Life a is Desk. Clear Yours

To prehistoric man, life was a spear. Today life is a desk. Joe Sugarman, in his book, Success Forces, explains that by clearing your desk every evening, you automatically have to choose what to work on the next day. This is a discipline that yields a marvelous sense of breathing space with which to start each day.

To ensure that your desk and office environment supports you, invest in yourself. If you need them, room dividers and sound barriers are available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and can improve upon any existing sound barriers.

Use the end of the day and slow periods to keep your desk orderly and better prepare yourself for high octane output when you're ready to get started again.

Every evening, after you've cleared your desk, acknowledge yourself for what you accomplished that day. Don't beat yourself up for what you didn't do. If you can do better, you will, maybe not at once, but soon enough.

The Tyranny of Choice

"Logic suggests that having options allows people to select precisely what makes them happiest. But, as studies show, abundant choice often makes for misery."
Barry Schwartz, "The Tyranny of Choice," Scientific American, April 2004

True Breathing Space

When you draw upon your own accumulated knowledge and the wisdom that you develop, you're able to intermittently free yourself from ever accelerating flows of information. That is true Breathing Space.

At Your Fingertips...

A tip worth employing: Use Google to find a topic-specific search engine, then use that engine to locate the sites that are most applicable to your needs.

Living Longer, Enjoying it Less

As a species, we live longer. The life span of the average caveman was 19 years. The life expectancy in Europe in 1392 was 38 years. The life expectancy in America in 1892 was 49. Today it is 74 for American men, 79 for women, and quickly rising for both sexes. Yet, for most people in our society, most days race by.

The faster we're able to travel or to gain new information, the greater our expectations regarding what can and needs to be accomplished in our lives. A day is still 24 hours but it seems to shrink in the face of more to do or higher expectations about what has to be done.

Time management is not the answer--it's too antiquated for the rapidly changing world. Instead, you and your fellow employees can recapture control of your lives:
* Reduce excess reading;
* Don't feel compelled to keep up with the news;
* Rest often; and most importantly,
* Handle your errands on weeknights--not on weekends.

Opt Out of Unwanted Mail, Calls

Here is a fabulous article from Consumer Reports on a message featured by the World Privacy Forum titled,

"How to Opt Out of Unwanted Mail and Calls."

"Tired of having your mailbox invaded and dinner interrupted? The World Privacy Forum has listed 10 "opt outs" to help consumers get their names and contact information off marketing lists. The nonprofit group's website explains how the opt-outs work and includes links and phone numbers." Here are options that are especially useful:

* The National Do Not Call Registry - Put your name on this list to stop most telemarketing calls. (You can't stop calls from charities, politicians, or companies you've done business with in the past 18 months.) Call 888-382-1222. Your number stays in the registry for five years. The first registrations will start expiring next year.

* www.optoutprescreen.com offers help to stop "preapproved" credit-card offers. Call 888-567-8688.

* Direct Marketing Association Mail Preference Service - The 3,600 plus DMA member companies (catalog marketers and nonprofits) must purge their mailing lists of people who register with this service, which costs $1.

* Once a year, financial institutions are required to send you their privacy policies, including how you can opt out if they share such information as your account balances. The Forum's site provides opt-out links for several of the largest banks in the U.S.

* Consumers Union mails subscription offers for Consumer Reports and its other publications. Because CU publications take no ads, subscriptions are their main revenue source. "We are advocates of opt-out options for consumers," says Meta Brophy, CU's director of publishing operations. "It's in the consumer's interest and our interest to send mail they want."

Ending Lawn Litter

Writing in the New York Times, Sewall Chan offers a wonderful article about local efforts to Halt Unwanted Paper Deliveries. Excerpted, he says:

"In an era of spam, telemarketing, moving billboards and other forms of aggressive commercial solicitation, an old-fashioned form of advertising is surprisingly - many say irritatingly - resilient: fliers, restaurant menus and business cards slipped under the doors, wedged in door jambs or left on the stoops of houses and apartment buildings in New York City."

"Until now, homeowners have had no recourse to block the unwanted paper, often called 'lawn litter' because in neighborhoods with yards much of the paper ends up on the lawn." Now however, the city is "enforcing a recent state law that prohibits the placement of 'unsolicited papers, fliers, pamphlets, handbills, circulars or other materials advertising a business or soliciting business" at homes in New York City if the property owner has posted a sign saying such materials are not wanted." Bravo!

"Advertisers who violate the law face fines from $250 for a first offense to $1,000 for repeat violations... Under the new law, the property owner's sign must be at least five inches tall and seven inches wide, and display the following language in legible letters at least one inch high: "Do Not Place Unsolicited Advertising Materials on This Property."

"...property owners who receive unwanted advertisements will be able to fill out a citizen complaint form and mail it, along with the unwanted ads, to the Sanitation Department's enforcement office in Brooklyn."

Pervasive Technology Overload

Here is a timely article that ran on 200 NBC TV news affiliates on the growing phenomena of something we all face, technology overload.

