Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life Read Free

them to work late at least two times each week. 1
A lack of time management and discipline while working toward [financial] planners’ professional goals contributes to 63 percent of those surveyed facing obstacles regarding their health. There is a direct correlation between too much stress, deteriorating health and poor practice management. 2
Forty-eight percent of Americans feel that their lives have become more stressful in the past five years. About one-half of Americans say that stress has a negative impact on both theirpersonal and professional lives. About one-third (31 percent) of employed adults have difficulty managing work and family responsibilities. And over one third (35 percent) cite jobs interfering with their family or personal time as a significant source of stress. 3
In a Gallup poll, 80 percent of workers said they feel stress on the job, nearly half said they need help in learning how to manage stress and 42 percent said their coworkers need help coping with stress. Job stress can lead to several problems, including illness and injury for employees, as well as higher insurance costs and lost productivity for employers. 4
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 80 percent of our medical expenditures are now stress-related. 5
Seventy percent of employees work beyond scheduled time and on weekends; more than half cited “self-imposed pressure” as the reason. 6
    One specific category of disorganization or, to be precise, distraction has come to symbolize an era of divided attention: distracted driving. The Department of Transportation (DOT) has a special website dedicated to this problem (distraction.gov), in which readers are reminded about the perils of distracted driving, which is often thought of as just texting but also includes driving while talking on a cell phone, watching a video, reading a map or other behaviors that involve taking your eyes off the road or away from the safe operation of your vehicle.
    The scope, effects and consequences of distracted driving are sobering, according to statistics compiled by DOT:
Using a cell phone while driving, whether it’s hand-held or hands-free, delays a driver’s reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent. 7
Driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent. 8
Nearly six thousand people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted driver and more than half a million were injured. 9
The younger, inexperienced drivers under twenty years old have the highest proportion of distraction-related fatal crashes.
Drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves. 10
    Lest we assume, as many seem to do, that distracted driving is purely a problem of the young; teenagers and young adults who are checking their friends’ Facebook status while doing ninety miles per hour on the interstate, think again: almost half of adults who send text messages have sent them while driving, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center (the same study found that about one-third of sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds admitted that they had done the same). According to distraction.gov, half of all people in the United States admit to cell phone use while driving; one in every seven admit to sending cell phone text messages while driving. These are also folks who should know better: 65 percent of drivers with a higher education text or talk while driving.
    All in all, the distracted driving crisis—part of that larger Distraction Epidemic—seems to some a part of an even greater problem, suggesting that the human race has reached a point of information overload—or at least a point where we feel so overwhelmed by the demands of our lives that we would risk our lives for one more text or phone call. In 2010, The New York Times published a series of articles