Open Loops

One Way to Spot a Liar

When I began my first appointment as a school administrator, I quickly found that a large part of my job was dealing with disciplinary issues that arose during the day.  As a result, I dealt with students who tried to lie to get out of deserved consequences for inappropriate behavior.  In addition, I found that I also dealt with a small number of parents who, in their effort to protect their children, would also bend the truth in an effort to get them out of trouble.  Some parents truly believed their children, despite the mountain of evidence against them.  Their children truly resided within the parent’s personal blind spot.  Other parents actually out and out lied to me.

How to Remember Amazing Amounts of Information - Pt. 1: The Basics

Mnemonics have always fascinated me.  Finding ways to remember inhuman amounts of information always attracted my attention, as I saw ways to impress friends, improve my ability to remember information at work and simply do things that others thought impossible to do.  So over the next few weeks, I’ll share some interesting ways to remember things.  You’ll simply amaze yourself!

Jump Drives - Productivity on a Key Chain

New technologies — and I include hacks in this category — are always fertile ground for making one’s life more efficacious and efficient.  One of the hottest technologies is finally coming of age and is ripe for use in making one’s productivity soar.  That technology is the humble jump drive.

Also known as flash drives, these simple plastic devices are the natural replacements of floppy discs.  Affordable units are available from 64 MB units the size of a penny to 2 GB drives that fit neatly on a key chain.  As technology advances, memory capacity is growing at an astounding rate while prices are falling.  When first introduced, the problem for some operating systems was that they required a driver to be installed prior to use.  Even then some computers still refused to recognize them.  That has changed and most computers seem to accept them as an additional drive very easily.

At first glance, one will assume that the best use for these pocket drives is simple storage of files.  Indeed, for the last two years, I’ve done exactly that.  In fact, I have three years worth of documents related to my profession and still have over half of the memory space still available.  This ended the hassle of e-mailing myself documents to work on at home and then e-mailing them back to work.  Now I simply set up a “Briefcase” (a windows folder designed to carry copies of documents from one computer to another while keeping both sets updated) on my jump drive and work from that folder at home.  I open my folder and see the exact same set up that I have at work.  Every morning, I update my files with one click.

Project Charts Can Boost Productivity

Human beings are sentient.  We process information through our senses.  Although we use all of our senses, the majority of us process information primarily through our visual senses.  When we see things, we can understand them.  This is why memory experts advocate turning everything, including numbers, into visual items that we can picture in our mind.  Using techniques that help us visualize things helps us remember complex things quite easily.  We make sense of them more rapidly and understand them more deeply.

Post-It Possibilities

I’m presently preparing a presentation for a conference that will be held in May.  I’ve placed a large piece of chart paper on my wall and have begun attaching Post-It Notes, on which I’ve written points that I intend to make during my presentation.  Later, I’ll move and re-group these small points into larger groups that represent larger concepts.  As I wrote and re-grouped, I became more aware of how easy the Post-It Notes made this process.  I also began to think how indispensable these little colored pieces of paper have become to my productivity.  Here is a few ways that I’ve been using them:

• Planning points and sub-points in presentations
• Bookmarks
• Posting goals on my bathroom mirror so I’ll see them everyday
• Creating seating charts on clipboards
• Scheduling teachers and classes
• Masking off completed areas of paper forms before copying to create a new “master”
• Labeling desk areas for sorting stacks of paper (File, Action, Refer, Trash, etc.)
• Writing Hall Passes that stick to clothing
• Leaving notes on doors of parents whom I’ve missed during home visits
• Writing next actions on the paperwork that constitutes my current project so I don’t have to start all over or try to remember where I was.

These ubiquitous small yellow, blue, and pink papers have become essential in my daily professional life.  What “tool” has become essential in your professional life?

A Quick and Dirty Reading Strategy When Time is Short

A week ago, I was out of town, spending time with my mother, who was very ill.  After her passing, I returned to work after about five days away.  I was greeted by a stuffed mailbox, an overflowing in-box, 700+ emails, and numerous voicemail messages.  If you’re like me, you’ve got some strategies to help hack through the backlog and get your desktop back under control — or almost under control.  One task, however, seems to stifle some executives:  Catching up on reading submitted letters, reports, professional journals, manuscripts, etc.  “To Read” piles can become mountainous if one does not bulldoze periodically. 

