How to avoid being flooded with obligations and deadlines? According to Bob Walsh in Lifehack.org, the trick is to focus on doing less.
“So there you are with your Today list, your to-do list, your project lists, your house list, your calls list and even your list of lists. You know each and ever one of the 49 things you want to accomplish today. There’s only one small problem: come the end of the day you’ve accomplished zip. What went wrong?
Your focus”
The University of Kent has published a number of excellent articles to help students to become better learners. I found this article about concentration especially well written and comprehensive.
In the summer of 2006, one of the books I have read is Goal-Free Living of Stephen M. Shapiro, who confesses in the beginning of the book that he used to chase goals month after month, neglecting to enjoy the moment in the passing. What I recognize from this is the tunnel vision that arises once you let yourself be led by some distant goal and not noticing things of value that are around you, simply because they do not fit in your scope of interest.
The eight secrets of Goal-Free Living according to Shapiro are:
I found the book inspiring to read. Nevertheless, it did not change my life or give me any important ideas. What is good about it though is that you think about living totally without goals. Is that possible? Can you achieve (especially larger) things without looking at the future? I guess not.
What I have seen myself, is an ambitious man who started with a demanding 5 year course to get his MBA, during which he experienced the goal of getting the diploma as a burden, and almost lost contact with his wife and children because he was studying all the time. I think for that guy the sacrifice was bigger than the gain.
Mindfulness is important and living in the present moment. Also, making contact with your deeper motives, transcending your blockades by insight and recognizing resistance when it occurs. This book can be a start when you want to succumb to the burden of too much deadlines and goals. It does not go very deep, but appeals to a bigger audience by staying down to earth and using ideas related to common sense.
Fabio Iaschi has created the spot My Moleskine and it containts a very nice layout of art work (all drawn in Moleskine sketchbooks). Fabio’s site is nominated for the Webby awards.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever tried working. I have and I don’t recommend it. I never did develop a natural enthusiasm for it the way some people do. I’m quite good at watching other people work. But my natural inclination is just to avoid work altogether.”
This week, I discovered a site that advocates slowing down, drinking lot’s of tea and doing less. It has a section with well written stories about slow living. I love the irony and humor of this (Mambo?) site, which features a mailing list and a blog as well.
Last week, I watched a documentary titled ‘Monks in the lab’. It is made by the Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation, in cooperation with the publisher Akosa. It is about scientific research on the neurological effects of different meditation states. I have attended a seminar last year, lead by Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. I found it is a very interesting field of study.
I absolutely recommend watching this broadcast (it is entirely in English, with some parts in French). I also have Alan’s book about Shamatha and I am looking forward to reading it soon.
The American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the discoverer of a mental state that he calles ‘Flow ‘. Csikszentmihalyi has researched this mental state for several decades and has published a great deal on the subject. In his books, Csikszentmihalyi writes extensively about Flow as the optimal psychological experience; e.g. as a violinist, when he has just finished playing in a concert in retrospect realises: “Wow, I was really in good shape there!” When somebody is performing a challenging task that is just within his reach of competence, he sometimes, not often, can get completely absorbed by what he is doing, forgetting himself or his surroundings becoming one with the action, as if the ‘Self’ dissapears and the consciousness of the person in the ‘Flow’ state is not disturbed by thoughts that are not relevant to the task at hand. When the Flow-state is over, usually after an hour or so, the person can see back and realise that he has been very productive and has overcome difficulties and made considerable progress. Once you have experienced Flow, it really makes your day and you feel very happy and on top of the world.
In Buddhism there is a comparible mental state, called Sati or mindfulness. Here’s a definition, taken from www.vipassana.com
“Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for Sati is ‘bare attention’. It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it was occurring for the first time. It is not analysis which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.”
According to experts, the Buddhist concept of Sati and the western scientific notion of Flow are one and the same thing. What is great though, is that the ancient Buddhist tradition delivers us dozens of techniques and hundreds of exercises to improve our concentration and to help us achieving Sati more often and longer. I am convinced that trained meditators can get into the Flow state more easily and can use this ability in their work or study. So start meditating! Here’s an article by George Boeree to start you off Buddhism.
Happy meditating 
P.S. I found a great article about Flow on this Buddhist site.
