Why do you spend as much time as you do on email?

For some time now I’ve been cutting way back on the amount of time that I spend doing email.

• I’ve set up rules for most of my mailing lists.
• I spend a couple of hours on important projects in the morning before opening my email.
• I take a day off a week from even opening the program.
• I do my best to resist any browsing (Zap or get out!)

What I haven’t done is write a book about it like John Freeman did: The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox.

Nor have I written a nice, clear and concise blog post of 10 suggestions about that book like Robert Middleton did.

But they did. Cool. Thanks guys.

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Photo credits:
Monster #2 by autumn_bliss

Hoping for some bounce-off gems*, I went to the library and checked out Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan‘s book, Cesar’s Way.

*bounce-off gems = ideas sparked by someone else’s work or creativity. In this case, the thought that drove me to the library was something like, “Cesar works to control unruly dogs. Natural Professionals work to control unruly minds. In reading about his philosophy and strategies in dealing with dogs, maybe some ideas will spark for dealing with minds.”

Wow and how! What ended up happening was that I became totally fascinated by his approach to dog psychology. (I mentioned this to my mom and she asked, “Are you getting a dog?” “No,” I replied. LOL.)

His two big concepts really stood out for me:

1. “Most of the cases I handle involve dogs who simply need stronger leadership from their owners plus rules, boundaries, limitations, and consistency. . .”
2. Introducing a troubled dog into a healthy pack will help it heal faster.

I know he’s talking about dogs, but he may as well be talking about an undisciplined human mind.

OK, maybe I have a somewhat pessimistic view of the unruly mind. It’ll probably mellow out once I get my own under regular control.

But check it out—when the mind is going off and spinning in circles, you get it to settle down by applying firm leadership and pulling in the boundaries. We essentially say, “you do not have free rein to go anywhere you please. Come back here and focus on one thing at a time.”

And when feeling out of sorts or stressed out, you just can’t help being lifted up when being around positive and good-natured friends.

So then what about the corrective action? The trick (again, what a great parallel!) is catching behavior before it becomes a big issue. He points out that you correct a dog as his attention starts to stray toward unruly behavior. Once the dog has hit the “red zone” (bonkers and spastic or even aggressive and dangerous), it’s very difficult to get results.

Now think about getting all stressed out. While it may have felt like it happened suddenly, the truth is there were probably numerous opportunities where you made a decision to continue on the current trajectory. You actually had several chances where you could have altered your attitude toward a more peaceful course.

We don’t have anyone (I assume) standing at our side yanking a leash to keep our attention focused on peaceful and productive thoughts. It’s up to us to monitor ourselves. It’s our job to remain mindful, to keep that observers view of ourselves that can say, “Hold on! That train of thought can only go in one direction—down. Take a breath, reconsider, and choose differently.”

Ahhh, and here’s what separates us from the dogs: self-awareness and choice. We got it. Let’s use it!

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Photo credits:
Running Dogs by TheGiantVermin

Once you’ve been on the GTD (Getting Things Done) train for a while, you may well wonder:
1. how you got by before
2. how is it that not everyone’s on board yet!

Since David Allen’s capture and processing system is primarily a productivity system, I was particularly stoked to read his most recent newsletter which open like this:

Hi Everyone!

As we further explore the phase of GTD that addresses prioritizing and deciding what to do amongst all our options, I want to reinforce an important principle to remember: to be successful requires a lot more than just getting organized. It’s also about paying attention to the part of ourself that has the wisdom to make the best choice. Sometimes that choice is not to take a physical action at all, but to simply wait and listen. That may be the most challenging practice for many of us to implement.

(click here for the rest of the newsletter)

Yes! Even in the context of getting stuff done, it’s important to remember that your intuition has the ultimate say.

Therein lies the ultimate challenge of our times: to have partial awareness turned inward for the subtle voice AND focus externally to make waves in our sphere of influence.

If you haven’t jumped on the GTD train, I highly recommend you take the time to get the book, give it a quick read through, then go back through and implement.

It’ll take some time to do. . . all of which is absolutely an investment in your sanity and future peace of mind.

My sister sent me an article from the March 22, 2010 issue of the New Yorker called “Everybody Have Fun” by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Turns out that books, studies and research all conclusively lead to the “disturbing fact” that “escalating consumption has not brought Americans increased satisfaction.”

Frankly, I was disturbed by this conclusion. It reads more like an Onion piece or an April Fools joke. The New Yorker?

Haven’t we graduated from the belief that stuff, money and consumption are the causes of happiness sometime in the last Century?!?

Happiness isn’t about your car, clothes and quantity of Coca-cola in your fridge.

It’s about living in integrity with our values. It’s about feeling like our actions are meaningful. That what we do has a positive impact on our world.

It’s about a lovely day of sunshine and a gentle breeze at the park with a dear friend. It’s about taking photos for the sake of capturing a lovely shot. It’s about sharing a meal with loved ones.

It’s about doing something hard–from the heart.

For ex. My upcoming workshop is scary: what if no one signs up? How in the world am going to distill all this info into a course? What if I fall flat? That sure sounds like anything but happy-making.

And yet, deep down, I know that bringing this into the world will invite a satisfaction into my being that will blow the wind to carry the wings of happiness through my soul. And I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

How about some new studies, research and books? Why didn’t she cite Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project?

Why didn’t she look to studies on the happiness factor of people who consciously bring more gratitude into their lives?

Reading list

• Gratitude: A Key to Happiness, by William F. Doverspike, Ph.D. (Georgia Psychological Association)
• Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania (Martin E P Seligman, Ph.D.)
• Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Positive Psychology (interview on SharpBrains and highlights from research project)
• The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
• and my own post with several research sources from 2006: Happiness and Positive Psychology

OK. Signing off from rant. Time to go change clothes for a dance fest with the March Fourth Marching Band.

For the record, I plan on being Super Duper Ridiculously Happy dancing my booty off. =)

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Photo credit:
Good Morning Sunshine….

by law_keven

Last night Patt Lind-Kyle (interviewed for The Simplifier in August 2008) had her book launch at the Nevada County Library. Over 100 people showed up to hear about healing the mind and rewiring the brain. Full house, standing room only! Fantastic.

Those of us who have been in her meditation group for years were there helping with sales and greeting. Her husband was there overseeing and had done a great job with marketing. The hosts, the Friends of the Library, were helping with chairs until they ran out. The flip chart graphics done by a local designer were beautifully done.

And the tea and coffee provided by the Friends were served in styrofoam. Really now, when are we (collectively speaking here) going to figure out how to replace disposable cups for events?

I think the easiest way, in the sense that no one is dumped with the duty of washing all these cups at the end of the evening or worrying about loss, breakage, or storage is for everyone to bring their own.

Someday that might be the norm. Now it decidedly isn’t. I hope that some day soon I’ll be reading FastCo magazine and some brilliant dudes or dudettes will have come up with some brilliant solution. Everyone will smack their forehead and say, “Of course! Why didn’t we think of that before?” And of course, it couldn’t have happened before.

Short of that hypothetical day in the hopefully near future, what needs happening to get it going in that direction? Most people who carry their own cups around have the large-sized stainless steel dealies which hold some 12-16 oz which is a tad awkward for the little donation-only folks who, understandably, want to serve 6-8 oz beverages.

My carry-around stainless steel mug is 10 oz which I picked out because most cafes, no matter how I plead and cajole, insist on filling the entire thing full of milk after pouring in an espresso shot for a latte. It’s as if they think they’d be gipping me if they didn’t fill the mug full. And these days, I’m on the one shot plan, not the two or three that would be required to actually make 14 oz of milk actually taste like a yummy latte.

Since this last journey to Burningman, I have an elephant on that 10 oz mug which makes for a good reference point (that’s him in the photo above). “Milk only up to the elephant’s trunk, please,” I say. The elephant apparently is influential enough that the baristas usually oblige.

