Talk Talk and the Five Whys

A very useful technique from the quality assurance profession is the 'five whys'.   This originated in Japan and has now been picked up around the world particularly by the car industry.  It is a simple approach to problem solving and more importantly continuous improvement.  When something goes wrong, you ask the question of why it happened five times, each time trying to probe the reason for the failure.  When it works well, it should lead you back to the real fundamental problem.  For example:

Giving Up Social Media for a Month - The Post Mortem

I gave up social media for a month on an impulse.  It was the middle of the morning.  I had loads to do.  I hadn't got round to starting anything.  I was miserable,  But I had managed to fit in my usual social media habits around my lack of achievement.  Was social media holding me back?  I didn't know, but like everyone I much prefer finding a scapegoat to actually thinking a problem through.  So there and then I decided I would give it up for a month and see what effect it had on my life.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 19

I am missing Twitter horribly, but I think I have established a healthy relationship with Facebook.  I can visit it once a day for a few minutes without getting distracted by it.  But then I never liked Facebook much in the first place.

Here's the thing though.  I got up yesterday with an idea for some writing that would make a good blog post.  But I didn't follow through on it because I had other things to do that were higher priority.  But I did get involved in making a comment on a blog.  This was a breach of my no social media regime.  And once I had started I found myself going back to it several times to keep up with the debate.  I nearly made a second comment - but managed to summon the willpower to delete it halfway through.

The thing is, the time I wasted on reading, commenting on and following the debate on that blog post would have been enough to have very nearly half completed the blog post of my own that I abandoned.   Am I the only person who does this?  It is really perverse behaviour.  Cutting out the good to concentrate on the great is a really sound principle. But when I try to put it into practice it often turns out to result in giving up the good to concentrate on the trivial.

I sometimes wonder if there is any hope for me.

http://personaldevlopmentforsensiblepeople.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/giving-up-social-media-for-month-post.html

Giving Up Social Media Day 16

Well so far I have avoided the temptation to get back onto Twitter.  I have checked Facebook a couple of times, but as some people use that as an alternative to e-mail I should have allowed that as part of my ground rules.  I didn't get sucked back in.

I have strayed a little by making some comments on blog posts.  I am regretting those both as spoiling the integrity of this one month experiment, and because I didn't really enjoy them.  The problem is the impulse to respond when you have an idea, coupled with the need for completeness once you have started.  The return on the time invested is not worth it.

Other than that I have found that I have more time for other things and and am doing more of the stuff that I want to be doing.  But I am not getting as much of a pay off as I had hoped for.  Time I used to spend dithering on Twitter and Facebook is now often spent reading up on news stories in more detail than I really need, or other trivial time wasters.  On the whole, I am coming to the conclusion that if I am going to waste time, social media are a better waste of time than some other things.

I will respect the parameters of my experiment and not draw any firm conclusions yet.  But my feeling at the moment is that it would be better to time limit my social media rather than exclude it altogether.  It is more fun than some of the things I do instead, and the real trick is to develop the willpower to stop and get on with something more worthwhile.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 19

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 5

07:30 Not feeling so many twinges, but also finding some non social media distractions to keep me from what I want to do.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 4

7.20 Sunday morning is my peak time for social media usage - combined with catching up with politics via the Sunday papers and Radio 4. One of the effects of my social media fast is that I feel less engaged with current affairs. This is making the morning rather refreshingly different.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 3

6.20 And to my surprise I wake up with no desire to check my Twitter feed. I have other things that are more important to me right now. I wasn't expecting to get into this frame of mind so quickly.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 2

6.15 For years the first thing I have done in the morning is to check my Twitter feed.  It feels a bit like being a Borg unit cut off from the collective this morning. Still I used the time to finish off and publish a blog post on which I have been working for a while, so that was good.

Giving Up Social Media Diary Day 1

9:40 I am barely an hour into this trial and already I'm feeling twinges.  I need to find some alternative activities to replace my reliance.  I wonder if it would have been better to have come up with more of a plan rather than impulsively starting the trial on the spur of the moment.

