Even the most productive workers are vulnerable to time sucks when certain triggers interrupt their day. One of the most popular of these triggers is the Internet, and social media sites, e-mail and blogs become addicting fast. But the key to maximizing the time you spend at work is to learn how to defend yourself against those traps and use the Internet in a more constructive way. First you’ll need to identify the websites that tempt you the most every day. By becoming more disciplined, you’ll be able to balance out the distractions along with your list of things you need to finish up before heading home. Keep reading for some popular ways that the Internet sabotages your workday, and what you can do to defend yourself.
•    Social media sites: Now that social media sites are for business networking as well as connecting with friends, they’re not always blocked on work computers and may even be encouraged. But logging on can also result in hours of procrastination as you click through pictures and update your own profile. To strike a balance, limit yourself to visiting only one social media site while you’re at work, and make sure it’s an account that you use for professional networking only. Set a timer or only log on during lunch to keep your Internet use to a minimum.
•    E-mail: Set up a separate work account than your personal account for organization’s sake and to keep yourself focused on work. Don’t subscribe to any shopping alerts or RSS feeds on your work account, either. If you’re still addicted to checking for new messages every few minutes, close your e-mail and only check it every hour or half hour. Many e-mail servers allow you to set up alerts whenever you receive an e-mail from a specified person, so you can still stick to your schedule and not have to worry about missing something important.
•    Blogs and websites: We all have our list of daily must-reads, from celebrity gossip sites to techie blogs. If you can, check these sites from your BlackBerry or iPhone on your way to work or during lunch. Consider them extra reading material. You wouldn’t open up your copy of your favorite John Grisham instead of prepping for a meeting, would you? Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s not separating you from what you should be doing.

*This post was contributed by Megan Jones, who writes about the online college degree. She welcomes your feedback at Meg.Jones0310 at gmail.com

This is a short note about something I read in the dictionary (of all places).  I have been fascinated for a while about intentions.  In particular the motives we have that drive us to take actions.  I looked it up in the dictionary just before and it said a intention was something ‘designed’ or made for a certain purpose:

something that someone plans or intends to do; an aim or purpose

I think the core meaning in the word here is lost in Chambers dictionary. The main thing that bothers me about ‘intent’ is that it sounds like a ‘design’ or something that was made as a fit to a purpose.  To me, an intent is more fluid and therefore inherently more complex.  That is, when I intend to do something I am not completely sure of my purpose.  I may understand an element of it, and have clues as to my intent, but until I take action I am not sure or cannot know what my intent was.   My intentions often become obvious to me after I act. I will often say nasty things to people, then my intent was clear, I wanted to hurt that person (don’t get me wrong I am not Gordon Ramsey!).

Other times you act and the very actions you take reveal what your intention is… it’s not always a matter of pre-defined purpose or action.   So what does this actually mean? I think, it means we won’t always know what we think, until the stuff of life finds you out.  Ok, so this is me ranting… I write obscure fringe papers for a living… what can I say!

This past semester I added a new reading to a course I designed called information policy and governance about how policy makers have problems with ‘nesting’.  In short the idea of nesting refers to how we make a big decision then allows every decision from that point forward to made using the same way of thinking.   An example is thinking about a major change in your life.  Do you take the plunge or stay on track?  If you nested… you would make the change look like a change but in reality you would be keeping the same old pattern moving along.  That’s nesting.

There are times when we nest, that we are doing so for many (no doubt) mental reasons: security, comfort, shelter and whatever else you can think of that makes you nest.  Often you will hear sports stars talking of how the ‘knew’ it was time to go.  I think sometimes they actually mean they realise the signs of change and they acknowledge the time to move on, mind you if they have money to do it, it does make the decision somewhat easier doesn’t it?

What happens to nesters?

I have a theory about that.  Nesters may be the people that die with the music still in them.  The grumpy old people you see who complain all the time, or the middle aged who whinge and complain about the state of the life or the young who know somehow that something is wrong and can’t work out what.  I don’t know.  What I know is that when I nest, I get grumpy, I stall, my personal development becomes endless reasoning to think through a problem that isn’t properly structured or designed for me to solve.  In essence, whether in our policy-making or personal lives when we nest – our growth comes to a grinding halt.

