Compulsive mouse-clicking is a powerful, mood-altering method for avoiding work.  Clicking around through business folders and business websites feels like work. The process may even resemble work. However, the process does not produce the results of starting and finishing one task at a time.

MY PERSONAL STORY OF COMPULSIVE MOUSE-CLICKING
On some days, I can find myself unable to complete any task.

These are the days when I have used mouse clicks to create a digital maze.

I click open my mailbox. In my email, I find a message that contains a link. I click on the link. I find data that needs to be put in my database.

I click open my database. My database calendar gives me a pop-up list of priorities.

Flash: I feel guilty. I realize that I have done none of those things yet and those things are my priorities!

So I take the first priority: This priority may require that I research information for a project with a fast-approaching deadline. The information is on a membership site. I click on a link to the membership site to gather information When I get on that site, I see that I have direct messages and updates from other members and from groups.

I click open the messages in separate windows so I do not lose track of which ones I have completed.

I begin to reply to the messages. Some of these messages are repetitive. I have form letters for those types of messages. So I click open the templates folder that contains form letters. But wait!  Some of those templates do not quite match what I need.  So I reword them a bit.

Other messages are in responses in groups. I click open those messages in a separate pages so that I do not lose track of my progress.  Better stated, I open these messages in separate pages so that I do not lose track of my progression of clicks.

As I review those messages, I realize that I need to access another location for the records of access information for yet more resources. So I click open another folder to search for the access information: passwords, website links, and other TOP SECRET information known only to identity thieves, web hackers and me.

At this point, I basically am working in four applications:

• Documents
• Database
• Email client
• Web browser

These fundamental applications are necessary for most workers to proceed through the work day. I have read that a person should not have more than two applications open at a time. Yet to get through my email alone, I need access to those four applications to complete most tasks.

So what went wrong?

THE SOLUTION
For me the solution is to schedule five things to do each day and complete those five
things first.

Along the way in going through my mailbox and opening website and in taking phone calls, I am going to have new things come to my attention.

Those things must wait.  If any new thing is important enough that it demands my attention over my five priorities, I must stop and pick one of those five priorities and reschedule it for tomorrow.

Communication that Works: All Do’s, No Don’ts

Tell people what you want them to do, not what you don’t want them to do.

A guest lecturer at one of my undergraduate classes put on note on the chalkboard and quickly erased the note and posted a different note.

She then explained her action.  She said that she nearly broke the first rule of using a chalk board in teaching.  If you do not want students to remember something, do not show the information to them in writing.

This same rule could apply to any direction given in any situation.  Tell people what you want them to do.

Be to work on time.
Offer to help when you see the opportunity.
Begin your exercise program with a walk to the front door.

Simple, positive direction focuses the mind of the manager and the mind of the employees.

Where the confusion over direction begins is often from behavior that a manager is trying to correct.  My first job as a legal, tax paying citizen was as a grocery clerk.  The second day on the job, I was a couple of minutes late getting onto the floor to work.  The manager stopped as soon as he saw me.  He firmly told me that I was late for work.  He said that he wanted me to be on the floor and working at the start of my work period.  To make sure that I was there on time, he told me that each day I was to come to the store fifteen minutes before I began work and to go to the break room.  A couple of minutes before my time to start work, I would then walk to my work station.

From a simple bit of position information, I understood exactly what I was supposed to do.  I was at work on time from that day forward and found that I was fortunate to be able to work for that company during the rest of my high school years and in the summer after my first year in college.

I schedule five things to do each day. This habit is one I have used for years but got away from for a period of time as I was adjusting to computer-based scheduling.

I imagine most people who read this article are already using some type of electronic calendar. As we all know too well, these calendars are easy to use and have convenient scheduling features:

• Things to do today
• Things to do tomorrow or later
• Recurring things to do

These calendars can also be shared and other people can, if we choose to allow them, add things for us to do on our own calendar.

