Frontiers Friday #15. Five Tips for Your Development: Busyness and Time.
Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development
Frontiers Friday #15 Dispatch: Busyness and Time.
This week's 5 tips are about our relationship with busyness and time.
From My Desk Archives:
Time Management vs. Attention Management (Fullcircles) and
What Burns You Out? (Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development).
Book Worm: Make Time
This book converts a seemingly mundane topic to become a very useful idea to reconsider on how we spend our time.
The one big idea I took away from this book is to have "daily highlights." This simply means, if everything else goes south, what is one thing that I want to make sure I do, that would make the day a time well spent? A walk by the beach, a chore that needs to be done, having coffee with a friend, etc?
I've had experiences with clients who like this daily highlights idea as well.
(There's a new app by the authors of the book that goes by the same name, Make Time. It's free, and very user friendly and useful.
Web-Read: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
I'm a big fan of Paul Graham's blog. This particular one is legendary. I've designed my schedule based on this, making a distinction between time for creating (i.e., maker) vs. managing.
My key grafs:“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.”
“I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.”
Listen: Thinking Allowed - Time
In this BBC podcast, they consider the extent to which the way we spend our time has changed over the last fifty years, as well as some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in.
My key grafs:- Americans are now the champions of longest work hours, beating Germans and Japanese. this is due to less time on paid holidays. - Daniel Hamermesh
- American immigrants work more than their locals. in France is the opposite.
Words Worth Contemplating: The Violence of Modern World by Thomas Merton
“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
Reflect
Time is the highest currency. Think about what it means for you to have time well spent.
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