How to Earn Extra Money through Tutoring Online

For those looking to make a little extra money in this economy, why not give online tutoring a shot? Tutoring online is a lot like tutoring in person except the tools you are going to be using will be digital as opposed to a physical book and note paper.

Here are some reasons to consider online tutoring as a second job:

Work When You Want

Just like any other Internet job, you can work when your schedule allows you to. If you want to work from 8am to 10am you are free to do so. If you want to work from 9pm to 10pm, go ahead and knock yourself out. You control your schedule and can work whenever you feel like it.

Tutor Whatever Subjects Are Interesting To You

Your college degree might be in English, but perhaps you are talented in history as well. You can put your talents to good use as an online history tutor. Most sites will require nothing more than passing a test to prove that you are competent and know what you are talking about.

This is great for people who want to make extra money just sharing the knowledge that they have and want to get some extra hours out of it. The more subjects you can tutor, the more opportunities that will be available to you to work.

How Much Do You Get Paid

Working as an online tutor will pay you close to what you might make in most retail situations. A lot of online sites will start you out around 8 dollars an hour, but will increase your pay over time. You might be able to max out at around 12-15 dollars.

This isn’t nearly as much as you can get as a private tutor, but you also don’t have to find the clients and worry about not getting paid. You also have the benefit of working at home and whenever you have the time. This isn’t something you can always dictate as a private tutor.

Online tutoring is a stable field that has many job opportunities. If you are looking for a second job, or a source of income while unemployed, working online as a tutor is a great way to share what you know while making an income. It might even be a resume boost if you hope to work in education someday.

 

Francine Gomez is a career consultant and loves giving stay-at-home moms new ideas for how to make money. There are many opportunities to bring needed funds into the home — learn how to make money writing articles to earn extra spending money or to fully support a family.

Definition of Goal Setting: How to Super-Power Your Goals

The Definition of Goal Setting is pretty self-explanatory – it is the process of deciding what you want (or setting a goal) and figuring out how to achieve it.

We all have goals, right? Well… actually… not exactly…

We have plans. We plan to make more money in a few years, we plan to find a better job, we plan to go on vacation in Europe and we plan to start a family when the time is right.

But all these are not goals. They are ‘wishes’, ‘desires’, or maybe ‘plans for the future’ at best.

Even those of us, who are familiar with the concept and definition of Goal Setting often set false goals for ourselves. This is actually one of the main reasons why only 10%-15% of people who have the motivation and skill to succeed, consistently achieve the results they desire.

Whether you are new to Goal Setting or consider yourself a pro, I urge you to take a few minutes and check if your goals are lacking some important characteristics or if they can be made more powerful and more effective.

Is Your Goal:

1. Challenging?

Make sure that your goal is challenging enough to motivate you, yet not too hard so that it discourages you before you have even started.

2. Specific?

How clear are you about what you want? If you were to share your goal with me, would I be able to picture it without asking any other questions?

3. Believable?

Are you confident enough in your abilities and your chances of success? Does your goal sound do-able to you?

4. Motivating?

Do you feel inspired by your goal or is it just something you would not mind having?

5. Limited in time?

Does your goal have a specific deadline, so that you can measure your progress along the way? In my practice, many people confuse goals with ongoing habits (e.g. “waking up early”, “going to the gym twice a week”). If your goal is based on something you have to do regularly for the rest of your life, you are setting yourself up for sure failure.

6. Enjoyable?

It is much easier to succeed at something that you enjoy doing, rather than at something that you have to force yourself into.

7. Written down?

Writing your goals down instantly makes them feel more tangible, more urgent and more desirable.

8. Breakable into smaller action steps?

Can you identify a number of steps that will take you from where you are now to where you want to be?

9. Easy to visualize?

Our mind thinks in pictures and, therefore, it is hard for our mind to focus on something like “tons of money”, “a beautiful body” or “a hot-looking date”. Make sure that when you think about your goal you can picture it up to the smallest detail.

10. Backed-up by a support team?

At times when your confidence wavers, is there anyone who can encourage you to stay on track and keep on moving forward?

Prudent Steps to Get Out of Debt and Start Building Wealth

Who does not crave for wealth? Everybody I guess. But those you are stuck in a mammoth debt, their dream of building wealth often go in vain. However, what if I say, with a little discipline and a few tricks one can transform his overwhelming debt into wealth. It might sound simply outrageous but it is true that with time and consistent efforts, one can transform debt to wealth and can save for his retirement, children’s education and other future expenses.

