Welcome to the end of the first week in January, the week where more New Year’s resolutions are broken than any other. According a study conducted in 2002, 25% of New Year’s resolutions are broken in the first week alone. The good news is that the very act of resolving to do something increases the likelihood of succes – that same study found that, after 6 months, those who set resolution were 10 times more likely to stick to their resolution than the non setters (46% versus 4%). That’s great news for many of my friends, who have publicly committed on their blogs to New Year’s resolution and goals. Over and over I see many of the same themes:
- New Year’s resolutions to get in shape
- New Year’s resolutions to eat better
- New Year’s resolutions to give up smoking
I have no doubt many of them will be successful. I’ve already discussed the importance of writing down goals, and absolutely believe that increases the likelihood of success. Having the support and social pressure from friends is another kick in the right direction. There’s one thing that has been missing from the discussions I’ve seen online however - how to balance these new resolutions with our prior commitments.
“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
- John of Salisbury
Today, anyone can buy an MP3 player, download some podcasts and transform their headphones into a mobile classroom. We can access discussions, explanations – and my favorite, solutions from the best minds of today and yesterday.
Rather than going through the process of trial and error ourselves, we can benefit from other people who have already made the mistakes and distilled those lessons into concise explanations.
What is metawork? Metawork, executed properly, is work done to make sure you can effectively do your work.
Sometimes we THINK we’re working, when really all we’re doing is preparing for work we intend to do someday – work we may never get around to doing. Learning better ways of doing different tasks, testing out different software or tools to do those tasks – but not doing those tasks themselves
Are you guilty of using metawork as an excuse to avoid real work?
That’s right, 12,853 Articles, Forum Topics & Blog Posts. At least approximately – that’s what I processed last week. And I do it all in less than 1 hour a day (mostly =) ). Rather than just blindly reading everything I come across though, I follow a process to make my time reading online as efficient as possible.
Read on as I discuss the issue and the process I have come up with to make my reading quick, and make the time spent efficient.
