Completions All Day Long

The process of giving yourself a mental completion on all tasks or even thoughts, described in my book Breathing Space, sets up a mental partition for you whereby you have more energy, focus, and direction for what’s next.

You can practice completions all day long. When you get up tomorrow morning, whether you had good sleep or bad sleep, you'll be complete with that phase of your day, and so on. If you give yourself acknowledgment, and this takes only two or three seconds, you will have more energy, more focus, and more direction for whatever else you face.

The Zeigarnik Effect

When interruptions predominate, little work gets done, observes Paul Radde, Ph.D. author of Thrival. Radde says "Cell phone use is not just plain rude, it is mentally distracting and abusive to others. Cell phone use captures the brain's interest in completing the conversation, so whether the user is broadcasting or simply within earshot, the Zeigarnik effect kicks in. This is the same desire for closure that makes the effects of multi-tasking akin to the effects of post-traumatic stress."

The Zeigarnik effect is characterized by the tendency for people to remember interrupted tasks better than those that have been completed. "Once taken off one task, without completing the transaction," Radde observes, "the mind continues to seek closure. If you have a number of things going, but none of them to completion, you have these tensions tending toward completion -- and that is stress-provoking."

Solitude is Golden

Too many career professionals are uncomfortable with solitude. Increasingly, this discomfort tolerates only shorter and shorter attention spans. To retreat into one's own mind, to pause, to reflect is now treated as if it were enemy territory, yet these skills are needed now more than ever!

Flip and Strip

When you receive newspaper or magazine subscriptions, flip through them immediately, tear out the articles of interest, and toss the rest. You’re now left with a smaller, lighter, manageable pile that you can tackle more easily or take with you as needed.

For more Breathing space tips, visit the Breathing Space Zine.

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Interruptions and Productivity

Paul Radde, Ph.D. author of Thrival says "Cell phone use is not just plain rude, it is mentally distracting and abusive to others. Cell phone use captures the brain's interest in completing the conversation, so whether the user is broadcasting or simply within earshot, the Zeigarnik effect kicks in. This is the same desire for closure that makes the effects of multi-tasking akin to the effects of post-traumatic stress."

The Zeigarnik effect is characterized by the tendency of people to remember interrupted tasks better than those that have been completed. "Once taken off one task, without completing the transaction," Radde observes, "the mind continues to seek closure. If you have a number of things going, but none of them to completion, you have these tensions tending toward completion -- and that is stress-provoking."

It's not that you can't get things done with the use of a cell phone; indeed, you can get a lot of things done. However, the nature of what you get done is highly skewed. Just as the man with only a hammer sees everything as nails, the incessant cell phone user accomplishes a variety of tasks, understandably enough, that accrue directly to having a cell phone. In other words whatever can be handled by a phone call is more likely to be tackled than say a problem that requires solitude and abstract reasoning.

Sometimes this get-it-done kind of individual overdoes this stay-in-touch aspect of what he's trying to accomplish. How often do you need to stay in touch with your office? Would every 60 minutes do it, or would 45 minutes be better, or 30 better still? What kinds of new tasks and new responsibilities at work are you creating for yourself and others as a result of the constant communication and, need I say it, over-communication?

Each 30 Minutes Count

Question: No matter how conscious I am of saving time throughout the day, I still find myself racing the clock. What, if anything, am I doing wrong?

Consider the following: any one-hour activity that you undertake in the course of the day will consume one solid year out of the next 24 years of your life. One hour is to 24 hours as one year is to 24 years. With this realization, consider the cumulative effects of reading junk
mail for only 30 minutes a day or spending 15 minutes a day in line at the bank--both of which could be avoided if you used mail, phone, or email services. Obviously there are some things that you couldn't or wouldn't want to give up and it is silly to apply this kind of arithmetic to activities such as personal hygiene. In general, however, each 30 minute segment of the day is valuable!