go.  If you still don’t get this reread the yellow box above.
3. Treat decisions as experiments.  If you don’t like the outcome conduct your next experiment.   What a wonderful way to navigate through life!
4. Flip a coin and accept the result.  However, if you find yourself hoping it comes out one way, you already have your answer and don’t need to flip.  If, after seeing the result, you wish it had come out differently, you also have your answer.
5. After letting a decision percolate while you are doing something else, go with your gut feeling.  Your subconscious mind figured it out for you.
6. In the end do what you want to do.   What a mind-blowing concept

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Email is an incredible technology and I know very few people who would give it up.  I also believe it is completely out of control both at work and at home; for many of us it has become a source of frustration and stress.  The question is how do we make effective use of this wonderful tool without letting it take over our time and our lives?

My email used to be an ugly out of control monster.  I was, and to some degree still am, afraid I was going to miss out on something.  So I spent years subscribing to blogs and newsletters and handing my email addresses to one source after another.  The price I paid was steep.  I tried about every email system imaginable and while they certainly helped and sometimes helped a lot, in the end something fairly simple turned out to work the best for me.   The tips that help me slay the email monster are the following (described in more detail later):

1. Keep Your Inbox Tiny
2. Create A Review Folder
3. Label or Categorize Liberally
4. Archive or File After Reviewing
5. Use a Tool That Allows Easy Search of Archived Mail
6. Make Sure You Have an Effective SPAM Filter
7. Tune Your System Continuously

The key concept is to keep receive and keep as much email as you desire, but keep most of it out of view until you choose to look at it.  You only allow the most important and urgent email into your inbox; email that you need or want to look at immediately.  Everything else goes into one or more folders that you look at when it is convenient for you or never.  This way you can feel comfortable that your most important email will always show up prominently in your inbox without getting lost in the stream of the less important and distracting email.  At the same time the other stuff is there for another time if you so choose.  With this simple system, even if I don’t look at my inbox for a day or two or more, I no longer feel overwhelmed and out of control.  I don’t feel like I missing out on anything.  I enjoy a comfortable and optimal email experience.

The Tips

I use Gmail, but I have used other email software and these same tips can be applied to most of them.

Keep Your Inbox Tiny

The only thing you want arriving in your inbox are items you consider important and want to see immediately upon opening your email.  Be ruthless and honest about this.  Most email is not that important and you don’t want it distracting you from what is truly important.

There are many techniques for keeping your inbox tiny, but the most obvious one is to stop getting email you don’t want and will never look at.  I’ve unsubscribed my email address from most of the lists I used to be on.  If you can’t or don’t know how to get off a list then use a filter to delete it or send it to your spam folder.

Another useful technique is to send any email that you are copied on to a CC folder.  If someone chose not to directly address you, they obviously don’t consider it important that you read it immediately (or at all).

Even after dropping out of most of my subscriptions, I still get a lot of email that I want to review or keep as a searchable database.  Here is the important point: It doesn’t matter how much you keep because you don’t ever let the vast majority of it go to your inbox.  It remains hidden so you only look at this less important email stream when you feel like looking at it.  You may never look at it. Thus you can keep as little or as much as you want.  A significant portion of my email goes straight to archived folders that I never review and only look at when I’m looking for something specific.  A typical example of this is online receipts or statements that are delivered periodically online.

Create A Review Folder

The only truly successful way I’ve been able to maintain a tiny inbox is to use the concept of a review folder.  Between important email that I want in my inbox and email that I archive directly without looking at, there is a significant portion of emails that I might want to look at when I feel like it.  Examples that go in here are blogs, newsletters, magazines, news, etc.  This is the stuff that I scan for something that looks interesting and open and read at my leisure.  These are the emails that used to overwhelm my inbox.  Much of it I never open and simply archive out of my review folder into my permanent searchable email database.

Label or Categorize Liberally

I label as much email as possible with one or more labels.  Even within the review folder or inbox, I try to keep email labeled with general categories so I know what it is with a simple glance.  With Gmail (and Outlook for example) you can turn your labels a specific color for even faster recognition.  I label most blogs with a “blog” label and the very best with a “best blog” label.  There is no limit to what you can do.

