I Never Procrastinate...

...on what I want to do now, like eat a piece of chocolate, read a good book, or wander around the internet.

Procrastination is the gap between intention and action: a voluntary, irrational, delay despite the expectation of a potential negative outcome. Usually we procrastinate on important tasks which move us toward our goals and improve our relationships.

Procrastination costs too much in many ways. It wastes the most time and creates the most stress. It causes us anything from mild discomfort to lost opportunities and grinding worry. It undermines our performance and disturbs our well-being. It often leaves us feeling guilty and frustrated.

According to Timothy Pychyl, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology at Carlton University, Ottawa, who has been researching procrastination since 1995, everyone procrastinates, but some of us definitely do it more than others.

In my case, for many years I believed that “I work better under pressure.” I believed this because, in my 20’s and 30’s, I was often able to rush at the last minute and still do a credible job - at least in my own eyes. But according to Pychyl’s research, procrastination results in less time to do a thorough job, so my performance was probably not as good as it could have been.

But a bigger problem arises out of believing you work better under pressure. You will inevitably get promoted to a position where you cannot get away with last minute scrambles. You are at your level of incompetence. At that point, you will have a lifetime habit you need to change quickly. This requires clear understanding and persistent effort.

It is bad enough that procrastination may be negatively affecting your performance at work, but what if it is also affecting your relationships with your spouse, your children, and other people you care about? What are the things you intended to do for someone else, but just didn’t do?

The stress of procrastinating and then trying to get too much done in too little time is bad enough, but some of us procrastinate in taking care of our health. We procrastinate on exercising regularly, shopping for and eating the right foods, and getting to bed on time. When you are on the hospital gurney, it is too late to wish you had developed healthy habits.

Here are some procrastination Do and Don’t suggestions that have helped me:

• DO start sooner than you think you need to.
• DO turn off all social media and email alerts.
• DON'T fall into “This will only take a minute” trap.
• DO block off time and space early in your day.
• DO protect your willpower. See Strengthen your Willpower on my blog.
• DO know you will “be in the mood” to do the work once you are well started.
• DON'T strive for perfection.
• DO the best you can with the time and energy you have now. If you get interrupted, ask, “Does this have to be done right now?” See Kelly Swanson’s article.
• DO try focus@will for music to help you concentrate.
• DO specify the what, the when, the where, and the how you will accomplish the task.
• DO forgive yourself for lost opportunities due to your procrastination.
• DO say, “Done is better than perfect.”
• DO be kind to yourself; expect two steps forward and one step back as you reduce your procrastination.

For additional inspiration, please check Tim Pychyl’s Procrastination Research Group Home page. Enjoy the video and the other tips.

photo by sean94110 / Flickr

Sculpt Your Brain

From my reading about brains and minds, I have become convinced that we can compensate for many weaknesses in our own brains by deliberately stimulating the weak part of the brain. For most of us, that is not a big deal until we start to notice that our brains are aging. Then it gets important pretty quickly. If you have any doubt about how much control you have over keeping your brain firing on all cylinders well into your 90’s, please read on.

We have Learning Disabilities in our family, so The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: How I Left My Learning Disability Behind and Other Stories of Cognitive Transformation by Barbara Arrowsmith-Young gave me hope.

Barbara’s book explains how she developed a brilliant auditory and visual memory in her struggle to compensate for several severe learning disabilities. By sheer dogged persistence, she graduated from high school, then university. Later she was accepted for graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and here her struggles continued.

To understand a research paper, she often had to read it twenty times. Everything involving reading, writing, and thinking took persistent repetition before she could derive any sense from it. In fact, she did not learn to tell time from clocks until she discovered just how to remediate her many deficits.

