Author Archives: teds
Author Archives: teds
Take 10 Minutes a Day to Reflect on Your Work-Life Balance
Some people believe that trying to balance their work and personal life takes too much effort and time. However, it only takes a small amount of time every day to reflect on your work to life ratio, and to recognize if there’s anything that you need to improve on in order to have a balanced lifestyle.
First off, look to see if you have your priorities set straight. If not, take some time to think about how you would re-prioritize the things in your life like travel, family, friends, and work.
Next, adjust your everyday schedule based on how you prioritize these things while being realistic with how many hours you’ll have to work to keep an income that will sustain you and your family’s needs.
Then, make sure there’s nothing that you’re suffering from that needs your undivided attention. This could be anything like health issues or serious family issues. Reflect on what you need to do to solve these issues, and take action depending on how important these things are to you.
You may feel like relaxing at home is difficult because you’re focused on your workload. Try making sure that your home is separate from your work life by having a set area for you to work and reserving the rest of your space for relaxation.
Also, you should be maintaining a clean home so that when you come back from work, you’re not worrying on having to tidy up and you can just focus on taking time for yourself and your family.
Reflect upon your personal life as well. Making sure that you maintain a good relationship with all of your friends and family members will make you feel much better about your work-life balance and will make life easier in terms of being able to relax and be happy when you’re off of work.
Taking time to realize areas of your life that need to be adjusted to benefit your happiness is key to maintaining a sustainable work-life balance. Once you realize things that could be fixed, make sure you don’t ignore the problems.
Change whatever you have to in order to adhere to your priorities and maintain happiness, even if it means sacrificing things like working over-time at work. Taking a little bit of time every day to reflect on your life and make a plan to follow the path that you need to in order to succeed is the way to make sure you’re maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Tap Into Your Creative Side for Success and Personal Satisfaction
At work, you want to be the best that you can be. To do this, you shouldn’t only follow the leader because you won’t stand out or be seen any differently than any of your co-workers.
You can do this by using your imagination to come up with innovative ideas that you can present to your boss and co-workers, making you be seen as a top performer in your workplace.
In order to let your creative side come out during work, at home you need to keep in touch with your imagination by expressing yourself through fun activities and artistic expression like listening to or making music, making art, or doing some creative writing like fiction.
These activities will not only help you express and grow your creative mind, but they will also provide stress relief through releasing endorphins. You can even express your creative mind at work by drawing on paper, doing virtual art, listening to music, or even writing fiction during your free time like your lunch break.
Before a meeting, try to think of some sort of idea that you could present to the group that could excite them and reflect positively upon you. Even if your idea isn’t innovative and amazing, you could try to think of a more efficient way to get the job done that both the group and your boss would most likely be open to.
When you’re presenting these ideas, make sure you remain serious about them. You don’t want to make yourself look like the laughing stock of the workplace by trying too hard to get attention lavished on you.
When you’re coming up with different plans, brainstorm and make sure that they would work before presenting them. By tapping into your creativity, you’ll feel more free and confident in your abilities to create and present information and ideas.
Don’t allow yourself to go through your whole life following someone else’s expectations for a path that they have set out for you. There are many ways to allow your creativity to flow, whether you express it through your work, clothes, or activities you do in your free time.
Even if you feel like you may not be good at art, music, or any other sort of creative activity you can always learn through classes or even YouTube videos. Showing your creative side through your work as a problem solver will show your boss what you’re capable of and will end up making you stand out, be seen as a top performer, and maybe even net you a higher salary!
The Biggest Problem with Achieving Success Is Not Enjoying It
Most people are taught from a young age to get a job that will make you lots of money so you can enjoy doing the things you love. But if you have a high stress job, even if it pays well, you’ll never get to enjoy the things that truly make you happy in life.
When you’re constantly working, you often sacrifice relationships. Working too much can cause you to not have time to spend with your family and friends. Make sure that you have a good balance of work and spending time with your loved ones when you can.
If you’re spending all of your time working, you won’t have time to do things that you enjoy. You need to make sure that you can have more of what makes you happy in life rather than what makes you the most money.
