LiveWorkBalance

This will be somewhat brief, as I didn’t plan on publishing today.  I’m currently working on taking the five outlines I wrote the other day and turning them into something resembling coherent posts, but when I came across this article this morning, I couldn’t stop myself.

Dustin Wax at Lifehack has published a great list of tips to find some time to follow your dreams.  Now, you can also just use this extra time for getting a few extra things done (or actually finishing everything on a list), but either way, these are some great tips.  Some of these I’ve written on in the past, such as waking up earlier and using your commute, but for a great, high-level overview, be sure to check out Dustin’s article!

August 11th, 2008 | Tags: commute, Sleep, time, tips | Category: Finding Time, Quick and Dirty |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

We never have enough of them, they’re never long enough, and what we do have, we rarely completely use. What is it that shares this interesting, yet paradoxical description?

Why, vacation of course!

Like other facets of your life, a vacation isn’t just a tool for maintaining balance, but also a place to maintain a balance in itself.

Now, I’m sure (at least I hope!) most of us already know what a vacation is, but to summarize quickly, a vacation can encompass changes in four main areas: your schedule, the scenery you’re seeing, what you’re doing to fill your time while enjoying said scenery, and how you’re paying for it all.

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August 6th, 2008 | Tags: choice, planning, relax, vacation | Category: General |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Success is an interesting phenomenon. It serves not only as a goal (Note: not an end point), but also as motivation towards the same goal. Each step we take in a certain direction not only gets us closer to this goal, but helps us gain momentum in this direction which makes the next step even easier.

But in order to take advantage of that motivation and momentum, we need to see the progress we’re making. What can we do to make sure we are seeing the steps we’re taking and leveraging these successes?

As I mentioned previously, success is personal, so for it to mean something, we’re the ones who have to define that. Now, we’ve already found our yardstick for measuring success. Whether it’s a lifelong goal, a weekly mantra, or anything in between, we now have a scale. But if we never hold anything up to the scale, does the scale even exist? (Don’t mind the philosophy). So let’s take a look at four ways we can hold things up to this scale. More »

July 11th, 2008 | Tags: GTD, success, tips | Category: General |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

This week I’ve come across a few articles that struck a chord with me and thought I’d share them.

A key component to a balanced workday, and a balanced life, is pace. Now, whether you work at a consistent pace, interspersing periods of work with periods of relaxtion, or you’re a member of the burst productivity school, working to a pace that suits your preferences and abilities allows you to remove stress and assists in maintaining balance. For a few tips on how to do this, take a look at LifeDev’s article, Pacing Your Work Day: Are You Stopping to Smell the Roses?

A major challenge in maintaining your ideal pace can be the amount of work you have on your plate. While we objectively know that taking breaks allows us to recharge and provide a net increase in productivity, if we’ve always got inboxes with 10 cm stacks of paper, we’re going to have a hard time taking those breaths.

FreelanceSwitch has a great article on Learning When to Say No. While I and approximately 18.7 million other people have written on this topic, one of the things that FreelanceSwitch’s article does to really set itself apart is to give you three basic criteria to judge opportunities by. While they take the view of evaluating potential freelance gigs, I think it’s easily adaptable to just about any situation.

Some of you might be wondering what everyone’s favourite constant is, especially since most people aren’t a big fan of death and taxes. Well, that leaves us with change. Change can be challenging, but one of the things I’ve found is that it’s going to happen whether you do anything or not, so taking a proactive stance towards it gives you an advantage that many won’t have.

Personal change can be the most challenging of all, but also the most effective at changing directions to get what you want. With that in mind, take a look at Life Optimizer’s post Top 10 Things You Should Change in Your Life to Get What You Want. It takes you things like changing your priorities, your motivations, and even your spending.

Enjoy!

Adam

June 26th, 2008 | Tags: change, choice, pace, saying no, stress | Category: Quick and Dirty |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment