3 Practical Steps For Controlling Your Negative Self-Talk

March 11th 2009   Personal Development   14 comments

On Monday I reviewed The Power Of Less and some of the insights in it inspired me to look at ways of dealing with my negative self-talk. Breaking your work down, focusing on one thing for a month… it  might seem commonsense in hindsight but I’ve never thought to apply it to habit building in such a systematic way. Go figure. Anyways, for the last month I’ve been putting these ideas to practise and today I want to cover how I’ve reined in my negative self-talk. At the bottom of this post I’ve also raised a question about positive self-talk. Interestingly, I stopped short of encouraging it. I’d been keen to hear your thoughts on that one.

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The Power Of Less: My Review And Thoughts

March 9th 2009   News & Updates   0 comments

I was keen to review The Power Of Less because Leo Babauta, the author and owner of Zen Habits, started blogging about the same time as me and it’s very encouraging to see him become one of the top bloggers and now a successful author to boot. The Power Of Less provides a blueprint for what I believe personal productivity actually is (you might call it simplifying, efficiency, GTD, Zen To Done… whatever). Essentially it covers how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary. This is encapsulated in six key principles, including setting limits, starting small and focusing on one thing at a time.

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Inspirational Quotes: Alfred Souza, John Schaar And More

March 6th 2009   Miscellaneous   2 comments

This is my regular collection of inspiring, intriguing and occasionally amusing quotes that I’ve discovered over the last couple of months. This edition includes quotes from Alfred North Whitehead, John Schaar and several others.

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Ask The Readers: What Would Your Ideal Productivity App Be?

March 4th 2009   Ask The Readers   11 comments

I’m very much a pen and paper type of person. I much prefer being able to scribble a bunch of ideas down, then having to fiddle about with a laptop or PDA. That being said, there are a great many people out there who prefer the high-tech approach. This is very apparent by the number of productivity apps out there. They all claim to do many different things, some better than others, but there is yet to be any one productivity software to rule them all! Ahem…

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4 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Rely On Your Brain (Too Much)

March 2nd 2009   Personal Development   5 comments

Some are bigger than others, and some use it more than most. Yes, I am of course talking about the brain… I’m sure many of us write thoughts down on paper so we don’t forget them and if you are serious about your productivity you may even have tried mind sweeps and discovered lots of things you would otherwise forget about. But why is it so beneficial? If I’m out and remember something I will save it to my mobile phone or scribble it on a scrap piece of paper. It annoys my wife but if she wants me to do something I will add it to my to-do list so I don’t forget it (and so she doesn’t have to constantly remind me).

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