vsbabu.org

Managing time and stress

Stress is anything that disturbs your healthy mental or physical well being. Isolation, overwork and poor time management all breed stress. Here are some guidelines to make it a little easier on yourself. [link]

It is a really good article with very valid and potent points. I’m home today with cold and cough. This article was emailed to my team by my boss. It made me think a bit and I must admit that my thought process went a bit astray.

"Doctors define stress as anything that disturbs your healthy mental or physical well being. Isolation, overwork and poor time management all breed stress. Having trouble getting motivated? Chances are you are stressed out. Or maybe you can’t handle setbacks? That’s stress!"

I had the misfortune to sit through a day long diversity training 2 months ago. I’d be really interested to see a debate between the author and the diversity expert. Might go something like this:

Author: Most of your problems can be traced to ineffective stress management.
Diversity: No. All your problems are because of diversity.
Author: What? Are we talking about the same thing here?
Diversity: I know what I’m talking about. In fact I’ve talked about this at many places including... (big list omitted for brevity and carpal tunnel syndrome).
Author: Hmmm. I’m an analyst trying to help people.
Diversity: You don’t know what you are doing.
Author: Enlighten me please.
Diversity: DKDK
Author: Excuse me?
Diversity: IK, IKIK, IKYDK, YDKDK... (can be roughly translated to "I know, I know I know, I know you don’t know, You don’t know you don’t know". Some thing like Bernard Shaw’s "An onion is an onion is an..." - you get the idea.)
Author: Excuse me please? I don’t quite follow this.
Diversity: Aha! See, this is what I was talking about. Your problem and the problem of people whom you are trying to help are all because of DKDK. Good thing is that you agreed now that you don’t know.
Author: Ok, now I’m getting stressed.

Now that I think about it, I’m getting stressed too - must be experiencing delirium 'coz of fever. I’ll just go back to my sick bed and wait for the proverbial carpenter to come by to fix all the problems in this world with a hammer

I’m not making this up. The expert actually said that he can explain all the problems in this world (including middle-east issue, Roman Catholic Church scandal, Osama bin Laden’s attitude etc) because the parties involved suffer from DKDK (They Don’t Know they Don’t Know). This went to the extent where he proclaimed that 9/11 attacks were long anticipated by the community of diversity experts - I guess we can dismantle CIA, FBI etc. and substitute it with a set of analysts who can explain every thing after it has happened.