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.

That Clear Up Clutter Time of the Year

My desk before a clean up - time for the PC to hit the trash?

It’s been that clear up clutter time of the year and I can report great progress with this Sisyphean chore: my desk is no longer like the photo above (but of course entropy has set in since the last tidy up/throw out/ place in drawers effort), and the kitchen has never been so organised.

Even so there’s more work needed in the bedroom and I have yet to face the horror of the black hole of the store room.

And it’s interesting the mental stuff that comes up when you are sorting through your physical possessions: the emotions, the memories, the desires long gone…

Guess my biggest problems are with books, clothes and tools.

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.

Tao Te Ching: Twenty Two

Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.

I Ching: 40 Hsieh/ Deliverance

The I Ching, regarded as one of the five Confucian Classics, originates in methods of foretelling dating back over 4,000 years.

Variously known as the Yì Jīng, Classic of Changes or Book of Changes or Zhouyi, the I Ching has long been used as an oracle to “cast” a reading. When yarrow stalks, coins or today a computer programme are used, six lines are randomly generated to form a hexagram. Then the book is consulted to find the appropriate reading.

I asked for advice for Feeling Good readers in the Year of the Tiger and up came hexagram 40: Hsieh / Deliverance

Tao Te Ching: One

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

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: