ÖreDev Day 1 - Accomplishing more by doing less

· November 2, 2009

I am at my first conference since 2000. My good times flies, then it was .NET launch and I was very envious of the people getting to try it out since I was stuck in a never ending VB6 Com+ assignment. Well, here we are - 2009 and ÖreDev.

The first day for me was spent with a single session that took the whole day. I didn’t know to much about it and simple went to it since the title was so alluring - Accomplishing more by doing less, with Marc Lesser (taken name?). Who can miss out on such a offering.

Well, as expected I guess, the content wasn’t so much on thing to do, that would only have added to the burden of things to do. But rather it was about doing less of some thing, namely:

  • Fear - here we talked a lot about why we fear stuff like time, not being seen etc. Also the antidote is to be generous which I think sounds very nice. Being generous with your attention, your joy etc.
  • Assumptions - we stopped for a while and pondered the false assumptions that we often bring to a situation. Also we did an excellent exercise in which we looped and dipped. looping is simple retell a story and see how it was received / interpreted. Dipping is talking about your emotions surrounding the story and story telling.
  • Distractions - how many thing that distracts us. Especially in the social media tsunami of today. We learned that successful people have their priorities in order and act on them. Be present and reduce your Work In Progress was other lessons learned. I mentioned Pomodoro as a great technique to manage distractions.
  • Resistance - actually we didn’t get into this one at all…
  • Busyness - we all want to look busy. But why? A thought was thrown out that it had to do with fear of life being short. If we are busy we think that we get the most out of it… But we would be wrong - we don’t have time to see that life is passing…

The lecture was Marc Lesser and he brought a real calmness and ease to the session. Starting with 30 minutes meditation will maybe do that.

Although I, as a Christian, don’t agree on everything surrounding the spiritual part of Zen - I still got a lot out of the session. I of course cannot describe all of it here - but I will take with me to start to be more present and be generous with my attention.

Thank you Marc, for a great day.

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