There might be a wonderful newsletter or blog that I want to make sure is always readily available when I’m ready to read it.  These go directly to the labeled folder and are a special review category.  I get a health newsletter every day that is so good I want to have instant access to it by clicking on a label.  On the other hand I don’t have time to read it every day and it is certainly not urgent so I keep it out of my inbox.

Archive or File After Reviewing

It is very important that you archive or file the email out of your inbox or review folder after you have processed it.  Otherwise, the system will just turn into a giant inbox again and you might as well have never bothered.  Your other folders serve as the permanent and searchable database; you leave those emails right where they sit.

Use a Tool That Allows Easy Search of Archived Mail

One thing I like about Gmail is that when you search it, you are using the powerful and flexible Google search engine.  You can find just about anything with a few simple keywords.

Make Sure You Have an Effective SPAM Filter

I think Gmail’s spam filter is great, and reducing spam is key to conquering the monster.  Invest some time and possibly money in a good spam filtering system.  Make sure you check your spam folder periodically and “un-spam” what doesn’t belong there.  About 1/3 of the people who get email subscriptions to my blog never confirm the subscription.  I assume this is because it goes into a spam folder that is never checked.

Tune Your System Continuously

As you process email, you must continual add new filters or add new sources to existing filters.  If you add new sources you may want to drop sources you never utilize.  It takes very little time to keep a tuned system running smoothly.

Well there it is.  What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

These days there may be no scarce resource more valuable than your attention and no ability more important than being able to focus that attention.  Success, however you define it, is dependent upon your ability to focus your attention.

This is such an important topic it cannot be covered in depth in a blog article, even a long one like this.  This article will provide you valuable practical tips, but if you want to go deeper into the subject I would recommend the following resources:

Leo Babauta has written a free eBook Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction.  It is fairly wide ranging and covers Leo’s overall simplicity and single-task focus philosophy.  Like all of Leo’s work it is well done and short.  It’s free and so it is well worth your time (a couple of hours to read).  He has a paid version with additional material that I did not purchase.

A much more content dense and frankly significantly better book is Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload by Lucy Jo Palladino.  While Leo’s book is useful, this book is much more focused on focus and I got a lot of practical tips out of it.  Of course you have to pay for this one.

A very different book is Can I Have Your Attention?: How to Think Fast, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Concentration by Joseph Cardillo.  This book contains a lot of science and interesting information.  It was a very compelling read that I couldn’t put down, but it is rather light on practical tips.

How to Improve Your Focus and Control Your Attention

1 – Improve Your Working Memory

This is something that is not very widely known, but research has clearly demonstrated that working memory capacity is is critical to both controlling your attention and the ability to ignore distractions.  I put this number one because I think it may be the most important and you ignore it at your own peril.  Working memory capacity was believed to be fixed and genetically determined, but it has been recently shown that it can be improved significantly.  Working memory also declines with age, stress, and lack of exercise.  See my article Working Memory – Why It’s Important and How To Improve It for more information.

2 – Control Your Environment

If you fail to control your environment, you will harm your ability to focus.  Even if you think you are focusing well, you will be using some working memory resources to filter out distractions.  Those resources are better utilized in the activity on which you have focused your attention.

Do not worry too much about what other people will think including your family.  Some people are offended if you put on headphones or go into another room.  As if your job at work or life is to be on instant response alert to their needs.  Get over it.  If you are truly needing to focus then you should give it your all and give your coworkers or family the full attention they deserve some other time.

• If you are exposed to auditory distractions like co-workers, TV, or family racket go somewhere quiet or try sound isolating earphones.  Play your music or stimulation sounds as described below.  If you don’t want to play sounds then just go for inexpensive foam earplugs.
• If you are exposed to visual distractions go somewhere else or block your view.  Visual distractions, especially electronic ones like TV are designed to grab your attention.  You can’t help being distracted even peripherally no matter what you think.  You simply must block it from view.  All kinds of visual distraction – the hubbub of people and activity around you for example – can be very tempting and disruptive. In your work area is open, put up plants, pictures, or other items to block your line of sight.
• Shut down any computer or electronic equipment that may potentially distract you.  Don’t use willpower to resist temptation because willpower is a limited resource.  The more you use it the less you have.  The more difficult you make it to be distracted, by shutting down email, IM, cell phones and computers, the better.  If you are working on your computer, only open the applications needed to perform the task and shut down everything else.
• For some people it also helps to eliminate clutter or other objects that might distract them – that includes photographs that may tempt them to take a trip down memory lane.

