Favorite Home Remedies

Once you have an understanding of your own mortality, you either try to ignore it or you think about ways to avoid it. Ignoring it is easy for most people; the drone of American Idol or the smell of another Big Mac are probably all defense mechanisms against awareness of the end.  Avoiding it is tougher, although the most popular solution (reproduction) is easy for most people.  Feeling that part of you will live on in your descendants is a good defense against that self-knowledge.  I found it was an oddly comforting thing which I didn’t expect when having children.  That feeling intensified as I started passing down stories about my deceased relatives to my kids; you’re almost performing some sort of Matrix-like implantation of memories into the next generation.  The memories will fade away generation by generation, but the increasing ease of creating near-permanent media (pictures, videos and so on) provide the cues to spark those memories.

Setting the question of whether children satisfy the desire for pseudo-immortality, you have to turn and look at Stonehenge. Some people got together a long time ago and said “let’s build something.”  We don’t know exactly why, although it was probably some sort of place of worship or sacrifice or celebration.  But we do know someone built it, and in a way the builders put some small part of themselves into that structure which is still sitting there.

Not everyone will build Stonehenge or paint the Mona Lisa. Not everyone will even go to the effort to trace their family tree more than 100 years into the past.  Many people won’t care, and retreat to ignorance.  Many people will care, and cling to their children as proof ‘they’ will live on forever.  Many people will turn to religion and the promise of an afterlife, but even if true it will still be a different life from the life they know.  The happiest people, I think, will build.

Most of us are terrible at building our Stonehenge. I have not created anything of much permanence yet in this life.  I have not built anything, or written anything of any significance, or started anything I expect to last much past my time here.    I suppose I could prepay hosting fees to Godaddy.com for the next 100 years and hope they stay in business and bripblap.com would be here for a while.  But I haven’t started a company, or written music or a novel.

And this is why I try to remind myself to focus on creativity. It’s easy to get up, go to work, eat a sandwich, come home, watch TV and go to sleep.  I’ve been doing more of that than I should, recently.  Doing nothing is a comforting white noise masking the lack of creation in day-to-day life.  Small changes can make a difference.  Even planting a few seeds will make you feel better than your favorite TV show.  Stonehenge wasn’t built in day; the builders must have missed entire seasons of “Druid Idol.”  But we know they were here.  How will people know you were here?

photo by SKI tripper

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“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” - Jack London

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

We all have days when we’re just not very inspired, when we need passion and creativity breathed into us.

I know I do.

For anyone who needs a little shove, whose creativity has dried up, who needs to be moved … I humbly offer this simple guide.

While I never claim to have all the answers, nor that my way is the only way, I share here some things I’ve learned about inspiration, some tricks I’ve learned that work for me.

I’m often in need of inspiration, but in all cases I’ve found it. And it’s a wonderful thing.

What Is Inspiration?

Many people think of it as an elusive quality that can’t be forced, and yet it can be found if you look for it.

Others think it’s a way to find ideas, but it’s more than ideas … it’s being moved to put those ideas into action.

Inspiration is finding something else that is divinely inspired (people, nature, amazing ideas), having that inspiration breathed into you (“breath” is the root of “inspiration”), and then taking action on it. Creating, doing, inspiring others.

How to Find Inspiration

Inspiration is just about everywhere you can look, if you’re looking for it. That’s the key: to keep your eyes open. Too often we miss beautiful sources of inspiration, because we’re too busy thinking about other things.

Be observant. See everything around you as a possible source of inspiration.

Some possible sources of inspiration:

• blogs
• books
• magazines
• films
• people around you
• nature
• children
• art
• music
• history
• exercise
• religion
• great projects
• dreams
• social media
• photographs
• forums
• google
• success stories
• life, everywhere

Just keep your eyes open, at all times, staying present whenever possible, and allow yourself to breathe in that inspiration.

How to Stay Inspired

Inspiration isn’t just a one-time thing. You’ll need it on a regular basis.

When you practice the above method — keeping your eyes open, staying present, and breathing in inspiration — you get better at it. It becomes a skill you can use at any time, and you’ll use it often.

Some tips for keeping the inspiration coming:

• Work with inspired people – one of the best ways to stay inspired is to work with creative, energetic, positive people.
• Read daily – varied things, from blogs to magazines to books of all kinds.
• Get outside – nature is one of the biggest inspirations, and you’ll miss it if you’re inside all day.
• Talk with new people – they’ll always expose you to new and interesting things, if you’re open to it.
• Break out of your routine – see things from a different perspective. Take a new route home. Go to a new restaurant. Visit someplace new in your area.
• Find time for silence – it’s more inspiring than you might think. Unfortunately, not enough of us do it.
• Exercise – or at least get moving. It helps the blood to circulate, and gets ideas moving around. My most inspired thoughts come during runs.

Now Take Action

Don’t just feel inspired. Take this inspiration and use it, be moved, and do something. Channel that inspiration into creating something amazing.

Put that something out into the world, and in turn, you will inspire others.

Having trouble taking action? Read The Little Rules of Action.

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” ~Vincent van Gogh

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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.

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Read more about simple effectiveness in my book, The Power of Less.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Michael Bungay Stanier of Box of Crayons.

Imagine everything you do could fall into one of three buckets:

1. Bad Work.

2. Good Work.

3. Great Work.

I’m not talking about the quality of the work you deliver – I’ve no doubt that’s fine. I’m talking about the meaning the work has for you and the impact it makes.

Let me explain.

Bad Work is the work that makes no difference yet consumes your time and energy. Put less politely, it’s those soul-sucking, spirit-draining activities that make you question how you ever ended up spending precious moments of your life on anything like this. Endless meetings. Paperwork. Busywork.

Good Work is most likely the work you do most of the time, and you do it well. It’s necessary stuff that moves things along and gets things done. Organizations are primarily set up to do Good Work: create a product or service, do it efficiently, sell it to the world.

There’s nothing wrong with Good Work– except for two things.

First of all, it’s endless. Trying to get your Good Work done can feel like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the mountain, a never-ending task. And second, Good Work is too comfortable. The routine and busy-ness of it all is seductive. You know in your heart of hearts that you’re no longer you stretching yourself or challenging how things are done. Your job has turned into just getting through your workload week in, week out.

And then there’s Great Work. Great Work is what you were hoping for when you signed up for this job. It’s meaningful and it’s challenging. It’s about making a difference, it matters to you and it lights you up.

It matters at an organizational level too. Great Work is at the heart of blue ocean strategy, of innovation and strategic differentiation, of evolution and change. Great Work sets up an organization for longer-term success.

The challenge is that Great Work carries with it uncertainty and risk as well as impact and reward. We’re pulled towards what Great Work promises and pushed away by its threat. We want to free ourselves from the regularity and comfortable rut that is Good Work, and yet we’re tugged back by the familiarity and certainty that it provides.

Why don’t you do more Great Work?

When I ask people how much of each type of work they do, here’s what I hear:

• 0% – 40% on Bad Work.
• 40% – 80% on Good Work.
• 0% – 25% on Great Work.

Regardless of the numbers (and probably more important), no-one yet has said to me, “I’ve got too much Great Work. I’m overloaded with meaningful, engaging work that really makes a difference.”

So why aren’t we doing more Great Work? Why does life at work feel like a conveyor belt, churning through tasks to try to make it to the weekend – when, let’s face it, we’ll most likely open up the laptop “just to stay on top of our email”?

Leo points to all sorts of things, from the quagmire of inaction to “feature creep” and suggests the Power of Less. And you know he’s full of good ideas.

Let me add one fundamental, foundational skill you need to master.

It comes down to this

At the heart of doing more Great Work are the choices you make. Not just what you are saying Yes to. But – and this follows your Yes just as the back of the hand follows the front – what you are also saying No to.

That sounds simple enough, but you know it’s not.

Sure, it’s easy to say a knee-jerk Yes to whatever comes along. We all do that. It’s much harder to be mindful and thoughtful and clear and bold and courageous as to what you really want to say Yes to.

And for most of us, it’s a nightmare to say No.

How to say No when you can’t say No

There are some people in your life to whom it’s fairly easy to say a clear No.

Category One: People you have a really close relationship with. Spouse, kids, best friends. You’ve got a solid enough relationship that No is going to be OK.

Category Two: People you have absolutely no relationship with. Telemarketers come to mind. “Hello, I’m from Hardsell Credit Card Company, can I …” <click>.

It’s everyone in the middle – and it’s a big group – that’s the challenge. For instance, it includes most everyone you work with.

So stop thinking about saying No.

Think about how to say Yes More Slowly.

Because that’s what’s really killing you. It’s not saying Yes. It’s saying Yes quickly.

Saying Yes More Slowly

Here’s how it goes.

Someone asks you to do something.

And, while nodding your head, you say “Sure – and let me just ask you a few questions first.”

And then you pick and chose from some of these questions. (Your goal is to ask at least three of these.)

• Why are you asking me?
• Who else have you asked?
• When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?
• If I could only do part of this, what part would it be?
• What part of this is something that only I could do?
• What standard do you expect this to be done to?
• Is this more urgent than X, Y and Z that are currently on my list?
• Have you checked with [name] about me taking this on?
• How does this contribute to [Great Work Project]?

You get the gist I’m sure. And I’ve no doubt that you can add some questions of your own.

When you start saying Yes More Slowly, one of four things happen.

First, the person will answer all your questions and make a very good case for your to say Yes. Which is fine – you’re saying Yes for all the right reasons.

