Guest Article Tuesday

Note From Stephen:  I get a lot of requests for guest articles.  I’ve decided to create a new feature called Guest Article Tuesday where readers or other bloggers can express their ideas to my readers.

Hugh DeBurgh, The Passionate Warrior, has dedicated his life to the achievement of the ultimate family lifestyle. You can find him writing about Creative Family Lifestyle Design over at his blog, The Way of Passionate Warrior. Currently he is on the second leg of a worldwide travel adventure with his wife and four young children.  Follow Hugh on Twitter or sign up for his RSS feed and don’t miss an update!

Where do you call home?

With my family, things can be a bit different than for most.  You see, we are road warriors.  Digital nomads.  Call us what you will.  For us, home is wherever we are.
We live most of the year in a 35 foot diesel motor home.  All six of us.  Me, my wife, and four young kids.

And during the time that we are on the road, that motor home is our home.

Friends have asked us how we do this.  Are we independently wealthy?  No.  Do we live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?  No.  Don’t we miss having roots in a community?  Not really, because we still have those.  Are we insane for living so close together for such long periods.  Perhaps.

I’ve also heard comments to the effect that a motor home can never have the feeling of home.  When folks say, “There’s no place like home,” they aren’t seeing a rolling box on wheels in their mind’s eye.

I guess what all these folks are asking is, “What do we sacrifice by living a mobile, nomadic lifestyle?”

Fair question.

First, we aren’t always on the road.

We do drive a lot.  We have circumnavigated North America (Canada and the US) one-and-a-half times.  And we have zig-zaged all over the interior as well.  We still do.

Yes, our motor home is our house.  But our community is wherever we choose to stop and experience for a while.

And we stop from time to time.  Often it is to visit an interesting place.  A museum, or a historical site, or a science center.  Or perhaps just somewhere that’s fun.

At other times we casually stop somewhere and just get that homey feeling.  When I feel that, I want to stay.  Not long enough to build a house, but for a week or two.

To me that homey feeling is when you feel it’s OK to let down your guard.  Where life’s affordable, the natives are friendly and sparse, the weather is nice and the scenery is pleasant.  And where all of your principle needs can be easily met.

We just found such a place.  In Champaign, Illinois.  It’s a little campground outside of town, in the middle of cornfields (what isn’t in the Midwest!).  The scenery here is very pleasant, its quiet, shaded with a lovely grove of trees, and yet five minutes from all the amenities you could need.  And the Internet here is awesome!  Finally I can get work done and backup my files online.  That’s a big deal for me.

Which brings up another issue.

Mobile Lifestyle Needs

When you live on the road, your needs are quite different than when you are just “camping.”  As a result, we have little in common with the casual campers who surround us at most campsites, especially in the summer months.

When you camp, you may be prepared to accept a certain amount of “roughing it.” But when you are “home,” you  have fairly consistent needs that now need to be provided for on a mobile platform.

There are the basics, like, food and such, there are comfort needs, and you may also have business needs – typically technologies that allow you to work on the road.

For me to be able to call a place “home” I will have to satisfy all of these needs wherever I happen to be.

A lot is written about lowering your needs “threshold” before heading on the road. That is, reducing the number of things that you think you need so you can pack a bit lighter. We did that when we started traveling.  And it feels fantastic to get rid of  all of that stuff that you thought you couldn’t live without.

But there are some things that we are not prepared to part with, and yet are difficult to carry with us.  We have to scavenge to satisfy these needs as we go along.
One of those scavenged needs is high speed Internet.  Without it, we cannot carry on our business.  And without that economic engine, the road trip is over.

The Internet Makes Our Lifestyle Possible

Without the Internet and cell phones, we could not live as free a life as we do today. To ensure that we keep connected, we carry our own Internet technology with us.

One of my big gripes when we’re on the road is the Internet quality, or lack of it, that we find.  So we do the best that we can.  Outside of major metropolitan areas, Internet signals are poor or inconsistent all over North America.

In fact, this is a serious problem for anyone who wants to live life on the road but needs world-class communications at the same time.

There are very few entrepreneurs who seem to be addressing this problem.  And those who are trying are using technology that’s getting a bit long in the tooth (cell technology and satellite Internet).

As more and more folks discover the freedom and beauty of the mobile lifestyle, this lack of Internet infrastructure means that North America is loosing its traditional advantages over parts of the former third world and Europe, where the Internet is often much more ubiquitous.

Anyway, even with these minor issues we sacrifice very little to live a mobile lifestyle.

You can buy most anything you need on the road.

Nice campsites in quiet and safe communities are available for $25 to $50 a night (water, power and sewer included), and we tow our car along with us.

And the scenery is always changing. When the weather is hot, we head north.  When it gets cold, we let the snow line chase us south.  All the while we run a business and write posts like this one.  The kids play and life goes on.

If you’ve ever wanted to chuck your current lifestyle and hit the road, just do it!

Give it a try.  Consider renting an RV  or other more affordable means of travel. Vacations are usually way too expensive to maintain as a lifestyle.  Yet you can live quite comfortably – even luxuriously – while living mobile.  It just requires that you reconfigure your life so that your dollars buy you the maximum possible return, and no more.

I hope that you will take this post as your wake up call to live the life you’ve dreamed of!

And let me know what you decide to do.  I’d love to hear about your adventures!
All the best,

Hugh

Braying Asses: Media whores talking about Tiger Woods and his mistresses

Braying Asses: Mainstream and tabloid media covering Tiger Woods’ “transgressions”

Braying Asses: Tiger Woods’ mistresses

Silent Ass: Tiger Woods

Silent Ass So Far: Gloria Allred

Scary Ass: Elin – club-wielding wife of Tiger Woods

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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This is the concluding article in the two part series on working memory.  Part I can be found here: Optimizing Your Working Memory – Part I

To review: Working memory is that part of the brain where you hold items in conscious attention.  It’s the scratch-pad where you manipulate maps in conscious reasoning.  It is a critical component of all kinds of intelligence (IQ, EQ, etc.)

The problem with working memory or your conscious mind is that it is very resource intensive, it is very small, and it is easily overwhelmed by distractions and emotions.  A lot of new research is showing that cognitive effort depletes your mental resources and you perform significantly worse on subsequent tasks.

The best solution is to learn optimize your use of your limited mental resources.

How To Optimize Your Working Memory – Continued

• Focus on One Task at a Time

  In reality you can only focus on one conscious task at a time.  When you multi-task, you are simply switching between tasks and that context switching is an expensive operation that uses up limited resources.  Research proves that accuracy drops off with multi-tasking.  Overall speed does not increase.

• Remove Distractions

  Most people accept numerous distractions even when they are not multi-tasking.  Those little email pop-ups or dings take mental resources and reloading your working memory is expensive.  Experiments have shown that even if you are instructed to ignore all email or text message chimes, they disrupt and harm your thinking process.  By accepting any distractions you are wasting precious resources and impacting your ability to perform, regardless of what you subjectively feel you are capable of doing.  Your subjective feeling is simply not accurate.  I put on sound-isolating earphones and play rain white noise to eliminate auditory distractions.  If you are working on your computer, close all the other windows.  If you don’t close your email or your browser you will be tempted to check them.  Work someplace where you will not be interrupted.

• Before focusing, clear your mind

  When you need to focus on an activity, you need to clear your mind of internal distractions first.  Internal distractions can be just as disruptive as external distractions.  Get them out of your head and onto a list with a plan for dealing with them later, so your brain does not continue to force them into your awareness when you are trying to focus on something else.

• Chunking

  Imagine that you are trying to prioritize a list of things you want to accomplish in various areas of your life and that list contains 25 items.  It will be very difficult for you to prioritize that list because first prioritizing is very difficult mentally, and second you can’t hold that many items in your mind at the same time.  Chunk the list into broad categories (say work, home, relationships, etc.).  Then chunk the broad categories into sub-categories.  This is a neat little demonstration of the power of chunking.

• Compare items two at a time

  I tried this idea once when I was tired and couldn’t decide on what I should work on and it produced an easy answer.  The mind most easily compares two items.  While you can compare four or five items, doing so is very taxing.  So instead try a series of two-way comparisons instead.  Let’s say I had ten items A through J and I wanted to pick one as the most important.  Start at the top and compare A and B.  A is more important so then compare A and C.  C is more important and so then compare C and D.  And so on.  I find this to be a very effective way to quickly work my way through a list of items that I need to prioritize or choose from.  Don’t agonize over individual decisions.  If it’s that hard to decide it probably doesn’t matter that much.

