Managing Yourself

[Anonymous]

This article in The Star could be helpful to most of us here. I have heard of this guy Drucker before, but I never looked into his writings. Probably would be a good idea to do so.

http://www.thestar.com/business/article/785995–the-office-balancing-act

Cheers!

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[Patte Rosebank]

The trouble with Shakespearean quotations is that the people who use them to demonstrate a point, generally fail to take into account the sort of character who speaks the line. Polonius is a meddling old idiot, who gets himself stabbed through the arras (so it really was curtains for him) while spying on Hamlet (because he knows that Hamlet is really unstable and prone to outbursts—something that would make a smart person choose to leave the room, instead of hiding behind a curtain and spying on them) in Gertrude’s bedroom. Knowing that Polonius is the same one who also says the much-quoted “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, should make you think twice about that advice too.

As for Drucker’s advice, it is definitely good advice, but in the hands of people who overly analyze everything to the point of getting stuck in “analysis-paralysis”, it can be kryptonite.

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[Anonymous]

Huh. Didn’t even notice the Shakespeare quote when I intitally read the article. Had to go back and look. So Polonius was an idiot? Aren’t we all sometimes!

Still think it’s a useful article to keep in mind.

Cheers!

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[Mike]

I like the phrase analysis paralysis.

I find I could spend the rest of my life analyzing what my friend meant by what he said or what a date meant when she said this or that. And I think of what I should have said. Or could have said. Which is totally negating whatever I did do.

I’ve been reading one of Thomas Brown’s books on ADHD and he talks about the fact that we can really get stuck on emotions, like worry or sadness or whatever, and not be able to move on. I don’t hear that much in other books about ADHD but it sure rang true with me.

Sometimes I just want to smack myself and go, ‘Get over it!’ Like I wasted a year of my life in ‘mourning’ after I broke up with my first girlfriend. I only went out with her for about 3 months, and then I spent the next 12 months fixated and obsessing on what happened. Four times longer! God help me if I get married and then divorced after 10 years. I’ll spend the next 40 analyzing what went wrong and what I should have said to ‘show her.’

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[Anonymous]

@Mike – Been there, done that. Still do sometimes. I don’t know if the ADD has anything to do with the way I hold onto things for so long. When I’m bored, I sometimes dig things up that have been buried for 25 years. Go figure.

Another thing I do is beat myself up over things that were only 80% perfect. Even when I know that nobody else could’ve done any better than I did, I mentally whip myself to sleep at night over things that I can’t do anything about. The odd thing is that I never get emotional about it. I’m just hyper-critical of myself.

Sometimes I actually visualize myself being beaten, whipped, cut, sometimes even shot. It’s like a part of my brain believes that visualizing this physical punishment on myself will somehow correct whatever it was that I think that I did or said wrong. I know it’s stupid, I can rationalize that. And I know that I would never really do anything to harm myself, so there are no worries there. I’m pretty sure that I’m incapable of that.

The ONLY thing that prevents me from going down that road–If I’ve had a successful day where I feel that I really accomplished something positive, did some really good work, learned something new and challenging, or just solved a nagging problem all of that goes away. And I don’t need validation from anyone else to TELL ME that I did well–I always know.

Dr. Phil says that we wouldn’t worry about what other people thought about us if we knew how seldom they did. I’m not a big Dr. Phil fan, but I caught that quote while channel-surfing one day and it was almost as if God was pushing the remote control buttons to make sure that I hit that channel at precisely that moment.

This concludes yet another off-topic post. It seems like a lot of threads around here wander. I’m glad I’m with people who understand.

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[Monika]

The Subject Topic “Managing Yourself” made me think it was suggestions about organization and time management.

One of my mentors is Randy Pausch, of “The Last Lecture”. If totallyadd.com wants to delete this link, I’ll understand but it’s his Time Management talk and I think it is second only to the “ADD and Loving It!” documentary in relaying valuable information in an entertaining way. Which is an incredibly high accolade from me.

http://www.archive.org/details/GabrielRobins-TimeManagementByRandyPauschNovember2007187

The first 7 1/2 minutes are an introduction that is recommended that you fast forward and while it’s 70minutes in length, I refer to it often.

Looking forward to learning from Rick’s dvd’s,

M

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