Category: Cognative Errors

Do Less

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When was the last time you did less?

Most of us live very full lives. Between work, exercise, housekeeping, and other commitments it seems like being on the go is the natural state of affairs. However, is it healthy to remain constantly picking up new projects, agreeing to new responsibilities and rushing to the next meeting?

In a Time magazine article from last year titled Do Less. It’s Good for You, journalist Jamie Ducharme explores how doing fewer things may bring greater health and life enjoyment. To do so, we must first rethink what it means to do less. Ducharme points to a set of studies that show how hard it is for most people to relax.

Researchers including Michelle Newman, a professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, have also studied the concepts of “relaxation anxiety” and “relaxation sensitivity,” which relate to the discomfort, boredom, or unease some people feel when they slow down. For some, “There’s this view that, ‘I should always be busy doing something,’” Newman says. “Often people feel like it’s not okay to just be reading a good book or watching a good program on TV.”

She then points out how relaxation through doing less is vital to staying healthy.

The truth is, rest and relaxation are vital to well-being. Chronic stress negatively affects nearly every aspect of mental and physical health, even contributing to higher risks for chronic disease and premature death. Meanwhile, rest may boost your health, quality of life, and longevity. Getting better at resting and relaxing, then, isn’t frivolous; it could actually be lifesaving.

The challenge of doing less involves setting boundaries between work and home, relaxing the body, and starting small with changes. To learn more about how to reprogram yourself from a state of constant doing to a lifestyle that values relaxation, please read the rest of the article.

The Secret to Success – Take Time Off

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When was the last time you took a vacation from work? I mean a true vacation where you unplugged completely from the office, not even peeking at your email once.

There is a mindset that we need to keep working to succeed. Breaks and vacations are seen as distractions from accomplishing goals. However, is this true or simply a recipe for burnout?

In an article on his website, Darius Foroux suggests that taking time off is actually vital to completing your goals. In fact, time off not only is good for your physical and mental well-being, but it also a way to increase creativity and focus. To start, he chastises the idea that taking time off is for wimps.

People who never take time off to do nothing are short-term focused. “I want to reach my goals! NOW!”

But as always, short-term thinking harms your long-term development and growth. What happens when you power through work and burn yourself out? In most instances, your results suffer, and you become less productive.

In some cases, you even become depressed — which will set you back even longer. 

His solution is to embrace time off from work. Whether it is deliberate breaks during the day or taking an unplugged vacation, time off has many benefits. One of the primary reasons breaks are important is that they give us time to think and process.

All ideas require processing. Are the ideas any good? Do I really want to do those things?

Again, that’s a thinking process. When you go from idea to execution, without processing, you often waste your time in hindsight.

Of course, you can never entirely prevent that. But by taking the time to process your ideas, you can prevent your future self a lot of pain, worry, and even money.

Read the full article on Foroux’s website to learn more benefits of taking time off.

The Path to Happiness

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Given the choice, most people would prefer to be happy. Yet, happiness remains frightfully elusive. Why is that?

It may have to do with where we place our attention. Quite often our happiness is a result of what we are choosing to do, and who we are with, in the moment. With that theory in mind, is it possible to mindfully improve our happiness?

According to Scott Young, the answer is yes. In an article on his website, Young proposes that the path to greater happiness is focusing on the things we love as opposed to the things we merely like. Early in the piece he lays out his logic.

Each of us has things we love. These things are both deeply enjoyable, and they fit ourselves into the vision of who we would like to be. When we’re doing them, we feel both fun and joy in the moment, but also feel content with the person we’re aiming to be.

We also have things we just like. These things may offer some momentary pings of joy, but the activity itself doesn’t really make us feel better about ourselves or deeply fulfilled. It’s just something to pass the time.

A route to greater happiness, in both the day-to-day enjoyment and long-term fulfillment with who you are and where you are in life is simple: do more of the things you love, and cut back on the things you merely like.

Young believes that by being methodical about identifying the things we love to do and the places and people we love to be with, our happiness will improve by focusing our time on them. To learn more about his theory and follow his step-by-step guide to make it happen, please read the rest of the article.

Do You Measure Your Wealth in Money or Time?