• Feed Your Brain

  Keeping a steady supply of glucose flowing to your brain is definitely a plus.  The best way to do this is to eat frequent small healthy meals with low GI complex carbohydrates.  I’ve been reviewing studies on what is best to eat when relative to mental performance and it’s just too complicated to review here.  I hate to say this but given the evidence that glucose and caffeine can erase resource deficits, if you have an occasional emergency situation you could consider an energy drink.  If you do this on any more than an occasional basis, you are going to hurt yourself more than help.  These drinks have a definite downside and the high is usually followed by a crash.  I like to use fruit as a quick pickup.

• Exercise

  Mental performance is increased with supplemental oxygen.  Blood carries both oxygen and glucose.  Improving your blood and oxygen carrying capacity through exercise may be the single best thing you can do for your brain overall.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Signal-to-noise ratio is defined by Wikipedia as “ratio of a signal power to the noise power corrupting the signal.”  This concept comes from electrical engineering but it can be applied to information overload.  I don’t know about you, but I constantly struggle with finding a signal hidden in all the background noise.  I also worry that I’m creating more noise than signal.  Thus, I’m looking for ways to increase the signal-to-noise ratio in the information I consume as well as the information I create.

Why Do We Suffer From Information Overload?

There may be a lot of reasons, but I have come to believe that it is primarily our own fault.  It boils down to something rather simple:

We are afraid we will miss important information or opportunities.

Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less says we are unhappy with all the choices we have because we are always wondering if we selected the right one out of the endless alternatives available to us.  I think this applies to information as well.  There are so many sources of information and so much information available, we worry that we are missing something important.

What You Need to Accept

• Accept that you can’t absorb it all.
• Accept that too much noise will drown out the signal and you’ll wind up with meaningless static.
• Accept that there is a lot of good information out there and you are benefitting from discovering and acting upon a small slice of it.
• Accept that that you will be far better off going deep with some systems rather than spending your life reading about a lot of different systems.
• Accept that others will be a lot more likely to pay attention to you if you create more signal than noise.

Increasing Your Signal-to-Noise Ratio

I readily admit I don’t have the answers and I’m looking for them myself.  This is what I came up with.

• Make sure you seek information with a purpose in mind.  Seeking with a purpose helps keep you focused.
• Focus on quality not quantity.  Act on quality instead of filling up with quantity.
• Find sources you trust, like The Rat Race Trap , and cut out the rest.
• Skim your sources for things that look interesting and go deeper.
• Adjust and prioritize your information sources as new sources become available.  Every time I find a new source I add it, but then what do I drop?  It’s a struggle.  I’m trying to focus on an important few.  I’m spending too much time looking and not enough time acting.
• Don’t get distracted and go hopping down bunny trails when you are seeking something.  You are researching X, you get distracted reading an article that looked promising on your results page, and the next thing you know you are watching some idiot on You Tube.
• Allow yourself some time to go looking for new and interesting information.  If you see something that tweaks your interest, look a little deeper but don’t get obsessed.
• If you don’t have something important to say, maybe you should be quiet.  Just because you have a blog, doesn’t mean you have to fill it with noisy placeholders.  I’m having a hard time with this one
• When you are creating information, concentrate on a single idea.
• Whether you are consuming or creating, always ask yourself whether you are dealing with a signal or with noise.  If it’s noise, drop it.

I fear I’m creating noise so I’m going to stop.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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I don’t claim these 7 simple principles are the principles for living the good life.  There are others that I reluctantly left out, but I chose these because they are simple and easy to understand.  I also wanted to limit the number of principles to seven, otherwise I would be violating principle number one.

Figuring out what actions need to be taken with these principles is not complicated.  Some of them are conceptually simple, but not necessarily easy to implement.  For example, eliminating draining people is a very simple concept.  It is easy to identify the people in your life that drain you and knowing what needs to be done as a next step is straightforward.  However, it requires courage and determination and for some of you, implementing it may be very uncomfortable.

1. Keep it Simple and Quick

   For some reason we tend to complicated everything.  If you want to go from point A to point B, travel in a straight line.  Don’t take any detours by adding unnecessary steps.  Life is not that complicated so why not try simple for a change?  You need to eat, sleep, love, express gratitude, and find meaning.  Pick the obvious, simple, or easy alternative and go for it.  Go with your gut and just enjoy the ride for a change.

