Jeff Davidson's Blog, page 10

Breathing Space and Concentration

Here are notes I took from Sam Horn's session on Concentration years back. Still great advice to this day!

* Concentration defined: voluntarily focused attention.
* Discipline of ignoring irrelevant matters
* Fixing ones' powers, efforts and attention
* Most people work best under a deadline; when their concentration is focused.
* Fatigue is a big road block to concentration

This last note is telling!:
* Society is moving towards a lower frustration tolerance with less discipline, and more need for immediate gratification. These are detriments to concentration.

Home, Your Sanctuary

Whether it’s your home, car, office, or any other space, seek to accommodate the way you sleep, eat, drive, work, and live.

Never mind how your arrangement appears to someone else. When you manage your environment, it might not look conventional or "normal" to others. So what? Which do would prefer? Easier ways of doing things or more involved, more complex ways of doing things?

One good trip to a Home Depot store can work wonders. You can pick up a few green plants, curtain rods, and new light fixtures. Whatever rooms and areas of your home could use a mild upgrade, go ahead and make the effort. Even minimal positive effects to your home environment can make a difference in your work effectiveness.

Making Decisions

Here is some sage advice about making decisions in both your professional and personal lives, from author and counselor Rebecca Merrill.

Rebecca Merrill, Living in Yes, c 2004

1. We all have to do it.

2. We never get to stop doing it.

3. Every new decision leads to more decisions. It's just a question of how

4. It's difficult to make good decisions for a multitude of reasons.

5. We spend a small percentage of our lives making decisions, but they determine the rest of our lives, which are the consequences.

6. There are no "right" or perfect decisions.

7. With every decision, you will experience some loss, especially if you choose to do nothing.

8. You can only make the decision you are capable of making when the decision is called for; all decisions are a function of who you are at the time you make them.

9. The quality of your life is directly related to the quality of your decisions.

10. It is well worth your while to learn how to make good ones.

Stop and Smell the Roses!

Studies at The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation shows that flowery odors will help your brain function more effectively. Test subjects were asked to complete puzzles before and after being exposed to flowery odors. The scents apparently relax or improve your mood -- subjects were able to complete puzzles 17% faster after smelling the flowers.

Sanborn's Leadership Blog

Check out Mark Sanborn's Leadership Blog. An interview about my book Simpler Living is featured, but then I started reading his other posts and saw that there is quite a bit worth considering. Mark Sanborn has several best selling books, including You Don't Need a Title to Be a Leader, The Fred Factor, and The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do.

Being Hacked = No Breathing Space

Using any of these 25 passwords is highly risky. A hacked password equals no breathing space. Instead make up something more complex, with random letters and numbers, such as ij6kf40d1. Or use an acronym and numbers known only to you, such a mwdSina8 ("my wonderful dog Skippy is now age 8").

These are a hackers delight:

      1. 123456
      2. password
      3. 12345
      4. 12345678
      5. qwerty

      6. 123456789
      7. 1234
      8. baseball
      9. dragon
    10. football

    11. 1234567
    12. monkey
    13. letmein
    14. abc123
    15. 111111

    16.mustang
    17. access
    18. shadow
    19. master
    20. michael

    21. superman
    22. 696969
    23. 123123
    24. batman)
    25. trustno1

More Meetings = Less Breathing Space

The typical employee spends +30 hours monthly in meetings and regards at least half of that time to be unnecessary. The calculated cost of unnecessary meetings is $37 billion a year.

Research by Bain & Company indicates that the typical manager consumes at least one full day each week in meetings, and that senior executives devote 40% of the work week in ineffective meetings. None of the findings above includes the time preparation and follow up time consumed before and after meetings.

,All Day

The process of giving yourself a mental completion on all tasks or even thoughts, described in my book Breathing Space, sets up a mental partition for you whereby you have more energy, focus, and direction for what’s next.

You can practice completions all day long. When you get up tomorrow morning, whether you had good sleep or bad sleep, you'll be complete with that phase of your day, and so on. If you give yourself acknowledgment, and this takes only two or three seconds, you will have more energy, more focus, and more direction for whatever else you face.

Do It Yourself

The Wall Street Journal offered a nice feature on website that help you take care of tasks on your own:

Instructions, Parts
Howstuffworks.com has step-by-step instructions and diagrams. YouTube.com has instructional videos submitted by users. Homerepair.about.com offers maintenance tips to avoid future repairs. Manualsonline.com has 1000's of owner's manuals available for download.
Searspartsdirect.com sells approved replacement parts for 1000's of models and brands. Partselect.com sells parts and has troubleshooting tips.

Don't Text While Driving

A sad story, but all too true: texting while driving is a death wish.