Annabel Candy has a great mind for helping people do what they love through their work, and the topic of money is a major factor whether we want to admit it or not. I love this post. I’ve also got a complimentary post on shipping successful ideas over at her blog. Enjoy!

Are financial problems stopping you from living your dream and sapping your creativity?

Finance is a huge part of our lives yet it remains something that many people struggle with, especially creative types. These days, maybe more than ever before, people all over the world are getting into financial difficulties and debt.

The recession has been going on for a few years and people’s houses are still being repossessed. They’re still losing their jobs. Worst of all, they’re losing their freedom and independence.

What saddens me most about people getting into debt is the ties it causes. It you’re in debt you’re often forced to stay in a job or an area you don’t like in order to repay the debt and your creative energy is sapped by worry and the grind of daily living.

There’s an incredible freedom that comes from being free of debt. Only when you’re debt free can you actually live the life you want and be the master of your own destiny.

So here are my tips on how you can avoid getting into debt, simplified and repackaged in a way that I hope makes you see the true value of living within your means.

Remember, if you want to travel, set up your own business or follow any other life dreams, being debt free will help you get there. Over spending will only hold you back in life.

Never borrow money to buy unnecessary toys

Living within your means brings happiness and freedom that expensive new gadgets don’t. If you can’t afford to buy the car or TV of your dreams then don’t buy it. Get what you can pay for in cash now and be happy with it. If you really need to buy a car to get from A to B then buy one you can easily afford.

Don’t be tricked into finance plans that offer “18 months interest free”. If you can’t afford to buy the item for cash now you may not be able to in 18 months either. If you buy something on those crazy “free credit” terms you’ll be paying over the odds for it and you won’t be free anymore. You’ll be tied down to making those repayments until they’re paid off. Much better to save up, pay cash and live free.

Maybe you’re worried about what people will think about your unfashionable car or clunky TV? Don’t be. Anyone who judges you by that isn’t worth worrying about anyway.

Non-Essentials

Little things like clothes, skincare, toiletries add up. Just get what you need. I’m sure that many of us in developed countries have many more clothes than we can actually wear. That’s why I’ve classified clothes as non-essentials here. How many pairs of jeans and tshirts does one person actually need? I’d be prepared to bet that it’s not as many as you’ve already got, especially if you’re female. Sorry girls!

I’ve just spent a year without buying any new clothes, apart from some new sports socks when my old ones had gone to holes and a pair of shoes for a wedding. It wasn’t as if I was going to be naked. I had more than enough clothes to see me through the year and I think I even managed to look quite nice most of the time too.

It was great not to bother going to shops and shopping centers and also good at the end of the year to evaluate what I actually needed clothes-wise and spend a few hours clothes shopping. If you can’t cut down your clothes shopping to once a year try shopping for clothes only twice a year, maybe when the sales are on.

Or have a clothes and accessories swap party. Invite about 10 friends of varying sizes and tell them to bring the clothes and accessories they never wear. You’ll be laughing over each others’ disaster buys and amazed to see how good your unflattering trousers look on someone else. This is a cheap, fun night in and a great way to bond with friends.

When it comes to skincare and toiletries get cheaper brands. The pricier ones aren’t worth it, you’re just paying for the expensive advertising campaigns and the supermodels who promote them. Now why would you want to do that?

So you really need something?

Do you really need it? Really? Truly? It’s amazing how many things I think I need and write on my list but never get round to buying because I don’t go to the shops very often. If you go shopping every week, apart from to the grocery store or food market, then you’re probably spending more than you need to just by being in the shopping mall. Avoid shopping malls like the plague, especially if you have kids with you.

But let’s say you’ve convinced me there’s something you really need, your bike’s broken beyond repair and you really need a new one to get to work. Please, never buy anything, new or used, without taking the time to ask these two questions:

What’s the best price you can do for me?

Can you do a better deal for cash?

You’ll probably get one discount this way but you might even get two price cuts.

If you can wait until the annual sales you might get a better deal that way. Or put a search on Ebay, go to garage sales and tell your friends and colleagues you’re in the market for a new bike to see if anything comes up.

