You can’t find opportunity if you go about with your eyes closed—or even just by looking straight ahead. You need to look around properly if you want to find good ideas.

There seems to be something about the way the human mind works that makes us see things in black and white. I don’t mean we see things without color—which is true only if you’re color blind—but that we often see things simply and don’t want to accept the complexity of things. There’s something to be said for keeping things simple. It can help us to get things done. But when it comes to finding and grasping opportunity, it can be a serious disadvantage.

The reason that human beings like to see things simply is that the human brain seems to seek patterns. Once it has found a pattern it makes the decision that the pattern explains how something works. Anything that doesn’t fit into the pattern is then disregarded. It’s the same with developing categories for things. We develop categories to sort things. After that anything that doesn’t fit into a category is disregarded or placed into a category of “miscellaneous” because it doesn’t “fit”.

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Making decisions is one of those things we can all struggle with at times. The trouble is we often don’t know what we’re looking for—and don’t have much to base the decision on. Here’s a way to make decisions as to which path to follow without getting a headache. 

Many of the decisions we make concern choosing which path to follow, or which process is best. What we usually try to do is think things through and then hope we can somehow make a decision by sheer brain power.

The problem with making decisions in this way is that we are making decisions—or trying to make them—without setting parameters for our decision making. What happens is that we see a huge amount of information and making the decision overwhelms us. We can’t think straight enough to make the decision. And the longer we take to make the decision, the more difficult the decision becomes. We end up wasting time in a fog (of indecision!), when time is our most precious resource.

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When we want to manage our time to achieve a goal we usually see it in terms of allocating blocks of time in order to move from A to B and then to C. This has its place in time management thinking, but it isn’t always true…

When we think of achieving a goal we often think of it in terms of building blocks. We have a goal to achieve, and in order to achieve the goal we have to do A, then B, then C etc. When all the blocks are in place, we have achieved the goal. You could think of it in terms of building a house. First you put down the foundations, and then build the walls and roof. And finally you put in the doors and windows, and maybe plant a few trees in the garden.

When all this is done, you can stand back and say you have achieved your goal. The house has been built, brick by brick.

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When we think of how to manage our time effectively we often think that we should try to get more done in the time available. This is missing one of the most simple and under-used time management skills

Human beings do like to complicate things. Even when the solution is apparent, many people will continue to do the opposite, even when they often repeat the solution to themselves every minute of the day.

What do I mean?

This…

We constantly find that we don’t have time to do everything we need to get done. “I don’t have the time…” is the sentence we repeat to ourselves almost like a mantra. In order to make time we try to organize our time more effectively, usually by doing things—or at least trying to do things—faster. Then when this approach fails we go back to looking at the list of things we need to do and banging our head against the wall as we try to squeeze more hours out of the day.

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Getting down to work means getting down to work—with the word “work” being the operative word. Here’s one of many elementary motivational strategies which show you how to get into the work quickly and start being productive without falling prey to window gazing.

One of the ways of getting more done is to jump into a project whenever you have some spare time and work on the project—even if you can do only a little. These short bursts of effort can make for substantial progress in a project and are an effective part of the time management arsenal. But what is often difficult—and this applies regardless of the time available—is actually getting “into” the work.

We know that once the work begins to flow, once we get into our stride, we can make a lot of progress. But just how do we get into our stride in the first place? We’ve all had the experience of sitting down to work in the morning, filled with good intentions, only to find ourselves staring at a blank sheet of paper for a few minutes… which stretches into another few minutes… and then after a bit of cursory doodling we find we’ve been at work for almost an hour and achieved nothing.

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