Second, they’ll tell you to stop with the questions and get on with it. (Sadly, this isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ that will work all the time.)

Third, they’ll go away and find the answers to your questions – which at the very least will buy you some time.

And finally – and this is a good result – they’ll go and find someone else who’s less trouble, someone who hasn’t mastered the art of saying Yes Slowly.

Time’s ticking

Kevin Kelly once explained how to calculate the date of your death. Mine is September 15, 2043 and that means – as I write this – I’ve got 12, 275 days left on this planet.

You’ll have more. Or less. But in any case, the minutes and hours and days are ticking away.

You can keep doing the busywork. Or you can do more Great Work.

Here’s how Steve Jobs puts it:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Do more Great Work.

Don’t settle.

Michael’s new book Do More Great Work: Stop the busywork and start the work that matters offers 15 practical strategies to find, start and sustain more Great Work. It features original guest contributions from Leo “Mr Zen Habits” Babauta, Seth Godin, Chris Guillebeau and others. You can watch the Do More Great Work movie at www.DoMoreGreatWork.com and follow Michael on Twitter at @boxofcrayons.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.” ~Woody Allen

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

Often you’ll read an article called “The Seven Deadly Sins of” (fill in your topic here). But when it comes to changing habits, there aren’t Seven Deadly Sins.

There’s just one.

You can do a lot of things wrong when you’re trying to form a new habit — just jumping into it without a plan, not having public accountability, not having the right support, etc. But there’s just one thing you can do wrong that will cause the habit change to absolutely fail.

The One Deadly Sin of Habit Change?

Not doing the habit.

If you don’t do it, it won’t become a habit. As obvious as that may sound, too many people fail at this one thing. They start the exercise habit (or flossing habit, or filing their papers habit, or waking early habit) and they do it with enthusiasm for a week or two, and then they stop. For whatever reason — work, or family problems, or other interests taking over.

Life gets in the way, right? Well sure, but if you’re not doing the habit, the habit will never form. If you want to form the habit, you have to do it regularly.

Let’s repeat that, and then talk about how to actually do it: If you want to form the habit, you have to do the habit regularly.

That’s how habits form. You do it one day, then the next, then the next, then the next, right after your habit trigger. Soon, it becomes so ingrained that … it’s a habit.

How To Avoid the Deadly Sin
So it’s easy to state the blindingly obvious, but it’s harder to put it into practice, right?

Sure. So I’m here to help. Some tips for avoiding the One Deadly Sin:

• Just start. Not feeling like doing the habit today? Tell yourself all you have to do is take the 1st step. Usually the 2nd step will follow, but if not, at the very least you got started. And that’s what matters most.
• Do it, no matter how small. Need to exercise but don’t have much energy? Do it for a few minutes at least. Need to meditate? Three minutes will do.
• Do it, no matter how badly. Want to form the habit of blogging? Write a quick and dirty post that takes five minutes of writing, no proofreading or formatting. Quality doesn’t matter when you’re forming habits — doing it matters.
• If you fail, don’t beat yourself up – do it the next day. Let’s be clear: missing one day won’t kill your habit. Feeling discouraged about missing one day, and then missing the next and the next, is what will kill the habit. So let go of the guilt and just get back on your horse. Start again, immediately.
• If you don’t do it the next day, do it the day after. If you miss two days, don’t let yourself miss a third.
• Figure out what’s stopping you. If you find yourself struggling and missing a day or two, think about why. What’s getting in the way? How can you adjust for that?
• Plan ahead. Life gets in the way, but if you know something’s coming up, think ahead and be sure to get your habit in.
• Engineer success. Knock down the barriers and set it up so it’s harder to fail than to actually do the habit. Public accountability is a good way to do that.

In the end, all that matters is doing it. So go do it already.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~Aristotle

If you liked this article, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my peeps.

Want more? Read my site on habit changes, 6 Changes, or check out my book, The Power of Less.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Scott Young of ScottYoung.com.

In high school, I rarely studied. Despite that, I graduated second in my class. In university, I generally studied less than an hour or two before major exams. However, over four years, my GPA always sat between an A and an A+.

Recently I had to write a law exam worth 100% of my final grade. Unfortunately, I was out of the country and didn’t get back by plane until late Sunday night. I had to write the test at 9 am Monday morning. I got an A after just one hour of review on the plane.

Right now, I’m guessing most of you think I’m just an arrogant jerk. And, if the story ended there, you would probably be right.

Why do Some People Learn Quickly?

The fact is most of my feats are relatively mundane. I’ve had a chance to meet polyglots who speak 8 languages, people who have mastered triple course loads and students who went from C or B averages to straight A+ grades while studying less than before.

The story isn’t about how great I am (I’m certainly not) or even about the fantastic accomplishments of other learners. The story is about an insight: that smart people don’t just learn better, they also learn differently.