Housing

Sometimes renting can be cheaper than buying, especially if house prices aren’t increasing. Don’t be pressurized into buying a house or buying a more expensive house than you can easily afford the mortgage repayments on. You’re not buying a better house, you’re buying worry and financial pressure.

Grocery Shopping

Forget silly food coupons, just make sure you bulk buy and buy the supermarkets own brands. With most items (basmati rice, virgin olive oil, canned tomatoes, pasta etc) some of the cheaper brands taste just as good as the more expensive brands to me. There are only a few things I’m fussy about – I have to have the more expensive brand of mayonnaise – but for most things you’ll probably find the no name brands are just as good. Pick and choose your products carefully.

Be Patient

For example, go to the movies on cheap Tuesdays or wait for the DVD to come out. Most things have promotions at certain times of the year or on certain days, you’ve just got to wait for them.

Banish takeouts

I love eating out. I don’t do it as often as I’d like but it’s a real treat for me to go to a cafe or restaurant and eat a meal someone else has cooked and will clear away for me too. I just don’t get the idea of takeouts though. Most of them don’t taste as good as the food you’d make at home and it’s not that hard to wash up a chopping board and a couple of saucepans. Most healthy food it quick to make at home too (things like stir-fries and omelets) or can be prepared in bulk so you can freeze some to reheat on another day (curries and soups.)

I know often you may want to socialize without feeling you need to kill yourself with cooking and shopping. Try having a curry night and asking everyone to bring along one dish. Or just a pot luck and see what happens. Or a fun sushi night where everyone knuckles down and learns how to make their own sushi.

Start making these life changes to stay out of debt and save money today. There’s no time like the present.

Like any addict you’ll suffer a bit at first, but when you get used to spending less you’ll be glad you did. Leave your credit cards at home and reassess how to cut down your spending and what you’ll do when you’ve controlled your spending and earned your own freedom.

What will you do when you’re out of debt and in control of your finances? How will your creativity be unleashed?

Keep your prize on the goal and you’ll get there in the end.

Annabel Candy writes the personal development blog, Get In the Hot Spot, to inspire and inform people on how to live their dream. If you dream of travel, writing, self-employment, or just being happy, then subscribe by email or to the RSS feed

Photo by Vaguely Artistic

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When I ran long distance track competitively in high school, there was always a point in the race where our coach pushed us where other coaches didn’t: the halfway point.

You see, most everyone’s heard of the “bell lap”. When the leaders in the race have one lap to go, they ring a bell. Long distance races have multiple laps and can be boring to watch, but the Bell Lap is the part where the race gets interesting. It’s where runners see what’s left in their tank and give it all they have to the finish, hopefully ahead of their competitor. The Bell Lap is where the race is won.

Well, not exactly.

My coach loved the halfway point. When I was running the mile, right after the first two laps my coach would tell me to “start rolling”. I wasn’t supposed to wait for the final lap like everyone else to start picking it up. I was supposed to pick it up at halfway. This was where I picked off other runners that were saving up for the Bell Lap.

Halfway was my new Bell Lap.

(Oh, and as a side note: My coach wasn’t crazy. He knew exactly what he was doing.)

It’s easy to get excited about the sexy Bell Lap, when we can give everything that’s left in us to finish, whatever it is we’re pushing ourselves to do. (They ring a bell, for crying out loud!) It’s exciting to blow by the competition in the last ten meters, with everyone in the stands on their feet cheering.

But it’s not easy to push yourselves when others aren’t, or when there’s no bell telling everyone to pay attention. It becomes a true test of finishing and mental hardness.

But you get used to pushing at halfway. And when you start gaining success, it becomes easier and a part of who you are.

Today is July 1, exactly halfway through 2010. Time to start kicking.

Photo by StuffEyeSee.

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Post by Ibrahim Husain. Follow him on Twitter.

