When does “the man” own you?

I said in my first bit about my prioirites for deciding: “The second step or priority I use for making decisions is this: People who want to give me money take priority over everything else.” But I’ve been thinking about that.

It’s important to decide how much of your life you’ll give over to people who want to give you money. I’m wondering if you’ve been on the road for a three days and you get home at 8 pm, should “the man who wants to give you money” expect that you’ll work another couple hours on a report about the trip?

At what point does “the man” own you? At what point do you get to say, “No.”

I think that it could be a different answer for everybody. The new hire may be more inclined to toe the corporate line, to learn the corporate culture. A man with 30 years experience may be in a different position.

But if you know your decision about “the man,” and you know why you chose to construct it in that specific way, I’m thinking it will be harder to be taken advantage of without your consent.

Decision Making in three steps: Part 2

Priorities don’t have to be complicated.

Here’s a reminder of my number one priority… always: If there is blood, you must attend to it. Immediately. By the way, that doesn’t mean you have to get inappropriately “big.” It means attend to the problem. If a child fell off the swing and knocked a tooth loose, push it back in, apply ice, and call the dentist.

The second step or priority I use for making decisions is this: People who want to give me money take priority over everything else.

When my clients, or prospective clients, call nothing else matters. Except, remember, when step one applies. One could say that’s terribly mercenary of me. But, in fact, if you have a job, you go to work every day. You have to. If you don’t, the man won’t pay you. You could choose to take a day off. But you can’t do it randomly. You ask permission. You plan.

If something comes up, like blood, it’s an emergency. You call in, if you can. People bleeding are, or should be (in my opinion), more important than work.

But when the emergency is handled, you go back to work. After you take that kid with the loose tooth to the dentist, you go back to work.

People who want to give you money are the top priority.

Decision Making in Three Steps: Part 1

“All literature on ‘effective decision making’ can be reduced to: Look before you cross the street. The academic solution is sufficiently broad to analyze everything, and thus nothing.” So says Dale A. Duten in Quitting: Knowing when to leave… a job, a marriage, or any other unhappy spot you’re in (1980, Beaver Books Ltd., Canada.) It’s a great little book, out of print, I believe but often available at Amazon as a used book. I particularly love the mathematical formula he devised for knowing when you might be successful at quitting. I’m not talking about making the right choice, but at least making a choice that you won’t revisit over and over.

But for the actual priorities of choice, I have just three simple rules. I’ll cover them in the next couple of posts.

First I always ask, “Is there blood?” I’m talking real-red-coming-out-of-your-arm blood? Not that you think there might be blood. Neither that you imagine really bad things will happen.. but real blood.

Real blood flow must be stopped immediately. This is a first aide kind of problem. And all other activities must wait until the blood is stopped.

This is a reactive position. If you’re in a planning phase the question is better asked: “Will any babies die?” I saw this in the newspaper once. OK, not exactly that phrase but I know the woman was misquoted. The reporter wrote something like: No serious harm would be caused to small children. I know she really said no babies will die if we do this.

Of course, if actual babies will die, the decision should be obvious. If it’s not, that’s a whole different problem, in my opinion.

Go with your gut. Just decide

As an AD/HD coach, lots of my clients have trouble making decisions. So finding ways to make it easier has become pretty fascinating to me. I came across this article in News@Nature about a recent study done at the University of Amsterdam on people shopping for bigger ticket items.

Published online February 16, 2006, author Helen Pearson reports “ Studies say you should list the pros and cons, then sleep on it. … The best way to make a tough decision is to put your feet up and think about something else.”

The article goes on:

For the simple decisions, students made better choices when they thought consciously about the problem. But for the more complex choice, they did better after not thinking about it, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues report in Science1.

My teachers have been telling me since grade school days that I don’t use enough of my brain. It seems like a brain can only hold so much information on its front page, so to speak. So it’s comforting for me to know that the parts of my brain I’m not using right now are off doing something that I’ll be able to use later.

If you’d like to know more about what I know about making decisions, you can buy a recording of a teleclass I gave called Decision Making: Can’t You Just Make Up Your Mind? It’s part of a series of audio classes in the library at www.addclasses.com

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Thanks.

Dollar bills move disease?

dollarbillIn the Jan. 26, 2006 online issue of Discovery News, the article Dollars Reveal How Flu Could Spread outlined a pretty interesting fact about the spread of this year’s dreaded Avian Flu.

Flu pandemics generally spread slowly in the past. But now people travel farther and more often. So it made sense this year to fear that the Avian Flu might spread around the globe seemingly in an instant.

But that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

Here’s what some German physicists are suggesting based on what they learned from the Where’s George website’s tracking of the movement of U.S. dollars.

They found that the banknotes mainly dispersed in a series of random steps over small distances, with occasional long hops, and there were long waiting times between displacements.

What emerges to replace the one-size-fits-all model is the belief that human movement, despite all its apparent randomness, can be mathematically predictable if important local parameters are factored in.

I love it when math is the answer… or at least part of it. And it is nice to be reminded that everything bad in the world won’t blow up tomorrow!

The study appears in Nature, the British weekly science journal.