Seven Ways to Stop the Busywork

If you are anything like me, you often get overwhelmed by connectivity and the myriad options it throws at us.

Michael Bungay Stanier, author of Do More Great Work: Stop the Busywork, and Start the Work that Matters has given our busy-ness some thought. In Seven Ways to Stop the Busywork he gives seven strategies to prevent overwhelm and burn-out:

I saw a recent report that said that in Intel people spend an average of 20 hours a week ON EMAIL ALONE!

Crazy.

So if you’re looking for something practical tips, here we go:

Here’s three of Michael’s seven strategies:

1. Define three things

It’s not a measure of success to check off forty-seven “to-dos” in a day if you haven’t actually accomplished what matters most. Define the three high-impact actions you want to take each day, and list them as “all-day tasks” on your calendar so you remember what they are.

6. Control the Blackberry [or iPhone]

Our culture of relentless connectedness disrupts our focus and our ability to do Great Work. Find systems or structures to manage the relentless flow of e-mail—because answering 150 e-mails a day is no one’s definition of Great Work.

7. Change places (I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of this one)

When you sit down at your desk at the start of the day and crank up your computer, you set your body and brain into Good Work mode: be productive and efficient. Great Work requires a different type of thinking. Find somewhere else to do your Great Work—another place in your office, an empty meeting room, the cafeteria, a coffee shop down the road. Changing the context will change the way you work.

Read more about Michael and his book here.

And see the full seven strategies here.

RR+: Just Poetry Part 6-Rasta Women Nyabingi Drums by Evan Belize

Found this while looking for the Nyabingi Drummers. Wonderfully wacked. En joi!

Will the World End in 2012?

Staring to panic about 2012? Fret not, guest blogger Piya Tan says that in every generation, there are scares about the end of the world and presents a Buddhist view of them.

Here we go again, in every century, in every generation, there is a prediction that the world will end.

Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhi,magga (translated at “The Path of Purification”) gives an interesting and positive account of the world’s end. It is said that we will know when the world is really going to end. “Heavenly messengers” called Loka,byuha (World Marshalls) will appear and warn us. Having described how it would occur, then the World Marshalls advise us: “Cultivate loving-kindness, good sirs, cultivate compassion, altruistic joy, equanimity, good sirs! Care for your mothers; care for your fathers; honour the elders of the clans!”

Hearing this, it is said, we will be filled with spiritual urgency (samvega), and become kind to one another, and make merit with loving-kindness, etc. In cultivating such good works, we will be able to attain dhyana (jhana), and be reborn in the higher Brahma worlds. (Only the physical sense-world will be destroyed).

Tao Te Ching: Sixty Eight & Eighty One

68

A good soldier is not violent.
A good fighter is not angry.
A good winner is not vengeful.
A good employer is humble.
This is known as the Virtue of not striving.
This is known as ability to deal with people.
This since ancient times has been known as the ultimate unity with heaven.

Rumi for St Val’s Day

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absentminded. Someone sober will worry about things going badly. Let the lover be! – Jelaluddin Rumi.

Make today special, but make every day Valentine’s Day. En joi!

Tao Te Ching: Forty Two

The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things…

One gains by losing
And loses by gaining.

What others teach, I also teach; that is:
“A violent man will die a violent death!”
This will be the essence of my teaching.

* The final post from this Chinese classic will come tomorrow, the first day of the Lunar New Year.

Enter the Yang Metal Tiger

Clarice at the launch of her 2010 book in Kinokumiya

Clarice Chan, a Singaporean Feng Shui Master, writes an annual book of predictions. We once shared a stall at WOMAD Festival and she was a regular exhibitor at the Holistic Living Festivals and Wellness Weekends I organised. Especially for Feeling Good, Clarice presents a selection from Your Fortune in 2010.

So will this be a good and auspicious year or a negative and disappointing one? This debate has gone on in the minds of many people.

In this year, four elements are present: they are Metal (the top element) while Wood, Fire and Earth are the hidden elements within the Tiger zodiac itself. The top element is known as the Heaven Stem and the bottom element is known as the Earth Branch, which is the animal zodiac, the Tiger. Directionally, the Tiger also known as the Tai Shui, is located in the North East at 52.5 – 67.5 degrees.

