Taivo Lints Blog

A book by Jurgen Wolff, from 2008, about how to fight procrastination and how to better focus on your most important activities and goals.

The feeling of not living up to your potential and letting the precious time slip by, day by day, year by year, can be extremely frustrating. The opposite -- fulfilling your potential and spending your time on activities that you love and / or that result in great achievements -- makes you feel happy and empowered. The good thing is that being able to focus on the activities that are important and positive for you is a skill and habit like any other -- you can learn it and become better by conscious practice. Thus, spending some of your time on improving your ability to work efficiently (as well as on other so-called "self-help" topics like improving your attitudes and social skills) is just as reasonable as spending some of your time on learning a foreign language, a musical instrument or some scientific theory.

Now, there already exist thousands and thousands of blogs and books about productivity and time management, offering a large number of tips and techniques, so why bother reading yet another one? Because Wolff's "Focus" has a somewhat nontraditional perspective and offers advice that at least I hadn't read anywhere else before. Wolff's view is that the majority of traditional time management methods are best suited for the analytical, well-organized, "left-brain" persons, whereas the more intuition-based, variety-loving "right-brain" people would benefit more from a slightly different approach that he then tries to provide.

Some of the advice Wolff gives is quite well-known (which, of course, does not diminish its importance), such as identifying your behavioral patterns, eliminating-delegating less important activities, setting big goals and dividing them into small subgoals, using visual reminders, focusing on positive things, creating the flow, and many more.

As of the less traditional suggestions, here's an example: be very careful about setting deadlines (especially if some parts of achieving the goal depend on external partially unpredictable factors), because failures to get things done by deadline are demotivating, and deadlines also tend to lead to the exponential increase of workload (and to a decrease in the willingness to look for alternative, more efficient routes, due to being in a hurry) just before the final date. A better approach might be to commit to moving steadily towards the goal in small steps (revising the strategies on the go as necessary) and achieving the goal whenever the steady progress has resulted in the desired state.

Other interesting advice includes the use of hero pattern (switching from "I have a problem / goal" mindset to "I am on a quest"); letting go of the belief that one person has one personality, and instead having a well-developed set of (possibly inconsistent) alter egos and for each situation picking the most suitable of them; taking the dividing of a big task into small steps to the extreme, e.g., making the first starting steps so absurdly tiny that they will not trigger postponing the task, for example if the goal is to start going to the gym regularly, then the first step might be literally stepping out of your front door with the gym bag, with the full permission to then stop and step back in (the trick is that the likelihood of continuing towards the gym instead of stepping back in is actually remarkably high); and much more.

Additionally, there are useful chapters on managing people and meetings, using language more efficiently (mostly NLP-inspired suggestions), dealing with the daily information overload, and so forth.

So, although "Focus" surely is not a magic book of spells that makes you highly efficient and happy overnight, it nevertheless gives very useful advice that is either complementary or alternative to the more traditional methods. If you are willing to make an effort to improve yourself, then this book most certainly can help you move faster towards your goals.

More info about the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0273715445

A book by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, from 2002, about how to keep up constructive dialogue in difficult situations.

A short and somewhat fragmentary summary:

Crucial conversations are those where the stakes are high, opinions are different, and emotions run strong. Such conflict situations trigger our natural fight-or-flight response (releasing adrenaline, increasing blood supply of the muscles and thus decreasing blood supply of the brain) which makes it difficult to keep calm and to keep up the level of mental activity that is necessary in complex communication situations. To keep the dialogue constructive in spite of this interference, we should learn and practice a set of supportive skills.

Focus on what you really want, honestly, for yourself, for others, and for the relations. Think about how you should behave to best reach these goals. Now, is your current behavior consistent with your true goals, or maybe your motives have quietly shifted into defending yourself or trying to win at any cost? If you have managed to keep, or to bring back, your focus on your real goals, then is this also clearly understandable to the communication partners, or maybe your behavior tells a different story? Learn to notice when the conversation turns crucial. Learn to monitor the behavior of yourself and others, and, most importantly, the level of safety in each participant. When somebody feels unsafe, they will either start fighting for themselves or close up, which both stop the constructive dialogue. To maintain the safety, make sure that you all have some common (possibly higher level) goal in mind and that you honestly work toward that goal, and also keep up mutual respect, no matter how different the opinions and personalities. If the other participants do not engage in constructive dialogue, do NOT blame them -- it is your responsibility to try to create an atmosphere where they will become more and more open and constructive.

Separate facts from interpretations. Find out and discuss explicitly how the participants interpret their observations about the issue under discussion. Be ready to change your interpretations in the light of the new information and ideas you get from others. Find alternative solutions that everybody agrees on, even to those problems that initially seem to have only two mutually exclusive ones. Honestly apologize for your mistakes, but do not apologize for your honest standpoints. Fully explain why you have the opinions and standpoints that you have, but never try to force them upon others -- forcing tends to automatically create counterreactions, even if your ideas are indeed the best (but never assume that they are before finding out the others' viewpoints as well). Beware: if your belief in your ideas is very strong, you might not even notice that others get the feeling that you are forcing those ideas upon them -- pay close attention to your tone of voice, posture, talkativeness, aggressiveness. Calm down and give others enough time to explain their views, too.

If there is a decision to be made, make sure that everybody understands the process through which it will be made, and that decisionmaking is a separate process from the dialogue (which is the process of finding out and discussing the information and viewpoints that the participants have).

In the book these ideas are, obviously, presented in a more systematic and detailed way, and there are more of them than listed here.

The only thing that slightly bothered me about this book was the feeling that it could have easily been condensed down to half of its size -- some of the ideas were getting a bit repetitive and diluted. On the one hand, repetition with variations is surely helpful for better understanding, but on the other a concise presentation might maybe make it easier to imprint the information into the memory.

But overall I found this book very educative and would recommend it to almost everybody, because we all have crucial conversations on a daily basis -- with our families and friends, with our coworkers, bosses, clients, opponents, and so on.

More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071401946

Note: The version that I read was not the English original, but a translation into Estonian, named "Otsustavad kõnelused": http://www.raamatuklubi.aripaev.ee/Book.aspx?ID=7d0ffb84-00ed-47eb-b392-a5fb4be3a42a