Value your time

In most of my post, I tried to be insightful... To show something usefull to someone. But i'll try something different this time. Since I have a little trouble with organizing my time, i'll share a simple test I did.

Take a sheet of paper. Divide it in four. On the top write 'Urgent' and 'Not Urgent' at the top of each of the collums. Write 'Important' and 'Not Important' in each of the row.

Done? ok

Now, try to place things you do in a day, projects you have, things that should be done, daily chores, etc. in an appropriate place. Think carefully before you place anything.Take your time.

Done?

Now look back at the sheet, but don't change anything. Is everything placed right? Is it really urgent? It is really important? is it both?

This exercise is supposed to show you want you fill you time with. We tend to fill our time with things that are urgent, but not neccessarily important, and neglect the important thing, until they become urgent. Yet, when you stop and think about it, it should be the opposite, we should be doing important things first...

It is mostly a problem of priority, but also one of perception. We don't think before we do things. We don't stop, and think: 'it is urgent? Should I be really doing this?'. I know I already talked about this butI want to really explain the idea behind it.

I give the example of the telephone. It rings. It is urgent? Of course! If you don't answer you will miss the call. But is really important? What will happen if you miss the call? It is really worth stoping what you are curently doing? Can't you just call back and say: 'Sorry I could not come to the phone'? It's even worst when you think that cellular phones are everywhere. I made a conscious decision and told my friends, that unless i'm not occupied, I might not answer the phone. If it is really urgent, they can send me an SMS. It takes me 5 sec to read it and I think it's more important that what I'm doing, I will call back. I do the same for them.

Another example is the all news channel. It is presented as if every bit of news was important, and we tend to sit there watching the news slowly develop minute by minute, hour by hour. But what do we learn that we would'n have learn simply watching the evening news? There is a certain limit to witch we can absord information. beyong that point, we suffer from something called 'information overload' where you see so much information, that you have trouble remember most of it. The north american sosciety is so obsessed with time and information that this sort of reflection is never done. We react to the what the world throws at us, but we don't priotize what we do.

I had one friend who could not cope with the idea of not seeing a movie in a cinema. He was so used the movie theater experience that he could not accept less. Now the theater experience is quite nice, I'll say that much, but it really that important? What is going to happen if you don't see that movie? I, on the other hand, don't watch much tv these days, much less go to a theater. I moved to a dorm on the campus 6 years ago, in a room with not access to cable or satelitte tv. At first, it felt like I was missing something, but I got used to watch nothing much than the evening news. I don't feel like I missed something important. No I didn't watch 'Lost' or '24'. I'm sure it's pretty good, but It's not called 'the entertainement industry' for nothing. I just didn't felt like I needed to be entertained. I can occupy my time with something else.

We have to learn to say 'NO'. Why? Because it's not important. Nobody will die. Nothing will explode. The world will still turn. The sun will still burn.

Value your time. Value your energy. You have a limited supply of both.

A closed mind?

I'm pretty sure you all have seen, at one point, things like this post. While I think it's a nice example of free speech, I don't think the writter understand the issues at all. Comments like this one gives a clue as to why: "And I would never go to Europe. What is there to see?"...

If you check the terms and conditions at the bottoms, you can read:

The web site is designed to be funny. We hope it made some of you laugh.

I won't give my opinion on the topics, but the fact that the (fictional) writter doesn't want to face the rest of the world, reminds me of some coworkers I had who didn't want to discuss the reasons why they beleived in some political party: because it was, to them, the only truth.

Well, if it was the absolute truth, why didn't everybody embrase it yet?

A closed mind is the worse thing anyone can have. The strength of one ideals of faith is not mesure by your devotion, or the number of things you do: it is mesured by going deep into hell and coming back unscared, by facing the demons themselves and comming back victorious. And I'm not speaking about a test of might, but more of a test of ideas. If your faith is perfect, and you know that you have the absolute truth, why are you afraid to test it? If you never tryied anything else, if you never been anywhere, if you never did anything, how can you be sure that your choises are the best ones? If truth was as crystal clear, why is there someone else to oppose you?

I talked about the fact that history repeats itself, and this is a classic example of the Allegory of the Cave, a concept describe by Plato in 'The republic', some 2000 years ago. In his exemple, a group of people was living inside a cave, and had never seen the outside. A single individual was taken from this group, and shown the outside: the sun, the plants, the trees, etc... But if he could never go back to the cave, not after seeing the outside world, and if he did, the individuals inside would simply never believe him. They would probably exile him because he is now an excentric in their eyes. But we all know he is not... Since people don't like to change and don't like to be wrong, they can sometime do very unlogical things, and not see that they are wrong...

Admiting that you might be wrong is, for some, the single most hardest thing they could ever do. That is why we have so many religion, so many political party, etc. because we hate to admit that we might be wrong, and prefer to stick to our ideas even if they are wrong.

Your house stays up because the ideas behind it, the works of the engineers that approved it, was tested over and over again, until they knew why this part or this part was wrong. Houses, bridges and the likes don't fall anymore because we have been perfecting the engineering expertise behind them from before ancient Roman times.

Brigdes occassional fall (Tacoma narrow bridge come to mind), and ideas are sometimes wrong, but if we don't want to change and to learn, we will never know what was wrong...

Everything important has already been said

We always think, as a new generation, that we invented something new... But when you think about it, we really didn't.
Take Remixes for example: Young ones think they are seeing or hearing something new, when actually, they are simply served an old lukewarm song.

it's not always a bad thing: it gives old ideas new life. Look at the idea behind The Matrix: It's basically Descartes' writings adapted to appeal to the masses... But, while the movie doesn't make that claim, it still gives the illusion of a new idea or a new concept for the uninitiated.

Knowledge is power, and history is full of knowledge. What we learn in school is built upon generations. It's information distilled from sources around the world, from millions of people working on problems, from the works of greater men that have spent their entire lives on a single subject.

For this very reason, I do not pretend to know the absolute truth or have the solution. The biggest repository of human knowledge (The Library of Congress), something around 17 to 20TB of text. I do not know that much, and I don't think nobody will... This blog simply represent my thoughts at the time. But if I can be the eye opener for the uninitiated, the post will have serve its purpose...

That and tell my friends what are my thoughts for the day.

I will end this post with a juicy quote:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

ATTRIBUTION: Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L.
Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277
(1953)."

Or this one:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-- George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905