One thing that I push my readers to experience is living proactively instead of reactively. A prolific lifestyle is one where you create your own opportunity, you take responsibility for your life and you go into your world and shape it into what you want it to be. A reactive lifestyle is just the opposite; you go out into the world and wait for life to interact with you, then you just react to each stimulus as it comes. People who live prolifically are more satisfied with their life, and I’ll tell you why.

People who live a prolific lifestyle decide what they want and create ways get it, rather than deciding what they want and waiting for the opportunity to arise. The difference isn’t necessarily in the end product, because with a little bit of luck they may both end up in the same place. Rather, the prolific one creates his own journey and therefore finds more satisfaction in it. It isn’t about the final product, the satisfaction comes from every step it took to get there.

With that in mind I urge you to try this little experiment. I started in 2008 and last year I experienced more stories worth telling than the rest of my years combined.

Make the Bucket List

Photo by Christabelle????

A bucket list is a list of things you want to do before you “kick the bucket.” I imagine you all know what that means, but just in case, a bucket list is a list of things to do before you die. You might have seen the Jack Nicholson/Morgan Freeman flick of a couple years ago with the same title. In the movie the two men escape from a cancer ward and take a road trip to check off all the things they want to do before they die.

I decided to put a little twist on my own personal bucket list. I make a yearly bucket list. What my list consists of is things that I want to accomplish or experience by the end of each year. And I make my list LONG. Last year is was 75 lofty accomplishments and experiences I wanted to have. I didn’t finish the list, but I enjoyed crossing off each one that I did finish. And this year I reassessed the ones that i didn’t get to last year, and the things that I still wanted to experience made their way to this year’s list.

The reason behind my yearly bucket list is twofold; if we wait for death, it may sneak up on us, leaving us unable to complete our lists, and if we make a list each year we will have accomplished life goals every year of our lives. Life will be richer, we will be happier, and we will have never lived stagnantly, because we always had a great experience or accomplishment just ahead of us.

Try my yearly bucket list this year. Print it out and hang it somewhere where you can see it each day, with a highlighter to mark things off as you experience them. And for even more enjoyment, make one of your goals to write the story of everything on your list. It will be such a wonderful peice to look back on, and it will motivate you to continue when life tries to slow you down. When you reach the finish line, you’ll have so many experiences under your belt that you won’t regret not doing the little things. And If we meet at the end, I’ll be looking forward to hearing your stories.

To read more of Ibrahim’s writing, check out his excellent blog ZenCollegeLife or follow him on Twitter.

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“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

Post written by Cath Duncan.

Photo by brewedfreshdaily

For the creative person, fear is always nearby. But in spite of the close proximity, it’s usually a very strained relationship. Fear is one of those emotions that most of us are trying not to have. Because it doesn’t feel good, it’s been coded as a so-called “negative” emotion. And we’re so keen to avoid this negative emotion that we find ourselves avoiding situations that elicit fear for us, so we code the fear-inducing situations as “negative” as well.

What happens then is we end up being afraid of fear, so we start building meta-levels of fear. And then we’re no longer just scared, but we’re scared of feeling scared. And we can even make ourselves scared of feeling scared of feeling scared… can you see how easy it is to end up with more fear, instead of less fear, when we see feeling fear as a bad thing?

But, fear isn’t bad at all. All emotions have a positive purpose that serves us. Have you ever thought about the positive purpose of your fear?

Fear alerts us to threats

Sometimes our fear can be a really useful gut-response that helps us anticipate and respond more quickly to a genuine threat. If something is unfamiliar, it might be dangerous, so, whenever we’re in unfamiliar territory, fear crops up and alerts us to pay attention. And of course, from a survival point of view, that’s really useful.

Fear is a signal you’re learning

Because we’re designed this way, we tend to respond to ALL unfamiliar experiences with fear – even if they’re not dangerous. So long as you’re taking yourself into new territory, and growing, you’ll always feel some fear along the way. From a creativity point of view, fear is useful because it makes you more alert when you’re learning and growing. And fear is a signal that you’re learning. In fact, if you’re telling yourself you’re learning in a particular area of your life, yet you’re not feeling any fear in that area of your life, you’re probably not learning.

