What are your major causes of stress? Mine are deadlines, broken software or hardware, bad customer service reps, and low blood sugar.

How about you?

(Please note that by posting a comment, you agree it can be used in the book. If you want specific attribution, please mention it in your comment.)

I’ve been thinking of linking my Blackberry to my email so deleting a message on the Blackberry once I’ve handled it will also delete it from my online inbox. That will likely result in me trashing about 97% of what I currently save.

But is that a bad thing? I recently purged my Gmail account of several gigabytes of old email and haven’t noticed any particular problems from that. And phone calls and voicemail get purged regularly and I don’t miss them. What do you think?

What do you do with email you’ve read?

• Never help out a colleague too much, because they’re just competition for the top spot.
• Always help your colleagues, because when we work together, we accomplish more than when we work alone.
• Our competitors will never be able to produce a product as good as ours.
• Management is stupid and doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I will be using these in my book. By submitting them here, you give me permission to do so. I would like to list everyone who contributes in the acknowledgements section. If you wish to be acknowledged, just sign your comment with your desired name (first name, full name, etc.).

Thanks!

I may use your answer in the Get-it-Done Guy episode. Please leave your name as you want me to read it if you would like me to give you credit in the episode. Thanks!

So…

How do you remember names and faces?

Will these work in the same book? Would someone looking for “happiness and success” tips be that interested in the “file folders” category? And vice versa…

Shelle Rose Charvet points out that most people already know the method. Now, when they hear positive feedback, they simply bypass it and wait fo the shoe to drop (then they ignore the final piece of positive feedback, which is obviously just there to soften the negative feedback). She advocates giving feedback in a way that avoids direct negative statements yet still accomplishes the goal, to stimulate behavior change. You can read Shelle Rose Charvet’s “The Feedback Sandwich is Out to Lunch.”

What do you think? If I were to include a “giving feedback” method in the Get-it-Done Guy book, which do you think would be best to include?

The problem happens when I take on a new project, here’s a delay in the project (e.g. I’m waiting for someone to get me a document), and during that delay, I start something new. Once the delay is over, I now have two projects on my plate that together take up more time than I have.

So I’m in the midst of re-examining how I use my time and space. When you are examining your own life, how do you decide what to drop and what to keep? If everything on your plate is related to one of your goals, how do you choose which stays and which goes?

Do you have some priorities that are constant (“Family always comes first”)? Do your priorities change? Why and how?

I’ve noticed that each year, I choose new constant priorities. For example, this year health is a huge theme. My workouts and health commitments have consciously dominated everything. But other priorities change according to my projects.

Insights appreciated!

Work Less and Do More is shaping up to be a book of a great many chapters or sections, each of which has a concrete tip. As I write, I’m having doubts about the humor-to-content ratio. In the podcast, about half the content is humor and attitude, and half is content. In a book, this seems too high on the humor for me.

Do people want more humor or more time spent on the content? Content seems pretty dry to me, but then, humor can feel overbearing if it’s hundreds of pages.

What do you think? You’re (hopefully) going to be my readers. Your thoughts appreciated!

I’m in the final stages of developing a product that helps people combat e-mail overload. Could you help me choose a title? The subtitle will describe the product; the main title should be catchy, PR-worthy, etc.

But even so, my list has far more items on it than I can do in any given day. So each day, I only accomplish part of what’s on the list. Usually, my intention is set by looking over the list and choosing 3-5 “must do” things. My actual accomplishments, however, end up being a complicated mix of those “must do” things (sometimes none of them, sigh) and dealing with stuff that pops up during the day.

For example, the other day, I was planning on recording a CD product in a marathon 8-hour recording session. This was my first such session and I simply didn’t know that my voice and energy levels are only good for around 2-3 hours. So now, the recording is spilling into additional days, displacing other stuff I’d planned to do.

How do you decide what to do each day? Does your method work for you?

What are your big e-mail challenges? What parts of dealing with e-mail would you like to streamline?

We say things like this all the time without thinking about it. Recently, my bedframe broke and I needed the mattress moved. Despite my newly developed manly-man muscles (thank you, Trainer Tyler), decades of sitting zombie-like in front of a flickering computer monitor has left me unable to do stuff like, say, lift things in the real world.

My cleaning lady and her husband offered to move the mattress. As I was watching them haul it between rooms, it looked like awful hard work. I sipped my martini and pondered the thought. Hard work.
Hard work. To an outside observer, I sit in one place all day and think. Sometimes, it feels like very hard work. My cleaning lady hauls mattresses, which I’m almost physically incapable of doing. Does she experience that as hard work?

The more I thought, the more a pattern became clear as to what makes something “hard work” for me. I don’t want to give it away just yet, until I’ve heard your thoughts.

Please tell me: what are some things you consider hard work, and what is it about them that makes them “hard work” rather than just “work” or “random activities” or “play”

I was complaining. Then I noticed that somethings, I complain about. Others, I don’t. What’s the difference?

For me, complaints seem to be statements of where in my life doesn’t seem under my control. Even when complaining about myself (“Darn these love handles”), I only complain about the things I have trouble with and perceive as being something I can’t change.

Is this universal? Are your complaints expressions of control frustration?

What are your favorite complaints? Is there any pattern about what we all consider under/not under our control?