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to expect an overnight change and drastic transition from debt to wealth; it is only if you stay patient and persistent in your efforts you can attain this coveted result.

Before you start the wealth building processes if required opt for a debt consolidation service and relieve your monthly payment to some extent. Read on to know a few steps that smoothen the journey from debt reduction to wealth creation.

Step #1: Spend less, save more

Your first lesson is to remember spending more than you earn trailed by debt and earning more than you spend is rewarded with wealth. Get a clear estimate of your monthly income and expenditures. For this, take into account the past records of your bank statements, credit card bills and checkbooks. Deduct your expenses from your income and make sure you save the leftover each month as your personal monthly cash flow.

Step #2: Priority list

Now that you have a clear idea of your spending, categorize your expenses between essentials and non essentials. Electric bill, utility bills, monthly mortgage, groceries and your minimum credit card payments all come under essentials whereas expenditures for entertainment, drinking or flaunting purpose come under non- essentials for the time being and therefore you must curtail them as much as possible. Sum up your essentials this time and subtract the total from your income. This extra money should be devoted to pay off you due bills every month.

Step #3: Time to pay off

Slay your bills in every possible way. Credit card has the highest APR than any other unsecured debts. You should first stop using credit cards and start using cash and debit card instead. If possible Get a 0% introductory rate credit card and consider a balance transfer. Turn down the offers of higher credit limits right away. If you have private vehicle, then plan your routes to lower gasoline expenditures. A big reduction in the annual mileage can ensure a reduction in the premium charged by the insurance company as well.

Start saving in rent, utility bills and all sorts of home related monthly bills. Once you embrace frugal living you will start to see a reduction in your monthly bills and eventually in the outstanding amount you owe. This is just the beginning; it will continue to accelerate even further if you consistently pay more in future.

Step #4: Accumulate Wealth

If you start reducing your loan amount, it means you have accomplished half of the task already. Eventually you can generate more disposable income and accumulate wealth. You might have heard about the term leverage which is like getting a loan to buy something that will generate future income. It is all about finding some income generating assets like rental properties, investments, stocks, starting a new business or buying an existing one.

You can simply purchase an index fund that mimics the S&P 500 and can consistently contribute to that fund on a monthly or quarterly basis. The best part is that you can evade paying tax and can save a considerable amount here. Make sure you have a good credit rating and sound knowledge in the respective subject to make the most of this wealth building strategy.

To conclude, depending on your current financial status, it can take a little longer to come out of the debt maze and actually start the wealth building procedure but if you remain determined to make your dream of wealth creation a reality, nothing can get in the way.

Patricia Briggs is a guest columnist, blogger, author for various websites and communities including Oak View Law Group, CCHFA, CSCDA etc . She loves to write articles during her free time especially on topics like bankruptcy, debt consolidation service, investment opportunities, monetary policies, etc

How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others and Boost your Self Esteem

Comparing ourselves to others is a complex process and can lead to very different outcomes. The consequences of which vary greatly depending on how and why we choose to draw comparisons with others.

Positive Comparisons

Reassurance is a key factor with self-comparison; people stand themselves up against others as a checking in or reference point. We look out for people with similar characteristics and mark ourselves against them.

For example; mothers may look to other mothers dealing with young children and asses their parenting skills. The outcome of this is that they sense that they are achieving the same outcome and feel good about what they are doing.

We can also learn and improve through comparing ourselves, look at what others are doing and see how they have done this, using this as a benchmark.

Comparing ourselves to older and more experienced individuals can also be a useful way of looking at our own development and can provide assistance to choosing paths. Learning from the mistakes of others and understanding that life doesn’t always run smoothly can help us move forward.

Observing the lives of others on a global scale or as close as next door can help put perspective on our own lives.

Negative Comparisons

Choosing to compare ourselves against people or situations that make us feel inadequate is an utter waste of time. If you had a painful cut on your finger would you rub a handful of salt all over the wound? No you would not; you would clean the cut and put a plaster on it. If you are feeling unsuccessful and down on yourself, take positive steps towards self-improvement and protect yourself rather than adding insult to injury.

