The Importance of Being Concise

Here’s a good article by Dr. Donald Wetmore on the importance of being concise in our communications. In a nutshell, appropriate “concision” benefits all parties!

Get the Best of Yourself

Author, songwriter, and comedian Steve Allen was among the most prolific talent in broadcasting history. He wrote more than 9,000 songs, including "This Could Be the Start of Something Big," which is still often played at New Year's Eve galas. Not bad for someone who played by ear. He wrote TV scripts, gags, jokes. He also managed to write 50 books: first mysteries; then on show business; then self-help topics like presenting, speaking, and humor; and then later on social issues before passing away early this century.

Like many others in TV, Allen's career began in radio where, as a young DJ, he once announced a Harvard vs. William & Mary football score as "Harvard 14, William 10, Mary 7." His interests extended beyond show business as well. A tireless advocate, Allen was instrumental in the airlines' smoking ban.

I met Steve Allen in the 1990s at the American Bookseller's Convention in Los Angeles. It was rumored that he never traveled without a pocket tape recorder and when I asked him if this was true, he took out his pocket tape recorder and showed me. Allen once explained that although he was thought of as extraordinarily productive, he figured he owed his high output to "Not letting good ideas get away." He recalled that even back in the 1950s, when tape recorders were bulky and expensive, he had one in each room of his house, even the bathroom.

Informed but not Overwhelmed

How can you stayed informed without being overwhelmed?

* Choose to acquire knowledge that supports or interests you, not what you simply happen to ingest, or think you have to ingest.

* Look for broad-based patterns and trends, as opposed to quickly disappearing fads and forgettable trivia.

* Learn to delegate some of your reading to your most junior staff. After only 15 minutes of instruction and armed with a list of key words, they will be able to rather easily identify articles of interest to you.

* Prune your files regularly and ruthlessly. Constantly throw out what does not support you.

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Multitasking and Your Brain

“There’s substantial literature on how the brain handles multitasking. And basically, it doesn’t … what’s really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous processing,” concludes Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Internet access in your area

Want to know what options you have for Internet access in your area or in an area you'll be visiting? Visit http://www.thelist.com/ and enter the telephone area code or zip code. You will then see a display of all the providers.

Today's Forecast: Data Smog

In his 1997 book Data Smog: Surviving The Information Glut, David Shenk remarkably predicted our current state of social affairs:

"The law of diminishing returns, applied to the growing speed and abundance of information, will produce infoglut that will no longer add to our quality of life. Infoglut is already beginning to
cultivate stress, confusion, and ignorance," he said. "Information overload threatens our ability to educate ourselves, leaves us more vulnerable as consumers, and less cohesive as a society, and diminishes control over most of our lives."

Here are Shenk's first 12 Laws of Data Smog:
1. Information is now plentiful and taken for granted.
2. Silicon circuits evolve more quickly than human genes; a future information overload disease is called Nerve Attenuation Syndrome.
3. Computers are neither human nor humane.
4. Putting a computer in every classroom is like putting an electric power plant into every home; education cannot be fixed with a digital pipeline of data.
5. The sales goal of the information industry is information anxiety; by 1995, computer users considered their machines obsolete in just two years.
6. Too many experts spoil the clarity; the paralysis of analysis.
7. In a glutted environment, the most difficult task is finding a receptive audience.
8. As info supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease, and people turn to niche media and specialized knowledge.
9. The electronic town hall allows for speedy communication and bad decision-making; government is too responsive to an ill-informed citizenry.
10. Personal privacy has replaced censorship as the prime concern of civil liberties.
11. In our increasing distraction and speediness, the lies will move so much faster than the truth, they will too often become the truth.
12. On the info highway, most roads bypass journalists, reducing the power of the press
and enhancing the power of public relations.

Thinking in an Age of Complexity

How to Think: Managing Brain Resources in an Age of Complexity by Ed Boyden in Technology Review is brilliant article, excerpted herer

"When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules...

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read...

2. Learn how to learn, rapidly... Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works.

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there...

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day...

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things...

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly... Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on...

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols... Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world..

