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Posts from the ‘Workshop’ Category

Feb 6

Week Two: Tidy Trials

Week Two dawns with you having a full file folder or a notebook of completed room evaluations, right? Perhaps. But if you didn’t quite finish all the rooms, of course, you want to do that. If you only have one room to attend to, week two may very well be day two. The point is to have worked through on paper what each room needs, or could have done to it. Here’s what you will have if you actually do all the work:

  • General information about the room is permanently recorded for future reference for those big improvement projects (new window treatments, painting, etc.). Accrued benefit.
  • The detailed list, broken down by how often the job should be done, for everything you can think of to keep the room spit spot. Pre-planning. Back Planning. Profitable inefficiencies. 
  • Several quick fix ideas that will improve something about the room or its function, as well as long-term ideas to improve the room. Evaluations. Attend.
  • A quick routine plan to pull the room into order in a limited amount of time. Attend and Automate. Dovetailing.

That’s where we start in week two, so if that didn’t get done last week, do it before “week two” starts!

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Jan 6

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Seeding the Brainstorming Clouds

If brainstorming ideas don’t flow freely, you can try at least three things to help.

Think about responsibilities, desires, and priorities to generate ideas

First, remind yourself of responsibilities, desires or priorities that are linked to whatever you are brainstorming about. Right now, we’ve been trying to give ourselves time to think about personal areas we’d like to be more successful in. We could try seeding the clouds, then, by jotting down specific personal responsibilities, ambitions and priorities you’d like to have more success with in your personal life. Read more

Jan 4

Concentration Cycles: A Statesman’s Example

Benjamin Franklin  also employed concentration cycles as part of his lifelong self-improvement program. According to his autobiography, he compiled his list of thirteen virtues when he was twenty, and his plan was to attend to each one in true cyclical fashion. He would concentrate on one quality for a week, then go on to the next. In this way, he would concentrate on each quality four times in any given year. Read more

Jan 3

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Cycles of Concentration: Brainstorming

Brainstorming, in any area, grants your mind an unfettered opportunity to frolic about in cloud bursts of ideas and lightning flashes of possibilities. Realize, some minds take to such outpourings better than others. A few—often those least used to being called upon for original, unscripted thinking—sit pensive, uncomfortable, and unproductive for so long, the inner being may almost convince itself that it inhabits a body with no mind of its own.

Rest assured, this is a categorical impossibility. Read more

Jan 2

Concentration Cycles: A President’s Example

“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”

—No. 110 from Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation

The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior are ascribed to George Washington, but not because he originated the list, which was already over 130 years old when his tutor assigned it to him as a penmanship assignment. Presumably, during those intervening 130 years, he was not the only school boy set to copying it by his tutor; surely others had longhanded the little statements as well.

What he did do was keep the list handy, making it part of his real life, rather than treating it like a school assignment. He did not pack it away in a bundle of forgotten school papers or throw it out once he received his mark. He reviewed it regularly, and made it part of his continued improvement as an adult. Read more

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