Battling insecurities through bringing up irrelevant comparisons is a dangerous game, the gut-wrenching emotions of uselessness that emerge are poisonous and can easily be avoided through taking control and not allowing yourself to get pulled into this pointless game.

The list of negative self-comparisons is endless, generally it will reflect whatever it is that you are struggling with at the time, below I have outlined a few examples of some of the most common forms:

• Body image: Feeling insecure about your appearance or weight? Picking up a magazine and flicking through pictures of scantily clad models is not going to help! Looking at the weight loss and dieting efforts of celebrities against your own is fruitless. All you are getting is an image with a brief written capsule of text you have nothing real or concrete to set against yourself. Ditch the magazines and opt for a novel instead.
• Relationships: Comparing yourself against your current partners ex is a sure fire way of creating avoidable bitterness and angst. Maybe she seems more successful? More attractive? More fun? Torturing yourself about the past can distance you from the present, it is your future that you are working towards, concentrate on what you are doing right and what works and learn to leave what is in the past: behind.
• Career: If you are feeling uncertain of unhappy in your current career, putting yourself up against someone who you see as being more successful is a damaging approach. Dwelling on how well somebody else is achieving does nothing but hinder your own development. Instead look into positive steps to improve your working situation.

How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Whoever or whatever it is that you use to negatively compare yourself against, should be recognised and dealt with.

Feeling jealously towards people involved in your life can be difficult to deal with; you may be very fond of them but find them difficult to be around when you are having moments of self-doubt. Rather than subjecting yourself to them, take a little break, it is far better to distance yourself for a moment than tainting a friendship with jealousy.

Making yourself aware of what makes you feel inadequate is a great way of dealing with it, learn to recognise how and why you get involved in this negative cycle and quickly remove yourself.

Think: comparing yourself to others is pointless, because there has never been or will be a person just like you!

Anne Davies is the author of anne’s-aneries a daily lifestyle blog, anne also guest blogs on on a varied selection of topics, from affordable bridal sets to self-help guides.

6 Powerful Tips to Increase Your Productivity

 

Do you want to increase your productivity? This is a desire that is shared by a lot of people worldwide and the good news is that there are simple ways that exist for people to do this. In this article I will be sharing 4 tips that will be quite useful when it comes to increasing your output and at the same time deal with procrastination.

Tip #1: Prioritize

Sorting out the priorities is one of the most important skills that you will need to learn if you want to increase your productivity. You are not forced to do each and every job in one go and the key here is to choose the most important ones. This is why it might be important that you set some time apart each morning to prioritize your task. Some people like to create a to-do list which they will follow each day in order to keep them focus.

Tip #2: Delegate

No man is an island and sometimes you will need to learn how to delegate some of your tasks if you want to increase your productivity. Some people have some highly specialized skills and can accomplish some tasks much more quickly than you. It might therefore be more sensible to delegate such tasks as it can be a major time saver for you. One possible idea will be for you to seek the assistance of a virtual worker that will allow you to not only save time doing these jobs but also allow you to cut down cost.

Tip #3: Beat procrastination

This is a major problem for most people and can hinder productivity a lot. Procrastination is all about postponing task that you can do today for a later time. This is where it might be important that you learn how to motivate yourself in order to accomplish more. Also it might be important that you identify your more productive hours of the day. One simple tip that I often use is to accomplish the most difficult or boring task first thing in the morning when still fresh and leave the much easier task for the afternoon.

Tip #4: Change environment

In some cases changing your environment can also help you to boost your productivity. For instance you might want to switch workplace and try to work from somewhere else where you will feel more productive. This can be easy to achieve for those that work from home as you can try to work in some different room or even in the garden if you feel like. The key here is to make sure that you break from your everyday routine in order to provide a mental refresh.

Tip #5: Beware of perfectionism

Some people spend far too much time on perfecting tasks that would have been otherwise quite acceptable. Sometimes we pressurize ourselves in order to make a task as perfect as possible when we could have done it much more quickly. Getting rid of this mentality can help us accomplish far more work than we could have thought possible.

Tip #6: Reward yourself

Working intensively for a long period of time can give rise to burn out. It is therefore important that you learn how to reward yourselves from time to time if you want to keep yourself motivated. For instance you might want to have some ice-cream for every hour you spend at your desk or may be go on your favorite website. Doing this will allow you to focus yourself on the task ahead and ensure that you get your work done.

There are many different productivity tips that exist and the key here is to find the ones that fit your situation. Although you might consider some of your tasks as chores, it is only after accomplishing them that you will really understand the real benefits of these productivity tips.

Robert Bellarmine is the writer behind Visitask.com where he covers topics related to project management and other management topics as well.

Why You Don’t Need To Include Change In Your Goal Setting!

Many people fail with their goal achievement, because they hope that simply setting a goal is enough – that once you have set a goal, the rest will magically happen without any action or any change. In this article I’m going to examine this by explaining the only time you can set goals without including change…

The fact is, the only way you can set goals without including change is to set a goal of ‘keeping everything the same’.

That may seem obvious, churlish even, but it’s a hugely important point which can be pivotal to whether you succeed or fail with your goals. If you set your goal as ‘keeping everything the same’, then you won’t have to change anything to achieve it, right?

After all, we all know that to keep repeating the same actions will keep bringing the same results. The trouble is, life will come along and throw a spanner in the works, and that spanner can be classed as ‘unexpected change’.

So, even if you did set a goal of changing nothing, of remaining in the safe and comfortable status quo, it’s unlikely to work in the long term, because life *will* throw change at us. It really is a case of when, not if.

That’s introduced the 2 points I want to make with this article, so let’s look more into what practical steps you can take to incorporate them into your goal setting…

Start small

Armed with the knowledge that change is essential in the achievement of goals, if we are afraid of change at the outset, it’s important how we phrase that change in our plan.

In the goal setting stage, when you lay out the steps you will take to get you from where you are now to where you want to be, most if not all of those steps will bring change. Although some of them may be massive changes, lots of those will be a way down the road, and some of the first steps you need to take will be small ones.

Make the small ones the priority!

Don’t worry about the big ones down the road – they will come in due course, but they won’t come at all unless you make the small changes to start with. So, don’t focus on big changes, focus on the small ones, as this will massively reduce the fear factor which stops so many people dead in their tracks.

In your written plan of action, look at the first step, and then break that step down as far as you can, into as many smaller steps as you can. Each time you do this you are reducing the size of the change you need to accept.

Accept the inevitability of change

Change happens to us whether we want it to or not. The physical ageing of our bodies is a good example of this, but other examples will come as a complete surprise.

By definition, those surprise changes cannot be planned for in advance, but you can develop your way of reacting to change, and a good exercise for this is to look to your past.

In the majority of cases, things we feared never ended up being as bad as we thought they would, and reminding ourselves of this is very helpful in developing an acceptance of change.

Take your pen and paper, and write down 3 examples of your past experiences which were not as bad as you had thought they would be. Three examples, and they must be from your own experience.

Writing them down will help to drive them home as memories you can draw on for support. It won’t be hard to think of 3 examples, and in fact once you start you will probably end up with a whole list.

Combine two steps for maximum results

So to sum up, remind yourself with your own experiences that change is rarely as bad as it may appear beforehand. Although it would be naïve to suggest that all change is nice, it certainly is true that most of the time change is not awful – a big difference.

You can combine this with focusing on small changes in your goal setting plan. If you use both these exercises, you move from someone who reacts to inevitable changes that life brings, to someone can ride those changes.

There is more though – you will also move to someone who takes control of change by making them yourself, steering them to your own purpose, and that’s a powerful foundation to drive some serious goal achievement!

So although it might be nice to think we don’t need to include change in our goal setting, that is a limiting mindset, and it must be accepted that change is a key element to the whole process.

Gordon Bryan is a UK writer about goal setting who has followed a powerful formula for over 25 years. He is passionate about sharing it with others, and reveals it in his free 8 Step Goal Achievement Formula.

5 Powerful Steps to Turning Adversity into Opportunity

Adversity is something nobody can elude forever. Whether you’re a risk-taker or someone who likes to play things safe, life will inevitably throw challenges in your direction.

That could be something in your professional life (maybe you missed out on a promotion or you lost your job after years of dedicated service). It could also be something in your personal life (maybe you were the victim of a traumatic crime or someone close to you just died).

Often, people experience a sense of injustice or hopelessness when something bad happens to them. We wonder “why did this happen to me?” or “how will I cope?”

