The Time Manager® Overview Philosophy
Every person needs overview, structure and the feeling of being in control. This is a necessary prerequisite for maintaining high levels of achievement and energy, for avoiding stress and for using the brain's full capacity. Your brain will be overloaded if you are interrupted while working with something that requires serious concentration.
Your brain will also be overloaded if it is occupied with more than ten things at a time. For example if your desk (or computer desktop) is messy.
Should this overload continue the consequences can be serious. At worst your health and sense of well-being will suffer. At best you will have difficulty using the capacity of your brain to arrive at creative solutions to problems. You will suffer from "Flapsi Hapsi".
Flapsi Hapsi is a TMI expression to describe the state of a person whose brain has become overloaded or 'short-circuited'.
Many people are long-term victims of Flapsi Hapsi. They see all their future assignments at home and at work as an unstructured, disorganised mass of tasks. Large and small jobs are confused and entangled.
People often try to work methodically whilst surrounded by a muddle. Desks, drawers, filing cabinets, storage areas, and bookshelves are all in a mess. Piles of papers, bills, print-outs, magazines, meeting reports, jottings and notepads jostle for pride of place in the heap of distractions.
(Note also that the computer age has meant that while many may appear to have a 'clean desk' they have often simply transferred their old desk clutter onto their computer through the haphazard storage of data.)
As a result, the brain is constantly busy processing a number of unrelated details.
In this way it becomes impossible to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Much too is simply forgotten or overlooked. Things are done in an erratic order governed by the impulses bombarding the brain.
Flapsi Hapsi people find it hard to stick to deadlines. They lose all sense of perspective and overview. They are tired when they go to work and even more tired at the end of the day. They often take home extra work which makes them unpopular with the family. And if the work is not touched they develop a guilty conscience. Work priorities are set in the wrong way. These individuals see their job and workload as a large heap of pine needles. No wonder they never feel up to date and in control.