2. Reduce Your Choices

   It may sound counterintuitive but the more choices you have the more unhappy you are.  Stop killing yourself with choices.

   Barry Schwartz calls it “the paradox of choice,”.  Facing many possibilities leaves us stressed out—and less satisfied with whatever we do decide. Having too many choices keeps us wondering about all the opportunities missed.

   When you seem to have too many alternatives to choose from, a good way to reduce the problem is to just reduce the time spent pondering the decision.  You want to lose weight and don’t know which diet is best?  Eat less.  Don’t know which outfit to wear?  Put on some damn clothes!  Want to see a movie?  Pick the first one that grabs your attention and head out the door.  Reduce your choices and stop wasting time making the simple complicated.  Stop fretting over the perfect decision and start living a little.

3. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

   I believe this to be one of the most important attitude changes you can make.  When you don’t sweat the small stuff, you allow your mental energy to be available for the big stuff.  I’ve made a lot of progress in not sweating the small stuff and it has made all the difference in the world for me.

4. Identify the Essential and Eliminate the Rest

   This is the basic principle espoused by Leo Babauta.  It is simple in concept, but takes a lot of commitment to implement.  Most people don’t progress their lives the way they want to because they spend huge amounts of time on the non-essential.  You need to sit down and specifically identify what in your life is essential and then eliminate everything else.  You will tend to think everything you do is essential and nothing can be eliminated.  Don’t get caught in that trap.  What if you only had one month to live?  Would all that trivia be essential then?

5. Eliminate the Drain People

   For most of us, people taxes are more burdensome than government taxes.  It is something that is overlooked and taken as a given, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

   You have it within your power to eliminate from your life the people who drain your resources.  The debaters, the complainers, the victims, the angry, the rude, the needy, and those who think you are obligated to live your life for them should be eliminated.

   If you think you can’t eliminate them, at least reduce the tax you pay to them by limiting your interaction with them.  Most important of all you should set yourself free from manipulative relationships.

6. Living in the Present Moment

   So much has been written on this that I won’t spend a lot of words on it.  Here is a nice article from Psychology Today: Six Steps to Living in the Moment.

7. Be Fit and Healthy

   Some of you may believe that being fit and healthy is not that simple, but it is actually quite straightforward.  It may require intense commitment to habit change in order to implement, but it is most assuredly not complicated. Do short, intense, and interval type exercises like the PACE program (not an affiliate link).  Eat natural whole foods.  Eat a lot of raw fruits and vegetables for enzymes.  Eat fish, chicken, and grass fed beef.  Eat tons of green leafy and cruciferous vegetables.  Eat a variety of seeds and nuts.  Vin’s Natural Bias blog is an excellent resource for natural eating.  See how simple that was?

What do you think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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Or not!  Science has pretty much established that your circumstances are not very relevant to your happiness.  The impact is not zero, but decades of research have shown that only about 10% of your happiness level is determined by external circumstances.

The reason is something called hedonic adaptation.  In short, that simply means when our circumstances change, for good or bad, we fairly quickly adjust to those new circumstances.  Any bump in happiness is temporary.  Once you get that bigger house, that fancier car, more free time, or whatever, you will soon be needing a new fix.  An even bigger house, and even more luxurious car, something to do with your time, etc.  My home and cars are certainly bigger and more luxurious than they used to be and it didn’t take me long to get used to them.  They are now my baseline.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we also adjust when bad things happen.  One study showed dialysis patients are just as happy as healthy people.  That one just blows my mind.  I have to believe that there is some level of deprivation or abuse that would contribute to unhappiness, but evidently within an extremely broad range of what we would refer to as normal, it doesn’t matter very much.

“One of the great ironies of our quest to become happier is that so many of us focus on changing the circumstances of our lives in the misguided hope that those changes will deliver happiness.  In an attempt to allay unhappiness, a recent college graduate may choose a high-paying job in a distant city, a middle-aged divorcee may undergo beautifying cosmetic surgery, or a retired couple may buy a condominium with a view.  Unfortunately, all these individuals will likely become only temporarily happier.  An impressive body of research now shows that trying to be happy by changing our life situations will ultimately not work.”  — Sonja Lyubomirsky

While I intellectually accept the strong scientific evidence, it just seems so counter-intuitive that the effect of changes in circumstances could be that weak.  It seems that if my income doubles or if I moved to a beautiful beach house, I would be happier.  It seems clear to my intuitive self that if I was suddenly paralyzed from the waist down, I would be unhappy.  Maybe so, but the evidence is clear that in those cases and others most everyone adapts and returns to their basic happiness set point relatively quickly. You may disagree, but I’ve been convinced by the evidence.