It’s this different strategy, not just blind luck and arrogance, that separates rapid learners from those who struggle.

Most sources say that the difference in IQ scores across a group is roughly half genes and half environment. I definitely won’t discount that. Some people got a larger sip of the genetic cocktail. Some people’s parents read their kids Chaucer and tutored them in quantum mechanics.

However, despite those gifts, if rapid learners had a different strategy for learning than ordinary students, wouldn’t you want to know what it was?

The Strategy that Separates Rapid Learners

The best way to understand the strategy of rapid learners is to look at its opposite, the approach most people take: rote memorization.

Rote memorization is based on the theory that if you look at information enough times it will magically be stored inside your head.

This wouldn’t be a terrible theory if your brain were like a computer. Computers just need one attempt to store information perfectly. However, in practice rote memorization means reading information over and over again. If you had to save a file 10 times in a computer to ensure it was stored, you’d probably throw it in the garbage.

The strategy of rapid learners is different. Instead of memorizing by rote, rapid learners store information by linking ideas together. Instead of repetition, they find connections. These connections create a web of knowledge that can succeed even when you forget one part.

When you think about it, the idea that successful learners create a web has intuitive appeal. The brain isn’t a computer hard drive, with millions of bits and bytes in a linear sequence. It is an interwoven network of trillions of neurons.

Why not adopt the strategy that makes sense with the way your brain actually works?

Not a New Idea, But an Incredibly Underused Idea

This isn’t a new idea, and I certainly didn’t invent it.

Polymath, cognitive scientist and AI researcher Marvin Minsky once said:

“If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking!” [emphasis mine]

Benny Lewis, polyglot and speaker of 8 languages, recently took up the task of learning Thai in two months. One of his first jobs was to memorize a phonetic script (Thai has a different alphabet than English). How did he do it?

“I saw [a Thai symbol] and needed to associate it with ‘t’, I thought of a number of common words starting with t. None of the first few looked anything like it, but then I got to toe! The symbol looks pretty much like your big toe, with the circle representing the nail of the second toe (if looking at your left foot). It’s very easy to remember and very hard to forget! Now I think of t instantly when I see that symbol.

It took time, but I’ve come up with such an association for all [75] symbols. Some are funny, or nerdy, or related to sex, or something childish. Some require a ridiculous stretch of the imagination to make it work. Whatever did the job best to help me remember.”

The famous British savant Daniel Tammet has the ability to multiply 5 digit numbers in his head. He explains that he can do this because each number, to him, has a color and texture, he doesn’t just do the straight calculation, he feels it.

All of these people believe in the power of connecting ideas. Connecting ideas together, as Minsky describes. Linking ideas with familiar pictures, like Lewis. Or even blending familiar shapes and sensations with the abstract to make it more tangible as Tammet can do.

How Can You Become a Rapid Learner?

So all this sounds great, but how do you actually do it?

I’m not going to suggest you can become a Tammet, Lewis or Minsky overnight. They have spent years working on their method. And no doubt, some of their success is owed to their genetic or environmental quirks early in life.

However, after writing about these ideas for a couple years I have seen people make drastic improvements in their learning method. It takes practice, but students have contacted me letting me know they are now getting better grades with less stress, one person even credited the method for allowing him to get an exam exemption for a major test.

Some Techniques for Learning by Connections

Here are the some of the most popular tactics I’ve experimented with and suggested to other students:

1. Metaphors and Analogy

Create your own metaphors for different ideas. Differential calculus doesn’t need to just be an equation, but the odometer and speedometer on a car. Functions in computer programming can be like pencil sharpeners. The balance sheet for a corporation can be like the circulatory system.

Shakespeare used metaphor prolifically to create vivid imagery for his audience. Your professor might not be the bard, but you can step in and try them yourself.

2. Visceralization

Visceralization is a portmanteau between visceral and visualization. The goal here is to envision an abstract idea as something more tangible. Not just by imagining a picture, but by integrating sounds, textures and feelings (like Tammet does).

When learning how to find the determinant of a matrix, I visualized my hands scooping through one axis of the matrix and dropping through the other, to represent the addition and subtraction of the elements.

Realize you already do this, just maybe not to the same degree. Whenever you see a graph or pie chart for an idea, you are taking something abstract and making it more tangible. Just be creative in pushing that a step further.

3. The 5-Year Old Method

Imagine you had to explain your toughest subject to a 5-year old. Now practice that.

It may be impossible to explain thermodynamics to a first grader, but the process of explanation forces you to link ideas. How would you explain the broader concepts in simpler terms a child would understand?

4. Diagramming

Mind-mapping is becoming increasingly popular as a way of retaining information. That’s the process of starting with a central idea and brainstorming adjacent connections. But mindmapping is just the skin of the onion.

Creating diagrams or pictures can allow you to connect ideas together on paper. Instead of having linear notes, organized in a hierarchy, what if you had notes that showed the relationships between all the ideas you were learning?

5. Storytelling to Remember Numbers and Facts

Pegging is a method people have been using for years to memorize large amounts of numbers or facts. What makes it unique isn’t just that it allows people to perform amazing mental feats (although it can), but the way it allows people to remember information–by connecting the numbers to a story.

Pegging is a bit outside the scope of this article, but the basic idea is that each digit is represented by the sound of a consonant (for example: 0=c, 3=t, 4=d…). This allows you to convert any number into a string of consonants (4304 = d-t-c-d).

The system allows you to add any number of vowels in between the consonants to make nouns (d-t-c-d = dot code). You can then turn this list of nouns into a story (The dot was a code that the snake used…). Then all you need to do is remember the order of the story to get the nouns, consonants and back to the numbers.

The Way We Were Taught to Learn is Broken

Children are imaginative, creative and, in many ways, the epitome of this rapid learning strategy. Maybe it’s the current school system, or maybe it’s just a consequence of growing up, but most people eventually suppress this instinct.

The sad truth is that the formal style of learning, makes learning less enjoyable. Chemistry, mathematics, computer science or classic literature should spawn new ideas, connections in the mind, exciting possibilities. Not only the right answers for a standardized test.

The irony is that maybe if that childlike, informal way of learning came back, even just in part, perhaps more people would succeed on those very tests. Or at least enjoyed the process of learning.

Scott Young is a university student, author and head of an online service designed to teach you rapid learning tactics. The program is currently sold out, but you can sign up here to get announcements when it reopens.

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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.

“If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, then this is the best season of your life.” ~Wu-Men

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

When I hear about a great idea that a friend has, I get excited. I can’t wait to see that idea become reality.

Then I ask about the idea a few months later, and it often is not one bit closer to completion.

Ideas stop short of becoming reality, and projects seem to drag on endlessly, because of one thing: complexity.

A software programmer can allow the development of a new app he’s building to drag on and on for years (I know of cases where this happened), only to find Google release something that makes his app obsolete. The problem: the program grew and grew in complexity and features, but never shipped.

A web developer can work on a rad new website with killer features, but after months of work the website never launches. Problem: too complex, and too much of a perfectionist.

A writer can work on a novel, working in characters and plotlines, and then work on revision after revision, only to abandon it. The complexity of a book can become overwhelming.

If your project has been dragging on, or you’re having problems completing, try simplifying, and stop trying for perfection.

I’ve launched a number of projects over the last few years, and learned a thing or two about making ideas take life, and getting to done.

Here are some of those key principles:

1. Keep the scope as simple as possible. You don’t need to do everything with this project. In fact, if you can just do one thing, that’s perfect. As small a thing as possible. Don’t redesign an entire city — just work on one building. If the project starts to get complex or seem overwhelming, narrow the scope. Do less. It’ll help you get things done.

2. Practice ‘Good Enough’. Perfectionism is the enemy of completion. Nitpick and worry about getting it “just right”, and you’ll never get it done. Done is better than right. So if you start to nitpick and worry about perfect, say “screw it” and then just try for “good enough”. You can always make it better in the next version.

3. Kill extra features. Similar to simplifying the scope, you’ll want to try to make your creation do as little as possible. Want it to talk and walk and cook breakfast? Just try for talking. Want your website to publish great content and have social networking and podcasts and news and a newsletter and a membership area? Just shoot for great content. Whenever you find yourself adding new features, see if they can’t be killed.

4. Make it public, quick. Your goal should be to get your project in some working form out to your customers/readers/public as soon as possible. In as few steps, as quickly, as easily, as simply as possible. Remember: don’t worry about perfect, and don’t let this first public release be wide in scope or full of features. Release it with as few features as possible. Releasing it publicly will 1) get you to done faster and 2) put some pressure on you to make it better, quickly.
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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Everett Bogue, author of The Art of Being Minimalist, and blogger at Far Beyond the Stars.

Have you ever had a creative evening when time suddenly flew by? A day when you executed a difficult project at work flawlessly? A brief moment in time when your challenging exercise routine felt effortless?

All of these times you were in a state of flow.

Flow is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago, who has studied the phenomena his whole career. Daniel Pink reintroduces the concept in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Many people flow through their lives in an effortless fashion, while countless others have a difficult time achieving a flow state.

Why flow is hard to achieve
Flow is a moment in time when you’re both challenged at the activity that you’re doing, and when you also have complete autonomy in the task you’re conducting.

We engage in flow under your own volition, with a skill which we’ve had some amount of experience.

If you’re not flowing, it’s probably because you aren’t allowing yourself to be challenged, you’re completely overwhelmed, or someone else is holding you back.

The majority of my experience with flow has been with dance and writing. I’ve studied dance for many years, and one of the technical skills that dancers work on is called improvisation. Improv is very tricky in dance. You have to turn off your mind and simply dance with your instincts.

When you’ve mastered improv dance, you’ve reached the sweet spot between your brain transferring commands to your nervous system. There is no longer any thinking involved, as thinking in improv dance will make everything stop. There just isn’t any time for brainwork when you are constantly moving.

Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that these moments of flow occur because we’re simply activating too many neurological functions. Because of this we no longer have capacity to be aware of what functions we’re engaging in. So the ‘conscious of me’ part of the mind switches off, your awareness of yourself slips away, and you just do.

You’re simply flowing in the the present moment
I have also experienced flow in writing. I think it’s very important for writers to engage in flow. A lot of writers stop and meticulously edit their work after every sentence, but writing this way (for most people) is counterproductive.

Why? I believe it’s because of the same reason that dancers can’t stop dancing in improvisation. If you just keep writing for 30 minutes without stopping, you give your mind a chance to turn off the ‘conscious of me’ brain functions. This in turn grants more brain power to challenging the boundaries of your writing ability.

You cannot edit while you’re producing work. If you do, you’ll be constantly switching between your right brain and your left brain. Your creative center will be switching off and on and it will be harder to produce anything meaningful.

A classic example of real world flow
Ray Bradbury was a freelance writer who was trying to support his family. However, he was working at home with his cute little children. This proved to be incredibly distracting, so he had to find somewhere else to write. So, he headed over to UCLA’s Lawrence Clark Powell Library.

In the basement of the library there was a number of typewriters that gave 30 minutes of writing time for a dime.

Ray was very poor at the time, and needed all the money he could to support his family. Whenever he popped in the dime, he wanted to get his month’s worth. This forced him to write at a frantic pace until his time was up. The most frustrating element of writing the novel was when the typewriter keys tangled, because it meant that he was wasting valuable time.

In between these 30 minute typewriter banging sessions, he would wander the halls of the library studying books and contemplating what he would write for the next 30 minutes.

The novel Ray finished was classic sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451. He created this novel in record amount of time, and recalled feeling as if the flow of time had accelerated. The novel wrote itself, effortlessly.

Think about how important it is to flow
I really believe many people miss this aspect of engaging in their work. If you aren’t flowing, you’re not reaching the peak of your ability. There is so much untapped hidden potential in flow, just waiting to be retrieved.

People who have learned flow are challenging themselves and creating work at their best.

We no longer have dime typewriters at the library, but there are a number of ways to practice flow without them.

9 simple ways you can bring yourself into flow

1. Pick a enjoyable, challenging activity. The easiest way to enter flow is by doing something you love. The activity also needs to challenge you, one you are extremely passionate about, that you enjoy doing, and that causes you to grow. If the activity is boring to tedious you won’t enjoy it, and so there is no way you can engage in flow.
2. Eliminate distractions. Turn off your phone, log out of twitter, switch off gmail. If you’re constantly flipping back and forth between different tasks you’ll never be able to achieve flow. A foreign distraction will quickly bring you out of the flow mindset.
3. Think before you do. Do any research or preparation before you engage in the activity you wish to flow in. If you stop and do research while writing, or have to grab a bite to eat in the middle of a run, you’ll throw yourself out of the grove. Preparation is the only way to avoid that.
4. Isolate yourself. The best way to achieve flow is alone. If you’re in a room full of people, your mind will constantly be drawn away from what you’re doing. Shut the door, put on headphones, or find another way to isolate yourself.
5. Let go. Give up any expectations that you have for yourself. If you enter a flow situation with preconceptions about the results that you’ll get from the practice, you’ll inevitably disappoint yourself. You also run the risk of narrowing your focus to a point where you can’t change coarse naturally if your flow takes you down a road less traveled.
6. Give yourself a time limit. Like Bradbury, set a timer on your activity. Give yourself 30 minutes of uninterrupted flow time and just go at it with everything you’ve got. Forget about how much time you’ve been doing the activity, and how much time you have left, just flow. You may just find that you lose track of time completely.
7. Keep moving. Continuous motion is key to flow, don’t give your mind a chance to start second guessing what you’re doing. Keep moving with the activity you’re flowing in. Go at a pace that’s challenging for you, but not overwhelming. You want to be calm and collected, but also have forward momentum.
8. Don’t think. Switch off the part of your brain that observes what you’re doing. This is your self-consciousness, your ego, your sabotage. Why flow is so important is that it circumvents the necessity to constantly critique yourself. This can be hard, if you’re used to constantly second-guessing everything you do, but it is so important to successfully entering flow.
9. Practice. Like any useful skill, flow takes time to master. Don’t stress if you can’t do it right away. If you’re interested in achieving a state of flow, you need to practice regularly. Set a time every day that will be dedicated flow time. Eventually you’ll start to recognize when you’re flowing, and when you’re not. After many hours of practice, you’ll eventually become a flow master.

Everett Bogue is the author of The Art of Being Minimalist, and writes about living a simple minimalist life at Far Beyond The Stars.
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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

The beauty of an empty inbox is a thing to behold. It is calming, peaceful and wonderful.

An inbox that is overflowing with actions, urgent calls for responses, stuff to read … it’s chaos, it’s stressful, it’s overwhelming.

A friend recently posted:

“Help! I’m drowning in email!”

Let’s look at how to get your head above water first, and then how to get safely to dry land.

Head Above Water
You need to give yourself some breathing room. A flooded inbox is overwhelming, and you don’t know where to start. So here’s where we’re going to start:

1. Create an “actions” folder or label in your email. This is where you’re going to store any emails that you need to take action on (other than just replying or filing or whatever).
2. Pick the most important. Go through your inbox and check off 10-15 that are the most urgent action emails, and file them in this new folder. If you don’t get to the sections below right away, you can at least work from this folder for now.
3. Temporarily archive. Now create a “temp” folder. File everything that’s still in your inbox into this temp folder. Everything. You’re going to get these out of the way and not worry about them at the moment. We’ll get to these, but it gives you a little breathing room.
4. Set a new policy. Every new email that comes in will follow the rules in the next section. No more allowing your inbox to pile up.

New Emails
So what to do with new emails that come in? Set some rules, and commit right this minute to ruthlessly sticking to them:

1. Process from the top down. When you open up your email, process the inbox completely. Start with the top email in your inbox, and open it. Take one of the following actions, in this preferred order: (1) delete (use this liberally), (2) archive (in case you want to look it up later), (3) quick reply (four sentences or less) and then archive, (4) put on your to-do list for action (if you don’t have a list, start one now) and then file in your “action” folder. This last item includes long replies (which should be as rare as possible). If you take one of these four actions, you should dispose of every email.
2. Go to the next email and take quick action, and so forth. Don’t spend longer than 20 seconds on any one email, and even then you should only do that if you’re doing a quick reply or adding the item to your to-do list. If you process this quickly, you’ll be done with your inbox in minutes.
3. Only when you’ve processed should you start worrying about the to-do items. You can choose to do those now, or later. Don’t start doing the to-do items when you’re processing.
4. Newsletters, etc. You’re never going to read all those newsletters, notices from services, catalogs from companies, and so on that regularly get delivered from your inbox. So go into your “temp” folder and delete all of them right now. All of them. And whenever new ones come in — emails that are not from real people directed just for you — you’re going to go to the bottom of the email and click on the “unsubscribe” link. Every single one of them should have an “unsubscribe” link — if not, mark as spam. It only takes 10 seconds to click on the unsubscribe link and then go to the new page and hit the unsubscribe button. And if you do this for every single one, you’ll soon get a lot less email.

Follow these four rules and you’ll never have a full inbox again.

Stop the Flood
OK, things should feel a bit more manageable now. Now we want to set some long-term policies so that you get fewer emails from now on.

Here’s what to do:

1. Unsubscribe from everything. This was talked about in the section above, but just in case you missed that, go back and read the newsletters item. You don’t need newsletters flooding your inbox.
2. Stop sending so many emails. The more emails you send, the more you’ll get. Use email as little as you possibly can. Call people if you can, or walk over and talk to them. If those aren’t possible, see if you can figure it out for yourself. If you send an email that doesn’t require a response, say so.
3. Send shorter emails. They’re more likely to get read and acted on, and it’ll take less of your time to write them. Try sticking to 4 sentences or fewer.
4. Check email less often. Set times each day, and only check email on those times. When you do, process your inbox to empty using the rules above.
5. Filter out notifications. If there are notifications you do want to see, create a folder or label for them, and create a filter (Gmail is great for this) so that the notifications go straight to that label/folder and skip the inbox.
6. Set policies. Put up policies on your website or send the policies out to the people you work with. These policies should be aimed at reducing the number of requests you get. For example, if requests are coming to you that should be going somewhere else, put that in your policies. If people should deal with things through a different channel than email, say it in the policies. Try to figure out your most common types of emails, and find solutions so you don’t have to respond to all of them.
7. Post FAQs. Similarly, if you get a bunch of questions regularly, post the answers publicly so that you don’t have to repeatedly answer them by email. It’ll save you a lot of time.

Processing the Old Emails
You’re going to want to return to your “temp” folder, when you have the time, and start processing it. Some steps:

1. Process it in chunks if there are too many to do now. Just do it for 5 minutes and then come back later.
2. When you process, follow the rules for processing your inbox above (under the “New Emails” section). Start at the top, take quick action on each email, moving it out of the temp folder as fast as you can.
3. Feel free to mass delete emails. If you know you’ll never reply or act on emails, just check a bunch of them off and delete or archive. You can get big chunks done at once this way. Give yourself the freedom to let these go — and just worry about what you need to do from this point on.
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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.

“Activity conquers cold, but stillness conquers heat.” ~ Lao Tzu

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

It’s a bias of our culture that stillness is regarded as lazy, as being stuck in inaction, as a negative.

It’s not. It’s an action, and a powerful one.

What’s more, it can change your day, and in doing so change your life.

You’re in the middle of a frazzled day, swamped by work and meetings and emails and interruptions, or hassled by kids and phone calls and errands and chores.

You pause. Stay still for a minute, and breathe. You close your eyes, and find a stillness within yourself. This stillness spreads to the rest of your body, and to your mind. It calms you, centers you, focuses you on what you’re doing right now, not on all you have to do and all that has happened.

The stillness becomes a transformative action.

Stillness can be a powerful answer to the noise of others. It can be a way to push back against the buzz of the world, to take control. It can remind you of what’s important.

How to Practice
Stillness, oddly, doesn’t come naturally to many people. So practice.

1. Start your day in stillness. Whether it’s sitting with a cup of coffee as the world awakes, or sitting on a pillow and focusing on your breath, stillness is a powerful way to start your day. It sets the tone for things to come. Even 5-10 minutes is great.

2. Take regular stillness breaks. Every hour, set an alarm on your computer or phone to go off. Think of it as a bell that rings, reminding you to be still for a minute. During this minute, focus first on your breathing, to bring yourself into the present. Let the worries of the world around you melt away — all that is left is your breath. And then let your focus expand beyond your breath to your other senses, one at a time.

3. When chaos roars, pause. In the middle of a crisis or a noisy day, stop. Be still. Take a deep breath, and focus on that breath coming in, and going out. Find your inner stillness and then let your next action come from that stillness. Focus on that next action only.

Let stillness become your most powerful action. It could change your life.

“Through return to simple living Comes control of desires. In control of desires Stillness is attained. In stillness the world is restored.” ~ Lao Tzu

If you liked this post, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Thanks, my friends.

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

How does ’simple’ differ from ‘minimalist’?

That’s the question someone asked me on Twitter recently, and it’s a good one.

Zen Habits has become known as a leading simplicity blog, and at the same time I recently started mnmlist, a blog about minimalism.

Why the two blogs? What’s the difference? It’s an important question as it forces us to examine each concept a little more closely.

First, let’s acknowledge that the two concepts are related, and in some ways are two ways of saying the same thing. When you simplify your life, you’re cutting back on the complexity of what you do and what you own. Minimalism is about the same things.

Each concept is really a striking back against the growing complexity of the modern world, against consumerism, against the mindset that we need to buy to solve our problems, that we need more and bigger. Against the idea that busier is better and that we must always be connected.

So how is minimalism different? It’s basically an extension of simplicity — not only do you take things from complex to simple, but you try to get rid of anything that’s unnecessary. All but the essential.

Minimalism says that what’s unnecessary is a luxury, and a waste. Why be wasteful when the unnecessary isn’t needed for happiness? When it just gets in the way of happiness, of peace? By eliminating the unnecessary, we make room for the essential, and give ourselves more breathing space.

Now, exactly what is essential will vary from person to person. So someone might look at my essential things and say “That’s too much — it’s not minimal!” But they’d be wrong — because essential is subjective.

How to do minimalism
There’s no one right way.

I talk more about my recommendations in my ebook, The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life. You can also read weekly (or so) articles at my other blog, mnmlist.

Some recent articles at mnmlist you might find useful:

• How to do minimalism in steps
• 12 minimalist ways to reduce your carbon footprint
• Minimalist eating
• A minimalist approach to books
• Less
• Why reading faster doesn’t increase productivity
• Learn to love less
• Simplicity is the path, not just the destination
• The sweet science of less mail
• The beauty of small
• The lust for new things
• 7 Ways to Avoid Buying New Stuff
• On owning nothing

Another great guide to minimalism is a new ebook by Everett Bogue called “The Art of Being Minimalist.” I just read it and it’s excellent.

You might also enjoy these other blogs on minimalism: mnmlist links.
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Potential Bloggers!
I’d like to let you know about my new blogging webinar — Blogging 101: How to Create a Blog that Rocks.

It’s aimed at absolute beginners, who want to create a professional blog but are overwhelmed with what to do. I’ll help you get started and navigate through all the confusing choices with some solid information I’ve learned, as well as other excellent bloggers.

The sign-up for the webinar has just opened up, and slots are limited, so sign up soon!