Mind Like Monkey

Let the games begin!

This is the first in a week-long series as the primates look at computer games. Today is Tara’s turn.

There's a great episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called The Game. In essence, an addictive, holographic game threatens to woo the crew of the Enterprise into being controlled by a nepharious enemy. Will Crusher and his lovely girlfriend (played by a very young Ashely Judd, no less) are the only two people who are able to resist the temptation to play. My attitude toward computer gaming is exactly like Will's, I want no part of it.

I’ve never been into playing board or card games. Not even as a kid. So when the popularity of computer games began to soar, I wasn’t tempted. Now, I’m downright hostile toward any sort of computer or online game. My iPad and iPhone and laptop are all entirely game-free. Don't send me any FarmVille requests; I ignore those.

One of the reasons I’ve been adamant about staying away from all the various permutations on diversions is time. I’ve watched countless people waste oodles of hours. I maybe wasting my oodles, too, but I’d prefer my free time to be spend on hiking or reading or watching sports.

From a productivity standpoint, games can be a slippery slope. The reward system in your brain is being activated as you play and you’re getting little surges of the brain’s happy chemical, dopamine. Therefore, games invite a sort of sustained attention that includes a feeling of arousal--that is, excitement with a little hyperactivity thrown in. In many, this experience is so much more enticing than their work that it makes the games hard to put down. I’ve noticed that some folks enter something similar to hypomania, during which they seem not to be able to stop playing, even though fatigue or other demands are calling them away.

I recommend that if you play computer games, you do so mindfully. Pay attention to the effects they have on you. Set limits and boundaries. If you’re experiencing difficulty walking away from a game, or feel a strong urge to play, you may have a bigger problem than merely wasting your time.

Get [FRAMED]!

I have to share this with you. One of the most brilliant minds I have ever had the pleasure of calling friend has put together a new show. If you have every enjoyed photography, get [FRAMED] now! The show follows a professional photographer to different cities to meet the best photographers and learn their secrets, their techniques, their business, everything that can be learned. And it is free! You can't lose. I know I'm going to be on the front row for this series!

[FRAMED]'s first stop

 

No Excuses by Brian Tracy - Review

I picked up No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy specifically because it was a book that came up when I searched for 'discipline' on Audible.com. I was looking for a book that I could use for research on my search for better discipline. I got it from Audible because I figured I would listen to it during my commute and exercise time. Little did I know it would require all my discipline to get to the end of the book.

It started off great. The first section, titled Self-Discipline and Personal Success, had a lot of good ideas on motivating myself to better discipline. I looked forward to hearing more on the areas of character, responsibility, goals and persistence. The only thing that bothered me was the book was read by the author. His voice drove me nuts. He didn't use much, if any, expression. What really struck me, though, was the lack of conviction behind the words. It didn't sound as if it meant anything to him. He wrote it, so it must have. The director of the recording should have pulled it out of him or gotten another reader. It didn't take long before I was forgetting what I heard because the of the voice droning on.

The next section really started to get to me, though. That section, Discipline in Business, Sales and Finance, is when he really stepped up on his soapbox. He writing style is so confident, it lost credibility. He explained, for example, how to be truly successful in life, one must own their own business. He continued by saying that if one is just disciplined, the business will not just be successful, but wildly successful. The treasures of the Earth will flow to your door, if you are just disciplined enough. There I had heartburn. I know enough disciplined entrepreneurs that have had their businesses fail to know there is more to it than what Tracy writes. He made it sound insultingly simple. If a business fails, the owner just wasn't disciplined enough. Shame on them for not being disciplined. Pass the Rolaids.

Then I got to the next section, Discipline and the Good Life. Tracy weighs in on topics such as Personal Health, Fitness, Marriage, Children and Friendship. The advice became short, trite and even more insulting. I couldn't stand it. I nearly turned off the book several times. However, in the interest of studying discipline for this blog and my personal study, I slogged on. To him, it is all so easy. Just fix everything. No excuses. And life will be a bed of roses. Sorry, my life is a little more complicated than that. Perhaps I am just undisciplined. I don't think that it is, though.

My recommendation is to ready the first 120 pages and stop. The exercises he puts at the end of each chapter are valid and worthwhile to use in this section. A little introspection is a good thing. Pushing to improve one's discipline to a higher notch is also a good thing.

Skip the last two sections of the book. Trust me. Have the discipline to do it. Don't waste your life.

 

Oldie but Goodie: Tara interviews an offer

This post was originally published on Tara's blog on Nov 2, 2009.

