Menu

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Top Posts

Most Viewed

Archives

Categories

Tags

believes bias expectations Faith fear feelings groups guidelines happiness health heroes Hope improvement Kahlil Gibran knowledge law life link live love madmen morality next step now others ownership Pandora planing productivity rituals rules Seth Godin society statistics stories stress tasks today tradition trust under planing video will you Zeus

License

Creative Commons License
Godless Faith by Marco Neves is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

© 2012 BlogName - All rights reserved.

Firstyme WordPress Theme.
Designed by Charlie Asemota.

What should you do?

 2012/11/26 - Author: Marco Neves

Sometimes we look around lost without knowing what to do. To do lists sometime help, but not all the time. When we really feel lost long to do lists don’t help – short to do list lists may help, but long linst don’t.

At this moments there is only one thing you really can (and must) do. Stop for a bit and ask yourself: “What is the thing I would really like to be doing?”

Sometime this question may result in dangerous answers (vengeance, hate and obsession are dangerous advisers) but whenever the answer doesn’t result in harming yourself or other, go ahead and do it.

No Comments - Categories: Produtivity

Types of Tasks

 2012/11/22 - Author: Marco Neves

Almost everything you may need or want to do belong to one of the following categories:

  • Practical Issues
  • Enjoying life
  • Small projects
  • Big Projects

The Practical Issues are those things that we all need to do in order to keep our lives going. Paying bills, buying food, cooking, cleaning, replacing damaged cloths (and to some point buying new) are part of this category.

The tasks in this category should be done as soon as possible, so that we can free our time and our minds  for other, more interesting tasks.

Enjoying life is the main reason for everything else – and also the most difficult category to define – what I enjoy is not the same that you enjoy, even if we may enjoy some of the same things.

For me a small group of people who like to discuss the meaning of life, the universe and everything, good food, the internet (the usefulness of it and building it) and books are four of the most enjoyable things.

Some people I know enjoys bars, others football, some computer games, others board games, some like to paint, other love music, some people love cats, others prefer dogs – and most people belong to several groups and enjoy doing several different things.

But enjoyable tasks don’t exist only on your personal live – you can most likely also find things that you would like to do, tasks that you would enjoy in your workplace, in college, in whatever your main occupation may be, you may find tasks that you want to do, something that you feel that need to be improved.

Maybe that task is not in your to do list, most likely it is not in any to do list. But most of the time that doesn’t mean you can’t do it, and better yet, even have fun while doing it.

Small projects and Big projects are two different categories because they mean different levels of commitment, different amounts of time, different levels of faith and generate different levels of expectation that you may need to keep under control.

Projects, however, big or small, are mostly lists of tasks, that need to be completed to complete the projects. Most of the time projects are also the result of an idea that we expect will improve our live, the live of those around us or the society in general in some way.

The problem with projects is that if you are the kind of person who is always getting new ideas, you may end with dozens of projects you are working on, you can get to a point where you are always starting new projects and rarely finishing them – and that is one of the worst things to your faith.

Juggling with a lot of projects without ever finishing any of them means that you can get the small increment in self-confidence (faith in your self) that comes from progression, but you don’t get the amazing boost in your own faith that comes from finishing, from completion.

Also, more projects mean more options to choose from every time you want to start a task, and often more options to choose from result in more doubts about whether the chosen task was the best option or not – I’ll talk about this in a future post.

Also, more projects mean more work in parallel, which means more time to finish each project and that results in less live testing. Less testing mean that we don’t really know if our ideas work in the real world or only in our heads, only in our dreams. Means that we don’t know if it works for others as we expect it to work, or as it work for us.

Sometimes we fall out of love with some of the projects we used to work on. That happens more when we keep starting new projects without finishing the current ones, but it can happen anyway, even if we have just one project we work on. When that happen, instead of keeping that project on the list of things you may work on, kick it out, transfer it to your idea box , if you think you may someday want to get back to it – or that someone may want to pick it up.

The same goes for your new ideas. If you already have more than a couple of projects you are working on, make sure that you can add a new one before starting working on it. And if you think that you don’t have time to work on everything you already have in your hands, don’t add a new project to that list. Adding it to your idea box instead is probably a good idea.

If you really want to start this project before finishing one of the projects you are currently working on, pick one of those open projects and move it to your idea box.

Careful, however. If you keep starting new projects and moving started projects to your idea box, you will never finish any of them, and that get you in the same place as having a lot of open projects you don’t have time to work on.

But, even when you have a limited list of projects you are working on, how do you choose between them, how do you balance the things you do for fun with projects that you expect to help improve your life, projects you are expected to work on – if the time frame you are planing is your work time – with the tasks you want to do?

No Comments - Categories: Produtivity

Labels

 2012/11/20 - Author: Marco Neves

Our brain loves them and most of the time we go with it. Labels make it easier for our brain to make the most obnoxious choices without any evidence to support them but the labels and general bias related with those labels.

Categorizing everything is a mostly automatic process for our brain but if on one hand it allow us to decide faster with very little information, it also let us assume with very little evidence.