3 – Limiting Daily Disruption and Demands on Your Time

Daily disruptions and ad-hoc requests are a huge problem for most people.  We are constantly being pinged; by IM, email, text, cell phone, banners, pop-ups, etc.  Rings, pings, and bells from your friends, family, and colleagues aren’t the only problem.  Marketers via internet, television, and print ads are using sophisticated techniques informed by brain science to figure out how to grab your attention.  Your brain is wired in ways that make it almost impossible to resist these techniques.  You are increasingly bombarded with demands on your attention, and failure to control it means failure to be who you really want to be.  You do not have to respond to all of this.  Doing so simply makes a a slave to the demands of others.

“We flit from one task to another, one response to another, living a life driven by the needs of others, instead of what we need, what we feel is important.

You don’t need to respond.” –Leo Babauta

If you have trained others that your are always available to respond to requests, you need to retrain them to expect something else.  Make it clear to people when you will be available for ad hoc requests and when you aren’t.

• You can schedule blocks of uninterrupted time.
• You can put up signs in your work area that you are not available.
• You can close the door.
• You can shut down IM and email and either turn off or not answer your phone.
• You can find a privacy room, a conference room, a library, or a coffee shop to get away from others.
• You can be assertive with your valuable time and resources

4 – Be Aware of Your Stimulation Level

In her book Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload, Lucy Jo Palladino describes the inverted U theory of performance and being in the “focus zone”.

The zone is the area between too little and too much stimulation where optimal performance can occur.  Too little stimulation leads to boredom and you are unable to maintain focus.  Too much stimulation leads to anxiousness and hyper activeness that decrease performance.

You need to monitor your stimulation level and increase it when it is too low and decrease it when it is too high.  Palladino suggest you rate your stimulation level on on a scale of 1 to 10.  To help you you with that, think of 0 (most relaxed) being equivalent to laying in a hammock stretched between palm trees on a beach; 5 (relaxed but alert) would be how you feel when you are working at your desk getting things done; 10 (most tense) would be waiting for news about a loved one after an accident.

5 – Adjust Your Stimulation Level

Depending upon the activity in which you are engaged, the level of stimulation required probably ranges between 3 and 7.  Focusing on a good novel might only be a 3 while a relaxed zone athletic performance might need to be a 7.  If you are having trouble focusing, decide whether you need to increase or decrease your your stimulation level.

To lower your stimulation level

• The very best way I have found is belly breathing.  You can do this anywhere and anytime.  You can do it more subtly than shown in this video if you are in public.
  If you don’t see the video in email click here.
• Play music or sounds that relax you.  It can be anything that works for you.  I like ocean and rain sounds.
• Take a low stimulation break.  Set outside, drink a cup of tea, take a short walk, or do some stretching.

To increase your stimulation level

• Play upbeat music or videos.  Try listening to or playing the Theme from Rocky video or Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer on the piano.  Upbeat classical music like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is also excellent.  Play loud rock and roll music (with headphones if you are around others) or whatever gets you pumped.
• Take a power break.  It can be anything you want.  Watch funny YouTube videos, play an intense video game, run around the block or dance a little jig.  Getting up and moving around is a great way to both increase your stimulation when you are bored and decrease your stimulation when you are stressed.
• Multitask.  That’s right I said multitask.  The one time I would recommend multitasking is when you are doing something that is not stimulating.  I often do my boring tasks while watching sports on TV.  You can actually increase your focus on the boring task and perhaps keep from falling asleep or screaming in frustration by doing something else at the same time.

6 – Just Say No To Commitments

Many, if not most people enslave themselves in their commitments.  I think commitments of time and money are enormous mistakes.  If you commitment money to cars, homes, or a lifestyle, you are committing your time and focus to earning money to pay for them.  That is time and focus you will not have for what you really want.

When you commitment your time, you are making the same mistake, although time commitments may be easier to escape.  You can volunteer, help others, or do whatever else you do via commitments in a dynamic and ad-hoc way; you do not have to commit to them.  Commitments almost never fail to come back to haunt you because they show up at the worst possible time – time when you want or need to focus on something else.