In a blog post, Steve Demaio gave some great advice about figuring out if you should say yes (or no) to assignments that come your way. His first point was “interview the offer, not just the person making it.” This was such great advice that I decided to take him up on it, and I invited an offer in for a conversation. Here’s the transcript.

Me: Hi, Recent Offer, thanks so much for coming in!

RO: You’re welcome! I’m excited about what we’re going to do together.

Me: That’s what I want to talk to you about, actually. Before I say yes, I’ve got some questions for you.

RO (looking surprised): Oh. Okay. I didn’t know you’d have questions. I mean, really, I’m a hot offer. I expected you’d say yes right away.

Me: I just want to make sure we’re a good fit.

RO: Sure, I understand. I already know you’re right for me and I want you to be happy, too. Fire away!

Me: What would working with you be like?

RO: I have to admit, I’m pretty demanding. You’d have to put me first. Sometimes, people tell me I don’t play well with others.

Me: Oh? How’s that?

RO: I tend to push other projects off to the side. I’m really competitive. And I like to be first.

Me: What about objectives?

RO: Well, those aren’t well defined. I have a tendency to get easily distracted. You know, chasing those bright shiny objects!

Me: Are you saying that the target moves?

RO: Well, I prefer to call it being responsive and flexible.

Me: Got it. How much time would we be spending together?

RO: Lots! Days, nights, weekends.

Me: Hmmm...this isn’t sounding so good to me.

RO: The good news is you’ll get to learn a lot. New skills, new technologies. And I’m all about helping people. You’ll get to help people.

Me: I like helping people, that’s true, but I’m not sure I have the bandwidth for you. Would I be able to delegate?

RO: Uh, no, not really.

Me: I see. What about compensation?

RO: Well, I can’t really compensate you for what you’re worth. But you’ll get tons of valuable experience! Money can’t really buy that!

Me: Well, Recent Offer, you’re very tempting. But I don’t think this is going to work out between us. You’re a great offer. I think you’re going to be highly successful. With someone else.

RO (stunned): I can’t believe it! You’re turning me down?

Me: Yes, I am.

RO (crestfallen): Wow, this doesn’t happen to me very often. Most people say yes right away. They’re always afraid I won’t come back around. Of course, that’s not true. There are lots of other offers. Truth is, we’re a dime a dozen.

Me: Thanks again for dropping by. Anything else I can help you with?

RO: Sure--can you refer me to one of your friends?

As you can see, interviewing an offer can be really revealing. You may uncover new information that makes the offer irresistible, or you may find that the offer isn’t so great after all. The next time you have a chance, interview your own offer and see what you learn. Just a short conversation may save both of you a lot of headaches.

Three Cool Websites

Surfing the web is a very common way to relax and stay informed. At least, that is the excuse we may use. It also is a common way to waste time and numb the mind. What is the difference? How do we keep the good from straying over to the bad? Unfortunately, this post isn't going to help you there. Go see a professional? I'll have to recommend that as a field to specialize in to my son who wants to study psychology. If I can get him off his computer...

This post is about three cool websites that I frequent and find useful. In choosing the sites, I tried to keep away from the sites that are popular and well known, such as major news sites, encylopedias (read: wikipedia) or espn. These are sites I find useful for a specific purpose.

The first is Screen It!  This site catalogs movies and provides information about the movie to make a better educated decision. They break the film down into categories such as Alcohol, Blood/Gore, Violence, Tense Family Scenes, Profanity and Sex/Nudity. They then go on to explain exactly what happens in each instance. This site has been especially helpful as my kids got into the teenage years. PG-13 doesn't mean what it did when I was a kid. There have been a couple movies rated PG-13 that I was able to stop the kids from seeing because of material I considered to be rated R. A side benefit is I can read enough of the story synopsis to keep up socially at work without shelling out all the money to actually see the picture.

The next site I use is Chef Doughty's blog and website. I must say Chef Doughty is a friend of mine. She has a radio show on KBSU Public Radio called Food For Thought. Her site is a treasure trove of cooking tips that I have always wanted to know. She shares the secrets learn in cooking school. The blog posts are clearly written and have wonderful pictures to guide the way. I have learned such great tips as how to cut an onion, a better way to cook bacon and shaping hamburgers. She has recipes and fun ideas. If you like to cook, you have to check it out. I subscribe to her blog and it is the first thing I read.

My final site I find very useful is mvelopes. I talked about this site in my post on managing money. It is one of thew few (okay, the only one I have found so far) online money management systems that is based on the envelope theory. Mvelopes has been a lifesaver for my wife and I while we lived in different cities for awhile. I wish they tracked investments. Their support is great and friendly. They have online chat that has solved just about all my problems instantly. Highly recommended. Mvelopes is a little spendy. I am looking at Mint.com to see if they have progressed far enough to tempt me to switch, but so far, the lure of the envelope budget is too great.

