Natural Freedom

“The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.”

“The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.”

This all made me think of Edward de Bono's and his book on Simplicity because he talks about looking at both sides of things to get a better picture of the whole, that way we can make better decisions.

Many arguments with managers who did not want to believe the numbers and more importantly wanted bums on seats in the offices, more than it seemed they wanted the work done or quality of work.

Universally, those that were requesting it returned gains in productivity and also quality of work afterwards. Equally important imho was they were happier and thought they were doing their jobs better. In my view their satisfaction levels went up.

personally, for decades in my work life, I have actively sought out and planned those periods in, an hour uninterrupted is worth many hours of split attention work imho.

It's amazing how many times I hear about an immature manager that makes the work harder for the team. It's comedy! You're the manager, you need to manage, why are you making things harder? Idiot.

So much! Over the months I've been cutting back on my own schedule and going deeper into less. Sometimes I struggle with thinking I'm not doing enough. Did you ever experience that?

All around me people are rushing around and sometimes it crosses my mind that maybe I can do more. But I notice this comes up when I'm being impatient and focusing too much on the future.

I thought I found this article on excellence from the forum, but I didn't see it on the forum so I just posted it. I think you'll like it peregrinus.

Thread - The Mundanity of Excellence

past, future or present.

you could always do more, imho

the question is, how much is enough and for whom

When adults notice that children and teens seem to be struggling to focus and pay attention today, we often say it with a weary and exasperated superiority. The implication is: Look at this degraded younger generation! Aren’t we better than them? Why can’t they be like us? But after learning all this, I think about it very differently. Children have needs—and it’s our job, as adults, to create an environment that meets those needs. In many cases, in this culture, we aren’t meeting those needs. We don’t let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.


Now, when Lenore speaks to parents, she still gets them to talk about the happiest moments in their own childhoods. It’s almost always a moment when they were free—building a fort, walking through the woods with friends, playing out in the street. She says to them: “We’re scrimping and saving to send them to the dance class,” but when it comes down to it, “you’re not giving them the thing you loved the most.” We don’t have to continue like this, she tells them. There’s a different childhood waiting for our kids, if we commit, together, to rebuild it—one where they can learn, like L.B. building his boats, to focus deeply again.

“The rules for parent are three…love, limit and let them be.”

Elaine M. Ward

Good Morning!

Could it really be this easy? Would just these three little “rules” really work? Let’s look at each one.

Love- loving your children means loving them no matter what. It means loving them when they are screaming at you, it means loving them when they say that they hate you, it means making the hard decisions on what you believe is in their best interests. Love means walking the floors when your baby has colic, it means giving up being just “you” centered” and becoming instead “we” centered, it means being there, being available all the time, 24/7.

Limits – setting limits can be really difficult and carrying out those limits can be even harder. But children need limits. They need limits because they need to learn about life but they also need limits because without them they are really, really scared. They need someone to stand up and take charge in order for them to feel safe.

Let them be- letting them be means giving them the space and freedom to discover the world and discover who they are. It means letting them make mistakes, it means letting them fail, it means letting take responsibility for their actions without worrying about or trying to control the consequences.

I really think that Elaine M. Ward might be on to something.

So… In her words ” love, limit, and let them be”. Love them with all of your heart, enforce limits so they feel safe and then let them go out to explore the world. Sounds good to me..what do you think?

...true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

Maturity is when you no longer blame anyone. You don’t blame others; you don’t blame yourself. You see what’s wrong, and you set about remedying it.