I’ve written about this topic in Edit Your Life and Freedom from Commitment. You will never truly have the time or attention to focus on what you really want unless you break free of the chains of commitment.

7 – Control Your Emotions

On this blog I preach the importance of peaceful well-being.  By nature I’m a moody person and I’ve had to work hard to develop my own peace and well-being.  I still have a long way to go, but  I can attest to the importance of a calm centeredness and mindful awareness and their impact on your ability to focus your attention.  I spent many years too stressed and moody to focus effectively.  Too much adrenaline prevents you from controlling your focus.  Too much cortisol (stress hormone) and you lose the ability to focus on much of anything as well as inflicting long term damage on important parts of your brain.

Do yourself a favor and get this book which is about life not just work: Happiness at Work: Be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful – No Matter What If you check out the reviews you will see I’m not the only person who raved about it.

See these article for more information:

Put Down Those Rocks
Eliminating Your Investment in the Outcome
Top 25 Small Things You Let Ruin Your Mood
The Best Ways To Not Sweat The Small Stuff – Part I and  Part II

8 – Limit Your Stream of Information

“With so many distractions, it’s impossible to truly focus on the important.
We try to drink the stream, but it’s too voluminous and never-ending to take
in this way.” – Leo Babauta

Accept the fact that you cannot possibly absorb it all or even the teeny tiniest fraction.

“A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.”  — Theodore Roszak

I used to have a severe problem with limiting my stream because I was suffering from the fear of missing out.  The trouble is that when you try to drink from the fire hose of  available information, you actually do miss out.  You are so distracted and overwhelmed you don’t have time to absorb and integrate anything valuable.  When I finally stood up to the fear and just let it go I was able to reduce the stream to something interesting and manageable.

You do not have to read / listen to/ watch every available tweet, Face Book update, IM, email, news update, blog article (except mine of course), podcast, TV show, or video.  I would recommend starting from scratch.  Get rid of all your sources of information and add back only those you truly need or want.  I’ve probably eliminated 95% of my stream over the last couple of years.

Well there it is.  What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

In today’s world of information overload, people move quickly from sound bite to sound bite.  To be successful with your message and to avoid be washed away in the sea of noise, you must connect quickly and convey effectively.  You must transmit something meaningful in the small window in which you have been granted the benefit of their attention.  This is true in face-to-face as well as electronic communication.  How many times, even when you are physically present with someone, are they distracted by some electronic device?  Failure to connect with someone and convey meaning to them quickly will often lead to failure.   Here are some tips:

• Present the Big Idea First – Don’t ramble and slowly build up to the big idea or you are likely to lose your audience.  A much better tactic is to present the big idea right up front and then try to prove it with what follows.
• The Eyes Are Most Important -  Humans are visual creatures and pictures are truly worth a thousand words.  Slides with text don’t work near as well as slides with pictures.  Think how much is conveyed in a cartoon picture with a short caption – for example.
• Trim the Data Fat – We now routinely ignore most of the information that we are blasted with simply as a defense mechanism.  Make your message stand out with simple, concise, and clear content.
• Tell a Short Story – Humans evolved telling stories.  Long stories may have worked in the past, but the key in today’s world is to make them short or people will tune out.  I recently read a book I really liked, but it started out with a long story. As valuable a lesson as the story contained, I am willing to bet the author lost a lot of people before they made it to the end of that initial story.
• Show Confidence and Decisiveness – Displaying confidence and decisiveness make you more credible and will lead to a greater likelihood you will convince your audience.  Many times in my work career people have complained to me “I told them the same thing but they only believe it when they hear it from you.”  A forceful, confident, and decisive manner makes all the difference.
• Aim For the Heart – The most rational person in the world cannot make a decision without their emotions.  This is a demonstrable scientific fact.  If you want someone to decide in your favor or buy what your selling, then appeal to their emotions first and their intellect second.

There is so much more that could be said on this topic but in the spirit of the message, I think this will do for now.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

“Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.” — Lao Tzu

I dream of being lazy, of having all day to just do whatever I feel like at any moment.  I dream of being able to do only a few things that don’t take a lot of time, but that matter a great deal – or not.  I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to do less.  The world is full of energetic and ambitious people being busy but not doing a whole lot that matters.  The world is full of active people trying to force their ideas on others.  How I wish they would get lazy and shut up.

