How to make your live easier
Last summer I started to do swimming lessons. Why? Well living in Barcelona, being close to an outdoor pool and the beach I thought it might be important. One thing I love about seeing people swim is how easy they make it look. They glide thru the water effortlessly. Me on the other hand, when I swim, I splash around a lot and seem to take longer to get to where I am going – but hey I´m just learning my technique.
It may me think that life is kind of like swimming. If you have the right techniques or strategies we can “glide” through life. After some though I decided to right this blog post with my top tips.
Keep an open mind and give the follow tips a try.
Focus only on what is important. Something that caused me lots of problems years ago was trying to get too many things done. This led to stress and a feeling of just keeping my head above water. I started to focus on the fewer important things and started to get more things done.
- Do you know the 80/20 rule? Research has shown that 80% of what we do each and every day is often irrelevant. Instead focus on the 20% important stuff and once you have this done you can work on the other things.
- Remove distractions and unproductive behavior while working on the important 20% things. Look at my blog post here about removing distractions and focusing. You will find that you will get more done and feel better. This feeling will inspire you to focus more and get more done – it´s a positive vicious circle!
Reduce clutter. Let´s face it. We all have a lot of things we don´t need. Try to do a “spring clean” of the clutter in your house or home office. Keep only what is really important and give the other stuff to a good home. I know this is hard. I moved apartments recently and it was difficult to part with some things. I kept saying well maybe I will use that sometime. Best thing was my partner was give a semi free reign to , how shall I say it “relocate” some of my stuff to others! Hey if I don´t know and don´t miss it I don´t really need it.
Don´t worry about the small things. This one is true to my heart. I used to worry a lot about small things and some bigger stuff, but a lot of it was either not that important or out of my control. My time was taken up with worrying about things that in fact might never happen. This worry can be all consuming. Instead think if you can control the outcome of what you are worrying, if you can you´ve come up with a solution. If you can then don´t worry about it – it will sort itself out.
Keep things tidy. Like the idea of removing clutter, keep your work area and home life area clean and tidy. When you don´t have things kept tidy what happens? You can´t find what you are looking for and this in turn then causes stress and makes you worry. You see you can avoid undue stress by keeping things tidy! When things are clean and tidy you reduce your stress too!
Embrace gradual change. Let´s face it we live in a fast paced world and sometimes we expect change to happen quicker than it does. We decide to, for example, lose weight. We get frustrated because after three weeks we find that our weight loss is slower than we wanted. It´s ok change sometimes happens at its own pace. I am a firm believer that sometimes things don´t happen when we want for a reason!
- Here´s a tip, work on one thing at a time. Make a change, give it a couple of weeks to see results and then add in another change. If you change too quickly one change you make may have an adverse effect on other changes!.
Remember in order to see change in your life you must do something different than what you are currently doing. Try the tips above – give them a couple of weeks and note the changes!