Immediate Memory

What do we use our immediate memory for? The almost trivial use of this immediate memory is when you try to remember a phone number. Most people will notice that they have trouble repeating more than seven digits of a phone number they have just heard. This is the limitation of your immediate memory.

The major purpose of immediate memory seems to be that it is part of a scratch pad system that we use in our minds to keep track of what we are hearing and to try to understand it. This can be shown in several ways. In the extreme, there are people who have very poor immediate memories for words because of damage to the brain, where the damage is so limited that it only seems to affect this type of immediate memory. Such cases are uncommon. Usually, damage in this region of the brain is associated with damage affecting other speech functions.

People with this problem typically cannot repeat back more than one or two digits at a time. And they have problems with accurate comprehension of what they hear, because they cannot keep track of all the clauses and redirections we normally juggle in our minds.

Popularity: 80% [?]

Is your marriage time-starved?

In one particular way, a relationship is just like a small baby. And although a baby is a very strong and resilient creature, without food and nourishment it will surely die. In the same way, couples who are living a time-starved lifestyle finds that their relationship dies unless they feed it emotionally.

You may have heard the term called “The 2 day marriage” before. This is a term that describe the hundreds of thousands of couples all over the world who are both so locked into their careers, mixed with the tasks of raising the family at night, that the only time they get together is on the two days of the weekend.

Although these 2 days may sound like fun and relaxing times to most people, couples find that even these weekends seem to drain their marriages of emotion and closeness. This is because so many of the forces of the weekend marriage try to suck the energy out of it.

During the week the schedule if full with work and then taking care of the kids, and of course sleep. But on the weekends, it seems that we have to take care of all of the other little tasks that we couldn’t get to during the week.

Stephanie, a married mother of two says “When we have much less time then we don’t give anything to ourselves, and of course we don’t have time for each other, and the stresses we face make it easier for us to turn on each other. My husband and I found each other arguing every chance we had, even when we set aside time on the weekends. Something had to change.”

We still love each other, but the distractions of our lives cause us to stop doing the things we know to do to take care of the relationship. So what is it that couples that are left with only time on the weekends do to heal and ultimately enjoy a better relationship?

One important way of getting close and dealing with time issues in a marriage is to take care of yourself. Successfully married couples who get in only a couple of days per week to be together made it a priority to take care of themselves as individuals and made sure that they each got their important needs met.

They understand the fact that if they do not give to themselves love and self attention, then they will not have love and attention to give away. Let’s put it another way: A little less for the relationship in the short run means a lot more for the relationship in the long run.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Your Personal Time Is Just As Valuable As Your Business Time

There are 24 hours in every day, 168 hours a week - the same for everyone, no exceptions. No matter how your time is used, the maximum time available remains constant. Your waking hours are customarily divided between your business and your personal life. There is no one right time to stop thinking about your business life, any more than there is one right time to attempt to forget your personal life.

When you are living a satisfactory, successful life, your business and personal hours are closely intertwined, but you have learned to focus on business and personal activities at the appropriate times. On the job your primary focus is on business activities and goals. That does not mean that on company time you won’t plan a golf game, have an interesting conversation with a friend or coworker about your personal thoughts and feelings, or think about how achieving your business and career goals will also help you achieve some of your personal objectives.

The same is true when you leave your work environment. There is no mental switch that causes you to shut off thoughts about business activities and plans. In fact, it is when you’re away from work that you may come up with your latest and greatest business-related ideas, even though your primary focus will normally be on personal activities and goals.

There is, however, one important separation that must be made between your business life and your personal life. Don’t drag worry and stress from your work into your personal life,
and vice versa.

No man on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.” Yet business time priorities often seem to take precedence over personal-time priorities. Don’t let it happen. One reason you work hard is to have the money to do the personal things you’ve always wanted to do, such as travel, play more golf, buy a boat, and spend enjoyable, uninterrupted time with your family.

Your personal time is just as important as, if not more important than, your business time. Don’t allow business activities to cancel, interrupt, or control personal activities. If in your job or business you treat everything that goes wrong as an emergency, you will end up spending your life handling emergencies rather than spending quality time with those you really care about - your spouse, kids, parents, and friends. Jobs and businesses come and go, but these folks are with you for a lifetime. Start treating your personal time with them as the priority it should be.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Forgetting Too Much?