The news story is accompanied by a short video: once you're on the NBC site, click on the little red camera to the right of the screen.

Cutting off the Catalogs

Catalogchoice.org offers a service to help you "cut off the catalogs" for good. Click and select which catalogs you no longer want rather than having to contact each company separately.

Mastery in Your Life

What does "mastery" of information overload look and feel like for me? As author of Breathing Space, people ask me.
* Keeping my desk clear, because clear spaces are an invitation for me to create.
* Having my email inbox periodically at zero because I've allocated everything.
* Maintaining a few key subscriptions via mail and a few online services.
* Focusing on the handful of key indicators that tell me how I'm doing.
* Staying in touch with knowledgeable peers, people who can share with me
* Forsaking megalomania – developing the ability to let go, not be on so many lists, not receive so many subscriptions, not have handle to much information.


How do we each to whittle down the number of choices?
*If you have too few choices in life, if you’re socially or economically disadvantaged, at any given time you tend to feel stressed and anxious. You don't have a lot of control.
* If you have too many choices, too many places to go, too many people to meet, and it's like this all the time, paradoxically, you also feel stressed and anxious. You get to the point where too many choices leads to a condition that Alvin Toffler called "future
shock."
*In any given field, if you have 12 trade magazines, you want to immediately narrow down the field to maybe 2 to 4 and form a smaller subscriptions list. It's possible for you to not only stay on top, but to also feel more comfortable.
* Who are the best and brightest in your industry or your company? What are they reading? What have they selected and why? That's usually a pretty good indicator that those publications are highly viable information sources.
*When the number of choices starts to climb, your quest is to narrow the field to a manageable few.

Caregiver "Emergency Kit"

From Bottom Line Personal , a publication of Boardroom Reports, comes a most useful list:
a Caregiver's "Emergency Kit"

* Personal basics:
Social Security number (original card or a photocopy).
Keys (home, car).

* Health information:
Photocopy of Medicare cared.
Copy of Medigap policy or policy number and agent contact information.
List of current diagnoses. Up-to-date list of current medications with dosage schedule.
Primary care physician and specialists with phone numbers and which conditions they are treating.

* Legal documents:
Living will (if they want extraordinary measures taken in a medical emergency).
Power of attorney for medical and/or financial decisions.

* Financial information:
Co-signing power for bank and brokerage accounts and safe-deposit box
Savings accounts numbers
Investment information
Stock broker
Loans information
Pension, etc.

Concentrate for Breathing Space

Here are notes I took from Sam Horn's session on Concentration on September 15th, 1981. Still great advice to this day!

* Concentration defined: voluntarily focused attention.
* Discipline of ignoring irrelevant matters
* Fixing ones' powers, efforts and attention
* Most people work best under a deadline; when their concentration is focused.
* Fatigue is a big road block to concentration

This last note is telling!:
* Society is moving towards a lower frustration tolerance with less discipline, and more need for immediate gratification. These are detriments to concentration.

Filing: Divide and Conquer

If you're facing volumes of information, divide and conquer. You may be facing a ten-inch pile of information. Put it into file folders, and group like items together. Eliminate duplicates and prioritize the important items in a given file. It's harmful to ingest too much information
at once. At least half the job of dealing with most information is simply dividing it into piles, categorizing, or putting it into various directories on your hard drive.

Parkinson's Law Repealed

Are you a staunch believer in Parkinson's Law, you know the old saying that "Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion?" Yet, do you know anyone who consistently
has unscheduled, free stretches? In a time-poor society, Parkinson's Law is meaningless for many of us. Today it's more accurate to say "Items competing for one's attention expand
so as to fill the time and hinder work allocated for completion." So, I hereby repeal Parkinson’s Law.

Meanwhile, if you find yourself continually battling the clock, especially at work, try clearing your desk or work area of everything except what you need to complete the one project before you. Also, hold all calls and mail until you complete the project at hand. And if you have to, leave the workplace when you need to finish something important and cannot tolerate interruptions.

Vanquish Telemarketing Calls

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 regulates telemarketing calls. Telemarketers violate the law by using a machine to play a recorded sales pitch, by calling you between the hours of 9 p.m. and 8 a.m., or by calling you within one year after being told "not to."

To avoid some of the law's loopholes, say the following to a telemarketer:

* Put me on your do-not-call list.
* Do not solicit me for anything offered by your firm, its clients, affiliates, subsidiaries, or principals.
* Notify other affiliated organizations of my request.

You may ask that a copy of the telemarketer's "do not call" policy be mailed to your home. If a telemarketer calls you again within one year, or if you do not get the telemarketer's written "do not call" policy, you can sue for $500 for each violation.

These rules apply only to telemarketers making sales calls to your home; see www.fcc.gov/cgb/donotcall. Calls from charities or survey groups are not covered. Also, if you have not done so already register all of your phone numbers with the National Do Not Call Registry. Most telemarketers (some are exempt) will be required to stop calling you 31 days from your registration date. Your registration is good for three years. Visit: www.donotcall.gov