Still, I’m not sure I have completely internalized that belief.  Have you?  Somewhere deep down inside my feeling self, I still am having those “if only” thoughts.  If only this or that were the case then things would be better.  Maybe that’s just human nature.  I don’t really know.  It’s so damn hard sometimes to follow your own advice.

This article may have seemed negative, but that was not my intent.  It’s extremely important that we know what not to do.  It’s critical to understand what does not work.  The path to happiness is becoming much clearer and it is no longer just a subject for speculation by philosophers.  Science is showing us the way.  You may consider that presumptuous, but I believe it to be true.

Does all this mean we shouldn’t try to improve our circumstances?  No it doesn’t.  However, we better be prepared for what we are getting when we succeed in doing so.  It’s not likely to be happiness unless there is some deeper meaning to what you are doing.  But in that case, what brings you happiness then is not your circumstances.  It is your actions, attitudes, and values.

I’m much happier than I was a year ago and it is the result of simply changing the way I think.  It came from the inside.  I can say that over and over and you can agree with it over and over, but unless you really internalize and accept the fact that your circumstances don’t matter much, you are never going to find the happiness you desperately seek.

There is nothing “missing” in your circumstances.

“You overlook what is already ‘here’ as you chase after ‘there’; you miss the ‘sacred now’ as you ponder your ‘next step’; you forget to be grateful for what ‘is’ as you prey after ‘more’.  You search, struggle, and strive, but you never arrive because you can’t get past the thought that something is missing.” — Robert Holden

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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For three days I’ve been trying to figure out what to write a blog article about.  When I look at my list of ideas, nothing excites me.  I have nothing profound or interesting to say.  It’s really been bugging me.  I’ve been looking at material trying to come up with something that grabs me.  Nothing does.

I’ve got nothing today.  I had nothing yesterday or the day before.  Well, big deal.  I guess some days you just don’t have it.  I haven’t had it for three days now.

What was my solution?  Write a short article saying I had nothing to write about.  I feel like I just cheated on a test.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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This is the second article in the series describing Leo Babauta’s ideas from his book Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta.  I highly recommend it.

The first article can be found here:

The Power of Less – Setting Limits

Identify the Essential

Choose only the essential and you will create maximal impact with minimal resources.  Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.

In contrast to most systems, in the Power of Less you learn to choose the essential first.  Most others tell you how to get things done quickly without teaching you how to determine what is most important to you.

You must constantly ask yourself, what is essential?  No matter what you are doing and when.  The context can be this hour, this day, this week, this year, or your whole life.

This is something that very few people do.  Our lives are filled with the trivial.  Are those hours of useless TV really essential to your long-term well-being?  I doubt it.  Do all of those 50 emails qualify as essential with a big impact today?  Are the hours of web surfing or online games essential to your well-being or are they an easy escape?

We rationalize everything we do as important and essential when in fact it is not.  Below are some questions to ask to help identify what is essential to you.  But keep in mind the standard must be very high.  Don’t just tell yourself everything is of the same value or everything is necessary, because it is most certainly not.  Take an axe to your non-essential activities and maximize your time by concentrating on the most important.

The Key Questions

These are not all Leo’s questions.  I’ve changed it up quite a bit.

Questions to identify the essential:

• What things give you that feeling of well-being or genuine happiness?
• What do you want out of life?
• What fills you with emotion and inspires you to want
  to make a difference?
• What are your most important values? What’s most
  important to you; the principles by which you want
  to live your life.
• What are your goals?  For your life, next year, next
  month?
• What do you love? Who, what, how you love to
  spend your time.
• What has the biggest impact? When you are making
  choices between projects, tasks, activities ask which
  one will create the biggest impact.
• What has the most long-term impact?
• What did you really enjoy doing as a kid at play?

Simplify

Simplify by eliminating anything that is not essential.

