Handling Outrage Fatigue

Does the thought of reading or watching the news make you queasy? Have you begun to curse aloud while reading your social media feeds? Do you find yourself saying, "It can't possibly get worse," and then of course it does?

Many of us are suffering from outrage fatigue-too many days, weeks, and months in a row of seeing indiscrete, impolite, immoral and violent behavior everywhere we look. We access the news with feelings of fear and dread. We prepare for social engagements with preemptive antacids or headache remedies. The world is no longer what we remember or long for, and we are tired. Tired of OMG moments and feeling helpless. What can we do to stay sane and sound during these times?

Don't try to fix the whole world on your own. While it's true that one person can make a difference, you cannot solve all the problems around you single-handedly. Trying to work your day job, volunteer for every cause that touches your heart, and talk your silly relatives over to your side in politics is going to wear you out and make you bitter. You must prioritize the people and issues that make demands on your time and energy.

Ask yourself what causes and people are truly the most important to you. Consider your natural talents. Where will you make the most difference? Maybe you should run for office or start a charity, but maybe you need to spend more time providing the very best family game night ever known.

Learn to smile and nod. There has been a decline in civil discourse and critical thinking lately that is alarming. However, when you're fighting outrage fatigue putting more effort into defending your position with a logical argument is hardly relaxing. Don't get me wrong; I am all for well-considered, courteous, discussion and debate. Yet, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned art of politely and graciously changing the subject. Conversation feels like a vanishing art, but with a little practice you can relearn how to divert chit-chat from toxic subjects and give yourself a rest.

Take up some form of meditation. Wait, wait... before you push the woo-woo alarm. The business community, educational professionals and healthcare providers are all on the same page here. Learning to relax, controlling your breathing, and practicing mindfulness have all kinds of benefits. In addition to the well-documented benefits for concentration and general health, a mindfulness practice can give you a break from feeling outraged, whether that outrage is justified or not. The mental distance provided by meditation can help you to see solutions where you previously only saw roadblocks, and may help you to realize that the world perhaps has more decent people fighting the same good fight than you thought.

https://ezinearticles.com/?Handling-Outrage-Fatigue&id=9730329

Open the Front Door: Take the Time to Smell the Roses

It's lovely when you can open the front door and allow the air to flow through your home. It has a therapeutic and calming effect on your mind and body.

At a certain time of the year you become tired and exhausted. The year is long and you work hard every day. You have your family to take care of. The pressure piles because there are tasks at work that are urgent, there are activities you have to take your children to, and you have to take care of your relationship with your partner. Life packs a lot on you.

But when do you get to relax?

When is it your turn to get back to your life?

Well, it all depends on you!

You have to take your life back. Find a way to control the things in your life or let some of it go. Firstly, you need to learn to say no and to prioritise what is important. Take on only what you can handle.

At work, prioritise your workload. Manage client expectations so that you can have better control over your eight hour day. Work causes a lot of stress and that stress is caused by your boss clamping down on you and customers being very demanding. If you can learn how to control the expectations of your boss and your customers, you can get your hours back. Make a list of what you need to do for the day. Allow about half an hour to deal with any unexpected tasks or problems that may come your way. This could allow you to manage the stress level. If you plan your day early in the morning, you can manage what needs to get done within a day.

At home, you also have a lot of errands to run. Your child doesn't need to partake in all the activities at school. Let them choose two or three activities that will fit into your schedule. Not only do you need to relax but your children need to be children for a little while longer. They should enjoy their childhood. This is good for you and for them. Select recipes that are quick and easy to make for supper. Don't stand around making a long and complicated meal at the end of the day when you are exhausted.

Then go and sit down. Open the front door, let the air flow, and smell the roses. Take the time for yourself and enjoy your life.

https://ezinearticles.com/?Open-the-Front-Door:-Take-the-Time-to-Smell-the-Roses&id=9998330

The Streamlined Mind - Organizing Your Time

Some of this also relates to organize and optimize your social life, but more broadly to organizing your time. For instance, scheduling important tasks and things you want or need to do as though they were social commitments is a good example of how you can organize your time.

But there's so much more to it than that.

Let's take a look at some of the things you can do to organize your time a little more easily.

Recognize Your Limits

The first and absolute most important point to consider when organizing your time, is that you must consider your own limitations. This is where a lot of us go wrong because we forget that our energy is finite as well as our time.

A perfect example of getting this wrong is if you write yourself a new training program and diet. Often we come up with plans to lose weight that essentially involve working out for an additional 3 hours on top of our regular training routines while also dieting.

So you now have less energy and you're expected to start exerting yourself for a total of three hours, as well as travelling to and from the gym?

This just doesn't work.

If you find that you currently aren't doing all the things you would like to be doing, then once again you need to prioritize. Find that you're not as healthy as you'd like to be? Then maybe it's time to stop going to the pub with your friends once a week. Never able to get on top of house work? Then maybe you need to quit that karate class!

Walk or Sit, Don't Wobble!

Likewise, you need to make sure that you always give yourself time to recover. We are actually much more productive overall when we have been given some time to recover and to recharge our batteries. If you are just constantly doing one thing after another, then eventually you'll become tired and you'll stop working properly.

