Loneliness is Unhealthy

If I was looking for an area to research, loneliness would not make the top of my list. But that is exactly what Steven Cole from the University of California, Los Angeles is studying. One of the more interesting discoveries has to do with a correlation between loneliness and detrimental gene activities. It appears that loneliness can actually change how your genes act and make your body less likely to produce antibodies and fight off viruses.

I have heard that from a life expectancy standpoint, not getting married is statistically equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes each day for males. Perhaps this is related to the same results Dr. Cole found.

Health issues aside, loneliness can reduce your quality of life. Loneliness can turn into something of a cycle where it is hard to make friends because you don’t have any friends to start with. Often, new friends come from existing friends.

If you want to become better at meeting people, I would recommend Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book was written around 1930, but still is very relevant today and it does a very good job of teaching you how to strike up a conversation with people.

• If you are traveling out of the country, be sure to call your credit card company and have them place a note on your account regarding your trip.  If their computers suddently see a bunch of activity internationally it is likely to trigger the fraud alerts.  Letting them know ahead of time won’t guarantee that it won’t get cut off, but it can help.  In my experience American Express is less likely be cut off than Visa or Mastercard. (2)

Socialization and Creativity

In the June/July issue of Scientific American Mind, Robert Epstein was quoted as saying:

When children are very young, they all express creativity, but by the end of the first grade, very few do so. This is because of socialization.

He talks about how much of what children learn in school stifles creativity. In addition to the formal training, the interactions with other children can encourage them to be “normal” which can also reduce their tendency to be creative. If Johnny likes to hum and make up tunes, but Robby gets the other kids to make fun of him for that, Johnny may stop expressing himself in that way.

Being aware of how creativity can be repressed is useful in raising children, but it is also very valuable in self evaluation. Are there things that you love to do that you stopped when someone laughed at you as a child? You may be overlooking key areas that would bring you a lot of enjoyment because you gave up on them at an early age.

I’m not trying to suggest that you should avoid socializing with friends, but there may be some enriching activities that you might not want to share with others–at least not at first. You need to measure value based on how it enriches your life personally–not what others think of it. If you find painting enjoyable, then it is worth pursuing even if your friends don’t like your paintings. If you like to write music, it should be enough that it makes you happy even if your early pieces don’t win the praise of your friends.

Don’t let your social connections prevent you from exploring your creativity.

• Unclutter posted an article about using a laptop to take notes at college.  I tend to disagree.  It is hard to beat a pen and paper for taking notes.  One thign that is commonly overlooked is how different tools exercise your mind.  When you work on the computer it uses substantially different parts of your brain than when you write with pen and paper. (I don’t know what happens if you use a typewriter.)  Since so much research and writing papers is done on the computer, taking notes by hand allow you to interact with the content in as many different parts of the brain as possible.  What do you think?  Is a laptop an effective way to take notes in a classroom? (19)
• I am posting this note from the road.  My wife is driving and I’m busy answering emails and arranging work with collegues from my laptop.  The thing that makes this possible is a Sprint EVDO card. From a productivity standpoint, it is well worth the $60 per month.  It more than pays for itself if I’m able to squeeze in an extra 30 minutes of work each month. (3)
• Several months ago I tried using Skype and it wouldn’t allow you to display your Skype-In number as the caller id to people you were calling.  This was frustrating and I even sent a letter to the CEO of Skype about it. However, as Hayden Tompkins pointed out, this now works–I just hadn’t checked it since it was fixed.  You may have to manually enable it, but logging into your account and going into the Caller ID preferences.  This is a great improvement because many people will just ignore calls that say UNKNOWN or from strange looking numbers. (0)
• The biggest problem with using Skype occurs when you call out.  Instead of seeing your number for Caller ID, the person you are calling will see 0123456789 or a random telephone number.  Has anyone found a way to work around this and get it to display your dial back number? (6)
• Some experiments seems to suggest that using a cell phone before going to bed can make it more difficult to fall asleep.  It seems that the radio waves can mess with the mind and excite it.  The effect is fairly subtle and is about equivalent to drinking half a cup of coffee, but still something to consider if you are having trouble going to sleep. (7)

Working Effectively with a New Assistant

Most successful and efficient people will eventually come to a point where they at least consider hiring an assistant.  It seems like a very logical step.  If some of your work can be handed off to someone else, then you can concentrate on the things that can only be done by you which will increase your personal productivity.  Unfortunately many people hire assistants and end up in this type of situation:

Lets say you are a mad scientist out to destroy the world.  You can spend more time thinking up doomsday scenarios if you had an assistant to study gauges and push the buttons that simply must be studied and pushed to keep your diabolical lab running smoothly.  So after a careful search you locate an assistant who seems to be perfect for what you need.

