Personal Development

Get Organized. Stay Motivated. Enjoy Life.

Archives for May 2006

Asking Questions The Smart Way

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Sometimes we get so busy trying to solve a particular problem, that it’s very hard to maintain the focus. I’ve seen it happening many times – simply because someone fails to solve the problem right away, this person starts jumping from one thing to another, asking random questions and making completely irrational decisions. It’s very easy to get into similar position, but knowing few simple techniques it’s as easy to steer clear of such traps. Today I’d like to mention just a few of such principles.

Make note of every question

It is vital that every question of yours is noted. Put them in a simple list, or make a complex tree-like structure – it’s up to you, but always document everything. Only when every single question is put down on a paper or entered into one of your electronic documents, you can be sure that you’re starting off properly.

The most important reasons for making notes are:

  • it’s easier to think when you take notes. It had been proven numerous times that even simple problems make seem uncomfortably complex just because you have no paper or pencil to work on them. Working on technical problems and doing some calculations, it’s much easier to see what I mean – sometimes just writing down a short list of numbers is all it takes to help you solve a problem.
  • it’s easier to maintain your focus. When you have all the questions (and answers) outlined in an easy to follow form, you can always see where you are and stick to the subject.
  • it’s easier to maintain a methodical problem solving. What I mean by this is that you have a much smaller chance of repeating your own questions or following the same direction more than once in your thinking process. Having your notes in front of you, it’s easier to see what you’ve already tried.

Never Leave A Question Unanswered

I have written a fairly long blog entry on this subject, so if you haven’t read it yet – please do so: Never Leave A Question Unanswered. Today I’m mentioning this to show one more thing why it is really important.

Asking questions is not very useful on its own. Answering them is what really matters. And since questions usually take form of a logical chain with a sole purpose of filling in the gaps of your knowledge about the problem, it’s important to realise that the more questions you answer before moving forward, the more complete picture you’re going to see and therefore there more easier it is going to be for you to stay focused.

If you don’t take some time to stop and answer some of the earlier questions of yours, you may easily get lost on your way towards the solution. So when asking questions, always maintain the number of unanswered questions as small as possible.

I use a very simple decision-making while asking questions: if I pose a question and it seems to be a fairly easy one to answer, like one of them I think is going to take only a couple of minutes to answer, I stop right there and start formulating the answer. Simply because 2 minutes is mostly an acceptable sacrifice to make in order to get one more answer answered right away. If it feels like it’s going to take longer, I move on.

After some time spent on a problem asking questions this way, always do a quick review. Many quickly answered questions from different thinking directions will be somehow related to other questions and may render some of more complex questions to be easier than you originally thought. So by reviewing all the questions all over again, even by simply glancing through the list of posed questions, you’re effectively making sure you re-assess every question with absolutely all the information you have at hand.

Know why you want a particular question answered

Again, it sounds so simple – but I just had to put it in here. So many people never do this. They pose one question after another, and they never stop to think whether a particular question is even relevant to their original problem at all. Asking yourself why you need a particular answer is always a good way to make sure you’re moving in the right direction. And as with many other routines, there is a number of simple principles:

  1. If you don’t know why you need an answer to some question, drop this question. Mark it off your list so that it doesn’t distract you anymore. If you don’t know why you would need an answer, this means that you don’t have a place for neither this question nor this answer in your logical chain of thinking. And it also confirms that answering this question is not going to help you progress simply because you wouldn’t know how and where to use this answer.
  2. Maintain your focus and respect priorities. By knowing exactly why you’re posing a particular question and trying to find an answer for it, you stay focused and aware of what impact a particular question might have. Sometimes a simple follow-up on a seemingly simple question triggers a whole chain of then-obvious steps to resolve the problem or reveals an area of your problem where you should concentrate on.

Taking just a few seconds to realize the purpose of answering each of the questions you pose is definitely worth the comfort and confidence it gives you in your problem solving.

I hope this short article will help you in your problem solving, and I’ll definitely write more on the subject in the future.

Let me know what you think – is there is anything you agree or disagree with? Are there some other approaches in asking questions you find particularly useful? What works for you and what doesn’t? Please let me know – I’m very keen to learn from you!

Performance or Balance: What’s More Important?

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The last few days of mine were spent browsing the web in search of a perfect organizing tool. I don’t care at this stage whether it’s online or offline, I just feel the need for a computerized way to improve my daily organizing routine.

 

As you have probably read in My To-Do Lists Revolution article before, I’ve gone through few stages of various optimizations in search of the most efficient way of organizing all the things I have to do.

 

These are the things I’d like to keep track of:

  • what needs to be done and when
  • what had already been finished, and when
  • what is tomorrow (today) going to be like

 

This isn’t the full list, of course, but it gives you the idea. All I’m trying to do is to get through the day in the most efficient way – meet my own expectations, make sure I fulfill requests of my peers, don’t forget to enjoy my lifestyle, and – most importantly – enjoy the comfort of knowing exactly what is getting done and why, trying my best not to forget anything. And while I’m growing better and better at this, I realise that it’s also important not only to keep track of things, but to keep them in some order and maintain a healthy balance.

I think in everyone’s personal development there are quite a few pivotal moments, when your approach to dealing with everyday tasks changes dramatically in such a way that it would feel unnatural, if possible at all, to come back to the old way of things. So here are just a few of such moments I can think of right now.

