Some say it’s the money. Others say it’s the career that makes you feel fulfilled. Others completely disagree and say friendship is the secret of life fulfillment. I disagree with all of them.

There are people who have everything imaginable in this world but still they are not happy and then there are people who have nothing but still they are unbelievably happy. Are they insane or what? No! I can assure you they are completely sane… the secret to their happiness is that they are happy with what they have.

Whilst there is nothing wrong in setting high goals and to strive to achieve more, you must be careful not to set unrealistic goals. The problem is that a lot of people these days are affected by the ”I want more!” syndrome. The more goals they achieve the more they work hard to get more. The more money they have, the more money they want! They are never satisfied. They don’t look at what they have achieved and appreciate what they have done. Instead they choose to say “I want more!”.

What is wrong with always wanting more?

Like most of you, I believe that if you set high goals and if you want more, you will get more. But like everything else in life, if you over do it in your “I want more” attitude, it can be disastrous. Why? It’s because believe it or not everyone has a limit. Whatever it is, being it your career or money, there is always more to earn or achieve. If you are not happy with what you achieved you will arrive at a point where you reach your limits and get frustrated because you are stuck… you cannot get more!

So the key to life fulfillment is to appreciate what you have and be grateful for it.

Reflect hard to see whether you are affected by the ”I want more!” syndrome too. If yes, start doing the following routine now and repeat it whenever you feel you want more and you will see how better of you will feel afterwards.

• Appreciate that you are healthy.
• Appreciate that you have a home offering shelter, comfort, and food.
• Appreciate that you have a loving family.
• Appreciate what you have achieved so far.

To move forward in your life and achieve more is a good thing, but always keep this analogy in mind. Achieving more in life is like going up a ladder. If you do not appreciate what you have right now, it is like going up a ladder whose lower steps are broken. If you set unrealistic goals it is like trying to go up a vertical ladder. In both cases you run a huge risk of falling down, and we all know that hurts badly.

So appreciate what you have and set realistic goals and it will be easy going up the ladder with a solid base and comfortable incline.  

The Stop Procrastination Now ebook we launched a week ago has been hand picked and suggested by the lifehack.org editors. As most of you are probably aware, lifehack.org is a leading blog featuring tips and tricks of how to get things done. Quoting directly from the about of lifehack.org:

“This blog is endorsed by many major newspapers and publishers, and it is rated as the #40 most popular blog in the blogosphere by Technorati.”

This goes to show that the free Stop Procrastination Now eBook published by FruitfulTime is a quality book full of useful tips that every one of us can use to help fight procrastination and get things done.

This is inline with our mission statement to help people “Make every second count!”. FruitfulTime is committed to continue providing completely free quality content, like the free Stop Procrastination Now ebook, both for its hundreds of satisfied customers and to the community at large.

So join thousands of other people, just like you, who have taken the first step in fighting procrastination and have downloaded the Stop Procrastination Now ebook. Grab your free copy now by clicking here.

Stress has devastating effects on you but if you apply the following tips in your day to day life, you will see a lot of improvement in your life. The first reaction when you will read the following suggested tips is “No… I don’t have time for this!!” but I still suggest you at least give them a shot.

Eliminate Stress method #1 - Express your feelingsThere is nothing wrong with expressing your feelings. Find someone that you trust and express your feelings, being it anger, worries, anxiety etc. There is nothing worst than bottling your feelings. This will make you feel lonely and tends to build up stress in you. It’s like trying to block a volcano… eventually enough pressure gets built up that will smash all the obstacles that it finds in its way.

Eliminate Stress method #2 - Accept things that you cannot change

There are some things that trouble you but there is nothing that you can do about. There is no point in worrying about such things since it will stress you. Just accept them as they are and try to live happy. Easier said than done but just remember that everybody has something (or a lot of things) that he or she wish to change. This might help you accept yours
Eliminate Stress method #3 - Forgive others. Our instinct tells us to not forgive but to take revenge

If you are hurt about something someone did to you, just spend sometime alone and find a way how you can forgive him or her. You will realise that after you forgive, you will find peace in your heart, making you feel much better. Thinking about how to take revenge will stress you out… definitely not worth it.

People who used to suffer from stress and applied the above techniques saw improvements in their life and helped them mitigate the effects of stress described in Dealing with Stress - Part 3 - Effects of stress on us.

