Should we feel secure and comfort?

As being said among analysts, the worst lies ahead, many layoffs will be occurring all around after the New Year – in January and February. Even Google is said to layoff.

Are you ready for this? Are your friends ready for this?

Day after day TV shows people already left without employment but with debts and mortgages. “What do they gonna do?” is the unanswered question. What would you do walking in their shoes?

I believe, we can adapt this changes. Remember Who Moved My Cheese? Money are not disappearing, they are being reallocated. So should we – reallocate our own resources, reconfigure our activities, step out of comfort zones, that are going to drown.

Some of us will be as always paralyzed be fears, but I believe you will not.

Assume, we got a month to prepare. Is it too late? Don’t think so.

What I personally am going to do to prepare for the storm? Two strategies in Top10 format (as Guy Kawasaki teaches), on practice I will mix them.

Strategy I (rational):

1. Take the situation as a challenge.
2. Let bygones be bygones.
3. Learn from the history. There is a great deal of books, e.g. discussing the Great Depression.
4. Monitor what is happening around, anticipating the events.
5. Have all data at the fingertips to be able to react quickly.
6. Look out for people who succeeded in resisting the crisis and learning from their experience.
7. Rethink current cash flow in favor of being flexible, e.g. not making any loans.
8. Establish direct relationships with producers, e.g. farmers, water suppliers and so on – excluding the resellers.
9. Become a producer myself.
10. Help people around – there is always someone in need more than you do.

Strategy II (philosophical):

1. Life is what I personally value at most.
2. All these houses, dresses, statuses, jobs, talks .. make no sense indeed.
3. Having no success in this place? Move to another – trial and error.
4. Love and only love. Even if my own plans are gone for a burton.
5. There is a challenge, why not to take a dare?
6. Whatever happens, stay a human. “Hard times” is not a reason to give up humanness.
7. Live proactively. Remember Viktor Frankl‘s lessons from Man’s Search for Meaning.
8. Hope. There is always a book of blank pages, as Romain Gary said in Les enchanteurs.
9. Stay simple – do not be overcomplicated and fearful.
10. Be grateful for what you have.

What do you think?

Further actions:

• Take a look at Wikipedia article on 2008 financial crisis, it provides many details in a single place.
• Take a time to read Man’s Search for Meaning once again.
• Give peace a chance.

Leading photo by Osvaldo_Zoom

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Distraction is a serious and world-wide problem. Office distraction especially. Not only it makes thousands people feel unsatisfied when it comes to answer “what have I accomplished today?” question, but also it is a hit to overall business performance – because huge amounts of critical time are being constantly lost.

Somewhat less often talked about is a personal distraction preventing many of us from reaching the goals of life – countless number of books/paintings/songs are never written, millions of tons of excess weight are never been worked off, innumerable life changing ventures are not even been thought about. You can continue this depressing list, I suppose.

We call it distraction, procrastination, lack of will, laziness, weakness, sluggishness, loss of motivation etc.

Books, posts, talks, advices, motivating speeches are all around but the question is standing still.

In this article I consider two question:

• Classification of distraction
• Methods to overcome distraction

The distraction classification scheme:

Outer (focus related):

• Information overload (cannot gain focus)
• Unexpected events (frequent loss of focus)

Inner (mind related):

• Fear
• Fuzzy thinking

Here is a more detailed scheme with some examples:

This classification of course is not a complete one, but for it helps to identify the sources of distraction, and then to develop a techniques for overcoming it.

Let’s move on to the methods and techniques.

Common methods can be divided into following classes:

• Inbox management methods: if you have constant inbox overload, that blocks your thinking ability, you should consider these methods. Simple enough, they are well-tested and described in high details. A lot can be found at 43 Folders, Lifehack and others.
  
• Prioritization methods: the core here is development of prioritization habit – you should determine your system of values and then assign priorities for every single task according to your values. Seems all time management/productivity books consider these methods – look there.
• Distraction source avoidance: these include identifying and getting rid of most dangerous distraction sources while working (disabling IMs, Twitter, always on top email-clients, junk food within eyeshot etc.), allocation of “distraction hours”, developing a habits of distraction-free work.

The methods are over here. And the temptation to use them out of the box is over here too. But what I have learned from lots of personal management attempts, is that nothing will work out the box when it comes to personal management.

Each single method should be adapted to you, to your lifestyle, to your health, to your work, to your family, to your religion, to your habits, to your self-image – only then it will have a chance to work.

That is why I think it is important to give some hints on developing a methods to overcome distraction.

First of all, each method should by definition have bounds of application. Some people do not take this fact into account, and this is a mistake, I think.

