In the last 2 articles,Steps to declutter your work area and Being Organized, I discussed the benefits of organization and then provided you steps with how you unclutter your workspace. Today I’ll give you a list of steps you can take to unclutter your mind. Your mind is the powerhouse of your body. For you to function properly as a human being you must have a properly functioning mind that can put its power into carrying out the tasks and objectives that you need to accomplish.

Uncluttering your mind is the process which removes any distractions that may be clouding your judgment and focus, and allows you to free up your mental resources to focus towards “getting shit done”^TM!

The first step that you’re going to take is: “Take a deep breath”. Arguably this is the most important tip, because it gives you the breathing room, the space you need and mental clarity you need for a few minutes where you can gather and focus your energies. Think of it like being tied up in rope. The more you try and push on the rope to try and break it and escape, the more effort you’re going to expend and the faster you’re going to get nowhere, but if you just calmed down and relaxed yourself, pulling yourself inwards, the rope can then easily be pushed down off you.

Alright, now that you have regained some energy, you can start moving forward.

Many times, when you’re feeling as if you have too much on your mind, guess what? You usually have too much on your mind! The great mystery is solved! Seriously, if you have a million and one things to do, you’re best off choosing one thing to get started on and forgetting about the other million things. You can’t do them all at once and thinking about them all at the same time doesn’t make them get finished any faster, so don’t think about them! DON’T!

To repeat, million and one things? Pick one, forget the rest, and just do it! If you’re worried about not worrying about them, well then you can worry about that later!

This is what is called “focus”. It’s like when you’re driving down… ooh look a cheese samich… the road and you’re… a squirrel! Trying to get someplace but you… … get the picture? That was painful to write, and I bet painful to read, just imagine what that does to you, your mind, and your productivity when you’re doing it all the time!

So, I’d like you to take the initiative and focus! Try not to get distracted. You only have so many hours in a day, wouldn’t you like one more hour to do the things you enjoy? If you do, then you need to focus on your work and get it done ASAP.

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If you’re reading this article then no doubt you have some issues with organization and clutter, so for the first step you’re going to go someplace where your mind can be free from the shackles of clutter, where you can actually gather most of your mental capacity. The reason you do this is simple enough, before beginning any task you should clear your mind so that you can focus all your mental energy on that one task. It doesn’t help you at all if you can barely focus on what you’re doing, you’re just not going to get anywhere like that.

Separate

The first thing you need to do when you get back to your messy, desolate land of clutter and confus… I mean work area; you should separate it into zones, so that you’re not tackling one huge job at once. Obviously the bigger the mess the more zones you’re going to have, but that’s alright because by the end you’re going to have a nice and tidy work area.

Your zones should be relatively small. For example, an averaged sized desk would have 2 zones, left and right. If you’re trying to organize an entire room then you’d split the room up into 4 parts, then split each part further depending how messy it was and what it actually contained.

Isolate

Next you would select the first zone you are going to begin working on. You don’t have to do anything special, just pick one out in your mind. Depending on how you see things, you may either choose to go with the easiest one first to ease yourself into this activity, or if you’re the kind of person that likes to tackle the hardest thing first and leave the best for last then by all means go for it!

Identify

Quickly look over the zone that you chose to start working on and mentally start categorizing where objects go. Your mind would have already begun working on this long before you chose what zone you were going to start working on.

Launch

Now we get into the nitty gritty business! Dig in! Start putting things into piles based on their common characteristics. You might put all office equipment together in a single pile, papers in another, books in yet another and so on. It’s up to you and how you see things. However, don’t get bogged down in details, if you don’t know where to put something, it might fit in more than one pile, then just choose one and keep moving. If you start to lose pace you’ll only lose motivation, so just keep working on it!

After you have the first zone done, you would move on to the second, using the piles that you already have created. At the end of this you should have a few neatly stacked(or towering and crumbling towers). At this point it’s simply taking the objects in those piles and putting them someplace appropriate. Papers would go on a shelf, so would books, pens and pencils in the drawer, and so on.

The biggest challenge to organizing is actually getting started. Once you’ve started then the rest is merely putting in the time to get it sorted, so you have to remember that once you start, keep going! If you stop then you’re pretty much back at square one. Go go go!

