Mindconnection Brainpower Informational eNewsletter 2003-01-22

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2. Time management tip

Let's look at two people who have different approaches to goal setting. The two people in question are editors. Let's call the efficient one Larry and the inefficient one Shemp. Larry knows exactly what his job is, and he focuses on it. He avoids tasks that do not make that job happen. Shemp has a fixation about making compost piles of paper, moving office furniture around, and doing all sorts of needless activities in an effort to show how hard he works. Shemp forgets his mission is to get quality editorial product out the door. But then, he does not really know what quality editorial product is, because he has been too busy with fruitless activity to have the time to learn what it is.

Larry reviews his own work, having made a point of learning the insider secrets of editing, writing, and producing quality editorial product. Shemp, on the other hand, doesn't have the time to review his work. So, he turns in work that is unacceptably poor. Shemp measures his value as an employee by how much activity he engages in, so he is not even aware there is a problem. Shemp's idea of his job is he must "manage paper." Larry's idea is he must produce quality editorial content. Both men accomplish what they set out to do.

If you are a project manager, your job is to turn out a quality project on time, and on budget. If you focus on the minutiae of your various charts and graphs or some other details and do not actively manage the flow of work, you will be successful as a manager of minutiae but not as a project manager. Thus, if you spend 39 hours with your charts and 1 hour with the work each 40-hour week, you will get-at most-1 hour of real work done. If you spend 5 hours of each 40-hour week working with the charts and 35 managing the work, then you could get 35 hours of work done. That's a 35:1 ratio. You might spend an additional 10 hours with correspondence, etc., and end up with a 45 hour week. But, you will be 35 times as effective as the person who spends only 1 hour a week working the project and 54 hours doing other things. In those 35 hours, you can raise product quality, manage more projects, enhance customer satisfaction, add scope (read, "revenue") to a project, and generally shine as a project manager. Your paper-shuffling counterpart will succeed on luck alone-if at all.

The biggest trap people fall into is confusing the ends with the means. You must eat to live, but if you live to eat, you will have obesity-related health problems. If you play with your charts to get the work done, fine. However, if you think your job is to manage the charts instead of the project, your project will not be a stunning success.

3. Finance tip

If you work on a W-2 (that is, you are an employee), you can increase your cash flow in the first half of the year to pay down debts. Simply add two additional withholding allowances for the next five months. Then, during the next five months, subtract two. Having your withholding at the normal amount (rather than more withheld) in November and December provides leaves you with a cushion for holiday shopping. It's a small adjustment, either way. If you are on a W-2, it doesn't matter to the IRS if you pay all your withholding in the last week of December or evenly throughout the year. However, the intention is that you pay taxes all year long--so don't get too wild with this idea.

4. Health tip

Cancers of the bowel affect both men and women in increasing numbers. Cancers of the prostate for men and breast for women are also on the rise. Part of this is due to actuarial demographics--folks are now living long enough to get the cancers they would not have gotten by dying of something else. However, these cancers are largely preventable. Here are some extremely heavy-duty carcinogens you can easily reduce in your diet and environment:

5. Fitness tip

Do you want rippling abdominals? I've got 'em, so I feel qualified to give you some tips. There are two things you must do:

To build the muscles, don't do crunches. These are pretty worthless, in my opinion. Years ago, I was doing 2500 each day. Now, think about that. If you can do that many crunches each day, are you working the muscle? Not really. My current ab workouts require 3 to 4 days of rest before I can do another. Hanging leg raises are good. But, the best exercises involve lifting heavy weights. Doing the front squat, for example, forces your body to tighten the trunk. My abs contract really hard on these, and it feels to me like I have a big steel band wrapped tightly around my middle. Of course, you can't do squats very often--professional athletes do them twice a month. But, they do them very seriously.

To reduce the fat, you must expend more calories than you take in. This is simple thermodynamics. A calorie is a unit of heat measurement--think about that. Just eat slightly smaller portions, and the fat will come off. Don't fool yourself into thinking you can work off a big fattening meal. Aint gonna happen. Remember those crunches I mentioned earlier? Takes something like 5,000 of them to burn the 3,500 calories you have in one pound of bodyfat. Running on a treadmill for an hour might--might--knock off 350 calories. The key is to handle the problem at the front end, not fix it later.

