Ecclesiastes (Funeral Reading/Message)

My grandmother died last week and I had the honour of giving the following reading at her funeral.  The people attending were mostly non-churchgoing folk.  I wanted something that could provide some comfort but at the same time challenged people.  As always, I welcome your feedback.

This reading is from the book of Ecclesiastes which is wise king Solomon’s account of his search for meaning in life, and in death.

1:3-4 
(3) What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? (4) A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

2:4, 8, 21, 
(4) I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. (8) I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines (20) [but] I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, (21) because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it.

3:1-2, 12-13 
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: (2) a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; (12) I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; (13) also that everyone should eat and drin/>And Solomon’s second conclusion is that we will all die one day, and we are reminded of this in the death of all loves ones, so we need to ensure that we bear our own mortality in mind when we make decisions and go about our lives.

Pleasure - 2 Ways to Enjoy

There are two ways to enjoy something pleasurable. Or perhaps it is better to say that there are two ways that we can find pleasure in our experiences.
First is by overloading the senses with an increasing amount of pleasure. For example, as a chocolate lover, you might be driven to consume the richest and tastiest samples or to consume great quantities. If you seek pleasure through overloading the senses, then you will eventually (and quickly) come to the end of your ability to increase your pleasure. From a scientific point of view you have used up all of the chemicals in the chemical receptors of your taste buds. This will result in you experiencing little to no flavour despite having more of your treat.

Second is by taking the time to appreciate the details. For example, chocolate can also be enjoyed in small quantities but with even more pleasure than through overdosing. Noticing the precise balance of flavour, smells, texture, how it changes the way blood flows around your mouth and the rest of your body (you can feel a surge of blood and chemicals of pleasure as it melts in your mouth if you observe yourself carefully). These things might reveal that your "special" brand is not really as nice as you thought and that it really only had more of the addictive sugar/sweet to fool you into thinking it was tastier.

These two methods can apply to the repetition that is required for learning a new skill. As you notice more detail in what you are learning you will find a greater appreciation and joy in improving. Simply doing something more often, or louder, or harder, will not necessarily increase enjoyment. Noticing more details and refining will yield much greater results for your personal pleasure in the long run.

Taking this a step or two further, we can:

1. Notice how refined the most successful people are in the parts of their lives for which they are known. Some are known for excess, but these are not lasting successes. The longest lasting popular music, for example, is technically much better than the rest.
2. When trying to eat less, during a period of weight-loss or for maintaining, we can eat slowly to savour the tastes of our meals and thus eat less to feel fulfilled.
3. Consider the destructive excesses of our own lives and how they might have corrupted a form of pleasure which can be refined, e.g. food, alcohol, sexual addictions
4. Seek out friends who are not exceedingly excessive in their personality in order to preserve your energy levels

What are some of the ways that you can reduce, or have reduced, harmful excess in your life? Is there a time and a place for excess?

Tools and Tips for Improving Productivity (and Maintaining Sanity)

The following is from a workshop I will be giving on Monday. Feedback is welcome in the comments section. Original document can be viewed here.

Introduction

There are two groups into which I’ve placed each of these tools and tips.  The first group are straight forward and relatively direct in how they help (MOE, ERO, etc. friendly if you like).  The second group are perhaps a little more indirect but are much more useful in the long run.  An example of a directly useful tool would be Google Calendar where you can set up your calendar to email or “txt” your schedule to you each morning.  This has obvious benefits to your productivity.  I won’t spend much time focusing on these direct methods because they are self explanatory as to how they can help.

An example of an indirectly useful tip is to develop your creativity.  While it might seem obvious to some, as to how this helps productivity and reduces stress, it’s hard to justify activities that develop creativity while “on-the-clock”.  The reality is that this will produce much more beneficial effects to your productivity (and to your sanity) than learning how to use Google Calendar ever will.  But, just so that we can easily justify this workshop, the first list is our direct list and has some immediate benefits listed alongside.


Implementing New Ideas

This is the caution:
In beginning to incorporate new tools and tips to improve productivity, the chief danger is in trying to do too much and increasing stress levels so that productivity actually decreases!

A tool that can make an immediate difference is learning how to block your time.  Instead of completing tasks, set aside a period of time, e.g. from 11:45am to 12:15pm on Tuesday during your non-contact period, and work on the task without a mind to finishing it during this time.  

The pressure of having to complete the task can affect your ability to do the task in a number of ways.  If the task is “big” (or even seems “big” when it isn’t) people are prone to procrastinating.  We are more likely to put off a task if we perceive that there is not enough time to complete it in the time that we have.  Even if we decide to give it a try, our performance will be affected by our knowledge that we can’t do as good a job as we would like, or that we can’t finish it in time.  By blocking a period of time on your Google Calendar, without the expectation of finishing anything immediately, you can make a good start.

To survive the implementation of these tools and tips, I suggest finding 10 minutes per week to expose yourself to ideas like this and to try and incorporate them.  Set a timer.  The worst that could happen is that you waste 10 minutes of time frustrating yourself each week.  The best that can happen is that you change your life and enjoy your work more than ever before.

Even if you don’t think that blocking time is a tool that will work for you, the caution still stands: Gradual change, not trying to do it all at once, is the most sustainable.


Personal Development (A comment on Group Two ideas)

This is something that the bottom line often misses:  
“Personal development may be the most beneficial investment to productivity.”  

Dan Pink, author of ‘Drive - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’, has found in his research that a carrot and stick approach is a mistake and that:

“the secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.”

You can watch a video of Dan Pink talking about these concepts in more detail here.  




Group One - The Obvious stuff

Countdown Timer http://www.online-stopwatch.com/countdown-timer/ for blocking your time.

Gmail and other Google Applications - www.google.com (click on the “more” link at the top).  The main benefit to these apps is that they are online so that you can access them anywhere.  It’s a good idea to keep a copy of some of the more commonly used files from your Google Docs on a memory stick in case you can’t access the Internet.  Dating your files in the file name before uploading them to Google Docs can provide a quick and easy reference to the newest version if you modify offline and re-upload.  Google also stores multiple versions of the same name with a timestamp but it’s not as obvious.

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ “The best way to manage your tasks.  Never forget the milk (or anything else) again.”

http://www.evernote.com/ Sort of like scrap booking great ideas, pictures, websites, and any online content or offline content that you can transfer online using a portable device.  You then have access to this info via your Internet connected mobile device.  Don’t bother with notes on paper.  Scan them, take a photo of them and then recycle the paper.  Puts it all together in one place.

Google Reader reader.google.com (one of the more useful Google Apps) - put all of the blogs that you read in one place.  This enables you to get through a seriously huge quantity of material in a meaningful way.  Subscribe to education blogs, subject specific blogs, personal interest blogs (you never know when you will find a learning context that you can help your students relate to more easily).  Be brutal with your screening of articles by their titles, starring the ones that you think are worth reading for later viewing.  Block your time on this because you can spend days reading random goodness through Google Reader.

Suggested feeds for interesting reading using Google Reader:

• http://www.boingboing.net/
• http://www.techdirt.com/
• http://www.thersa.org/
• http://news.discovery.com/
• http://xkcd.com/

www.stumbleupon.com  Another innovation along the lines of Google Reader, except broader in scope.  You set up your preferences for topics and click the “stumble” button to go to a random web-page that is along the lines of your interests.  As you stumble through pages you can click the “like” or “dislike” button so that Stumbleupon better learns what you are looking for.  This has good entertainment purposes but, if you set up a “work” Stumbleupon account for research of ideas, you can keep your every day lessons fresh using the unlimited scope of the Internet.