Barbara had tried the typical treatments for Learning Disabilities which involved 'compensation'. People who had difficulty reading were told to listen to audio tapes of the information. Those who were 'slow' writing, were given extra time in exams or were allowed to take exams orally. If they had trouble following an argument, they were taught to colour-code the key points. The problem with these compensation techniques, is that the person using them could get through certain academic challenges, but their deficits in reading, writing, or doing math did not change.

In fact, Barbara’s Master’s degree thesis on the results of her study of children with learning disabilities being treated with compensations at the OISE clinic showed that most were not really improving.

One day, a friend urged her to read some books by Aleksandr Luria, a Russian neurophysiologist who studied people with brain injuries. She read about Zazetsky, a soldier who had been wounded at the juncture of his parietal and occipital lobes and had trouble with grammar, logic, and reading clocks – just like Barbara did.

She then knew that she had deficits in a particular area of her brain, but she had no idea what to do about it.

At age 28 and still in graduate school, but getting more and more exhausted and depressed, she read a paper by Professor Mark Rosenzweig who had studied rats in stimulating and non-stimulating environments. He found that the rats in the stimulating environments had heavier brains, with more blood supply and more neurotransmitters than those in non-stimulating environments. He was one of the first scientists to show brain neuroplasticity, the possibility that stimulating certain nerve cells in the brain could lead to changes in the wiring of the brain.

Barbara designed a series of exercises for herself to stimulate her weakest function – the ability to relate symbols. One exercise involved reading hundreds of cards showing clock faces with different times on the front and the correct time on the back. The clock faces started out showing simple times with just two hands, and advanced to having second hands and even sixtieths-of-a-second hands. After weeks of daily drilling, she could not only read clocks faster than average, but she was able to grasp grammar, math, and logic. Gradually, she developed and drilled on other weaknesses for her spatial, kinesthetic, and visual disabilities, and brought them up to average level.

She then started designing exercises for children and adults who had various learning disabilities. Barbara’s Arrowsmith School in Toronto has been running for thirty years and has helped thousands of children and adults strengthen the various weaknesses in their brains.

After months, sometimes two or three years, of daily drilling under the direction of teachers trained by Barbara, these children and adults can return successfully to standard school or university programs. Over the years, Barbara and her team have developed exercises for the nineteen brain areas most commonly weakened in people with learning disabilities. There are now Arrowsmith programs in 35 schools across Canada and around the world. To learn more about these schools, please visit arrowsmithschool.org.

If you don’t want to take the time to read her book, then check into her website (barbaraarrowsmithyoung.com) and click on Articles, where there are many, many articles you will find very interesting. If you really want to understand the detail behind her breakthrough ability to help so many people with learning disabilities, read the article there called Building a Better Brain (.pdf) by Norman Doidge, MD.

Instead, consider the possibility that any man could, if he were so inclined,
be the sculptor of his own brain, and that even the least gifted may,
like the poorest land that has been well cultivated and fertilized,
produce an abundant harvest.

 - Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852–1934), Spanish neuroscientist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1906

Build and Condition Your Brain

If you were offered a pill that could do the following for your brain...

• Increase the growth of brain cells in your memory centre (hippocampus)
• Improve blood flow and nutrition to your whole brain
• Enhance your ability to learn and remember
• Improve your daily mood
• Delay the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer’s

...would you take the pill?

Most of us would say "yes". But you don’t have to take a pill to get these benefits. All you have to do is exercise regularly and you can have all of the advantages above and more. In fact, the more you exercise, the more advantages you can accumulate. The easiest way to get more power from your brain is to take part in aerobic exercise for 20 to 30 minutes preferably daily, but at least 3 times a week.

Aerobic exercise is where you move the big muscles in your legs, hips, and your arms, as when you walk briskly, run, or swim, or use one of the cardio machines at your gym. This movement increases your heart rate and the depth of your breathing. This gets more oxygen into your blood which fires up the recovery process in your muscles and your brain neurons. As Dr. John Ratey explains in his book Spark: The revolutionary science of exercise and the brain:

“It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.”

