Mother Dearest, aka Mum, recently attended a mental health night (she works for a mental health provider in Melbourne’s South East) and heard a guy (don’t have name at the moment…i’ll post later today) speak about busyness and unfocused thinking, and the immense stress it places on a persons mental health. This guy is a frontier scientist from Monash Uni, a Sandstone Institution here in oz that is prestigious world wide.
I found this particularly interesting, as I am always buzzing around – checking emails, twittering, jumping from msn, to skype, to Facebook, to the web and then back to the thing I was actually supposed to be focusing on. And if I have trouble, spare a thought for my brothers generation…who know nothing else but homework with the ‘aid’ of MSN.
I realized when reading some of this guys work that it overlaps a bit with De Bono’s thoughts on Lateral Thinking – especially setting a firm Thinking Purpose when setting about working. I have thus concluded that, email and the other tools I use, whilst immensely useful, are disruptive to my productivity, and my creative thinking.
From now on, I’m going to practice a bit of mental application. I’ll set a thinking purpose (what do I wanna get out of this hour?), shut down the blessed email, make my last twitter for the hour, and then burn into some productive and focused thinking.
Follow me here for the results…more on this as I go
(Note…this post was completed whilst I should have been focusing on transcribing lateral thoughts from the Creative Thought session I facilitated the other day…good start!)
The Squiggly Line 
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