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% [?]

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% [?]

What tools should I use to help me master time management skills?

What is time management and how can it help you get more done in less time? This question has many different answers to many different people because time management is not a type of cookie-cutter course that everyone can use for their lives. With each individual comes different needs. And although you can learn time management skills and techniques, you must approach it with your own style, your own goals, your own visions, and your own unique motivations.

In today’s article we will discuss motivation and how it can help you manage your time better so that you can get more work done, spend more time with your family and friends, and have a better sense of accomplishment in your life.

The term motivation itself contains “motive”. And without a clear understanding of your motive (why exactly you are doing what you are doing) then you will be forever lost in the cycle of doing more and gaining less. You must be absolutely clear about the reasons “why” you are undertaking all of the tasks in your life. This is not limited to your work and career choices, but your personal and family choices as well. You can never effectively manage your time if you are not motivated enough to do more and at faster speeds. And this motivation comes from understanding the underlying reasons why you are doing whatever it is you are doing in the first place.

Take out a pen and a piece of paper and start this little time management mental exercise. Simply ask yourself the following questions and write your answers down:

Why do you work as much as you do? Why are you involved in the tasks that you are involved in today? Why do you work so hard? What is it that you are trying to achieve? And what is the fastest and most simple route to get you from where you are now to where you want to go?

Now that you have started to put your thoughts on paper, your next step is to start gaining the additional knowledge and skills that you will need to perform your best and with the greatest productivity. Your goal is become an expert in time management. And in order to become an expert in any subject, all you need to do is read and study the principles outlined within that material each and every day.

Read books on time management for thirty minutes each morning and again at night. Listen to time management audio tapes and CDs in your car while driving and at home in your spare time. And back up all that you see and hear with action. Back up your studies of time management with practice and I promise you that you will start to see and feel changes not only in managing our time, but in all areas of your life as well.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Is Your Time Properly Organized For Maximum Performance?

Interruptions are a roadblock to work, but they come all day long in the form of babies, friends, and personal and household emergencies. Life involves learning to accomplish things in spite of interruptions. Don’t wait to organize yourself until all the interruptions are gone.

You have three strategies: (1) work around them, (2) eliminate some, and (3) manage others. When you are stopped for one reason or another, train yourself to go right back to the job you were doing. When the task is well denned, it is easy. For example, if your first housekeeping goal for the day is to clean a bathroom, when an interruption comes, it’s easy to go back to the original chore. Otherwise, you may waste time or risk being sidetracked.

You can learn to work with direction and purpose. Think of how a receptionist at the front desk of an office operates. She takes care of each request as it comes, but goes back to typing a letter whenever she gets a chance. Do not let an imperfect situation be an excuse to do nothing.

Eliminate some of the hassle by taking a good look at your life. If you are really serious about this, keep a log for two days. Make a brief entry of what is happening every fifteen minutes. Efficiency experts do this analysis in businesses to pinpoint time leaks and problem times. Who is the offender? When? Is one time worse than others? What was needed when they interrupted you? With this insight, you can start improvement.

Some interruptions are caused by lack of order: runs to the dryer for socks, trips to the store for forgotten ingredients, or shoe hunts. Devise a way for kids to get their own drinks of water. Install a pet door so your animals can get in and out without your help. As one father has said, “Instead of putting out fires all day, catch the guy with the matches.” A little organization can save a lot of hassle.

Sometimes we interrupt ourselves. Perhaps you are not very dedicated to the task and can be easily distracted. You might think of a phone call that needs to be made, remember to take something out of the freezer, or get an urge for a snack. There is a difference between a break and an interruption. To stop in the middle of a job with an unnecessary interruption is a defeating work habit.

It takes time after each interruption to start up and build momentum again. Next time you are tempted to jump from what you are doing, ask yourself if you could wait a little longer until you finish this project or until you get to a better stopping point. Plan periodic breaks to refresh yourself and take care of such needs. A paid secretary gets “coffee” breaks. You can, too. This is self-control.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Time Management: Avoiding unnecessary meetings at work

Creating good time management habits at the office can be a tough, especially when you must work around other people’s projects and meeting plans. But just because somebody wants to schedule a face-to-face meeting doesn’t mean that the meeting must be held. Once you talk with that person on the phone, you may discover that you can gather all of the necessary information without ever having to take time from your day for a meeting with him.

Another example of unnecessary time-wasting at the office is attending meetings where it wasn’t necessary for you to be there. You would be surprised as to how many meetings are held with people who did not need to be there. How much time is wasted for those people? How much of their time management planning goes down the drain due to these meetings?

But how do you communicate your desire to bypass a meeting or to have a meeting canceled altogether, without offending the person who is trying to schedule it? Simply try to ask the person on the phone questions about as much information that the meeting is to be about. Then politely say “Well it looks like I have everything that I need, how about I get to work on this project right away and we can meet about the results tomorrow”? However you approach the situation, be conscious of who you are dealing with and what position at the office they hold.

Popularity: 20% [?]

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