Imagine this scenario: Bob is working on manpower estimates for the upcoming year, a big project. Two hours in, when he is deep in the details, his boss drags him away to a meeting with a customer. During the meeting, new ideas for the manpower estimates pop into his...
Finding a Topic for Concentration Exercises
Finding a Topic for Concentration Exercises For the exercises and tactics in the Thinking Lab Library section "General-Purpose Question-Asking", you need topics to think about. The purpose of this exercise is to generate some interesting possibilities. We will use a...
Exercise: Review Thinking on Paper
Exercise: Review Thinking on Paper Background Here's a refresher on my #1 tactic to aid concentration: Thinking on Paper. Whenever you have trouble settling down, trying to concentrate on a thinking task, I recommend turning immediately to "thinking on paper."...
Planning for the New Year and Beyond
What are your long-range goals? That is, goals that will take a year or more to achieve? If you already have long-range goals, now is a good time to take stock. How will you make significant progress toward them in the weeks and months ahead? The longer-range the...
The Prioritization Challenge
The Prioritization Challenge Overview Know the Time Scale to Shift I've read a lot of books on productivity and time management, but I've never seen any of them make this point: if you want to shift how you spend your time, you first need to figure out the time scale...
The Value of Role Models
A role model is someone who exemplifies your ideal in some area. Though you can learn concrete skills from role models, there is something more important you get from them: an integrated sense of the kind of person you want to be. That is what is irreplaceable. When...
What is Anxiety?
Do you find the term "anxiety" a bit puzzling? It's always been described to me as a non-specific fear. My fears are always specific, so I never knew quite how to differentiate fear from anxiety until I read an article about anxiety by Brooke Castillo that clarified...
What’s the value of planning?
You have probably heard the saying, "no plan survives contact with reality." There's a lot of truth in this — so what's the value of planning? Planning pays off before you take action, while you are taking action, and after you have taken action. The most obvious...
Four Ways to Act in the Face of Conflict
Whenever we experience a conflict, it can be difficult to figure out how to move forward. On the one hand, it is never right to mindlessly suppress what you think is “emotion” and go by “reason.” On the other hand, it is never right to mindlessly go by “emotion” and...
The Work of Happiness
I derive my ideas on happiness from Ayn Rand, who wrote, among other things, "Morality...is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life." (AR, The...