Tag: Productivity

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Five Boosts To Put Less Pressure On Yourself

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 3/17/21

Today’s boosts are about putting less pressure on yourself.

You Don’t Have to Work On Yourself Forever

(Shayla Love | Vice | 3400 words)

Self-improvement can become an unhealthy obsession.

Nobody’s perfect. You can always improve yourself.

This may lead to believing you’re never good enough. Or working so hard to improve that you don’t enjoy life.

I found this article in The Idea Enthusiast

Related: Don’t Challenge Yourself

How to Stop Being a People Pleaser: 7 Powerful Habits

(Henrik Edberg | Positivity Blog | 1600 words)

Being too much of a people pleaser turns you into a martyr, making yourself miserable, and ultimately making those you try to please unhappy as well.

To prevent this:

  • Learn how to say “no.”
  • Remember people don’t care that much about what you say or do.
  • Learn healthy ways to handle criticism, verbal attacks, and disagreements.

It May Be Time to Give Up on Your Passion

(Brian Miller | Thrive Global | 1250 words)

Not every idea is good. A bad idea won’t work no matter how much effort you put into it.

A Job is what you do for money. A Career is a job you love. A Hobby is what you do for fun. A Vocation is something you feel you were born to do, whether or not you make money from it.

Not everyone can turn their vocation into a career. It’s okay to use a boring job to fund your vocation and hobbies.

Related: It’s Okay to Quit – Sometimes That’s a Good Thing

The Life-Altering Practice of Making Cuts

(Courtney Carver | Be More With Less | 825 words)

Write up a list of things you regularly do. Consciously choose to stop doing what’s unimportant, makes you feel bad, or doesn’t work in your life.

Do the same with your worries and regrets.

How to Stop Feeling Productivity Shame

(Jory MacKay | Doist | 3450 words)

You’ll never run out of tasks to do.

If you see productivity as completing everything on your to-do list, you’ll always feel guilty.

If you see productivity as being busy, you’ll spend too much time on unimportant tasks, and any downtime feeling guilty that you’re not working.

Instead, think of productivity as making progress toward important goals. Relaxation is an important part of progress. It’s necessary to recharge your energy and avoid burnout. (Plus live a happy life.)

Enjoy Five Boosts By Self Helping Yourself? Be sure to Subscribe and check out the Self Helping Yourself site.

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If you can’t donate, you can always help by subscribing, recommending Five Boosts, Self Helping Yourself, or any articles to your friends, or by rating/reviewing The Weight Loss Habit on Amazon. (If you’ve read it.)

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Five Boosts 11/24/20 – Change Minds and Get Beter

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Anger and hate - Fist punching through glass

Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 11/24/20

Anger and Hate Hurt You More Than The Target of Your Rage – But You Don’t Have to Feel Them

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 1075 words)

Anger and hatred consume your thoughts, mindset, and soul, while doing nothing to improve the world or change those you’re angry at/hate.

To feel anger and hatred less, and take ownership over your own happiness:

  • Minimize exposure to triggers
  • Build the mindset that anger is a choice
  • Stop complaining to break the anger habit

How to Get Better

(Mark Manson | 1425 Words)

Therapy helps because talking over problems separates negative thoughts and feelings from your sense of self, changing unhappiness from the subject to the object.

The same is true of journaling and meditation, which is why they’re effective as well.

Be Specific

(Josh Spector | For The Interested | 725 words)

Specificity forces you to be clear, focused, and unique. Your life will be better if you’re more specific about:

  • Goals
  • Audience
  • Communication
  • Requests
  • Success

Change Someone’s Mind: 6 Secrets From Research

(Eric Barker | Bakadesuyo | 3375 words)

To change someone’s mind, you need to get them to change their own mind. Be a respectful partner, not an adversary.

Ask why they believe their beliefs with genuine curiosity, not to find “gotchas” or attack. Ask how certain they are, and to make comparisons on a scale of 1 to 10. What evidence would change their mind?

And be open to learning from them and changing your own mind.

I found this article in Josh Spector’s For The Interested newsletter. (Josh Spector also wrote the “Be Specific” article above.)

