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July 7, 2019 by joesgps Leave a Comment

Patience, More than a Virtue

Benjamin Franklin said: “He that can have patience, can have what he will.” Everyone understands that patience is important, and that becoming frustrated or stressed out does not solve any problems. The difficulty is actually mastering this all-important virtue. You may dismiss patience as something that is reserved for certain special people but, is not really relevant to you. It’s just another thing that you are not good at. Here’s where I tell you to have patience (really), and at least read on to the end of this post.

Patience starts with yourself. The most important object of your patience must be you. This comes as a surprise to many people. You may think about patience as relating to annoying situations like traffic delays or a long check-out line. Or the mention of patience may conjure up images of an annoying boss or co-worker. These are just secondary uses for patience. The primary use is to be patient with yourself.

There are many goals in your life that you have not achieved. This is true for everyone. Often, you have a goal and do not even do anything to help yourself attain it. When you think about the goal what may pop into your head are a bunch of excuses. You don’t have time, money, or the necessary information to actualize the goal etc. The reality is different. You can make the time, save the money and track down the required information. You are simply not being patient enough with yourself.

You might tell yourself that you have a goal to workout four to five days a week. Then the excuses start. You don’t have four or five times a week to workout. The gym membership is too expensive. You don’t know how to workout properly. If you really think about it, you will see that this is a patience problem. You can’t go from not working out at all to working out four to five days a week in one leap. You need to be a lot more patient with yourself. Do you have time for one workout a week (if you don’t, you should seriously re-examine your life and make some changes)? Start with going for a run for 20 minutes every weekend. No major time commitment, no gym membership, no techniques required.

The same process can be applied to almost every goal that you are not getting around to. You haven’t started saving for retirement. Why not? Well, you don’t have the time to set up an investment account. Besides, you don’t have enough money to put aside for a meaningful retirement plan. And, you don’t know the first thing about investment. Again, be patient with yourself. Start with setting up an online savings account (Ally Bank is a great option). Then set up an auto-transfer from your checking account of just $25 a month. This is an amount most of you won’t even notice. Once you have saved $200 (8 months), log in to the account and get excited about the fact that you have done it. You have saved money towards your retirement. Then buy a book (or borrow one from the library) on investing. The Smartest Investment Book You Will Ever Read is a good first choice (Amazon Link).

Being patient with yourself allows you to break up your larger goals into smaller more doable pieces. This will encourage you to take action and stop disparaging yourself for never accomplishing any of your goals.

Once, you develop a habit of being patient with yourself, patience with other will follow. Thinking about a traffic jam or a lengthy check-out line as simply a series of little steps that will need to be taken one at a time, allows you to apply your patience skills to these situations as well. Developing the patience to deal calmly with your annoying boss or co-worker may be somewhat harder, but it is also a series of small steps. Do not expect to be patient and calm with them immediately. Set a really low bar. Today I will consider being patient when my boss forgets about the report due tomorrow and gives me a different project to work on. You do not actually have to be patient, just consider being patient. Move up from there to remaining calm for 10 seconds. Use the skills of patience that you have established with yourself, and you will find that you can also have patience with others.

Go ahead, try to work on improving your patience with yourself. Tell me how if went. I love to hear from you.

Joe

June 24, 2019 by joesgps Leave a Comment

Choice Architecture

Often, you really want to do something, but you just can’t get yourself to take the first step. For example, you really want to wake up early in the morning and exercise, but you can’t get out of bed. Or you really want to work on a project, but you keep stalling and working on other less important things. How do you resolve this type of situation and just do what you really want to do?

The term “choice architecture” is developed fully in the excellent book Nudge (Amazon Link), by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. The term refers to the possibility of setting up choices so that they push you in a desirable direction. For example, when corporate 401k plans (a form of retirement savings plan that offers tax advantages in the United States) are setup so that the employee must opt-out of the plan, rather than opt-in to the plan, the participation rate increases dramatically. Similarly, when water bottles are placed closer to the checkout counter than soda, people make the healthier choice more often.

What does this have to do with you and your daily struggles? The answer will surprise you. You are the choice architect of your life. You can often setup your own life so that choosing the better choice is easier. You want to make it easier to get up and exercise in the morning. Do everything in your power to make that choice the easiest one. Keep the alarm clock just out of reach, so pressing the snooze button is harder than getting up. Sleep in your workout clothes, or at least have them right next to your bed. Have your sneakers lined up where you place your feet when getting out of bed. Make the choice to exercise the easy one, and you will increase your success rate dramatically.