Fear lets you know what’s important to you

A third purpose of fear is that fear let’s us know what’s really important to us. Think about it: when something isn’t important to you, you probably don’t care what happens with it, and you won’t feel fear then. It’s the stuff that’s closest to our hearts, that we really care about, that we feel the most fear about – because it matters to us how things work out. With so many choices available to us these days, alot of creative people find it difficult to figure out what’s really important to them and decide what they want in life. A really counter-intuitive, but easy way to figure whether something is genuinely important to you is to notice how much fear you have about it. The more important it is to you, the bigger your fear will probably be.

Fear holds creative tension

When there’s an unresolved problem or a gap between where we are and where we want to be, a tension develops. The bigger the gap, the greater the tension, and fear we’ll feel. Alot of the time, in order to relieve the tension, we change our vision of where we want to be or stop asking that unresolved question. Successful creatives embrace this tension, knowing that tension is an important part of the creative process. Creative tension motivates our unconscious mind to continue searching for a resolution, even while we go on with our other tasks or go to sleep at night, those epiphanies that you have, where the idea just seems to have popped into your head out of nowhere.

So next time you feel afraid, stop and remind yourself that fear works. And then check which purpose your fear is serving, and ask yourself, “Knowing that this is the purpose of my fear, what would I love to do next?” (hint: if you’re still standing there, the purpose of your fear is probably not nr 1!). Thank your fear for working for you, and honor it by taking the next action you’d love to take.

Cath Duncan helps knowledge workers to master their WHOLE MIND so that they can confidently do what they love and be more productive at it. You can find more of Cath’s self-coaching resources at Mine Your Resources, or follow Cath on Twitter.

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This post was helped along by tips from amazing (and punctual) designer Grace Smith of PostScript 5.

I’ve struggled over the years as a freelancer trying to find the best way to gauge a deadline. It’s safe to say that creating an attainable deadline is more than just picking a date. There are lots of factors that go into projects, and gauging how long they will take is a hard thing to do. The more complicated a project is, the harder it is to create realistic deadlines. Have you ever known a contractor to finish construction of a house on time? It’s a rare thing, my friends.

No matter how much experience you might have, you just can’t plan for every delay. Strange things happen when working on deadlines. Much like you can’t predict the weather, you can’t know everything that might cause a hitch with finishing the project on time. And hitches will happen. But you can still create an attainable deadline with lots of unknowns too.

Perfect deadlines, (at their core), consist of 3 factors: Full understanding of the project at hand, realistic assessment of skills/tools needed, and proper time allotment. If you can get these factors aligned, you’ll be well on your way to creating a perfect deadline. Here are some ways to really assess a project and give ample time to finish it.

Know your specs inside out. Knowing everything that needs to be done on the project is absolutely critical. Make sure you and the client agree to everything that has to be done in writing before you even start to think about timeframes. Hashing this out right from the start clears up any confusion later on.

Leave no stone unturned. Getting to know the client a little bit can be helpful in not only deciding whether or not you want to work with them, but also for getting a feel of their preferences. Grace uses a client worksheet that really allows her to get a deep understanding of who she’ll be working with and what they expect. There’s no such thing as getting too much information about the client and the project.

Overshoot. Not giving yourself any wiggle-room on a deadline is just plain crazy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a project that went without a hitch. There’s always something unexpected that goes wrong, from sickness to equipment malfunction. (Ever heard of Murphy’s Law?) Make sure to give yourself plenty of padding. Both you and your client will be glad you did.

Be a pessimist, but only when making deadlines. The worst thing that you can do is to be an optimist when planning deadlines. If you see a possible hiccup, plan for it to happen. It’s better to be surprised when bad things don’t happen than when they do happen.

Plan to the smallest detail. There’s a quote from the movie The Patriot that I love. Mel Gibson’s character is reminding his sons that when shooting a gun they should “aim small, miss small”. If you can “aim small” by planning every detail that needs to be done, your proposed completion date will be much closer to the mark.

