Instead, it’s just the silence of the empty consumerism and fame we all follow. And it’s easy to say money rules the world, but money is just an avenue to status and division. Hell, when middle income earners need an Asian nanny to raise their kids because they are either too busy, not capable, rather uncaring, and just plain interested in the status of a career, modern life isn’t long for this world. Division of mother and child is the death blow.

And that sucks! Yet the chatter of endless emails, calls and forms silence us all to do anything about it.

Multitasking can create such a bad mental state. Have you spoken to someone on the phone and you know they are not really listening? Maybe doing email?

Don’t get me wrong, I am also guilty of that sometimes but I try and turn away from my computer when I take a call. It’s about having a quality chat with someone rather than not thinking about what you are saying.

In terms of learning from an early age we are not given the right focus. Making money is never taught even in a business studies course. We figure that out usually in middle age when its too late.

Talking of time management, how much work do we all get through on that last before we go on a holiday? If we worked like that every day we could work a two day week.

The result was virtually no one ended up where they had planned to go. Even those who did got there through a combination of luck, timing, and serendipity, rather than by following their careful plans. And yet every book on career planning I’ve seen advocates some variant of figuring out where you want to be in five years and making a plan out of that. Empirically, I don’t believe that works (I do believe there are systematic things you can do to increase the chances you’ll end up somewhere interesting, I just don’t think you can predict where that will be or how you’ll get there in advance).

Here in America, we’re also saturated with a couple hundred billion dollars’ worth of advertising a year telling us that the route to happiness is by being cool, fashionable, owning the latest stuff, etc. Of course they say such things because they’re in the business of selling all that stuff. But that’s just simply wrong. The route to happiness has far more to do with having strong relationships and community, doing good for others, and learning not to sweat the small stuff.

Learning outdated material could be a large issue holding back the youth, as it is like learning how to use AltaVista search when Google advanced search is where the time should be spent nowadays. Your book examples, plus what I have seen written around, do agree that a lot is either wrongly taught or taught by example that isn’t fruitful, like in Debi’s comment about news stations packing so much information on screen that we get even less out of their show.

That point about there not being enough time, and then having saved time filled in with more garbage, is a great response to those who say they don’t have enough of it. I’ve done that where I’ve saved time and then tossed away, and it sure didn’t make sense. I would now rather save time and spend it sitting there thinking than put it into some wasteful activity.

I cut out multitasking from my routine when I saw that the short-term feeling of getting so much done was just a feeling, and wasn’t supported with actual results that come from doing the right things well.

Thanks for this relevant discussion.