How To Be A Straight A Student - Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina is a human like the rest of us and only has a limited number of good ideas.  One of those is the simple, obvious but often overlooked one that life is easier if you are disciplined and organised about how you go about it.  This is something we all know at some level.  Paying off your credit card on time is cheaper than forgetting it.  Doing a shopping list before you go to the shop minimises the time you spend in it and maximises the usefulness of what you end up leaving with.  Steve is particularly creative at coming up with great examples of this general principle and producing highly readable blog posts from them.   A good one is his description of how he became a straight A student.

Is Twitter Any Use?

I love Twitter and can happily spend hours on it.  I visit the site every day for at least a few minutes and I am rather worried that it might be the single biggest thing I do with my time after actually working.  I enjoy reading the amazing range of stuff people put up on it and often laugh out loud.  It is certainly a better source of news and comment than the mainstream media.  I regard it as generally a good thing and I am very happy that it exists.  I follow a couple of thousand people - I know some people regard this is as problem but I find that getting loads of tweets from all over the place is the best way to enjoy it.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

Maybe I should be a Trainer Rather Than A Consultant

I have been doing my consultancy business for just over a year now.  It is going okay, in the sense that I have very nearly as much money now as I did this time last year, and there is every prospect that I will be earning more than when I had a job in the fairly near future.  So neither a catastrophic failure nor a runaway success.  I hasn't turned out quite how I expected though, so I have to confess that the modest results are down to luck rather than judgement.  In other words, when I took the plunge there was a real possibility that I would now be looking back on a year of failure and disappointment.

Getting The Most Done With Your Time Part 5 - Affirmations

One of the factors my experiment into working practices is looking at is affirmations.   This is the idea that continually repeating a mantra throughout the day leads you on to greater achievement.  This is the factor I have the least confidence in.  It smacks a bit of woo and nonsense like the Law of Attraction.  Surely our brains are too complex to be manipulated so easily by such a low effort trick?

Getting The Most Done With Your Time Part 4 - Metrics

This blog used to get no readers at all.  Since I started promoting it on Twitter a bit, it has started to get a few viewers and is now getting the odd referral from Google.  Hi guys.  You are still a small, select group.  But I hope you are enjoying it and finding it useful.  I don't plan on optimising this blog to get as many readers as possible or seeking out compelling content to build traffic or anything like that.  However, I think it only fair to keep the handful of running stories going so that I don't leave things hanging.  To which end, the working methods experiment I am working on has developed a bit since I last wrote about it, so here is an update.

What To Do When Your Company Makes People Redundant

I can't really complain about how my career as an employee worked out, but I did manage to work for several companies who went through cycles of redundancies.  In every case the redundancies were done in a piecemeal fashion, at least at first.  In no case did they turn the company around and save the remaining jobs.  I was never senior enough to be privy to the whole story, but in every case it seemed to me at the time that they contributed to rather than ameliorated any problems.  In one case I am reasonably sure that they were a major factor in destabilising the company and making recovery impossible.

Get In The Mood For Maximum Productivity

One of the most popular works that the composer Handel came up with in his own lifetime was Alexander's Feast.  In those days getting a piece of music into print was a rare feat, and only two of Handel's masterpieces were published in that format while he was still alive: Messiah naturally enough and Alexander's Feast.

Planning - Upping the Ante

My planning process is working pretty okay now.  I am keeping track of where I am spending time.  It isn't perfect but it is working.  I have lists of projects and activities and I am keeping on top of them.  And I am reducing the amount of time I waste.  So it is all good.  But I have to be realistic.  I have a pretty poor track record of keeping up with planning and every other planning system I have used has eventually, and always within six months, collapsed when it became too big an overhead.  Even when they work well they are hard to keep going on.

Don't Trust A Company's Better Nature

One of the first customers I got was a start up, but a very well funded one.  They had sold out their previous very successful business some years before and were now starting again.  I assume they have a reasonable pile of cash behind them.  I was contacted to do some work by a young employee and helpfully steered her in the right direction and gave her a quote.  Once she had to get approval she had to come back to me and ask for a discount.   I was just starting and keen to sign up solvent customers so happily conceded one to be sure of getting the business.

Fruit For Breakfast

When you wake up in the morning your blood sugar level is low and if you want to get started you need to get that glucose flowing in your blood.  What's the best solution to this?  The most widespread option is breakfast cereals.  These have the advantage of speed and convenience.  They certainly give you the sugar.  Many are very rich in the stuff indeed, particularly the ones that children seem to find most appealing.  But for shear pleasure you can't beat something hot and fried.  Bacon, egg and sausages are all a glorious start to the day.  But if you want to get things done, I don't think you can beat fruit.

Leadership. Is it really that great?

 

Humans are always impressed by leaders.  We used to write epic poems about them.  More recently we have devoted numerous biographies to their lives.  It goes without saying that top leaders deserve the limelight.  They are treated as celebrities and earn stonking great piles of cash.  After all, these are the people that make all the decisions and drive the rest of us on to make progress.  It is little wonder that we accord them such a high level of status.

What Reality TV Shows Tell Us About Reality

There is one myth that I, and I suspect a lot of people, have found hard to shake off.  It is the idea that leaders are somehow special and have unique insight and skills.  I suppose it goes back to childhood when your parents were your expert guides to life and whose opinions you weren't in a position to question.  This mindset gets transferred onto teachers and then managers as you grow up.  You are hardly aware of it.

The Seventies - Three Things About Them You Won't Know If You Weren't There

For no other reason than it popped into my head, here are my recollections about a decade that doesn't get much attention.  History usually concentrates on the big picture and ignores what life was like on a day to day basis, and certainly has no way of telling what it was like for the people at the time.

Zen Approach To Annoying People

Annoying People Often Reflect Ourselves

In a recent political story here in the UK a member of a political party was caught investing a considerable amount of  his time and resources to plotting against the party leader.  He ended up having to resign and left with the parting shot that the leadership had become too middle of the road and had abandoned its principles.

Seek Richness Not Riches

When the Titanic sunk it took about 15 minutes to hit the bottom after sinking beneath the waves.  We can make this estimate even though nobody was there to observe it thanks to the Navier-Stokes equation.