Related: How to Win Allies and How to Stop Making Enemies

The Mistake Smart People Make: Being in Motion vs. Taking Action

(James Clear | 925 words)

Motion is planning and research. Action is doing and creating things.

Sometimes you need to plan and research. But you’ll never accomplish anything without action.

Often people get stuck on motion, thinking it’s productive when really they’re procrastinating.

Set a schedule or hard deadline to take action.

Self Helping Yourself Tweet of the Week

Be sure to follow @YourselfHelping on Twitter.

Enjoy Five Boosts By Self Helping Yourself? Be sure to Subscribe and check out the Self Helping Yourself site.

Enjoy Five Boosts? Please consider buying me a coffee.

I work hard reviewing hundreds of articles a week to find the five that contain the best actionable advice on easy ways to improve your life.

As well as writing the posts for Self Helping Yourself, and now Rockstar Excel.

If you can’t donate, you can always help out by subscribing, recommending Five Boosts, Self Helping Yourself, or any articles to your friends, or by rating/reviewing The Weight Loss Habit on Amazon. (If you’ve read it.)

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Five Boosts 11/17/20 – Good Habits For Productive Days

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Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 11/17/20

7 Easy Strategies for Overcoming Seasonal Affective Disorder

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 825 words)

Like a lot of people, I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Often advice for coping with SAD is exceptionally difficult to do for anyone suffering from it.

You aren’t going to exercise and do yoga when you can barely get out of bed.

Here are some easy suggestions, such as:

  • Assign a name to your SAD
  • Use a light-therapy box
  • Avoid windows at dusk

How to Network When You’re Painfully Shy

(Anouare Abdou | The Ladders | 1175 words)

Networking is important for a lot of careers, but a lot of people struggle with it. To get better:

  • Make a “win list” to boost your confidence
  • Prepare conversation starters and responses
  • Turn it into a game
  • Practice by talking to yourself
  • Be a good listener

I’d add: Don’t go into networking with the mindset “What can these people do for me?” Instead, focus on forming genuine connections, and “What can I do for them?”

14 Things My Highly Productive Friends Have Given Up

(Tim Denning | The Ascent on Medium | 1450 words)

Being more productive doesn’t always mean being a superachiever with infinite energy.

Sometimes it means eliminating things. Such as:

  • Automatically agreeing to give others your time
  • Overworking
  • Listening to ‘preachers of chaos’
  • Having too many goals
  • Being an a–hole

13 Evening Routine Habits to Perfectly End Your Day

(Connie Stemmle | Developing Good Habits | 2875 words)

A good evening routine sets the stage for a productive morning.

Suggestions include:

  • Establish a ‘shut down’ ritual
  • Plan for the next day
  • Spend time with your family
  • Practice something you enjoy
  • Reflect

How to Make Good Habits Stick

(Barrie Davenport | Live Bold and Bloom | 2275 words)

The way to make lasting change is through habits. But how do you build and maintain habits?

  • Start ridiculously small
  • Begin with one habit at a time
  • Have clear intentions
  • Celebrate small Wins
  • Change your mindset

#Self-PromotionThese ideas are similar to the philosophy toward weight loss laid out in my book The Weight Loss Habit. If you enjoy this article, you might want to check out the book.

Bonus Boost

Understanding Serving Size

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 550 words)

It can be difficult to know how much you’re eating if the amount doesn’t match up to what the manufacturer lists as a serving size.

Sometimes the labels are intentionally confusing, but even when they aren’t, it can be hard to judge.

Here I walk you through a simple method to figure this out.

Self Helping Yourself Tweet of the Week

Be sure to follow @YourselfHelping on Twitter.

Enjoy Five Boosts By Self Helping Yourself? Be sure to Subscribe and check out the Self Helping Yourself site.

Enjoy Five Boosts? Please consider buying me a coffee.

I work hard reviewing hundreds of articles a week to find the five that contain the best actionable advice on easy ways to improve your life.

As well as writing the posts for Self Helping Yourself, and now Rockstar Excel.

If you can’t donate, you can always help out by subscribing, recommending Five Boosts, Self Helping Yourself, or any articles to your friends, or by rating/reviewing The Weight Loss Habit on Amazon. (If you’ve read it.)

