#theberry #quotes #well #wise #saying #motivation #raisinggirls
Month: April 2017
Why Working Less Will Let You Get More Done
You’re reading Why Working Less Will Let You Get More Done, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
The key to get more done isn’t to slave away for 10 hours a day, it’s to work smarter instead of harder. Working less is one way to working smarter, and here’s why.
The Simple Law That Can Revolutionize the Way You Work
In school I often procrastinated until the deadline was 45 minutes away. I panicked, worked like a machine and miraculously finished it in time.
I experienced Parkinson’s Law: that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
If you have a deadline, you’ll almost always meet it. Parkinson’s Law works because it forces you to bring more energy, motivation and focus to your work. If you’re close to a deadline, you’ll become a working machine. But if you have all the time in the world, you’ll constantly check Facebook, watch YouTube and do easy work.
If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute – Cyril Northcote Parkinson
Limiting the time you work also forces you to focus on your most important tasks. You would be able to fill a 120 hour week with work, because there’s always an infinite amount of things you could be doing. But that doesn’t mean you should.
How Many Hours a Week Should You Work?
Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, said that if you study world-class performers in a lot of different fields, none of them practice more than 4 hours a day. The conclusion? Most people can’t sustain more than 4 hours of intense concentration a day.
All other hours of focus are much less productive. In most work the amount of focus and energy spent is just as important as the time put in.
Studies has shown people are the most productive while working 35 hour weeks. While 60-hour weeks increase your productivity in the short run, after a few weeks you’ll be too fatigued and stressed to do anything efficiently. You have to make room to recharge.
Researchers concluded that “at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.” Another study found that productivity “falls off a cliff after 55 hours—so much that someone who puts in 70 hours produces nothing more with those 15 extra hours.”
The Key for Taking Advantage of Working Less
Track how much you’re working.
If your goal is to spend 35 hours a week, stop when you’ve tracked 35 focused hours. The daily limit could be 4 hours, or to never work after noon. The time tracking software I use is Toggl.
That’s it. Working less makes you more productive by creating a deadline, making you focus on your most important things and letting you recharge. Start tracking your work now, and have a great day!
Elias Edgren is a writer, productivity geek and addicted to music. Do you want to get more done? How convenient: he has written a free “Cheat Sheet for Extreme Productivity“.
You’ve read Why Working Less Will Let You Get More Done, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
What Is A Demisexual? 5 Signs You May Be One
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a demisexual friend years ago.
At the time, I didn’t know she was demisexual. I didn’t even know what a demisexual was.
But I did know that, unlike most of my other friends, she didn’t display obvious sexual attraction towards anyone of any gender.
Until she met John, that is.
I remember she wouldn’t stop talking about John.
She would go on and on about his amazing qualities — how smart and kind he was and how he looked so much like a Hollywood star. As she gushed, “He’s almost too perfect to be true.”
Of all the things she said, however, one stood out.
“You know,” I said, putting down my cup of coffee, “I noticed you keep describing John as a ‘good friend’ over and over.”
“Yes,” she replied thoughtfully, twirling a spoon into her coffee, “because we are good friends.”
I almost slammed my coffee cup on the table. “Are?”
“Yes, we ‘are’ good friends,” she repeated. “What’s wrong with that?”
I didn’t reply. I wanted to point out that “friends” and “lovers” aren’t the same thing, but I had a feeling she’d be offended.
She seemed to sense my discomfort, because she said, “Ah, I’m a demisexual, you see.”
Thankfully, I resisted the urge to say “What?” outright.
Instead, I got the conversation going with, “I’m not very familiar with the term ‘demisexual,’ to be honest. But I’d love to hear more about what it’s like from you!”
Fortunately for me, she chose not to be offended or at least to ignore my discomfort at her revelation. As our conversations about the subject deepened, this is what I gathered about being a demisexual.
What is a demisexual? Here are some of the signs:
According to Asexuality.org, demisexuals only feel sexual attraction towards people with whom they already have a strong emotional connection.
That emotional connection isn’t necessarily romantic; in fact, it’s more common for demisexuals to be attracted to their friends before anyone else.
Most of the time, however, demisexuals don’t feel sexual attraction — which is why they’re said to fall under the asexuality spectrum.
Here are some other signs you might be a demisexual:
1. You don’t put as much importance on sex as others do.
It’s not that you don’t like sex or think it’s wrong. It’s just that, for the most part, you don’t see the point of doing it.
Why get physically intimate with someone when you can simply share lively conversations with each other?
Why use someone else for your sexual pleasure, when you can please yourself on your own? And why do people talk like having sex is the pinnacle of existence?
These are some of the questions that bother you as a demisexual. You’re not sure how to explain not wanting sex to people who’ve wanted it for most of their adult lives.
Engaging in conversations about the subject makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable.
2. You are primarily attracted to someone’s personality, as opposed to their looks.
There are two types of attraction: primary and secondary. Primary attraction is what you feel for someone based on their looks and other qualities you can easily discern.
Secondary attraction, on the other hand, is based on someone’s personality and how well you connect with that person.
As a demisexual, you aren’t necessarily incapable of primary attraction.
On the contrary, you’ve had your fair share of crushes at first sight. Like many people, you appreciate the way an actor runs his hands through his hair or the way an actress tilts her mouth up when she laughs.
However, you don’t hit on random strangers just because you find them “hot.” In fact, you hardly use the word “hot” to describe people.
You are far more interested in what’s behind the pretty face. Chemistry for you is an intriguing personality.
3. You prefer to befriend, rather than flirt.
Since you’re more likely to be attracted to someone based on their secondary qualities, your romantic relationships usually start out as friendships.
After all, you already know your friends like the back of your hand. To you, the idea of dating people within hours — or even months — after meeting them is unthinkable.
Also, the word “flirting” is not in your vocabulary. You are not a flirter, and you wonder why other people do it. Often you’re oblivious to (and uncomfortable with) people who try to flirt with you.
You’d rather that lovers get to know you first before they begin acting flirtatious and romantic.
4. When you are sexually attracted to someone, you’re either confused or single-minded.
Because you don’t feel sexual attraction very often, you struggle when you do feel it.
When you get a strange, fluttery feeling around someone, it confuses you.
How do you act on the feeling? Is it okay to have sex with a special someone, even if you two are already good friends?
How do you even start with sexual intercourse? Do you need to have sex in the first place?
Why not just show someone how much you love them based on what you do for them every day, rather than focusing on how skilled you are in the bedroom?
Once you realize you’re in love, you also realize one other thing: you can’t imagine being in love with anyone else other than that person.
If you’re being honest with yourself, that’s more terrifying than anything else you’ve ever experienced in your life.
5. You’ve been called “prudish,” “old-fashioned,” or similar words.
Most people think you’re demisexual by choice. They think you’re old-fashioned and want to wait until marriage before having sex.
You’re often teased and told things like, “It’s the 21st century for goodness sake. You don’t have to wait for a marriage license.”
In reality, you just don’t feel compelled to seek out “the one” in the first place.
You’re also fully aware of the fact that anyone can sleep with anyone else, regardless of gender, religion, or marital status.
Still that doesn’t change the fact that you just can’t turn on sexual attraction like a switch, no matter how much everyone else thinks you should.
You are not alone as a demisexual. There are others like you who understand wanting a deeper emotional connection before getting sexually involved with someone.
Remember that regardless of your sexuality, you deserve to have love, care, and understanding — not only from others but also from yourself.
Are you a demisexual, or know someone who is? How do you feel about it? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
The post What Is A Demisexual? 5 Signs You May Be One appeared first on Live Bold and Bloom.
Grand Canyon National Park – Arizona – USA (by Marc Cooper)
Grand Canyon National Park – Arizona – USA (by Marc Cooper)
‘Sex and the City’ in Hell
What are we meant to conclude about the sexual experiences of women when we realize that two out of four of the smart, beautiful women in the HBO series Big Little Lies have been—or are being—abused? Perhaps it’s a sign of the times in which we live, that something intended to be a frothy, sexy Sunday night entertainment (it has been described as “darkly comic”) should turn out to conceal a message about the prevalence of overt and hidden violence against women.
How A Broken Heart Can Be Your Biggest Teacher
Losing someone you love, either through a death or a breakup, is arguably one of the most painful experiences a person has to endure.
It is particularly challenging during the initial stages.
I like to compare it to the drowsiness and uncomfortable sensations a patient experiences right after having a surgery. The only difference is that the physical pain has a fairly predictable healing time, whereas emotional pain does not.
The recovery time for the brokenhearted completely depends on how much effort they are willing to put into healing themselves. Unlike what some people believe, time does not heal all wounds. Instead, conscious self-care does.
The reaction towards a painful loss depends on a person’s inner strength and psychology. It ranges between taking time off to go on a spiritual retreat to something as extreme as committing suicide.
Clearly one has to be very careful and gentle with himself as he recovers. I know how fragile one can feel during that time as I have endured a painful loss, too.
Yet, I have found that if we can overcome the immediate maelstrom of emotions, we can later learn a great deal from our experience and use that wisdom to improve both our lives and the lives of others.
The biggest lesson a broken heart taught me was that no matter how intense a relationship is, I had to learn to love from a place of healthy detachment so that if anything goes wrong, I will stay strong and not let my life fall apart. This kind of objectivity creates more balance and harmony in relationships.
In addition to that, I also learned that taking care of my individual needs is paramount if I wanted to have a healthy intimate relationship. I have to make time to meet my own personal needs and avoid placing that responsibility on the person I’m with.
I have to admit that it did take some time for me to have this breakthrough. It only came to me after taking the time to process my feelings and engaging in long periods of introspection. No book or workshop in the world could have taught me these lessons as effectively as my experiences did.
If you are someone who is still in the midst of recovery from a painful break, I can assure you that with a consistent self-care regime, you will gradually feel better.
Here are a few tips I would like to share with you to help you get started:
Be gentle with yourself
Much like a patient after a surgery, you need to understand that your emotional state is delicate and you will require time to heal. Get the support that you need from friends and loved ones and be gentle with yourself.
Honor your feelings
Getting over a break up shouldn’t numb you. Don’t resist your feelings because that will only make them stronger. Instead, you need to find healthy ways to process them, such as journaling or speaking to someone you trust.
You can talk to your friends, family members, a counselor or coach. Work on forgiveness for both yourself and your ex-partner, and walk away with a feeling of acceptance and inner peace.
Understand the lessons
Once you feel stable and objective enough to see things from a neutral and grounded perspective, you’ll be able to understand the lessons the process came with. Ask yourself: “What did I learn about myself and my relationships after going through this?” and “What can I do differently next time?”
Getting over a break up isn’t entirely a negative experience. It can come with positive lessons, too.
See Also: What To Do After A Break Up: A Handbook For Every Newly Single Guy
Move on
After processing your feelings and the lessons, you need to do whatever it takes to get your life back on track. You have made great efforts to overcome this bump in your life and the time has come for you to make plans to move forward.
On the other end of the tunnel, you will be filled with gratitude and trust that every experience that you go through will help you become a wiser, more loving and giving individual.
See Also: I’m Saying Thanks For Breaking My Heart
The post How A Broken Heart Can Be Your Biggest Teacher appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
#rockies #rockymountains #canada #alberta #bc #mountains #mountain #lake #lakes #water #landscapes #landscape #landscapephotography #photography #photographersontumblr #photo #pics #pic #rain #sky #beauty #outdoors #explore #roadtrip #nature #wilderness #wander
#rockies #rockymountains #canada #alberta #bc #mountains #mountain #lake #lakes #water #landscapes #landscape #landscapephotography #photography #photographersontumblr #photo #pics #pic #rain #sky #beauty #outdoors #explore #roadtrip #nature #wilderness #wander
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
The government-funded “Monitoring the Future” survey, an annual measure of substance abuse by teenagers, recently reported that drug, alcohol, and cigarette use by teens is at the lowest level in the survey’s 40-year history. Given that the decline continues a ten-year trend and that the iPhone was introduced ten years ago, some have speculated that teens are simply swapping the high of illicit substances for the high of Instagram likes. One doctor, blogging for Harvard Medical School, referred to the findings as “a bit of a silver lining” to teens’ ceaseless phone use.
Readers of Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked will find little consolation in a possible correlation between the rise of smartphones and the dip in drug use. Alter’s unsettling but riveting book argues that today’s tech, from e-mail to video games to Netflix, is as addictive as the most habit-forming narcotic; moreover, as Alter observes, unlike drugs or alcohol, quitting technology, whose grasp extends into our jobs, schools, recreational activities, and social lives, “isn’t an option.”
Alter, an associate professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of 2013’s Drunk Tank Pink, spends much of the book establishing that we have a problem. He convincingly argues that technology is increasingly engineered to be addictive, making all of us, but especially children, vulnerable to its dangers; it’s not for nothing that Steve Jobs didn’t let his own kids near an iPad.
The author doesn’t use the word “addiction” lightly: one of his goals is to legitimize the notion that behaviors are as addictive as substances. (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders almost included Internet addiction in its latest edition; for now, gambling disorder is the only behavioral addiction listed in the DSM.) Brain scans show that the pattern of neurons firing across the brains of “a drug addict as he injects heroin” and “a gaming addict as he fires up a new World of Warcraft quest” are “almost identical,” Alter writes. Indeed, he spends time with a WoW addict who, after a stint at an Internet addiction rehab clinic near Seattle, relapsed spectacularly with a five-week binge spent playing the game 20 hours a day. World of Warcraft’s effect on the young man’s life was easily as ruinous as a hard drug habit would have been.
Irresistible draws on the work of scientists and social scientists, and Alter excels at applying their research to examples that resonate with everyday tech users. For instance, he describes a 1970s-era study of lab pigeons that pecked buttons in order to receive food pellets. Sometimes the pigeons received food with every peck, while other times they would peck in vain until finally food would be delivered. The psychologist who devised the study found that the pigeons’ dopamine levels spiked when the buttons delivered food on an unpredictable basis.
Alter applies this finding to a very different type of button. “It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook use,” he writes of the company’s 2009 activation of the feature. “Users were gambling every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation: either you didn’t have enough online friends, or, worse still, your online friends weren’t impressed.” Many Facebook users compulsively track their “likes” and post in an effort to attract ever more positive reinforcement. “Like pigeons,” Alter observes, “we’re more driven to seek feedback when it isn’t guaranteed.” Little wonder that Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube all introduced “like” buttons, too.
Unfortunately, after Alter sells us so convincingly on the idea that our immersive relationship to tech is hindering our human relationships and our overall quality of life, the solutions he offers hardly feel up to the task. He encourages employers to disable access to work e-mail between midnight and 5 a.m. He describes intriguing apps like the Demetricator, which prohibits Facebook users from seeing—and thus obsessing over—how many people have liked or shared their posts (“10 people like this” becomes “people like this”). He praises “a growing movement of ethical game design,” spearheaded by designers spooked by gamers whose lives have been destroyed by their creations; an ethical game might, for instance, have a natural stopping point to encourage players to disengage.
Given that these strategies are not in tech companies’ or employers’ economic interests, it’s hard to envision them gaining much traction, particularly as the tech landscape evolves in ways impossible to imagine now. (Alter is especially dire predicting virtual reality’s eventual “capacity to render face-to-face interactions obsolete.”) His conclusion, that screen-free downtime will teach us that “the glow of…social bonds will leave us richer and happier than the glow of screens ever could,” feels platitudinous after reading about all of the very specific hooks designed to ensnare us. Moreover, Alter’s book arrives at a time when our devices are irresistible for another reason: many of us are so anxious about the current political situation that we’re compelled to keep checking on the latest developments in a dizzying news cycle. I already know that my relationships with my loved ones are more rewarding than my relationship with my smartphone or laptop. That knowledge doesn’t always prevent me from scrolling through my Facebook feed for just five more minutes even when there are real people in the room waiting to spend time with me. After reading Irresistible, though, I better understand why.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2o1n82S
White Apartment in Barcelona Remodeled by Architecture-G
This particular apartment is located in El Ensanche de Barcelona District, Barcelona, Spain, and has been remodeled by the architecture firm Architecture-G. It consists of 120 square meters and its remodeling was finished in 2015. The floor was almost completely covered with a thick carpet, the only exceptions being the kitchen, bathrooms and laundry area. A resistant material was used in the floor for these areas, each one distinguishable by..
The post White Apartment in Barcelona Remodeled by Architecture-G appeared first on HomeDSGN.
DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa and Nebraska lies on the…
DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa and Nebraska lies on the wide plain formed by the flooding and shifting of the Missouri River. Each spring and fall since the end of the last ice age, spectacular flights of ducks and geese have marked the changing seasons along this traditional waterfowl flyway. Land clearing, drainage projects and flood control measures during the past 150 years have transformed the Missouri River floodplain from diverse wildlife habitat to farmland. DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge is part of a network of refuges devoted to preserving and restoring increasingly scarce habitat for migratory waterfowl and other wildlife. Photo by Andrew Loftis (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).
Sig Nordal 