I don’t like chores and I choose to avoid them to whatever degree possible.  When I have free time and free days, I don’t often exert myself; a lot of people viewing me sitting around reading a book might call me lazy. That’s OK, I’m not going to spend my precious minutes doing things I don’t want to do and I don’t think anyone else should either.  Today I was sitting on a bench in my back yard reading a book while the hummingbirds buzzed around.  It was glorious.  My lazy butt wasn’t bothering anyone, but some ambitious hard-working neighbor was outside blasting his 1,000 decibel leaf blower.  Please neighbor, be lazy on Saturday afternoon!

The word “lazy” carries a negative connotation and is mostly used in a pejorative manner.  Something similar to “Get your lazy butt off the couch and do something around here” has probably been uttered billions of times and most of us have said or heard it.  People who lack the drive to work hard and succeed in the manner the culture defines as proper are also frequently considered lazy.

Despite working extremely hard through a lot of my life, I’ve been called lazy at times.  I’ve called other people lazy when I probably shouldn’t have.  Most of the time people are simply projecting their values on someone else.  We throw the word “lazy” around far too often when we are judging other people’s free choice to live their lives as they see fit.  If you are taking care of yourself and are not a burden on others, as far as I’m concerned you can be as lazy as you want.

Imagine a young man who gets home from work, changes clothes and throws his dirty outfit on the floor of his bedroom, invites some of his buddies over and they order pizza and beer and settle in to watch a football game.  They leave pizza cartons and empty beer bottles lying around.  His apartment is a mess with junk piled everywhere.

This young man has a new girlfriend with a “better” job (i.e. makes more money) and she moves into his apartment.  She is a very neat, hard-working, ambitious young woman.  We all know what happens.  Slowly over time she starts demanding that he conform to her lifestyle.  She’s always on his back about getting a better job.  She calls him lazy for not doing more household chores.  She’s always mad about his mess and she tells her friends he just sits on his lazy butt watching TV.

But why are her lifestyle choices better than his?  Why does his choosing to live by a different set of values make him lazy?  What makes her right and him wrong?  She simply has a different set of values than him and wants him to change to conform to hers.  We have to be very careful about thinking we are superior to someone else because we choose to work “harder” or live differently than they do.  They are not lazy because they make different choices than we do.  They may be lazy by the technical definition of the word, but that shouldn’t carry a negative connotation; it’s simply a different choice.

Imagine another young man who chooses to live simply.  He doesn’t want or need much.  He has a part-time job in a bookstore to pay his meager bills and he spends his much valued free time reading and being in nature.  His small apartment is very neat and minimalist.  It’s not that he works hard at keeping things neat, he just doesn’t do or buy things to make much of a mess.   He’s a nice quiet guy whom people like despite thinking he is a little bit strange.  His new girlfriend dreams of a house in the suburbs raising soccer-playing kids and driving an SUV.  They are in trouble.

I think most of us would think the second young man is superior to the first, even though he actually works less than the pizza-eating beer drinker (BTW, I drink beer).  The soccer mom, the ambitious career woman, the beer drinker, and the simple man are all different people with different values. This article is not about picking more compatible mates, even though that is important.  Even in much less extreme cases, people expect their partners to have the same values as themselves.  Your partner is not lazy because he or she chooses to be different than you.  Your choices are not intrinsically better, they are just different.

There are times however, when I think it is appropriate to call someone lazy and to judge them harshly.  Anyone who forces someone else to take care of them is in my mind a lazy bum.  I’m not talking about people who are physically or mentally incapable of taking care of themselves, but those who can but don’t.  The word “force” is key here.  When you vote the taxpayers money into your pockets so you don’t have to support yourself, you are a lazy bum.  When you force someone to wait on you, you are a lazy bum.  As long as people are freely choosing to take care of others, I have no problem with it.  Remember Tom Sawyer who recruited people to whitewash the fence?  Was he lazy or smart?

