Budgeting Tools - Money Management. FreeMind - mind mapping software. Don't trash broken stuff; send it back - Lifehacker. How to nap. George Washington: Simplicity seeker. By Erin Doland on Feb 15, 2010 Today is Presidents Day in the U.S., and over the past week I’ve been re-reading James Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man in preparation. I’ve been fascinated by George Washington since I read his first inaugural address my junior year of high school. It was his desire not to be president that captivated me then and continues to interest me today. He wanted a simple retirement after the Revolution, not the responsibilities of leading a nation that his friends guilted him into doing. After serving out his two presidential terms, Washington was finally able to retire to his home at Mount Vernon and live at a more relaxed pace.
Washington rose with the sun. I have to laugh aloud at Washington’s candor in this passage. Washington struggled with his desire to live a more simple life even in his retirement from public service. Daily Routines. How to Work Like the Masters | LifeRemix. Written by Jay of Dumb Little Man. When I need work done on my car, I consult with a mechanic. When it's time to build a deck in the backyard, I will search for an expert and listen to what he says. So when it comes to life itself, why wouldn't you at least consider what experts think? Trust me, I completely understand that the term 'expert' is often self-proclaimed. Nevertheless, it is up to you to hear, interpret, and evaluate information. What you do with it is ultimately your call. With that, LifeRemix has done some homework and we're bringing you a list of things that you'll need to consider. Here are a handful of tips on working from the most popular productivity bloggers on the internet, along with bloggers on organization, the environment and more.
From Wisebread: Achieve greatness fifteen minutes at a time. From Dumb Little Man: Gain 10 days per year by adjusting your sleep. From Zen Habits: Eliminate all but the essential tasks. From LifeDev: Take creative breaks. From LifeClever: 13 Things to Avoid When Changing Habits | Zen Habits. “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” - Mark Twain Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter. I’ve learned a lot about changing habits in the last 2 1/2 years, from quitting smoking to taking up running and GTD and vegetarianism and waking early and all that. I could go on, of course, but you get the picture. I’ve not only learned a lot about what you should do when changing habits, but through my failures, I’ve learned about what not to do. And trust me, I’ve had lots of failures. I’ve found failures to be just as important as successes when trying to learn how to improve, especially when it comes to changing habits.
I’ve done that, with one failure after another, and would like to share a few things I’ve learned to avoid when trying to change a habit. “Motivation is what gets you started. Taking on two or more habits at once. “We are what we repeatedly do. 10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work. Post written by Albert van Zyl from the blog HeadSpace. The lives of great people give us interesting clues about how to organise our days. All of them attached great value to their daily routines. This is because they saw it as being part of ‘becoming who they are’, as Nietzsche puts it. For the same reason they were also highly individual in their routines.
They had the courage to go against popular opinion and work out often strange daily plans that suited them. This is perhaps the first lesson that we can learn – that it takes courage and resolve to design and stick to a routine that suits you. There are at least 10 other lessons that the daily routines of the great can teach us: 1. Despite the modern obsession with physical presence at offices (also known as ‘presenteeism’), very few of the great worked long hours. Philosopher Michel Foucault would only work from 9am to 3pm. 2. Even during these short days, the great took plenty of breaks. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Mandela. 7 Secrets of the Super Organized. A few years ago, my life was a mess. So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized.
Am I perfect? Of course not, and I don’t aim to be. But I know where everything is, I know what I need to do today, I don’t forget things most of the time, and my house is uncluttered and relatively clean (well, as clean as you can get when you have toddlers and big kids running around). So what’s the secret? Are these obvious principles? If your life is a mess, like mine was, I don’t recommend trying to get organized all in one shot. So here are the 7 habits: Reduce before organizing. If you take your closet full of 100 things and throw out all but the 10 things you love and use, now you don’t need a fancy closet organizer. How to reduce: take everything out of a closet or drawer or other container (including your schedule), clean it out, and only put back those items you truly love and really use on a regular basis.
10 simple ways to save yourself from messing up your life - Step. Stop taking so much notice of how you feel. How you feel is how you feel. It’ll pass soon. What you’re thinking is what you’re thinking. It’ll go too. Tell yourself that whatever you feel, you feel; whatever you think, you think.