What about pushing off that project? Here too you can make the project the choice of least resistance. Set up whatever you need to start on the project the night before. This is surprisingly easy, as you will face less resistance from the part of your brain that wants to keep pushing it off when you know you will not be working on this until tomorrow. Send an email to an assistant or a colleague that you would like to start working on the project first thing in the morning. And, close out of everything else that you are working on the night before. When you start your day the next morning, you will have a really hard time pushing off the task again. After all, everything is setup for you, your assistant or colleague is expecting you to work on this, and nothing else is readily available. The same approach can be used with lunch break; however, it is easier to make this work overnight as you will face less resistance the night before.

If you cannot structure your choice in a way that makes it easier, try incentives. You can, and should, incentivize yourself to make the choices that you really want to do, but just keep pushing off. Offer yourself a small reward (it could be that new drink in Starbucks you are waiting to try, or whatever would work for you) for getting up and exercising a certain number of times. Start with a small number (even 1 is okay) and then slowly increase the number as the choice becomes easier. The same can work for something you are pushing off at work. Offer yourself an incentive and watch the choice become a whole lot easier.

Go ahead, try to work on improving your daily choice architecture and start offering yourself incentives. Tell me how if went. I love to hear from you.

Joe

June 12, 2019 by joesgps Leave a Comment

Not in the Mood?

Do you ever get the feeling that what you are doing should be so easy, but you are just not in the mood? Or sometimes, you are in the mood for something but somehow everyone else is disinterested. What exactly causes moodiness, and how do you make things happen despite it, or even use it to your advantage?

One of the main causes of moodiness is the daily Temporal Affective Pattern (TAP). An affective pattern is a pattern of emotions or moods. All of us experience daily mental mood swings. For most people, the TAP is similar. The mornings, from two to six hours following awakening, are a period of steadily improving mood, followed by a slow decline for the next four hours, which is again followed by an improvement for the rest of the evening. This would equate to 9am to 1pm, then 1pm to 5pm and 5pm and on. Well, now that you know this, what should you do with this information?

If you are on a typical work day, like the one outlined above, you should try to use the TAP to determine your daily schedule. High focus tasks, like client meetings, complex data analytics or complex areas of programming should be scheduled into the first part of the day. The increasingly positive affect that exists in the morning is ideal for this type of activity. For later in the day, plan the more creative or more robotic parts of your agenda. Data entry, design work or repetitive programming are examples. These activities will dovetail better with your reduced emotional state and will allow your mood to be in sync with your actions.

One surprise you may have noted here is that creative work is done best in periods of lesser cognitive strength. This is a rather odd phenomenon that is known as the “inspiration paradox.” This is best understood with the following thought process. For optimal cognitive function in analytical tasks, you must reduce distraction and limit your focus to a narrow range of thoughts. This is exactly the opposite of what creativity looks like. To be artistic and creative requires a broader mind frame and a less narrow focus. Therefore, periods of time that are great for mentally demanding tasks are actually poor for artistic ones and visa versa.

As with all rules there are exceptions. Not everyone is a “morning person.” Some people start their daily TAP later than others. Roughly 20 to 25% of people are what you may refer to as “evening people.” For the evening person the daily TAP starts much later perhaps even as late as 3pm for some people. The mornings for these people are better for creative or insight tasks or for work that does not require intense focus. Often people we think of as creative types are merely “evening people.” For this reason, if you are a “morning person,” you may be in the mood for one thing, while someone around you who is on a different daily TAP may be in the mood for something completely different.

Knowing that certain times of day are better than others for specific types of tasks is invaluable. If you find yourself staring blankly at the screen at a certain time of day, you are not alone. Try to restructure your daily routines to the best of your ability so that the times of day fit with your daily TAP. You will find that it is easier to do the work and you will face less resistance.

If you find this topic to be of great interest, I would recommend the book “When” by Daniel H. Pink. It is a fun and entertaining read and contains many further applications of similar ideas with ways of determining your own daily TAP and ideal times for specific activities. You can find it here on Amazon.

Go ahead, try to work on improving your daily schedule to fit your mood. Tell me how if went. I love to hear from you.

Joe