Those who choose to take it easy are just fine in my book.  The fact that they choose to do something different than what you think they should do, only means that they choose differently than you.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk? — Albert Einstein

I’m not naturally an organized person.  It seems there is some set point of disorder and clutter that occurs around me; if I de-clutter and organize, things quickly return to their disordered set point.  I find those pictures of minimalist workspaces and homes very aesthetically pleasing.  I love the look of them, but I fail to achieve anything close.  From a personal productivity approach I think I’ve tried about every system and I can never stick with them.  For whatever reason, it seems I’m just not wired to work that way.

I recently picked up a delightful bargain book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place.  The authors make a compelling argument that the time spent on organizing, planning, and keeping things uncluttered is simply not worth it; that you spend more time organizing than you save as a result of being organized.

They go further and argue that in many cases messiness and disorder is a good thing.  They give interesting examples like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin because his lab was a dirty, messy, and cluttered place; something that would not have happened in a clean and organized lab.  Some of my favorite examples were messy and unorganized small business like hardware stores or bookstores that make more profit than nearby highly ordered and organized megastores.

The argument is basically that organization is inflexible and resistant to new information, changing circumstances, and unexpected events.  On the other hand messy systems are flexible and allow more creative connections of apparently unrelated information.  This really resonated with me.  They describe 12 kinds of messiness: clutter, mixture, time sprawl, improvisation, inconsistency, blur, noise, distraction, bounce, convolution, inclusion, and distortion.

This book was an enjoyable read and made some excellent points.  The message I took from this book was to accept your natural tendencies.  Don’t be pressured by the culture to change.  Starting with your parents’ demands to clean up your room and continuing with your regimented school and work lives, you are bombarded by the message that neat, planned, and organized is good and messy, unplanned, and disorganized is bad.  Well maybe not.  This may be an extreme minority view as it is the first time I have encountered it this way, but I loved it.  I found it utterly compelling and convincing.  From this day forward I am embracing my messy and disorganized self.  What about you?

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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In in my previous article I explained Why You Should Be More Decisive.  In this article I will give you my suggestions for just how to do that.  They are:

1. Make Fewer Decisions
2. Identify a Single Owner for All Decisions
3. Feel the Decision
4. Create Decision-Making Guidelines
5. Identify the Essential Factors
6. Treat Most Decisions as Trivial Because They are Trivial
7. Practice Near Instantaneous Decisions on Trivial Issues
8. Use Your Unconscious Mind for Complex Decisions
9. Set a Deadline for Important Decisions

Make Fewer Decisions

This almost feels like cheating, but let others make as many decisions as you possibly can.  Delegate, Delegate, Delegate.  There is something incredibly freeing about letting go of decisions.  Mark Victor Hansen wrote:

I told my assistant, “Get me a cell phone.” She asked, “What type?” I said, “I really don’t care; you figure it out.”

Beautifully done. My wife hears “You decide”, “It’s up to you”, “Do whatever you want”, etc. all the time.

Identify a Single Owner for All Decisions

Avoid joint or group decisions whenever possible.  There is no greater cause for indecisiveness than joint decisions.  Even decisions most people think have to be made jointly don’t.  Couples are notoriously invested in joint decision making about everything.  This is our culture and many people have known no other way.  I know many will disagree, but I promise you that if you somehow divide up decision making you will be better off.  For really important decisions that involve another, one person can set a few basic requirements and let the other person make the decision as long as it satisfies those requirements.

Feel the Decision

Bright people who score well on IQ tests, but who have had brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotion, have a problem.  They can’t make decisions.  They are truly paralyzed by analysis and seem to never stop analyzing long enough to make a decision.  Whether you admit it or not, you have to use your emotions to make decisions.  So the best way to shorten the decision making process is to get to the feeling faster.  Pull the trigger and go with your gut.

Create Decision-Making Guidelines

Creating guidelines for how you will make decisions is a great way to streamline the process.  Have some rules in mind that you consistently follow.  Maybe you are frugal so you can go with the least expensive choice that satisfies your requirements.   Maybe you are a novelty seeker and so everything has to be different than the last time; a new experience.  If you are indecisive you can choose the first option you see, you can flip a coin, you can go with your gut or whatever.  If you are having a hard time deciding something because there is no obvious choice, then there is no obvious choice.  Just pick one and decide to have no regrets.

Identify the Essential Factors

For decisions you deem more critical and that you want to spend more time analyzing, limit the number of factors to analyze to only the few that truly matter.

