9 Ways to Focus on your Priorities

Extracted and abridged from Far Beyond the Stars by Everett Bogue
For full article go to here

1. Identify the four areas of your life that are most important to you.
2. Learn to say no to requests.
3. Start to eliminate things you don’t care about. 
4. Give yourself huge blocks of time to work on one project. 
5. Turn off distractions. 
6. Don’t comment on things that you don’t want to be involved in. 
7. Make time for important things. 
8. Tell people about your priorities. 
9. Learn as much as you can.

Far Beyond the Stars

Simplify Your Life with Balance

Edited extracts from zenhabits' excellent guest post 'Simplify Your Life with Balance' originally from Anastasiya Goers  

 

These are the habits that I need to work on at the moment:

• Don’t always need to be part of the team.

Social commitments can be a good thing sometimes but they can also be a huge waste of time.  There is no point in supporting causes that you do not feel strongly about or visiting events that are not interesting to you. We are often afraid of what others would think if we do not participate. Be brave enough to break away from the crowd and make room for what really matters in your life.

There are plenty more examples of social standards that we try to follow in life.

• Find the strength to let go

We feel uncomfortable letting go of things and memories that we are emotionally connected to. This connection makes simplifying life very difficult. We feel responsible for keeping certain things (gifts from our relatives of friends) and holding on to memories. Over time it leads to enormous amounts of clutter and huge emotional baggage that does not let you move on in life

Some memories (especially negative ones) can suffocate you. You need to find strength to forgive the person or even yourself for what happened. There is no way to change your past but there is a way to change your future. Grasp the moment and focus on living in the present.

Simplicity becomes very easy and enjoyable if you approach it with balance. Keep decluttering your life until you feel completely comfortable with the results and until you feel simply in balance inside and out.

Throw Away Expectations

 Re-posted From zenhabits

‘Act without expectation.’ ~Lao Tzu

How much of your stress, frustration, disappointment, anger, irritation, pissed-offedness comes from one little thing?

Almost all of it comes from your expectations, and when things (inevitably) don’t turn out as we expect, from wishing things were different.

We build these expectations in our heads of what other people should do, what our lives should be like, how other drivers should behave … and yet it’s all fantasy. It’s not real.

And when reality doesn’t meet our fantasy, we wish the world were different.

Here’s a simple solution:

Kill your to-do list

From Zen Habits

For the important things, you tend to know what you really want to get done. If you’re a writer, you know what you want to write, usually. If you’re a designer, you already have an idea of what you’re excited about working on. You don’t need a list. You just need to forget about the list, and get working.
Kill your to-do list, and forget about all the things you need to do … except the One Thing you’re passionate about, right now.

Zen Habits