While I was browsing for inspiring content I found out this…

Ask more questions, not the same questions more often
Recognize you can be whatever you desire to be
Know that performance does not equal identity
Realize that you are the equal of everybody
Realize that you are the better of nobody
Appreciate you did the best you could
Face the future, live for the moment
Understand suffering is part of life
Accept you will make mistakes
Breathe from your diaphragm
Smile when things get tough
Always be kind to yourself
Think before your answer
Visualize Your Success
Take time for yourself
Make time for others
Listen with interest
Suspend disbelief
Embrace change
Still Your Mind
Be curious
Exercise
Laugh
Love
Cry
Be

I would like to thank Time Brownson for allowing me to publish his work at FruitfulTime Blog.

Tim Brownson is a qualified English born Life Coach, NLP Master Practitioner and Hypnotherapist. He is based just outside Orlando, Florida and coaches people on a face-to-face basis helping them to unleash their true potential and feel good about life. He is the author of ‘Don’t Ask Stupid Questions - There Are No Stupid Questions’ and you can read his lighthearted Blog at http://www.adaringadventure.com/blog/wordpress/

A lot is said about what makes us stressed and how we can cope with stress but few articulate how stress affects us. The aim of this blog post is to give a glimpse of how stress is harmful and how much should we work to either eliminate it or at least compensate for it. Stress affects us:

• Emotionally such as anxiety, being moody or feeling sad without any particular reason
• Mentally such as inability to concentrate, forgetfulness, indecisiveness, apathy and hopelessness
• Behaviorally such as high consumption of alcohol, more immune to vices like smoking and gambling, insomnia, accident proneness, weight loss or gain problems.

The more stress increases the higher the probability of being affected by one of the above affects. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do to completely eliminate stress from our lives since we live in a stressful world. But fortunately there is something you can do to reduce stress… the next blog post gives tips of how you can deal with stress.

Stress is not something pleasant to experience hence everyone is always on the lookout for ways of how to eliminate stress. There are several ways how stress can be counterbalanced which we will go through in future blog posts. Meanwhile this blog post lists common stressful situations. The aim of this blog post is to make you aware of such stressful situations to if possible help you avoid them in the first place. Before you delve into ways how to eliminate stress, make sure that you are eliminating stressful situations in the first place. So here is the list of common situations that cause stress.

Extra commitments

It is a common misconception that the more commitments that we have the more we achieve. WRONG! Trying to do more than we are able to do and over committing ourselves is one of the major causes of stress. What happens is that we are happy at first with a lot of activities in our life. A few weeks down the line though, we feel like we cannot cope with all the work related with the commitments that we have. You will feel bad when you find yourself unable to cope with the work load causing stress which will further slow you down.

Procrastination

Delay stuff to a later time, possibly to the very last minute, is another common cause of stress. You think that by delaying stuff you will relax and enjoy life but in fact it’s the other way round. Apart from killing your productivity, procrastination stresses you since it will make you work extreme hours in order to make it just in time for your deadlines.

Difficult people

Some people simply enjoy making your life difficult. These people will always try to find things to criticise in order to let you down or make you give up on something that you believe in. Exposure to a lot of negative feedback creates a stressful environment for you to live in. Simply avoid difficult people and refuse to argue with them since it is a complete waste of time.

The three situations mentioned above are very common for everyone. Sensing stressful situations and avoiding them is the number one stress killer you can easily implement. In a future blog post I will be listing several tips which I suggest you take note off and act upon to counterbalance stress.

FruitfulTime is pleased to announce the release of Stop Procrastination Now, a top notch FREE eBook which covers every aspect of procrastination. Stop Procrastination Now is bundled with FruitfulTime TaskManager, which together can help you eliminate procrastination and live a better life. Click on the poster below to download the Stop Procrastination bundle.

What is Stress?

The word ’stress’ is commonly associated with negative life situations. But stress can be caused by both negative and positive circumstances in your life. Fired from a job or the death of a loved one is considered to be stress by everyone. But the birth of a baby, a job promotion or a new relationship is not considered to be stressful by most of us. The proper meaning of the word stress is the effort required to adapt to changes in you life. These changes can be for your better or for your worse and can be changes that you chose to do or were simply imposed on you.

Why do we suffer stress?

