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

Gain Freedom by Disabling Your Network Connection

Recently I discovered Freedom for Mac OS X. This application disables all wireless and ethernet networking on your computer for up to three hours at a time. When you open the application it asks you ‘how many minutes of freedom’ you would like.

Set the amount, hit ‘OK’ and it you will not be able to use your internet or your wireless network anymore. Afterwards your connections will be re-enabled. You can quit Freedom before the time you set, but this does not get you back on the internet. You will have to restart your computer to for that.

Why would we want to do something like that? Is it so hard to keep yourself focused on your task at hand? Yes, for some people it is! What could be so distracting then? There are more than a few things that can keep you away from what you should be doing. Read more

A Remote Control For Your Teacher? - The Importance Of Asking Questions

Are you always sure about what your teacher really wants from you? Have you ever been in the situation that you present your work but it appeared you got the assignment wrong? There are a lot of situations in which you’ve been told to do something, but it might not be totally clear to you what the outcome has to be.

There can be various reasons for this unclearity. Maybe you’ve not been paying attention while the assignment was given. Maybe it was explained in a bad way, maybe the teacher assumed you had the knowledge to understand what he or she was talking about but you didn’t. When thinking about assignments and formulating them an educator will get fully into a subject. We might assume that, because he is teaching this subject he will know a lot about it. And the more you know about something the more difficult it is to understand why other people really don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s why it actually is very difficult to teach a seemingly very simple subject to a group of newcomers. Great teachers know this, of course, and know how to formulate their questions. But this is not always the case. Read more