In Praise of Slow is an elegy to the art of joyfull slow living and claims that there is a growing ‘Slow’ movement. In this age of great speed, distraction and mulitasking, it is refreshing to see that a growing number of people value the quality of a slow, but attentive life. The book’s author, Carl Honoré, delivers many examples where slow is better and as contradictory as this may appear, very often slow is faster. Chapters are devoted to different areas of life, such as cooking, city planning, psychology, medicine, (tantric) sex, work, leisure and children. Carl showes that the industrialisation and urbanisation in the west has caused the economy to run round the clock and that we do not seem to have enough time for all the things that claim our attention. Our market-driven world urges us to total efficiency, even to the point where we try to ‘organise’ the time with our spouse and children. The remedy against this rat-race is simple: Do everything slower! If you start with taking the right amount of time for everything, you can appreciate things and enjoy the richness of the moment more. If you go out to eat for instance, you can have a splendid evening if you savor every course with full attention while you take time to get to know your company better and enjoy the conversation. When you are allways in a hurry, you enjoy the now less.
Slower can mean faster
Slow can also produce faster results, however contradictory this may seem. When for instance you are writing a report and relax and take as much time as you need, you will find that because of the ‘no hurry, no worry’ attitude, creativity is boosted. You will find it easier to devote your full attention to your task. Anxiety and fear are reduced, because there is no time pressure. When fear is less, expression and creativity is more, and so is the quality of your output. An atmosphere arises in which you can be more productive. Often, people can create far better results in these conditions. But remarkably, they also can produce more in less time, because, during an afternoon of relaxed and focused work, knowledge workers can cover a lot more ground than distracted, fearfull and hasty people working the same amount of time.
I think the key-words for the success of the Slow movement are focus and attention. The tortoise knows more about the road than the hare. If you do not live with a constant time pressure (and this means taking up less commitments and appointments) and take a more laid-back and relaxed attitude to daily existence, not only the risk of getting exhausted is diminished, but you notice more of the colorfull details of ‘ordinary’ things and events and can understand and appreciate them more at a deeper level. A hurried life is a shallow life.
Carl Honoré has done a great job in showing us the advantages of the ’slow’ approach, worth reading.
In her commentary on CNNMoney.com, Anne Fisher points out that the best thinking is done when the mind is at rest or working on some relaxed task, like gardening.
Finding a silent place during the work day is a luxury, especially for those who cannot afford a house in a quiet neighbourhood, people with young children, or workers in industry or transport. Of course there are technical solutions, like isolation headphones, but you can find relaxation and rest by every 30 minutes or so taking a short break and open a window or go to a balcony and just take a deep breath and watch the clouds go by for a few moments. What’s important is your ability to focus your attention to the moment to enjoy it the most. That way, you only need a few of these breaks to get you through the morning or the afternoon with as little stress and worries as possible. What is also a great way to reduce stress, is writing down every task you have committed to do, so you do not have the think about them all the time. Walking meditation is a good way to find tranquillity while moving to a meeting, or strolling down a corridor to another room.
In this interview with Daniel Redwood, Stephan Rechtschaffen, the author of the book Timeshifting , argues that we need to have time to relax during the workday, so that we can regain our balance. He also recommends mindfullness practice and shifting gears (higher and lower) whenever the situation requires it.
For office workers using computers with RSI preventing software, I would recommend in stead of getting angry about the interruptions, take the oppurtunity to sit back and relax, or walk-meditate to get a fresh cup of tea!
It is generally acknowledged that Open Source software (OSS) benefits greatly from the feedback it gets from it’s users. It takes a community mindset to file a bug report once you as a user stumble upon a fault in the software. How do you react when you discover a bug in an Open Source package? On a number of occasions, I have witnessed a response from users, that varies from “I told you so” to “I am a bit disappointed in that so called Open Source stuff”. I think you might call this the consumer mindset. During the years, we have become accustomed to have a critical eye for tools like Microsoft Office, especially after reading a report about the wealth of people like Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer. Often, we thought: “why is this software so buggy, while these guys make so much money?” For a number of users, this irritated, critical consumer mindset has stayed and while they have switched over to a Open Source package, they are comparing the people that created this package to large companies like Microsoft. But in the philosophy of the Open Source movement, everybody can contribute; rich or poor, developer or user, irrespect of the country you live in or your occupation.
3 Signs of the consumer mindset
3 Signs of the community mindset