Are You "Out of Control"

Early warning signs when you’re heading for an "out of control" situation: Control is always based on your perception; still any time you start stacking horizontal piles on your desk you are operating in a malfunctioning mode.

If you find yourself perpetually 5 to 10 minutes late for meetings and always handling activities up to the last minute before turning your attention to what is next, you are leaving yourself wide open for some anxious moments. Also if you don't give yourself enough physical space to handle a task you are also likely to feel out of control.

Life is Finite, Information Infinite

Too much information violates our senses and even becomes harmful. As you receive more information, you experience stress, anxiety, and even helplessness. Your perception of breathing space is adversely and directly influenced by the more news, information and details that you ingest, or believe you have to ingest.

* In 1302, the Sorbonne Library in Paris housed 1,338 books, most handwritten, representing nearly all of humankind's accumulated knowledge spanning a few thousand years.
* In 2005, at least 730,000 books are published each year -- more than 2,000 a day.

In today's business environment we are being pulled in so many directions at once!Recognize, with the clarity of death, that life is finite; you cannot wistfully ingest the daily deluge of information/communication and expect to achieve balance.

Don't passively yield to the din and settle for living your life in what's left over after each day's onslaught. Hereafter make sensible choices about what is best ignored and what merits your time and attention.

Drugged Nation

You'll never convince me otherwise: as a society our default response to information and communication overload is ingesting psychopharmaceuticals. Patrick Di Justo, writing in Wired Magazine says, "America may be the land of Mickey Mouse and Goofy, but the US isn’t exactly the happiest place on Earth. Antidepressants are the most commonly popped pills in the country, accounting for 227 million prescriptions filled last year alone. Of course, Prozac and its descendants aren’t the only popular psychiatric meds: Remedies for seizure disorders — often used to treat bipolar disease, as well as epilepsy — and for anxiety are among the 10 most-prescribed drugs in the nation."

"But even as our hunger for pills has grown, basic innovation has slowed. Many “new” medications are actually reformulations of previously approved drugs, not novel molecules. As a result, some of the most widely taken treatments have been around for years: Today's leading anxiety beater, alprazolam, for example, originally hit the market in 1981 as Xanax."

Cell Phones Decrease Freedom

"Cell phones-and, indeed, all wireless devices-constitute another chapter in the ongoing breakdown between work and everything else. They pretend to increase your freedom while actually stealing it. People are supposed to be always capable of participating in the next meeting, responding to their e-mails or retrieving factoids from the Internet. People so devoted to staying interconnected are kept in a perpetual state of anxiety, because they may have missed some significant memo, rendezvous, bit of news or gossip. They may be more plugged in and less thoughtful.
--Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek columnist