In fact, Dr. Ratey has been quoted as referring to one of these proteins as “Miracle-Gro for the brain”.

If you need some more motivation, take a look at the YouTube video, 23 and 1/2 Hours by Dr. Mike Evans.

An easy way to start an exercise program is to start counting the number of steps you walk per day. You will need a pedometer, or you might want to go high tech and get a fitbit, which will track steps, distance, calories burned and even stairs climbed.

Here is what my friend Jeannette Folin says about using a fitbit.

“Being self-employed, I always thought my time was best spent working on generating income, not exercising. But after using the fitbit to track my daily exercise, I quickly discovered that I was billing 10-15% more hours during the weeks when I got at least 45 minutes of exercise a day. And now I realize that the exercise was boosting my physical AND mental energy levels.” 

When you have some hard intellectual work to do or some important decisions to make, take 10 minutes first to climb the stairs in your building or take a brisk walk around the block. Then come back to your desk and reap the benefits of your re-charged brain for the next hour.

Disputing Your Irrational Thoughts

That *** makes me so mad!!

It feels as if ***'s behaviour instantaneously makes us angry, but really it is our own thinking that is making us that way. When we tell our subconscious, "*** should listen to me," when clearly *** is not listening to you, your subconscious will get very angry or anxious because it believes exactly what you're telling it.

But in your conscious mind, you know that other people don't often do what you think they should or shouldn't. It would be nice (but a little crazy) if everybody behaved exactly as you think they should.

In fact, you don't even behave as you think you should behave sometimes.

How often have you told yourself you should or shouldn’t do something, and then just ignored your own advice? It’s more rational to recognize that, although you would rather other people behave as you’d prefer, getting angry and frustrated about it is like getting angry with the weather. The following chart outlines popular Irrational Thoughts and the corresponding Rational Disputes that will give you more power.

You can use the chart below to reduce your stress about a situation that has caused you trouble in the past and that you anticipate may happen again.

Imagine you are in the middle of the situation again, for example – missing a deadline with your boss. Enter that as A, the Activating Event. Then, continue to imagine yourself in the middle of the situation, and record the different strong, unpleasant feelings under C, Consequences. Choose one of the strongest, most unpleasant feelings. Visualize yourself in the middle of the situation, feeling that feeling, and record the exact words you were probably saying to yourself at the time. For example,” My boss will be really angry with me.” Record your words under B. Then say to yourself, “If she is really angry with me, that means _____” and record the words that next come to mind. If _____, that means _____ - until you find yourself writing down an irrational thought (as described above). Then choose a Dispute that makes sense to you and record it under D, Dispute. Whenever you start getting uncomfortable about the issue, say the Dispute firmly to yourself as often as you need to until you feel strong enough to handle it differently.

The next time that situation arises, and you begin to feel those strong, uncomfortable feelings, say the Dispute to yourself several times and notice how your feelings change.

As you practice Rational Thinking, you will find that you can turn difficult situations into interesting challenges and even opportunities for growth. Listen to your thoughts, identify when they’re becoming irrational, and figure out a rational dispute.

photo by peretzp/Flickr

Am I at Risk for Alzheimer’s?

Joan and Shirley don’t know each other, but they’d enjoyed similar careers. Each was a well-respected accountant who became Chief Financial Officer of her organization. After years of demanding work, each retired about seven years ago.

Joan followed her passion for fly fishing and now has her own TV program. She’s having a ball.

Shirley watches TV all day. She needs constant care in a nursing home. Shirley has Alzheimer’s.

So why is Joan living the good life and Shirley doesn’t know what life she is living? There’s evidence that it might be, in part, because Joan took care of her brain and Shirley didn’t even realize she needed to.

In her forties, Joan noticed she was gaining weight and slowing down. About the same time, her older brother had a mild heart attack and took early retirement. That was enough for Joan. She installed a machine in her family room and exercised every morning. As she was developing an interest in fly fishing at the time, she started watching instructional videos while exercising. She used the same approach to learn Spanish as she prepared for fishing trips to Costa Rica and Argentina. Combining exercising with learning worked well for Joan.

Shirley also gained weight in her forties, but she was too busy to exercise. In her fifties, her doctor warned that her blood pressure was elevated and she should change her lifestyle. Shirley tried, but her job required regular travel and entertaining, so exercising and adjusting her diet was difficult. About five years before she retired, her new boss turned out to be a bully. Shirley stood up to him, but the stress took a toll and she developed full-blown high blood pressure.

When Joan had found herself in a particularly stressful period at work, she recruited a coach to help tackle her problems with less stress. At retirement, Joan started walking 30 minutes a day and weight lifting three times a week. She started thinking about the benefits of fly fishing. She decided to encourage more women, especially those recovering from cancer, to take up the sport. Gradually her interest built into a weekly TV program and a reputation as an expert.

Watch this YouTube video by Dr. Helena Popovic called "A Daughter’s Determination to Defeat Dementia". It will give you loads of valuable information that Shirley needed, but never received.

By the time Shirley retired, her doctor was encouraging her to lose 20 pounds and get her blood pressure under control. She tried for a while, and then decided it was time to see the world. Over the next two years, she visited Australia, Africa, and Europe. But it was difficult to exercise regularly and she gained another 10 pounds. One day in Italy, she tripped on cobblestones and broke an ankle. When she got home her ankle had to be operated on and the bone pinned. It took six months to heal. She kept meaning to exercise more. She even joined a gym. But during her convalescence she had gained more pounds and was uncomfortable about her appearance. She abandoned the gym.

In their early forties, Joan and Shirley had equal risk factors for Alzheimer’s. But, as they grew older, Shirley’s risk factors increased while Joan’s stayed level.

Resolve that during 2014, you will reduce your risk factors for Alzheimer’s by:

• Taking a brisk walk, swim, run, or stair climb every other day
• Reducing your risks of hypertension or diabetes, by reaching your goal weight
• Learning something that engages and challenges you weekly, if not daily

It was well over 2,000 years ago when China’s Yellow Emperor wrote,

"Maintaining order rather than correcting disorder is the ultimate principle of wisdom. To cure a disease after it has manifest is like digging a well when one feels thirsty, or forging a weapon when the war has already begun."

You might want to read Halina St. James’ article after she met Dr. Popovic at the Global Speakers Summit in Vancouver last December.

photo by kaotso/Flickr

Wired and Tired

We have two opposing forces or rhythms operating in our brains at all times. One is the Circadian Arousal System and the other is called the Homeostatic Sleep Process. Let’s call them the Awake cycle and the Sleep cycle. Certain hormones and various other chemicals are released in the brain to support the Awake cycle. After about 16 hours, other hormones and various chemicals are released by the brain and the Sleep cycle takes over. It is almost as if the two cycles are in competition with each other. But each wins the competition for a certain amount of time and then the other takes over. These two cycles continue throughout our lifetime and seem to work pretty well until something disrupts them, like travelling to a new time zone or using an electronic device right up to bedtime.

Electronic Devices Steal Sleep

There is growing evidence that when we play video games, or even just surf the internet for engaging information, we trigger the fight or flight stress response in our brains. If we do this just before falling asleep, it means that although we sleep, we don’t attain the same depth of normal sleep because our brain is still vigilant (the fight or flight response).

In addition, there are two more problems with using electronic devices just before bedtime. First, the screens are very bright. This bright light shining directly into our eyes shuts down the release of melatonin, one of the important chemicals for turning on our Sleep cycle. Second, anything electronic emits electromagnetic radiation (EMR). Internet use compounds the level of EMR. Like bright light, EMR disrupts melatonin release. Plus it can also enhance our fight or flight state.

According to Dr. Victoria L. Dunckley, M.D, “The Kempton West Study in Germany (2007) showed that residents exposed to a wireless cell phone transmitter (which emits high amounts of EMR) installed nearby, developed dramatic changes in their melatonin and serotonin (another brain chemical, related to feeling calm and having a sense of well-being) regulation. Interestingly, night time melatonin was reduced in the majority of the subjects, while daytime melatonin increased. Essentially, the melatonin release ‘flattened out’ and shifted to being released in the morning. This effectively reduced deep sleep and at the same time caused a feeling of exhaustion upon awakening in the study participants - the ‘wired and tired’ effect.”

Are you or your children waking in the morning with the following complaints?

• Feeling as if you have not slept well
• Dark circles under the eyes
• Poor memory, poor focus
• Hard to wake up in the morning
• Disorganized in the morning
• Irritability and meltdowns
• Difficulty with learning

You might try cutting out all interactive electronic devices, like cell phones, iPads, and e-readers after 7:00pm.

Don’t allow these devices in bedrooms. To stop using interactive electronic devices early in the evening will probably be a real challenge but, if doing so gives longer and more restful sleep, it will be worthwhile.

Remember, when you lack sleep, you’re only working at half power. Not enough sleep could lead to a momentary lack of attention causing an accident, leaving you with a brain injury for the rest of your life.

As William Shakespeare says:

“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,Chief nourisher in life’s feast."- Macbeth (2.2.46-51)

Don’t miss out on your precious sleep.

Are You Sabotaging Your Best Intentions?

“Self-Control is not a problem in the future, it is only a problem now.”

- Shlomo Benartzi

According to eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we each have two selves. There's the Experiencing Self, which lives life continuously and is aware of what is happening about 3 seconds at a time. And then there's the Remembering Self, which thinks it remembers most of what happens, but which actually remembers very little.

Kahneman believes the Remembering Self can (and often does) sabotage our best intentions. Kahneman's insights carry a lot of weight. He's a former Nobel Memorial Prize winner, one of Foreign Policy magazine's "top global thinkers", and the author of the best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Let's see how his theory works in practice. What do you remember about July and August? You experienced a lot in those two months: more than 1.6 million three-second intervals. But, if asked what you remember about the summer, what would you say? How long could you talk about your summer? Twenty or thirty minutes perhaps? That is not much compared with the 80,000 minutes you actually lived during July and August.

Although your mind only remembers a fraction of what you think about moment by moment, your Remembering Self makes almost all of your decisions. Here's where the sabotage comes in. When we make decisions, we don’t choose between experiences - we choose between our memories (or our stories) of those experiences.

How many times has your Remembering Self promised you that you will:

• Save more for your retirement
• Exercise more regularly
• Pay down your credit cards
• Eat healthier foods
• Stop procrastinating

And yet, when you actually experience the moments when you could put those promises into practice (your Experiencing Self), your Remembering Self sabotages the opportunity by remembering  a good reason why you can’t do it this minute.

But there's help at hand. Authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggest we can overcome the 'can't do it now' message if we give ourselves a gentle nudge, rather than a giant task.

Nudge Yourself and Improve Your Life

According to their new book, Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, you can achieve your goals more easily, and live more happily, if you get into the habit of giving yourself... a nudge. For example, if you would like to increase your retirement fund, arrange with your bank to transfer $25, $50,or $100 per week into an RRSP fund. Once the arrangement is made, you will hardly notice the deduction, but you will enjoy seeing your fund steadily increase.

Want to eat more healthily? Here's how the nudge strategy works. Instead of declaring you are going to lose 10 pounds (a giant task), give yourself a nudge: remove all sugary, fatty, and salty snacks from your environment and replace them with your favorite fruits and veggies. You can also explore stickk.com to choose other nudges which will help you achieve your goals.

So, when that self-sabotaging Remembering Self tells you can't pay your debts, or improve your diet, or get fitter - give yourself a nudge.

