Forgetful? 8 Tips to Help Memory

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“We try many ways to be awake, but our society still keeps us forgetful. Meditation is to help us remember.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

The days leading up to a holiday are often filled with chores, errands and obligations. Not only do you find yourself with endless lists of things to do, but you often neglect good self-care in the process. No wonder you forget details, fail to live up to your obligations, or walk around in a fog.

Everyone has bouts of forgetfulness from time to time. It’s generally nothing serious and doesn’t linger. If forgetfulness does become persistent and begins to cause problems in your life or that of your loved ones, see a doctor to rule out any medical issue.

For the occasional memory problems, however, here are eight tips that may help.

Learn how to make and use lists.

Far from being a bother, lists are very effective in helping keep track of important tasks and goals. When you take the time to construct a list, you’re removing the burden of trying to keep too many things in your head. By eliminating this logjam, you’re freeing up memory. Listing things on paper is much simpler and more effective than juggling, and dropping, them in your head.

Get a good night’s sleep.

Lack of sleep is one of numerous causes of forgetfulness. In addition to waking up grumpy, insufficient sleep messes with your memory. You forget details, don’t remember what you told yourself the night before was important. The solution is to make it a habit to get a good 8 hours of sleep each night, more if you’re a teenager or young child.

Avoid drugs and alcohol.

As the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) warns, one of the ways alcohol affects the brain is by impairing memory. Memory deficits can occur after only a few drinks, increasing in length and severity with more drinks consumed. Binge drinking – consuming five or more drinks in about 2 hours for men, four for women – causes blackouts. These are serious episodes where you wake up and don’t remember anything from the night or day before.

Drug use, whether prescription or illicit substances, can produce similar impairment in memory. Some drugs also interact with other medications and significantly impair memory when used in combination with alcohol.

The best way to protect your memory is to avoid drugs and alcohol, especially to excess.

Meditate.

Clearing your head of all the conflicting messages can give you more than just peace of mind. It can also aid memory. For centuries, people have been practicing meditation to produce a sense of harmony and balance, as well as the calming influence it bestows. And studies have shown that mindfulness meditation helps with attention span and memory. When you meditate, you’re not shutting off all thoughts as much as you’re acknowledging them and letting them go. The resulting peace of mind disentangles those internal conflicts you felt and allows your memory to recalibrate. Also, try mindful walking to ease stress and help with memory.

Do one thing at a time.

Unless you’re a professional juggler, you can’t juggle more than one thing at a time. In a similar manner, trying to do more than one thing at a time is likely to result in a less-than-favorable outcome for both. Not only that, but you don’t focus completely on the task at hand, thus splitting your concentration and causing your memory to work overtime when it doesn’t have to. The clear solution is to do one thing at a time. Then you can move on to the next item, task, project or goal with a clear head and a sense of accomplishment.

Eliminate distractions.

How can you concentrate on a project that’s on deadline when you’ve got your social media messages flooding in, the phone’s jangling nonstop, you allow interruptions from your co-workers or seek out distractions to keep you from tending to the job? In addition to wreaking havoc with a work, school or home assignment or duty, constant distractions produce a confusing effect that’s bad for your memory. When you eliminate distractions, however, you facilitate full use of your mind without overtaxing it.

Make use of reminders.

Sticky notes, post-its, alerts, reminder calls and emails are a great way to keep from forgetting important things. There’s nothing wrong with using these to ensure you never miss what must be done. That way, even if you didn’t get enough sleep last night, are ill, overstressed, had too much to drink or too much on your to-do list, you’ll have a ready reminder at hand.

Take time to relax.

Not only do you not want to be that dull boy (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”), but you want to have quality time for yourself. This means making sure that you take time to relax. Whether the relaxation takes the form of a hobby, walking outdoors, going to a movie with a friend, shopping, recreational activity or sport doesn’t matter. You and your memory need some downtime, time that you spend doing something you enjoy.

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10 Tips to Decrease Work Stress

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Are you stressed to the max at work? Feel like you can’t catch a break no matter how hard you try? The truth is that work stress will kill you if you don’t do something about it. But what should you do? Here are 10 tips to decrease work stress you can begin today.

Figure out what’s causing you stress.

Before you can begin to decrease work stress, it’s helpful to know what it is that’s causing you to be stressed in the first place. Are you taking on too many projects at once? Is your boss expecting too much from you and have you not mentioned any limitations to what you can reasonably do to him or her?

By analyzing what bothers you at work, you’ll be better able to pinpoint ways to effectively deal with the stressor. If, for example, you’re overworked, you must carve out some of those responsibilities and either delegate them or reduce them.

Your supervisor will be a great help in this area, although it might be tough to broach the subject. Construct a proactive approach. If you let your boss know that you’ll be able to finish X project within deadline if Y and Z are either delayed, assigned to a different person or team, or can be consolidated, he or she may be amenable to making some changes.

Take regular breaks.

Working non-stop is going to wear you down, increase stress and make you miserable. The only way out of this dilemma is to institute a practice of taking regular breaks. Even if you only get a 10-minute break in the morning and afternoon, you can still stand up and walk around at regular intervals.

Instead of staring at a computer screen for hours on end, avert your eyes and gaze outdoors once an hour. These mini-breaks help you compartmentalize what you were doing and provide a buffer so that stress doesn’t exact too great a toll.

Cut down on tasks.

When your to-do list starts to resemble a phone book, you’ve got too much to handle. No human being can possibly tend to an overwhelming number of tasks, not to mention the unnecessary stress such an accumulation tends to produce.

The quickest and perhaps the only way around this is to simply cut down on the number of tasks. Streamline the entries, combining similar ones and deleting, delegating or deciding others. For example, if you have 30 tasks listed, see how many are necessary and which ones are perhaps holdover items no longer relevant. Cut the list in half. That’s a good start. Shedding this amount of weight will lighten your load and help to decrease work stress.

Prioritize what’s necessary.

No doubt there are some work items that need to rank high on your to-do list. Your boss may demand action on a project, or you’re the head of a team working on a hot development. Some are time-sensitive, while others require the assistance of others only available for a certain period.

But there are also other items on your to-do list that don’t require immediate action. They may be better suited to a lower ranking on the list or even deserve their own list of tasks and projects for when there’s a lull.

Mark each item on the list in numerical order, with #1 being the most important and requiring prompt attention. You might even color code those items in the top five, assigning different colors to those further down the ranking of priority.

By prioritizing things, you exert control over what and when you intend to work on them. This alone will reduce the type of stress that often goes together with work-related duties and responsibilities.

Limit distractions.

When you’re trying to work on a task or project, listening to your co-workers’ conversations in adjacent cubicles or offices isn’t exactly conducive to productivity. Neither is having your email client notifications of incoming messages going to keep you focused on the work at hand. Constant interruptions of any kind drain your energy, scatter your attention and limit your ability to get work done.

What’s helpful is to schedule times to check emails, take or make phone calls. Turn off your email client, put the phone on silence mode and automatic answer. Tell co-workers you’re not going to be available for the next hour while you tend to an assignment. Most of all, don’t allow yourself to search for distractions to keep you from your work.

When you’re less distracted, you can concentrate on what you need to do now. This is a great way to curb stress at work and something very much in your control.

Confide in someone you trust.

When you’ve bottled all that stress inside you, you feel like you’re going to burst. That’s not a pleasant feeling and it won’t go away on its own. A huge help is finding someone you trust that you can confide in. This doesn’t mean you do a dump of everything on your mind. That will just succeed in exhausting you and your confidante. Maybe talk about the biggest thing that’s bothering you, the one causing you the most stress.

Also, be aware that you can go to the well too often. Instead of abusing your relationship with too many instances of crying the blues, balance your time with that person by doing other things. Ask about his or her problems and listen without jumping in to talk about your own.

Sometimes it’s enough that you have someone you can go to and talk over things. It isn’t always necessary to dwell on them when you’re with that person.

Meditate or try yoga.

You don’t have to be spiritual to get value from meditating. Think of meditation to get in touch with your inner self, whatever that concept means to you. Through the practice of meditation, you’re not forcing items out of your mind as much as you’re acknowledging their presence and then allowing them to dissipate. This is a huge boost in reducing work stress. You can take classes to learn how to meditate or teach yourself with the help of books, tapes and information on meditation websites.

Another way to decrease work stress is to practice yoga. Again, there are classes you can take to learn yoga as well as self-help instruction. There are numerous types of yoga, so you can check out what resonates with you.

Eat well and sleep better.

Too much stress at work also wreaks havoc on your health in other ways. You tend to eat inappropriate foods, eat too much or fail to eat altogether. You’re also likely to toss and turn at night, mind racing over things left undone at work, remembering something you should have done but didn’t, endlessly going over in your mind what’s on tap for tomorrow.

A key part of your quest to decrease work stress begins at home. You need good self-care: to eat well-balanced, nutritious meals and get a good eight hours of sleep each night. There’s no getting around the fact that your body requires adequate nutrition and rest to function properly. This includes the ability to fight the cumulative effects of stress.

Start to exercise.

You might think that scheduling time for exercise has no place in your busy life, especially given all your work responsibilities. Who has an hour to devote to something that doesn’t lighten your work load? When you exercise, your energy levels get a boost, your mood lightens, and you’re better able to channel the anxiety and stress you feel at work.

Furthermore, after a quick, brisk walk, riding an exercise bike or working the treadmill – or any other vigorous physical exercise that gets your blood flowing, heart rate increasing and oxygen coursing throughout your body – you’ll likely return to the task at hand with greater focus and a resulting increase in productivity.

Enjoy a recreational activity or hobby.

All work and no play is bad for your health. If you’re so caught up in work projects that you never have time to do things you enjoy, your life is seriously out of balance. It’s time to remedy that by figuring out something you can do away from work that, well, takes your mind completely away from anything related to work.

What the activity is doesn’t matter. It can be a recreational activity you do alone or with others. It can be a hobby you’ve long wanted to pursue or just discovered you have an interest in. Spending free time with friends, loved ones and family members also qualifies if this brings you a sense of contentment, love and fulfillment.

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Related articles:

Combat Stress with Mindful Walking

10 Quick Ways to Beat Stress

Self-Care: The Most Important Person to Take Care of Is You

10 Ways Lists Rule

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10 Ways Lists Rule

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“Making lists helps me be more focused and productive, lowers my stress level and makes it easier to stay on top of tasks.” — Suzanne Kane

I’ll confess. I’m an avid list-maker. In fact, I’m so convinced that lists are beneficial that I’ve decided to reveal my personal thoughts on the 10 ways lists rule.

Lists:

#1 — Keep you on-track. I don’t know about you, but it’s sometimes the case that I get so deeply immersed in what I’m doing that I lose track of time. This is a good and a bad thing. It’s good that I’m so focused and being productive, but it’s bad if I lose sight of other things I also need to tend to. Lists help keep me on track. They can do the same for you.

#2 — Remind you what’s important. List have the very appealing benefit of showing you and providing a vivid reminder of what you deem important. When you prepare and pay attention to your lists, you’ll always have a ready guidepost to the meaningful tasks and duties in your life. It may mean reorganizing some items when one takes precedence over another or a new one demands attention. Lists help remind you when you may need this the most.

#3 — Give you something to do. Not that there are many times when you have completed everything you need to do and are looking for something else to devote your attention to. But lists can serve this purpose when you want or need something that’s not on the top of your to-do chart. Be sure to include some fun or for-whenever items on your list so you’ve got something readily available when the power is out, there’s a snow day, you’re on vacation or just have some free time on your hands you’d like to put to good use.

#4 — Provide an easy way to prioritize tasks. It’s simply impossible to do everything at once. There has to be a means to prioritize what gets done first, what can wait a while, and what you can tend to whenever you get around to it. Lists provide this in an easy and painless manner. Assign a number to each item, with #1 being the most important and #10 (or whatever number) the least important. Sometimes, you’ll work on the #1, 2 or 3 items first and intersperse that with a lower-priority item. That’s so you don’t burn yourself out working too hard in succession.

#5 — Take away the stress of trying to keep everything in your head. Your kid needs picking up from school. The cleaning is ready. Dinner plans are uncertain. Your boss just handed you an urgent project and everything else has to be put on hold. What about all the other items you have to do today? What if you forget some? Here’s where a list removes the stress of trying to juggle and remember it all. There’s no forgetting when you’ve put it down on your list.

#6 — Allow you to track progress and results. Once you’ve constructed your list, created a plan or approach and begun work on one or more items, you’ve got a ready-made template from which to track where you are with each. When you achieve a certain level or stage of completion, note that, along with any lessons learned and what’s left to do. Seeing results cements the value of making lists. After all, lists are meant to be helpful. They will be, if you use them.

#7 — Increase self-esteem. Lists are composed of items that are designed to be worked on in some sort of order. When you complete or finish one item, cross it off your list. This helps increase self-esteem and makes you proud of your accomplishment at the same time. It’s not necessary to cross everything off your list in order to boost your self-esteem. Doing one or more well or making significant progress on a few also elevates your sense of accomplishment.

#8 — Improve focus. By selecting one of the items on your list and doing some work on it, you’re helping to refine your focus. Doing one thing at a time does wonders for improving this critical aspect of successful accomplishment. Instead of trying to do many things at once, keeping to one task on your list at a time will help you be more focused.

#9 — Help you organize your thoughts. With so much going on around you, it can be hard to separate one task, project, duty or activity requiring your effort from another. You need organizational ability in your thought process to keep things in order. Lists help you do that in black and white. When an item is right in front of you, you can better figure out an approach.

#10 — Allay anxiety. Ever feel that gnawing and miserable sense of worry over not being able to get a handle on all the things you have to do? It’s no secret that everyday life throws a lot of unexpected situations your way, things you need to deal with immediately. With a list, however, you can feel confident that you’ve put down what you need to do and can come back to as soon as you tend to the pressing concern. Lists also remove the element of uncertainty. If it’s on your list, you’ve given it thought.

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Do you have other ways lists have helped you? I’d love to hear your comments. Maybe they’ll result in a follow-up piece on the topic.

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Are You Lonely Tonight? How to Combat Loneliness

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Are you lonely tonight? Do you feel powerless about how to combat loneliness? You’re not alone. But there are things you can do about it.

Loneliness is a powerful emotion that can be devastating in its consequences. Being alone and isolated has been shown to be an underlying factor in some of the most common health conditions, including depression, substance abuse and chronic pain.

This is borne out by the findings of a recent study conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of the American Osteopathic Association. Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of more than 2,000 American adults surveyed said they have felt loneliness, while nearly a third (31 percent) admitted to feeling loneliness at least once a week.

What Loneliness Is…And Isn’t

Do not confuse loneliness with being alone. You choose to be alone or solitary, sometimes to meditate or think through problems, sometimes for other reasons. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a state of mind. When you are lonely, you may feel unwanted, empty and isolated. Most lonely people desperately want contact with others but find it difficult to make connections because of their state of mind.

10 Effective Ways to Combat Loneliness

As dire as loneliness sounds, it can be overcome. Whether your loneliness is situational due to travel, business or other circumstances, or the kind that almost always accompanies the loss of a loved one or close friend, there are things you can do to combat it.

• Get checked out. To rule out any underlying conditions, physical or mental, it’s important to get a thorough medical checkup by your doctor. This is especially true if your loneliness has spiraled downward into depression that lasts for longer than two weeks. If there is a medical reason at least contributing to your lonely feelings, your physician will be able to offer approaches to remedy the situation, perhaps with professional counseling, a prescription for medication or other treatment.

• Recognize loneliness for what it is. Just saying you feel miserable isn’t going to make things change. You need to recognize that what you’re feeling is loneliness in order to make a decision to change.

• Understand the effects of loneliness. Talking with your doctor and reading about the effects of loneliness will give you a clearer picture of how loneliness affects your physical and mental well-being. If you’re so lonely you don’t want to eat, for example, your physical and mental health will suffer as a result of poor nutrition. Once you know the ways loneliness is bad for you, you can concentrate on working to change those areas of your life that need attention.

• Learn to be resilient. Instead of breaking under the weight of your problems and withdrawing even further into a shell of self-imposed isolation, work on cultivating resilience. Granted, this might seem impossible at first, but learning to bend with the wind and not snapped by its force will help you nurture resilience.

• Adopt a positive outlook. When everything seems dark and hopeless, it might appear to be counter-intuitive to look on the bright side. Yet, when you adopt a positive outlook and see life’s possibilities instead of its negatives, you’ll find yourself more willing to go after opportunities. Furthermore, you’ll be more motivated to be with others and end your self-limiting isolation and loneliness.

• Be sparing with social media. Connecting virtually with others on social media isn’t the same thing as one-on-one and face-to-face interaction. When you’re lonely, the last thing you need to do is immerse yourself on Facebook and other social networks.

In fact, studies have shown that social media addiction actually contributes to feelings of loneliness and depression. For now, go for a hiatus on using social media. At the very least, limit your time there. Get out and interact with people real-time.

• Take care of yourself. When you’re lonely, you tend to ignore good self-care. You likely aren’t getting enough sleep, or the sleep you do get is fitful, interrupted, plagued by unsettling dreams. You wake feeling exhausted and even more lonely.

Sleep deprivation erodes mood, contributes to getting sick, saps energy and becomes an ingrained pattern. Along with ensuring you get sufficient, quality sleep, also work on eating healthy, drinking plenty of water, and getting a good amount of physical exercise.

• Create a list of goals and plans to achieve them. Many times, when a person says they feel lonely, they also describe feeling that something is missing from their life. Spend some time to determine what that might be.

o Is it that you have no hobby or interest to devote your time to?
o Do you feel unable to make any progress in your career?
o Is the house just too empty?

Once you know what that missing piece is, you can work on finding potential solutions. Most of them, you’ll find, involve interaction with other people.

• Take action. In order to stop feeling lonely, you have to take action. Sitting around the house feeling sorry for yourself is not the solution. If you identify that there’s no one in your surroundings that you can hang out with, join a club or group.
o Connect with others at work with whom you share something in common.
o Go visit your neighbors.
o Volunteer at church.

Making new friends and keeping your social calendar filled will help dispel loneliness.

• Consider a pet. For some people, there’s nothing like a pet to help banish loneliness. Why is this? For one thing, pets need nurturing and attention. Along with feeding and grooming and cleaning up their mess, pets naturally gravitate toward displays of affection. They give as well as receive. As the pet’s owner, you benefit from this loving exchange. It helps you feel less lonely when you have your constant pet companion.

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Also see these articles for inspiration and uplifting messages:

7 Tips on Mastering Change
Self-Care: The Most Important Person to Take Care of is You
5 Tips on How to Make Plans
Stuck in a Rut? Tips on How to Break Free from Monotony

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How to Be Fair to Yourself

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“You cannot be fair to others without first being fair to yourself.” – Vera Nazarian

Are you quick to criticize others? Do you find fault in the smallest things? It might be that you lash out at others to mask what you don’t like in yourself.

And that’s not fair.

It’s not fair to you most of all, because you’re capable of so much more that you’re not giving yourself credit for.

If fairness is important – and it’s a highly desirable trait – what can you do to start being fair to yourself so that you can be fair to others?

This isn’t a trick question. It does, however, deserve some careful thought.

What is Fairness?

What does it mean to be fair?

When you consider a solution to a problem, several options or approaches likely come to mind:

You might brainstorm and arrive at these, or they may be suggestions from trusted advisors, friends, family members, co-workers or someone else.
Some you might toss out immediately as unworkable, impractical, too costly or time-constraining.
Other ideas you may mull over for a while before deciding which category they fall into: toss, analyze further, modify or use.

When weighing the pros and cons of each possible solution, giving credence to fairness should be part of the equation. Often, however, it’s not. Instead, other considerations take precedence, such as expediency, return on investment, instant recognition, catapulting to the top or edging out someone or something else.

Ask yourself, is that fair?

Don’t Sabotage Yourself by Being Unfair

Why do people fail to give themselves a fair chance? Why have you done this? Is it because of a feeling of inferiority or that something’s lacking? Is it that you never received encouragement as a child, have a history of mistakes or failures, or never believed enough in yourself to take a chance? Any or all of these could be underlying contributors to a lack of self-fairness.

And they’re all examples of sabotaging yourself by being unfair – to you, most of all.

Steps to Take to Be Fair to Yourself

But this tendency to self-sabotage can be overcome. You can learn how to be fair to yourself. It just takes determination and practice.

Think first. The next time you want to take an action and think about what it is you’re going to do, take a minute to think how this proposed action is fair to you – before you proceed. Are you doing yourself justice? Are you taking advantage of strengths and abilities you possess but haven’t allowed yourself to pursue? Or, are you doing what others tell you without any thought to whether it’s fair or not? Figuring out your underlying motivation will greatly aid in your goal to be fair with yourself. You have to know what’s driving your behavior before you can change it.

Commit to self-fairness. When you insist on fairness to yourself, you’ll radiate that sense of fairness to others. Indeed, after you diligently practice fairness, you will find it easier to be fair in your dealings with others. For example, instead of demanding employees stop everything to jump on a project you deem important, you’ll consider whether this is a fair request. This means putting yourself in their position, to understand how your request affects them. If it’s not absolutely critical, you may decide to alter the due date or timetable for completion, allowing for other high priority items already on your employees’ work schedule to continue. The positive reinforcement you’ll receive from grateful employees will add to your recognition that being fair to others starts by being fair to yourself.

Put yourself first for a change. Often, you’re the last person on your list. Everyone else’s needs are tended to before you even think about taking care of your own. That’s definitely not conducive to overall well-being. In fact, it sets you up for disappointment, increased tension and stress, and a general malaise and dissatisfaction with life. On the other hand, when you take your own needs into consideration, in conjunction with or ahead of those you know you need to attend to, you’re inserting balance into your life. After all, you need to do what’s right for you in order that you can do right for others.

Model fairness to others. Be a leader who models fairness. This type of leadership is inspirational and motivational. When you show others that fairness is important in all dealings, and being fair to yourself is part of that, you’ll be demonstrating an admirable trait of effective leaders. If you need any help with this, take a lesson from some of the world’s most respected leaders, from Winston Churchill to John F. Kennedy to Mother Teresa. They not only knew what was fair, they embodied fairness. Others, seeing such leadership, were inspired to insist on fairness in their own lives.

At the heart of living a vibrant and purposeful life is a fairness to self. Being fair to others will naturally ensue.

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Stuck in a Rut? Tips on How to Break Free From Monotony

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When you’re stuck in a rut, everything seems to run along the same track. Nothing ever changes and you find yourself doing the same things day in and day out.

Some might argue there’s nothing worse than endless monotony, but there truly are more serious situations. Like chronic pain, a sudden illness, trauma, financial disaster, losing loved ones, getting fired and so on.

Compared to what you could be experiencing, being stuck in a rut isn’t all that bad – if you want to continue living a life of sameness. But most people want more out of life than that. Once you recognize the rut you’re in and know you want to change, that’s the first major hurdle. Here are some tips on how to break free from monotony.

Scrutinize your daily schedule.

Maybe you think you know your daily routine inside and out, but do you really know how much time you spend doing various tasks? Here’s where you put down on paper what you do and when from the time you get up until you go to bed. This means jotting down everything and assigning the time you spent doing it, whether it’s brushing your teeth for two minutes or taking the subway to work for 45 minutes.

What you’ll discover is that there’s a lot of time spent looking for things you might have misplaced, time spent frivolously on social media when you could be tending to a work assignment, backtracking to fix an error you made because you were in a hurry to finish, and other instances where your head either wasn’t into what you were doing or you just got bogged down in the details and lost the objective.

Add up the lost moments and you’ll find that there’s a lot of time you could be utilizing to better purpose.

Examine your rituals and make adjustments.

If you do the same thing every morning that you’ve done for the past year, is there a reason why you continue? Is it a ritual you do to get ready for the day that you find helps you or has this become a chore you dread?

Whether it’s deciding what to wear or making something to eat, maybe switching what you do or the order in which you do it will remove the element of boredom and monotony and contribute to a more positive outlook on the day ahead.

The same principle applies at work or school. If your first order of business is to open your desk and take out the files for the day’s work, maybe you talk with your supervisor or co-workers first about the today’s top projects. If there’s something hot or new, you want to be the first to know about it.

When you’re not afraid to look at your everyday rituals and make adjustments, the result will be a lightening of the load and adding an element of change to the day.

Prioritize tasks and delete unnecessary ones.

No one has just one thing to do on any given day. There’s always a multitude of tasks, chores, responsibilities and duties to tend to. No wonder you wind up frustrated and feeling stuck in a rut. How can anyone not feel this way when there’s so much to do and only 24 hours in the day?

Knowing that you can only work on one thing at a time, it’s important to pick out the one you intend to work on first. This requires prioritization of your tasks and it’s not always easy to do. There might be an important assignment that you know will take a long time and you’re reluctant to get started on it. On the other hand, you know you can dash off a few short tasks. It’s going to be a trade-off. Sometimes, the prudent course of action is to do some work on a longer task and then intersperse it with several shorter ones.

During your prioritization of tasks, when you come to some that are purely arbitrary, have no real deadline or have outlived their usefulness on your list, delete them. Cleaning up your to-do list will leave you feeling more in charge and less stuck in a rut.

Factor in some free time.

Since you’ve made some changes in your daily routine already and also prioritized your tasks, you’ve likely created some space in your schedule. Use this time to your advantage to do something that you enjoy.

This could be as simple and uncomplicated as going for coffee with a friend on a break or making a lunch date, taking a walk in the park after work and before heading on your commute home.

It may be more involved, such as researching a goal you’re interested in, connecting with friends to arrange a weekend activity, shopping for clothing and equipment for a hobby you want to begin.

The important thing to remember about free time is that it’s just that: free time. This means you use it for whatever you want. By allowing yourself to enjoy your free time, you’re making great strides to break free from monotony and getting out of being stuck in a rut.

If you need help, ask for it.

Sometimes you may be in over your head, swamped with projects and beset with impossible deadlines. This is not conducive to your well-being. You aren’t superhuman and cannot possibly tackle it all at once. You need help.

It may come as a shock to know that it’s OK to ask for help when you need it. Your supervisor won’t be surprised or shocked if you request assistance, an extended deadline or more resources. In fact, if he or she is, that means they haven’t been paying attention, or they may be getting pressured by their own higher-ups. In any case, when you ask for help, it’s a wake-up call. A good supervisor will accommodate in any way possible.

Once you’ve gotten the help, or the promise of it, this will alleviate some of the stress and tension of the overwhelming workload. Be sure you don’t take advantage of this assistance and dawdle on the projects or tasks. Work efficiently and make progress. That shows your boss you value his or her help and you’ve made good use of it.

It also reinforces your self-confidence and judgement to know that you’ve analyzed your situation and figured out where you need a helping hand.

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5 Tips on How to Make Plans

Photo by Ryan McGuire/Gratisography

“You can never plan the future by the past.” – Edmund Burke

Looking toward the future is an exercise many are afraid to do, principally because they’re held captive by the past. With so much baggage carried forward, is it any wonder that plans sometimes get cast aside for fear they’d turn out to be failures, just like so many did before? This is shortsightedness in the extreme, for no momentum or traction can be gained when your eyes are firmly planted on the past.

“You are not today who you were yesterday.”

It takes a certain amount of courage to pull down the door on the past, particularly if those memories are recent, disastrous, and painful or one more in a long line of failures. But this is an important point to keep in mind: You are not today who you were yesterday.

Hopefully, you’ve learned from what didn’t work so

that you don’t endlessly repeat those mistakes. Having a good support system is also critically important as you draft plans for how you’ll go about completing goals you consider worthwhile.

But do give yourself some credit for having the tenacity to slog through some incredibly hard work. It’s rough going through failure and disappointment. It stings, saps your immediate energy and definitely puts a temporary damper on plans for the future.

You are here today, however, living testament to the restorative power within you. It’s time now to move ahead, look for new opportunities to get involved in, an interest that fires you up and you just can’t wait to pursue, and people whom you haven’t yet met who may provide that added spark that you need to take action.

What you really want to know, however, is what can you do now. Here are five tips on how to make plans – and stop thinking and obsessing over the past:

Adopt a hopeful outlook.

Instead of condemning yourself to repeated failure, reverse that trend. Tell yourself that this is a new day and you are moving ahead with excitement and purpose. You may need to repeat this mantra daily for it to begin to take root – and it will, it you allow it.

See the lesson in everything.

There’s always something valuable to learn from everything you do, regardless of the outcome. If you train yourself to find the kernel of wisdom in all your actions, you will boost your self-confidence and feel more empowered.

Share what works with your network.

Even when plans don’t turn out to be completely successful at first, there are some aspects of your action that does work. Be willing to share what works with those in your network who support your efforts – and listen to the suggestions they offer. You might learn something incredibly valuable that will further your own efforts.

Embrace change.

You may be fearful of change, likening it to past disastrous outcomes, but the truth is that life is filled with constant change. Without change, there would be no growth. Instead of fearing change, make it a point to embrace it, to eke every last bit of knowledge and opportunity from it and make it your own. When you are in charge – and you are – change doesn’t look as formidable. That’s because you’ve put change in your go-to bag and are running with it.

Use the building-block approach.

A house doesn’t get built without going through many stages of construction. Similarly, achieving a successful outcome when working toward a goal almost always involves a number of steps. It isn’t just point A to point B. You may need to accommodate layers and a building-block approach. Capitalize on what you’ve learned and apply it to the next stage of development of your plan.

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