Thoughts Flying Around

brilliant_idea_business_concept_illustration.jpgPart of what humans are unable to control is the sheer volume of thoughts that travel through the average person’s head on a given day. We cannot stem the torrent of useful and useless ideas, bits of conversation, idle fantasies and the like that don’t seem to stop even when we are asleep.

The challenge that we have is to develop habits to deal with at least some of them effectively, and especially when they create time demands.

Part of the trouble I have with some of the language Steven Covey uses in his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is that the things he talks about are not really habits at all, because they are not actionable, observable physical movements.

Instead, they are more like mental principles to be followed than anything else.

The thing about principles is that we humans are quite likely to think we are following them when we are doing nothing of the sort.

When we think of habits in 2Time, however, we are thinking of actions that can be observed by an onlooker. They are measurable in the industrial engineering sense, in that a time and motion study could be used to determine the efficacy of someone doing, for example, that act of “Capturing“.

In this sense, examples of habits include smoking, taking a vitamin each day and brushing one’s teeth after meals.

The 11 components are best thought of as small daily routines that are learned slowly over time, but build productivity steadily and surely.