Short Post About Short Emails

The Puumaja Crew loves this. How many of us have overflowing inboxes that we can't possibly attend to as adequately as we would like to or even at all adequately say 'aye'! The Puumaja certainly does and we don't even work in the conventional sense of the word.

So the premise here is, keep your email responses to a maximum of two sentences (or three, or four, or five but no more). That way you treat email more like SMS messaging rather than a vortex that sucks you in all day long, preventing you from actually doing anything. There's nothing that can't be said in that amount of space.

Not an excuse for poor punctuation, grammar, spelling, or etiquette, that can be just as grating as a Joycean stream of consciousness on a Monday morning, just keep it simple.

Should Friday Be Abolished?

We hear a chorus of 'a thousand times no' or words to that effect, but anyway, there's a genuine case to be made I believe.

The Puumaja isn't just making this assertion because we work from home, and so Friday doesn't have the resonance that it once did. There's something irksome about the wastefulness of it, in our view. From the air of anticipation first thing on a Friday morning, possibly even starting on Thursday evening, to the mandatory, hysterical "let's get to the pub at 5pm and stay there all evening", at least in the UK, and amongst emigre brits wherever they may be found, thus wiping out much of Saturday as well, to the 'novelty' of 'dress down Friday' to the general attitude of " let's just not do anything", which can be found all over the world I expect, Friday is really a huge vortex placed towards the end of the week (but not quite) which simply sucks all productivity from the remaining days into it and spits it out somewhere in the middle of the dark ages.

We think the muslims have got it right in simply making Friday a holy day in which you should just spend all day hanging round at the mosque, doing nothing concrete, since that's what everyone does anyway (bar the praying).

The fact remains, Friday promises so much and yet can never deliver. Even if you steer clear of a hangover (in which case you didn't drink enough and the night out turned out to be a bit flat) we don't believe that anyone can honestly look back and say "yes, all that was worthwhile" when all they did was that four hours trip to the country in the pouring rain at the end of which they just crashed out and fell asleep, or settled down with a lukewarm and overpriced takeaway curry for that that 25 minute long comedy slot which just ain't as funny as it used to be. In any case it's only two days away from Sunday, so you might as well start looking backwards to that, as much as start looking forward to Friday some time around Wednesday lunchtime.

So what to do with it, there are after all seven days in the week. The etymology of the name may give us an idea. We understand it refers to an ancient nordic goddess called, amongst other things, Frigg, presumably hence all the frigging around that goes on on the day, who had some kind of fertility cult associated with her. So that's what we should be doing really. It's the day of procreating! Who can oppose that? And procreating is of course, well, productive, so it would be in keeping with the idea that productivity levels should in fact be through the roof on the fifth day.

In any event the Puumaja is aiming to have one hell of a productive day tomorrow, starting early, and getting things done and, even if there's no procreating as such the attitude change should be for the best.

The Kiyosaki 401(k) Knell..

The first and possibly last time I'll ever post a link to yahoo! finance, and it's not even particularly relevant unless you're in the states, but it's a good article, in my humble, from the ultimate economic doom-monger (problem is he may well be right) Robert Kiyosaki.

Throw a Bigger Rock - Walt Gleeson

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Aaron... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt Gleeson is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. With a career spanning over half a decade, he has enthralled readers all over the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Hawaii to Rhode Island, with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You and Become a Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet. Here, Walt expands and improves upon an old teaching by synergizing it with his own native Nebraska wit, to bring it up to date for the i-Wap generation.

You know one of the  greatest personal motivators of all time, at least until the twentieth century, Jesus Christ reportedly said 'let he who cast the first stone have a bigger one thrown back at them', in a story which only appears in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and even then might be a later addition, probably by schoolboys in the Greek lessons in nineteenth-century public school Britain. But nevertheless he was an important spiritual teacher and I happen to agree with him on this. But I'd like to add something more to it.

Throughout the last few decades we've seen a lot of upheaval and destruction directed toward us. The war on terror, Eye-rack, Uzbekistan, El Garagua and the confusions in Western Ireland to name but five of them. But through it all one truth has remained steady, that of sticking up for yourself and throwing back a bigger rock at your opponent. But I say, why wait for someone to cast a stone? Why not just chuck a big rock at your problems straight  off the bat?

Let me example-ize for you. Supposing you're a guy, 22 years old who's been working a few years and is afraid he's already past it. The boss has only given a small pay rise, the corner cafe has stopped serving those delicious lattes you used to treat yourself to every half hour, Shelby have brought out a new model which makes yours now obsolete and looking like something from the "wacky races", and with the 401k situation looking more and more direr and direr by the year, your retirement years are looking pretty bleak.
But stop, wait! Throw a rock at it - now I'm not just talkin' any old run-of-the-mill housebrick, that'd be too easy; I want you to find the biggest rock in the yard that you can possibly pick up, and just pitch it there and then at your problems. You'll find it immensely empowering how they seem to melt right away, a feeling of serenity will descend on you for the rest of your life and noone will think you're a lunatic.

Then carry that rock round with you in your pocket to remind you of everything that you have to express aggression towards, and pull it out of your pocket at regular intervals in case you forget again.

Walt.

Small Change is Just That - Seth's Blog

Another great post from the inactively-folicled one, which kind of echoes something which he (and consequently I) had posted on a couple of days ago, that of fearing things which ain't actually going to come to pass anyway.

He homes in this time on something which I've increasingly come to realize is bollocks, that of fretting over tiny little bits and pieces of money, easy to do, rather than, for want of a less grating phrase, getting the bigger picture. In other words, that old 'catch the pennies..' myth. If that is all you do, then pennies is all you are likely to get (and nowadays they're presumably worth even less in real terms than when this old adage was not so old).

He even, in an assertion that I can only sit back and admire, makes the claim that money worries are merely the lizard brain in action (see this post for more on that).

So if one can stop running on lizard power and/or behaving like a hoary old puritanical maid during rationing times, maybe this so-called crisis would up sticks and f*ck off.

Easy to say. Harder to implement. But then the truth often is.

Top Financial Tip for Today

What does the Puumaja crew know about personal finances? Pretty close on absolute zero, so that puts us in good company with the lions' share of so-called financial experts you get on yahoo, the UK media and TV shows with titles like 'Business Brunch' or some such...

..so with that disclaimer out the way take or leave this or do with it what you will, but I read today that if you're investing in equities and bonds (which I wouldn't bother with myself, just sticking to something real like gold and silver and, er, real estate) you should invest your age (as a percentage) in bonds and the rest in equities, unless you like fast living. So, if you're ten, you should invest 10 per cent in Government bonds or even company-issued ones (make sure they carry the 'investment grade' tag, if they're in the UK) and the remaining 90 you can piss up the wall trying to 'beat' the markets.

The Puumaja, being about 100 years old, will be sticking stolidly to bonds then.

(source: "Smarter Investing", Tim Hale, 2nd Ed 2009, Prentice Hall, pp 39-40)

Your Most Vivid Fears Virtually Never Come True - Seth's Blog

My older brother posted a very short post which I'm cheekily gonna expand on for once, rather than post a very short precis of what he wrote...

...He essentially says that we always attend to the people/situations/organizations that scream at us the most - at the price of neglecting those things most important to us, that will actually move us along.

I know I do this. Someone calls with an urgent job, a request to cover for them, or a bill reminder comes in and instead of saying, in the nicest possible way "screw ya, I'm going to spend the afternoon researching a field I'm interested in", or brainstorming this or that idea, or even just reading a book or going for a walk,mass panic sets in we fall in line like lemmings (do they fall in line? I know it's a myth that they commit mass suicide. Oh well,we  unthinkingly fall into line anyway).

Noone wants to be the worm that turns, the one that doesn't do what everyone else is doing and runs the risk of all the vivid shock horror images people have of being buried in a pauper's grave as a penalty for standing up for themselves. It's the mentality that keeps people in a shitty job earning a pittance and going nowhere, forever attending to 'urgent' matters, failure in which will result in sure death.
 
I should know I was one of the lemmings myself once. So give yourself a break. Literally if need be. Just remember all those fears of plane/car crashes, financial ruin, murder, disastrously failed relationships etc., whilst they can happen, very rarely do so, and shouldn't be a reason for you to destory your own life every bit as much (only in a much more protracted way) as those catastophes would. In fact those that believe int he law of attraction (don't think that includes Seth but I can't be sure) would have it that it's solely the relentless thrashing of self with these bogie stories that ends up in them becoming reality.

Not sure this is exactly what Seth meant but I've enjoyed running with the ball for once..

Britain Wins a Gold in the Winter Olypmics!..

..I still hang my head in shame and colour up to the extent that I don't need to worry about winter heating whenever I think of that ski jumper...but at last there's something to be genuinely, if not proud of, reassured by.
Despite having no winter to speak of (although I gather this year was an exception) and a multiplicity of better things to do than stand around in the cold watching a couple of square jawed, android like and seemingly  utterly humourless men/women move around on snow and ice, "we" have bagged a gold in the winter olympics, and it's only a few days in!
So well done, Amy Williams, who managed to beat a load of the aforementioned nordic types and/or local Canadians in the alarmingly-named skeleton event, to bag Britain's first gold in the games in 30 years!
Actually I don't know why I'm coming out with this 'we' and 'us' stuff, when I'd normally disapprove of such misplaced jingoism (can jingoism ever be 'placed'? I don't know), given that I (and you) had absolutely nothing to do with her success or otherwise. Reminds me of a sketch I like..