This could mean taking time to travel to places you’ve always wanted to go, or simply engaging in your hobbies such as gardening or cooking. The main cause of most people’s stress is their career.
Stress takes a toll on your health, and could cause things like severe migraines, chronic inflammation, or heart problems which could potentially land you in the hospital. Working a highly stressful job that takes up a large portion of your time is bound to cause your health to suffer.
Along with physical health problems, stress due to your career can also cause mental health issues. Stress can cause you to have severe panic attacks and develop long-term anxiety and depression.
You can ensure that you’re taking care of your mental health by taking time to focus on self-care - like meditating, reading a book, taking a bath, or any other stress-relieving activity.
Taking care of your personal life is just as, if not more important than working a high paying job, because you will have a much happier life. Money alone isn’t what makes people’s lives enjoyable.
It’s doing the things that they love, taking care of their health, and spending time with loved ones that makes life really worth living. Throwing away a chance at a happier lifestyle to earn more money isn’t worth it, because someday the memories will be much more important than how much money’s in your bank account.
You have to prioritize what’s important. Money will always be around. However, you and the people you love won’t, so make sure you’re taking care of your needs and spending time with your loved ones.
Could a New Job Deliver More in Terms of Personal Satisfaction?
Sometimes you follow a career path thinking that it’d be best for you in terms of happiness and income. However, after time, you could realize that your job choice is constricting your ability to be truly happy and stress-free.
The best way to combat this is to try to pursue a new career path. If you are working for a company and you still want to work with them, you could try working in a new department.
Maybe if you’re in a higher position of power, you could find a comparable position to transfer to, doing a completely new job for the company by taking on a new position in a different department.
You may feel that you chose the wrong company to work with completely. If this is the case, try applying to multiple companies that work within the same profession you chose.
While doing this, keep your original job so that you have a financial support system if your job applications don’t get accepted anywhere else. It’s possible that you might be looking back and regretting your occupation choice completely.
The good news is that there’s always time to change your career. You might have to go back to college and get educated in that subject and change your degree. However, while you make your plan to change your career, you need to make sure you stay at your job as a safety net in case things don’t work out.
This way, you’re making sure that you’re maintaining a stable income while following your passion. If you don’t want to go back to school, or work for another company, you could always become an entrepreneur for your chosen topic.
For example, if you love gardening but don’t know how to make a career out of it, you could make your own website and have your customers pay you to teach them how to garden by selling them digital information courses.
You could also start your own business selling products that you make, like coloring books or crafts on Etsy. There’s no reason to suppress your happiness and stress yourself out by staying at a job that you don’t enjoy.
There are so many options for you to achieve true happiness by following your passion, even if it takes time to go back to school. If you’re feeling stressed, make sure you avoid desperation when choosing a new employment path while keeping a safety net of your current job to maintain your revenue.
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You may be reading this book because you have been forced by circumstances to start working from home. But there’s also a chance that you’re reading it in a prospective fashion: that you want to start working from home. Hopefully, you’ve seen that with the right mindset, this can be a hugely positive influence on your lifestyle!
Or maybe you’ve been recently forced to work from home and you’re now thinking about the other types of work you could do. Why not transition to a workplace that is better suited to this new working style?
The great news is that this is now more possible than ever: as more organizations start hiring online, and countless apps and services seek streamline the process.
In short: it’s now easier than ever to maintain a productive online workflow, and the number of online jobs is rapidly increasing.
Before we begin listing the top online jobs, it’s worth noting that the top online jobs broadly fall into one of three categories:
In other words, you can either find a company to work for but send your work in remotely, or you can sell your skills to online clients on a freelance basis.
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Perhaps what will help to make your office most productive of all though, is to use productivity apps and tools. There are now countless services, apps, and products designed specifically to help you get more work done, and these can make a huge difference to your ability to stay on task, and to collaborate with people around the world.
Many of these apps in particular will become nigh essential as you start to work from home, while others will give you a big advantage and help you to avoid confusion, errors, and distractions.
