When everything is a priority, nothing is.

Here is a column I published last week. I have been giving a number of talks on burnout and stress recently.

It seems that in our modern world of management by objectives, the number of people on the verge of a breakdown is rising dramatically. The source of overwork can come from others (superiors, public demands, etc) or from the individual him or herself (some people expect too much of themselves).

In order to manage better our time and other limited resources we use time management principles such as the setting of priorities. Although the setting of priorities can help us achieve...

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Posted on 27 Jun 2008
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How good is this post?

I have a confession to make. I sometimes make careless mistakes with my writing. Although I don’t like to let obvious grammatical or spelling errors slip by, I figure the alternative is worse. The alternative is spending an inordinate amount of time checking my posts and columns for accuracy. Frankly, I’d rather be golfing, or riding my bike, or even just scratching myself for that matter.

Nevertheless, quality is important and this fact makes me somewhat obsessive when I write. I hope to have found a reasonable balance between shoddy work caused by lack of standards, and hopelessly...

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Posted on 22 Jun 2008
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Put that on my expense account

I don’t mind spending money but I really really hate to waste it. This past week, I wrote a column on third party payments and how much easier it is to spend other people’s money than it is our own. It was inspired by a conference that was paid for by the taxpayer that I ended up skipping. Although I had the intention of going, and I think it is a conference that I would normally have paid for myself, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was indeed easier to stay away because it wasn’t my money being wasted.

This got me thinking about many many cases where I see (or hear of) public money being...

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Posted on 29 May 2008
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Homelessness and mental illness

As a young student in CEGEP (in Quebec, we replace the last year of high school and the first of university with an intermediate general college system called CEGEPs), I took a course called Poverty in Montreal.

I thought it was a joke at first. I had grown up watching starving children in Biafra with matchstick legs and bloated bellies. At the time, that was my understanding of poverty. The idea that poverty had different faces, and that some of them could be found in our own backyards, never even crossed my mind until I took that course.

As an assignment, I spent a night in a Salvation...

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Posted on 12 May 2008
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24

Acting like a jerk

So, it looks like rioting along Ste-Catherine street is now to be expected after every playoff series win. When did that become the norm?

The first time that rioting happened in victory was following the 1986 Stanley Cup win by Montreal. It happened again in 1993. I guess this means that we can no longer call it exceptional.

I hadn’t planned on talking about riots, but in today’s Métro column I discuss social disinhibition. I give some examples of how we can act like jerks when we are anonymous and there is no mechanism to reign in our urges. A riot is a perfect example of this. I doubt if...

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Posted on 22 Apr 2008
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Pants on fire!

As a parent, if there is one thing I really, really hate, it is when my kids lie to me. Yet I remember lying to my parents hundreds of times when I was young. In fact, I still lie to my mother all the time even though I consider myself an extremely honest man.

When my mother asks me how the kids are, I always say, “Fine,” even when one of them has a bad cold. I figure it is easier to do so than to get a lecture about how I should bundle them up when they go outside. I also get to hear her theory about how the constantly changing weather conditions make us sick, followed by her insistence...

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Posted on 13 Apr 2008
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The hard worker and the smart worker

I am in a fairly unique position at the Douglas. I’m a manager, yet I have no actual staff. My role is that of providing professional development. The professionals work directly for their programs instead of for the psychology department. What this implies is that both staff and management feel equally comfortable talking to me about the other group.

Managers complain to me about their employees and staff complain to me about their managers. As in all arguments, they both have valid points. I try to be supportive and usually people walk away thinking that I am on their side. Of course, in...

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Posted on 31 Mar 2008
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21

The paradox of anxiety

Anxiety is a very easy to understand. When we are confronted with a danger, we feel anxiety. This anxiety then pushes us to protect ourselves by either fighting against the danger or by running away from it. Very simple. But what happens if you are afraid of being anxious? Where do you run or how do you fight?

While not pleasant, anxiety goes away when we are once again safe (for ex., if you are a passenger in a car driven by a reckless speed demon, you will feel MUCH calmer when safe at home). This is normal. Problem anxiety, on the other hand, occurs when we fear our own anxiety instead...

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Posted on 15 Mar 2008
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Gambling on our self-control

Hi folks,

I didn’t add a post last week because I did not want to take the focus off Randy Pausch’s lecture.

It was also an emotional week for me. My cousin Sam died. He was a great man. The Pausch lecture said so much about how to live one’s life to the fullest (as did Sam) that I wanted to leave it front and center for a little while longer.

Now back to less existential matters.

In this week’s post, I am quoting my last Metro column entitled, “I bet you won’t read this.” It is an editorial on government sponsored gambling.

It seems that we can’t get away from the marketing of games of...

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Posted on 03 Mar 2008
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21

A great attitude…a great life

A friend of mine sent me a link to a site that she thought I might like (especially since I wrote a post on a similar topic on October 29, 2007). It is a video of a lecture given at Carnegie Mellon University given by Dr. Randy Pausch, a professor who has only a few months left to live. On YouTube, there is also a ten minute version of the lecture that he reprised on Oprah, but it lacks the punch of the full-length version that I am including here.

It is 76 minutes long and there are lots of sections in it that talk about academia, (a subject that I am familiar with but which might not...

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Posted on 19 Feb 2008
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