Life can be described as follows:

Choose between this… this… and this.
Live consequences
Repeat Until you die

You work hard… you get the promotion or you earn a lot of money but you have to sacrifice time off or time with your family. You study hard at university you get your A+ but as a consequence you might put aside your relationship resulting in its degradation.

Life is like that. You are faced with a decision with a limited amount of options. With every option you choose, you will get benefits but you also get consequences. This makes decision making very important since our life takes shape depending on what decision we make. This leads us to the million dollar question.

How do you make the right choices in life?

Please allow me to suggest my brain dead simple method that I use when I am faced with a decision which is bigger than me. All it takes is a white blank sheet of paper, a pen and a clean desk. I split the paper into a series of columns depending on how many options I have available. After I list all the options at the top, one per column, I split the paper into two rows: in the top most row I list the pro and in the bottom row I write down the cons.

While doing this exercise you have to take care that you list everything down. Make sure that you think hard enough to see all the effects of the corresponding option. Don’t be biased and take some effects for granted. Be open minded and list every effect down. If you are biased in your decisions this will have severe effects on your future, since you might take the wrong decision.

I know that the decision making system that I use is very simple. But after all you need something simple, something that does not make you think since you are already overloaded with the decision that you are about to take. However, I would like to hear how you go about making decisions.

All right let’s play a game! As from now lets try to smile more at others. There are a lot of places where we can smile more, both at people who we know and at strangers. For instance, you can smile to the person serving you lunch, smile at your colleagues, and smile to walking by strangers while you are walking home.

It is incredible what effect a smile has on you and the person who receives it. First of all, the fact that you smile at someone makes you feel good. When giving a good honest smile, it makes you feel good because it seems like you are giving something very valuable to someone. Actually you are, you are sharing with them something priceless.

Can you remember the last time you got smiled at? How important you felt? If you receive a smile after you just handed a report to your boss, you will automatically feel that you did a great job. So why not make others share this great feeling? Why don’t you smile at the waitress who has done an excellent job in serving you a hot snack for your breakfast?

What is interesting about this game is that the more you smile at people, the more smiles you get back. A smile is reciprocated with another smile. Such attitude will help create a better place for living… a better world.

One of the problems that working from home has, is that it is very difficult to differentiate between your personal life and work. It is very easy to get distracted by other members of the family. People at home, look at you as if you are off from work or as if you are not busy. They will ask for a lift or maybe to help them out in cooking, doing the washing or do an errand for them.

On the other hand, working from home might mean that you go to the other extreme and work from early in the morning till very late. When working from home, your office is the room next to your bedroom. There are no opening and closing hours, no colleague to distract you… just working from very early till very late from Monday till Sunday. It’s not easy to strike a balance between the two extremes. The following are some points that might help you benefit from the advantages that working from home has to offer whilst making sure that you don’t over do it.

Define your workspace

This can be easily done, by setting up your office in a separate room. You can maybe stick up a note saying “Office” and maybe the opening and closing hours (joking apart). Such seperation helps you to make the difference between your personal life and your working life. It will help other members of the family to differentiate when you are working and when you are not.

Set schedule

As I have stated above, set the opening and closing hours. Don’t wake up late because there will be no grumbling from your boss. Make sure you stick to the opening hours of your office. This applies to the closing hours. Don’t over do it. Ok fine, if it is a hard day, you need to put some extra effort to help trash more stuff. But don’t do it everyday. You have got a life to live!

Have a comfortable environment

Having a comfortable environment will help you work better and be more productive. It will also make you want to spend time in the working environment. If you have an uncomfortable chair and desk, you will be very tempted to go and work in the next room where the comfortable sofas are waiting for you.

Listen to music

Since you are most of the time alone in a room you will feel like sleeping. Music can help you keep the vibe. I don’t personally listen to music all the time. When I need to concentrate I turn it off. But when I am doing stuff that doesn’t need 100% concentration, I switch on music to help me stay awake, especially in the mornings.

In order to be successful you need to know how to fail. You can find a lot of articles describing how you can be successful. Depending on what you are trying to achieve, you need to apply a particular plan. But irrespective of which area you are in, the following are the ways how you can fail.

Limiting yourself

Think that you can’t do it and guess what? You will not do it. If you limit yourself and you don’t believe in what you can achieve then what do you expect? A lot of pyschologists say “We are what we think!” Think that you are a failure and you will become one.

Losing focus

Everyone has a lot of ideas. Ideas come and go. We chose what we think is the best idea and focus on it. Focus is a key component to success. Hoping from one idea to another, without giving the chance for any of the ideas to grow and prosper is a very common way how people fail. It’s not because their ideas are wrong and there is nothing wrong with the way how they are executing them… it’s because succeeding needs time.

It simply happens to everyone… we get bored of our everyday routine and we feel like not doing anything. Going through such a period in life is normal. The day seems to stretch itself and be longer than usual. But how do you go about to motivate yourself and get back that momentum that you used to have?

During such periods, instead of trying to force yourself in getting things done, I suggest that you be very selective in what you do. You should choose one item that you feel like doing but which has quite a high priority. The most important thing is that you feel like doing it. Make yourself think that the task that you have selected is the only thing that you aim to achieve that day. With that in mind you will get motivated to trash the task away so that you have the rest of the day off. From my experience, I can tell that after you finish off the task you will spend something like 10 to 20 minutes admiring the fact that you managed to break the chain and started moving again. Telling the truth, it is interesting that the above technique really works. What seems to be very difficult to get past, is so easy to beat with the right technique.I manage to get past tough periods of my life where I feel very bored and uninspired with the above technique. I would like to hear what you think of it. Have you ever tried it? Did it work? If not, what works for you?