What in the world does this have to do with simplifying? Everything! Materials for disposable products, production, transportation, and disposal is a poor use of energy. And as long as we, as a society, tacitly or overtly consent to that kind of wasteful energy use, then we better buck up and expect to waste time in our own lives.

When I commit to good uses of my time that contributes to making the world a better place, I’m also saying I want that for everyone else.

Oh my! The elephant has just pulled me off the soapbox. Rightly so, rightly so.

Enjoy your morning hot beverages, soap box free. (just keep it in ceramic, glass, or steel) =)

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Photo credit:
Fall 2009 19
Originally uploaded by st_photos

Sunrise Over Barcelona

Originally uploaded by papalars

One friend is healthy after giving birth to a baby boy.
Another friend’s husband took his own life.
Our country just entered a new, and significant, chapter in history.

This being the kind community that it is, dinner rotation’s have been filled for both. A dinner rotation being our way of helping out our loved ones in a time of need. We take turns bringing dinner to a family for a week or two.

Water Jet

Originally uploaded by Clearly Ambiguous

Considering our resources and status, we oughta be one of the leaders of making change. Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game was all about responsibility. The question being that if you are in the position of privilege, do you have a duty to contribute your skills to a greater cause than yourself.

Which isn’t to say that as a country, everyone is out of survival mode–far from it. What tough choices he has. Start with our own backyard or make amends with the rest of the world. Which comes first?

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to say, “Do it all!” But that isn’t effective. Channeling efforts in a concentrated direction is much more powerful than spewing it in multiple directions.

Watering the garden in June sunshine…

Originally uploaded by markhillary

The equivalent of water coming out of a hose–which will fill a bucket of water faster?
Water shooting out in a steady stream, vs.
putting your thumb at the opening and making the water spray out in a wide arc.

Considering everything going on, I share a reminder as much for myself as any who read this…

Take quiet time. Daily. Allow the body and mind to calm. Give loved ones the benefit of being the foremost priority that they are.

Love is, after all, the most noble cause of all.

He presents the material in a bunch of different ways–one is bound to sink in and have an effect on you: it’s the little actions that build up to have significant impact on your life, in your business, on your meditation practice, whatever.

The sentence that jumped out to me to share is this one: “Successful people form habits that feed their success, instead of habits that feed their failure.”

In other words, set yourself up for success. The phrase implies an element of design–as if you had the time, vision, and motivation to design your life down to the smallest detail.

But if you are in the midst of the whirlwind, stopping to take stock just might not make it to the top of the ToDo list any time in the next century.

However, it is really, really important for helping you get out of the whirlwind habit! So what can you do to start getting some positive effects through changing behavior on the fly? I’m so glad you asked!

Tap into the power of visualization and a simple question.

Ideally you’ve conjured up a visualization of how you want your life to look and feel. You can give it a name. I’ve used the “Natural Professional” could be “Flowing Woman” or “My inner Superhero”. (I’ve written on this stuff before–here’s where you can learn more about the Natural Professional, here for visualization, here for your Simplicity Statement.

Now while I encourage you to develop your own unique personal vision, there is an insta-vision to use if the creative juices just aren’t ready to flow: pick someone you admire, yup, a role model. Doesn’t matter if your know them personally or not, pick someone who embodies or represents a number of traits you wished were more present in your life right now.

Once you have a vision in mind, either your personally developed one or a role model, you can ask a simple question:

What would a Natural Professional do right now? or
What would Flowing Woman do in this situation? or
What would my dad do here? or
How would the Dalai Lama respond?

I recommend sticking with one role model or vision until it no longer serves you. Then develop another that reflects your situation and where you want to be heading and stick with that one. After a while, it more or less becomes an alter ego that you can call on at will.

I’ve found that just pausing to ask the question to this alter ego, helps whatever situation I’m in. As if simply calling it into the space gets me out of my patterned rut. It’s cool.

The essays show different approaches that we take towards our life and our work. Great ideas to ponder and consider for our own lives and work lives.

