I'm looking for my slip-on gardening shoes. Can't find them. I spend three minutes looking around the garage - then give up. Instead, I put on my lace-up gardening shoes.
And then it occurs to me - I wasted three minutes because I was trying to avoid thirty seconds of work lacing up this pair, that was staring me in the face at the outset.
Inside my brain, the following subconscious train of thought was occurring [sound effect of voice echoing as though a muffled loud hailer] ... "The act of lacing up these shoes will take time and effort. Crouch down - lace up one shoe, stand up, crouch down on the other leg, lace up the other shoe, stand up - it requires, as Eddie so often puts it, the 'F'-word - effort. So much easier to walk into the garage and find those old loafers than it is to do all that crouching and knot-tying..."
I go into the garage - it's a mess - the attic remont didn't get finished before Xmas and the builders' stuff is still there, the loafers must me here among all these tools and bags of rubbish and planks of wood and dismantled radiators... Looking hither and yon I get distracted. "Ah! I've been looking for this!" Or "What's this still lagging doing here - they should have dumped this on the skip before it went" and so on...
Really, what I needed was to have done that crouching, laced up those lace-up gardening shoes, and gone outside in them to face the molehills. Two and half utterly wasted minutes - and why? Because I was subconsciously trying to work around a little bit of effort.
New Year and a time to resolve to improve. It's a good time to do this, not so much cutting things out as working out new solutions to old bad habits, in particular to avoid wasting time, to maximise the effectiveness of one's actions. It's a good time to revisit four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix which I guess most of my readers will know, but which all too often we forget about in our day-to-day lives...
| The Eisenhower Matrix | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| URGENT AND IMPORTANT | URGENT BUT NOT IMPORTANT | |||
| NOT URGENT, YET STILL IMPORTANT | NEITHER URGENT NOR IMPORTANT | |||
How often do we spend our lives wasting time on things we subconsciously know to be neither urgent nor important, as we set aside things that are urgent and important... because... because...
Well, why? Fear? Fear of doing things we're not comfortable with - or outright laziness? Are the two connected? The mother and father of Procrastination? What do you think?
Something to work on this year. Something to work on every year. Life should be one long process of learning and improvement, something one should never give up on. Consciously, continuously learning, reaching conclusions, putting them into action, checking to see how you're getting on, then moving on up again.
This time last year:
A Year of Round Anniversaries
This time two years ago:
Walking on frozen water
This time three years ago:
Fireworks herald 2015 in Jeziorki
This time four years ago
Jeziorki welcomes 2014
This time five years ago:
LOT's second Dreamliner over Jeziorki
This time six years ago:
New Year's coal train
This time nine years ago:
Welcome to 2009!
This time ten years ago:
Happy 2008!
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2 comments:
Our moles returned as well - after a 1 year hiatus
My patented treatment works well. This is the first return after a six year gap. And they stuck to a line to the north-east of where they'd got to last time round - they daren't go any further in. Anyway, another 31 litres of my urine did the job :-)
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