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When people consider the idea of success, often they equate dollar signs as the measure. The belief is that having more money in the bank account equals greater satisfaction. However, one can have an abundance of dollars, but it is worthless when there is no time to enjoy it. Therefore, is it more accurate to say that a person should be measured by how much time freedom they have?

In a recent article on Lifehacker, writer Jeff Somers explores how control over one’s time rather than monetary wealth may be the best sign of success. He writes:

Time affluence—the feeling that you have enough time to accomplish everything you want to get done—is a crucial aspect of our happiness and sense of personal satisfaction. Time poverty is the opposite—that stressful feeling you get when there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between commuting to and from our jobs, the time spent working, then the chores at home, many of us barely have time to eat some dinner and maybe stream a show before collapsing into bed—and starting the process over again the next day.

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Later in the article he offers some time hacks that can free up valuable space in the day. The first method he discusses is organizing and prioritizing.

Since your time is limited, stop treating it like an amorphous, infinite resource you always have more of. Make lists of things you need or want to do and prioritize them. Then use time blocking to break each of those priorities into a fixed amount of time needed to accomplish them or at least move them toward completion. This avoids letting tasks pile up, which increases stress and that sense of not being in control of your time, and provides a visual guide to how your day will play out. And having clear times for specific activities to end will increase your efficiency.

Learn his other techniques for building up time affluence by reading the rest of the article.

Opening Up Your Personal Constraints

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Oftentimes personal development seems like a nebulous task. Since a lot of it takes place in our heads and hearts, it would seem that attempts at self-improvement are hard to quantify. However, could there be a way to use physical world productivity systems to produce inner growth?

On his YouTube channel, Tiago Forte recently explored using the Theory of Constraints to improve personal productivity and development. For those not familiar with the theory, it was developed decades ago to better understand how large-scale systems, especially factories, could function more effectively. A key focus of the process is identifying the bottleneck. The website Lean Production defines it this way:

The core concept of the Theory of Constraints is that every process has a single constraint and that total process throughput can only be improved when the constraint is improved. A very important corollary to this is that spending time optimizing non-constraints will not provide significant benefits; only improvements to the constraint will further the goal (achieving more profit).

Thus, TOC seeks to provide precise and sustained focus on improving the current constraint until it no longer limits throughput, at which point the focus moves to the next constraint. The underlying power of TOC flows from its ability to generate a tremendously strong focus towards a single goal (profit) and to removing the principal impediment (the constraint) to achieving more of that goal. In fact, Goldratt considers focus to be the essence of TOC.

Tiago believes that this theory can be applied to personal growth. In the video, he gives an example of how he uses it to improve his deep-thinking time for writing his next book. Since there is no physical bottleneck, what he explores is how his personal energy is the obstacle to his process. He then identifies ways to overcome it, such as blocking out time in the morning, exercising, eating healthy, and minimizing distractions. All these actions are ways to expand his capacity to think deeper.

The video is only five minutes long and easy to understand. I invite you to watch it and learn how the Theory of Constraints could improve your life.

Habits of Success – Are They Real?

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If you scroll long enough on any social media feed eventually a story will show up with a title like “The Top Ten Ways to be Successful” or “Emperor Caesar’s Habits for Success.” The gist of these articles is that copying the things successful people do will inevitably lead you to success too. But is that true?

According to Darious Foroux, copying the actions of seemingly successful people is no guarantee of success for yourself. In his article, Stop Imitating The Habits Of Successful People: It’s Killing You, he points out the main flaw with all these Internet advice pieces.

They always focus on the outcome. Not the process. Studying, learning, and stealing productive habits or tactics are all smart things to do. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I talk about people who only focus on the outcome. I.e. success.

Also, everyone pretends that the word success has nothing to do with money and status. But that’s simply not true. When we talk about success, we all talk about getting rich. Just be honest.

For Foroux, success is not simply a matter of counting your money to keep score. Success is much more varied than that. He adds:

But let’s keep it real and not pretend that “only you can determine the definition of success,” and then talk about the habits of millionaires. 

Foroux then points out the flaw in the logic of copying the actions of notable people. It is simply that mindlessly following habits alone does very little to help us achieve our goals.