Free bonus: I can't start the day without a little humor. Comics.com is my guilty pleasure. I have customized a page with all my favorites. It is the first place I go in the morning after the news (have to see if we blew up overnight and no one told me...). Need my Peanuts! Also, Dilbert braces me for the office. I swear he has a camera hooked up.

What are some of your favorite sites? What have you found useful time and again? Come on and share.

Quick Lessons From Observation

Here are a few quick lessons for the day.

1. When you have a great idea, write it down immediately, now matter how half baked it may be. When I suggested the topic of learning through observation a few weeks ago, I had, what I thought at the time,  a great idea to write on. Now? I can't remember it.

2. If you put a task off, it won't get any easier. It may even get harder. I have been noodling over this post for over a week. It was due last Friday and I still kept putting it off. Yes, I could have skipped it, but I would have learned I can get away with skipping instead of doing. That is not a habit I want to start.

3. You can learn much by watching others. You can learn even more by watching yourself. I believe taking a step back and analyzing actions, motives and results is very healthy. This concept is at the core of the weekly review, even though it may not be expressly stated as such. We learn by doing. We gain wisdom by thinking about those actions and planning different actions to gain a different result next time. That is the key, young padawan.

4. If you must procrastinate, do something useful while you are doing it. This weekend, instead of writing, I cleaned my desk. This morning, when I sat down to write, I had a clean space to work in. It is kind of like a little gift sent to my future self. 

Life is like a box of chocolates

Once more, we have to set ourselves up and show to the world that we are a family of warriors. When I was 15 years old, I discover a path, that for a lot of people was simply wrong, regardless of how much I enjoy that path or chocolate, people didn't think that was a good one for me to take. I listen, you know your mother also tell: 'you should listen to your elders, since you can learn a thing or two, and I have, but in this case I think the elders were afraid, afraid that I failed.
'Don't try to taste that kind of chocolate, most of the people that eat it failed.' I listen, and took the advise they give me. Had been a great run, I had enjoy it, I had fun and I had learn a lot, but it is time for me to try a different box of chocolate, the box I want to open and try when I was 15 and got afraid.
I am a writer, I write, and I enjoy writing very much, I get reenergize by reading and writing, I read and write constantly, and I love it, and for the next months I am going to be eating that sweet chocolate.
On November 2009, I embrace NANOWRIMO, and I won. In order to win you need to write 50,000 words. This year I am beginning my second novel on November 1st, again on NANOWRIMO. My First Novel to the public, (I write my first novel when I was 17, but I never published, so the one I begin on 2009 is technically my second one)
On this novel (the one I begin in 2009), I had wrote the manuscript 3 times, but this time I think I have something good in my hands, and had took me a while to understand why, and the reason of all this lines. I am writing about the Chocolate I want to eat, I am writing the novel I want to read, and I am enjoying all the seconds of it, it had been a pleasure to share over 200,000 words (All the drafts together) with George Mason (My Main Character), he and I are eating that forbidden chocolate, the one I wasn't suppose to eat, because people tend to failed. 
I don't know if I will be able to make my life selling words, (during the last seven years I had done it selling computer software and components) but I have discover that the only failure I had made with my dream of selling words, had been that I didn't even try to sell them (I was afraid, remember).
Beginning Monday October 25th, I am going to try to make my life selling my words, in other words, I am going to make it as a Writer. That doesn't mean I would not get into other adventures, projects, just mean that instead of identify myself as a Sales Manager, I would do it as a Writer, I am going to taste this Chocolate, and I am planning to enjoy it! 
I hope you join me in this journey, and I hope that if you have a Chocolate that you are afraid to taste, you think again, think harder, and taste it, doesn't matter what it is, matters that you try hard.
In my last years as a Sales Manager, I had lost many deals, but I had close some fantastic ones, the reason I try hard, I always try hard. There is going to be no difference here, I am going to be trying hard again, I am just selling something else, something I hope other people will enjoy.

 

 

**Image courtesy of: http://www.tradingphrases.com/item_654/Life-Like-Box-of-Chocolates-Wall-Decals.htm

How will you use the gift of this day?

This is the second post in our series "On Productivity." Today, Tara shares what productivity means to her.