How do we break from a nesting cycle?

I would think that when we ‘nest’ our development cycle is stuck on repeat.  However, it may not always be the case.  You may need a few years of no growth in order to recover from a long period of sustained growth or alternatively it may be a lifestyle choice.  In that sense, nesting isn’t always bad.  It can be dangerous in some cases though to remain stagnate.  Especially when the pressure and the drive to grow is showing itself.

A key skill is recognising the time to change is when you know it and don’t do it.  A strange feeling of cognitive dissonance waves over you (well it does for me)… you can sense it intuitively.  For me your inward emotions are saying, ‘it’s time’ but your head is full of fear and worry.  Here’s where courage and common sense meet.  A hard place, but one that you have to move on if you are committed to personal development.  So the answer?  You have to commit to change.  The pain of not changing versus the pain of changing?  Which pain do you choose… because doing nothing is still a choice.  In short, you need to follow it through when you can and rely of serendipity and faith to provide the rest.  Plans are a great place to start… but random categories of action is even better!

In closing the Sunday afternoon post, I would like to you to examine yourself.  Are you nested or nesting?  If you are then is it productive to do so?  Is it the right thing for you right now?

Here is an interesting post on how you can improve you life scientifically:

25 Scientifically Proven Ways to Make Yourself Smarter

Worth a look… hey at least for me… I need this!

Every now and again something catches your eye in the news and you are left with something to think about.  Here is one such article:

Redcliffe’s tent city.

If you are unsure where Redcliffe is in Australia (no not in Victoria) then check this website out:

Redcliffe near the beach

In this article we see people who are homeless living in tents near the beach.  What caught my attention was the sheer irony of this.  Here we have beaches and a seaside community with a collection of homeless people living by the beach.  Incredible isn’t it?  Now for once I am not inclined to rant (or ramble) but I will say as much as this: Where do we go when hard times fall on us?  I remember when I was studying the generosity of my relatives who cared for and looked after me.  It certainly makes you think.

Edward De Bono noted in Serious Creativity, that often we pay lip service to creativity but don’t actually do it.   What I have learned should come as no surprise to most, yet it’s what I have found to hinder most creative and liberating efforts to produce organisational learning and innovation, is politics.

Why Politics hinders creativity

Often solutions that should happen aren’t the ones that are implemented.  This is sometimes for reasons beyond our control.  However, it’s been my experience that some solutions that are creative challenge political arrangements.  I have heard it said this way, what is politically attainable and culturally feasible (nod to Checkland) doesn’t necessarily mean the best solution.  Often we dream up the best answers to problems and even in some cases we completely redesign things giving fantastic ideas.  These ideas are wonderful but workplace arrangements and politics hinder there uptake.  In essence an idea can be the ‘best’ answered in theory but through the reality of politics, it will not ever get off the ground.

Creativity isn’t unbounded

The lesson here is the creativity should be nurtured, I cite Google and 3M as examples (see also Semco, Virgin and other such places).   Often though, it isn’t nurtured, it’s squandered and crushed into Dilbert sized cubes.  In the rawest most artistic sense creativity is unbounded but only by itself.  When we apply it to a situation where other people are there to interpret it, it’s subject to their opinions and judgements.  Yet, if the artist is faced with a canvas or a page, they are truly unbounded.  Yet, when the art is released, it’s turn over to the political realities of social structures.  People engage with it, they interpret and reinterpret it and make their own judgements about it.

In essence you can’t predict how creativity will be received even if it seems it really obvious that it’s the best thing to do.  The fact is, there are a lot of areas in our society where we don’t do what is best.  For instance, in abandonded petrol station about a one kilometre from my house were 17 homeless children.  In this country, with our abundant welfare and support it shouldn’t happen but it does.  It’s very sad.

What’s creatively best may not be politically feasible and it may not be accepted socially… even if it’s a great concept.  These realities are not minor hindrances to creativity, they are the foundation of it.  Truly creative solutions must pay attention to things like culture and politics.  If they don’t they run the risk of not being redunant.