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Memory, Happiness, And Confidence – Five Boosts 9/20/20

Written by Steven Ray Marks Leave a Comment on Memory, Happiness, And Confidence – Five Boosts 9/20/20
Coins

Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 9/20/20

2 Most Powerful Ways to Remember Everything You Learn

(Thomas Oppong | Entrepreneur’s Handbook | 900 words)

We forget 90% of what we learn. This is a normal, healthy function of the brain, filtering out useless information to save room for the important stuff. When there’s information you do want to remember, these techniques are helpful:

  1. Spacing – Relearning the information over time. That signals to your brain that it is something important to be retained.
  2. The 50/50 Rule – Spend half your time learning, and half your time sharing or explaining what you’ve learned.

Related: Accepting Your Memory is Unreliable Will Make You Happier

17 Incredibly Easy Ways to Save Money While Shopping

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 1925 words)

A series of tips that can help you save hundreds of dollars a month without any effort, time-commitment, or sacrifice. Some highlights:

  • How to make razor cartridges last for months.
  • Don’t have brand loyalty.
  • Check the per-unit cost when shopping.
  • Use Instacart to compare grocery prices, even if you aren’t ordering from Instacart.
  • How to (legally) get eBooks and audiobooks for free.

7 Simple Habits to Overcome Nervousness

(Henrik Edberg | Positivity Blog | Subscribe | 1175 words)

If you allow nervousness to overcome you, you’ll perform poorly at whatever it is you’re nervous about. Instead:

  1. Prepare, if possible.
  2. Ask yourself what’s the worst that could realistically happen.
  3. Visualize in a positive way.
  4. Slow down and breathe with your belly.
  5. Pretend the person you’re meeting is already a friend.
  6. Remember people don’t think about you that much.
  7. Tell yourself you’re excited.

20 Little Things that Secretly Make You Unhappy

(Tanuj Sarva | Iynk | 1,725 words)

A list of mistakes you might be making that are sabotaging your happiness. Once you identify any that apply to you, some simple awareness can go a long way toward breaking the habit. These include:

  • Believing everyone should play by your rules.
  • Waiting for your dreams to come true to be happy.
  • Not making time for the right things.
  • Holding grudges.
  • Being a perfectionist.
  • Caring too much about what others think.
  • Playing the victim card.
  • Thinking you don’t deserve happiness.

3 Five Minute Confidence Boosters

(Anouare Abdou | The Ladders | 750 words)

To pump up your own confidence:

  1. Collect evidence of your skills and abilities.
  2. Visualize your future self, after you’ve achieved greater success.
  3. Use bridge thoughts to connect where you are now to where you want to be.

Bonus Boost

Why I Don’t Believe in Cheat Days

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 750 words)

A “cheat day” in a diet disrupts the habit-building process, and reinforces the notion that eating right is a burden while eating like a drunk grizzly bear is a celebration.

Needing a cheat day is a sign that your entire weight loss strategy is flawed.

Instead, you should build the lifelong habit of making good decisions about what you eat. And sometimes good decisions can include eating unhealthy things, as long as you do it in moderation.

Self Helping Yourself Tweet of the Week

Be sure to follow @YourselfHelping on Twitter.

Enjoy Five Boosts By Self Helping Yourself? Be sure to Subscribe and check out the Self Helping Yourself site.

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Good Enough Grounding And Productivity – Five Boosts 9/6/20

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Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 9/6/20

From Productivity Wishfulness to Mindful Productivity

(Anne-Laure Le Cunff | Ness Labs | Subscribe | 1100 words)

Many productivity systems that promise to make you superhuman are just fantasy.

Some telltale signs are that they make unrealistic demands, promise unrealistic results, or are advocated by a guru-like personality.

Studying these can become a form of procrastination itself. Instead, focus on building a system that works for you individually, based on your own individual needs and tendencies.

Develop this system by identifying bottlenecks, making time for self-reflection, managing your information-diet, and learning by doing.

Related: Don’t challenge yourself!

I found this in Khe Hy’s Rad Reads newsletter.

