Train the Brain

In our imaginations we fancy ourselves possessors of the wit and skill. But during many conversations we realize our limitations. But it's not entirely a flight of fancy. It's entirely possible to think a little faster, a little smarter, a little wittier.

Think of it as cross-training your brain. It's not all that difficult, insists Joel Saltzman, author of Shake That Brain. Conventional wisdom holds that we use a mere 10 percent of our brain cells. Why not put the rest of your head into gear?

Saltzman offers some fun, simple techniques that will help flex your brain muscles.

• Question your assumptions. Give conventional wisdom a nudge and re-think your environment. Consider an everyday product and list everything you know to be absolutely true about the product. Now go back and question every assumption. Tony Basche did just that when he stopped assuming locks had numbers and invented the Wordlock—he won $25,000 plus royalties in a Staples contest for his innovation

• Laugh. Watching Comedy Central may give your creative thinking a boost. Studies show that people are better at solving exercises designed to measure creative thinking immediately after exposure to comedy. Subjects said they felt more alert, active, interested and excited after watching comedy. But there's a caveat: Humor can be distracting and can decrease performance on non-creative tasks.

• Limit TV. When you watch television, your brain goes into neutral. In one study, people watching television had increased alpha brain waves—their brains were in a passive state, as if they were just sitting in the dark. No wonder TV watching has been tied to low achievement.

• Think beans for breakfast. Eating the right morning meal can have a big impact on brainpower. Kids who have fizzy drinks and sugary snacks for breakfast perform poorly on tests of memory and attention. You can get the biggest brain boost from—believe it or not—beans. High-protein beans up cognitive test scores by a wide margin.

• Exercise. Physical activity is as much a workout for your brain as for your body. Exercise actually stimulates growth in brain cells. Schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher than average exam scores. Senior citizens who walk regularly perform better on memory tests than their sedentary peers. In fact, as they age, walkers show far less cognitive decline than that of non-walkers.

• Master eloquence. Verbal charm is a powerful tool—it can get you that job you are seeking or that date you are after. Each day, prepare flashcards with a few new words and review them at least four times a day. Content yourself with fewer than eight new words per day; more than that could inhibit retention. At the end of the year, you will have increased your vocabulary by 2,000 words!

• Get your nutrients. Unlike muscles, the brain cannot store energy; it must be constantly replenished with nutrients. Studies show that a diet rich in antioxidants and vitamins boosts memory and cognition. The best way to meet needs is by eating a variety of foods. In fact, healthy individuals who eat a balanced diet rarely need supplements. So load up on foods like nuts, whole grains, vegetables, fruits and fish.

• Play with your brain. Learn a new language, master a new hobby or engage in friendly debate. Playing with your brain stimulates blood flow and strengthens the connections (synapses) between nerve cells in the brain. Read challenging books, do puzzles—and whatever you do, use your other hand to comb your hair or brush your teeth.

Role of Project Manager

The role of the project manager is really tricky. He has to concentrate on following three things.

1. Direct Results

• Ability to complete projects successfully. 
• Manage expectations
• Meet the client requirements – On time – With in budget
• Develop People for tomorrow Ability to develop people working on projects

2. Building of values and reaffirmation (Mantra)

• Ability to contribute to organizational Process Effectiveness
• Use of different tools

3. Ability to pull through

• Know what needs to be delivered
• Creating effective work break down structure
• Game plan in place to deliver
• Effective team members
• Track the plan on a daily basis to check progress
• Manage Risks for the project
• Communicate progress and report work completed to stakeholders
  

Some points about work

Navigating between workaholism and hard work, on the one hand, and firm goals and ferocious control, on the other, is often tricky. And it’s not always easy to tell where you are. Here are some signals that you are approaching the inner balance at the heart of discipline.

• When given a deadline for a complex task, you automatically set up a schedule of mini-deadlines.
  No one has to tell you how to structure your time. 
• You work according to the time necessary to complete your work, which may end up being longer than the time specified by the clock. 
• You can close your office door and focus on a task, but you can also hang out in the hall sometimes and focus on people. 
• You generally have a plan, and you’ve been known to change it. 
• The people you supervise feel comfortable making suggestions to you. 
• You’ve contributed to work not in your job description. 
• You are prompt most of the time.

Procrastination

We have to start with the definition of procrastination. In general, procrastination is the gap between intention and action. You wake up with the intention to write a report. But for some reason it is aversive, and you keep putting it off. A key point—procrastination involves actively putting something off, not just letting something slide in front of it from a too-long to-do list.

Only you can tell whether you are a procrastinator. It usually involves some negative feeling when you put off a task, like anxiety or guilt.

If you think of procrastination as a trait, then we all have a certain amount within us. It's related to conscientiousness, your sense of orderliness, of dutifulness. People who are low on the trait of conscientiousness also tend to be procrastinators. But for most of us, the "procrastinating" that we do is not problematic. Most likely, we are unduly beating ourselves up for being procrastinators when the real problem is that we live in a world that is loaded with deadlines. And we're just engaging an a kind of after-the-fact task management.

College, for example, makes procrastinators of many people. Or, rather, it brings that trait out even in people who have low levels of it. There are constant deadlines, apprehension about evaluation comes with the territory, and and projects are constantly being foist upon students that compete for their time.

The point is, not all deferring of tasks is procrastination. Dr. Pychyl insists that we make the distinction. There is such a thing as the planning fallacy. Most of us are overly optimistic, especially about what we are going to get done. We drag home bulging briefcases for the weekend, even if we know at some level that we can't possibly do all of it.

We live in a world with lots of deadlines. We put things off as a matter of good task management, but we wind up beating ourselves up and mistakenly attribute it to procrastination. When realistically we probably put too many things on our plate.

But the waters get a bit muddy here because true procrastinators rationalize away their own self-injurious behavior by invoking the press of competing demands. Unlike the rest of us they are not de facto prioritizing their activities, they are actually actively expending mental energy to put something off.

Here's another way that not everything that looks like procrastination is procrastination. Like procrastination, depression involves a failure to act. It's one of the things that characterizes depression—lack of energy and motivation. People who are depressed are likely to beat themselves up for procrastinating, when in fact in their case procrastination is the surface symptoms of mental illness. And it must be handled differently.

So before you beat yourself up for procrastinating, check to see whether you make a career out of it. If you don't do it in most of the areas of your life, then probably you are not a procrastinator. Now you really have no excuses... so get moving