Scarcity: Why Having so Much Means so Little

How is it that we can be so smart in many ways, and yet some of us can't manage our time? How come others are smart in different ways, but still find themselves maxed out on their credit cards? A new book helps us understand why the poor stay poor, and the busy stay busy.

In their book, Scarcity, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir paint an alarming picture of how completely scarcity - whether money or time or some other asset - colonizes our minds and destabilizes our decision-making.

Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, and why students and busy executives mismanage their time.

Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus. Chronically busy people, suffering from a scarcity of time, demonstrate impaired abilities and make self-defeating choices, such as unproductive multi-tasking or neglecting family for work. Lonely people, suffering from a scarcity of social contact, become hyper-focused on their loneliness, prompting behaviours that render it worse.

Mullainathan and Shafir have written a book that provides a new way of understanding why the poor stay poor and the busy stay busy. And it reveals not only how scarcity leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.

Richard Thaler and UCLA Economist Shlomo Benartzi have worked together for years on finding the crucial steps to help people save for the future. You might enjoy Benartze’s TED talk “Saving for Tomorrow, Tomorrow.”

Wired for Easy Answers

Good decisions take time.

Daniel Kahneman demonstrates that we have two systems of thinking:

System 1 is what he calls 'thinking fast'. It represents intuition, and engages us three seconds at a time. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions, and feelings. It is also called the Experiencing Self.

System 2 is 'thinking slow'. It represents reason, self-control, and intelligence. It is also called the Remembering Self. But the Remembering Self only remembers a tiny fraction of what happened, although it thinks it remembers almost everything.

The Remembering Self is also reluctant to put much effort into thinking and will only do so when it has to. For example, if I ask you to tell me the answer to 2+2 you would give me the answer easily. But if I asked you to tell me the answer to 271 x 37 you would resist - unless you could reach for your calculator.

Of course, we are working with both 'selves' simultaneously. But both compete for our attention and the Experiencing Self often wins, even though the Remembering Self is more rational and cautious. The big problem for the Remembering Self is that it has to work harder to stay on task and quickly forgets most of what the Experiencing Self has been experiencing.

Watch Daniel Kahneman for more of an explanation.

When System 2 thinking gets tired, the brain goes with System 1. So when you have an important decision to make, you will get a better result if you allow time for careful, step-by-step thinking, and don’t let yourself be swayed by your fears and hopes of the moment. Ask critical friends or colleagues for their honest input and sleep on the decision for at least one night.

If you are a manager or a technical expert, you tend to be convinced very easily that you know best, that you have very good intuition about your particular field. But this depends on whether the domain you work in is inherently predictable and whether you have had sufficient experience to learn the regularities.

In today’s fast changing world, those conditions are very difficult to maintain. To keep your expertise up-to-date, you need to be able to listen without pre-judgment to many different resources, especially front line employees and customers.

This information about our Experiencing Self and Remembering Self ties in directly with the insights from my April newsletter on Willpower. The fact that our willpower can be easily depleted and then we are more subject to immediate temptations, sounds a lot like the collaboration/struggle between thinking fast and thinking slow.

It also explains why it is so difficult sometimes to concentrate, as discussed in my December 2012 newsletter.

Focusing our pre-frontal cortex on important tasks takes effort. When we do concentrate our attention, extra blood rich in oxygen and glucose flows to the relevant neurons, helping us concentrate even more.

However, our cave-dweller past can upset our plans. We are hard-wired to switch our attention to bright lights or colours, loud noise or movement, or even a moment of fear. It's one of our many survival mechanisms. In an office, it could be the ping of an email or a flashing light on your phone or a worrying thought. Once your attention has been distracted, it takes real effort to re-focus.

To teach our brains to focus more predictably, we need to set up conditions which reduce distractions.

originally published June 2013 Newsletter

Read Faster, Remember Longer: Technique

We see and we think very rapidly, much faster than we can talk.