13 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Finances

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 2300 words)

Ways to improve your finances that take no ongoing willpower, effort, and minimal time-commitment. Some highlights:

  • Invest your money in index funds without paying attention to the stock market.
  • Don’t use a savings account
  • Max out your company sponsored 401k match
  • Get a rewards credit card, and pay it off every month
  • Don’t use debit cards
  • Set up automatic bill pay
  • Refinance your mortgage and student loans right now

Good Enough is Just Fine

(Lawrence Yeo | More to That | 1150 words)

There’s no such thing as perfection.

But perfectionists can hamper their efforts by endlessly chasing this quality that doesn’t exist. And thus they never release their work.

Instead of struggling for the unattainable 100% standard, aim for a “Good Enough” standard of 95%.

Related: Perfectionism Paralysis Can Be Beaten By Half-Assing It

Replacing Negative Thoughts With Positive Thoughts

(Barrie Davenport | Live Bold & Bloom | 2500 Words)

Remind yourself to regularly examine your thoughts. And when they are negative, try to replace them with positive thoughts.

For example, replace “I am helpless” with “I am powerful and in control of my own destiny.”

Replace “Nothing good ever happens to me” with “I am surrounded by an abundance of opportunities.”

Replace “I am so angry at that person” with “I respect and love myself enough to let go of anger and live in peace.”

7 Grounding Exercises For When You Feel Overwhelmed

(Steven Handel | The Emotion Machine | 1650 words)

When you find yourself feeling stressed or overwhelmed, try grounding yourself in the present moment with these techniques:

  • Five Senses: What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? What do you smell? What do you taste?
  • 10 Slow, Deep Breaths
  • Mindful Stretching: Yoga, Tai Chi, or just stretching while paying attention to your body.
  • Nature Bathing: Go outside and take a walk. Ideally in a forest or park, but if that’s not convenient, just getting outside is helpful. Or if you can’t get outside, watch a video of nature.
  • Spend Time With a Pet or Stuffed Animal
  • Feel-Good Smells
  • Sound Meditation: Take 30 seconds to listen to the world

Bonus Boost

Who’s to Blame For Your Weight

(Steven Ray Marks | Self Helping Yourself | 700 words)

Focusing on blame when it comes to weight is unhelpful. Blaming yourself is demotivating and unfair, because you may have been cursed with a lousy metabolism.

But saying you’re not to blame is also demotivating – that’s just making excuses.

Instead, focus on taking ownership. Your weight may not be your fault. But only you can take the necessary actions to improve it.

Self Helping Yourself Tweet of the Week

Be sure to follow @YourselfHelping on Twitter.

Enjoy Five Boosts By Self Helping Yourself? Be sure to Subscribe and check out the Self Helping Yourself site.

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Be Happier and More Productive – Five Boosts 7/12/20

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Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 7/12/20

Sometimes Good Advice Isn’t Good For You
(Self Helping Yourself | Steven Ray Marks)
There’s a lot of great advice you can find in the world. But every individual is different. Sometimes strategies that work for most people just aren’t right for you. You should still be open to trying advice, but you need to use self-observation to understand how it’s working for you in particular.

Volunteering Can Improve Your Mental Health
(Elizabeth Hopper | Greater Good Magazine)
Volunteering is a great way to make yourself happier. It gives you a warm glow directly. And it also has indirect effects to make your life better. It can give you a sense of community. And it can help build your professional and leadership skills. And many charities are offering ways to volunteer online during the COVID crisis.

Avoid “Bikeshedding” to Increase Your Productivity
(Melina Parker | Inc.)
“Bikeshedding” is when you spend way too long worrying about a minor detail, which keeps you from moving forward on your larger project. It’s something we all do, and keeps us from being as productive as we could be. To avoid it, ask yourself: 1. Will this decision matter five months from now? 2. What is the consequence if I choose “wrong.” 3. Is this problem helping me reach my big goal or distracting from it?

Get Your Career (And Life) Back on Track After a Disruption
(May Busch | maybusch.com)
When your life is disrupted – which let’s face it, describes most of us right now – it can be hard to get back on track. A good way to start is: 1. Take stock. 2. Go for small wins. 3. Focus where it matters.

