Delay is preferable to error.

Ian says it’s like being able to “press the ‘pause button.’” And that makes for a much “different life.”

His friend, Nancy Robinson, worried, in her comment to Ian, that delay might let her forget entirely.

But see, I read the quote differently. I thought it said “Delay is preferable to terror.”

That’s a whole different kettle of fish! Seemed a bit out of character for ole TJ. But hey, he lived in harrowing times.

So when I put these thoughts together, well, my mind goes a couple of ways.

If it’s terror

Sometimes the decisions I think I must make immediately really only seem that way because of some worry or anxiety I’ve got over the outcome.

A choice to delay an action removes, for me, a measure of anxiety and gives me space to consider options and possible out comes.

If it’s error

A choice to delay allows a situation to unfold a bit more and that may present different opportunities.

Now, sometimes, that delay could eliminate certain choices. But sometimes, too, fewer choices makes the decision easier.

How do I make the choice to delay?

I like to pay attention, as best I can, to the Morita notion “to do what must be done now.”

I can handle now.

• Is the error inevitable?
• Is it necessary to make the terrible decision now?
• Will babies die if I do or don’t do this thing? (That would sure put a different kind of pressure on the terror.)

Must the decision be made NOW?
If not now, then the decision to delay is exactly the right one to make.

Read more about Shoma Morita here

Actually, we’ve had pretty many since then. But I digress.

At the time of that particular party, we were in the middle of doing planning  a lot of projects around the house. We had the list of all those projects posted on the wall in the kitchen.

Here’s a party hint.

Some stuff you can’t clean up before people come over. But if you post a larger than life list, it WILL give people something to talk about. And they’ll focus on your list instead of the half painted walls.

At another party, when the hallway needed paint, I went to the wall paper store and got a bunch of samples. I taped them all over the hall way and asked people to vote on the one they liked best.  Another great conversation starter!

(The hall got painted.)

I sure wish I had a picture of that original list. But I tell you what, everyone who came to the party remembers that list and that the lynch pin task was fix the gutters!

Personally, I never understood why the gutters needed to be replaced before a bedroom was painted, but some how, in the mind of some-other-adult-with-whom-I-live, there was no point in doing anything until that task was completed.

The point is this: sometimes you need more than just a list.

Sometimes you have to figure out which parts of the project come first and then what happens next.

I love a good list. But stuff can get missed if it’s just linear. Or, as in my case, in a notebook on many pages.

However, I just read or at MakeUseOf.com about this cool new online project manager called Gantter.com You don’t have to sign in, or make an account.

The MakeUseOf guys say it’s a  lot like MS Project.  But it’s freakin’ free!  You work on the plan, you save it to your own machine, you upload it when you want to come back to it. You can print it out as a pdf and carry it around with you. OR blow it up really big, post it on the wall in your kitchen and have a party!

It’s surely over kill for figuring out a normal weekly schedule.  But if it’s a complicated week, or a project with many steps, I think it will really rock.

A friend sent me this info… today… on the day it was posted at Wordsmith.org.

perendinate

PRONUNCIATION:
(puh-REN-di-nayt)

Meaning:

verb tr. : To put off until the day after tomorrow.
verb intr.: To stay at a college for an extended time.

(Personally, I like that the day after tomorrow and being at college too long are somehow related!)

I’d like to think that this is not necessarily a bad thing… the putting off part, not the college part.  If I just don’t get around to something to day for some “whatever” reason, then I feel like a slug.

HOWEVER, if I decide that I can’t do it today, and tomorrow won’t work either, then I can perendinate on purpose. I can give myself a slight break from feeling guilty for putting the thing off and make a real plan to do it the day after.

The trick is to actually pat myself on the back for making the decision and then doing the thing.

We can hope, right?

Wanna lose weight? Couldn’t there just be one food you could eat that would fix it all? Buy a car? Some simple calculation to make the right decision?

A couple of years ago (actually way back in 1980) Dale Dauten wrote a book called Quitting, Knowing When to Leave…a job, a marriage, or any other unhappy spot you’re in.

I loved the simple process of evaluating the possibility of really being satisfied with a decision to quit something.

Basically he says, first you become aware that a decision must be made. Then you determine and weight the possibilities for the future, whether the decision is really in your own best interest and how certain you are about the necessity of the decision.

I loved the book!

And then this morning I read over at ScientificBlogging.com an article by Hank Campbell, Garth Sundem Makes Geeks Cool(er) Again.  The post at least starts out with a reference to Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life by Garth Sundam. Hank suggests it’s:

a way to quantify every important decision you may have wanted to make, from how many drinks at the company picnic you should have to how much sports you should watch today. The beauty of it was that by abdicating the decision you also abdicated responsibility – or so you thought. ‘Should I hit on that girl?’ calculations combined with errors in a ‘How many beers should I have?’ calculation probably took you to a bad place if you are married and no amount of pointing to his book was going to help.

The value of using equations to solve life’s dilemmas was verified time and again…

Check out the results of four geeks in a bar in the 5:44 minute video  here.

But in the end, it seems that making the right decision has less to do with the math and more to do with the evaluation that yields the confidence to move forward.

And really that confidence in the choice is most important.

… Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions-but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”

I knew it! Don’t work so hard… Just freakin’ decide, already!

Further Pouget says:

If we had to wait until we’re 99 percent sure before we make a decision…then we would waste time accumulating data unnecessarily. If we only required a 51 percent certainty, then we might reach a decision before enough data has been collected.

Try it.  See what it feels like.

As long as no babies will die, you can always change your mind.

Check out my other articles on deciding.

Our old TV is starting to make noises like it might be time to replace it. So we’re just trying to determine SIZE TV will fit in the a nice-piece-of-furniture we bought a couple years ago to house the TV and all those other wires and components.

I know how big the box is. I know a TV should fit in there. We have one in there now.  But if the new TV is to be a different size–and this HD thing makes them ALL different sizes–then what is the largest size I can get?

WHY is this so freakin’ hard?

The reviews of the TV’s online tell me all kinds of crap that WOULD matter IF it fit in the box. But it is of NO value if it doesn’t fit in the box.

My husband explains to me that “All TVs are measured on the diagonal of the screen.”

Yea? Great but will that fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture?

Well, you have to do “big math.” You can’t just consider the aspect of 16:9 and figure 32 is to 19 as x is to 9    … blah blah blah. It requires square roots and squares.

I am a math major.  I COULD figure this out if I wanted to … but really, all I want is some TV manufacturer, or more likely another nice person, to make it clear that a 32″ screen comes on a TV that is this basically wide and this high. Therefore, I can judge whether or not it will, or will not,  fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture. (P.S. I know that no matter how wide they say the screen is, it will still not be as wide as the whole TV.  I lived in the 50s and 60s with console TVs that were as wide as trucks and that was a good thing!)

If Google will convert dollars to euros why can’t it as easily tell me how big the screen is in normal person numbers?  Then I can estimate if the case on the screen will fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture!

Oh, Wait! Google knows everything!

SO I searched (finally) on 16:9 calculator and Google returned up this great site where you can put in the diagonal TV size in inches, push a button and it gives you the screen size in width and height and compares it to a similar sized old style 4:3 ratio TV.

You can check it out for your house here: www.nicetaco.com/tv.aspx#calculator (Thank you, thank you nicetaco.com)

Now I have learned I’m gonna need a new TV AND  a new nice-piece-of-furniture.

Yippee?

This morning I stumbled upon this article “How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned Though Failure”  over at UnstructuredAdventures.com

It’s an interesting list of learning opportunities. But I was particularly attracted to this one:

2. Postpone hard decisions until you have to make hard trade-offs.
Instead: Make decisions earlier to create options and build flexibility.

Make decisions before you think you need to. You’re probably too late if you come to the point where you realize you have to make a choice between hard trade-offs. By waiting to make a decision you’ve created trade-offs instead of options. Postponing decisions in the attempt to optimize your results is probably a waste of your resources in other ways.

The longer you wait to make a decision… well, probably some of your options are gone. So your choices are automatically narrowed down. Sometimes that’s not a bad way to make a decision , especially if it’s not a big one. Show up at the movie theater at 7:30 and watch what ever starts next.  No real decision. Can you think of stuff you decide that way?

But what about when it does matter: either for business or fun?

Can’t decide on seeing Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band in Baltimore or David Bromberg in Reading?  Wait long enough and you’ll miss the first concert. The decision is made.  Wait a little longer and you don’t have to decide at all.  The decision is made for you.

Sure, that’s easy.  But do you get what you want out of it? Or is it just easy?  Was it fun? Or just easy?

And may I just say that I did NOT wait to buy my tickets to either show!

Rev. Peyton was a nonstop rush of music and stage presence. The albums are great but in person, they’re even better.  Breezy could be my new measure of stage presence. On his MySpace page one review says  Rev Peyton sounds like:

“Robert Johnson on crack… they get one hell of a sound out of an acoustic guitar, washboard, and snare drum. It’s easy to see why they are big.”  according to Steve Hammer, in Nuvo Newsweekly

However, I probably did not need to buy my tickets two weeks in advance. The concert was, after all, on a Tuesday night and featured a rather obsure group. But I did not miss it!~

But the purchase was within my mental discretionary purchase limit, and I thought I’d like to try it out.

I brought the thing home and sat it on the counter for a week or so. Then I put it in the cupboard because it takes up too much room on the counter. I studied the instruction book for the bread maker. Are you listening? I READ the instructions over and over. I bought the stuff it said I needed. None was very expensive. And then I read the instructions some more. Finally after nearly three weeks, I got up the nerve to try making bread. It is amazingly simple. And the bread was pretty good.

Please tell me what is so scary about making bread in a machine that does all the work for you? You just put the stuff in the bucket and turn it on. Really, how hard can that be? Why did it take me so long to try the thing out?