Authors include Thich Nhat Hanh, Tarthang Tulku, Gary Snider (Nevada County local!), Shakti Gawain, and many more.

While shutting down the computer last night I thought about the Clean Desk Challenge from earlier this year, probably because there have been a couple of misplaced lingerers on my desk this past week. Not a big deal in my home office since very few people see my desk. While the clean desk is definitely for my own piece of mind, the always cleared & cleaned desk is also for other people’s benefit.

I’m not one for extremes–I don’t see them as sustainable or conducive to leaving much space for multiple interests. There’s a lot to do in this world… get it done and move on to the next thing, eh?

In the upcoming shared office space however…. I’m not going to allow the luxury of desk lingerers. My visual office organization is the easiest and simplest form of marketing for office mates and their visitors.

Is that extreme? With a good system to rely on, no. Then why are there even lingerers worth mentioning? Yup, even your friendly neighborhood simplifier skates occasionally. How exactly? By not slowing down to make decisions on the not-so-obvious papers. This is by far the greatest culprit in my client’s offices–skipping the decisions that require you to pause the speedy thinking brain. One straggler turns into two, breeds into 10, multiplies into 50 and next thing you know, you’re calling in the troops for help because you forgot what the surface of your desk looks like. Each of those pieces of paper represent something: a decision, an action to take, a system to set up, a project imagined… if you aren’t going to take the time to figure out where it should park, how in the world are you going to take the time to do the dang thing?

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-hour Workweek, had some interesting insights into keeping the desk clean in his post called Rethinking the Office – Dutch Design (Plus: Pics of My Home Office). The first part of the post is an excerpt from an article about the new style of office that is throwing the cubicle out the window (finally!!)

The second part of the post is about Tim’s own office. The idea I want to point out is how he sets himself up for a good “office” experience. Beauty, intention, and a strategic lack of surfaces to clutter helps him keep his space sacred (my word, not his). He sums it up: “Don’t want to eat too much chocolate? Don’t put it in your house.”

Stuff has to be managed, surfaces have to be cleaned, files need to be purged.

Keep what you really need, don’t even consider letting in the rest!

(and did I mention my birthday is coming up?)

What I found helpful in Take Back Your Life this time around (directly related to my own long term business planning adventures for the Natural Professional and Project Simplify) is her breakdown and distinction of objectives/projects/tasks (she actually has “tasks” and then “SNA (strategic next actions) but that’s a bit too much for me.)

So often I see people put projects on their ToDo lists (instead of next actions). Or they lose sight of what they are working on, i.e. their “objectives”. Or they’ll put objectives on the wall and not break them down into projects and then get down on themselves for not seeing more progress more quickly. What’s the world coming to? Total mayhem, obviously. (yikes!)

So let’s do a quick review so you don’t have to go buy the book if you don’t want to (save your cash for mine, eh?):

Objectives: The big kahuna. The ultimate goal.
for example, for client X, “Create awesome website”

This is what you might put on your wall to keep you focused on current high priority.

Next to that objective you might write the next phase or two moving you towards completion. These are sub-projects, or, to drop the dash, just projects.
for example: site navigation

Finally, as you review your projects to determine what you will actually be doing during the day, you’ll put the next action(s) on your ToDo list.
for example: 1. draft navigation plan, 2. call client for appointment to review draft plan

While you may have many more irons burning at one time, you’d break each down in a similar manner. The process of the steps above were inspired by Sally McGhee’s book–though as indicated by the title, she’d track them all in Outlook. If you are good with your lists and check them regularly, then using Outlook is fine. Most of my clients are of the more visual/creative oriented type and want the reminders on the wall, not hidden in a list in the Tasks section of Outlook. Besides, a good portion of said clients are Mac based, and they frequently don’t use their email program to track tasks (I do!) Which is all to say, you can customize and personalize systems written about in a book dedicated to Outlook even if you don’t use the program.

Thanks for the inspiration, Sally!

p.s. did I close all my parantheticals??? =)