Working On Me

Some of the best ideas we have come out of team brainstorming sessions, which are an increasingly familiar part of the workplace. But if you've every tried to have a brainstorm on a solo basis, you've probably been disappointed.

Group brainstorms work because of the challenge of generating ideas collaboratively. A new idea will emerge which has sparked off someone else's idea - it needed both people to be there to give birth to the idea. Then again, when everyone thinks they have run out of ideas, someone contributes one which opens a whole new cascade of related ideas. This seems to be a technique best suited to a group of people rather than an individual.

And yet there are ways for a lone person to use elements of the brainstorming technique effectively. The first twist is to set yourself an ideas quota. For instance, write at the top of a sheet of paper:

50 ways to increase my income

Challenge yourself to come up with the full fifty. Don't stop until you get there. Always set the number at about twice as many as you think you could reasonably manage.

The second technique is to revisit the list later, viewing it with fresh eyes and making new associations. If you can afford to wait this long, leave it a week or so. Your task this time is to increase the list by 50%. Use a differently-coloured pen so that the new ideas stand out.

Using these two twists together, you'll be able to undertake one-person brainstorms with something approaching the effectiveness of the team exercise.

I've written before about talking straight to someone's unconscious mind and about using the unconsious in getting past 'I don't know'.

Another useful ability is to plant a seed in someone's unconscious to make people react in a certain way to a certain future event. For instance, if I want to make sure my spouse enjoys a holiday, and will be able to put out of her mind day-to-day concerns and enjoy herself, I can say to her something like this:

“When that plane takes off, you’ll feel so relaxed, and you’ll be looking forward to a great week away.”

This will slip quickly from her conscious mind, although if she spends a while visualising that outcome, so much the better. Her unconscious, however, will consider this as an instruction for the future, and will work to bring about the circumstances described in reaction to the plane taking off. This will work in all sorts of ways, so long as you follow the basic formula of:

“When [event], you will feel [description]”

As we have seen before, the trick that pushes this into the unconconscious is to make the statement, then immediately ask a question.

Often, we are advised to face challenges and work through issues by writing about how we feel in a journal. I'd certainly advocate that as worthwhile, because once you've cleared the air and got those feelings down on paper, I find that they stop eating away at you. It can be as though you have pulled them from your mind and trapped them on the paper, and that's a great result.

However, there comes a time when enough is enough and when what's lacking is a little positivity. Just like you can smile yourself into a good mood, you can write your way into a positive attitude, or confidence, or relaxation. Simply write about some or all of these topics:

1. What am I grateful for?
2. What am I looking forward to?
3. If things go well for me, how will I feel next week/month/year?
4. What nice things do people say about me?
5. Who do I love and why?
6. What are my greatest achievements this year/this decade/in my life?

You will end the writing session smiling and feeling warm and confident, which could be enough to make a big difference to the outcomes of your day.

One of the toughest aspects of being managed is to work out what your boss wants to know about what you’re doing. Unfortunately, one of the toughest things about being a manager is working out what you want to know!

Whenever I have to report to someone who hasn’t yet worked out what they want to know, I tend to offer a weekly report under four headings:

1. Wins – what have I accomplished this week?
2. Issues – what have I run into that represents potential trouble?
3. Actions – what actions have I taken this week that have yet to yield results? These actions may relate to this week’s wins and issues, or to anticipated future wins and issues.
4. Plans – what am I planning to do next week and beyond?

These reports almost write themselves as the week progresses and stuff happens. I have never had a boss who didn’t appreciate them, and they’re particularly useful when you are being managed remotely.

As I've mentioned before, at http://www.grbps.com I maintain a website for the business I run with my friend, Graham. Over time, I've posted quite a few little mini articles there on popular software, featuring the kinds of little tricks that have really made a difference to me. They're all based on questions people have actually asked on web forums or face-to-face. Here is another of the best ones.

Q: We have Word documents that need a notary stamp with the date formatted as below:

This 30th day of January, 2004.

Is there a way within word to accomplish this automatically using the computer date? Perhaps using the Microsoft Equation? Assistance would be greatly appreciated. Current work around has this being accomplished by linking to a excel sheet formatted the way we need it.

A: There's a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on how to do that here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=212689

But there's another way to do this, which might better suit your needs. This one uses the CREATEDATE form field and doesn't require any VBA to work. I'm assuming you know how to enter a form field (CTRL+F to create the curly brackets, then type inbetween them.) Here is the structure:

This { CREATEDATE \@ "d" \*ordinal} day of { CREATEDATE \@ "MMMM"}, { CREATEDATE \@ "yyyy" }

Most of us these days have a scroll mouse. To see it do something very clever, open up either Word or Excel and hold down the CTRL key. With that key held down move the central scroll wheel on your mouse and see what happens.

Since I learned how to do this, I must have saved hours of clicking on the view controls.

And as a bonus, it will perform a similar function in most browsers with most websites, too.

This idea is inspired by an exchange in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall" (which started life as a much better short story by Phillip K Dick called "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale".) In the film, our hero, Douglas Quaid, visits the HQ of a company called Rekall Inc. At Rekall, they offer a service which implants false memories of a holiday. Rather than the expense and inconvenience of actually going to a place, you can simply remember the experience.

Doug meets Bob McClane there and explains he wants to have memories of a holiday on Mars implanted. Bob outlines a new optional extra:

Bob McClane: What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken?

Douglas Quaid: I give up.

Bob McClane: You! You're the same. No matter where you go, there you are. It's always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. I know it sounds wild. It is the latest thing in travel. We call it the Ego Trip.

Doug decides to be a secret agent on his holiday, and the film then gets rather weird. But the point is this: you can use a similar trick in your journal. You can write in the persona of a secret agent, or a visiting alien, or a TV reporter, or whatever your imagination can conceive.

When writing, think about what your persona would notice or find interesting, and write about that. Set yourself the task of staying in this persona in your journal for a week or two and just see what emerges. You will undoubtedly write about things that would ordinarily never have made it to your journal, and at the end of the 'Ego Trip' you can evaluate the exercise and decide what you'd like to keep writing about even after you drop the persona.