Made You Look!

A grey sky here in the Canadian Capital today. Yes that's grey with an 'e' and capital with an 'a' as in most of the English-using world - at least geographically speaking. :) The neat thing about doing this blog is that it makes me at least take a second to look out at the sky at the start of the day. We glance out our office windows pretty typically anyway - but don't mentally register what we see so much.

If you were to even just put a checkmark on a piece of paper each time you did something small and normally un-notable, the novelty and outside-your-brain event is enough to give it extra weight and create an event in your memory files that would otherwise not be retained explicitly. Hmmm - maybe a good way to enhance one's happiness. Anytime you feel briefly happy or smile, make a checkmark, or a happy face on a sheet of paper. The result should be that you begin to feel more happy as the faces stack up. Then again, maybe you'll have a blank sheet and get depressed. But that in itself probably gives you pause to think about why it is. An, afterall, it's the examined life that is most worth living to bastardize a proverb.

Thinking while blogging - it can be so productive.

Starting my morning with a blog entry continues to be a challenge. The pull of the initial email read is too strong. But whereas I initially thought it was conditioning, and as sense of obligation, I'm beginning to wonder if it might actually be a desire for accomplishment. Accomplishing things is like a reward (at least for me) it creates, well, a sense of accomplishment (go figure!). So, scrubbing those first several unread emails off your list, and seeing your MS Outlook (if you are as unlucky as I am to be using it) change from "Inbox(23)" to a more happy, simple "Inbox" is a reward in itself.

If all your work tasks were resolved so quickly, a day in the office would be a more rewarding thing. It's the ones that drag on for weeks without resolution that saps your enthusiasm, motivation and job satisfaction. Out of your control or authority to fix, and unresolvable. Like the current impasse about my research organization's existence at the hands of a North Europe office-fascista. That's the tough stuff.

And so on to the tasks at hand. Objective setting for my legions of researchers. Ugh.