For instance, take waking up early. That’s always part of the lists of habits. But waking up is not a skill that does something. When you try to imitate a rich person who wakes up early, will you become rich by waking up early?

That’s why I find it odd that people try to imitate successful people. What’s the point? Even if you know the EXACT ingredients of success, it’s no good to you.

To hear what Foroux suggests instead, please visit his website to read the rest of his article.

Organizing is Not Decluttering

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What’s the best way to declutter a space?

The first solution most people jump to is organization. They find storage boxes into which to stash their horde of items. The boxes are then placed out of the way in a closet, attic, or basement for months or years to come. Problem solved right?

According to the Minimalists, this approach is the worst way to approach decluttering. Why?

Because all you are doing is moving items from one place to another. The clutter is put out of sight but not removed entirely. In a recent video on their Instagram channel, the Minimalists argue that storage boxes are actually “clutter coffins where all your stuff goes to die.”

Worst still, many people use up valuable space in their homes or even rent space in a storage locker to keep these completely unneeded belongings in their lives.

What is the best way handle clutter?

The Minimalists believe that completely letting go of our unnecessary items is the path to declutter. Reducing our belongings clears up space, both physically and psychologically. That way we can use our physical spaces to store only the things we currently value. As well, we keep our minds clear by removing items that no longer match who we are and what we aspire to do.

Therefore, resist the urge to buy that shiny new container. Instead, as Marie Kondo would tell you, discard anything that doesn’t spark joy. Once done, enjoy the results.

Are You an Overthinker?

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When encountering a problem, do you spend time thinking about how to solve it?

Usually, it is a good practice to think deeply about how to solve a problem. Understanding the situation and considering ways to solve it can be very helpful. However, is there a limit to how helpful thinking about a problem can be?

According to Darius Foroux, overthinking can be a huge impediment to solving problems. In a recent blog post, he shares how thinking too much can be a trap for the mind.

Despite all this knowledge of philosophy and knowing what I “should” do, I still get caught in bouts of excessive thinking.

During these moments, I no longer observe my thoughts and live in the present moment; my thoughts consume me.

In the past, I was permanently stuck in that state of mind. It’s not uncommon. Most people live their lives as slaves to their thoughts.

When we obsess over our woes, it becomes harder to solve them. So, is there a way to get past repetitive thinking? To resolve the tendency to overthink, Foroux suggests doing a practice that spiritual folk have done for ages.

The key to overcoming overthinking is not only about awareness. Yes, being aware of your thoughts is important. This is the starting point of waking up.

You must become the observer of your thoughts.

But it’s also about understanding your nature.

To understand more about this concept, please read the rest of blog post.

When to Check Your Tech & How to Stop

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Have you ever checked your phone for a social media update in the middle of a meeting? Or started looking at news headlines in the middle of a group lunch? Or got distracted by unimportant texts while doing deep work on a project?

It is very easy to be drawn into looking at our phones. This can lead to unproductive behavior and sloppy work. A recent article by Liz Fosslien on the Pocket website wonders why we have allowed these habits to become socially accepted.

I used to do nothing in the face of indiscriminate gadget use. Now, I’ve come to believe that doing nothing is no longer O.K. Staying silent about bad technology habits is making things worse for all of us.

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How do we as a change these habits to make them less desirable? Perhaps we need to develop what investor Paul Graham calls “social antibodies.”

He uses the example of cigarette smoking: smoking in public became taboo over the span of just one generation after social conventions changed.

Like cigarettes, our personal technology use can become a bad habit. People enter a zone when they use their gadgets. Checking email or scrolling through Facebook can be intoxicating and disorienting. Tech makers design these products using the same psychology that makes slot machines addictive. The variable rewards built into apps make time pass quickly and can make people oblivious to what’s happening around them.

How can we build up social antibodies in the workplace? One way is to set up well articulated standards.

The best way to prevent this waste of time is for someone senior to mandate a “no-screen meeting.” In my experience conducting hundreds of workshops, the discussions declared device-free are by far more productive. Setting expectations up front is equivalent to administering a distraction vaccine.

Learn more about how to build social antibodies by reading the rest of the article.