With thanks to Peggy this week for an interesting article about personal focus and our eternal attempts to try, and be, too much. The article discussed the frenetic pace of our professional lives and the notion that we have an eternally full in box of worries which we can never clear. We’ve touched on time management tips in the past, but we haven’t, until now, explored the degree to which we are driven by intuition or by external influences. So this weeks question is:
“Are you a binge thinker?”
The article suggests that if you answer yes to three or more of the statements below, you could be well overdue a mind-detox. How do you fair?
- do you wake at 3am worrying about unfinished tasks and how you’ll never clear your to do list?
- in a work meeting, does your mind drift to fretting about what so-and-so really meant by that e-mail?
- do you obsess about previous arguments?
- is your commute to work consumed by worrying about the day ahead?
- do you deliberately drink caffeine to cope when you feel tired but then feel increasingly jittery?
- do you look at Facebook, Twitter and your e-mail the moment you wake up and feel the need to respond at once?
The article suggests potential solutions around doing one thing at a time, diet and exercise but I’m sure many of us have had particularly stressful times in work in the past, and we have these (and other) ways of coping and producing our own mind detox.
My own coping strategy involves turning my blackberry off when I’m at home and having a “one in one out” approach to saying yes to more work, on the basis that I can do it if something else stops. I’m not saying its been a complete success all of the time, but it is something I’ve used. So, do you consider that you have suffered from binge thinking and if so, how have you coped?
Aresko 