By Jakob Barry

Everyone’s dream job is to be doing something they enjoy but unfortunately that’s not the case for a large segment of the population, especially in these tough economic times. Rather than holding off on opportunities in order to pursue more meaningful ones many people are settling for whatever they can find in order to pay the bills; a fine and commendable decision but it does have a price.

For example, when spending a third of the day or more at the office five days a week personal interests are often shelved for long periods of time -an unhealthy predicament for the creative individual. In order for a person to really shine such interests need to be fed but how is this done with so few minutes in the day?

Even when time presents itself exhaustion or the need to take it easy sometimes coerces us into watching TV shows passing out on our favorite comfortable chair.

To win the battle takes a lot of effort yet surprisingly, the key to making it happen is no secret. It’s all about maximizing time both at work and at home.

Maximizing time at work:

1. Prioritize: Get work done on time and don’t take it home. Set daily goals so when you leave work accomplishments are recognized. Even if you don’t finish what you set out to do, make what’s left a part of the next day’s goals. Bringing work or work-related stress home diverts important energy away from family responsibilities and creative activities. Have a positive outlook that everything is for the good and what you are doing now will benefit you down the road.  
2. Exercise: Many people think exercising is only about loosing weight or competing but the truth is when you feel good physically other faculties are optimized. Whether it’s a short jog, doing yoga, or an actual sport, working out will help you concentrate on the moment. Find time to fit it in.
3. Eat right. This doesn’t just mean eating well. Consuming too much food can make a person lethargic compromising daily goals. Learn to listen to your body when it’s saying “enough.” Also, instead of drinking a lot of caffeinated soda and sugar drinks which can dry you out find simple and healthy ways to keep going.

Maximizing time at home:

1. Prioritize: Don’t come home and spend time thinking about what to do; already have it planned out. It’s a no-brainer that when you come home after a long day you’ll be tired so when family responsibilities are complete regulate personal down time and then get focused.
2. Exercise: Many people think exercising tires you out but this isn’t so. Once a routine is established exercising gets the heart pumping waking you up. Essentially, it’s another tool for focusing. If you can’t exercise in the morning before work, try the evening. A work out and shower will get your creative senses and thinking processes flowing.
3. Eat right: If you intend to maximize your time into the late night eat earlier and try avoiding heavy foods, which will tire you out and most likely contribute to a slow start the next day. Don’t rely on caffeine for that drive through the night. Teach your mind to be your wings and carry you.

Finally, it’s understood not everybody’s schedule is the same but these suggestions can be applied in different ways through various formats. The most important thing to remember is even when life appears to have made it almost impossible to move forward creatively, don’t give up; keep following your dreams.

Jakob Barry writes for Networx.com, a growing community of users sharing home improvement projects and monitoring new ones in real time allowing homeowners and contractors to get the most from their resources. He covers various home improvement topics, including green lighting ideas, reducing household allergens, and home safety awareness.

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Majoring on the Majors by Learning to Say NO
Focusing on Your Areas of Brilliance
Imagine Being Owned by No One…

Success requires high energy level

By Kevin M

Of all the traits that make a person successful I think the most underrated is energy level. You can be brilliant, you can be a master salesman, you can be an inventor without equal, but it takes energy to convert those talents into success. Many talented people achieve nothing more than average success and I think that for many the missing ingredient is inability to take their ideas and talents and drive them forward. That’s where energy comes in. That’s how important it is.

How many good ideas have you had that you never acted on? High energy people can act on many ideas—often simultaneously—taking full advantage of the numbers game. They may fail at many more attempts than the average person, but ultimately find success through their relentless forward motion. They become the preverbal “irresistible force”.

How to become a HIGHER energy person

Notice that I didn’t say you can become a high energy person—there’s something about body chemistry that seems to determine that. But if you aren’t a high energy type, it hardly means you’re doomed to failure. You can become a higher energy person than you are now.

Human energy is a product of physiology, behavior and emotion, but we’ll get to the behavior and emotional components in a bit. What are physical factors affecting energy level?

Diet. We’ve all heard the saying “you are what you eat” and that’s something we need to take seriously. Foods that provide energy or improve body functions—like fruits and vegetables—should be emphasized over junk foods that do little beyond satisfying a craving. High water consumption keeps the body hydrated and clean, and that reduces fatigue. A larger number of smaller meals are better than fewer, larger ones that can leave you feeling over-stuffed and sluggish. Find an energy maximizing diet that works for you.

Exercise. Muscle capacity, circulation, digestion and a host of other functions improve efficiency with at least moderate exercise. Adding regular sessions to your schedule can have a multiplier effect—your energy level increases as a result of the energy you expend for exercise. There are also significant psychological benefits to getting in touch with our bodies, as well as the sense of well being that comes with looking better as a result.

Weight control. Energy is expended more rapidly carrying around excess weight. Being leaner means traveling lighter, and that means more energy for productive purposes.

What are behavioral factors affecting energy level?

Time management. Procrastination is the mortal enemy of good time management and an energy burner for no good purpose. We usually have one or two tasks we need to accomplish each day, the kind that can make a long term difference in our lives. But if we put them off while we pursue the trivial, we may not ever get to them. That can raise our sense of guilt and guilt is negative energy.

My good friend and frequent OutOfYourRut contributor, Dave Kelly, often says “Do the dreaded thing first”—a declaration that the most important action we take on any given day is usually the one we like the least. But once that task is done and out of the way, our minds, our time and our energy are free to take on new tasks. Do what’s most important first each day and see if your energy level doesn’t surge.

Focus. If you have an average energy level or less, you have less energy to burn than your high energy brethren and that means what you focus on is crucial. Think of focus as a sliding scale—you only have so much energy so to maximize your results, it’s critical that the greatest share of it is used on the most important tasks. Major on the majors, and let the rest fall where it will.

Energy wasting activities. Here’s a short list of activities that can soak up valuable energy for no good purpose:

• Working to create the nicest lawn in the neighborhood
• Maintaining the cleanest house in the neighborhood
• Having the cleanest car in town
• Getting involved in everyone else’s business
• Fixing things that aren’t broken
• Busy work/keeping your hands busy
• Worrying, and all the ways that manifests itself

Each of us has only so much energy to expend—be careful what you spend it on!

None of this will make you into Superman/woman but it will produce a more energetic you, and that should be the goal.

Let’s take a look at emotional factors affecting energy level…

Passion and purpose: the twin energy ramjets

OK, you’re already doing all of the things listed above, but you still don’t quite “feel it”—the energy surge that is; something’s missing! Two something’s actually: passion and purpose!

Find a high energy person who is successful in his career and in his life and you’ll probably have found one who is living life with both passion and purpose. Those are the twin fuels that power success.

Whether you’re a high-, medium- or low-energy person, having a purpose in life and doing work you’re passionate about will raise your energy level immediately.

Passion. No energy flows from just going through the motions—quite the opposite in fact. Showing up at work every day and passing the time until 5:00 can suck the energy right out of us.

Passion flows from doing what you love, doing what feels right, doing what you believe in. It may be that these can’t be had through your work, in which case you have some decisions to make:

1. Change careers. By moving into a career you feel passionately about, your energy will surge and you’ll become more productive than you’ve ever known.
2. Continue in your current career, but find your passion in something non-work related—charitable work, political involvement, training for marathons, or any activities that get you excited. The energy generated from these activities will carry over to your entire life including your career.
3. Begin a new career as a side venture. You can move into your desired field without giving up the income and benefits of your job. Get it going gradually, then you can decide when the moment is right to make a complete change.

Purpose. Purpose is the big picture in our lives. Unfortunately, most people seem to move through life without an overriding purpose, or maybe the details of life overwhelmed it long ago.

For help in determining your purpose in life, consider the following questions:

1. What drives you? What do you hope to accomplish? What do you want for your family, your health, your lifestyle, you’re spiritual journey?
2. If you don’t have a purpose now, what might it have been early in life—before things got so hectic? Maybe it’s time to resurrect some old ideas.
3. If you don’t have a purpose and never have in the past, what would you like it to be?

Having a written purpose—a personal mission statement—can be the item that unifies your life and provides that crucial forward motion that drives so many of success stories in life.

Purpose can keep us moving past the minutiae in life that tends to tie us down and suck the energy right out of us. Like a lighthouse in stormy seas, it can keep us focused on where we want to go. When we’re stuck in the weeds of life it can represent an all important escape hatch. Yes, I’m facing difficulty right now, but it’s just a detour on the way to my ultimate destination.

Not having that destination is probably the reason many people feel tired, overwhelmed, out of control and helpless. That’s why we need a purpose.

We don’t need just to survive, but to thrive–we can’t do that without energy, and we can’t have energy without better living habits and without passion and purpose. We can have all of these—and the energy they produce—and that will give us the fuel we need to accomplish that which we’ve only dreamed of in the past.

Do you think there’s a valid connection between energy and success? What do you do to raise your own energy level? What can you tell others about raising their energy level?

By Kevin M

We’re taking on this weekly forum as a way of exchanging ideas to help lower the cost of living. This includes expense reduction and elimination, but goes beyond, even to include lifestyle changes that may bring savings on a number of fronts. Ideas on ways to cut personal, household or business expenses are welcome!

This weeks suggestions:

Is it time to go on a diet? It’s unfortunate that most diet plans require that we buy food that’s actually more expensive than the kind we eat when we’re not dieting. On some plans, where you have to purchase prepared foods directly from the plan sponsor, it can be dramatically higher. At a minimum, most diets require that you change your food consumption to include more lean meats, fish, fresh produce and other food types that may be good for the waistline, but a disaster for the household budget.

So does that mean that we abandon hope of losing weight until the economy improves, increasing our incomes and enabling us to even be able to afford to be on a diet?

It seems there’s an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone here; we can lose weight and save some money.

There’s a neat point here where the twin objectives of losing weight and saving money intersect: in order to lose weight we need to eat less, and in order to save money we need to buy less. We can do both!

Now is an excellent time then to begin a diet centered on the simple directive of eating less. Cut the volume of food you consume by some desired amount—10%, 20%, 30%, or what ever is appropriate—and you should not only lose weight, but you’ll also save money on grocery bills.

There’s nothing fancy about this. The most crucial element both in losing weight and saving money are the same—to consume less.

Buy food at ethnic markets. The immigrant population is growing all over America, and because of their position as new entrants to the country, they often have less expensive ways to live, and often to live well. This is a compelling reason to expand our social circles a bit to include making some friends in the many ethnic communities springing up all over.

Ethnic markets can be an excellent place to find bargains on groceries. In Spanish speaking markets it’s possible to buy bulk items, such as rice, beans and produce, for less than you’d pay in chain grocery stores. There is also a variety of products available that you won’t find in a chain store.

One big way to cut down on your spending is to reduce the number of times you go out to eat. It will be easier to accomplish this if what you prepare at home is new and different, and ethnic markets are a good place to help make that happen. Invest a few dollars in a cook book specializing in the foods available at one or more ethnic markets in your area and you may develop some delicious reasons to eat more meals at home.

Not all products are less expensive than in chain grocery stores so you need to be careful. Package goods that you’d find in a chain supermarket tend to be more expensive at ethnic markets, perhaps because they aren’t big sellers. It’s not a bad idea to have a friend from the ethnic culture to help guide you along the first time or two you shop at a store.

A good description of Asian food markets appears on Wisebread and is well worth checking out.

Close little used checking or credit accounts. Do you have checking accounts or credit cards that you hardly use? You know, the kind you keep around just in case? Unless such accounts carry zero maintenance fees, you’re incurring expenses for no good purpose.

Many accounts have fees even if you don’t use them, such as monthly maintenance fees or annual administrative fees. A $10 per month maintenance fee on an unused checking account it costing you $120 a year. Some banks actually charge inactivity fees, just to keep an account open. Either way, if you have little or no use for the account, any charges associated with are a waste of good money.

What are some changes you’ve made or plans you’ve implemented to lower living or business expenses? What expenses have you been able to reduce? Are there any you’ve been able to eliminate entirely? Big ideas, small ideas, they’re all worth exploring.