Constantly improving our skills is hard work, but the rewards are greater than the effort. Here's why training is important, and how you can get the best from it

One of the things I learned from practicing martial arts was the concept of training in order to do things better. This seems like common sense—of course we train to do things better—but what can easily happen is that we keep doing the same training over and again, expecting to get better, when what we need is not just training, but constant improvement in our training.

In the martial arts—especially in karate—this is done by structuring the training into a formal system that teaches the basics and then ever more complicated moves until the student acquires competency. Sometimes the movements being taught don't seem—to the student at least—to have anything to do with the other moves. But then the student learns a more complicated move and finds that one of the basic moves is needed to complete a more complicated sequence.

In Japanese, the moves are called kata, and mean literally "form". It's a way of keeping the student on his toes and ensuring he keeps moving forward. In some ways this relates to the concept of Kaizen—a concept used by Japanese companies (and now companies from many other countries) which teaches that small incremental improvements will eventually lead to a big improvement, or a market advantage.

Sounds good… But how can we use this in our self-development? More on Constant self-improvement

When we think of how to manage our time effectively we often think that we should try to get more done in the time available. This is missing one of the most simple and under-used time management skills

Human beings do like to complicate things. Even when the solution is apparent, many people will continue to do the opposite, even when they often repeat the solution to themselves every minute of the day.

What do I mean?

This…

We constantly find that we don't have time to do everything we need to get done. "I don't have the time…" is the sentence we repeat to ourselves almost like a mantra. In order to make time we try to organize our time more effectively, usually by doing things—or at least trying to do things-faster. Then when this approach fails we go back to looking at the list of things we need to do and banging our head against the wall as we try to squeeze more hours out of the day. More on A trick of time management

Getting down to work means getting down to work—with "work" being the operative word. Here's one of many elementary motivational strategies which show you how to get into the work quickly and start being productive without falling prey to window gazing.

One of the ways of getting more done is to jump into a project whenever you have some spare time and work on the project—even if you can do only a little. These short bursts of effort can make for substantial progress in a project and are an effective part of the time management arsenal. But what is often difficult—and this applies regardless of the time available—is actually getting "into" the work.

We know that once the work begins to flow, once we get into our stride, we can make a lot of progress. But just how do we get into our stride in the first place? We've all had the experience of sitting down to work in the morning, filled with good intentions, only to find ourselves staring at a blank sheet of paper for a few minutes… which stretches into another few minutes… and then after a bit of cursory doodling we find we've been at work for almost an hour and achieved nothing. More on How to be motivated to get down to work

You can't find opportunity if you go about with your eyes closed—or even just by looking straight ahead. If you want to find good ideas, you need to look around properly, and change the way you think…

There seems to be something about the way the human mind works that makes us see things in black and white. I don't mean we see things without color-which is true only if you're color blind—but that we often see things simply and don't want to accept the complexity of things. There's something to be said for keeping things simple. It can help us to get things done. But when it comes to finding and grasping opportunity, it can be a serious disadvantage.

The reason that human beings like to see things simply is that the human brain seems to seek patterns. Once it has found a pattern it makes the decision that the pattern explains how something works. Anything that doesn't fit into the pattern is then disregarded. It's the same with developing categories for things. We develop categories to sort things. After that anything that doesn't fit into a category is disregarded or placed into a category of "miscellaneous" because it doesn't "fit". More on Grasping opportunity by good thinking habits

The way the human mind works is filled with paradoxes. We think in order to solve problems, but then once the problems are solved we stop thinking about them because we feel there's no need to think about them any longer. We file the problem away in a drawer labeled "solved". It could be said that the whole reason we think about stuff is so that we can stop thinking about it. This can be a good thing… it also has its drawbacks

Computer technology is an amazing thing. Tasks which used to take up piles of brainpower can, with the help of a few processors smaller than the size of a thumb nail, be completed with the push of a few buttons. Take flying an aircraft. To get that huge piece of metal from one point of the globe to another takes hundreds of calculations regarding speed, altitude and direction. Years ago it would have required the full-time attentions of a pilot and navigator, armed with paper maps and keen eye, and, if the flight was a long one, a good supply of coffee, no doubt.

But no longer. Now the main job for the pilot and his crew is to get the plane up in the air and bring it down safely. Between those two tasks—each needing a high skill requirement, I'm sure—the crew can simply monitor the computer systems which keep the plane on course. Everyone has heard the name for this system. It's called autopilot. And we use it to describe the state of doing stuff without thinking. More on The thinking habit

We often think we have to wait until we have perfect knowledge before we make a start on something. We spend a lot of time studying, trying to discover exactly how things work before we get going. But often there's no need to know exactly how things work before we start something, because a lot of the time we only need to know which buttons to press.

We do this all the time in daily life. We press the ignition button on the car and know how to drive it without knowing a thing about how it works. And yet when we come to do other things in our life, we hold back from fear of the unknown. Look here to read an article which puts things in a different perspective: Knowing Enough To Get Things Done