by BRIAN HALL
Finally, the scanning method involves simply scanning the contents of the page at hand. When using this method, we are usually looking for things like key sentences, numbers, figures, illustrations, etc. Here, our peripheral vision should be used to point out key concepts, words, and phrases to give us an outline of what the page is saying without overloading us with unnecessary information.
Now, onto the subject of personal development—when we invest in this development, we are effectually taking on the voluntary suffering and responsibility that comes with leading our own lives. Our happiness and well-being are more, so put into our own hands when we invest in our own personal development since we are taking charge of what happens to us and determining the directions in which we move for ourselves. If, on the other hand, we sit back and let things happen to us as they will then we cannot complain when things fall apart. It is either we make ourselves proactive when dealing with life’s vicissitudes beforehand or are forced into a reaction when these changes do occur.
Few things, if any, go as planned in life. Our mighty ships sink, and we are left drowning on a regular basis because even the best laid-out plans in life tend to fall through the cracks due to seemingly random changes coming about without our knowledge or consent.
Personal development can seem overwhelming to many to start off on because as a practice, it involves so many different facets of understanding. It is when we consider our lives as the multifaceted happenings that they really are that we can start to affect the expansive change that needs to be aimed at in order to improve our overall situations. It is only by these more holistic efforts that our lives can start to come together more effortlessly, with our progress being mutually supported throughout all that we do. First, we have to focus on the issues within each one of these systems. Once we have solved our most urgent problems and planned ahead to deal with issues that may present themselves in the future, we can then focus on our personal development, asking ourselves first: where is it that I would like to be?
In these initial stages, we should create development checklists for ourselves which give us directives as to how to make progress in all the various areas of our lives. Here, our goals should be divided into categories specifying the areas of our lives they pertain to. For instance, health goals could include exercising more, cutting back on fats and supplementing them with fruits and vegetables, drinking more water, going to bed earlier, and cutting back on junk food.
Intellectual goals could include reading around a book a week, going to art galleries, reading about philosophers, and or listening to new musical genres/artists. Finally, emotional and or spiritual goals could be things like meditation, prayer, deep breathing and relaxation techniques, taking more time to contemplate on things and rejuvenate ourselves, spending more quality time with our families and friends, and using visualization techniques, affirmations, and positive thinking habits to better our perceptions on our lives.
All of these things and others like them should be employed in our daily routines if we want to develop well. There is always, however, a plateau of latent potential that we have to get over before the compounding interests that we bring about to start to benefit us.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Investing in your skills is never a waste
Speed reading is one of the best skills which you can take up
Learning is a lifelong skill that pays off in troves
Things to try out:
Identifying which skills you can improve will help you focus your self-improvement efforts
Speed reading will enable you to boost your self-improvement
The internet is perhaps the best tool for lifelong learning.
Chapter Ten: The Importance of Breaks
A break is a cessation of work, activity, or physical exertion. These cessations are meant to punctuate larger periods of time in which we are performing all of these various tasks. Here, we get opportunities to sit back and recharge before getting back into the work that had been overwhelming us beforehand.
The area of the brain that benefits the most from a break is the prefrontal cortex (or PFC). This area is very much or executive command center, which is responsible for most of the higher thinking that we do. This is why those who do highly cerebral work benefit the most from regular breaks out of all of us. These breaks benefit this area of the brain more so than perhaps any other area.
The prefrontal cortex does numerous things for us. When we have goal-oriented work for ourselves, this area keeps us focused on the end goals that we are pursuing. This area of the brain is also responsible for logical thinking and overriding impulses with willpower. With all of these diverse functions in mind, it is no wonder that this area of the brain needs rests more frequently than do any others, though they all rest for the most part with one another anyway. While breaks can bring us things like joy and fun, we will focus more here on the benefits that they provide us in the way of productivity.
Movement breaks are, for many, the most important types of breaks there are. People who have stationary positions at their work obviously benefit the most from these breaks due to the fact that excessive sitting at work is positively correlated to higher risks of obesity, depression, heart disease, and diabetes, among other things. Getting up from our chairs every now and again to stretch, walk, or even go about doing a full-fledged exercise is not only beneficial to our health, but it might also even be crucial to maintaining it in the long run. If we desire longevity, then we have to live actively, which may include moving around more than our work sometimes entails.