Hope this helps, let me know what you thought of it by leaving me a comment, and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed! Orange button at the top! Show it some love!

Organization

“Clean up your room!”  I’m sure you heard this being yelled at you countless times during your youth, and I’m sure you hated every time you heard it, or even when you simply knew it was coming. You dreaded those words, because you knew it meant work, or at least some anguish at the coming battle that you will be doing with your parents. Oh yes, I bet you were a cheeky little bugger!

Can you remember having a messy room or a messy desk? Do you remember how hard it was to find anything under all the junk that was lying around? Do you still have that problem?  I’m sure you hated having to spend half an hour just to find your shoes, or 15 minutes just to find your pen so you could get on with your work.  Did you ever get agitated when you had to do work on a messy desk and never found out why?

It’s because of all that clutter! Whenever you thought of that mess your mind would begin going through all the stress and frustration you felt whenever you worked in a cluttered environment in the past. Flashbacks of losing track of where you were in your work would reoccur every now and then as you thought about your work, even if you may have never noticed these flashbacks, they were happening and your mood was being affected by it, whether you liked it or not.

Whenever you sat down to do some work in a cluttered and messy environment, your mind would automatically become preoccupied with all the clutter around you, leaving you much less mental capacity for the work you have to do. This can make even the smallest of tasks look huge, simply because your mind associates that task with everything currently running through your mind. Because of this, you will inevitably lose your focus many times throughout the time you spend there and your work will take even longer.

Does that sound enjoyable to you? No, I didn’t think so. If it did, I’m afraid you need more help than I can give you, perhaps a padded cell may be appropriate!

Read on to find out how you can cure this problem once and for all!

Why organize?

You may have always heard that organization and being organized is a good thing, yet you never heard exactly why it’s a good thing. All through your years you were provided with the solution to a problem you weren’t even aware of. How ironic is that?  Well I’m going to tell you exactly what being organized will do to you, and what profound effects it will have on your life!

Organization improves thought flow; I remember when I used to sit at a cluttered desk, papers strewn all over, pencils and pens everywhere and on the floor. Just getting started at working on anything was a major chore, and when I did start I would find it incredibly hard to actually get anything finished because I would keep getting distracted. I kept getting distracted because my mind didn’t want to deal with the current situation. My mind wanted to focus on something structured but the situation around me wouldn’t let it do that.

I decided one day that I was fed up with this, the clutter, and the inability to get anything meaningful done, so I began to organize my desk. I started with picking up the papers and just putting them in a pile vaguely resembling organization by topic. I think I gained a whole new desk out of that, just because I could now use the space that was previously covered up by mounds of paper. I picked up the pens and pencils, cleaned up the dust, and put away everything else that was strewn around into drawers just so they could be out sight, and out of mind.

Guess what happened to my work? It actually got completed in less time than it did for me to drink a glass of tea! Amazing isn’t it? With all that clutter gone, my mind was finally able to focus on the task at hand. The electrical impulses flowing around inside my brain began to coalesce into a great mass of pure productive thought. It was suddenly much easier to put a pen in my hand, put it onto the piece of paper, and actually write a piece that didn’t resemble the writing of a 5 year old kid on speed!

You r brain only has a certain amount of power at any one point in time for it to devote to any particular task. When you put mounds of useless information in front of it, it’s going to do what it’s best at and try to focus on it and do it, but this in turn robs you of power that you need for other important things.

Organization improves creativity; With your brain now free to focus on important things, you can now finally direct it towards matters of creativity.  Creativity, to create, is the process by which you turn semi-random thoughts and impulses into a work of art, a work of art judged by you to be so.

With your mind and workspace now organized, you finally have the mental capacity available to you where you can take the semi-random thoughts and impulses flowing around in your head and apply some structure to them, turning them from thought soup into a great masterpiece.

Organization improves productivity; This is partly a result of the above effects. Improving your thought flow and creativity increases productivity substantially. You also gain an improvement from simply being happier with your new workspace and newfound freedom(freedom from the evil oppressive powers of clutter!).

These results can all be yours if you simply put in the effort to be more organized and try to remove as much clutter from your life as possible. All it takes is a little effort and a little forethought every day.

Next article I’ll provide you with a plan to remove clutter from your life and to start becoming more organized. You will have all these improvements if you follow along.

Hope you enjoyed the article; leave me a comment if you have anything to share. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the feed located at the top of the page! Subscribe!

I chose the following video because I thought it might brighten your day, and also it has a few interesting things related to personal development, self improvement, and self help. At least I think so.

Enjoy! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Blasted Crossing feed, which you can find at the top.

Email was touted as being one of the biggest productivity boosters when it first appeared on the scene. “No more waiting for messages”, “No more lost mail”, and “Send mail instantly!” were some of the more common catch phrases that were associated with it. As more and more people learned about it and started using it, the more messages were flowing around the wires. Today there are millions upon millions of messages floating through cyberspace, and I bet you anything that less than 0.0001% of those messages were of any importance whatsoever. Yet you can always hear somebody saying “but I have to check my email! There’s something really important I’m waiting for!”.

“You have mail!”. They drop everything and away they rush to the computer! They open their email program, type in their username and password and lo and behold! They have a new offer for Viagra! Wow, that was a close call! What if they had missed that email, what would they have done!? Oh the humanity!

Email as a productivity killer

Do you ever have that problem? Constantly being afraid what you might miss if you don’t check your email, and so you check it constantly every 30, 15, maybe 5 minutes? Or you might be working on something, writing a blog post perhaps, doing some banking, buying some stocks, finishing up some work for tomorrow, whatever it may be, then suddenly you get an email and you drop everything you were doing and rush to check it out.

After you answer it, you try to go back to what you were doing, but oh wait! You forgot what you were doing; now you can’t remember whether you were going to add or subtract that money from your account, you decided to subtract. Oops, you’re now overdrawn, your insurance eats away at your savings, you can’t pay your bills, you lose your car, house, dog, and you’re now out on the street!

Ok, maybe that’s a little too melodramatic. Let’s back up. You answer that email, but now you forget what you were doing exactly and you’re going to have to spend another 5 or 10 minutes trying to get back to where you were. I hope whatever was in that email was worth wasting away 5 or 10 minutes of your life.

This is a simple scenario, now imagine how it really is, you’re working on more than one thing, and you keep getting an email every half an hour or so, throughout an 8 hour day, if it takes you just 5 or 10 minutes to get back to what you were doing before that email arrived, and you get 5 or so emails per day, that’s 25 to 50 minutes a day you’re losing!

Increasing your productivity

Now obviously some emails absolutely cannot wait, and I understand that, but what about the rest of them? Are they really that important, or do you just THINK that they’re that important?

Try not responding to just 1 email and see if the world explodes. If it doesn’t, start cutting back on the amount of time you spend reading and responding to email. Check your email once every 4 hours or so to start with, just before your lunch break. After all, you have work to do too.

If the email truly is important and is a matter of life and death, then whoever sent it to you will almost assuredly try to contact you in a more direct manner, through the telephone for instance.

If someone thinks you are being inconsiderate because you are not answer your emails, then you can tell them that when they are prepared to give you 5 minutes of their life in exchange for 5 minutes of yours (the time it would take you to answer it and get back to what you were doing) then you will answer them as soon as the email comes in. Ask them if their work is more important than yours, or if their life is somehow more important than yours.

Stop wasting time and do what you are supposed to be doing so that you can finish up and enjoy some of your time that you have. Don’t waste it frivolously answer every single little message that comes your way.

That’s all I have to say for now. I’d be happy to hear some of your responses. And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed at the top (the orange-y-goodness button).

I’ll also try to get a quote of the day up sometime soon!

So today’s post will be posted later on in the day (assuming I don’t slack off!), and then on Friday I’ll start with the Friday posts.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for the Feed! You can click the link under the header marked Entries RSS, which has a nice orange icon next to it! Look for the orange! mmmm, orange…

This is personal development, self-improvement, or self help, whatever you want to call it. It means you helping yourself, and these items will allow you to become better acquainted with who you are.

Just remember, to get any sort of usefulness out of self help and self improvement, you have to ‘do’ and not just ‘read’ . got it? ok! Lets go…

1. Take a minute to sit back and relax.
2. Think long and hard about where you are right now in your life
3. Is this the life you wanted to be living? Is this what you dreamed about when you were a kid?
4. If no to the above questions, then find out what went wrong and where.
5. Take the time to analyze what you just discovered.
6. Write down 1 long term goal and 1 short term objective. The short term objective should be something that will help you reach your goal.
7. Work out how you can accomplish the objective.
8. Start working on the objective!

That’s all for now. Get moving!

Making money is one of the things that we seem to be so very interested in, going above and beyond the supposed limitations of our bodies and minds to try to make an extra buck. I detest any situation where a person gives up part of their health to try and make a little more money, so I thought I’d offer these 4 short tips to try and save you some of your health(those of you that are sacrificing your health) and earn you a little more cash(for everybody!).

Before you start reading these tips, keep in mind that theory without practice is worthless. If you think you can make money just by reading how then please by all means share that secret with me!

So here we go:

1. Give to receive. Making money is about providing people with something, a product or service that would justify in their minds the action of giving you their hard earned cash. This may seem blindingly obvious, but so many people forget that when offering a product or service, they need to offer something the consumer actually WANTS.

   A book about getting your cat to stick to the ceiling? If somebody wants it, and you provide enough incentive for them to have it, then they will buy it. It doesn’t matter how mundane, outrageous, ridiculous, or genius it is. Keep that in mind!

2. Help somebody. “Pfft!” you say! “How can I gain money by helping someone?” you ask. Simple really. This follows on from the previous tip, referring specifically to offering a service. You will always find somebody needing help in their work or business. What they need and what you can offer depends on your skill set. For example, if you are a computer specialist, you could help them out by offering to manage their computers.

   Now obviously, depending on their size/budget, they may not be able to pay you. This does NOT mean you shouldn’t help them. If they can’t pay, and you still offer to help them, then congratulations, you just put yourself way above the rest of the fold that would only consider working for a green piece of paper. This person or company will be more willing to refer their friends and associates to you in the future since they have at least 1 positive association with you without having had to pay you anything.I know that you have to eat and pay rent, but consider this tip as part of your marketing repertoire. Increasing exposure, good will, and word of mouth referrals is a cornerstone of doing good business.

3. Find a way to make $1, I don’t care how as long as it’s conscionable and not immoral/unethical. After you make $1, all you have to do is increase your sales to your desired level. This isn’t easy, but $1 is the first step, which effectively unlocks the door for you.
4. Join a referral program. There are many many many referral programs available no matter where you look. These programs normally pay you a commission for what you sell, so the more you sell, the more you earn. This allows you to leverage your contacts (friends, family, colleagues…etc) to help get you started.

Money making tips, indeed. You have to start some place, and I hope this gives you the small push you need to get started on your path to financial independence.

Drop me a line and tell me what you think. Over and out.

Remember the days of youth where you used to do interesting things all the time just because it was new and exciting? When you were constantly bored and often had to think about new and creative ways to cure that boredom? That was a fun time wasn’t it?

Even though you’re older now, it seems like that constant feeling of boredom remained with you, except that you’ve lost the ability to think up new and creative ways to cure it. So I’ll help you get started back on the path of excitement and FUN!

So without further delay, here are 5 ways to cure your boredom!

1. Ever had a thought like “Wow that would be cool to do; I could never do it though, nah, I’d be too embarrassed”? Well, whatever that thought was, go do it! Unless of course it’s antisocial, then you might be better off keeping it to yourself rather than spending some time in jail!
2. Invent a new game and try it out on your friends. Seriously! You never know, it might become “the next big thing”(tm).
3. Think of something completely unconventional to talk to people about, and then go talk to them about it. Ever tried this? It completely freaks people out because you just went outside their expectations, and they have no idea what to think.
4. Go outside and run around in a circle. What?! You think I’m kidding? , well yeah I am. Don’t tell that to the next person though!
5. Do something that you enjoy and haven’t done in a while. If you’ve been neglecting some hobbies, or even just forgot about something you enjoy doing so go ahead and take it up again.

Go ahead and try some of these out. Let me know how you do and if this helped or not. I’ll be posting some more ideas on how to cure boredom in the coming week or so. So check back often!