Whilst it’s important to work through the emotions that these episodes provoke, it’s also important not to wallow in self-pity and despair.

Acceptance

The first step to turning adversity into opportunity is acceptance. You need to accept the reality of what has happened, and accept the fact that this isn’t something you can go back and change. Reliving past events and allowing yourself to become consumed with disappointment, anger, guilt or regret is not a healthy process.

You should never deny the reality of what has happened or the emotions this has stirred, but rather than worrying about what you could have done differently, you should start thinking about what changes you want to make moving forward. At the same time, you should accept that there are things beyond your control, and allow yourself to let go of any fear of the difficulties you might face in the future. Otherwise, you will end up living in a state of paralysis.

Taking responsibility

When adversity strikes, people often feel like victims, and this becomes a kind of archetypal role that they assume. People like to be able to find someone to blame when things go wrong in their lives, and find some sort of transient comfort in the notion of their own innocence or misfortune. Ultimately, however, this is not a constructive way to approach the situation.

In some cases, such as the death of a loved one from natural causes, there really is no-one to blame. In others, such as losing a job, you may be able to identify someone who could have treated you differently, but focusing on that person won’t get you anywhere.

Whilst the situation may be something you could never have prevented, the way you respond to it is something you can take responsibility for. The way in which you handle negative experiences is up to you, and once you realise that, you will be empowered to find positive ways of channelling your energy.

Recognising what you have learnt

If you have managed to accept the unpleasant experiences you have endured, and you have taken responsibility for the way you react, it’s important to stop and reflect on the ways in which that journey has affected you. Has it made you a stronger person, better prepared to take on challenges in future? Are you wiser now, more comfortable with your place in the world? Perhaps you will even be able to pass on the insights you have gained to others facing adversity of their own.

Identifying new goals

There is no better time to take stock of the direction in which your life is heading. If you lost your job, this is the time to be honest with yourself – were you 100% happy with your career path so far, or does your passion lie elsewhere? If you lost a parent to a preventable disease, you could use this to motivate yourself to live a healthier life. Or you might just be more grateful for the time you’ve got, and think of new things you want to achieve, places you want to see, or experiences you want to have.

Pursuing your dreams

Once you’ve set some new goals for yourself, remember how active you are in dictating your own destiny, and follow your dreams!

This post was written by Joel who is an online consultant to an NLP training provider called Inspire 360.

Organizing Your Home Office for Maximum Efficiency: Tools and Tips

Working from home is a great way to make a living. If you’re about to start your own online business or if you already have one, you may be looking for ways to ensure that your enterprise runs smoothly, efficiently and profitably.

But how do you streamline your efforts to ensure you are as organized and efficient as you can be? If you work on a computer, it is essential to know where you can find things fast. These tools are invaluable to anyone who has an online business.

8 Essential Tools

I’ve found the following eight online tools to be essential to my being able to work efficiently, collaborate easily and stay organized. All are easy to use and many are totally free!

1. Skype: Meet with other business people, designers and vendors anytime you want. Skype connects people across the world through online videoconferencing.
2. SnagIt: Screen captures and sharing them has never been easier. Want to inspire others with an image, connect them to stylistic look or offer logo suggestions? You can do that and much more with this tool.
3. Pamela: You’re busy and details from that Skype meeting can fade from your memory quickly. No problem. With Pamela, you can record up to 15 minutes of that meeting. This is just one of many great features.
4. RoboForm: Fill in forms, user names and passwords easily. RoboForm remembers all the information needed to make sure you never waste another moment looking for basic information.
5. PageLeap: Turn on your computer and PageLeap displays the websites that are invaluable to your enterprise. One click and you’re exactly where you want to be.
6. Carbonite: Be sure to backup every ounce of information on your hard drive by using this service. Carbonite connects your computer to a backup server that is designed to keep your data, records, financial information and more safe and secure.
7. Google Documents: You will always be able to access each and every one of your documents from any computer anywhere through this software from Google. Collaborate, share and save with this online tool.
8. Google Calendar: Never miss an appointment again, make sure everyone involved in a meeting or project are on the same page and coordinate schedules with ease using this calendar tool from Google.
Settling in, Making it Your Own

It’s important that you find your home office environment enjoyable. It needs to be a place that encourages you to work and in which you enjoy spending time. Take some time to make the space into a real office. What sort of decorations do you want? What types of plants are you going to include? How are you going to configure the furniture? Is your office light and airy? If not, can you brighten it up and find a way to open it up?