Our need to make decisions throughout our days is shown to deplete our capacities of reason and willpower. This effect is what is known as decision fatigue and leads to entire arrays of other problems as it worsens throughout our days. We are much more likely to make faulty decisions and either neglect to finish or poorly finish our tasks when we have not had a break in some time, and this trend is only made worse as more time goes by without a break. Not only does this fatigue lead to overly simplistic decision making, but it even causes procrastination if we do not relieve ourselves in time.
Break restore our motivation to complete long term goals. When we are working past the time constraints that our own minds want to impose on themselves, in the long run, we are bound to lose any motivation that we might start off with. Our prefrontal cortex is the main system helping us to work toward our goals. As mentioned earlier, if this cortex is overworked due to a lack of break time, then our willpower and focus toward meeting these goals will both become overworked with it and subsequently lessened. We need to ensure that we will be able to sustain attention on the goals that we have before ourselves, and the only surefire way to ensure this is by taking periodic breaks when our minds are not focused and at certain predetermined times.
The prolonged attention that is given to any single task to too long of a period of time eventually hinders our ability to get the task done. Our minds naturally need some break time in order to stay focused on tasks in the long run.
Stress and exhaustion are two much more common byproducts of prolonged work than our success and accomplishment. It is when we take breaks from the things that we are doing that our minds can refresh themselves, allowing us to think with much greater clarity and creativity when we do finally delve back into the same work. This change of mind will, in part, always allow us to examine our decision making differently and find new and greater solutions to our problems. When we think of the greatest “ah ha” moments that we have in life, we typically find that these only come to us after we have rested our minds regarding an issue for some time.
Rest is also great for memory consolidation. When we allow ourselves to think freely, with no tasks or assignments hindering us, our minds typically go over and better remember the information that they have been taking in. Here, often without our realizing it consciously, our brains review the information that they have taken in, ing
raining it more sternly into its networking in the process. Not only is rest necessary for staying productive and maintaining attention, but it is also needed for the formation of simple memories of everyday life.
A state of flow is characterized by the complete absorption of our attention when performing a certain task. Within this state, disruptions should be avoided at all cost, including breaks. This is a very rare mentality for most to find themselves in, so when it does come about, they should let nothing take it away from them.
Some of the most common activities people do on their breaks are as follows: walking/exercise, connecting with nature, changing one’s environment, having lunch or a snack, taking a short “power nap”, deep breathing exercises, meditation, daydreaming, engaging in creative activities, and drinking coffee or tea. We all have our own preferred methods of taking time off, but it is usually advisable to oscillate between some of these as to add variety to our routines.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
Rest is a vital element in improving overall performance
Scheduling breaks will help you get a firm grasp on your willpower
Exercise and good nutrition will help you improve your overall performance
Things to try out:
Set up scheduled breaks throughout your day and your week
Use your breaks to help you recover your willpower and determination
Take up a sport you enjoy and eat healthy foods which you like to help you balance out your scheduled breaks
Chapter Eleven: Time Management and Discipline
Nowhere is self-discipline more important to develop than where it regards to time management. Our discipline faculties governing the ways in which we use our time are the most important faculties of discipline that we have due to the fact that they determine the effectiveness of all of our discipline. This is because time is the only think of value that we have, so if we are not using this time in a disciplined manner, then all of our further efforts are in vain because the one source material that all of these efforts are being drawn from is not being appropriated properly.
The time that we have is not only finite but is also irretrievable. Not only do we have limited time on earth, but the time that does happen to come to us is never gotten back once it passes us by. This creates two main factors that necessitate our greater time management: the need to use limited time with more efficiency, and the avoidance of the threat of wasting this time. Here, we are caught between living our lives to the fullest in a premeditated manner and jumping over the rabbit holes that take up much of our time and eventually lead us nowhere.
We cannot manage time, by definition, but we can manage ourselves. As the early Stoics pointed out, the only things that we can control in life are our actions. This lack of influence is held towards all externalities, time included. We cannot fully control all of the things that we are obligated to do within a day, nor can we control changes as they come up. All that we can do is make certain use of our own time and hope for the best in the way of whatever may happen. Our actions should be governed by an urgency stemming from our lack of time and by the fear of wasting this time. We cannot halt the progress of existence, so we have to focus on making our lives as comfortable as they possibly can be moving forward on the temporal spectrum. Doing this requires a good amount of self-discipline and maturity, as we are sacrificing some parts of our present for our future in this process.
If we want to appropriate our time more wisely, we should analyze what the activities are that we assign a higher value to. The things that we feel that we get the most out of should be focused on more so than all others. This could be taken with a utilitarian lens, one trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, but a more pragmatic approach would take into to account the objects of our desire that require more pain exerted to be found.