I tend to shy away from advice that says to start a “To Read” folder for use on airplanes, trains, and other locations when one has enough down time to read a few items.  I find that I never have enough free time to plow through the darned things.  So the file grows to outrageous proportions, where it becomes a visible reminder that I’m not “getting things done” when it comes to my required business reading.  Instead, I use a simple, yet effective way to get through some of the professional reading that we all have to do.  It’s not elegant; It’s quick and dirty, but it gets the job done for me.

The Universal Packing List: One More Way to Clear Up Psychic RAM

Many of us love to travel.  Some of us have to travel, whether we love it or not.  In any case, one of the most frustrating things is to travel a substantial distance from home only to find that something, usually an important something, has been left behind.  Unfortunately, the first evening is spent, not getting acquainted with our host, setting up the conference room, or unwinding by having a nice dinner out, but cruising the aisles of the local ubiquitous Wal-Mart searching for items that we forgot to pack.  Although I love to travel, I invariably feel that I’ve cheated myself when this happens.

Even worse is, upon arriving back at home, finding that something has been left that the hotel.  Sometimes it is something cheap and simple, sometimes something expensive is left behind.  No one ever finds and turns in the left-behind item, naturally.

Tinkering With Your Circadian Rhythms Can Cause Weight Increases

Psychology Today: Sleep the Weight Off

Following up on a previous post about the importance of getting enough sleep to enhance effectiveness and productivity, Northwestern University researchers have found another reason why we should not slight ourselves out of those needed hours that give our bodies a chance to repair and prepare for the next day:

The sun goes up, the sun goes down, and the Earth goes round and round. It's been happening for all the days of our lives, not to mention those of our amoeba ancestors. That daily cycle is built into our very fiber, into our genetic code; we run on circadian rhythms that tell us when to rise, when to sleep and when to eat.
When Northwestern researchers recently fiddled with one of the circadian clock genes in test mice, conveniently known as CLOCK, the animals stayed up when they would normally sleep and snacked all the time. They also developed symptoms that could lead to diabetes, like insulin resistance and high blood sugar levels. Ultimately, the circadian cycle-confused rodents gained more weight on the very same diet as mice whose clocks ran straight.
The physical results are important, but so to is where researchers found the CLOCK gene. It was all over the place. Especially intriguing was its location in areas of the brain that control metabolism and appetite, and in cells that metabolize sugar.

Now, if you’re up late reading this — go to bed.  Now!

Unwritten Laws, Rules, and Observations

The last few posts were pretty heavy so here’s a fun one.  Every profession develops its own rules of thumb that everyone in that profession remembers, uses, applies, and heeds.  Here are a couple from my profession:

• Regarding Observing and Evaluating Teachers – If it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen.
• When doing informal observations during the school day – If a student can’t explain it, they didn’t learn it.

However, there are unwritten laws that observant people have noted in everyday life.

In Case of Emergency

A brief trip out of state to take my sons to a hospital to shadow cardiologists (both are planning to be physicians) kept me from posting yesterday.  I returned a few minutes ago to find an excellent post about a great idea that  everyone should have thought about.

With my sister, her son-in-law, and several cousins in the medical profession, they often run into the problem of how to reach the loved ones who are injured to the point that they cannot speak for themselves at the moment.  The answer comes from a paramedic who launched a nation-wide campaign to solve that problem.  The answer?  Putting the emergency contact person's name in your cell phone address book under the name of "ICE" (In Case of Emergency).  Simple, easy, common-sense.  Why has this not been thought of before?  Multiple contacts can be handled by appending a number to the acronym (ICE1, ICE2, ICE3...).  Emergency personnel will be able to find who you want contacted in an emergency.

Thank you, Bob Brotchie!  I'm doing this tonight.

Source

• Moleskinerie
• Via Lifehacker

Additional Reading