When you don’t get to something on your “to do” list on a given day, how long does it stick around before you finally do it or drop it from the list? What kind of things chronically stick around?

For me, it’s: people to call who I haven’t already talked to recently; books to read; low-priority changes to my web site to make; important-but-not-urgent household things (“find that leak in the roof”); financial stuff (“balance checkbook” “pay bills”).

• Where in your life do you find more choices are good?
• Where would life be easier if you had less choice?

Question for my friends out there who have messy desks:

What do the piles consist of? I’ll bet you have whole categories of stuff that never end up in piles (men: think back to your teenage years, when you had certain, er, magazines that never got accidentally left out in the room). But what kind of stuff actually does end up in piles?

What stops you from getting the pile clean? For example, some people won’t throw away books, but don’t know what else to do with them. In my case, seven evil gnomes live beneath my desk and threaten to lock me in a tower if I actually clean up the pile.

Thanks!

• What problems are unique to college students?
• What problems do college students have that the rest of us have, but that require different solutions?

What is the relationship for you between achievement and recognition? How do you know you’ve achieved something? What forms of recognition do you want for your achievements (from self? others?)? Is there a relationship? If you achieve something alone in a forest and no one ever knows about it, is it still an achievment? Are you motivated by achieving, by recognition, a combination, or something else altogether (e.g. power or relationship or family or …)?

This question isn’t for the book, but for my own curiosity. I was talking with several people from European countries this February. We compared tax rates, and when you add in state, federal, FICA, and sales taxes, I pay as much of each dollar in taxes as they do.

Among the things they get: national health insurance (or in some countries, national health care directly), guaranteed mortgage payments on their home made if they’re past retirement age so they know they’ll have a place to live, six to eight weeks a year of vacation, nanny care for new mothers, etc.

We don’t spend our tax dollars that way. We spend roughly 20% on military, 20% on interest payments on our national debt (increasing at record rates, by the way), and 20% on Medicare. Everything else (education, social programs) all squeezes into the remaining 40%. (See here for reference.)

Once we’re done paying our taxes, if we want any of the freedoms and choices that some other countries have, we must pay for them ourselves with after-tax dollars. (Security’s a fine example. 20% of tax dollars go to physical/military security, but not other forms of security like housing, food, or education/prep-for-future.)

In America, we’ve very successfully adopted the knee-jerk idea that “taxes are bad” so we never look at the other side of the equation: what our tax dollars actually provide.

So here’s the question: if we had social programs provided by or supervised by the government that provided things that gave you more time, choices, or freedoms, would you be willing to pay more in taxes? If so, which choices or freedoms would you want provided? If not, why not–are the choices/freedoms not important to you, are you already happy, etc.?

In my life, money hasn’t bought happiness. In fact, regardless of how much I’ve had, made, or lost, I’ve pretty much always felt insecure and panicked, thanks to some early experiences involving not really being able to afford food. Only in the last year have I really sorted through the issues enough that they seem to have let go.

While lack of money is stressful for me, past a certain point, more doesn’t make me happier. Other things take over as the most important. Fun, community, challenge, meaning, and contribution all seem more important to me just now.

How ’bout for you? Is you life happier because of money? Is acquiring money sufficient for happiness? Is it necessary?

I think on a personal level, there’s room for us to use data in our lives where we just don’t do it, yet life would be a lot better if we did.

Example #1, data about what’s going on in others’ heads: I “knew” Tom S hated me in high school. I never thought to ask him or find out, I just decided it, based on the way he treated me. One day we were assigned to work together on a project, I called his house, and his mother said, “Oh! You’re the boy he admires so much.” I was floored. Tom and I ended up becoming friends.

Example #2, retirement planning: after the March 2000 market crash, a friend was re-evaluating her retirement plans. Numerically, she could only meet her goals in the stock market by getting 15%+ returns for over 15 years. She thought it unlikely and began finding other ways to finance her retirement and diversified into other investments.

1. Is this a good topic for the book?
2. Do you have any examples of how you’ve used data to reach contrary or surprising conclusions?

One thing I’m sure of: none of you stopped to analyze the quality of your 2004 decision-making and explicitly change the criteria you used to make your bad decision. It may be 2008, but you’re about to use the same broken decision-making process in November and you’ll wonder why politics doesn’t change.

Political flaming aside, when you make a decision that turns out badly, do you explicitly learn from it? And if so, do you use an explicit “post mortem” process? And do you tend to learn about specifics of a situation (e.g. “I’m never voting for candidate Z again because they lie”), or do you actually change your decision-making process (e.g. “next time, I will look at voting records and read news articles on opposing web sites and supporting web sites before making my decision.”)?

For me, it can kick me into action. Once I’m in action, though, my immediate instinct is to do what makes the most sense to reach the goal.

But it seems to me that it isn’t failure we’re afraid of, it’s uncertainty. So I tried asking, “What would I do if I had to do something, but knew I would fail anyway?” (Eliminate the uncertainty, but make it a guarantee of failure rather than a guarantee of success.)

Much to my surprise, my approach became a game. It freed my thinking in a way that the other question did not, and I began coming up with very “out-of-the-box” ideas.

(This reminds me of the essay The Wisdom of No Escape, by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron.)

What’s your experience? Does the question “What would you do if you knew you would fail?” do anything for you?