Putting things on “pause”….. What are your “pause buttons”? I was on stage with Beverly Kaye this morning in Phoenix, and she mentioned a wonderful little trick that we all do, but probably not enough. She said, “What do you do to put the pause button on, so you can just stop and reflect about what you've been doing (like, this week) and what you want to be doing (like, next week)?” I reflected on what my own “pause buttons” were, and was heartened that I was able to come up with quite a few. A hot bath, pruning my trees, a nice dinner with my lady and friends, a good massage, a good movie, playing GO on my computer, to mention a few. These are real doing-nothing-with-a-vengeance kind of things that interrupt my patterns and give me very different kinds of zones to get into. I also do spiritual retreats at least once a year, sometimes more, and those are a biggee in this regard. My a-ha is that I could use more of that pause that refreshes during my weekly review, or perhaps once a month, that's neither a completely think-of-nothing space nor a totally operational kind of debrief like my weekly review. Writing in my journal comes close to what I think I need more of, but it's still not exactly what I saw I could use. There's still a place to develop for myself for a kind of self-reflection about how things are going…perhaps mapping to what I consider “20,000-ft” thinking – the checklist of areas of focus and interest in life and work. Hmmm. And I teach this stuff…! … [David Allen]