Giving Up Social Media for a Month

Are social media good or bad for you? I have been pondering this for a while now.  I really enjoy social media, and Twitter in particular.  I often find myself checking Twitter at more or less any time of the day.  If I think of 'bon mot' my first reaction is to tweet it. I enjoy all the great stuff other people stick up as well.  It is also a great way to keep abreast of the news and other interesting things.  I am not a huge fan of Facebook and rarely spend huge amounts of time on it, but even so I still visit it nearly every day to see what is going on.  I also read comments on articles if the article itself is interesting.  I also make comments - it is obviously important to make my own position clear over quite range of areas.  Needless to say I will check back to see if anyone has commented on my comments.

Why I Am Not Interested In Benefits

Harriet Harman is a skilled and experienced politician, and if she feels the need to support her political opponents' policy to reduce benefits to claimants  I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she knows what she is doing.  As to the issue itself, I am inclined to be generous when it comes to benefits.  But I don't really care too much about it.  I am quite sure that a journalist who put his mind to it could come up with a highly outrageous story of people living dreadful lives funded by the public purse.  And likewise, J.K.Rowling is not going to be the only example of someone for whom benefits provided a vital help in an otherwise highly productive life.

Jazz Notes

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I came across an idea a while back called Morning Pages.  The idea is aimed at creative writers and is rather prescriptive. You have to write three pages of free form prose first thing every morning.  I liked the idea but for me it wasn't free form enough.  So I have adapted it.  I try and do it fairly early in the morning but I already have other things I want to do first.  So I might leave it to lunchtime. I also don't have a set time allocated to it or a set amount I need to write.  So I have taken the free form but and really run with it.  In light of this I call them my Jazz Notes.  Basically, once a day I just sit down with a reporters pad and pencil and jam.

Focus Blocks

Steve Pavlina's blog has not been offering me much value lately - though I always read anything new he comes up with. But today he managed to deliver something really handy and right on time. I am at the stage with developing my business where finding the time to get things done is critical.

Will Smart Phones Change The Way We Write?

I am writing this blog post was just walking down the street. Well I say writing it, in fact I'm using the voice recognition software built into my smartphone. As it happens I have just come back from a meeting where lots of people were getting up and giving talks. I was taking notes on those talks, and it is very noticeable that we have a very different way of writing things down to the way we speak them out loud.

How Different People See The Same Thing

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Today there was a vote at the UN about whether or not Israel has committed war crimes during its invasion of Gaza.  You'll know what I think about the situation if you follow my Twitter feed - but I was interested in the pattern of voting.  The US opposed investigating.   It was as far as  I could see from a quick glance the only country to do so.  Most European countries choose to abstain, and the rest of the world wanted to carry out an enquiry.

Epicurus Was Right - Don't Overdo It

I don't follow football much, and in fact don't even support a particular football team.  But I do like the big international matches in the European and the World Cups.  Being English I don't get to support my own national team for very long most seasons, but I follow the drama through to the end.  My son is in his twenties and his level of football interest is about the same as mine, so we often watch the matches together with a few tins of beer and some highly processed unhealthy snacks.  We cheer.  We drink. We eat. We bond.  It is one of those things that don't seem important but really are.

Can You Write A Book Without Even Noticing?

My last blog post was on the 7th of June, where I pondered whether writing a book on the management was a good way of keeping my focus on managing my time well.  Two weeks isn't long enough to make a definitive judgement, though it certainly isn't doing any harm. I think the 10 to 15 minutes I spend on it every morning before is returned in increased productivity, but I will keep an open mind on it for while.

Is Writing A Book On Time Management A Good Way To Manage Your Time?

I am, as always, struggling with time management.  Epictetus said that no man is free unless he is a master of himself.  This is very true, and nowhere more so than in making sure you are spending the little time you have wisely.