Microsoft OneNote  - Similar to Evernote but with no Internet connection required, a little known tool included in Microsoft Office 2010.  You can link OneNote use to a smart board to easily keep your notes given during a lesson.  Notes can easily be exported in pdf format and uploaded to the Internet for students that are absent, overseas, in other teachers’ classes (to give them a different perspective from their own teacher perhaps) or for future use if you are sick the following year and need to give notes with no preparation.  One of the more powerful tools is that you can record audio (class discussion or teacher explanations) and directly embed this audio into the OneNote sheet with the notes.  This is a great way to contribute to department resources and to show evidence for appraisal, etc (Likewise with Google Docs and the various sharing features)

Email Tips:

• If you typically check your email more than 2 or 3 times through the day, you might like to consider blocking time for your email checking and replying.  Email can be a huge time waster if you keep going back to it too often.
• If you must have your email open, e.g. for video chat or instant messaging availability in Gmail, then learn to use the “priority inbox” to sort your email and don’t feel that you have to answer emails immediately.  Train yourself not to compulsively answer emails or mark them as read!
• If you run out of time, it’s okay to leave an email half written (but saved) in a draft form.  It is easy to develop the habit of putting pressure on ourselves to finish emails before heading off to a meeting or class.  This results in lower quality emails and being late which reduce our effectiveness.
• Take the day off from checking emails once in a while.  Some businesses even have email-free days.  And don’t be afraid to totally empty your inbox if it has months (or years) of emails to respond to.  Anything important and people will get back to you.  An inbox full of emails to respond to can be an enormous weight that can kick your procrastination into gear!
• Try not to check your emails until you have completed one of your major priorities for the day.  Otherwise your day can be totally hijacked by checking and replying to emails or by actioning.  Learning to prioritise will help with this, but having rules about when you check email can help you prioritise.

Only agree to meetings (or calls) with a clear agenda or end time otherwise you will sit through many a pointless meeting.

Related to the above: Learn how to stop people/students from rambling.  It’s good to give your time to others to show that you are listening, but if they ramble on you are wasting time that you could use to help many others.  The nature of our role (and our education system) is to work for many (too many?) so we have to be a little brutal with time-wasters sometimes.  If you run meetings, don’t let people ramble on - remember that any activity which holds everyone in one place has the potential to waste hours of time when multiplied by the number of people attending.

Don’t have unnecessary meetings and try to include only people with a direct vested interest in the content of the meeting.  If only 3 out of 10 people are involved in one agenda item that takes 30 minutes to discuss, that is 7x30=3.5 hours of work time wasted.

Learn to be concise.  Get to the point quickly.  Don’t waste other peoples’ time.

Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should.  Humans are social beings and if we don’t have non-work social outlets, our work time will develop into a social outlet that can waste much time.  It’s also good to “switch off” from work regularly and this is hard to do if your work is also your social outlet.

Learn some speed reading tips (even if you don’t learn to read a page by looking at it, you will read faster).  Some quick tips:

1. Use a ruler or other line marker to help you focus on the line and then move it down the page/screen (I often use my finger).
2. Practise spotting key words and phrases to avoid reading non-essential words.
3. Try reading with no internal monologue.  Most people read by “hearing” a voice in their mind at close to normal speaking speed.  This limits your speed significantly.  The goal is to bypass the internal “voice” and pass straight to the comprehension part.  It takes a lot of practise but is possible for everyone.

Develop filtering techniques for reading articles (fits in well with Google Reader).  For example, if a title “rambles” or is vague, then the article is probably going to be the same and will take too long to get to the point.  Don’t bother wasting your time - read something else that will give another idea to you quicker.  If in doubt, read the first paragraph to confirm.  Reading headings + first and last paragraph + two or three random paragraphs through the article can often give you the gist of an article too.

Use tabs in your Internet browser.  Open links in a new tab, finish reading your current page and then close that tab (or bookmark for later).  Bookmark tabs if you don’t have time to look at them now, or email links to yourself.

Develop your memory using some simple memory techniques, e.g. assigning letters to numbers to memorise long strings of digits or associating tasks with crazy images that link in with the physical environment where the task must be remembered.


Group Two - Indirect (But Powerful) Stuff

Nutrition - Eat right (but enjoy your food), maintain a healthy weight, and your stress will decrease while your creativity and productivity will increase.  Feeling physically great has many positive side effects for work outcomes.  If you feel great from proper nutrition you will feel more like exercising.  Use tech tools to learn about good nutrition and to record your intake for later reflection - you’ll likely be surprised how the junk food adds up and what your calorie intake actually amounts to.  Some applications can give you nutritional information just by taking a photo of the food!  One of the best resources for healthy lifestyle changes that I’ve found is from Dr. Phil Maffetone, Ironman coach, author, and musician.  Read some of his nutritional advice here.