After a week, you’ve discovered that hiring an assistant doesn’t give you the increased productivity you were hoping for.  Instead of having many more hours to plan you next death ray gun, you constantly interrupted by Igor who is trying to understand which buttons need pushed and which ones will initiate the labs irreversible self-destruct sequence.  Not only are you getting interrupted, but your new assistants is making many mistakes that you have to spend time fixing.  Why just yesterday he misunderstood you and fed one of your genetically enhanced telepathic rats to the man eating plant specimen and now it won’t eat anything but cheese.    Worse yet, your new assistant seems to be developing a large hump on his back.  You aren’t sure if this is due to stress or if he mistook the nuclear cooling liquid pump for the water fountain. What is a self-respecting insane mental giant as yourself to do?

While, you may not be out to take over the world, the scenario described above is very similar to many people’s first experience hiring an assistant.  Working effectively with an assistant is something you have to invest in.  You have a great deal of information in your head and your assistant only has access to what you tell them.  You can’t expect them to automatically know things that it has taken you months or years to learn.

Before hiring an assistant, you should make an assessment of what exactly your needs are.  Be honest about the skill level each task will require and the amount of training time you will need to invest in someone before they are able to do it on their own.  From this assessment, create a skills checklist of everything that your assistant will need to know how to do.

When your assistant starts, plan to spend the first few days going over the skills checklist.  Don’t check off an item until both you and your assistant feel confident that they can perform the task.  It may take several months to go through the entire list, so make sure you start with the things they need to do most frequently first.

When delegating a task to your assistant, you need to make sure you have a process in place so both of you are clear on what has been assigned.  You can accomplish this through some type of shared list.  This lets you see what you’ve requested in case something changes and it lets them know exactly what you are expecting.  There are several ways to accomplish this:

• Franklin planners have a special page for keeping track of delegated items.
• Microsoft Outlook has a way to create a task and delegate it.  When the task is updated by your assistant it updates it in your task list as well.
• Most ticket tracking systems have some way of assigning items to an individual and tracking the progress.
• A whiteboard can serve this purpose as well.

Another common issue when working with a new assistant is poorly defined scope of authority.  Your assistant needs to know what decisions they can make on their own and what decisions require your sign off.  You’ll probably want them to take on more responsibility as they become more familiar with their job, so you might say something like:

For now let me sign all of the requisition orders.  Eventually you’ll be handling most of them on your own. As we go I’ll show you which ones are things that you can sign and which one’s you require that you check with me first.

This makes it clear the level of responsibility that you are expecting in the future, so your assistant knows what to expect.  It also lets them know that you want to keep an eye on it for now while you train them.

When you give your assistant the responsibility for something, think very carefully to make sure you’ve given them the tools and training that they need to be successful. For example, if you ask them to pick something up from the store, make sure their name is on the credit account, or that they have access to petty cash.  Otherwise they are going to have to interrupt you to accomplish the task.  This keeps it from being a big benefit to you and makes their job frustrating as well.

Hiring an assistant can be a key step in increasing your personal productivity. By planning ahead you can make the transition to working with an assistant a smooth one, whether your goal is world domination or some less dastardly objective.

We have also written The Ultimate Virtual Assistant Guide that helps prepare you for working with a remote assistant.

Originally published on October 8, 2005

How Much Time do You Actually Have

The September/October 2005 issue of The Futurist examines Americans’ use of time. According to the article, the common perception that there just isn’t enough time isn’t supported by the stats from a national study using time-diaries.  Basically, the findings show that Americans average 35 hours per week of work time and 35 hours per week of free time.  This is much more time than what most Americans perceive.

One of the reasons people feel like they have no time is because of marketing.  There are many businesses who make money if you don’t feel like you have enough time.  Everything from self-help books to prepared foods to services depend on people who feel like they are too busy.

So where does all the free time go?  According to the article, over half of it is spent watching television.  (However, the article notes that time spent watching television isn’t any higher than it was in 1990.)

When people say that they don’t have enough time, it says more about how they spend their time than the actual quantity.  After all, no one really has more time, we all just spend it in different ways.  When people feel like their time is being spent on very valuable things, they may still run out of time, but there is a completely different level of fulfillment involved.

The trick to having enough time is making sure that it is spent on things that you feel are important.  This means setting priorities and deciding what is actually valuable to you ahead of time.

By spending your free time on things that you feel are truly valuable, you won’t have actually ended up with more time, but you can increaseyour satisfaction with how your time is spent.

This funny quote from the article seems to sum up many Americans’ feelings about why they don’t have any free time. “Of course I don’t have any free time, because I spend so much of my time watching TV.”

Originally published November 17th, 2005.

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