I ask myself this question just about every morning: how will I use the gift of this day? I ask it with greater intensity on the days that are relatively free of meetings and appointments--those are the days that are most precious, full of the potential granted by the uninterrupted time to dig deep into a single project. And those are the days that are also endangered by the very thing that makes them so valuable--with no boundaries or external structure, it can be all too easy to fritter away the hours.

Over the past few months, I’ve looked more deeply into what productivity means. And in that thinking, I came to the conclusion that productivity isn’t just producing results. Productivity is taking actions that lead in the direction of an envisioned future. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say that your right-now, your present life, isn’t one you love. Maybe it’s your job or where you live. It could be the circumstances or your mindset. No matter what’s making now into “not the greatest,” you want the future to be different from now. Cool. So you imagine your future and you envision how things will be different. Maybe you make a vision board or right down a vision statement. Then you expand on the vision and create some goals. Now you have what I’m calling an envisioned future.

To get from your envisioned future to the actualized vision, you have to take action. When you take actions designed to lead toward your envisioned future, that’s productive.

Put another way, if you choose actions that lead in some other direction, you’re not being productive relative to your envisioned future. This is why you need to add in reflection--looking for lessons and insights from past actions and their outcomes--so you can implement those lessons in choosing future actions. That’s how your actions become strategic.

You may or may not succeed in realizing the vision you’ve created. We don’t get to fully control our outcomes. But your actions--those are your choices. And it is your actions that determine your success or failure in the long run. Your actions are your productivity.

How will you use the gift of this day, dear reader? Will you savor or squander it? Your future awaits you--will you arrive to meet it at the appointed time and place? What actions will you take today?

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Thanks for sharing the bananas!

Thoughts on Labor: Tara's take

Long weekend. Holiday. Time off. There was a long stretch in my life when I didn’t know what those words meant. Weekends had no meaning to me--I worked straight through. Holidays? Fuggetaboutit. I lived in a tropical paradise and rarely went to see any sights.

I was in grad school. And then I was a post-doc. And then a professor. Those were my excuses. I had to work, work, work to get where I wanted to go. Not that all my hard work failed to pay off. It did: I earned my degree. Wrote a book that’s done pretty well for its genre. And now I enjoy a successful business. But my perspective on time off has changed a lot over the years.

I have learned to set some boundaries.

Like I don’t work at night. And no email after 5 pm.

I take long weekends. I go on vacations and--gasp--don’t work during them.

So when this past Labor Day rolled around, I gave myself permission to be on holiday, even not writing my usual Monday blog post because I was off-duty. And that’s a big step for me, I have to admit. For a long time, I believed that if I went off and rested, my gains and progress would be lost. I had myself convinced that any interruption spelled doom for whatever I was working on. Now I know better. I’ve learned to pick back up where I left off, better for the break, and get back on track.

And when I think of Labor Day, I think more about time spent with my beloved--just hanging out, going to do fun stuff, just being in each other’s company--perhaps the most important labor of all: the labor of love.

Hey, hey! The monkeys are back and better than ever

After a full summer, the monkeys convened via phone last week. Yep, we had taken some time off and yep, we all agreed it was time to get back to our monkey business. This week, we’ll report on what we did over our summer time away. Today, it’s Tara’s turn.

Summers in the Pacific Northwest are glorious. And short. We often don’t get sunny, warm weather until June and by September, the clouds start returning. What this means is that people up here (including me) are pretty much crazy about sunshine. We thrive on it. It makes us giddy and cheerful and way more friendly. We even cancel school for good weather (seriously!). So it should be no surprise that when the sun shines, The Productivity Maven (yeah, that’s me) wants to get outside and enjoy the rays.

Because I’m building up miles to tackle The 3-Day benefiting Susan G Komen for the Cure (and your donations are appreciated!), I got a lot of my sunshine time out hiking and walking. I got to walk in all sorts of awesome places this summer. That’s me in the photo, getting ready to walk the Newport Marathon in June. I strolled around New York City, in Amsterdam, and on lovely forest roads in Germany.

And all that walking is a good thing for your brain. New research indicates that walking improves functioning of a part of the brain called the “default mode network” (or DMN, for short).

The DMN handles your brain’s activity when you’re just sitting around--either in passive observation mode or daydreaming. The DMN loses some of its pizzaz as people age, decreasing in overall activity as well as being less coordinated in its function. For example, in people with Alzheimer’s, the DMN gets stuck, so to speak, and those folks have trouble shifting gears to focus and pay attention on things in their environments.

Not so with people who walk a lot. In walkers, the DMN gets more “connectivity” resulting in improved productivity in activities like planning, prioritizing, and strategizing. Yay! Cheerful sunshine vibes, better brain function, and more productivity after time off spent walking.