Here’s my question: How much do you miss because you read more instructions that you need? How much time do you waste trying to be sure you have everything right before you try something new?

• Nike says: “Just do it.”
• Guy Kawasaki says, in his book, The Art of the Start “Get going.”
  Check out his talk on the topic at TiECon 2006 here.

Really, almost never will the bread machine explode gooey dough all over the kitchen.
And if it does, you can just clean it up.

What are you gonna get off your duff and do this week?

Twice in the last week, I’ve received a sorta automatic email from someone I’m pretty sure I don’t know asking me to change their contact information from some old unknown email address to a new one.

In each case, there has been a real name associated with the change. But I sure don’t recognize it.

I manage a bunch of websites and I write for several publications not to mention the times my address could appear in someone’s address book or contact list because I know someone they know and so we were on the same distribution list one time.

So while I certainly appreciate the world keeping me updated with where they are, do I really need to know it? Nope!

And really, isn’t one of biggest the reasons to change email addresses is because you were getting too much junk at the old address?

If I move, I’m not gonna share my new address with Publisher’s Clearing House. (Note to PCH: I just don’t believe you any more, I really don’t care if you find me ever again. No offense, but you’ve been telling me for more than 30 years that I “may have already won” and I never have! So please find someplace else to peddle your magazines!)

I sure AM gonna tell Rolling Stone. I want them to know where I am. We’ve got a life time subscription!

And if one day I need to find somebody I once corresponded with over the value of a particular drip irrigation system, I figure it’s my responsibility to keep up with that! It’s sure not that company’s responsibility to keep up with me — especially if I only wrote to them one time!

How many people can you actually keep up with? Seems like I read a study about that one time and maybe it was some number close to a couple dozen. (If you know, please shoot a comment thru!)

I just checked my list — for laughs. There are about 500 names in my current Eudora address book. That doesn’t count those in the master excel spread sheet of old contacts from another computer or the contacts in my current outlook list. That doesn’t count the single names that are really lists of names.

I also noticed as I went through, that I have no idea who some of those people are. So do I think they’ll care if they never hear from me again? Nope! I suppose I ought to spend some time deciding which of these addresses to keep and which to archive to that master spread sheet just in case. But that would take time I just don’t feel like spending right now. And I know that the longer I wait, the longer it will take to actually go through that list. But putting off for tomorrow always seems like the easy choice. I do think that backing up that list of contacts is an excellent idea! THAT I think I will do now.

You know, I’m thinking this could be the same kind of put-off exercise as backing up your computer files. But you do have a plan for that, right?

Back in the day, the size of your Rolodex was some sort of measure of your worth as a business person. But now, the list in the computer is invisible to the untrained eye.

So do me a favor, if you don’t really know me, or you don’t particularly want to either give me something, or ask for something, don’t bother telling me that you’ve moved.

Hey, if you think a person should care, ask yourself this question: “When was the last time you had contact with them?”

Friends, even acquaintances and business contacts, need some kind of attention from time to time if they are to be of any kind of use when you really do need them.

As the old song goes, “Reach out and touch me.” But if we’ve never met… then let’s have a formal introduction first.

Is this a rambling? Probably.
Thanks for reading.

Once a man I knew fairly spit at me, “Your intuition has landed you on your feet for a long time, but you shouldn’t trust that it will always work!”

Uh? Why not?

It does work for me. And when it doesn’t I do have find a way to fix the mistake. (Yep, it does happen!)

However, I also like to think that if I make a decision I have considered at least some options. I like to think that I’ve made the right choice. (After all, who makes decisions, on purpose, and believes they are wrong?)

How can you tell that your intuition is giving you the straight scoop and not just reflecting some history or gossip or something else that’s really just getting in the way? What is it that makes me just know when something or someone is just right, or just isn’t quite right, or maybe more accurately, isn’t quite as it seems?

Dori Molitor wrote a piece called The Sensory Potential about using all five senses to connect with customers. The article published by The Hub click here. She said:

Intuition is a felt understanding that’s capable of sizing up a brand and judging whether it’s authentic, credible and worthy of our trust — all in the same millisecond. Many times, intuitive feelings seem contrary to reasoned logic, but more often than not they prove to be right. … Our intuition tells us, right away, whether we should trust a brand or not. And if you don’t earn your consumers’ trust, you have nothing!

Authentic is a word that coaches throw around a lot. And it’s one that just feels particularly INauthentic to me. But maybe real authenticity does matter in the recesses of my brain that are my intuition.

I depend on my intuition to make all kinds of decisions in my life, from whether I should fly or drive to a vacation in Vermont to whether this is the right plumber for me to whether these pants really do make me look fat.

It’s your intuition that tells you the red car will make you feel faster. It’s your intuition that tells you that a coach really will help you figure out how to make your life work better. It’s your intuition that tells you that I am – or am not – the right coach for you.

But you have to engage your intuition. You have to consider that that still small voice in side you really has learned something from all those years trapped in your head. Maybe you should let it out for a little exercise.

Call me.. see if I’m the right coach for you.