No Time Like the Present

The primary thing that you need to do is to get started. You probably have a day job and while you’re starting your online venture, you will need to keep that job. Use the weekends, evenings, lunch breaks and other times to work on your new venture.

You need to develop a plan for your business and office. Then it’s time to take positive steps towards creating your workspace. Your home office will be the anchor, catalyst and central nervous system for your company. With a little effort over the course of a weekend or two, you can be up and running.

It’s Your Energy and Dreams

Your home office is the crucible for your energy and dreams. It needs to be part inspiration, as it should at least support your desire to work (the perspiration part of the equation). If music gives you energy, personal photos inspiration and DVDs instruction, then add an entertainment unit to your space. These can add depth and variety to the space, while providing you with space for other useful technical devices such as a HD television, extra monitor and CD player.

By creating an efficient and pleasant home office space and equipping it for success, you’re well on your way to fulfilling your objectives and realizing your dreams. Be sure to make your home office a place where you will want to spend a lot of time working. Doing so will payoff in the long run.

Joan Mychreest is the publisher of allwalldecor.com helping consumers find wonderful resources and wall decorating tips and ideas. She specializes exclusively in wall decor and TV wall units for your home and office and has many years of experience in the art of wall design representing many major manufacturers in the industry, and working closely with interior decorators and large retail and home decor stores.

Office Gossip – Are Your Employees Out of Control?

Tantamount to bullying, malicious or excessive gossip can severely interrupt production and wreak havoc with your office’s morale. Though “water cooler intrigue” can be entertaining at times, when a colleague becomes a target of harassment it can perpetuate a self-defeating attitude within the company. Set the boundaries now, before it gets out of control and costs you a bundle!

Stop rumors in their tracks

Tell your employees to take the “high road” and help to make sure the rumor ends with them. Emphasize how important it can be to not perpetuate gossip, and how eventually others will begin to emulate the integrity of this behavior. Gossip by definition goes around “in a circle,” which means it will eventually come back to the maligned individual; it always does. If you fail to protect an employee from such attacks your business could be exposed to liabilities, such as constructive dismissal.

Zero tolerance

Let your people know you mean business. Create rules with consequences for ignoring them. It’s important that employees understand the ways gossip can demean not only their morale, but also a customer’s impression of your business. One miserable employee can lose you more goodwill in a single day than you can build from a week of lunch meetings with clients and new prospects. Keep your wits about you.

Staff meetings

Many employers get busy and forget how vital these sessions can be for the overall health and well being of their companies. Staff meetings let your people know there is a time and place they can air their concerns, so they don’t have to brood about problems to the point of commiserating with their fellow workers. It is also a good time to let your employees in on your future plans or enlist their suggestions in fixing problem areas.

Is it a symptom?

Not always. Sometimes it’s just a bad habit that got “too big for its britches.” But occasionally it does indicate there is a malady festering within your company. Like antibodies rushing to an infection site, disgruntled employees will flock to the water cooler to plan their attack. They may blame undeserving people, denigrate the “pretty girl” or the “nerdy guy” just to give a physical target to their overall unhappiness, which may be a mere lack of inspiration from their bosses. Sometimes they won’t be able to wrap their heads around what’s really wrong; that is, after all, your job. They just know they are unhappy and they are soon going to give it a face; overworked, underpaid, too few benefits, too many plants. Gossip takes on a life of its own if left unattended. Pay attention.

Be supportive and respectful

The proverbial “golden rule” really does apply in the office environment; treat your employees the way you would want to be treated and they will pass it on. Praise team efforts, especially when one employee shows supportive behavior when another colleague falters. Your people will notice and want “some of that” positive attention as well. If workers are acknowledged for going out of their way to train or assist, they won’t tend to complain if they have to occasionally carry the load of a slower person. Let them know these are leadership traits.

It’s important

Don’t underestimate the damage that gossip can cause in your office. If allowed to go on unchallenged it can and will undermine all your best efforts, distilling what could otherwise be great results into “what-could-have-beens.” If you don’t spot it and stop it first, then your customers will recognize it and back away from what could have been successful relationships with you.