Exercise - Find a way to exercise regularly that you enjoy and can easily maintain.  Don’t exercise to lose weight (proper nutrition will take care of that well enough), exercise to enjoy yourself in a physical way and to develop your cardiovascular fitness.  Dr. Maffetone has plenty of advice for exercise also (hiking is one of his favourites).  As for nutrition, exercise sets your body up for great work performance and even a moderate level of fitness improves your ability to deal with stress.  Keep a public blog/journal of your exercise and encourage friends to do the same - get ideas and talk with each other to develop the exercise community.  This will help you stick with it.  The same process could be used for students learning a new task, using a blog to plot their learning observations and progress.  Some great opportunities for data collection using pedometer functions or GPS in mobile devices can lead to interesting lessons with students if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Sleep/Rest - With good nutrition and exercise, sleep patterns often settle into something suitable automatically.  Again, you can research online for interesting tools to track your sleep habits or for fun things to try to develop your knowledge and control over your sleep, e.g. lucid dreaming

Learn to avoid multi-tasking - your creativity can drop significantly with even a little multi-tasking.  Rather, focus on one thing at a time and complete that task better or faster.  Students will multi-task to their detriment with competing distractions of mobile devices in class.  As this becomes more the reality, we must educate our students of this danger.  Josh Waitzkin - author of “The Art of Learning” discusses the problem of multi-tasking with a detailed example from a classroom/lecture situation here. And he is interviewed about his book and life in Part One, and Part Two.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/ “Get 80% of the results for 20% of the effort” is a common phrase heard around Tim Ferriss, the author of this site and various productivity and life-management resources.  I’ve already linked a few of his articles.  One of the more amazing articles I’ve read (and tested to a small degree) is how to learn languages in super fast time (Tim can become conversational within an hour because he has refined the techniques but anyone can apply the principles).

http://litemind.com/boost-brain-power/ - another source of great brain improving techniques.  There is a valuable free e-book through this site when you sign up for the newsletter (which comes very rarely in my experience).

http://zenhabits.net/digital/ - more lifestyle skills and observations.

Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Website is another fantastic source of motivation and inspiration for positive change to develop your life.  Steve is a highly successful businessman who has seen enough ups and downs in life to relate to everyone.  He is an incredibly clear communicator who stands out among other life-enhancement gurus because of this.

RSA Animate has a collection of visually engaging lectures presented in a short but clear form.  You will be amazed at the creative way these ideas are drawn.  Check out a sample: Changing Education Paradigms

TED.com is the source of many of the original talks that are adapted for the RSA Animate presentations.  There is much more variety here and the longer talks give more time to absorb details.  One classic from TED.com is Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about how schools can kill creativity.  His book The Element gets into more detail on this topic.

Video Clips Demonstrating Use of Tools (NOT!!!)

This is a bit of a cheeky section (sorry) because there are no links here.  Just go to YouTube and search using the keywords “demonstration” and “tool-you-want-a-demo-of”.  



A Final Word

I hope these links are of value to you.  They have certainly been of incredible value to me over the last 10 years or so.  Please share them with others and send me your own discoveries if you think they are in a similar vein (especially the group 2 ones!).

If any of the links do not work, and seems unresolvable from your end, please let me know and I will try to work out the issue.

You can email me at Hillcrest High: shight@hillcrest-high.school.nz

If you want to follow my occasional musings, book reviews, and various other aspects of my personal development (perhaps via Google Reader) you might like to read my blog: http://sambooksandthoughts.blogspot.com/

100 Questions that you absolutely have to ask!

A call for common sense and a well reasoned life, an attempt at inspiration, an encouragement to develop yourself, a personal challenge, and much more.