Whilst a lot is said about how to reduce your sleeping to a minimum not a lot is said about the effects of lack of sleeping. People often ask questions like, “How can I reduce my sleeping time so that I can be more productive?” or “How can I reduce sleeping to achieve more?”. Beware that there is a threshold that should not be ignored. This threshold is built into our nature. Ignoring such thresholds will have the following effects on you.

Less sleeping is harmful for your health

It is scientifically proven that sleeping less than 7-8 hours a day is harmful for health. This is because as has been discussed in [Sleeping cycles], while you are sleeping your body repairs itself: physically and mentally.

Increases stress

Losing sleep makes you feel stressed. Due to lack of sleeping, you will lose your patience. Such stress will affect your life and the lives of the people who live with you like your husband/wife, children and colleagues. Stress is a major health hazard and has a significant list of bad side effects, such as heart problems, and obesity through nervous over eating.

You are not efficient

The idea of sleeping less is to have more time where you can work. Don’t get shocked. The fact that you sleep less means that you will be tired during most parts of the day. This will severely affect your productivity rendering you less efficient. This will lead to more work piling up which leads you to reduce sleep time further. Sleeping less is not a solution. Better time management and fighting procrastination are sure fire ways to deal with your workload.

Other effects of Missed Sleeping

Missed sleep is cumulative; if you lose sleep one day, you feel its effects the next. If you miss a lot of sleeping several days in a row, you build up a ‘sleep deficit’, which impairs the following:

Your reaction time will decrease resulting in higher probability of car accidents.
  Poor eye sight vision
  Slow information processing
  Short-term memory loss
  Lack of motivation

I wise man by the name of Benjamin Franklin once said: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Last week, I went to a leading consumer appliance store to buy a home appliance. I asked for help because I could not make up my mind on which appliance to choose out of two in particular. A young salesman approached me and started what seemed to me like a pre-learned keynote speech saying things like…

“Sir we are not like our competitors. We here value our customers.” - It was in the first place why I went to the store because I thought that they value me. But he made me ask myself, “Why is he emphasizing it? Maybe it’s not true and he wants me to believe it is?”

“Unlike our competitors we will replace your broken appliance if it is still in the warranty period.” - That is the definition of warranty no? I mean if something breaks down within the period of warranty it should be either fixed or replaced. But yet again he made me ask myself why is he emphasising it?

To cut a long story short, I thanked the salesman for his help and left the store. With the new questions that the salesman made me ask I felt that I’d better get some trusted advice from a couple of close friends.

This experience made me think and from it we can all learn that, when we speak we are instilling feelings in our listeners, be they a family member, friend, or colleague. The feelings that we instil in the people we are addressing are associated with us and what we say. In the case of the salesman, he instilled in me negative feelings which I automatically associated with the store he was representing.

On the other hand if you speak positively, people will associate positive feelings with you and what you do. Hence, next time when you speak, keep in mind what feelings you want to instil in your listeners and speak accordingly.

When producing something, being it writing an article, drawing a painting or whatever you do, you have to learn how to strike a balance between the quality of what you are producing and the amount of time you allow yourself to work on the project. Assuming that you don’t waste time, the more time you allocate to a project, the higher the quality.

The problem with perfectionists is that they only focus on one dimension: quality; without giving any importance to time. A perfectionist produces excellent stuff but most of the time this is done at great cost, since a lot of time is used to finish the work.

In the real world, quality is sometimes sacrificed in order to meet deadlines. Harsh competition forces such attitude since everyone wants to be the first to break the news: “First to produce this… New record in that…”. Perfectionists tend to be conservative and do not accept such reality. When perfectionists are part of a team, they tend to be show stoppers for every single defect that in a way or another diminishes quality. Don’t take me wrong… you need perfectionists in a team; since that way you will make sure that your product will have a certain degree of quality. But you have to be aware as to how many perfectionist you put in a team. Either too few or too many has undesirable effects.

In order to meet their own high standards, perfectionists put a lot of effort. They are ready to work long and extra hours, even if not getting paid, redo work of others which in their opinion is not up to standard and stress themselves by worrying too much. It is interesting the results obtained from a study published in the New York Times, where a group of perfectionists were made to slack on purpose. They were allowed to leave a messy desk, arrive at work late and leave early. When these perfectionists were asked for comments after such an experiment, they reported that they felt more relaxed and happier with this new life. They showed their surprise that things went well even though they ‘slacked’.

Even though perfectionists suffer from stress due to their ‘defect’, they still find it hard to get themselves not worrying too much about quality. It is the same like procrastinators cannot help themselves from delaying stuff to a later time. From my experience, I believe that perfectionist suffer since they are abused by others. Slacking team members tend to spot out perfectionists to do their job knowing that with the right words they will manage to use perfectionism to their advantage

This is a guest blog post by Vanessa Van Petten. Vanessa is the teen author of the parenting book “You’re Grounded!” She writes a parenting blog from a teen’s perspective to help parents understand what is actually going on in the mind of kid’s today to make life a little bit easier.

Parent, teens and family advice blog

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