If we analyze the passage of time merely as a sequence of events, regardless of what these events might be, then time management becomes an ability to choose this sequence of events, presumably to meet our own greater interests.
The Pareto principle applies to many different happenings in life, but as far as time management is concerned this principle offers us that 20% of the things that we work on result in 80% of the overall value in all things we accomplish, while the other 80% of things result in only 20% of this value. In other words, 20% of our work (our greatest work) is creating 80% of the end results that we reap, while the other 80% is creating the other 20%. This means that most of the work that we do is of limited use to us and that this work is trumped by our greater work, which splits the difference for our overall production, producing most of what we end up with.
The tasks that we assign to ourselves at the top of this hierarchy produce the greatest results of any in our lives. These tasks are, however, typically the most difficult and time-consuming ones that we ever take up. This extra difficulty in these tasks is not without silver lining though, being the main reason that these tasks give us such greater rewards as they as completed. The age-old platitude of accepting the thorn to smell the rose applies here as anywhere.
If half of the time management consists of setting clear priorities, then the other half consists of sticking to these priorities. Anyone can set priorities up for themselves, but very few can actually stand to stick to these priorities once they have proposed them to themselves. Naturally, we are much more inclined to stick to the priorities that we enjoy more and that we find to be more valuable. When we try to put the things that we enjoy the least over those that we enjoy the most, we are less likely to maintain the willpower necessary to complete all of the tasks that we have set before ourselves. We are also looking for the highest return on our energy in the tasks that we complete. The things that we are spending our time on should make us walk away from them feeling energized and curious to learn more about them, rather than tired and potentially avoidant of them in the future.
We must be as careful about what we invest our time into as we are about what we invest our money into. We are again looking for the highest possible returns when making these investments, so the most valuable uses of these resources need to take priority over all of the rest. While we can make inferences as to what tasks are going to be the most valuable for us to complete beforehand, we only really come to know of the worth in what we are doing after it has been done, so ascertaining what we should focus the most on can be very much a process of trial and error, requiring lots of time to master just as any other skill does.
Action plan for this chapter
Things to keep in mind:
The most important tasks take up a relatively short amount of your time
Being disciplined will help you manage your time effectively
Setting clear priorities will lead you to allocate your time appropriately
Things to try out:
Follow the 80/20 rule in order to assess what tasks you need to focus on
By planning, and sticking to your plan, you will get a good grip on your time management skills
Make a list of the most important things you need to get done; rank them so that they can become your priorities
Chapter Twelve: Urgency vs. Importance
Of all of the tasks that present themselves to us, it is the urgent ones that make the biggest impact on our decision making, asserting themselves loudly and abruptly and directing us to new modes of action as they urge us through the problem solving that they require. Our immediate attention is directed to these tasks, and so much of our time (especially the time that is not managed properly) is subsequently wasted in this rude and hasty manner of thinking, which is meant only to keep us afloat temporarily and not to give us any greater security in the long run.
We are reactive rather than proactive when we are dealing with urgent demands imposed onto us. This is a useful mode of conduct only in the wake of urgent duties, it does not help us to achieve our long-term goals and does not provide any stability fo
r us, even in the short term. To live in this reactionary way with everything constantly overwhelming us is not fit for a human for an extended period of time. The urgent tasks that we have to complete are a good indication of the further chaos that can come into our lives that we should work hard to avoid. In order to move forward, we must have two things here: something positive to move forward toward and something negative to run away from. Between these two things, we can live our lives at a steady pace, constantly progressing toward new and better things.
The important tasks, on the other hand, are the ones helping us to move toward our long-term goals and end missions. Some of these more important tasks also happen to be urgent, though most are not going to be. The important tasks are only completed when we are in responsive moods that allow us to work rationally and remain open to new ideas, modes of thinking, etc.
The tasks that are both urgent and important should always be the first ones that we complete. These tasks are not only needed to be completed by us to stay above water, but they also are the ones that will help us to make more progress in the future. These include things that are evergreen in their applicability and also happen to be necessary for us to focus on at the moment. If these things are important in the long run as well as urgent in the short term, then we can rationally deduce that they are some of the more necessary tasks that we are going to have assigned to ourselves and that we are going to need to focus on others like them for some time in the future.
Not all urgent activities are important. In fact, some of the more urgent tasks that we have to complete are bound to be almost useless, but they should still be completed with urgency, nonetheless. This is a rational proclivity though, as we should often be more concerned with short term concern than with long term strategy.
