Would a Paperless Life Make You Happy?

As a follow-up on my previous post A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork I would like to take a closer look at what can be done to get rid of as much paper as possible. A few practical tips.

Eliminate

First of all it’s a good idea to eliminate as much of the incoming paper as possible. Let’s take some time to make a list of all sources of paper sent to us. Bills, obligations and notices, promotional material, things like that. Do we really need them? Do we read all that stuff?

A lot of the information banks and telecom providers send can also be viewed online. A lot of companies offer the possibility to unsubscribe from these mailings and just send an email with a link to the information. If companies send us promotional offers we can Read more

Book Review: The War Of Art

Sometimes a book can give you just what you need at that specific moment. It’s great to read a book and discover how you seem to recognize a lot of the information. It’s like you already know it but you never really thought about it. For me, Steven Pressfield accomplishes this with his book The War of Art - Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

Clear And Concise
It’s a small book containing a lot of short and easy-to-read chapters. This is good. The book is about winning your inner creative battles, and it’s good to see the writer doesn’t need 500 pages to explain this. It’s about starting, so the sooner we are done reading the book, the sooner we can start. Start what? Start creating!

There are negative forces inside each one of us that holds us back from doing what we know we should be doing. Pressfield calls those forces Resistance. Read more

A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork

As much as we want to have everything organized inside our computers, there is still a lot of real paperwork sent and given to us. What are we going to do with it?

I’ve been searching for the best way to organize my digital documents for a while now, tried different systems and found great new ways of doing so. Very interesting indeed, but what if too much attention is going to organizing our virtual documents and while inventing and tinkering our best digital file system to date, the papers, letters, presentation or lesson handouts and other printed documents pile up around the computer cluttering our desk.

During a conversation I had with a colleague he described how he organizes his paperwork using a smart and simple system. It goes like this: Read more

Do You Really Need A Car?

Today I was sitting in my car, annoyed while watching the traffic lights go red again before I passed them. This happens so many times, and every time I find myself grumbling and blaming the other drivers. Why didn’t they speed up a bit before me?

Then, while driving I was thinking about writing this post. I had some ideas but I couldn’t write them down, so I took my phone and started to look for the voice recorder function which appeared to be hidden somewhere far away in the menu. I though I found it, looked at the road in front of me and discovered I was almost driving on the wrong side with a car going the opposite direction coming dangerously close! Now that really made me think, does driving like this make me happy? Do I really need a car? Read more