Since you can’t stop yourself thinking, or prevent emotions from arising in your mind, it makes no sense to be proud or ashamed of either. You didn’t cause them. Adrian Savage is a writer, an Englishman, and a retired business executive, in that order. Read full content. 50 Tricks to Get Things Done Faster, Better, and More Easily - S. Increase your productivity at work by letting go of negative men. My alma mater is currently ranked number one in all of the college men’s basketball rankings. They’ve been in the top spot for 11 of the 14 weeks of the polls, and were number one in the preseason. There are five games left in the regular season, and all of the teams Kansas has left to play would love to see the Jayhawks lose.
Colorado, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, and Missouri fans aren’t the only ones who want to see Kansas mess up their record in the last five games. Fans of the other ranked teams would be happy to see Kansas take a tumble, and, after watching some of the games this year, I’m pretty certain there are a few referees that would be glad to see Kansas lose, too. In competitive sports like basketball, a game has to end with a winner and a loser. If you’re on top, it’s because you beat other teams to get there. You make enemies quickly when success after success stacks up beneath you. In our work lives, however, very few things are like competitive sports. Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed.
Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. The Anchoring Trap: Over-Relying on First Thoughts “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million?
What’s your best estimate?” Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. Consider the status quo as just another alternative. 3. 4. 5. Litemind Endorsed Books - All Books. 6 Productivity Principles to Live By (My Personal Productivity M. Here are six principles I strive to live by. This is my own “personal productivity manifesto”: it summarizes what works for me about personal productivity. Whenever I follow these guidelines, I am at my very best, feeling productive and joyful. If I feel that I am doing things outside these guidelines, I know I can refer to them and quickly get back on track. Since these principles work so well for me, I figured they might work for you, too.
Here they are: Principle 6: Devote Time No matter how capable or gifted we may be, it’s an illusion to think we can do it all. These choices, at the most fundamental level, always boil down to how we allocate and spend our time. How to Apply this Principle Use a time budget. Principle 5: Focus Your Attention If the previous principle was about allocating time for the things that matter, this one is about how well you’re able to spend that time. Very often it seems we just can’t concentrate, even though we know what we should be doing, right? Webnote - an online tool for taking notes. Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace.
You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend. new host! I'm in the process of migrating the website to a new hosting provider. If you want to try it out (you can think of it as a beta release), please save your notes, then load them from the server is melting Please don’t embed your webnote page in an iframe or a frame if you’re going to be sending thousands of users a day. Database update I’ve made a change to how the database of the site works. Anyway, this shouldn’t cause any noticeable changes. Scrollbars Two new features: crash downtime. Plan, Organize, Store, and Share. Get Zoho Planner. 25 Free Mac Apps That Will Boost Your Productivity - Smashing Ma. Advertisement There are many applications that can help you work faster and efficiently.
Though, not many applications come cheap. For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free and/or open source Mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer. We’re covering from application launchers, GTD (Getting Things Done) to design utilities that can help you focus on what’s important: create. 1. aLunch aLunch1 is a very lightweight but powerful application that does what it is supposed to do and nothing more: a handy launcher that runs from within the menu bar.
aLunch helps you get all your apps organized and get an uncluttered dock. 2. Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 applications – Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Fireworks and Flash – have an Extension panel that connects directly to Kuler2, the web-hosted application for generating color themes. But you can also access the Kuler site from its own standalone application to get more flexibility. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 60 Open Source and Free Mac Apps. We regularly feature commercial software on AppStorm, so decided it was time to bring a roundup of completely free (and often open source) apps to your attention.
If you’re on a budget, you’ll be pleased to know that a variety of great OS X software is available free. Applications are broken down into various categories, with each one containing a ‘featured’ app and several other free solutions. I hope you find something useful, and do let me know if your favorite freeware app isn’t on the list! Web Browsers Firefox Firefox There’s a reason why Firefox has stormed ahead over the past few years to take such a large share of the browser market. A variety of different extensions are available, taking the functionality of the browser far beyond the basics. Email & Communication Thunderbird Thunderbird Developed by the same people behind Firefox, Thunderbird is a worthy alternative to Mail.app on the Mac.
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