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Steve's clean whiteboard
Here is a photo and a blog post from a guy who I mentored a couple of years ago – Steve Keevil. I like his attitude to a problem that dogs us all. A to-do list that you don’t do!
Here is what he says:
For a long time the white board contained a lot of items that I failed to do.
Ideas that were had and never achieved.
And then I’d beat myself up over my lack of achievements and then procrastinate from actually doing something proactive to change this. It became a slippery slope.
So this year… the simple rule is, if it’s not on the board then I’m not working on it.
So I’ve done the same here at Martonhouse.
The other day I was talking to an interviewee from one of our film shoots and the topic of the conversation was threefold; Why do we worry about things? Where do answers for daily problems come from? And why can we sometimes not sleep at night because of our thoughts?
This got me thinking. I’m a worrier, I churn things around in my head over and over again. This can be things I need to do, things I need to say, things that I may have said. I don’t lose sleep over it but it’s a regular thought process for me.
These thoughts often make things seem a lot worse than they really are.
Talking to John made us both realise we are the same, not just John and I but quite possibly everybody. Perhaps not to extremes but certainly to a varying level. John ranks high in my list of wise people I have met, yet still he loses sleep at night because he stresses about sometimes the simplest of problems.
The biggest problem is we still look for answers when we already know them but deep down we don’t want to take action for whatever reason.
Of course there are many external factors to take into account when it comes to stress, but the bottom line is we often make ourselves feel a heck of a lot worse about it by delaying a course of action.
One possible remedy for this is to limit the amount of options you have for a solution to maybe 3 possible answers. When you have 3 then think sensibly about what the outcome of each one could be. Then dig a little deeper, you probably already know which answer is best. At this point stop and take action. Don’t wait for somebody to tell you what to do, after all nobody know you better than you know yourself.
I reckon more often that not you’ll produce the right answer without even trying too hard.
I’ll give it a try and if I fall over into a quivering wreck you’ll know why.
Remember, the answer often comes from within.
I’ll leave you with this thought for the weekend:
Sometimes by leading the vision we are blinding ourselves from the wisdom of others.
Following on from Edit Blindness something happened yesterday that hasn’t happened for a while – we went out for lunch!
We keep going on about it here on The Learning Journey and that is because it is a vital ingredient to the success of your day. Sometimes though a working schedule, such as our recent busy time doesn’t allow for it and even though we still ate food at about the right time we were rarely moving from our desks to eat it and that went a good way towards edit blindness we suffered.
Getting out for lunch is incredibly liberating, whether it is with other people or by yourself. Being by yourself allows for some thinking time, whilst being with other people can provide some much needed distraction from the stuff which is at the front of your mind for the other 7+ working hours of the day.
For people who work from home mainly by themselves a lunch out with other human beings can provide a form of escape and some necessary social skills which can be lost by working alone.
I actually did go out for lunch today but sadly ended up in the middle of a cloudburst. It was entertaining to say the least.
Do you make time for lunch? Did you get out today? What did you eat? How did it affect your afternoon?
image courtesy of Red Bubble and artist Mike Stimpson. You can see more of Mike’s wonderful Lego art here.
As you may have guessed from the slightly more sporadic postings appearing on the blog we’ve been very busy working to deadlines here.
Being busy though doesn’t mean our brains aren’t quietly collating more data for future posts though.
All 3 of the film guys here at Marton House have been working alone in darkened video edit suites for too long and it was only a matter of time before one of us snapped. This time it was Tim, whom we discovered the other day wandering the corridors, swilkering coffee around and muttering something about not being able to “see” the project anymore.
This was a problem he termed “edit blindness”, you may know it better as not being able to see the wood for the trees. Either way it is a point in time when you have been looking at something for too long and suddenly none of it makes sense and you can see no way to proceed.
At this point you start making serious errors and the best thing you can do for the project and more importantly yourself is to step away. Take a break, have a look at something completely different for a while. Come back to it later, or maybe even the next day if the project can afford it with a fresh perspective on things.
Tim is now stable again thankfully, for the time being at least.
How many times today have you been left fumbling around for a word which you know instinctively is rattling around somewhere inside that void of a mind?
Lifehacker points us to this video which claims to be able to help us.
How many offices around the world has, at one point had a picture on the wall that says something like “Choice” or “Change”? Well check out these from bandyhumor.com.
Remember these?
The humble filofax was the ultimate status symbol of the 80’s. If you had one you were either regarded as a top business person by some or as a dreaded yuppie by others.
Filofax’s are still around just nowhere near as popular as they once were. Maybe it’s that in this technologically wonderful age it has been replaced by things like mobile phones, Blackberries, iPhones, iPods etc. The great thing is all of those things are smaller but they all do roughly the same thing as a Filofax – they store data. Dates, times, appointments, meetings, notes, memos and most importantly ideas. Heck you can even scribble on most of them with a fake pen or a finger.
Have we all lost the ability to store those great ideas that sneak up on us? If we don’t write them down somehow we’ll forget them.
How do you know if an idea is worth storing? The answer is you don’t but the trick is if the thought is interesting, jot it down. You may come back to it later and think it’s a load of old rubbish but it’s only relative to your current state of mind and who knows tomorrow it may be a real gem!
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