Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “time management”
I want to try and start a new proverb this year: Time is not money, time is health. Time is health. If you get a couple minutes’ break, use them for stress management, a few simple breathing exercises, then get back to work. If you get 15 minutes, close your eyes for a real rest. Every work day should have an hour …
Are you busy? Why? Are you rushing? Why? Being busy and accomplishing a lot of things is supposed to get us somewhere we want to be, or something we want to have. But is it working? We usually believe that we have to rush to get everything done and we have to get everything done in order to get what …
How can we think about the relationship between states of mind (moods, energy levels, focus, etcetera) and task planning? All of us are aware that there are times when we are able to be very effective with certain tasks, and other times when it is practically impossible to complete a certain kind of project. This is not entirely a random …
It has been a very busy time for me professionally, perhaps for you as well. Certainly it seems as though people in the Bay Area are moving faster and faster with less time to relax. After working with a number of tech professionals at companies which talk about the importance of a work life balance, I have come to the …
One of the perennial challenges for anyone with problems with depression or mood swings, and perhaps for anyone in our increasingly busy and frantic world, is how to not get overwhelmed by work and personal tasks.It is a challenge and we have historically relied on two sources of wisdom when we counsel people who are struggling with this:1. David Allen’s …
One difficult aspect of living with bipolar disorder, especially when it is new, is that our ever changing moods make it difficult to keep up a regular and normal social life. After all, If you can’t get out of bed for 3 weeks on account of acute depression, it’s pretty hard to make new or keep existing commitments. In my …
I recently spent an interesting half an hour talking with a very successful businessman who has bipolar about how to get his office work done even though he has periods when he is depressed, and his thought processes are slowed down. One of his big issues is that when he is depressed he finds himself staring off into space rather than working his …
Procrastination may be related to impulsive decision making. This somewhat surprising finding is based on a large study of twins. Most modern explanations of procrastination have focused on avoidance and aversion. You put off things because you are afraid of some negative consequence (doing badly, not meeting your standards, etcetera), in other words, you are avoiding a bad outcome. More recent studies have suggested that …
A young woman who is attending architecture school mentioned a sudden dip in mood that happened the previous evening. She told me that this had to do with a day of working very hard to try to get tasks accomplished, and the anger and frustration at the end of the day when she hadn’t done as much as she wanted to, …
Proactive behavior refers to actions taken that are forward thinking, that anticipate future problems, and are aimed at avoiding those problems. They are focused on changing the environment for the better. Proactivity contrasts with reactivity as an approach to challenges. Reactive behavior is about dealing with the crisis that is present right now. Reactivity also often is associated with a wish …
In a different post, we talked about the frustrating problem of getting sick at the beginning of vacations. We said that this has to do with the difficultly that our bodies have switching from high stress to relaxation, and something called cortisol withdraw. A version of this same phenomenon may be happening in your home almost every evening. This week …
It should be raining. It is March in the San Francisco Bay area, and we have had hardly any rain for the past three months. It’s a funny thing, but even though I have been taking advantage of the good weather to go out bicycle riding and hiking, there’s a part of me that doesn’t feel quite right about this …
The New York Times recently published an intriguing article entitled “Relax, You Will Be More Effective.” It arrived at just the right time. Preparing for an upcoming vacation had made me particularly hectic. And then, while I was on vacation and writing this post, I got a blog post from MoodScope which was devoted to the importance of taking regular …
From time to time I am inspired to pass on portions of a post from a favorite blog. Today’s Moodscope blog was all about those days when you feel a bit “blah” and what you can do to not get trapped in indecisiveness and time wasting. As it happened this arrived on a day when I was struggling to get …
The first of the big winter storms blew through the Bay Area today. Winds whipped up the already large waves and the pouring rain made it hard to see much more than a few feet in any direction. Of course, there were some hardy folk out there surfing anyway. But we assume that most of you recognize that when there …
Traveling can be exciting, but it can also be very stressful. It is particularly important for people living with moods to do prepare for travel before they leave. A surprisingly high percentage of serious mood catastrophes, in our experience, happen during trips. And they are almost always preventable. First, if your traveling to some place without good medical care, it’s a …
What makes us happy? How can we have more happiness? Is happiness just the absence of sadness and depression? These are some of the questions that are addressed in an entertaining, informative and inspiring movie called “Happy.” Some ideas we saw – 50% of our happiness is determined by genes, 10% is related to life circumstances (financial situation, what country …
The time change in the United States is the classic “time of challenge and time of opportunity.” First, the challenge – If you wanted to do something to make America more depressed you would be hard pressed to come up with a better intervention. Shift everyone’s schedule so that they wake up an hour later (according to the solar clock) …
This past weekend, we were at a Halloween party talking to a computer engineer who recently moved here from Holland. The topic turned to a discussion of things that are unusual about Americans, in particular, the American relationship to work and vacations. We take less vacation than almost any industrialized country in the world. Of course, we think it’s responsible …
Sometimes we can be so overwhelmed, or so depressed, that we forget what it is that gives, or used to give, us pleasure. This list is adapted from Peter Lewinsohn’s Pleasant Events Schedule. You won’t enjoy many of these things, but you should find a number that are somewhat pleasurable (or would have been if you were not depressed) and …