For example, when buying a car do I really need to consider the comparative value of all the bells and whistles?  If I am going to buy a car, I’m going to assume they all have wheels that rotate forward and backward on demand and they have a steering wheel, a gas pedal, and a brake pedal that work.  Aside from that all I truly care about is 1) reliability 2) comfort 3) sound system.  I have all kinds of stuff on my loaded car, but as I drive it around I seldom use any of them.  They really don’t matter.  Comfort and reliability are what I care about and that is what I should base my decision on.  The rest is noise that clutters the decision and creates post-decision second guessing.

Treat Most Decisions as Trivial Because They are Trivial

Identify up front the kinds of decisions that are of life-altering importance and then categorize everything else as trivial.  This is where many people are going to have a problem.  Almost everything is trivial to me and the older I get the bigger the trivial bucket gets.  I’m sorry but those decisions you agonize over just don’t make any difference.  The color you paint your house, whether you should let your child do x, where you go on vacation, etc.

When you analyze something to death you are being extremely arrogant.  You are assuming that you can predict the future, that nothing will change to mess it up, and that you actually knew what you were doing in the first place.  Sorry to burst your bubble, but none of that is true. Someday you are going to realize that micromanaging your child’s life drove them away and all that other stuff just didn’t amount to a hill of beans.  You made yourself miserable trying to over decide yourself and your family to a perfect life.

Practice Near Instantaneous Decisions on Trivial Issues

Force yourself to just pull the trigger quickly on every decision you possibly can.  Everyone will draw the line differently, but the more you can push over the trivial line, the more decisive and the happier you will be.  Try to decide these trivial issues in seconds or a minute or two for the less trivial, but still trivial.  Just pick the first thing that comes to mind or use an instant gut feeling.  Practice the habit of not analyzing and whatever you do don’t consult someone else, even your partner.  If you feel you must consult them, then just turn the decision over to them.  Let them own it.

Use Your Unconscious Mind for Complex Decisions

For complex decisions with lots of important factors, feed your unconscious mind the data and than let it ponder the decision for a while.  It’s very important you don’t consciously analyze or you will interfere with the more powerful parallel processor below.  Think about something else and over a day or two you will start feeling the right answer.

Set a Deadline for Important Decisions

Finally, for important decisions when you are going to take more time, set a deadline for making it and stick to it.

I’ll repeat what I said in my previous article: A decisive person understands all this and takes charge making most decisions quickly and with clarity.  A decisive person understands the difference between decisions that really make a difference and those that don’t.  A decisive person has a lot more time for the important things in their lives and a lot more peace of mind.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Technology should be making our lives easier, but life doesn’t seem easier.  I think that is because we unnecessarily complicate it.

I’ve been observing a ridiculous amount of self-inflicted over complication around me lately.  The solutions to this are generally simple.  I’m a big fan of simple.

One of the best overall ways to simplify your life and make it less complicated is to be much more decisive.  I read once that being decisive meant making decisions with speed and clarity.  I like that definition.

Decisiveness Died With Technology

I’m absolutely convinced that people are much less decisive than they used to be.  One of the culprits is our connected world.  It seems some people can’t decided to go to the bathroom anymore without calling or texting someone on their cell phone to discuss it first and make sure it is a good idea.

Teenagers used to have to be responsible (at least to some degree) and make some decisions for themselves.  Now they have to call mommy on their cell phone and get permission or advice for everything.  Employees who used to be responsible for decisions, now have to run it by their boss or their colleagues.  They have to do this 24 hours a day via technology like email or cell phones, even when they or their boss is on vacation.  Couples who used to make independent decisions now email, text, or call each other to discuss trivial decisions.  Don’t say it isn’t so because I can hear it going on around me all the time.  We are all talking to everyone about everything.  Individual decision making and decisiveness have taken a big hit.

Information is Killing Our Decisions

There is so much information available today that people feel like they have to consider it without realizing that it is usually not helping them.  All this information overload creates analysis paralysis.  When you spend too much time analyzing a decision, you are usually less satisfied with whatever decision you end up making.  People who consider more factors when making decisions are more likely to worry later that they didn’t make the right decisions.  So they agonize during the decision making process and then worry even after they’ve made a decision.

The overwhelming number of decisions people agonize over in small or large ways, are not that big of a deal.  We are massively overcomplicating our lives with all this nonsense.