Have you ever been in (or narrowly avoided) an accident? Do you remember how much thinking went on in only a few seconds? We think that fast all the time and our subconscious works even faster than our conscious thinking. When you’re driving down a multi-lane highway, changing lanes, talking to your passenger, assessing hazards and watching for cops in the rear-view mirror, your eyes and your brain work almost automatically to use your well-developed driving skills and keep you safely on the road.

Are you skilled at a hobby, or a sport, or at playing a musical instrument? Do you remember how slow and clumsy you were as a beginner? Yet now you can apply the skills rapidly and easily.

Boost Your Reading Speed and Comprehension

Just as you can drive rapidly, you have the brain and eyes that allow you to read really fast. Being able to read your work related material quickly with good concentration and retention is a skill you can improve dramatically.

Here are some tips to help you read more effectively.

1. Take a document you need to read this week. First scan the whole document quickly, asking yourself “Why am I reading this now?” The answer to that question is your purpose - the reason you need to read this document this week. You need to find certain key information, you need to refresh your knowledge of some other information, and you need to page rapidly through the document to the end to get a better sense of where the “good stuff” is. This overview helps focus your attention and improve your concentration.
2. Try sliding the forefinger of your preferred hand (or your cursor) under each line, reading as quickly as you can understand. Reading is getting information from print. Keep in mind the information you are looking for and read quickly to meet your purpose.
3. Try to finish a section or chapter in 5 minutes or less, then look back over what you read and talk to yourself about what you’ve learned. You might want to make a few brief notes.
4. Continue through the document this way, reminding yourself about your purpose and looking for the information you need. If you notice that your mind starts to wander at any point, speed up. Mind wandering indicates that you are reading more slowly than you can think and that is a waste of time and energy.
5. When you have found the information you need to meet your purpose, add to your notes.
6. Then review your understanding of what you have learned and look through the document once again to pick up any additional detail which will be helpful.

This is very similar to a study technique called SQ3R, which stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review, a study method introduced by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1964 book, Effective Study.

This technique causes you to work much more effectively with your brain when you’re reading. By surveying the document and asking yourself questions about it, you draw information from your long-term memory and prepare your brain to learn more.

Then you read with more engagement and concentration using your finger to keep you on track.

Next you recite to yourself what you've understood while looking back over the document to remind yourself of the various aspects of what you've learned. Then you review the questions you asked yourself as you surveyed the document and make sure you know the answers.

Even if you never take a speed reading course, this focused and concentrated reading will help you read faster and remember longer. If you time yourself and keep a record of your progress, you’ll see steady improvement. If you want to push your speed and comprehension even more, consider a speed reading course.

Strengthen your Willpower

The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up. That's the conclusion of Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney in their book Willpower - Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. They found willpower gives people the strength to persevere and to make good decisions - but willpower is easily depleted.

Things that deplete our willpower include difficult decisions, lots of decisions, lack of sleep, lack of food, disorganization, trying to change a habit, making other major changes, starting to exercise, chronic pain, and dieting. Once our willpower is depleted, we tend to make more mistakes, to find decisions harder to make, to be more irritable, and to eat, drink, and spend too much.

You can strengthen your willpower by making sure you are getting enough sleep, eating regularly - especially at breakfast time - and recognizing your supply of willpower is limited. To strengthen your willpower, you want to develop effective habits. Your brain loves routines and habits, but it hates changing them. So just developing new habits will deplete your willpower. But your strengthened willpower will pay off in the future.

