12 tips on improving work, life and the work-Life balance

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A few months ago, I started keeping and categorizing insights in a Word document. This gave me an opportunity to centralize knowledge and remember what is truly important to me.

But, what I realized is that this document also creates an objective, browsable list of ideas that can be used to generate additional insight.

Because I believe that this could be valuable to other people, I created a serie to share these insights, one category at a time.

Work, life and the work-life balance

• Be patient. Things don’t happen overnight. It’s the journey - not the destination - that will teach you the most.
• Don’t live in the past. Yes, you need to learn from the past but, we only have the future to work with. We often fall into patterns (good or bad), breaking them is often the best way to move forward.
• Nothing really worth having comes without a fight. The “easy” solution rarely brings the best results. Life will be easier if you already know that things will be difficult. Challenge the status quo and aim high.
• Be aggressive and try. The most succesful people generally failed a lot before succeeding. It’s best to try and fail than never try at all. The first-hand knowledge you will get in the process is extremely valuable.
• You won’t go anywhere without an objective. Plan loosely enough to allow for adaptation but keep your eyes on the prize. Maybe the path you’re on is not the right one but, you can only know that if you know where you’re going.
• Work on your strengths. Truth is, you’re never going to be perfect. Fix major flaws but focus on being better at what you’re already good at. Succesful people are not perfect, they just excel at certain things.
• Don’t try to do everything right. You’re generally the only person expecting yourself to be good at everything. Define the things that really matter to you or your business and focus on getting good at them.
• Balance is everything. The best way to burnout is to only do one thing in life (eg. work). Balancing the different facets of your life is difficult but will make you happy. Most good ideas come when you’re doing other things.
• More work hours does not equal more productivity. It’s proven that productivity decreases when working longer hours. Use constraints as opportunities. Find a way to simplify or improve your methodology.
• Deal with things face to face or over the phone. Email is bad communication. If you’re hesitating before sending an email, don’t send it.
• Don’t be too close to your ideas. Feeling too closely about any idea will make you unhappy if it’s turned down and reduce your ability to adapt and think creatively. There will always be new ideas if you’re willing to look for them.
• Be humble. That’s the only way to keep on learning and growing. When people think they know something, they generally stop looking for answers. Maybe there’s a better answer… Everyone can teach you a thing or two about something.

The next post in this serie will be on the art of presenting concepts, ideas, designs, etc. Subscribe to our feed to make sure you’re not missing out.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.