I heard a couple discussing a Disney World trip in B&N the other day.  They had some travel guide to Disney World and they were trying to decide which Disney resort to stay in.  They were looking at a grid with all the options of all the different resorts and discussing the pros and cons.  I stuck around to see how long it would take, but they went on and on about it forever so I finally gave up and left.  I wanted to shoot myself.

Is the resort on the transportation system?  Check.  Do the rooms have beds and bathrooms? Check.  Does it have a swimming pool? Check.  Is it in our budget? Check.  That’s all you need to know.  How much of their life together are they wasting with all the unnecessary decision making discussions?  One of them could have decided the hotel in a couple of minutes.  While they are chasing all over the Disney World parks, they are going to find out all their kids want to do is go back to the hotel and play in the pool.  And in the end the kids mostly want water.  The fact that the pool is shaped like Donald Duck isn’t on their minds.

A Decisive Person

A decisive person understands all this and takes charge making most decisions quickly and with clarity.  A decisive person understands the difference between decisions that really make a difference and those that don’t.  A decisive person has a lot more time for the important things in their lives and a lot more peace of mind.

Tomorrow I’ll make some suggestions for becoming a more decisive person.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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I sat down to write an article on why being busy is a mistake and I decided I should check the dictionary definition of the word.

bus·y –adjective: actively and attentively engaged in work or a pastime

That’s not exactly what I had in mind.  That definition of “busy” makes being busy a good thing.  If I’m sitting on a beach lost in a good book, then I’m busy; I’m actively and attentively engaged in a pastime I love.  It’s very important to me.  However, most people wouldn’t call me busy nor look upon what I was doing as something important or productive.  The soccer mom with 1,000 things to do while helicoptering around her children would be called busy.  If she was my wife I would be called lazy.

Imagine an office.  Compare and contrast two employees.

One of them has a to-do list of hundreds of tasks.  She is constantly on the go with phone calls, emails, instant messages, and meetings.  She moves at 100 mph, barely stopping to breathe.  She comes in early, works through lunch, and leaves late.  She’s always connected  and working issues when out of the office.  She is definitely “busy”.

The other employee casually and calmly walks in around 9:00 AM.  He spends a bit of time chatting with some of his co-workers.  Then he quietly sits down and concentrates on some work.  He doesn’t go to any meetings.  At 11:45 AM he opens his email and spends a few minutes answering them and makes a few notes.  At 12:00 PM he wraps up for the day and leaves.  He doesn’t seem to be “busy”.

In a modern corporation the second person would probably be fired while the first would be considered an extremely valuable employee.  Most people knowing nothing else would probably strongly prefer the first over the second as she demonstrates hard work and extraordinary dedication.  In my former days I would have done the same.

Now I think differently about all this.  Nowadays, knowing nothing else I would choose the second.  The first employee may be “busy”, but that doesn’t mean she’s doing valuable or important work.  In fact her busyness may be disrupting other people and preventing them from doing important work.  The second employee may be a game changer.  The fact that somebody works 15 hours a day means nothing.  What matters is what they create, not how many things they do.  One good idea is worth more than 1,000 trivial completed tasks.

I used to be busy in a way that looked more like the first.  Now my goal is to be more like the second; I’m much of the way there.

Important work can be hard and lonely.  Doing a 1,000 small things is like a drug addiction.  Every time you respond to an email, go to a meeting, complete a trivial tasks, it is like taking a hit.  You get a temporary high.  You feel good about completing something.  You feel important and needed.  It’s a sickness and an addiction with long-term consequences you don’t want.

Everybody has the same amount of time.  Everybody gets 1440 minutes a day.  Don’t say “I don’t have time” or “I’m too busy”.  In that respect we are all equal; we all have the same allocation of daily minutes.

I’m tired of being busy in a 24/7 connected world.  I want to be valuable.  I want to do what is important to me.  I don’t want to be in a constant state of high-tension stress because I’m “busy” and because I have too much to do.  I want to be calm and reflective and quietly go about getting important work done.  I’ve decided being busy is no longer for me.

“Less is not more.  Less is better.” — Leo Babauta

You might also be interested in Scott Berkun’s The Cult of Busy.

What do YOU think?  Are you busy?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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