By Martin Vogel
The charity, Mind, is running a campaign on mental health at work.
It’s offering resources to help employees manage stress at work. Mind emphasises the need to recognise when you are feeling and stress and your ability to take action about it, however small. In most jobs, one has some autonomy to manage things without reference to anyone else; making the most of this gives you some sense of control and helps you to stop feeling the victim of other people’s demands.
By Martin Vogel
This week I’ve been refreshing my GTD system: reviewing my horizons of focus, tidying up my project lists, and emptying my collection baskets.
If that doesn’t mean anything to you, perhaps it’s time you were inculcated to the cult of Getting Things Done – a book on how to organise yourself and manage all the stuff in your life with the minimum of stress.
Getting Things Done, by David Allen, must be one of the most blogged about of books so I hesitate to add to the cacophony. But, since I find myself recommending it to clients with increasing frequency, I feel a need to explain its particular appeal to me.
David Allen’s great achievement in my opinion was to notice the kind of things we tend to do all the time, when trying to process and get through the cascade of responsibilities that we all face, and order them into a set of routines which, if adhered to, remove much of the friction around being productive. Instead of prescribing a time management system which tries to slot your work into rigid structures of prioritisation, GTD – as it’s known to its friends – offers a more natural, fluid process of keeping track of your commitments and following your energy in deciding what needs to be done.
By Martin Vogel
A year ago this week, I was listening to a radio programme which made such an impression on me that my thoughts have returned to it many times since. It was a 30-minute essay by the BBC reporter, Alan Johnston, in which he described his experience of being kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza. He’d been seized by Palestinian militants in March 2007, and held for nearly four months.
As a BBC employee at the time, and a former journalist, I’d naturally taken a great interest in his story and shared the relief and joy that coursed through the organisation when he was released. I didn’t know Alan Johnston personally, but recognised the integrity and courage of his journalism. In describing his ordeal, he showed characteristic decency as his narrative combined understanding of his tormentors with great insight into his personal condition.
By Martin Vogel
As part of my continuance professional development as a coach, I try to immerse myself in the psychological perspectives that inform the profession. But recently I’ve turned as much to philosophical and social theory to make sense of the challenges that people face in their lives. So it was with some interest that I found Julian Baggini writing in The Guardian this week on the contribution philosophy can make to helping us live well.
Baggini was reviewing a new series of books – called The Art of Living – which aims to give the general reader an overview of philosophical insights into our age. He finds that the books’ authors have interesting and thought-provoking things to say about such subjects as illness, hunger or even fashion. But they tend to reach conclusions that others commonly reach without recourse to the likes of Aristotle or Heidegger.
By Martin Vogel
Book review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit writes non-fiction as if it were a work of poetry. A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The meaning of these experiences – the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing – is different today than it was in the past. 19th century travellers thought nothing of being off course for days at a time; for us, anxiety sets in within minutes of losing our way. People had the skills to navigate the natural landscape and with this came a sense of optimism about their ability to find their way and survive. Today, even those who walk in the wilderness lack this familiarity with the landscape and rely on mobile phones to get them out of trouble.
For Rebecca Solnit, to live this way is to miss something of the very essence of life: “Never to get lost is not to live.” Indeed, her theme is less the hazards of getting lost and more a hymn to losing oneself – the life of discovery that comes with living with uncertainty.
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