Three Ways to Stop Procrastination

Procrastination may feel like the human condition, but it doesn’t have to. To get out of your own way and increase your productivity, try these three tactics:

• Set deadlines. Create a schedule with clear due dates for each task. Remind yourself by using visual cues: Set reminders in your calendar, add items to your to-do list, or put a sticky note on your computer screen.
• Ask for help. Ask a trusted colleague to review your work. Knowing that she’s expecting it can spur you to get started.
• Change your mind-set. Stop thinking of yourself as a procrastinator. See yourself — and talk about yourself with others — as someone who gets things done.

Adapted from the Guide to Getting the Right Work Done.

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/10/19/three-ways-to-stop-procrastination/#ixzz2A2qshg00

Want to Read Faster? Stop Saying The Words in Your Head As You Read

When you read, do you hear the words in your mind or even subconsciously say them under your breath? Break this one habit, called subvocalization, and you can double or even triple your reading speed.

When you say the words as you read them, you can't read any faster than you can talk.

Spreeder, a web app that teaches speed reading, offers this tip to quiet the little voice in our heads that slows us down when we read: Keep your mouth occupied.

One simple way is to preoccupy your mouth. When you give your mouth something else to do while you read, you can disengage the speech mechanism in the brain, allowing what your read to go straight to your conscious awareness rather than being slowed down by your brain needing to figure out how to say the words first.

So chew some gum, hum, or eat lunch while reading and you may find yourself going through a ton of reading material like never before.

How to Read Faster by Eliminating Subvocalization | Spreeder

from Lifehackr (source)

A good analysis from Business Insider on unemployment rate

The best news for President Obama is that the unemployment rate has steadily fallen in an election year, and had a big drop today.

At a campaign event today, Mitt Romney sought to play down the significance of these numbers.

Buzzfeed has Romney's quote:

"The unemployment rate as you noted this year has come down very, very slowly, but it’s come down none the less. The reason it’s come down this year is primarily due to the fact that more and more people have just stopped looking for work. And if you just dropped out of the work force, if you just give up and say look I can’t go back to work I’m just going to stay home, if you just drop out all together why you’re not longer part of the employment statistics so it looks like unemployment is getting better, but the truth is, if the same share of people were participating in the workforce today as on the day the president got elected, our unemployment rate would be around 11 percent."

So is Romney correct?

Is the reason that unemployment has come down due to more and more people leaving the work force?

To answer this question, we first require a clear definition of how the unemployment is calculated.

Essentially, the unemployment rate is derived using the Civilian Employment Level (how many people have jobs) and the size of the Civilian Labor Force (how many people could have jobs).

Specifically to recreate the number we take the following equation: [1-(Civilian Employment/Civilian Labor Force]*100.

Here's a long-term chart of the above equation.

As you can see, the chart is identical to the actual chart of the Unemployment Rate:

Now that you know the two inputs, you know that there are two ways that the unemployment rate could fall: The total level of Civilian Employment could rise or the Civilian Labor Force could fall.

Romney is saying that the drop has mostly been about the latter, a fall in the Civilian Labor Force (the number of potential workers out there).

So how do we test Romney's theory?

Here you need to be introduced to the concept of the Labor Force Participation Rate.

The Labor Force Participation Rate is simply, the size of the Civilian Labor Force (number of potential workers) divided by the Civilian Population.

A chart of that looks like this.

FRED

Just to confirm that this is indeed the Labor Force Participation Rate, here's a straight up chart of that number.

So to judge Romney we have to ask the question: If the participation rate were the same today as it was at the beginning of the year, what would the unemployment rate look like?

So let's work backwards.

Here's a year-to-date chart of the participation rate. It has fallen from 64% last December to 63.6% today.

So, if the Civilian Participation Rate were still 64% today, to derive what the Civilian Labor Force would be today, we'd take 0.64 and multiply by that by today's Civilian Population.

The Civilian Population today is 243.772 million. That times 0.64 is 156.014 million. That would be the size of the Civilian Labor Force today if the participation rate were still where it was after the December jobs report.

Now as we showed above, to figure out the unemployment rate we have to go back and find the current size of the Civilian Employment Level.

According to today's report, the Civilian Employment Level is 142.974 million.

The unemployment rate is thus [1-(142.974/156.014)]*100. That works out to 8.35 or 8.35%.

In other words, if the Civilian Participation Rate had stayed constant this year, today's level of employment would translate to 8.35% unemployment.

Last December's unemployment rate was 8.5%.

So Romney said specifically:

The reason it’s come down this year is primarily due to the fact that more and more people have just stopped looking for work

The above analysis shows he's correct. Whereas the headline unemployment rate has dropped from 8.5% to 7.8% this year, if there were the same number of people looking for work today, as there were in December 2011, the unemployment rate would have only dropped from 8.5% to 8.35% today.

Now there is one more catch here, which is that there are two main reasons the Civilian Participation Rate can decline. One is discouragement (people just totally dropping out, going to live on a relative's couch, or something like that) and one is demographics, basically more people retiring. It's widely believed that the participation rate was always going to be on the down slope now, merely due to America's aging workforce, and more people going into retirement.

But that's a different debate, and either way, both technically fall into Romney's words: Both represent people who have stopped looking for work.

Two other quick things to note: One is that this has nothing to do with the latest September jobs data. In fact, the participation rate jumped up, and the payroll gains appear to be quite legitimate. Second of all, job creation has been part of it, so it's not ALL demographics.

