Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. - Albert Einstein
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. - Howard Zinn
COMPASSION
Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live thoughtlessly and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to give it true value. — Albert Schweitzer
"People look at their garbage differently now, seeing every bottle and crushed carton in a planetary context...We ask whether it is responsible to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live a million years." Don DeLillo, writing in 1997 in his novel Underworld.
Calling your help on conserving and protecting the elephants! Today marks the #WorldElephantDay of 2018. The inaugural World Elephant Day was initiated on August 12, 2012, to bring attention to the urgent plight of Asian and African elephants.
Have you ever thought that elephants were never meant to be tamed? These elephants are trained at an early age and often go through harsh treatment by their trainer. We can stop this if we discourage
As Nashville’s population explodes
and the music industry continues to evolve in the digital age, what
does the dream of making it big as a country artist in the 10-year town
even look like in 2018?
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
This article originally published on June 12, 2012.
In his book, Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours,
author Robert Pozen reveals his secrets and strategies for productivity
and high performance, focusing on results produced rather than simply
hours worked. In this edited excerpt, Pozen lays out six steps to
analyze whether your efforts are supporting your most critical business
goals and objectives.
Many executives race from meeting to
meeting or crisis to crisis without giving much thought to the rationale
for their hectic schedules. They spend too little time on activities
that support their highest goals and often report a serious mismatch
between priorities and time allocations.
Think
carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you
expect to get out of it.
Establish your highest-ranking goals and
determine whether your schedule is consistent with this ranking.
This
process has six steps:
1. Write everything down.
Include the routine tasks that you have to do daily or weekly and
longer-term projects assigned to you.But you can only tread water if you
spend all your time responding to crises and tasks assigned by others.
To get ahead, you also must think about what you want to do.
These
may be long-term goals, such as advancing your career, or short-term
goals, like developing a new skill. Add these aspirations for your work
to your list. Be as broad as possible; capture all your tasks and goals.
2. Organize by time horizon. Divide your list into three time categories:
Career aims: Long-term goals over at least five years.
Objectives: Professional goals over the next three months to two years.
Targets:
Action steps that should guide your work on a weekly or daily basis--or
example, finishing one part of a larger project.
Make sure
that each objective has one or two associated targets. If any lacks a
target, think hard about the next actionable step you can take to
advance that objective, and then add it to your list of targets.
3. Rank your objectives.
Think about what you want to do, what you're good at, and what the
world needs from you. These are distinctly different -- and there may be
some conflict among them.Determining what you want to do is critical to
your ranking decisions. For instance, if you have a burning desire to
invent your company's newest product, you should rank that objective
higher.
Then,
ask yourself, "What am I better at doing than others? Which objectives
play to my strengths?" Rank an objective higher if you have a
comparative advantage in accomplishing it because of your personality or
skills.
Lastly, ask what the world needs from you. You can't be
fully productive by looking only at the supply side. You must also
consider the demand side -- what the world, your organization, or your
boss needs most from you.
Write down two or three top objectives
for your organization and think about the metric used to evaluate
performance. Ask yourself what one change you could make to help achieve
success: more time visiting clients? Recruiting a talented professional
to replace a retiring employee?
4. Rank your targets.
Your targets, or action steps, will typically fall into one of two
categories: enabling targets, which help you accomplish your objectives,
and assigned targets, which are given to you. First decide which
targets belong in which category and then try to rank them.
For
example, finishing my book was a very high objective for me, so writing
the first draft of a chapter tended to be my highest-ranked enabling
target. An enabling target also can further an objective in more subtle
ways. Suppose that you've been told that you'll be assigned a major
project (i.e., an objective) that will require your full attention. So,
you want to get many of your small tasks out of the way. Completing
these lower-priority enabling targets supports your new objective by
clearing away distractions.
List
and rank your enabling targets based on the objective's importance and
how effectively the enabling target furthers it. Assigned targets are
daily and weekly chores that often seem unrelated to your bigger
picture. They are very different than those that support your
objectives. Although assigned targets are immediate and concrete, that
doesn't mean they are important enough to consume your schedule.
Consider them low priority and spend as little time on them as possible.
5. Estimate how you spend your time. Once
you've ranked your objectives and targets, determine how effectively
your schedule matches your high-priority goals.
Take out your calendar
and answer these six questions:
How many hours do you spend at work vs. other activities?
What are the three main work activities on which you spend the most time?
How many hours each week do you spend on meetings, forms or reports, and responding to emails?
Will your weekly schedule be similar a year from now?
What will be your three main activities during the next year, and will they change?
How will you measure success and failure over the next year?
Compare
your allocations of time with your ranked list of objectives and
targets. What percentage of your time do you spend on activities that
help you meet your highest objectives and targets? How much time do you
spend on lower-ranking items?
6. Address the mismatch.
You'll likely find that you are spending no more than half your time on
your highest priorities. Some professionals haven't carefully thought
about their objectives and targets, and so often neglect an important
goal -- until it becomes a crisis, demanding their full time and effort.
Robert C. Pozen
Robert C. Pozen
is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution.
He was formerly chairman of MFS Investment
Management and served on the president's bi-partisan Commission to
Strengthen Social Security.
He is a former vice chairman of Fidelity
Investments and was a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm Caplin and Drysdale.
Aristotle said that to sneeze from noon to midnight was fortunate but to sneeze from midnight to noon was unlucky. Helenium is known as 'sneezeweed'. In olden times the dried leaves were used to make snuff which induced sneezing thus ridding the body from evil spirits. #folklore
"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else." - Georgia O'Keeffe, American #artist (1887-1986). #MondayMotivation#flower#photography
Passionate about flowers and nature. Tweets on; gardening; plant history, folklore & poetry. Photographing and supporting @NSbedfordshire Open Gardens.
"Give me the joys of summer, Of Summer
Queen so fair, With wealth of lovely flowers And fruits and sun-kissed
air!" From 'Midsummer Joys' by Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr. American
poet (1902-1983)
In #Scotland harebells grow in meadows beloved of hares, hence their name. The hares were said to be witches in hiding, having shapeshifted after drinking the juice of the harebell. Witches also used this juice in their ‘flying’ ointment. (Image: Cicely Barker) #FolkloreThursday
In the west of #Scotland dark brown or spotted butterflies were feared and known as 'witch butterflies'. To keep one alive was sure to bring bad luck but to kill one would bring evil upon the perpetrator before the day was out. #FolkloreThursday#witches#butterfly#superstition
"It is not how busy you are but why you are busy -
the bee is praised, the mosquito is swatted" - Mary Flannery O'Connor,
American writer (1925-1964)#WednedayWisdom#bee#nature
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