10. Keep it simple... If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler,
do it...

Too Much Info, too Little Sleep

Only 3 per cent of professionals get eight hours of sleep every night of the working week. According to Travelodge's 2007 sleep study, company directors are the most sleep-deprived of all, with 8 per cent getting under four hours of rest per night.

The survey included more than 5,200 individuals from 30 different careers to discover more about how work affects rest. Those in the travel industry, such as cabin crew and pilots, found it hardest to get to sleep: 86% struggled with sleepless nights. Teachers were the most likely to stay awake because they were worrying about their work (39%). Here are the top 10 most sleep-deprived professions are:

* Company directors (averaging 5.9 hours of sleep a night)
* Ambulance crew/paramedics (6 hours)
* Tradesmen (6 hours)
* Leisure and hospitality workers (6 hours)
* Police officers (6.1 hours)

* Factory workers (6.2 hours)
* Nurses (6.3 hours)
* Engineers (6.3 hours)
* Doctors (6.4 hours)
* Civil servants (6.4 hours)

Concentrate Despite the Clutter

On September 15th, 1981, I attended Sam Horn's session on Concentration. Still great advice to this day!

* Concentration defined: voluntarily focused attention.
* Discipline of ignoring irrelevant matters
* Fixing ones' powers, efforts and attention
* Most people work best under a deadline; when their concentration is focused.
* Fatigue is a big road block to concentration

This last note is telling!:
* Society is moving towards a lower frustration tolerance with less discipline, and more need for immediate gratification. These are detriments to concentration.

Too Much Info to Get Started?

Dr. Piers Steel, an expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today, has distilled information on procrastination from 691 other research sources, and estimated that 95% of the population procrastinates sometimes, and about 15% to 20% are chronic procrastinators.

"Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task," he says. "Perfectionism is not the culprit. In fact, perfectionists actually procrastinate less, but they worry about it more."

The High Cost of Procastination

A recent article “Man returns book overdue since 1960” features the high cost of procrastination! Robert Nuranen of Hancock, Michigan just turned in a book that he had borrowed for a ninth-grade assignment. Mr. Nuranen claimed that his mother misplaced the copy of "Prince of Egypt" while cleaning the house. Every now and then the family came across it, only to set it aside again. (Hardly his mother’s fault.) He found the book again around New Year’s day while goinh through a box in the attic, presuming looking for something else

"I figured I'd better get it in before we waited another 10 years," he reported on Friday with a $171.32 check, equal to 47 years' worth of late fees. Current librarian Sue Zubiena said that the library had long ago lost any record of the book, but she said, "I'm going to use it as an example," she said. "It's never too late to return your books."

If only he had read my book, The 60 Second Procrastinator (Adams Media) Ref: http://tinyurl.com/fedl8. He might have turned it in a bit earlier!

Self-Induced Lost Opportunities

"For all the hand-wringing about Generation M, technology is not really the problem... It's not so much that the video is going to rot your brain, it's what you are not doing that's going to rot your life."

– David Levy, Ph.D., University of Washington Information School

Information is Stored in Spaces

It's important to understand that you control the spaces in your life, because information is stored in spaces--tables, shelves, desks, disks, hard drives, web sites, etc. If your desk is a mess right now, strewn high with piles that are growing higher, remember you're the one who controls that space, as well as your filing cabinet, your shelves, the top of your dining room table, your kitchen counter, your glove compartment, or your back seat. You are the one controlling your space, and this acknowledgment will help you to stay in control of your information.

A Game Plan for Today

You need a game plan for your day, and for your week. Otherwise you'll allocate your time according to whatever information happens to land on your desk or whatever communications begs for your attention. As such, other people's actions will determine your priorities. And you will find yourself making the fatal mistake of dealing primarily with problems rather than opportunities.

Advice from a Fellow Speaker

Have you noticed that your productivity is down because you're constantly checking email? If so, consider using a spare computer or laptop that is not connected to the Web. Your productivity will be amazing.

Three Simple Blogs

If you have yet to visit my other two blogs, start Autumn off right by clicking below:

* for the time-pressured: www.BreathingSpaceBlog.com
* for meeting planners: www.OpeningKeynote.com