As a young engineering professional coming to the end of my degree Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk on creativity, fulfilment and flow introduced a useful model for assessing elements that contribute to pleasure and lasting satisfaction.
Money doesn’t matter: He illustrated that once income is slightly above the poverty line, further increases in income don’t contribute to further increases in well being or happiness. Rather increased pleasure and satisfaction come as a result of being involved in activities that are valued by the participant.
Skills & Challenges: The following diagram clearly indicates that flow is achieved when the participant has high skills to meet the high challenge that they are facing. Slightly lower skill level lead to arousal as the participant is stimulated to meet the challenges, while slightly lower challenges enables comfortable control to be achieved with the participants skill set. If challenges increases, while skill are not improved then this can lead to anxiety and worry. And if a person with high skills is unchallenged they will most likely be relaxed or board. Low skills & apathy results in the largest tragedy of all: apathy.
With this in mind I am continuing my search for a final year project in the renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean green technology sectors. Areas that I feel have the potential to make huge contributions to environmental and social well being. I am lucky as an engineer that I have the good fortune of my income being above the threshold of significance to personal well being. In addition, I am putting particular focus on companies that can challenge me and build my skill level.
Hit on success tonight with a salmon fillet recipe.
1. Rub salt and pepper into salmon fillet and dust both sides with a little flour.
2. Pan fry the flesh side lightly in butter, then flip and cook longer on the skin side. It should be ready just after the flesh goes pink. (It’s not a stake - don’t over cook!)
In a stroke of procrastination today, I very ironically googled a TLA (three letter acronym). It was GTD, or Getting Things Done. Turns out there is quite a cult around the action management method created by David Allen. It is one solution for not having enough hours in the day, a form of time management.
If you are a process person, and love having a good system to work from I strongly suggest looking into GTD. While you don’t require software to implement the method, I’m 66% geek and 23% dork, so I do.
After a short burst of research I turned up some OmniFocus. Omni makes some great products for osx that I have previously used. While there are some great free alternatives. I decided to stick with what I know, (for once), and focus on GTD. Since I work in the computer field, I was particular taken by the fact that OmniFocus lets you import emails as tasks into projects, then have them organised by context! Yes, there is a little learning curve involved in setting up a new process, but the results will probably be worth it.
After an an hour and a half I’d collated all my lists, into OmniFocus. I’m still having trouble getting Mail.app to work, I never thought I would have a reason to revert to it from Thunderbird, but alas here I am. I’ll have a go at reinstalling Mail and get back to you. But it is all looking very promising.
I now feel like I am well on the way to developing a universal actions workflow. This will tie all my projects and far flung ideas into one system. Whooo hooo! For a person with more ideas than he knows what to do with, this could be a big break through. This way I’ll be able to do a weekly review of all my projects in the same place. I’ve just had so many things on my plate lately that things have been falling out the back of my head. Keep you posted. I’ll leave you with a few “productivitysites” that I stumbled across. Zen Habits speaks to me the most.
p.s. I’m still sticking with a pen and notebook for when I’m not near the computer.
p.p.s. Here is a sexy flow chart that gives you a feel for GTD action method.