The heading of this section is actually an old saying that is particularly relevant to this particular discussion. 'Walk or Sit, Don't Wobble' basically means that you need to divide your time between resting and working. This prevents you from getting into those situations where you are 'half working'.

Half working is the worst thing, because it means that you aren't getting much done but you aren't really relaxing either.

Just as bad is 'half relaxing'. Half relaxing is what you do when you're too tired to do anything useful but you feel like you can't justify putting on a film, reading a book or taking a bath. So instead you just sit there, watching rubbish TV. At the end of the day, you've achieved nothing but you've also failed to enjoy the time off.

This is why you need to allow yourself that recovery time and then make full use of it. Better yet, schedule it in and that way, you'll be able to look forward to it while you're working.

Timing Your Tasks

As you decide when to schedule those important tasks and when to schedule rest, it's useful to consider the natural ebbs and flows of your energy.

All of us have times of day where we are more productive and times of day where we crash. Most of us for instance will find we crash when getting in from work and that we're less productive at work after 4pm. Likewise, it takes us a little while to get around to being productive.

Also important to take into account is the way our other activities impact on our energy levels. One of the easiest ways to make yourself exhausted and want to crash for instance is to eat dinner! Once you've eaten, your body needs to digest and that leaves you with little energy to do anything else.

So instead of making dinner, eating on the sofa and then planning on tidying, the tidying should always come before the eating.

Don't sit on the couch if you want to keep your energy levels up and don't eat until you've completed at least your most important task. You can always enjoy a light snack when you get in if you're too hungry to do anything!

Multitasking

In the chapter on work, we're going to talk about how multitasking can be a bad thing. However, in the right circumstances multitasking can be highly useful.

Multitasking at work doesn't usually work but in your private life it can be useful in any situation where one of the tasks doesn't require your full attention.

For instance then, if you need to go shopping then you can call a friend on your hands-free kit while you're shopping. This way, you're able to catch up with your correspondence while at the same time getting in the food - two birds killed with one stone!

Likewise, you can sort out bills while washing up, or you can research activities on a tablet while cooking.

This can help you to literally accomplish twice as much in a lot of circumstances so start looking for opportunities to tick off more than one of your tasks at once!

Close Open Loops

One very important tip to helping you feel more on top of life is to close all those smaller and fiddly tasks that you consider 'open loops'.

In the next chapter, we'll see that it makes sense to work on the biggest and hardest task first so that you can ensure maximum productivity. At home though, you should aim to do the reverse.

Tasks are generally less pressing at home, so it makes sense to tick off the smaller things you have to do so that you have less stress and fewer things weighing on your mind.

This means things like paying that bill, things like calling that friend, things like RSVPing to that event. We put off these jobs because we find them stressful and don't want to use up energy thinking about them. As a result though, we actually just end up worrying about them unconsciously and having less time and energy available to do anything else.

If you have something you can complete quickly that's playing on your mind then just tell yourself: it needs to be done eventually, so it's better to get it out of the way.

Every day when you come home from work, give yourself half an hour to close off those 'open loops' so you have a small unconscious 'to-do' list.

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Streamlined-Mind---Organizing-Your-Time&id=9358464

13 Pieces of Career Advice to Help You Flourish at Work

Smart tips to succeed in the professional world

Whether you’re just starting out, fresh off campus, or celebrating an impressive work anniversary, there’s always chatter: Make sure you do this. Are you doing that? Don’t do this. Here’s my advice…

But chatter gets lost, forgotten. And that’s unfortunate. Because some of that chatter is good stuff—really good stuff.

So we asked the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share the best advice they’ve ever gotten from a colleague—and now it’s all in one place, found again, for you to read, reflect on and apply.

Here are 13 tips to succeed in your career:

1. If it doesn’t make you better, it’s not worth doing.

“Quit” is the ultimate four-letter word of the business world. Quitting just because something is hard can be a terrible decision, but quitting when something is not helping you improve can actually benefit your career. When I was at a job that wasn’t working, the colleague who heard me out urged me to go pursue something that made me better. That piece of advice has made all the difference.

—Brian Honigman, BrianHonigman.com

2. Leadership is the art of doing through others.

I was told, “Leadership is not just getting things done. Rather, it’s the art of getting things done through others.” This statement has caused a focused effort to delegate and empower our employees to get things done so I can focus elsewhere. I was often guilty of doing things myself but have noticed a shift in myself and in some of our employees since I’ve started owning that statement.

—Angela Harless, AcrobatAnt

3. Over-prepare, and then go with the flow.

Whether it’s sales calls, meetings, presentations or anything else associated with job-related duties, over-prepared individuals can relax once they are in the hot seat. It gives you the ability to maintain a grace under fire and creates room for necessary improvisation and flexibility. Nothing will ever turn out as planned, and when you are over-prepared, you can compensate for this dynamic.

—Jon Cline, Rokit SEO

4. Listen more than you talk.

Listening carefully and with real intent is such an important thing. My colleague is great at it, and every time I am reminded that by just listening well, you pick up a lot of what it eventually takes to succeed, or, for example, to complete a final sale. Customers will literally tell you what they need when asked.

—Ridaa Murad, Christina Ventures

5. Your colleagues are not your friends.

Just because you happen to be spending a majority of your day in the same building—or work situation—with these people doesn’t automatically mean that you can trust them or rely on them to have your best interests at heart. Save yourself disappointment by realizing that it takes time for a “work friend” to become a “real friend.”

—Alexandra Levit, Inspiration at Work

6. Race your own race.

When doing business at all levels, people lose the forest for the trees and get lost in the details. My business partner saw me doing this and told me his old swim coach’s mantra: “Race your own race.” The idea is that you ignore the details of what others are doing, and you do your best based on the objective information at hand. It has helped us stay focused and pass competitors.

—Brennan White, Cortex

7. Self-promote.

A former manager of mine noticed that I was doing good work but that I wasn’t being public about my own success. He said that I had to self-promote in order to get credit—and once it sunk in, I realized it was excellent advice. I have to make my own case as an awesome team member and show the milestones I’ve achieved.

—Jared Brown, Hubstaff

8. Slow down.

I walk quickly, especially when I’m at an event location and getting things done. At one of my first large events, a colleague told me to slow down—more specifically, to saunter. When I slowed down my walking, my brain slowed down. And during the walk from Point A to Point B at an event location, I could better assess how to handle four tasks at once. Saunter is my new middle name.

—Sydney Owen Williams, Planet Green Socks

9. Write out your plan for the day.

I learned from one of my first bosses the value in writing things down and creating a game plan for your day. Have a list of the things you want to accomplish for the day and prioritize the one or two big-ticket items that are most important. Tackle those first.

—Matt Murphy, Global Citizens Travel

10. Focus on the problem in its simplest form.

One of the most important things you can learn as an entrepreneur is to focus on the problem in its simplest form, one that you can describe in one sentence. Then come up with the simplest answer to that problem. If you know a problem exists, then you can determine the demand for an actual solution.

—Andy Karuza, SpotSurvey

11. Get things done early on.

Focus on identifying specific tasks or objectives you can achieve early on to establish your reputation as someone who gets things done. Be sure to choose a goal that matters to the company and its business objectives.

—Ryan Stoner, ryanstoner.com

12. Stay hungry, stay humble.

This advice was given to me by Scott Van Pelt, the ESPN SportsCenter anchor. The key to never faltering in business or life is to truly stay motivated and to not get overly confident when things go well.

—Nick Friedman, College Hunks Hauling Junk

13. Cheerfulness makes for usefulness.

When I started, too often stress showed on my face and I was projecting fear and anxiety, rather than confidence and faith. A co-worker pulled me aside one day and simply reminded me that I was the face of the company. “Cheerfulness makes for usefulness,” were her exact words. Since then, that has been my mantra.

—Mark Salamon, Gold Crest Care Center

http://www.success.com/article/13-pieces-of-career-advice-to-help-you-flourish-at-work

8 Ways to Effectively Prioritize the Things on Your To-Do List

Change your habits to become proactive—instead of reactive—in your approach to priorities... and see how much time you gain.

Priorities are things that are important—I know that, you know that. But a lot of us are guilty of the habit of reacting to the urgent things on—and off—our to-do list, rather than responding to the important ones.

Think about this: Important activities should be of high priority because they are the things that contribute most significantly to our objectives. They have more long-term impact, and they should help us the most in reaching our goals. Urgent activities are usually more short-term in nature and may or may not relate to our big-picture objectives, and they do not usually make significant contributions. Instead, by pressuring us daily, they make endless demands on our time.

There is a constant tension between the urgent and the important. And because the important things seldom need to be done today—and the urgent almost always do—there is a critical need to learn how to set proper priorities so that our visions, goals and desires can be met more effectively. 

Don’t prioritize based on who gave you the work; fit it based on its importance and urgency for the big picture. Most people don’t take this time, the time to prioritize. They are usually reactive, so make a concerted effort to be proactive.

How much time could you gain by changing your habits—by more effectively prioritizing? Here are 8 time-gaining tips that you can apply to everyday tasks:

1. Create lists—a lot. Prioritized notes and lists help with focus and multitasking.

2. Set priorities during your daily planning. Eliminate or minimize unproductive to-do items from your daily list to make room for the productive ones.

3. Learn when your high-energy time is. Scheduling your priority work for when you have the most energy gains minutes through more effective work.

4. Early in the day, sort email and quickly categorize each piece appropriately—now, future, trash. Because each piece is only addressed once, you gain time throughout the day.

5. Request simplified emails. When appropriate, request that people send you prioritized emails that spell out the actions required of you with clear bullet points, not long narratives. Set the example yourself by sending only efficient, bullet-pointed emails.

6. Write down your objectives before you return phone calls to gain time through quicker, more effective communication.

7. Prioritize your reading by learning to skim industry newsletters, articles and books. Then read only what really gives you value.

8. Create a written agenda and follow it for every meeting. If you’re not the meeting organizer, help guide a long, rambling meeting to some actionable objectives.

http://success.com/article/8-ways-to-effectively-prioritize-the-things-on-your-to-do-list