Constantly review what needs to be done. It’s easy to miss little steps throughout the duration of the project. However, if you’ve planned to the smallest detail, it’s harder to miss small elements. This also ensures that everything is done in order, without missing any steps.

Create smaller deadlines for yourself. By creating project milestones for yourself, you can ensure that the work gets done without too much procrastination. I’ve found that if I don’t impose small deliverables on myself, I just drag my feet and create stress for myself.

Keep a separate calendar for projects. Don’t try to fit all of your self-imposed deadlines on your personal calendar. You’ll need as much space as possible to put all the project information on there. You should never mix business with pleasure ;)

Be honest with yourself. Being realistic with our abilities and work paces is incredibly important when creating deadlines. Knowing what you’re capable of will allow you to only pick clients that really fit your expertise, and allows you to gauge the time needed to complete the project.

Know your pace. It’s human nature to think we can get projects done faster than what we’re capable of. For me it’s an issue of pride. I reckon I’m an efficiency monster, when I’m really not. If I swallow the pride and give myself some realistic deadlines, it works out better for everyone. I don’t put out shoddy work due to running out of time, and the client isn’t upset because I’m late on the deliverable.

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We all have ambitions of working that dream job or buying that shmancy X, yet we often find ourselves nowhere near that goal. Life, it seems, has a funny way of quickly putting the kibosh on our dreams.

When people fantasize about doing their dream job, the fantasy isn’t that they couldn’t be in that occupation, but that it would happen overnight. Like winning the lottery. But everyone knows the chances of winning the lottery are like 1 in Never, so that’s why it’s called a “dream”. More of a fantasy than anything else. But what if the dream could be a reality with a little bit of spit and stick-to-it-ivness?

Chasing your dreams

Ever wonder why it’s called “chasing your dreams”, and not “waking-up-smack-dab-in-the-middle-of your dreams”? It’s because your dream job probably won’t land in your lap. Odds are you’ll have to work for it.

But the work towards your dreams doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, the best way to achieve your dreams is to work a little bit at them (yes, each one) every day. This, in a nutshell, is what I call Dreamwork.

Life is a Garden… Dig it

Think of Dreamwork as a form of gardening. You don’t just walk out one day and have a healthy, lush garden sitting in your backyard. You have to plant the seeds, water, and tend it at consistent intervals. The best gardens are tended to every day.

Getting started with Dreamworking is as simple as creating a list for each of your dreams and goals, and taking baby steps each day to achieving them. Once you’ve got your lists, immediately start populating the list with action steps that can be done right away. They could be as small as “check out book on woodworking” if your goal is to carve a kayak.

Now, for the easy part. Do at least one task each day on each dream list. (If you’ve got a butt-load of dreams, than maybe not all of them. Just be consistent on the amount of time you spend on each list.)

You’ll need to keep populating these lists with todos on a regular basis (I try to do it weekly), and pretty soon you’ll start to see major breakthroughs, and (Warning! Cliche alert!) eventually your dream will become a reality.

The whole process may take longer than you’d like. But if it’s your dreams we’re talking about, the wait will be worth it.

Using dreamwork to become a freelancer

I’ve been using the concept of Dreamworking for the past year in hopes of launching my own business, allowing me to develop my own ideas and projects full time. I’m not gonna lie to you smart people… it was a bit daunting at first. But I started small and daily worked a little bit on each project. Fast-forward a year later to last week when I signed the papers that officially formed my company Midnight Pineapple LLC. The only way it could have worked was with a little effort each day.

And lastly… this is nothing new

Remember the tortoise and the hare? Or that corny saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day”? Yep, those same principles apply here. In fact, this post is based on some of the oldest rules in the book. Sorry to disappoint ;)

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Written by Chrissy Scivicque of  The Executive Assistant’s Toolbox.