6. Global warming

I won't belabor the record cold we've had of late as contradicting the great myth of global warming. We actually have global cooling, and I remember all the dire predictions of an impending ice age just 30 years ago. If you visit www.spaceweather.com, you can see the cause of earth's temperature changes, weather patterns, etc. When solar flares are 50 earth diameters, guess what? We get warmer weather. When there is a coronal hole and/or no solar flares that reach out toward the earth, it gets cooler. This past June, a single solar flare (that warmed us up but good!) released more energy in a few days than mankind has released in all of history.

Emissions of hydrocarbons is fairly constant. We have X gazillion termites producing methane, and billions of animals such as cows and other ruminants that belch out copious quantities of "green house gases." Then, we have volcanoes and other natural phenomena. Way, way, way down the list, we have hydrocarbons produced by mankind. Basically, we are very minor players on the stage of global temperature.

What about ice melts? If the earth isn't getting warmer, why is so much ice melting? There are several possibilities for that. You might also ask why a lake in Minnesota freezes over, except for a patch in the middle. The ice is thick enough to drive trucks on, and the temperature is in the single digits. Yet, here's this ice hole that comes back every year and doesn't go away. Researchers at the University of Kansas have been working on ice melt measuring systems for several years. I have visited their labs, heard papers presented, and so on. The rate of ice melt cannot be explained, even by a temperature increase much larger than that the hysterical left is claiming exists (I find it amazing that these people ignore satellite data, but that is another issue).

If not air temperature, what would explain these ice melts? Surely, you have heard of lava flows, Old Faithful, and other releases of very hot stuff from deep inside the earth. Keep in mind, we are sitting on a mantel that is about as thick as an orange peel, relative to the molten iron and lava that form the core of the earth. It's hot as hell down there, and I do mean that literally. Ice makes a good sealant. Antarctica is covered with a very extensive layer of the stuff. All this heat is trapped under this lid, and it has to go somewhere. So, it leaks out at weak points in the ice, causing it to melt off. The same thing is true in the Arctic--which is why icebergs were sighted long before the first SUV hit the market or even before Bill Clinton told his first lie. In fact, icebergs were a reality before the USA was even an idea.

The crust of the earth is sitting on a liquid--it's floating. So, just like letters that float in alphabet soup, clumps of this crust are moving. The surface of the earth is very unstable. So, we have motion and we have heat. Why would the ice not melt? The air temperature is irrelevant in this situation. To prove that last statement, ice is melting much more rapidly at the south pole than at the north, but the south is 30 DegrF cooler.

This whole fraud of "global warming" is quite interesting, but I think I have hacked at it enough for now. I'll leave you with one last item--a harmful treaty that many people are backing simply because of unsupported claims that it is "pro-environment." It is, in fact, disastrous for the environment. The Kyoto Treaty requires replacing gasoline engines with diesel, for passenger automobiles. This treaty is full of many such anti-environmental rules. What, then, is its purpose? The redistribution of wealth from first-world countries to third-world ones. The old adage is true: If you can't steal it by force, steal it by legislation.

On the other hand, we have the opportunity to speak up and stick up for ourselves. Let your Congressman know you don't want to breathe diesel fumes, and that you are delighted a 2003 gasoline automobile produces less than 1/100th the pollution of its 1973 predecessor. The world really is a wonderful place, if you don't let the Chicken Littles scare you senseless. And I mean "senseless" literally.

As Chief Seattle said, "We do not own the earth. It owns us." Remember that. It will be here long after mankind is extinct.

7. Thought for the Day

Be patient with others. Over the past year and a half or so, I have been mentoring a young man (well, young relative to me) who thought of himself as second-rate. I advocated his appointment to an officership in a non-profit, because I believed he could excel if someone just believed in him and helped him out a bit. He did poorly in college, and his first job out of college was one more exercise in masochism and failure. It's sometimes been hard to work with him, but I have kept the faith. Recently, I had the utter joy of watching him run a meeting where he was large and in charge. He did a great job, and I hope he will, in turn, mentor others. If you have the opportunity to mentor someone, take it. Run with it.

Authorship

Except where noted, this e-newsletter is entirely the work of Mark Lamendola. Anything presented as fact can be independently verified. Often, sources are given; but where not given, they are readily available to anyone who makes the effort.

Mark provides information from either research or his own areas of established expertise. Sometimes, what appears to be a personal opinion is the only possibility when applying sound logic--reason it out before judging! (That said, some personal opinions do appear on occasion).

The purpose of this publication is to inform and empower its readers (and save you money!).

Personal note from Mark: I value each and every one of you, and I hope that shows in the diligent effort I put into writing this e-newsletter. Thank you for being a faithful reader.

Mindconnection eNL, 2003-01-22