1. Thus, developing of a method begin with delimitation of its bounds. Having the scheme above it is fairly easy to do on the classification basis.
   The key here is to identify the most significant distraction, and develop a technique to reduce it to zero.
2. Once you are done with this, you have both the goal and the bounds of methods.
   Now you need a goal testing criterion – answer the question – “how will you understand that you have no distraction?” Define the exact conditions you are seeking.
3. After that the method should be described. It indeed can be the adapted variation of existing technique, or combination of some (don’t be scared to mix them up).
4. Avoid abstract descriptions. The method should be as much personal as possible – it is for you only, you should literally feel each step, see it crystally clear. (That is why I’m not giving a hypothetical examples here – they would be meaningless.)
5. The main point: method should be smooth, incremental, easy to use. If you have to study a 100 pages spec to reduce IM-twaddle, I guess you won’t. First steps should be the easiest.
6. Once the method is smooth, start applying it.

Summing up, the main steps to develop a method for overcoming distraction:

• Determine the most significant distraction you experience – that is goal and bounds for the method.
• Define the conditions that will tell you when you are done.
• Describe method in personal terms, so you can feel each step.
• Assure that method is smooth to apply, if not, make it smoother.
• Take the first step

Well, today I shared some thought on method design, in future I am going to share the exact method I implemented for myself, just to prove the concept.

In addition, I will write about Roots of Distraction in detail. Stay tuned.

Leading picture by Erick Schonfeld.

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Taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure

When it comes to decisions, I think, making decisions without evaluation is the cause of many failures.

You can’t control the things you can’t measure. The ground truth.

Once you have started a project, which goal is more than a waste of time, you should take care of evaluation.

Here are the main steps of effective evaluation process (most basic and very quick):

• Define the goals of project.
• Define measurable metrics for each goal. Metrics can be direct, e.g. weight measuring, and indirect, e.g. IQ test.
• Define the desired results via chosen metrics – exact values that indicate that a certain goal is met.
• Define the factors that influence each of metrics, e.g. food consumption influences weight.
• Identify the factors you can control. Can you control your daily food consumption?
• Define the periods between evaluations.
• Set up a kind of database for storing the measurements – it can be a Moleskine or MySQL – whatever you prefer.
• Set up a convenient evaluation environment, e.g. if you’re doing the evaluation twice a week at monday and thursday evening, make sure it is the time you are waiting for – prepare a coffee, favorite music, etc.
• Use convenient tools. Dealing with plain numbers can be truly boring. Find the tools for creating eye-candy graphs, tables, for doing statistical analysis in one-click.
• If you don’t like numbers, hire someone who likes, the analyst.
• Carry out atomic experiments to find out the most significant factors.
• Do not tweak too frequently. Each decision must be supported with statistically valid data.
• Each time you tweak something, make sure you keep a record of your changes.
• From time to time think of your goals, metrics and factors – look for something to add, also remove irrelevant ones.
• Look what other people do, what kind of tools they use, what do they measure, learn from the best practices.
• Keep eye on technology and technology will be your ally.

Proper evaluation is a good foundation when you are about to make decisions about your project. Not only it provides you with data to rely on, but also it gives you a clear view of your project’ state.

Imagine the improvements you can achieve if you had the perfect evaluation system by your side. It is quite useful to write down these improvements and start implementing your perfect system. Not such a difficult task, once you care about it.

Stay tuned. In upcoming posts I will explain each of the points above in detail.

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It is ridiculous when someone stricken by a food poisoning endures pain just because she is afraid of being treated as a fake.

It is even more ridiculous when employee cannot stay at home nursing a sick spouse because “firm is more important than family”.

It is absurd when a professional who decided to change his job to be able to spend more time with children is disrespected and called a renegade.

I think these are not a single instances. The suffering causes more suffering when you are trying to alleviate it. Something has gone wrong.

I see following problems:

• People are treated as interfaces providing a functionality, not as a human beings. It has become a common view within today’s consumer society.
• Suffering is considered unnatural and nearly as an act of sabotage.
• The spiritual values are progressively depreciated. The higher the stakes the lower the moral.

My point can be summarized in the following: to overcome such serious problems we need to think intensively about improving the global education system.

Why education? Because today’s education tends to reinforce the problems. I’m scared when I look at students who believe the goal of education is graduation. The goal of education is to become a human. It is mostly overlooked today even in prestigious universities. Now imagine what’s with the village schools.

It’s we who have almost unlimited power compared to people living beyond the poverty line, we are responsible for the future.

It is totally disappointing to see that today’s financial crisis and other crises are being used as an excuses for inactivity and shifting the blame. “Everything’ s bad and going worse, so why should I do anything?”. It is inadmissible to think this way.

Do you prefer to give up instead of living the life you are dreaming of? Most people who have unlimited power do.

If you do not, engage in the social movement. Start taking action today.

The actions:

• Contribute by yourself. Resolve to achieve humanness. Rethink your frame of reference.
• Teach. If you are a parent, then the most important thing you can do is teaching your children the right way.
• Change little things. They are of most importance. I suppose you feel more resistance when it is about changing a small things, act locally, than it is about a whole. The more resistance you feel the more important is to overcome this resistance.
• Forgive people. You are responsible.
• Spread the word. The easiest action you can take. With today’s tremendous level of people interconnections word-of-mouth became very powerful.

Never give up!

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