1. Who am I?
2. What is the purpose for my existence?
3. Is there a God?
4. If there is a God, how would I find out about him?
5. Is religion worthwhile?
6. When faced with a hard decision, how do I decide?
7. How should I decide?
8. Am I a person that other people appreciate?
9. If yes, then why? If no, then why? (I’m only counting this as one question)
10. Do others feel physically and emotionally safe around me?
11. If yes, then why? If no, then why?
12. Do I get enough exercise to be healthy?
13. How can I get more exercise?
14. How can I enjoy exercise more?
15. How can I enjoy life more?
16. What stops me from enjoying life?
17. Am I an active and contributing part of a community? (Community could be family)
18. How can I be better involved in my community?
19. How can I help others to have a better life?
20. Do I listen to other people?
21. When I listen, am I trying to understand the person or am I putting my own experience into what they are saying too much? (Selfish listening versus empathic listening)
22. What do I do that is selfish?
23. What do I do that is selfless?
24. Do I act in a morally consistent way? (Applying the same standard of rules to myself as others)
25. Where do my morals come from?
26. Are my morals fair?
27. Do I care about justice in the world?
28. Where does our desire for justice come from?
29. Am I a positive or negative person?
30. Am I optimistic? Pessimistic?  Realistic?
31. Can I take criticism without getting defensive?
32. Can I give criticism without being offensive?
33. What is love?
34. Why do we want to love and be loved?
35. Why does it take work to love others sometimes?
36. Why is love so satisfying at times while being so unsatisfying at other times?
37. Why do we hurt other people?
38. Why are puppies so cute and cuddly?
39. Why is the sky blue?
40. Why are spring blossoms so pretty?
41. How does the Internet work?
42. What is my favourite food?
43. Why do we find things funny?
44. Why do we laugh at inappropriate things sometimes?
45. What do I want to do with my life?
46. When will I die?
47. What happens when I die?
48. Am I scared of dying?
49. How can I deal with the death of loved ones and my own certain death?
50. Do I think about things enough?
51. Do I make space to think hard about important things?
52. Do I distract myself with entertainment too much?
53. What do I miss out on doing because of entertainment?
54. Is my entertainment social?
55. When was the last time that I stepped out of my comfort zone socially?
56. When was the last time that I took a calculated risk?
57. Do I trust the media?
58. If so, how far do I trust the media?
59. What routines do I adopt unconsciously in my life?
60. What routines do I rely on for “mental comfort”?
61. How adaptable am I when my routine is upset?
62. Do I try and develop my ability to adapt to unfamiliar situations?
63. Am I aware of potential sources of danger around me?
64. Am I over or under cautious when trusting other people?
65. Do I threaten people?
66. Am I trustworthy?
67. Do I make promises I can’t keep?
68. Am I a procrastinator?
69. Which social/cultural/religious groups do I associate myself with?
70. Do I feel better being associated with a group or being identified as an individual?
71. Do I show much creative talent?
72. What is creativity?
73. Am I a good learner?
74. Am I a good teacher?
75. Is there a difference between teaching and learning?
76. Am I good at helping or serving others?
77. Is it worth giving to charity?
78. Do I care about money?
79. Should people care about money?
80. How much money is “enough”?
81. How much pain/sadness must I know to be able to appreciate joy/happiness?
82. If God exists, does he want me to be happy?
83. If God exists, is he happy?
84. Could I learn another language if I tried?
85. Am I a shy person?
86. Do I think that war is an appropriate way of dealing with conflict?
87. How can I know if global warming is really happening?
88. What does “sustainable living” mean?
89. Who should be my role models and heroes?
90. Am I any one's hero?
91. What makes a person worthy of being a hero?
92. Do people ever follow the wrong person?
93. Should I feel bad if I make a mistake?
94. Am I capable of choosing based on rational/logical thought even if my emotions/feelings make me want to choose something else?
95. Is there ever a time when someone should go with their emotions instead of the logic?
96. When is it okay to be afraid?
97. How would I bring up kids in an ideal world?
98. Is a mortgage worth getting?
99. Should I have a second helping?
100. What other questions do I need to ask myself?