This part is easy.  Stop doing anything that you have not identified as essential.  Spend your time on your most important priorities.  This simple principle will do more to advance your real goals that almost anything else you can do.  The heart surgeon does not perform the janitorial duties in the operating room, even though he may be perfectly capable of it.  His valuable time is best spent on the patients.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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Overview

I’ve been a fan of Leo Babauta’s ideas ever since I stumbled across his blog.  His book Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta. is simply fantastic.  I’m going to give you a summary of his ideas in a series of articles starting with this one.

The other articles are listed below:

The Power of Less – Identify the Essential

Leo’s ideas are true to themselves – they are elegant examples of less.  The system has two foundational steps from which the rest of the system derives:

1. Identify the Essential
2. Eliminate the Rest

Modern society is consumption oriented.  Everything seems to be focused towards getting more stuff.  To get more stuff we spend our time getting more money.  Time is finite and so is human ability so there is a limit to what we can do.  If we maximize productivity and time management practice, we can get more tasks done.  But by trying to maximize the number of tasks we do, we end up doing unimportant things.  This dilutes our focus and takes energy away from the more important tasks.  We also end up stressed-out, overworked, and unhealthy.

Setting Limits

Setting limits forces you to choose the essential.  So set limitations for everything you do.

Setting limits is the first of Leo’s six main principles.  Leo provides a beautiful illustration of it with Japanese Haiku.  This form of poetry requires the poet to express a complete idea in 17 syllables.  In order to accomplish this, the poet must eliminate everything that is not absolutely essential to the meaning.  The result is something very powerful.

Another example.  Imagine two reporters.  Each week, one reporter writes 30 short, quick, and limited articles that get little attention.  The other reporter writes one really good article each week.  Each article has high impact and he receives awards on some of them.  The second reporter did less, focused on the long-term, and gets promotions and widespread recognition as a result.  This is the Power of Less at work.

You can choose to be like the first reporter and “Get Things Done” or you can choose to be like the second reporter and do fewer but more high impact tasks.  How do you decide what activities are high impact?  Use the following criteria:

• Long-term view – Will it make you a lot of money or get you a lot of recognition in the long-term?  Will it make you happy and contribute to your long-term well-being?
• Life changing – Your career or personal life is changed for the better in some important way.
• Makes a significant contribution to society or humanity.

Apply these criteria to your tasks, projects, and goals to help determine what is essential for your life.  I would also suggest you check out these articles:

Edit Your Life
Finding Your True Self

Setting Limits

Apply limits to all aspects of your Life – email, possessions, work hours, phone calls, internet surfing, etc.  Apply limits first to any area in your life that seems overwhelming.  It will force you to be very effective.  This is one of the greatest ideas on how to live your life I have ever found.

We lead lives filled with way too much stuff.  It weakens and dilutes our effectiveness.  Go from a limitless life of too much stuff, gadgets, information, etc. that is overwhelming, stressful and ineffective to a life of limits, focus, and incredible power.  This change will bring the following benefits:

• Simplifies your life.  Everyday life becomes stress-free and under control.
• You gain focus.  You are focused on a small number of things and you are focused only on what is important.  You stop doing everything else.
• Demonstrates that your time is valuable – others will respect this.  Firm limits on what you do demonstrates to other people that you treat your
  time as a precious resource.  You expect everyone else to treat your time the same way.
• You are more effective and you achieve more.  You are doing less busy work and more of your important work.  You aren’t spinning your wheels on the trivial.

Set limits on any area of your life that you think is overwhelming.  Examples might include:

• Email
• Number of tasks or projects
• Time spent on phone calls or internet surfing
• The number of things on your desk or workspace
• The number of subscriptions, paper or online, you regularly read

In reality this is a small fraction of the things you will ultimately want to limit.  However you need to move slowly, changing only one thing at a time until it becomes a habit.

How to Set Limits

Put a strict limit on something you do such as checking email.  Instead of 10 times a day try checking it three times a day.  Test the result.  Can you live with it?  Can you do your job with it?  The first week or so of your new habit is an experiment and you will tweak the limit as you learn more about what is reasonable for you.  Continually adjust until you find the right level and make it a habit.

Setting limits is a powerful technique to prevent common tasks from taking over your life.  I suggest you give it a spin.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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I found this on Lori’s blog. Just watch it. You won’t regret it.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

What do you think?  Leave a comment below.