Organize IT

We are well into Spring now and it’s at this time of year that people begin the traditional spring clean. While this typically involves cleaning the home, it can also involve other aspects of your life. As we finally recover from the holiday season and begin to feel the benefits of the warmer weather, there is no better time to have a good look at your life and get everything in good shape for the rest of the year.  Below are the six key areas I intend to look at in my own life. What about you?

In the first part of my series discussing how to boost your creativity I looked at the five basics that are required to get those creative juices flowing. The fifth point covered the importance of finding the right location. In fact I believe that your surroundings are so important in boosting your creativity, that in this post I will list my own top five inspirational locations. This is by no means a definitive list but I hope it will encourage you to think of your own favorite places to visit.

Creativity is all about coming up with new ideas, interpretations and methods and involves thinking and exploring what goes through your mind. It’s a quality that should be encouraged in all walks of life. Regardless of whether you are naturally imaginative or not, you need to feed your creative side with inspirational material, give it the time and attention it needs and let it run free. Below are the five key variables that I have found to work best in getting those creative juices running:

I recently came across a formula for procrastination developed by a University of Calgary academic and it really caught my attention. I saw a lot of potential in it, but as is typical with formulas of this type, real world application isn’t obvious. Trying to mathematically apply it in your daily life is hardly practical (go to the author’s site if you want to understand the intricacies behind it). As a result I decided to look into the four elements that make up the equation (expectancy, value, sensitivity and delay) and consider how we can proactively increase/improve the odds for each of them and in turn decrease our chances of procrastination:

In today’s society stress is an ever present problem that’s only going to get worse as we are increasingly expected on a personal and professional level to do more with less. We have to work more hours and get more done for less pay and in less time. That’s a depressing shift in our lives and it shows no signs of changing any time soon. As a consequence we have to develop ways of reducing the stress that results. Below I’ve detailed my top ten suggestions for doing just that.