Personal management – A musing Mulcahy

When in doubt (or actually in a hole) stop digging

How often have you gone one step further down a path only to wish you had stopped earlier and checked what you were doing or where you were going? Not made that one additional cut that ruined the carving? Did not strike the additional hammer blow that revealed the impediment behind the drywall was a water pipe? Didn’t speak the one extra word or make the comment that turned a dispute into a full-blown argument?

Sometimes, our motivation to “just get things done” can cause us to make poor decisions. We overrule the voice in our heads that says, “Hold up a sec. Is this what we should be doing right now?” That voice is often the sound of our subconscious, which may have spotted warning signs that our conscious mind is either unaware of or has dismissed. We can save ourselves some unnecessary grief if we pause for a minute and ask – “Why am I feeling doubt about this?”

When Life Just Keeps Coming

There are periods in every life where the pace seems relentless. We roll from one crisis to another, sometimes feeling like survival alone is challenging. For some of us, these are short periods before we get back into a smoother rhythm. For others, the challenges can keep coming, one after another, until it seems almost impossible to continue. In either case, there are things that we can do to help ourselves. One of those things is to take advice from the Stoics.

It might be time to make a change

We learn a lot about change as we age. We’re told change is a constant, which seems like both an oxymoron and a truism. We are told that persistent change is difficult, particularly regarding habitual behaviours. The fact is, we are all in a constant state of change whether we acknowledge it to ourselves or not.

A few people have asked me recently, “When do I know it’s time to make a change?” In this post, I propose some criteria that I hope you will find relevant.

Stress and the Goldilocks Effect

We are in an age where stress and stress management are frequently discussed and often without context. Stress is a complex topic, and I’d like to cover some of it in this blog post. The key question for this post is how do we know when our stress levels are “just right”?

On dealing with the ungrateful

Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, instructed himself this way:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.

Given Marcus’ other writings, this seems like a harsh judgement of his fellow men. Marcus, like other Stoics, believed in reserving harshness for himself. He also believed in being unsurprised by people behaving according to their nature. So, how should we deal with the ungrateful in our lives?

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.

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.