Around the holidays, I always end up a little overwhelmed with stress. It’s natural, I suppose. As a child, my mother did Christmas in a big way – a big, beautiful tree, lots of presents and more food than a small army could ever eat. It was always a very special time of year. As I age and those memories get further and further away, they seem to grow more and more perfect. My expectations of what Christmas is supposed to be get bigger and better. I’ve realized recently that the expectations are part of what stresses me out about the holidays- this idea that each year has to live up to something I’ve truly created in my mind. After all, in reality, I know that no Christmas have ever been that magical thing you see on TV. I also feel this way about New Year’s Eve. I hate trying to make plans because everyone wants to go “big” and have huge parties or do some crazy event. But it always feels like I’m working so hard to live up to the idea of what I want it to be that I don’t get to even enjoy it. And on New Year’s Day, I always feel sad and let down.

So, I’ve made a commitment this year:  I will release all expectations that surround the holidays and instead, I will live in a world of possibilities. So I’ve researched expectations – what they are, why they happen and how we can shift them to a more positive presence in our lives.

In my life, I’ve struggled a lot with expectations. Not only the ones I place on myself, but also the expectations I inflict on others (and those others place on me).

It’s a pretty common problem actually. Expectations are so prevalent; you may hardly notice them anymore. For example, you may expect that certain actions will yield specific results. Likewise, you may expect that certain people will act in predefined ways. You may have very clear expectations of what defines a good marriage, or a good person or success.

Consider for a moment, the pain and suffering that comes from expectations that are not met. Perhaps, you have such a clear expectation of what success means, that you are unable to enjoy any other definition of it. Maybe you have built such a precise expectation of “Mr. Right” that you can’t see the man in front of you – who is perfect in a most unexpected way. Expectations can lead to disappointment, hurt and anger.

Expectations are rooted in desire and anxiety. They are formed when we create a belief of how we think the world should be. They limit us, forcing us to interpret our present experiences only in the context of an expected future. When we release our expectations can we open ourselves to the possibilities of the world.

Release Expectations

It’s important to first understand how expectations appear in your life. Make an effort to observe yourself and see how they manifest. Do you expect unrealistic things of yourself and others? Do you have high, low or even negative expectations? Watch how they pop up in your everyday life and simply consider their impact.

Live in the World of Possibilities

Expectations create pressure and rigidity in your life. When you expect things (or people) to be a certain way, you limit them and sometimes in the process, actually cause them to be (or NOT be) that way. You narrow options, stifle imagination and impede possibility. When expectations shape your view of reality, your intuition is blocked. Releasing expectations allows you to see the possibilities that  surround you. If you don’t believe success will look a certain way, you may be more likely to find it. Be willing to re-evaluate and reconsider your ideas of what the future looks like. Don’t hold yourself or others to predetermined expectations or you take the risk of oppressing creativity and spontaneity.

This holiday season, I will be living in a world of possibilities. I will not focus on expectations. Instead, I will keep my eyes open for unexpected delights, new ways of doing things, spontaneous pleasures, and the wide open world of possibilities. I hope you join me there!!

This article was written for LifeDev by Chrissy. You can visit her anytime at The Executive Assistant’s Toolbox where she blogs regularly about professional and personal development. Stop by and check out some of her most popular articles, like How to Energize Your Workday and How to Speak Your Mind (and Keep Your Job).

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While perusing everyone’s favorite bookmarking site, I came across this incredible photo of the Grand Tetons at night. While the picture alone is pretty impressive, the amazing part is how many planets you can actually see: The Milky Way, Jupiter, a kickin’ star named Arcturus, and the Big Dipper. That’s a pretty stellar cast. And it turns out that normally it takes five separate camera shots to get all of these high-profile stars/planets in a single frame.

Here’s the part that kills me: I spend 8 hours a day looking at 14 inches of computer screen.

I’m going to call this Work Tunnel Vision (WTV), for lack of a better phrase. This is when we only focus on what’s directly in front of us (job/career), as we pass by the finer points of life like friends, family, children, and even incredible starry nights. It keeps us from having proper perspective. It ensures that we work too long on stuff that probably isn’t that important. Ultimately, WTV skews our priorities.

It’s quite easy to lose focus on what’s truly important sometimes. This was just a gentle check to force us all to ask the question:

Am I focusing on what’s really important? Or am I too busy working?

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Self-perspective is one of the hardest things to understand. I mean, it seems simple enough on the surface; it’s merely what you think of yourself. But many times we don’t see that how we view ourselves can affect our successes as a professional/parent/circus clown/etc. Maxwell Maltz put it best when he said

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment.

There’s nothing more dangerous or helpful to your individual success than high self-image. Many have failed miserably at fostering high self-image, while others have risen like fresh cream straight ‘outta the udder.

Companies are the same way. A company with positive self-image is going to be around for a while, and one such company has shown what it truly means to be confident in their product. Love or hate them, Google is an excellent example of masterful self-image.

1. You don’t have to change to fit in. Google knew what they were: a great search engine. Yet instead of tinkering with the latest thing, the continued to improve their bread-winning product, Google Search (I know, I know… do I really need to link to Google?!). Sure, they could have kept fiddling with new technologies early on, trying to stay relevant and trendy like the other search engines. But as Bush Sr. put it so eloquently, they “stayed the course“.

2. Become insanely successful at one thing, and use your confidence to branch out. This is almost straight from number one. Larry, Sergey and the gang kept at refining their central product until it was the best. Only then did they say a collective “booyah!” and branch into many other arenas like contextual advertising, feed readers, as well as every other aspect of our digital lives.

3. Not too fast, now (aka the “whoa nelly”). You can’t rush perfection, people. It took Google quite a long time before they started looking at other projects. If they had run around chickens with their heads cut off trying to create the “next best thing”, they would have squashed any possibility of creating one truly amazing thing.

Positive self-image is a lot like that: You don’t have to rush things. Make the world wait on you for once.  You have to believe what you’re doing is worth waiting for.

(Note: Interestingly, Google is taking the headless chicken approach these days with all of their acquisitions and new products, but they appear to have simmered down and focused more on features.)

4. Always act like you know what you’re doing. I just had to throw this one in for fun. Google will lead you to believe that they’ve known what they were doing from day one. Ok, come on… this is impossible. Believe it or not, they have screwed up before. They have had growing pains. But so does everybody.

It can be a great strategy to cover your insecurity with a fig leaf of bravado. It’s OK to occasionally act like you know what you’re doing, even if you really don’t. Come on, just stick out your chest, throw up your head and make a fool of yourself proclaim to the world that you might definitely know what you’re doing.

Really, we can form our self-image (kudos to Google) in one word: Confidence. Be confident enough not to rush, or sell out, and you can even act like you know what you’re doing (when you really don’t) from time to time.  Walk like you know you’re the best thing to hit the block since Google, and you’ll be fine…

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10 Minutes has gotten a bad rap. While it may seem like an insignificant amount of time, 10 minutes can be very useful in productivity. Although there aren’t many projects that can get done in 10 minutes, you sure can get one started.

As a matter of fact, I think that 10 minutes is way better than, say, 55. Any procrastinator worth his/her salt knows that your mind will take as long has been allotted to finish a task. If you’ve got 55 minutes to finish something, well by George it’s gonna take at least that long. Odds are you’ll slack off for 40 minutes and take the remaining 15 doing a shoddy job on whatever it is you’re working on.

Oh, but 10 minutes… now that’s a tasty number. Not only will ten get you started, you’ll probably be finished too, if you focus. And focus is practically required with 10 minutes. It’s a small, focused amount of time.

And if you’ve got five blocks of 10 minutes lying around in your day, that’s 50 minutes of highly-focused time. Compare that to a larger chunk of 50 minutes. That’s right, more time for procrastination. Small, focused, manageable bursts of productivity are much more effective than those flabby blocks of time.

I’ve found that breaking apart my day into 10 minutes blocks of time has been useful.  When those 10 minutes are up I take a quick break, move on to the next task or re-evaluate what still needs to be done on the current task.  This constant re-evaluation really keeps my mind from wandering off to other, less-important things, keeping my purpose razor sharp.

Do you guys use this method?  I’m sure we’ve got some opinions out there either for or against it.  I’d love to hear them…

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