Related: Disembarking from the Failboat

Five Ways Your Pessimism is Destroying Your Happiness, Career, and Relationships
(Holly Riordan | Thought Catalog | Scroll to end of article to subscribe)
1. You assume you won’t succeed so you don’t try. 2. You focus on negatives in others. 3. You stress out over things that haven’t happened. 4. You come across as a downer. 5. You psych yourself out and dread events that should be exciting. A personal note on this: While I’m generally optimistic, I often struggle with #3. I’ve developed a mantra, “Don’t get upset about imaginary things.”

Self Helping Yourself Tweet of the Week

There will always be people better off than you, and there will always be people who have it worse than you.

Comparisons to others shouldn’t stop you from taking the steps you need to live your best life.

And you certainly shouldn’t let comparisons shame you for your feelings.

Be sure to follow @YourselfHelping on Twitter.

Enjoy Five Boosts By Self Helping Yourself? Be sure to Subscribe and check out the Self Helping Yourself site.

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Help People, Be Productive, and Avoid Outrage – Five Boosts 6/28/20

Written by Steven Ray Marks Leave a Comment on Help People, Be Productive, and Avoid Outrage – Five Boosts 6/28/20
Feeling Overwhelmed Tangibly Improve the World

Five Easy Ways to Make Your Life Better for 6/28/20

Feeling Overwhelmed? Try Tangibly Improving The World
(Self Helping Yourself | Steven Ray Marks)
There’s a lot about the world that can feel overwhelming, and a lot of problems that we as individuals can’t effectively solve. Instead of being frustrated and depressed about this, the best way to respond is to improve a specific individual’s life in a tangible way you can see. This will make you feel better, and will make the world better as well.

My Most Productive Days are a Result of These Five Choices
(For the Interested | Josh Spector | Subscribe)
1. Do the most important thing first. 2. Say no to one unimportant thing every day. 3. Keep a running list of questions you’re curious about, so you know what to ask when you meet experts. 4. Make a specific schedule of how much time to work each day. 5. End your day with something on your to-do list that you’ve been avoiding.

For The Interested is probably my favorite weekly newsletter, especially if you’re any sort of creator, and I highly recommend subscribing.

Taking a Daily Walk Will Make You Much Happier
(Ladders | Kyle Schnitzer)
Diversity of experiences is a big factor in our happiness. With the recent COVID resurgence, it seems like we’ll be stuck at home for a while longer. An easy way to shake things up and get off the couch is to simply take a daily walk around your neighborhood. Try to take a different path and observe new things each time you do. It will make you a lot happier than staring at the walls of your house.

The Danger of Outrage Narratives
(How It Actually Works | Trevor McKendrick | Subscribe)
Whenever you see something outrage-inducing on the internet, you’re almost certainly not getting the full story. You’re seeing a highly skewed narrative from one side. There’s missing context. You aren’t in the heads of the people involved, and you don’t know their thought process. Nobody wakes up in the morning saying, “Muhaha, I’m going to be evil today!” If you were to take the time to fully research the situation, you’d find that everyone involved was acting a lot more reasonably than it seemed at first glance. But of course, you don’t have the time and energy to spend hours researching every angry tweet you ever see. So you’re better off simply ignoring them.

I’m always a fan of ways to reduce your hate and anger, and ways to be happier by not doing something instead of doing something, so I love this advice.

Hate Exercise? Try This Zero Minute Workout Instead
(Considerable | Stephanie Thurrott)
Exercise is important for health. But if you’re older and haven’t built the habit of taking time out of your day to exercise by now, you probably aren’t going to. An alternative is to incorporate exercise into activities you’re already doing, so it doesn’t cost you any time. Do things like carrying groceries, playing with your kids/grandkids/pets, walking up stairs, or cleaning in a way that is physically active and raises your heart rate.

Self Helping Yourself Tweet of the Week

Impostor syndrome can sap our mental health. If your bosses/clients are praising your work, that’s all the proof you need that you *are* good at it, and you deserve your success. Remind yourself of this, and tell your inner critic and doubts to take a hike.

Follow Self Helping Yourself on Twitter.

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