 

The pivotal points in personal growth:

  1. You accept that your way of doing things is not perfect. In fact, it’s far from being perfect. And not only you feel it’s time to change, but you also decide to change things. You agree with yourself to make commitments.
  2. You find out that there are better ways of organizing your life. You’re excited and you’re full of energy, and everything seems to be so easier to manage even if you don’t really change anything in your approach. You enjoy the first results of your personal growth.
  3. You pick a set of rules to follow, and you do your best in making the whole new approach work. And it does! You soon enough realise that dealing with daily routine isn’t hard at all. Things at work get done easier, things at home bring joy in a natural way, and you finally accept that your development does pay off.
  4. You realise that your life isn’t only about getting things done, and there has to be more to it. This is when you agree that everything has to be balanced. You have to work, but you also have to enjoy other aspects of life. You have to advance with your career, but you should also never forget about your precious half making some professional progress too. And there are all sorts of things which don’t quite fall into one of the bigger categories of your daily routine, but your life will become dull and grey and sometimes even empty without them. You suddenly realise that you can’t go on without balancing things.
  5. You find the perfect balance, and yet again you realise how much you’ve grown – things are done with ease, and you enjoy every day of your life more that ever.

 

This list is probably much longer, but I think I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 on this scale, and because of this I can’t see much further than 5. I’m sure though that many things will become obvious and apparent once I make some progress.

Don’t Be Afraid series

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I think I’m ready to start yet another category of my blog – the Don’t Be Afraid series of posts.

 

Fear is one of the most natural feelings we can experience. It’s a self-preservation mechanism which takes a form of a strong unpleasant emotional state when we sense some kind of danger. It is quite common to feel the danger unconsciously, and the more unclear the possible threat is, the stronger your fear becomes.

What I’d like to cover in my series is just a basic list of our everyday fears practically everyone has. Some fears are simple and even childish, others are serious and very hard to overcome, so hopefully my notes will help you understand just a little bit more.

 

The purpose of this series is to:

  • show you that the fears you have are common, well-known and can be dealt with
  • provide an explanation how you can overcome your fears
  • help you become a stronger person
  • help you look at your fears from a different point of view

 

Don’t Be Afraid series has the following posts so far:

16/05/2006: Don’t Be Afraid To Show Your True Self

05/07/2006: Don’t Be Afraid To Speak Up At Meetings

Having To-Do Lists Is Just Not Enough

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I’m not a to-do lists person. Not anymore, anyway. You’ll see what I mean if you read about my recent To-Do Lists Revolution. Still, I have deliberately left quite a room for developing the topic, so there it is – yet another blog entry on to-do lists.

Thoughts described below are just an opinion of mine, and the aim of this entry is to help you make up your own view of to-do lists and decide whether they really are the best tool available for managing your daily tasks.

To-do lists are supposed to be a fairly simple and self-explanatory concept. You make and follow these lists to do stuff. Usually we refer to our daily to-do lists, but it’s not uncommon to have weekly or even monthly to-do lists as well.

To-Do lists are great for getting more things done that you’d normally do without such lists, but at the same time they’re not so great for lots of other aspects of your activities. In other words, simply having to-do lists is just not enough to stay on top of things. And in this entry, I’m going you show you why, and I will give you examples of how to-do lists don’t encourage and sometimes even slow down your progress.

Reaching your goals

If there’s one thing completely left out in traditional to-do lists, that’s the goals we’re trying to achieve. To-do lists are simply not about goals. You’re supposed to have your goals defined somewhere else, and keep them outside of the to-do lists routine.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get buried in your to-do lists. Quite often we get so thrilled with the idea of getting all the planned actions into our to-do list, that we forget to stop and ask ourselves, why exactly we’re going to do this thing or that one. This means that we’re still going to have many things done according to our list, but we’re not necessarily going to achieve the original goals which have triggered us working and creating to-do lists in first place.

So it’s important to stay conscious and be focused on the goals, not the tasks in your to-do list. If all you’ve got is your daily to-do list – you’re playing a dangerous game. You really need to take some time and analyze the current state of things in order to come up with your new goals or maybe simply correct the existing ones.

The good thing though is that you can always have a “Review goals” item on your to-do list for the day, and this will attract your attention and make you work more on your goals at the end of the day. And naturally, once you have worked out the habit of reviewing your goals daily or weekly, you can get this item off your lists.

Tracking progress

Again, because to-do lists are not meant to be a sophisticated progress tracking tool, you need something else to help you do this.

Daily to-do lists could be giving you a false impression of having everything completed each day, while in reality you may be nowhere near the completion of a bigger task or a project. You have to track your projects and goals with a separate process. Daily to-do lists are just too small a scale to reflect the overall state of your projects.

Staying motivated

For many people, to-do lists are a constant source of frustration. Whenever they start their day by looking at the list, they find the list to be too long. There are so many tasks and so little time to make them all happen, that it can easily depress people even before they get started. On odd days, it requires some real courage to dive into your to-do list and find a way to get most of the things done in a matter of just few hours. Some people always find this courage, but then some of us never do, so it could be a real problem even though making to-do lists and following them is somewhat the right way to go.

Routine may be another reason for your lack of motivation. When every workday starts with a long list of things to do, and you know that no matter how hard you work, you’re going to get a similarly long list for the following morning, at some stage you lose your interest. You don’t see any challenge in doing better that you already are, because each brand new day will invariably bring a brand new list full of not so exciting things you’re going to just have to work through.

So again, you need something else to keep you motivated. Reviewing your goals daily is a good start because it will help you realise how far you’ve progressed with each of your goals, and see the difference a paricular day has made.

That’s it for now, I don’t want to make this entry too long, so I guess I’ll write more on this topic later. I hope you found this useful, so please let me know if you did.