High Anxiety Background The "High Anxiety" tactic is a variant on the "Judge Your Neighbor" and "Pity Party" techniques. These tactics are helpful when you have been utterly stuck for a whole day. That means you know that there is some wrong premise at work. You know...
Brainstorming means: generating a long list of creative ideas to solve some problem or answer some question. Any time you are feeling a little blank, you need some form of brainstorming to start ideas flowing again. Often we think of brainstorming as a group activity,...
Tactic: "Complaining" Overview What: Complaining When: This is a good first tactic to use to figure out why you are floundering on a project, (e.g., stalled, going in circles, or slogging along). How: This is a variation on the 3-step process used for clearing...
The Thinker’s Toolkit explains the mental tools you need to solve problems faster, understand emotions, and make better decisions. These time-tested tactics come with some material support: a 4-color pen, a thinking notebook, and “mental cleanup” pads.[…]
In Tap Your Own Brilliance, I teach in-depth tactics for dealing with the three most common thinking obstacles: overload, blankness, and floundering. But sometimes you need only the basic solution. The basic solution for overload is to get ideas out of your head onto...
Guilt Trip Background This is one of a series of tactics that helps you get back on track when you've lost a day or so due to some kind of emotional distress. These tactics help you critically evaluate the situation to identify false premises, old baggage, and...
In the first article in this series, I explained the fundamental nature of happiness, which I learned from Ayn Rand. Elaborating on this concept, she wrote: In psychological terms, the issue of man's survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of...
The very first article I wrote for my newsletter was a book recommendation for David Allen's book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. That was 2004. Recently I realized that I had misunderstood the utility of a key tool from his system — the...
Every few years, I re-read How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein. This little book helps me answer a crucial question: "What is the best use of my time right now?" Figuring out the answer can be difficult, particularly when I undertake new...
At Thinking Directions, we are committed to protecting the privacy of all visitors to our Web site by creating an environment where you feel safe to share your information with us. Your personal information, and the information of all Thinking Directions visitors is...
Powered by WishList Member - Membership Software