Quote for the Day (week, month, lifetime...): On Wasting Time

“Divide your life into 10-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”

- Ingvar Kamprad

I just love this quote! (Although I of course prefer 15-minute units… ;-)

I love that it makes living a meaningful and productive life so….well….manageable!

All I have to do is decide - intentionally, on purpose decide — what to do with the next 10 (or 15!) minutes and do that. Repeat.

Even if I “mess up”, it’s only for 10/15 minutes at a time, then I re-decide.

Yet another reason to be using that timer — kind of a wake-up call to decide on the next time period.

“What was I just doing?”

“Is that what I meant to be doing?”

“What do I want to be doing next?”

What do you think? Helpful? Too simple?

Quote for the Day: Keep Generating Stuff

The best way to have a good idea

is to have lots of ideas

— Linus Pauling, two time Nobel Prize Winner

Following up on the Procrastination theme from yesterday, I wanted to share this quote.

Too often (if you’re anything like me), we tend to think we can’t write something down until we’ve “figured it out”. We convince ourselves that we either can’t write until it’s clear in our mind or that it will be embarassing gobblety-goop if we were to just write whatever is cooking in our minds and we’d make a fool of ourselves by saying it “out loud”.

However, the truth is that most writers and many thinkers in other fields actually do the working out of ideas best on paper when they don’t yet know what they want to say. By “talking to ourselves”, we can start to gather relevant bits, discard less important bits, see patterns emerging — actually shape our thoughts more clearly as we go - instead of expecting it to be all right there right now.

Is it painful for those of us raised in the Fixed Mindset of “get it right, get it right quickly, don’t need to work at getting it right quickly”? You betcha.

Is the pain useful to tolerate and move through? Absolutely.

So here’s my challenge to you today - and I’ll share it with you:

I have a report I’m writing on a very tight deadline. I’m not sure what patterns I see in my data yet, so I haven’t been writing “The Next Section”. I’m going to follow my own advice and just write — think “out loud” — about what I’m seeing, what I’m not seeing, and what it might mean in the way of patterns and see where I get.

Your challenge? … What could you “think out loud” about? No editing, no worrying about the clarity of the word choices or other distracting editorial activities. Just writing and writing as you think.

Feel free to share your thoughts, your challenge outcome, whatever you have to say.

Get as many ideas down as you can as often as you can —

The 5 Brain Habits of Procrastination

These 5 “brain habits” are taken from Neil Fiore’s book The Now Habit. He describes them as the “negative attitudes or self-statements” that differentiate Procrastinators from Producers, but I think it’s important to emphasize that our self-talk is really related to our patterns of brain activity. To the extent we repeat certain kinds of self-talk over and over, we create a tendency for those neurons to fire together easily and quickly in the future (“neurons that fire together, wire together” is the underlying principle). That means we literally talk ourselves into a way of being and thinking and feeling. So if a certain kind of self-talk isn’t producing the kind of outcomes we want, one of the tools we can use to “re-wire” ourselves for better success is our self-talk and attitudinal habits — what I call “Habits of Brain”. Along with…

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Quote for the Day: More Growth Mindset

A life spent making mistakes

is not only more honorable,

but more usefulthan

a life spent doing nothing.

- George Bernard Shaw

What a great little summary of a Growth mindset!

What will get your dissertation done faster: messing about with mistakes until you’ve got it good enough?

Or waiting, doing nothing, until you’re sure to do it right?

Love this one for the procrastinators among us ;-)

Is Your Muse Lost?

What’s your image of Writing?

When I’m not paying attention, I know mine tends to be a wonderfully-romanticized picture of sitting down at the computer (anywhere — my office, a cafe, home, on a bench at the lake — it doesn’t matter) and letting fingers fly.

I yearn for the day when I will have so much to say and the elegantly flowing words to say it that my fingers won’t even be able to keep up with my well-formulated thoughts.

Each day, I will awake with a Message on my fingertips and the itch to Get It Down as soon as possible.

Boatloads of material will regularly appear, ready for dissemination (and we talking oil-tankers, not dinghies here!).

Ahh….how does that fit with your own image? Are you with me here?

On the other hand, when I am paying attention,

…

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