Metaphysically, the element of the year 2010 marks it as a year of conflict. According to the law of the five elements, the top element – Metal – clashes with the bottom – Wood – element. How the elements interact with each other is important and we can see this more clearly if we compare the elements for 2009 and 2010.

Don’t Own the Pain

Piya Tan writes:

The Buddhist teaching of “not-self” (anattaa) is difficult to understand. This may well be true, as it is also said that only the fully awakened, the arhats, fully understand the nature of not-self. However, even as unawakened beings, we can have a very good idea of what not-self is. That is, if we allow ourselves to see and learn openly without being blinkered or blinded by any opinion or religion.

Just assume for a moment that we do not know anything. And here we are reading this article. How do we know how to read? A simple answer would be that we have learned English before. We need not even know any religion before. This knowledge comes from past experiences.

How do we understand what this article is trying to say? We can only know as much as we allow ourselves to know. If we allow our past knowledge of reading to flow through our minds like music, then we will fully enjoy what we are reading. In other words, just as this is written with feeling, it should be read with feeling. Try reading this article (or listening to anyone) without pasting any of our past ideas upon it: it is like reading this as if you have written it yourself. You are likely to learn more from it and enjoy it.

Piya Tan: Our First Guest Blogger

Piya gives a talk after lunch.

Feeling Good welcomes its first guest blogger Piya Tan of The Minding Centre, Singapore. Piya is a full-time lay Buddhist teacher and translator.

Today we will feature his first post Don’t Own the Pain. Watch out for his opinions on Will The World End In 2012? coming soon.

Piya’s special interests are the early Buddhist Canon, Buddhist psychology and meditation and is a Buddhist consultant, meditation counsellor and therapist.

He ordained as a Theravada monk for 20 years and learned Insight Meditation from Mahasi Sayadaw himself. Piya has taught meditation at the University of Berkeley, CA, USA, etc as well as meditation courses at the Defence Science Organization, Singapore.

He currently teaches meditation to corporations including SIA, HP, DSO, Hitachi, JPMorgan, BP, etc., holds regular classes at the Brahm Education Centre, NUS Buddhist Society, NTU Buddhist Society, etc.

As well as the research & translation of ancient Indian meditation texts (see http://dharmafarer.googlepages.com) he conducts personal meditation, counselling and mentoring (at The Minding Centre as well as making house calls).

The Minding Centre is located at: Block 644 Bukit Batok Central, #01-68 (2nd flr), (near Bukit Batok MRT/Interchange) Singapore 650644.

Dharmafarer (Sutta) website: http://dharmafarer.org
Meditation courses & therapy : http://themindingcentre.org
Sutta translation: http://dharmafarer.org

Rye on the Rocks

The writer/ recluse JD Salinger has passed on at the ripe age of 91. His novel “Catcher in the Rye” gave me and many more a procession of aha moments.

Can’t be bothered to read it again? The Guardian newspaper offers a digested read. Here’s a sample:

Did I tell you I had just been thrown out for flunking four subjects? Nah, thought not, ‘cos I’m also a cool, unreliable narrator dude. Anyways, I wasn’t that bovvered ‘cos I’d been kicked out of all my previous schools. I mean, working is just so not hip when you’ve got all this other teenage shit going through your head, like sex an’ girls an’ sex an’ how no one really, like, understands you.

Anyways, there I was kicking my heels till term ended on Wednesday, thinking I really wasn’t that bovvered about how pissed my father was gonna be when he found out I’d been kicked out, when that sexy bastard Stradlater came in late after dating a girl that I fancied and I went mad an’ got him in a head lock and then he called me “you crumby sonofabitch, Caulfield” an beat me up cos’ he’s, like, much bigger than me, so I thought, yeah, like, whatevva, sod this for a game of soldiers, and decided to leave school there and then.

So I picked up my last few hundred dollars and went to the station. I met the mother of a right bastard at Pencey on the train and told her I had a brain tumour, how funny was that? An’ when I got to Penn station I thought about calling my mother, my 10-year-old sister, Phoebe, an’ a couple of girls I vaguely knew who I imagined might want to have sex with me as I was feeling horny as hell, but then I thought, nah, can’t be bovvered, I’ll smoke 20 cigarettes an’ try an’ get drunk and check into a divey hotel full of perverts.

There’s also a discussion about Sallinger, the iPad and more here: