Personal management – A musing Mulcahy

The Nature of Reality

I spoke with a colleague recently over dinner, and we started talking about physics, which is his passionate interest. I’m not a physicist, nor can I play one even in my mind, never mind on the Internet. He, on the other hand, studied physics in college. He continues to read widely on things I consider borderline arcane, including quantum physics and mechanics. The conversation briefly moved onto the nature of reality before diverging and heading into more mundane conversational waters. But it triggered something because I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that the nature of reality is about individual experience.

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The Illusion of Productivity – Procrastinating through Work

I’ve been having interesting conversations with people lately about “how busy we are.” Busyness is an incredible modern affliction. We can fill our days with activity and, in the end, look back and wonder what we’ve accomplished. But, in work and life, if we labour without clear priorities, we often labour in vain.

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Sleep like your life depends on it (it might)

I recently spoke with a mid-level executive who told me they fall asleep on their laptop every night, usually around midnight. They then get up to conduct the day’s business starting around 5:00 AM. By any measure, this is chronic short sleeping. It made me wonder, what has gone so wrong with our understanding of the importance of a good night’s sleep?

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Be intentional to be fulfilled.

What a challenging, enjoyable, wonderful time to be alive. Distractions constantly bombard us. We are living through a global pandemic, a European war, and economic uncertainty and have a constant overload of technology, social media, and the daily grind. It is so easy for us to be reactive always – to drift from one thing to another. In my experience, and in that of my coachees, this can lead to a feeling of dissatisfaction, of being out of control. So what can we do to address this? We can be intentional in our actions, thoughts and decisions.

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Care enough to be constant

Life is a peculiar mix of the constant and inconstant. Our days are filled with variability, and yet, some things seem to remain the same. Our life span is such that the pace of change of certain things seems almost immeasurable. Despite this, as constant as certain things seem, deep down, we know nothing lasts forever.

Setting expectations

Life is full of interactions with others. We meet new colleagues at work, we build new relationships in our neighbourhoods, and we might be in a personal relationship that results in opportunities to set and meet expectations on a regular basis every day. Each of those interactions is an opportunity to strengthen or weaken the relationship with the other person. In many of the coaching and mentoring conversations that I have, it is clear that the ability to set and manage expectations successfully is a skill that many of us need to work on.

On Listening to Experts

I recently did something I’ve never done before. I moved a thermostat from one point on my hot water tank to another. I did this based on the advice of a plumber, an “expert” in these matters. Five minutes after I had done the work, my brain started to function, and I wondered why I had done it in the first place.