Do you sometimes find yourself going to your refrigerator, opening the door, and then staring inside and wondering what it is you wanted? If you want this to stop then just simply make an association the moment you think of what it is you want from the refrigerator.

If you want a glass of milk, see yourself opening the refrigerator door and gallons of milk flying out and hitting you in the face! Try this idea, and you’ll never stare into a refrigerator again. That’s all there is to it. It’s like grabbing your mind by the scruff of the neck and forcing it to think of a specific thing at a specific moment.

Force yourself to do it at first, and it will become habitual before you know it. Forming these associations may strike you as a waste of time. You won’t feel that way once you’ve tried using the idea. You’ll see, after a short while, that the ridiculous pictures are formed in hardly any time at all. Even more important is the time that you’ll be saving.

Popularity: 27% [?]

17 Ways to properly welcome a new employee

Taking care of your employees during his or her first few weeks of work can mean the difference between their success and failure as employees as well as your success and failure as a supervisor. Proper orientation determines how fast the new employee can be productive and efficient in his or her new job while giving you a good opportunity to make to make your new employee part of your team.

Below is a list of suggestions that will help you deal with your new employees during their first few weeks to help make sure that they get started on the right track:

1. Give your employee a warm welcome. Nothing makes a new employee feel comfortable more than a warm welcome.
2. Give them a brief description about your role as a supervisor. This will make them more comfortable with you as the “boss”.
3. Give your new employee a welcome tour of the whole department, making sure she knows how to get to the bathroom, emergency exits, cafeteria, etc.
4. Give him a brief summary about the company as well as its mission and objectives.
5. Demonstrate your company’s products and/or services. This will make them more secure and confident with the work that they are going to be doing.
6. Explain to your new employee how the company works. Again, this will familiarize them with the company.
7. Provide them with a short story on how and when the company started.
8. If applicable, tell your new employee about the company’s competitors and what is being done to make sure that the company is staying ahead of the business.
9. Explain in detail your new employee’s responsibilities and describe her job functions.
10. Let your new employee be aware of what you and the company expect from them. This includes proper work ethics, productivity, teamwork, and appearance.
11. Explain the specific conditions and requirements of employment.
12. Be very clear about the rules, policies, procedures, and regulations.
13. Introduce your new employee to her co workers along with a brief description of their jobs and responsibilities.
14. Make sure your new employee understands and fully aware of his benefits such as salaries, pay periods, medical benefits, retirement, etc.
15. Outline opportunities for promotions and other opportunities to look forward to.
16. Explain and show proper use of safety devices.
17. Once you’re done with your portion of orientation, appoint your newly-hired person to an experienced employee for further training.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Doing What You Love For A Living

Success and happiness means finding something you enjoy doing and then building your goals around it. For example, I have a friend who said she loved to bake cheesecakes but she was afraid that thinking she could make a living from baking them was silly. Instead, I told her to write it down so we could brainstorm about how she could make money doing something she liked. We came up with a strategy for her to begin setting goals and creating a success plan and she called me a couple of weeks later and told me she’d quit her job.

She said, “I am baking cheesecakes every day and selling the cakes at twelve dollars each to specialty food stores throughout Ohio.” She began making a good living doing what she loved. She was in control of her life and loving it. What if her cheesecake business had failed? That’s okay, because if you love what you are doing, at least you can enjoy the trip. George Burns said it best, “I would rather fail at what I love than succeed at what I hate.”

Identify Your Talents and Nurture Them

Identify what you want to do and go after it. Assess your talents and then think of where they can take you. Write down the things you enjoy doing and how they might be turned into productive, marketable skills. You do have talents, you know. We all have things that we have a knack for and enjoy doing; those are talents. It is simply a matter of identifying them and developing them.

Do you get along well with people? Then you have a talent that can be channeled many ways - public relations, personnel training, etc. Are you good with numbers? Accounting, income tax preparation, bookkeeping, loan management, and banking are all possibilities for you. Are you musically inclined but not a particularly good musician? How about sound engineering? Band promotion? Record marketing? Jingle writing? What do you enjoy doing? How can you do what you enjoy and make a living at it?