Keep in mind that gossip is not idle; it’s a breeding ground for unrest and derogatory office behavior. Make sure to keep your finger “on the pulse” of your organization. Take time to listen to your employees, give them guidance and encourage their growth with positive learning experiences, and place them where they excel. Better this comes “full circle” than the gossip.

Before having children, Loretta Pleasant worked full time for a reverse phone lookup service in Los Angeles. She now spends her time with her family and, when the kids are asleep, writing.

5 Steps to Creating a Balanced Life

In the age of the Internet, it can feel as if you need to be “always on” and always working. It can be almost impossible to disconnect and enjoy the more mundane and human things in life, especially when you have cell phones, emails, IMs, social networking and countless other things constantly calling you back in.

This can lead very quickly to a feeling of overload, as if you’ve got too much to do and not enough time to do it in. This can lead to a variety of problems including depression, marital problems and even, perhaps ironically, poor work quality.

Simply put, finding balance in your life means more than just taking two weeks of vacation every year. It’s something that has to be worked and fought for every day.

On that note, here are five steps you can take right now to help you lead a more balanced, happy and fulfilling life.

1. Determine Your Priorities

You can’t hope to find balance in your life if you don’t know how things are “weighted”. Sit down and draft a list of the things that are most important to you. This can lead to some very big questions such as whether you put career before family, but if you can’t answer them honestly, you’re going to struggle to make decisions that will bring you happiness.

It’s important to keep in mind that this list needs to be a selfish one, meaning the things most important to you personally and not what others feel is the most important. If you can’t decide, try to imagine a life without one or more of the elements and see which, when absent, would hurt you the most.

2. Plan Your Days Starting With #1

Now that you know what’s more important in your life, it’s time to start planning a typical day or a typical week. When doing that, start with what’s more important to you and block out time for it. For example, if you have a hobby that’s important to you, set a side some time every day or week to to do it.

While there are some things that you may have to block in that might be a lower priority, such as hours you have to be at work, dole out your free time starting with what makes you the happiest and work our way down the list.

3. Drop What’s Not Important

If you make a long enough list, you’re going to find quickly that some things just don’t fit. Those that are lower down on your list need to be dropped from your life. At least for now.

This may mean that you stop doing some things that you enjoyed but don’t find as important as you might have once thought. Likewise, it might mean dropping or scaling back on things that you thought were important to you, but aren’t of as high of a priority as they seemed.

Some of these decisions will be painful, but they are most likely for the greater good. However, if dropping something does wind up causing more grief than it gains, you can always adjust your priorities later with this new knowledge.

4. Set Boundaries

Once you have your schedule, even if it is just a general idea of how you want to divide up your time, you need to set strict boundaries on how you spend your time.

The biggest rule is to never let lower priority things intrude on higher priority things. For example, if you put your family ahead of your work, remember that order when work asks you to stay late on a night that you were going to spend at home.

Though sometimes life gets in the way, it’s important to remember that there’s always tomorrow and you can’t let your lower priorities interfere with your higher ones, at least not without a very good reason.

5. Remember to Take Down Time

Finally, though it’s tempting to try and schedule an activity for every waking moment of every day, it’s crucial that you set aside some down time. This is time where you are doing nothing, or at least as little as possible.

Simply put, humans were not meant to be going every waking moment between morning and night. Whether it’s a few minutes sprinkled throughout the day or a block of time that’s just for you, be sure to have a time where you can do nothing but relax.

While there’s no real rule as to how much time you need to set aside, it needs to be enough for you to recharge and continue to face the day.

On a related note, make sure that you give yourself enough time to sleep. Though it’s tempting to skimp on sleep to get more things done, doing so makes you less effective and can make you far more miserable than leaving a few unfinished tasks.

Conclusions

The simple truth is that there is no magic solution to leading a more balanced life. The key is to determine what is most important to you, focus on those things and then learn to let go of the things that are less crucial.

For most, unfortunately, it’s the letting go part that’s the hardest of the process. The good news is that most will quickly learn to do that when they see how happy they are doing the things that matter the most to them.

So, while there’s always some initial pain with moving to a more balanced life, it’s quickly dulled by a much happier and more fulfilling life over the long haul.

This post was written by Lior who is an online consultant to to a live chat support software startup company called iAdvize. Lior Also works for an MA in Israel studies program in TLV university.