Eight Steps to Efficient Time Management
Keep a daily work diary. Write down every task that you handle. At the end of each week, assign a value to each task indicating which tasks can be delegated or outsourced. When making this type of decision, think about what your time is worth. For example, is your time better spent focusing on marketing or filing paperwork? Time Management Tips Keep your working space organized. File papers promptly, or set a time to file papers all at once. Don’t let that paperwork pile up. Get into the filing habit now, while your company is still small. This will also set a good example for your employees to follow. Return emails and calls promptly, ideally within twenty-four hours. Set a time to do this but not first thing in the morning. I found that when I would answer calls first thing, I would get distracted by what other people wanted or needed me to do and my to-do list would get pushed back or put off. The best time to answer the phone or reply to emails is after you got your priority items done or started as sometimes you’re also waiting on others input. Focus on accomplishing things. In other words, focus on productivity. Getting Started Checklist
Ecom Hell: How to Make Money in Ecommerce Without Getting Burned “If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t,” asserts Steven Pressfield, “you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself; you hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
The only way to stay young is to keep learning. That’s not last-chapter hyperbole—that’s science. In the book Ten Steps Ahead, Erik Calonius wrote, “Even though the number of neurons in the human brain decreases as we age (as has been said time and again), the number of synaptic connections can grow as long as we live. If we keep using our noodle, in other words, we can make our brain better every day.” Neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski report, “Being born some way doesn’t amount to forever remaining that way. . . . Your experiences with the world alter your brain’s structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout your life.” And most encouraging—given that the first land on the road to awesome is Learning—is what New York University neurologist Joseph LeDoux has to say on the matter: “Learning allows us to transcend our genes.” Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters Art is a process and a journey. All artists have to find ways to lie to themselves, find ways to fool themselves into believing that what they’re doing is good enough, the best they can do at that moment, and that’s okay. Every work of art falls short of what the artist envisioned. It is precisely that gap between their intention and their execution that opens up the door for the next work.
Almost without realizing it, I’d discovered the community of like-minded truth seekers I’d hungered for in the Haight. Art was our godhead. It was our calling and our discipline. It summoned and focused our energies, structured our time. Art humbled us. Everyone agreed they didn’t know the answers, or even the questions. Everyone was open to the new, struggling to make his or her stuff important, vying for attention. It was intensely competitive. Much later I realized I’d not only set aside logic—I’d gone beyond language. Even though I was using words as images, I wasn’t thinking in words. I wasn’t thinking, period. I was using a part of my imagination connected to image making. I was painting. Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas Are your 10 most expensive material possessions the 10 things that add the most value to your life?2/3/2014
Here’s an exercise for you.
Take a moment, write down your 10 most expensive material possessions from the last decade. Things like your car, your house, your jewelry, your furniture, and any other material possessions you own or have owned in the last ten years. The big ticket items. Next to that list, make another top 10 list: 10 things that add the most value to your life. This list might include experiences like catching a sunset with a loved one, watching your kid play baseball, eating dinner with your parents, etc. Be honest with yourself when you’re making these lists. It’s likely that the lists share zero things in common. What if, instead of focusing the majority of your time, attention, and energy on the 10 most expensive material possessions, you shifted your focus towards the 10 things that added the most value to your life? How would that make you feel? How would your life be different a month from now? A year from now? Five years from now? But then we stopped taking it at face value and asked, “What is an anchor?” That question led us to an important discovery about our own lives: an anchor is the thing that keeps a ship at bay, planted in the harbor, stuck in one place, unable to explore the freedom of the sea. Perhaps we were anchored—we knew we weren’t happy with our lives—and perhaps being anchored wasn’t necessarily a good thing. In the course of time, we each identified our own personal anchors—circumstances keeping us from realizing real freedom—and found they were plentiful (Joshua catalogued 83 anchors; Ryan, 54). We discovered big anchors (debt, bad relationships, etc.) and small anchors (superfluous bills, material possessions, etc.) and in time we eliminated the vast majority of those anchors, one by one, documenting our experience in our book, Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. It turned out that being anchored was a terrible thing; it kept us from leading the lives we wanted to lead. No, not all our anchors were bad, but the vast majority prevented us from encountering lasting contentment. Simplicity: Essays For decades, psychologists have been studying this phenomenon, called the “mere exposure” principle, which says that people develop a preference for things that are more familiar (i.e., merely being exposed to something makes us view it more positively).
One of the pioneers in the field was Robert Zajonc (whose name now feels strangely likable …). When Zajonc exposed people to various stimuli—nonsense words, Chinese-type characters, photographs of faces—he found that the more they saw the stimuli, the more positive they felt about them. In a fascinating application of this principle, psychologists studied people’s reactions to their own faces. To introduce the study, let’s talk about you for a moment. This may sound odd, but you’re actually not very familiar with your own face. The face you know well is the one you see in the mirror, which of course is the reverse image from what your loved ones see. Knowing this, some clever researchers developed two different photographs of their subjects’ faces: One photo corresponded to their images as seen by everyone else in the world, and the other to their mirror images as seen by them. As predicted by the mere-exposure principle, the subjects preferred the mirror-image photo, and their loved ones preferred the real-image photo. We like our mirror face better than our real face, because it’s more familiar! The face-flipping finding is harmless enough, though weird and surprising. But what’s more troubling is that the mere-exposure principle also extends to our perception of truth. When the participants were exposed to a particular statement three times during the experiment, rather than once, they rated it as more truthful. Repetition sparked trust. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work There is one rule, though: once you discover your truth, you have to go all in. Fully.
Sometimes, the only way to evolve is to open ourselves fully. Be raw, honest. Vulnerable. That’s another thing I’ve learned. There is strength in this vulnerability, in tearing down the walls. People sense it in you. The world is hungry for it. And the greatest healing — for you, for those around you — it comes from opening. Opening yourself wide. To your humanness, to your feelings. And ultimately, to yourself. “Put this into action,” Musashi says of his teachings. “Surpass today what you were yesterday.” James Altucher has his daily practice, four buckets to fill: mental, spiritual, physical, emotional. According to him, if you meet those each day, your life will be transformed. And I believe him. When you search for truth within, and then you see it outside yourself, you know instinctively if it will work for you. One thing I’ve learned: we don’t stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves. The best ones I know, like the two above, they do it daily. A focused practice. They fail, but they pick themselves up, continue forward. If there is any secret, that is it. And over time, the days blend into a life that amazes the world. When your sense of self and happiness comes from within and isn’t a roller coaster ride dependent on others or circumstances, you approach life differently. You make better choices. You draw to you the people and situations that matter. The others, they fall away. I may not be able to change someone. I may not be able to change a circumstance. But I can change myself, how I respond, who I am being. That is where all the power resides. Inside. Live Your Truth - Kamal Ravikant |
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Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |