Day 15: Your Life Is Spiraling Out Of Control—Here’s How To Fix It

Are you someone who works best under pressure or thrives in a stressful situation?

Do you take pride in your great multi-tasking abilities?

Do you find yourself surrounded with drama queens or people just like you who run full throttle until they puke?

Most important, are you someone who avoids pain or disappointment by “getting busy?”

If you find yourself rushing around with a packed schedule, glued to your phone or email (or both!), filling empty time slots with activities to keep you constantly moving, then not only do your fit the bill of a modern day urgency junkie, you are slowly killing your soul, draining your creative potential and taking years off your life. Read the Rest of This Article »

Day 80:How to Get Ahead (And Never Fall Behind)

Imagine that you’re on vacation. This couple told you about an awesome little spot. While they give you a general idea of where it is, the directions are vague and you’re completely unfamiliar with the area. How likely is it that you’d be able to find the place without a map of some kind?

Probably not very.

Yet many of us erroneously feel that we should be able to achieve our goals without making a plan or “map” of some sort to keep us on track. Trying to achieve goals without writing them down is a sure way to get lost along the way, or worse, never getting to where we need to be.

Identify your destination & map your route

When you’re looking at a map, you look first at where you want to go, right? Then you chart your course from your current location. The same is true for goal-setting. Begin with the end in mind and work your way back to the start, writing down the necessary steps to fulfill your goal. (I’ll get to benchmarks in a bit.)

Map alternate routes

Identifying potential obstacles ahead of time is a great way to be prepared when they crop up. And something always seems to pop up, right? Identify things which can go wrong and either prepare for them in advance, or compile a list of people who can help you, if needed. Having a team of people on the standby can be a life-saver when disaster strikes close to deadline.

Set benchmarks

You will find that staying on path, or even ahead of the game, is much easier when you give yourself benchmarks to ensure that you’re making adequate progress towards your goal. In fact, these benchmarks can help spur you on, as many of us are naturally inclined to work harder when we are able to set our sights towards specific, attainable goals.

The converse is true as well; in the face of vague or overwhelming goals, it’s difficult for most of us to maintain our motivation and assess our progress.

How to set benchmarks

Remember those steps you wrote down? Take those steps and break them down into actionable, manageable, logical goals.
You will also need to know the deadline for completion or set one yourself if working on a self-directed project. Be sure to be reasonable and don’t push yourself too hard or allow too much ‘just in case’ room as neither lends itself to working efficiently and effectively.

These are a couple of ways to set benchmarks:
    Have a specific day every week where you will check on your progress and list the things that you expect to have done by that date.
    Decide on a completion date for each individual task.

Either will work and it might be beneficial to try both out and see which works best for you.

The beauty of benchmarks

The absolutely gorgeous thing about benchmarks is that they naturally appeal to the competitive streaks that many of us have.
At the same time, by breaking the project down into manageable pieces, it’s possible to make real progress and meet those benchmarks without getting frustrated or discouraged.

Keeping yourself accountable to smaller benchmarks helps ensure that you’ll never fall too far behind that you can’t catch up in a reasonable period of time.
By setting each benchmark a bit in advance of when it absolutely needs to be done, you can actually get ahead in a project and allow yourself a bit of wiggle room for disasters.

Many people find it helpful to make some sort of visual representation of their benchmarks, such as a time-line, so that they can see at a glance how much they’ve achieved. Some people also find mind-maps help them in the goal-setting process.

Keep your pace

When you set tangible goals, and prepare for setbacks, it’s far easier to stay the course and keep motivated. Knowing where you are in the process at anytime also helps you when deciding whether to begin new projects. When you have a map, it takes emotion out of the decision-making process and allows you to reach your goals without falling behind.

Tracy O’Connor blogs about ghostwriting and blogs about living a better life. Follow her on Twitter

5 Motivational Tips to Get You Through the Day

Photo Credit: The Pirata

Your motivation is what pushed you to succeed and determines to a large degree if you are going to succeed or fail. But even the most motivated person needs a little extra help sometimes.

When the going gets tough these 5 tips can help you turn the day around and get you back on track.

Getting out of a cold streak
 I recall using these techniques with one of my salesmen; he was having a really bad week and was on the verge of just giving up, working just meant another rejection anyway.

At the beginning of the month we had set the goal that he was going to make two sales a week and agreed upon a very nice reward if he made it.

He was still motivated, as he really wanted the reward, but just couldn’t focus and get hungry about his work.

We went through these 5 tips (I will share the results with you below): Read the Rest of This Article »

5 Ways Timers Can Help You Be More Productive

Do you feel as though your work, studying or chores always end up taking too long? Do you feel as though you could be more effective if only you could stay on task?

Maybe you’re convinced it’s a question of will power, or organization, or motivation. The solution, though, might be very simple.

One of the easiest ways to get dramatic improvements in your productivity is to use a timer. You can grab the one from your kitchen, use the alarm on your phone, or try one of the popular free online timers like e.ggtimer.com or Tick Tock Timer.

When you’ve got a timing ticking away, you’ll suddenly discover a new sense of focus which you never knew you had. Here are five specific ways in which your timer will help: Read the Rest of This Article »

Why You Should Work Smart Not Hard: 4 Ways To Do It

We’re often told that hard work gets us ahead. That’s true to an extent – if you put effort and focus into something, you’re going to achieve more than if you go at it in a half-hearted way. But it’s all too easy to get sucked into working long hours, ticking tasks off a list, without being all that effective or successful.

Instead of just working hard – putting in lots of hours – look for ways to work smart.

Why? Read the Rest of This Article »

10 Life Lessons Learned in Grade School

Grade school was an impressionable time for everyone. It’s when we became immersed into a mini-society, learning valuable life lessons that have remained through adulthood. If you think about it, many comparisons can be made between life in grade school and life in the real world. For example, back then, we had to learn to coexist with our peers – for better or for worse. And for many, it has proven to be a never-ending learning process; though you’re hopefully better at it now than you were as an 8-year-old. Here are a few life lessons we learned during that fun yet trying time, when the world was fresh and we were a bit more resilient.

• Pay attention
  When you’re a kid and possess the attention span of a fruit fly, paying attention isn’t the easiest of tasks. This was especially the case when you first entered elementary school. No longer was there naptime or extended periods of time to expend your massive amounts of energy – recess wasn’t nearly long enough. In junior high, the opposite sex served as a constant distraction – if not an obsession. Read the Rest of This Article »

The Key To An Effortless Life

A few months ago I had a toothache and so I went to see a dentist. He had a look at the problem and then knocked off a bit of my tooth and smoothed the rough edge down. I can feel it now as I’m writing this. He told me that he could try to build the tooth back up, but that a basic rule of dentistry is that removal strengthens and addition weakens.

I am not a Buddhist and I don’t know much about Buddhism. But one thing I know – and I think it’s probably all I need or care to know – is that Buddhism teaches a simple truth: suffering comes from attachment, and the end of attachment is the end of suffering. So whenever you can feel yourself feeling bad, you know you’ve become attached to something. Something matters to you.

There is no end to the list of things you can be attached to, no end to the things that can matter to you, things that you care about, things that have meaning for you. People sometimes talk about the ‘meaning of life’ – in the Buddhist view, meaning means suffering. So the way to stop suffering is to relinquish meaning. Let it go. Surrender. Read the Rest of This Article »

4 Things You Must Do To Get Things Done!

Getting things done is a topic of many websites out there these days, and they all say different things.  How is a person supposed to get anything done when there are so many sites to read on how to get things done?!?  I don’t subscribe to any specific guru out there, but here are a few ways that I have stayed productive for the last several years.  These methods might not be ground breaking, but they work for me, and I think they will work for you too.

Create Small Lists

I take an 8 1/2×11 sheet of paper and fold it in half three times, and use one side to make my list.  This accomplishes a few things.  First it keeps my list short, which requires me to only put my high priority items on the list.  Second, I can carry it around with me easily during the day so I can mark things off of the list.  This is very motivating.  Finally it saves paper; I just refold it for the next list!  Keeping a small list makes the to-do list less overwhelming and more manageable. Read the Rest of This Article »

How to Deny the Devil of Procrastination

A couple of days ago, sadly, shockingly, one of my dear friends took her own life. I will miss her largely, and will treasure her joy, laughter, incredible energy, savory jokes, smile, and her love of people. She was a special jewel, and I hope she knows how special she was, even in her afterlife.

When these unforgettable and unexpected events occur in life, I struggle to understand “the lesson.” I believe that my girlfriend is in a more peaceful place, so the lesson is really for me.

My friend was on a roll. But it wasn’t a good roll; it was a downward roll, worsened by procrastination. There were other things involved of course, but I feel that the “devil of procrastination” ultimately took her down. Others may say it was “finances,” or “depression,” but I think her finances could have been mended and the depression would have lifted, had procrastination not been running amuck. It all snowballed and grew into the ultimate procrastination…the procrastination of living, and then…the end of her life. Read the Rest of This Article »

5 Ways To Escape Overwhelm

Ever had one of those days when you’ve got such a ridiculous amount of stuff to do that even the idea of unpacking the groceries makes you feel frazzled and teary? When you frantically flit from task to task, never quite completing anything and in most cases not really doing anything useful at all? When by night-time it’s hard to escape the somewhat depressing fact that although you’ve been stupidly busy all day you’ve actually accomplished precisely zip? Read the Rest of This Article »

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