Everyone suffers from stress. There is no human being that does not suffer from stress. The difference is that some people know how to deal with it and some do not. Stress is something hard wired in our nature. When we experience anxiety or fear our brain fires a chemical alarm which causes our nervous system to respond by releasing stress hormones. A very common and well known chemical contained in these stress hormones is adrenaline. These chemicals help your body push its limits in life or death situations. For instance, you will run faster and your reaction time will be shorter. Unfortunately our brain is not yet able to distinguish between different types of stress. For instance, the stress of a deadline does not require adrenaline like our ancestors used to need when running away from a tiger.

What are the effects of stress?

Stress has several effects, both physical and behavioural. Some of the physical effects stress has on us are:

1. Headaches or backaches
2. Muscle tension and stiffness
3. Diarrhoea or constipation
4. Nausea, dizziness
5. Insomnia
6. Chest pain, rapid heartbeat
7. Weight gain or loss
8. Frequent colds

Some of the behavioural effects are:

1. Moodiness
2. Agitation
3. Restlessness
4. Short temper
5. Irritability, impatience
6. Inability to relax
7. Feeling tense and “on edge”
8. Feeling overwhelmed
9. Sense of loneliness and isolation

How to eliminate stress?

As I said above, stress cannot be completely eliminated but fortunately enough there are ways that can counterbalance stress. First of all you should avoid stressful situations as much as possible. In future posts I will be publishing which are the most common stressful situations that we encounter in our lifes. When you sense such a situation just avoid them. For those stressful situations which are imposed on us I will be describing different ways how to deal with them to reduce your overall stress.

Although a lot has been said about procrastination in the blog sphere, we keep on getting email from our readers asking us to write about procrastination. In our prepared blog posts we had a series of posts (7 blog posts to be exact) about procrastination which were to be published in one week time. But since we kept on getting readers asking us about procrastination we decided to go big.

We are not going to publish the procrastination series but instead we decided to write a complete ebook about how to deal with procrastination. The ebook is called Stop Procrastination Now! and we will be giving it away for FREE. It is jam packed with information about what procrastination is, why you procrastinate, what are the effects of procrastination, how to deal with procrastination and ends up with how FruitfulTime can help you completely eliminate procrastination from your life.

We felt that procrastination is a subject that must be given attention for two reasons. First of all because as our readers you are asking about it and secondly to help you eliminate procrastination is inline with FruitfulTime’s mission statement that of “Making every second count!”

The ebook will be released next Wednesday the 23rd January. We will publish a blog post to announce the official release of Stop Procrastination Now! Subscribe to this blog to make sure you will not miss this free ebook and be the first to download it. You can subscribe to this blog by filling your email address in the form below or by using one of the methods available on the right under the Free Subscription section.

Let’s put this straight… different people concentrate in different ways. I have tried various ways to better concentrate and after a lot of trial and error I found this method works best for me. As I said it does not mean that it will work for you, but I think it is worth sharing the method anyways. However I am very positive that since it worked for me, with some effort, it will work for you too.

First of all concentration requires an effort. You have to have a mindset to concentrate. When I am busy and I need to concentrate on some work I do the following:

I close the door. I want complete silence. I don’t want to hear what others are doing in the house. The faintest noise might make me lose my concentration or make me nervous or curious about what is going on. By closing myself in a room, I eliminate such situations.

I switch OFF music. As I said complete silence works best for me. Some people prefer soft music, classical music or ambient music. I found out that having complete silence helps me immerse myself in the work I have to do.

Switch off all communication devices and methods. I switch off my instant messaging and if I don’t need internet I switch off my laptop. That way I also eliminate the sound whirring laptop fans :P. I switch off my cell phone and unplug my phone. Well, I only unplug the phone when I seriously want to concentrate.

Clear the desk. I clear the desk from all kinds of paper and other stationary. Sometimes I find myself playing with a rubber or a pen. To eliminate such situations I remove everything and only leave the stuff I absolutely need to carry out my work.

Proper lighting. I found that proper lighting is a fundamental ambient property that helps you to concentrate. I tend to like warm tropical light (slightly yellowish) since it feels warmer and less artificial than white light.

Once I enter my concentration zone I try to finish off all the tasks that I planned before I take a break. This is because to get into the concentration zone again it takes time and it does not always work. Once I finish of the task I take a long break in order to recover after an intensive session of concentration. Before I take a break though, I look at the work I managed to finish with admiration and look forward for another session of concentration
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