Everyone Has Something To Offer

Most people never nurture their talents, skills and abilities. If you don’t they will never serve you. I believe that each of us came here with something to give the world. Each of us has a unique offering. No one else is going to produce your product, write your book, open your academy. And if you don’t bring your gift forward, if you die with it still inside you, then we all suffer from being deprived of your particular genius.

I heard a minister once say that the richest place on the planet is not some diamond mine or an oil field. It is a cemetery, because in the cemetery, we bury the inventions that were never produced, the ideas and dreams that never became reality, the hopes and aspirations that were never acted upon. Most people take their dreams to the grave with them because they are fearful or they don’t feel worthy or they listen to negative inner conversations instead of creating their own circumstances for success and exercising the power to change their lives. But if you tune out those voices, your talents - no matter how basic - will take you many places. You too have something that you brought to the universe. If you decide to develop what you do well and become a master of yourself, if you set goals and go after them with all the determination you can muster, your gifts will take you places that will amaze you!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Time Management: How to handle disruptions in your daily schedule

Time management is about taking charge of oneself. It is about accepting responsibility for our lives and what we choose to do with our time. Perhaps you have no problem acknowledging that you are, in fact, in control of your time, but in real life practice you may find that this is a bit more difficult to accept.

Every day life presents us with obstacles and issues that may conflict with our goals or with our schedules and it is easy to feel that you lack the control factor in all of this. But regardless of what happens to you that may affect your time management goals, you are always responsible.

At this point your goal is to overcome these daily obstacles with an attitude of a consultant. When you are faced with many choices of what decision to make, what path to turn to, or which way to handle a situation, pretend that you are a highly-paid consultant. I’m not talking about consulting other people, the key here is to be a consultant to yourself. When there is a decision to make that disrupts your daily schedule then ask yourself: “What does Mike have to do next?” “What would be the best use of his time, right now, within the current situation?”

By referring to yourself in the third person, you will be able to derive different answers for those that would come from thinking to yourself “What should I do next? How can I overcome this obstacle and still keep my time schedule intact?” Instead, by asking yourself in the third person, you will automatically visualize yourself mentoring another person, and the advice given will not be based on fear of what can go wrong, but rather from a neutral mindset.

Going back to time management and making the right choices, let’s quickly cover the subject of taking action once you have made your decision. Again, once you have hit a roadblock in your daily schedule, quickly assess the situation and visualize yourself as the consultant.

Then once you have come to the conclusion of what you need to to in order to rectify the problem, visualize then yourself quickly tending to the task at hand with vigor so that you can get back to your time schedule, and then do it! Take action immediately. Do not waste any thoughts wishing that you could be doing something else. Do not curse the fact that your daily planning is now off balance. Simply follow through with the issue and get back on track ASAP. Time management means to effectively handle surprise knocks in your daily schedule, not just handling the goals that you planned on paper the night before.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Organizing Your Grocery Shopping & Cut Your Time In Half

Most people I know find themselves running to the supermarket at least two or three times a week, and many shop more often than that. Think about how you could simplify our grocery shopping chore and made it a goal to cut by at least half the two or three hours I spent shopping each week.

Type up a list of all the food items you might possibly buy. Then arrange them in the order they appear in the aisles of your favorite grocery store. Run off a couple dozen copies of the list, and keep in one of the kitchen cabinets so a fresh one is there when you need it. It can easily be updated as your eating patterns change.

Before I go shopping, I sit down at the kitchen table and draw up a quick meal plan for the week. Then I go through my computer list and check off the items I’ll need. Since I’m right there in the kitchen, I can quickly see what we’re out of, and note those items on the list.

The entire process, from making the list to doing the shopping to putting the groceries away, takes a little less than an hour, and I almost never have to run back to the store during the week for items I’ve forgotten. Just by keeping a list, we’ve substantially cut our monthly food expenditure, and created more free time for ourselves.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Internal Memory Techniques: How They Work

Internal memory techniques are very powerful ways to learn and remember information. Let’s look at how they work:

* They force you to focus attention on what you are trying to learn. When you apply an internal memory technique, you are forced to concentrate. In fact, just using a technique makes it impossible not to pay attention. And we already know that we absorb something we want to remember more effectively when we attend to it.

* They give meaning to what you are trying to learn. Internal memory techniques are successful because they give meaning to something you want to remember. This works in two ways: In many cases, we can find meaning inherent to the information we are trying to learn. Or we can impose meaning on material that doesn’t necessarily have that meaning to make it more memorable. And something that is meaningful is more memorable.

Some of you may believe internal memory techniques are simply too complicated for you. If so, think again. Chances are you already use some of these methods without even knowing it. Take a look at these examples:

1. What year did Columbus sail for America? Did you say 1492? That’s correct. Chances are you got there by reciting the following rhyme: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Rhymes such as these are a popular internal memory technique.

2. How can you remember the correct spelling of the word “stationery”? Well, if in fourth grade you learned the saying, “Stationery is for a letter,” you were given a way of connecting the correct spelling of stationery with another word you already knew the proper spelling for. English teachers loved these connection techniques for learning proper spelling.

3. Here’s one from the history books. Need to remember what happened to the wives of Henry VIII? Perhaps someone taught you the following rhyme for recalling their fates: Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived.

4. Trying to remember the colors of the rainbow? Consider the following first letter association, which my son learned in his kindergarten class: ROY G. BIV. This name is made up of the first letter of each color in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

You can see from these examples that internal memory techniques are really part of our everyday world. So don’t be afraid of these methods. They can be simple to learn and use, and can help you remember better. The goal of any memory technique is to help you learn an internal memory technique that you like and will use.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Improving Your Business Relationships By Becoming A “Super-Star”

In the business world, relationships are an integral part of success or failure. Most people don’t know that when Thomas Edison’s laboratory and factory burned down, he was 67 years old and carried no insurance. Before the ashes were cold, Henry Ford handed Edison a check for $750,000 with the words “no interest” written on it. He also included a note saying that if Edison needed more, he would have it.

Many people were surprised by Ford’s generosity, but one reason he gave Edison the money probably went back to an incident that took place many years earlier. Edison was working on an electric car and had built batteries that made it viable to a point. He heard that a young man named Henry Ford was working on a gasoline engine, so he went to see him and asked him many questions. Ford answered those questions thoroughly and carefully. At the end of the interview, Edison said to Ford, “Young man, I think you’re on to something. I encourage you to continue in your pursuits.” Later, Ford said that these words of encouragement from the most highly respected inventor in the United States meant a great deal to him. He obviously continued in his pursuits.

Business relationships play a major role in the security and productivity of every individual involved, as well as the growth and success of the company. I’m fascinated with the research done by Bell Laboratories, a high-tech company. These figures do not hold true for all companies, but the concept is true.

Bell Laboratories discovered that out of every 100 employees in a typical organization, approximately 5 of them are misplaced. They’re hard-working, intelligent, and cooperative, but for some reason they simply do not fit into the culture or the company mission. Of the remaining 95, approximately 88 are good, solid employees - honest, productive, dependable, loyal, and so on. The remaining 7 are superstars who are far more productive than the 88 good, solid workers on the payroll. Actually, they are eight times as productive, which is an incredible figure. Their value is dramatically higher because they not only know and love their jobs but also are constantly “on the grow.”

These seven superstar employees are team players and are a team building, unifying force, which increases company production tremendously. They get along well with other employees, have bought into the company’s mission, and are excited about what they do. Their value comes from the fact that they make an honest effort to know and understand the roles that others play in the company. These superstars take advantage of break time, lunchtime, and the early morning hours, as well as a few minutes after work, to acquire information and cement relationships with people above and around them, developing team spirit.

These superstars also make it a point to be available when someone comes to them seeking information or inquiring about techniques or procedures at which they excel. They patiently and cheerfully share information and, in the process, make the company more productive. As a result, the people they teach make more progress, qualify for promotions and raises, and enjoy a better reputation within the company. You truly can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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