In saying all of this, sometimes there is a solution that should be taken up, but often isn’t because of politics.  People protect themselves from change sometimes because of the political structures they build around themselves.  They select the right deputy,  a certain person for a certain task and a cavelcade of yes men and women.  This is an enemy of creativity because it stands in it’s way and hinders it, to no positive end.   Yes, if you have read this far, I have contradicted myself and said that creative solutions need to consider politics and then how political structures hinder it.   Yet, as so often happens in real life, it is contradictory.   We want real change, we seek it because we know we need it, yet we fear it and build structures around ourselves to make sure we don’t change.  What ensues is usually disaster, and we need look no further than recent world events like global warming, financial crises and epidemics.

What can we do to be truly creative?

While we need to be sensitive to politics, social and cultural concerns and we should not ignore them,  on the other hand to be innovative and clever in our practices we need to question our assumptions and learning.  Doing so, offers us the unique opportunity to change.   I have to be cynical at this point and say most people I meet talk of change, but in reality return back to a revised version of the same thing over and over again.  True reframing, political restructure and redesign is rare because it means a complete shift of assumptions, a change in the frame of reference we used to assess things.  Why is this case?  Ask a psychologist, I have no idea!

It is clear to me that people what to be capable of change.  Yet, I am not certain of it.   I hope for it… but I doubt I will see real change in my life time.  There are times when I have seen changes, real creativity at work… yet 95% of the time we fail to change.  I have not given up hope to see real creativity in my life time and as a matter of fact I am committed to see it, wherever I may find it.  However, I suspect that real change and creativity escapes us time and time again.   I would welcome comments with your thoughts.

Obscurity, the curse of being a person who is isolated and without connection.  Did you know that you may only be six degrees of seperation away from someone of real influence?  Probably, BUT I bet you didn’t know that you can build a wall around yourself that makes you feel like you are the only one who knows something about something.  Well, I can say that through this blog I have learned that you aren’t the only that knows something about something.  Others do and chances are they may be equally as interested as you in finding that stuff out.

How do we box ourselves into obscurity?

The way I did it, was primarily through three ways.

Way # 1 – The language we use

A colleague pointed out to me the other day that I had reduced my potential on the academic market 400% (not his words mine) because I kept referring to the work I was doing as methodology rather than applicability.  He encouraged me to use more general terms accepted by the wider community and find more acceptable language to promote myself.  So instead of saying, “conceptual frame shifting” which is academic language I could use, “changing your perspective”.  Now my audience of interest is about 400 times wider than it was before.

Way # 2 – Having  a bad attitude

Another thing that I did which boxed me into obscurity was the idea that everyone didn’t have a clue… but me.  This is stupid.  You are not the only person who knows something about your area.  Chances are, you feel alone and rightly so in some cases… maybe even out of place.  However, you are the not the only one.  A paper I wrote recently was published in a journal that most people, or so I thought, didn’t really read.  After it was published I received several emails from people all over the world saying how the core idea of the paper was helpful to them.  They were from agricultural science, information systems, technical and management backgrounds to name just a few.  Now, I never thought I would ever get an email from anyone about anything I had written, let alone someone in agricultural science!  The people are out there, you just have to patient and look for them.  Most people are not going to hunt you down,  you have to find them.

Way #3 – Refusing to network

This one is particulary hard for me because I am not an out-going person.  I don’t like going to parties and I certainly don’t like swapping business cards!  That’s me.  However, if you want to work with interesting people you have to build bridges here.  It’s hard, but the world is not external to us, we made, co-create and develop it.  Without people there are no partnerships, no buildings, no work, no progress … only nature!  Now unless you worship the sun or don’t need a network to take your ideas and use them, then you need to find partners to work with.    This is hard but the fact of the matter is people support other people, there is no magic here, it’s a simple matter of maths!

There are many more things we do to box ourselves into obscurity.  However, these are the ones that I have used and more recently realised were attitudes that were hampering my development.  I have to be honest here and say more often than not, I will avoid people.  BUT I am learning and getting better at this, and I hope you are too.

A few years ago I wrote a post about what I was learning from integrating a Tiki Wiki into the curriculum of a course called Mobile Workforce Technologies.  Time has passed, wheels have churned and work was done.  GUESS WHAT!  A paper came from that experience that started on this very blog…

Read the paper here

The idea that came to me while we were using the wiki, shaped the final outcome here and I am very happy with this paper.  Ideas are not just little things we keep and then throw away.  They are things from which BIGGER THINGS can grow.  Like papers for example.  More than that though, ideas have a way of being carried sometimes way beyond what you intended and can reach bigger and better heights when you let them go.  This small victory is a case in point.

Ideas are important and we need to be constantly building, shaping and guiding the ideas we have.  We need to stretch boundaries, go beyond what we accept and create more about what is known, we need to build better things from the dust of our past failures.  We need to destroy creatively the past sometimes and make new things grow where they need to.  Standing still doesn’t work, observing doesn’t work… it’s action and the engagement of new ideas!  Get out there and build something awesome right now! DO IT!

I am attempting to do something similar to Alison who wrote a list of things she was interested in as an attempt to find focus.   At this point in time I find myself horrendously bored with my work, life and pretty much what I spend 99% of my time doing.   Perhaps, boredom is a larger symptom of a dissatisfaction with life itself… especially since I set out with four goals this year and none of them have been reached.   Yes, I am whining and so what.  You don’t like it … I apologise.   This is not a whine though, it’s a structuring activity, I am attempting to build a list of things that I am interested in.  So here it is… the master list… in glorious technicolour black and white:

A list that makes my previous list feel less adequate

1. The art of starting a business (and not failing!)
2. Internet and internet business
3. Human problem solving and how that works
4. Fiction writing
5. Creativity and design
6. Gaming
7. Technology (cool stuff not fixing or repairing computers or programming… I HATE THAT)
8. Family stuff and values
9. Existence and reality
10. Theology, the human spirit and matters of Faith
11. Music and guitar playing
12. Film (pimpslap!)
13. Aid work
14. Having fun

This is all I could think of right now!  Our lives are rich are they not?  However, in all the fluff I read there is something I have found to be of value. Recently, in our standard occupational health and safety text, I was led to a section on strategic planning. This sectionthat had some interesting information on how to meet objectives.  You have to formulate the steps as a “To” statement (that was my interpretation, upon reflection it probably didn’t say that!!!) To me I think I could summarise what I would want (i.e. the deep down desires) as the following “To” statements:

1. To start new and interesting business ventures
2. To write new and interesting fiction
3. To learn new and interesting things every single day
4. To somehow contribute to the spirituality of people in a positive way

Now comes the next part.  I need the “how”.  Dammit!  Oh well… at least I have begun my life structuring exercise.  I can’t leave it here, I need a how statement of some sort.  The “How” puts legs on the “To” statement. For example how would I learn new and interesting things every single day:

How: Make a conscious effort to seek new opportunities to learn interesting things every day by making time to learn something (basket weaving, French, eschatology, step aerobics or fly fishing for example),  for a small amount of time everyday.

Now this is a commitment.  I am committed!  Learning is a way of life for me and I love it.  But I only love it while it’s new.  Hence, why I want to start new and interesting businesses.  I hate the boredom of repetition found in work  routines and the mundane grind of administration… if I could I would outsource the ruddy lot of it!   In fact I probably do… let’s not talk about that, let’s talk about the how statement.  Now, I must work out the how as I possess more clarity that I previously thought I did when I started writing this thirty minutes ago.   I am ending this post now because I must meditate on the “how”!

I am a filmmaker… it’s official.  What follows is a commercial I made for a Doritos competition with the help of my wife (Cinematographer) and the sister-in-law (the ho who gets slapped).

I submitted this video to win $20,000 and it was made at home on a Macbook Pro using: iMovie HD, Boinx TV and Garageband and I used a Kodak V1073 ($300 HD digital camera).   It was the most fun I have had in a while (being a star and all ).  When I submitted it to Doritos, they raised a question about the violence.  Personally, I think it’s funny but I am fan of comic violence.  What do you think… too violent?  The word, “pimpslap” didn’t really help I don’t think…