But bottom line: At the level of today's Civilian Employment, if we still had the same potential size of the labor force as we did at the start of the year (which is what Romney is saying), the drop in the official Unemployment Rate would have been quite small.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-unemployment-rate-has-fallen-in-2012-2012-10#ixzz28UMVndJr

Words of Wisdom by the late Barton Biggs

I only recall meeting Barton Biggs once (via a Green room somewhere), but his legend preceded him.

This list of quotes (Thanks J!) should give you a solid basis as to his thought process and investment philosophy:

* “Good information, thoughtful analysis, quick but not impulsive reactions, and knowledge of the historic interaction between companies, sectors, countries, and asset classes under similar circumstances in the past are all important ingredients in getting the legendary ‘it’ right that we all strive so desperately for.”

* “[T]here are no relationships or equations that always work. Quantitatively based solutions and asset-allocation equations invariably fail as they are designed to capture what would have worked in the previous cycle whereas the next one remains a riddle wrapped in an enigma. The successful macro investor must be some magical mixture of an acute analyst, an investment scholar, a listener, a historian, a river boat gambler, and be a voracious reader.Reading is crucial. Charlie Munger, a great investor and a very sagacious old guy, said it best: ‘I have said that in my whole life, I have known no wise person, over a broad subject matter who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. Now I know all kinds of shrewd people who by staying within a narrow area do very well without reading. But investment is a broad area. So if you think you’re going to be good at it and not read all the time you have a different idea than I do.’”

* “[T]he investment process is only half the battle. The other weighty component is struggling with yourself, and immunizing yourself from the psychological effects of the swings of markets, career risk, the pressure of benchmarks, competition, and the loneliness of the long distance runner.”

* “I’ve come to believe a personal investment diary is a step in the right direction in coping with these pressures, in getting to know yourself and improving your investment behavior.”

* “As I reflect on this crisis period so stuffed with opportunity but also so full of pain and terror, I am struck with how hard it is to be an investor and a fiduciary.”

* “The history of the world is one of progress, and as a congenital optimist, I believe in equities. Fundamentally, in the long run, you want to be an owner, not a lender. However, you always have to bear in mind that this time truly may be different as Reinhart and Rogoff so eloquently preach. Remember the 1930s, Japan in the late 1990s, and then, of course, as Rogoff said once with a sly smile, there is that period of human history known as ‘The Dark Ages and it lasted three hundred years.’”

* “Mr. Market is a manic depressive with huge mood swings, and you should bet against him, not with him, particularly when he is raving.”

* “As investors, we also always have to be aware of our innate and very human tendency to be fighting the last war. We forget that Mr. Market is an ingenious sadist, and that he delights in torturing us in different ways.”

* “Buffett, a man, like me, who believes in America and the Tooth Fairy, presents the dilemma best. It’s as though you are in business with a partner who has a bi-polar personality. When your partner is deeply distressed, depressed, and in a dark mood and offers to sell his share of the business at a huge discount, you should buy it. When he is ebullient and optimistic and wants to buy your share from you at an exorbitant premium, you should oblige him. As usual, Buffett makes it sound easier than it is because measuring the level of intensity of the mood swings of your bipolar partner is far from an exact science.”

* “Fifty some years ago, Sir Alec Cairncross doodled it best:

A trend is a trend is a trend
But the question is, will it bend?
Will it alter its course
Through some unforeseen force
And come to a premature end?

* “Nations, institutions, and individuals always have had and still have a powerful tendency to prepare themselves to fight the last war.”

* “[W]hat’s the moral of this story? Know thyself and know thy foibles. Study the history of your emotions and your actions.”

* “At the extreme moments of fear and greed, the power of the daily price momentum and the mood and passions of ‘the crowd’ are tremendously important psychological influences on you. It takes a strong, self-confident, emotionally mature person to stand firm against disdain, mockery, and repudiation when the market itself seems to be absolutely confirming that you are both mad and wrong.”

* “Also, be obsessive in making sure your facts are right and that you haven’t missed or misunderstood something. Beware of committing to mechanistic investing rules such as stop-loss limits or other formulas. Work very hard to better understand how you as an investor react to both prosperity and adversity, and particularly to the market’s manic swings, both euphoric and traumatic. Keep an investment diary and re-read it from time to time but particularly at moments when there is tremendous exuberance and also panic. We are in a very emotional business, and any wisdom we can extract from our own experience is very valuable.”

* “Understanding the effect of emotion on your actions has never been more important than it is now. In the midst of this great financial and economic crisis that grips the world, Central Banks are printing money in one form or another. This makes our investment world even more prone to bubbles and panics than it has been in the past. Either plague can kill you.”

Why It Seems to Take Longer to Go to Work Than to Go Home

The journey from home to an office or any other destination feels longer than the return trip, according to a series of studies by Priya Raghubir, Vicki G. Morwitz, and Amitav Chakravarti of New York University. In one experiment with 127 undergraduates, for example, participants estimated that it took them an average of about 22 minutes to go from home to the classroom, but just 17 minutes to get back. The reason, the researchers suggest, may be that people mentally define the destination "home" as a relatively large area and unfamiliar destinations as relatively small.

The Three Don'ts of Persuasion

Persuading people to believe in your idea is a critical leadership skill. But too many managers don't know how. Here are three things to try next time you need to gain consensus or secure a deal:
Don't make the hard sell. Setting out a strong position at the start gives opponents something to fight. It's better to present your position with reserve, so you can adjust it if needed.
Don't resist compromise. Compromise is not surrender. People want to see that you are flexible enough to respond to their concerns and incorporate their perspectives.
Don't assume it's a one-shot deal. Persuasion is a process. You'll rarely arrive at a solution on the first try. Listen, test your position, and then refine it based on the group's input.