For remote collaboration, the best tools are:
Zoom (www.zoom.us)
Slack (www.slack.com)
Asana (www.asana.com)
Other powerful tools include Google Drive (https://drive.google.com) and Workplace (https://work.facebook.com).
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Your ally in the battle to maintain productivity and health while working from home, is your home office. While you might be limited for space, if there is any way possible, then you should design a home office that will be separate from the rest of your home.
This is important, because it will allow you to step in and out of your “work mode.” The worst thing you can do, is to work in the room you sleep in. This will make it much harder to separate your working life from your downtime, which will have deleterious impacts on your sleep.
There are other things you can do to make an ideal home office for productivity too.
One powerful tip, is to surround your office with things that inspire you and that put you in the mood to be productive. These might be examples of the best work in your niche or industry, or pictures of your heroes and people who inspire you.
This is something that Cal Newport talks about in his book Deep Work (which I’ve referenced before). Here, he talks about the idea of the “Eudaimonia Machine” – a space built by architects with the singular purpose of generating the most productivity possible.
Part of this design involves museums filled with inspirational works. This is something that I feel very strongly about and believe can make a huge difference to overall productivity.
This is linked to the psychological concept of “priming.” Priming essentially means putting someone in the frame of mind most conducive to whatever
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Working from home creates other challenges too. Chief among these, is trying to look after yourself and your wellbeing.
When you don’t leave the house to go to work, there is no incentive to dress well. When no one sees you for days, there is no requirement to wash.
And when you can get up at any time you want, and work at any time you like, there is nothing stopping you from losing all semblance of routine and health.
What’s more, is that because you don’t need to go to work, there is no guarantee that you’ll get any fresh air or exercise! These are all serious issues, because they can be detrimental to your health and wellbeing.
When work gets on top of you, you might even find yourself eating poorly as you grab whatever is quick and stuff it in a microwave.
All this leads to your being tired, de-motivated, and less able to focus. Focussing and staying motivated requires energy, and resisting temptations and distractions likewise requires that you be in good health.
In short, if you don’t look after yourself outside of work, you’ll struggle to stay focussed when you sit down at the computer.
Optimizing your health will allow you to focus better, seeing as focus requires energy. Using a disciplined routine will ensure you get proper time to rest and recover. And taking the time to groom yourself and look your best will help you to feel (and thus become) more productive and professional.
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But THE most important key ingredient for doing lots of great work, is to be passionate and inspired by your work.
Inspiration is different from motivation. Motivation is being able to push yourself to work even when you don’t want to. But inspiration means having ideas for how you want your project to turn out. It means visualizing it when it’s complete, and it means wanting to get back to work to put those ideas and plans into action.
When you are inspired by work, it becomes intrinsically motivating. That means that you want to do it for its own sake.
One way to accomplish this, is to think about the type of work you’re doing. If you find that you are consistently being given tasks that you find dull or boring, or that you really can’t be excited about, then perhaps it is time to assess whether you’re in the right line of work.
Should you consider changing jobs?
Because when you find work you really love, you’ll find you become instantly more productive and better at working.
Now of course, changing jobs won’t be an option for everyone. You might not have this luxury. Moreover, even if you love your job, there will be still be tasks and jobs that you don’t love. No one loves every single part of their job!
So another thing to do, is to try and look at whatever it is you’re doing, and then make it more interesting
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Of course, sitting down and doing the hardest and biggest thing first, isn’t always easy. It’s one thing to set yourself rules for working, but it’s quite another to stick to them! With so much to do, how can you make sure that you stay on-course and actually do it?
Especially when it would be so easy to grab a good book and a hot drink, and then retire into the armchair that’s right there in the corner of the room!
This is where you need some productivity hacks!
Coming to our rescue is a tip from the book “How to Save an Hour A Day” by Michael Heppell. He says that you should set yourself smaller goals within a project, and then reward yourself for completing those.
So for instance, if you normally start your day by going to make yourself a coffee, then browsing through emails, and having a cheeky look at Facebook… that needs to change.
It is about half nine and you’ve so far achieved nothing! That’s a deflating way to start your day
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