To strengthen your willpower:

• DO have one clear annual goal.
• DO convert your annual goal into monthly goals.
• DO identify your top three To Do’s for each week.
• DO your top three To Do’s first.
• DO have a To Don’t list, which outlaws phrases like:
• “I’m too busy.”
• “I’m too tired.”
• “I deserve a cookie.”
• “I’ll do that later.”
• DO recognize that whatever your conscious mind says to your subconscious, your subconscious believes every word. Instead of saying “it’s too hard”, say “it’s hard, but it’s not too hard”. Instead of saying “I should/I must”, say “I would prefer to”.
• DO set up to avoid crises. For example, hitting the snooze button too often, procrastinating, and believing that last minute rushes work as well as a systematic planned approach.
• DO review your progress regularly and reward yourself for good progress.
• DO remind yourself that like any development, strengthening your willpower takes time and effort.
• DO resist poor decision making, by writing out your rationale for the decision.

To strengthen your willpower:

• DON’T work on important decisions when you are tired, hungry or angry.
• DON’T forget Murphy’s Laws when you’re planning.
• 1. Nothing is as simple as it seems.
• 2. Everything takes longer than you think.
• 3. If anything can go wrong, it will.
• DON’T set unrealistic deadlines.
• DON’T procrastinate on fun, allow specific time for it.

Use these do’s and don’ts to strengthen your willpower. You will decrease your stress and increase your enjoyment of life. Your enriched willpower will do more than just help you get through crises; it will help you avoid them.

In the Conclusion chapter of Baumeister and Tierney’s book, they say:

“Everyone appreciates the benefits of self-control - someday. But when, if ever, is that day ever going to arrive? If willpower is finite and temptations keep proliferating, how can there be a lasting revival of this virtue? 

We don’t minimize the obstacles, but we’re still bullish on the future of self-control, at both the personal and social level. Yes, temptations are getting more sophisticated, but so are the tools for resisting them. The benefits of willpower are appreciated more clearly than ever. You could sum up a large new body of research literature with the simple rule: The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.”

How to Remember Names

Here is a mnemonic - a memory technique - to help you remember names.

You need to pay attention to the sound of the name as the person is being introduced. Then interest yourself in the person and have the intention to remember. Find ways to repeat the name to yourself while you visualize how you’ll link something in that person’s face to his or her name. Then check that the link you’ve created will remind you of the name.

It’s usually more effective to work to learn both the first and last name of each person you’re meeting. Both names together are more unique than just a first name. There are many people called Jack in the world, but not so many called Jack Pease.

The mnemonic is HELLO:

H - Hear
Make sure you’ve heard the name clearly enough to repeat it correctly.

E - Explore
Repeat the name back to the person and ask whether you’re saying it correctly. Ask how it is spelled, where it is from, and so forth. Repeat the name silently and out loud as often as you can while you...

L - Look
Look carefully at the face for any feature to which you can mentally attach the name. Sometimes just visualizing the name written on the person’s forehead will work.

L - Link
Link a feature of the face to the sound of the name by creating a ridiculous mental picture. Use action, colour, humour, or 'sounds like'. (Keep your mental image to yourself; they might not appreciate it.)

O - Organize
Make sure your mental picture or link triggers the name in your mind when you look at their face. As soon as you get the opportunity, write down the name of the person you met and add a few notes so you will be able to recall the person's face later.

You will find that if you use the HELLO technique consistently when you’re meeting someone for the first time, your name remembering skill will improve. You will not always be able to think of a visual image that reminds you of the name, but just by focussing your attention on the person’s face and thinking about the sound of the name, you will improve your ability to remember.

Here are some examples of visual images linking someone’s face and name:

• Patricia Williams: Patricia sounds like patches, so I have patches on her face and she is writing her will using a yam.
• Michael Taylor: I use a white glove (Michael Jackson) on the top of his head, which also has an old-fashioned, cross-legged tailor sitting there sewing the glove.
• Zelia Chouinard: I imagine a big Z over her face and her hair is quite bushy and flat on top. Chouinard sounds like shoe-in-yard, so I stick a shoe in the yard of her hair.

Because so many people have difficulty remembering names, your effort will be much appreciated and the people you meet will tend to think you’re caring and intelligent. You will also be improving your ability to use your memory more effectively.