IT IS EASY TO OVER COMMIT.
I have my calendar connected to a contact manager, so I can schedule activities right out of my database.

When I first began to use a calendar on my computer, I found that the new calendar worked about as well as the desktop paper calendar I had been using. Over time, however, I found that the calendar had so many things on it that it was almost worthless.

The things which I scheduled for today but did not accomplish would often just roll over into the next day. Eventually the things I had not got to would roll over into the future dated things to do. Included in future-dated items were recurring activities. As I scheduled more recurring things, I would think of recurring things to schedule. Then I had to add today’s activities to yesterday’s activities, yesterday’s and today’s future activities, and recurring activities on a task list that I honestly just quick checking. Just clearing the activities was a lot of work.

So I have simplified the process. I schedule my days the last hour of each day. If I already have five things scheduled from tasks I did not complete each day or from future-dated and recurring activities, I pick the ones that I will actually get done and delete the rest. I add additional activities that are important enough to be in my top five priorities for tomorrow and schedule those five things.

Am I only doing five things a day? Of course, I am doing much more. I will have a myriad of new things come in from professional networks, calls, and emails. I will be swamped. My schedule, however, is for the five things I consider priorities that I want to ensure that I accomplish.

Life is easy. I stick to my schedule of five things to do each do and get them done.

The philosophy towards careers and business has made a tremendous shift in Millennium 2.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, American business and economics looked very different from the way it looks now. The mentality of this time period was based more on the philosophy that there will always be more.  Lifestyles were geared toward working to make as much money as you can.  There will always be more.  Live in excess, because you deserve it.

A mutual fund manager named Peter Lynch took a $20,000,000 mutual fund and built it into to a $13,000,0000 mutual fund from the 1700% returns that Lynch produced on investments and from the new investments drawn into the fund the Fidelity Investments Magellan Fund he managed from 1977 – 1990.

Some of Peter Lynch’s more famous quotes reflect his confidence in himself and express confidence to his investors.  Furthermore, the quotes are reflective of the confidence that many people felt in general toward their lives: the mentality that there will always be more.

• “Absent a lot of surprises, stocks are relatively predictable over twenty years. As to whether they’re going to be higher or lower in two to three years, you might as well flip a coin to decide.”
• “Go for a business that any idiot can run – because sooner or later, any idiot is probably going to run it.”
• ‘If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you’ve wasted 10 minutes.”

Peter Lynch preached that financial success is simple, formulaic, and predictable.

The writers and speakers of the era were focused on attitude of you can have it all.  The mentality was that anything is possible through goal setting and work.

“You can get everything in life you want as long as you can help enough other people get what they want.”  Zig Ziglar, Secrets of Closing the Sale (1984)

“If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you.” Jim Rohn.

Peter Lynch retired from his role as the Manager at Magellan Fund Fidelity investments in 1990.  Since that time, there have been three recessions.

July 1990 – Mar 1991
March 2001–Nov 2001
Dec 2007 – June 2009

What Peter Lynch, Zig Ziglar, and Jim Rohn said and wrote are as inspiring and perhaps no less meaningful today. Yet there is a new mentality in American business, economics, and lifestyle. New writers and speakers have found success with practicing and preaching a minimalist, more-focused view of doing less of what you have to do and more of what you want to do when it is more effective.

Coincidental to these recessions has come the Internet, which enables us to click from place to place without getting real value out of any place we have gone.  So with a knowledge that there may not always be more and more and the exhaustion and lack of production that has come from a flood of information slamming into our think banks, people in American business and in fact the public in general have looked for new thinking. The result these recessions and of the mental crush of technology is that Millennium 2 has found new philosophies and new philosophers.

“By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.”  Tim Ferris

“Instead of focusing on how much you can accomplish, focus on how much you can absolutely love what you’re doing.”  Leo Babauta

“The ethic of more, bigger, faster generates value that is narrow, shallow and short-term.” Tony Schwartz