Posts from — March 2009

In todays online edition of Business Week David Allen writes a guest column entitled: “Time Management in the Age of Social Media.”  As a person who frequents both twitter and facebook I ask myself if these social networking sites are productive or black holes of time.  David Allen writes:

“The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you’re doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It’s an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.”

Read the full article at businessweek.com here

FYI for the increasingly larger portion of the population that is looking for work.  Tomorrow (March 10, 2009) the FedEx Office / Kinkos stores are going to be offering up to 25 free copies of your resume when you bring in a paper or CD copy of it. See the full story at lifehacker.com.

Always love to hear and watch when two people I am fans of get together to chat and exchange ideas.  If you have read this blog you know about my man-crush on David Allen but I also very much enjoy the work Leo Laporte does on the TWIT network.  In February ’09 David and Leo connected on TWIT Live and exchanged some great ideas about how the mind works, why it is a horrible master and how to squeeze the most out of it.  Watch the video and read some of the main ideas below presented below:

• When you hold something in your mind it has no sense of past or future – it thinks you should be doing it all the time psychologically which is why it will wake you up at 3 in the morning and beat you bloody about something you cant do anything about while you are lying in bed.

• Its telling you that you need to go buy batteries when in fact you cant buy batteries from bed at 3 in the morning.

• Once you get it out the brain calms down and lets go.  The brain realizes it no longer needs to hang on to that and will allow you to renegotiate that agreement with yourself.

• You cant renegotiate agreements you cant remember you made so you have to get them out of your head and look at them and say, ‘no, not right now!’ (thus the importance of having a ubiquitous capture tool at hand at all times)

• You mind is for having ideas but not hanging on to them.

• Your mind needs to be free to express and expand… so the more you can trust that on the back end that you have an executive process that can handle things the more freedom it will have on the front end