Everyone have bias, and when labeling others those bias are one of the first things that show up on the labels we use.

There are several problems with labeling people.

The first of those problems is assignment. We assign labels, most of the time, based on our perception of the other people, and perception doesn’t always match with reality. It rarely does, I would even say.

The second problem is that people are not static uni-functional tools/objects. People not only have multiple sides to their personalities, they also change with time as well as with their interactions with other people.

The third problem with labeling people is related with our bias. Our brain takes more attention to anything that confirms what we already believe in than to everything that denies it. And that means that the label we assign to people tend to stick, be very hard to remove or change.

And that also means that we tend to justify a lot more than we should with those labels. “joking around as always”, “do you always have to be so critic”, “stop being a pussy”…

But, the real question, I guess, is: Can we avoid labeling people and accept them with all they are? Can we at least avoid the single label?

Maybe it is too hard to you – as it is for everyone else – to not label everyone, but you can at least keep vigilant and when you understand that you did it, try to find other, more appropriate labels for that person – and with that make it a bit more difficult for your automatic brain to classify everything that person says or does as a consequence of that single label.

Can you do that?

1 Comment - Categories: Life

Spending time

 2012/11/08 - Author: Marco Neves

How often do you catch yourself just spending time, doing things that don’t need to be done and that don’t add anything new?

It’s no checking facebook or twitter, it’s refreshing and rechecking facebook and twitter again, after you checked it for 10 times already in the last 10 minutes.

It’s not seeing TV, it is staying in front of the TV even if everything that is being broadcasted doesn’t interest you, or you saw it already and are not really interested in viewing it again.

It’s not reading a book, it is looking at the book as if reading it while your mind travels trough time and space, to what was or was not, or to what can or can’t be.

But, the true is that there is nothing else you could be doing with your time, with your life – that’s you.

At least until you find the one rule that you think you can’t break and that is holding you – and you go and break it. At least until you find the one person that you need to get to and tell her/him to go pound sand. At least until you find the one thing that you would really love to do and you do it. At least until you met that one person that will light your eyes. At least until you…

It doesn’t matter. Your luck will change someday. It doesn’t matter that you don’t do anything to change your luck, it doesn’t matter that you don’t do anything to meet new people, it doesn’t matter that you don’t try to do anything.

Your luck will change someday… just because by you wish it does.

Do you really believe that crap? Do you want your life to change? Get you butt out of the couch and change it!

Your life is what you make of it. You can’t go to college? Go to the library! Don’t get a job? Start a business. Do have have someone who love you? Love the world, love Life!

Yes, I know, it is hard! So hard that is not worth trying! And that’s why you keep spending time on facebook, on twitter, on tv, instead of starting something useful, something you would like, something someone else would pay to have, to use.

Yes, I know, you’re tired, you’ll start it tomorrow, when you are less tired. I know you only have a little bit of time now, it’s not enough, you’ll start it later when you have more time.

You know what… go and read the power of now. It seem that you didn’t read it yet!

And when you are done with that, go and start something. NOW!

No Comments - Categories: Life

The Power of Now

 2012/11/05 - Author: Marco Neves

Now is the time, the only time you have.

You may think you are a busy person, and that you’ll have time later for the things you want to do, but you don’t.

Or you may think that is it not urgent, that you can do it later, but you can’t.

Later never come. Later will become further apart from you as time passes. You only have now. And now you will not be able to do everything you may want.

Now you can choose any single thing and do it.

Often enough we juggle with several tasks at once, and most of the time the only thing that results from it is that all those tasks continue keeping us busy longer  than they should,  far longer than they needed to.

Other times we keep doing meaningless tasks, keeping ourselves occupied to avoid getting started with what can really make a difference in our lives.

We know, deep down, what we should be doing, what needs to be done. But we don’t always want to face our fears, we don’t always want to find out if we can indeed be happier if we make that change, we are often afraid of what changes can come from completing a project, from doing the next step toward our dreams, in the direction of our goals.

We can create long lists of things that we would like to do, big and small projects that will make us rich, that will make us famous – and then keep getting small, meaningless tasks in front of those projects – always find good reasons to do something else.

We all have things in our lives that we feel are not perfect, things that we would like to change, places we would like to visit, people we would like to know, words we would like to say, kisses we want to give. And all of us keep saying ourselves that now is not the time, that later it will be better.

But Now is the time. The time we look at all of that and pick one thing – just one – on thing that will make us happier, that remove some pain from our lives, that will get us closer to some goal – and DO IT!

Now is the time to do it. And just for a moment we leave everything else behind. Just for a moment we forget everything else.

Now, not later, not after a coffe or right after smoking, or after checking the email or facebook.

Now! And if now the thing we want to do is get a coffee or check the email, we do it fully, we do it because we believe that it is the one thing that we want to do now, because it is the one thing that can make us a bit happier, because that is the one thing we want to do now!

Now is the time, the only time we have to do what we want, what needs to be done.

If we don’t do it now, we will never do it!

No Comments - Categories: Produtivity