About abstraction and layers

I have seen lately in different realms of real life extensive use of sub-organizations.

For example: When they built the house where our new apartment is the jobs where given in commission and sub-commission. And this for about 4 levels. But we are not talking about 4 different people involved here - no - we are talking about 4 different companies and a lot more people. I could see that information flow often neither reached level 2. I further noticed that there is a strong inhibition on the "bottom" level to contact the above level in problem case. People do quick and dirty fixes before contacting the higher level to solve a problem where it occurs or where it should be solved. But things then easily escalate and then you get a mess easily where everybody's most important interest is pushing the responsibility to somebody else.

The above example can be seen with similar characteristics in many realms and is not limited to "manual" work and communication. Either when thinking of the IT branch or more in detail looking at software concepts I can see such characteristics.

Often each level/layers when you go from bottom (actual implementation layer) to upper levels (towards management and top management) there is always a little bit of abstraction introduced which also leads to information loss and increases overhead.

So my message today: Remember to focus on the actual concrete problem to solve and introduce additional layers and abstraction only where really helpful!

Expectation dropping

The problem: Manic depression
Although manic depression is a well known psychological illness a lot of people not classified as manic depressive anyway suffer from manic and depressive phases in their life.

The reason: Expectations and wishes
Expectations are the motivation for a lot of actions you wouldn't do without the result you hoped for. You delay happiness until a specific goal has been reached. When you have success or simply too many things worked in the past you are mislead to higher goals and higher expectations. When reality tears you back to earth you fall into depressive phase because you did a lot of things "for nothing". You didn't got honored, you didn't earned the expected amount of money or some other outcome of your work turns out to be useless.

The solution: Drop your expectations
Dropping expectations initially sounds like dropping any motivation for getting to action and is pure negativism. But take a second view. When you drop your expectations

• everything that works or results in a positive feeling it is a pure wonder,
• when you do something you do it out of the current necessity or benefit without having to fear investment loss (because you simple do not invest - at least long term),
• you can also drop a lot of fears in form of negative expectations.

Without expectations you easier can decide from one moment to the other whether to invest more time into a specific action or not. When you do things for other persons, do it as a gift, this let you feel distributing love to others.

Related posts: Success with optimism AND pessimism, positivity barricades

Humor heals

The problem: You feel stressed by others (or even yourself).
Situations that cause stress to me are usually when others get in trouble and then put some of their pains at me to help them get out of their hell. This can be in form of unplanned additional tasks for me or in listening to long complains or lamentations about their problems (without searching for a solution). Or it can even be that they are criticizing me because they are angry. And so I suddenly find myself under stress without either knowing how it happened.

The reason: It is part of my mission to help improving the world - and maybe you have similar goals in your life. And as I take my work and goals for serious I take problems for serious - in general.

The solution: Not taking life and problems too serious.
We should distinguish real emergency from other problems. And regarding the "other" problems we should again distinguish between our own problems and the ones of others.

And the most important thing: You are working on your life and improving yourself preventing from problems in the future. You are not responsible for the problems that other people created on themselves ignoring their life's lessons. "Imagine, it's your own fault" is an important sentence for me. But I should add something: "...if you have a problem".

But anyway you have to deal with the suffering person in front of you. And the best medicine to take out the stress, pressure ad hoc is humor! - Exaggerate and make a joke. This reduces stress level immediately.


Related posts: About this Blog, Serious life starts immediately, Quality of solution

Impacts increase with procrastination

Yesterday evening our baby did some big job in digestion and the issue which at first seemed to be small then escalated. The steps and appropriate were:

1. First notice
   Reaction: "The problem is too small yet to deal with. There will come more in the next few minutes and then we will deal with it."
2. Forget
   Reaction: Dealing with other things in the household we forgot about the issue for more than a few minutes - just for "some" time.
3. Fear - most dangerous step beginning real big and fatal procrastination!
   Reaction: The odor was already well developed and the resistance increased opening the diaper.
4. State of emergency
   Reaction: Dealing with the issue which grew up now in a frantic pace.

There was already small impact to the clothing. Changing the diaper and putting new clothes took far longer than changing a half full diaper twice.

What to learn:

• When is the best time to take action on an issue?
  When you think of it the first time.
  This is something my father told me he got taught when going for the sailing patent.
• If you do not take action of an issue it is likely to grow up to a bigger one and the (negative) impact of an issue increases as the time goes by.
• You will tend to procrastinate more as the issue is growing and you begin to develop fear.
  

Time optimization

Two weeks ago we changed to our new apartment definitely and now the daily morning and evening routine for changes slightly - not completely, but enough to encounter some "problems".

For example I did not know the exact times when the train passes and how much time the walk to the station exactly takes. Although the train passes every 10 or 15 minutes, when leaving home it can make a great difference because in 10 minutes I can even change the diaper of our baby. Waiting for the train memorizing the times when it passes I noticed that my clock is not in sync with the train clock. That leaded to further recalculation of my time when I have to leave home.

I either noticed that my alarm clock either wasn't in sync - neither with my wrist clock nor with the train clock.

No everything is in sync and the morning routine is less stressy because when using several clocks for reference you might find some time "lost" suddenly and in reality it is due to an out-of-sync clock.

So my tip: Just use ONE reference clock or bring those you use in sync!