Reality Upgrade

Routines. They are easy to acquire, and hard to change.

Humans are creatures of habit, and there is nothing wrong with that. Habits make doing repetitive things easier, it makes complicated tasks easier to remember, and frees us up to think about other things while we take care of routine tasks.

But habits are only useful when they are good habits. This great article by Lifehacker suggests that you might want to review your habits, and think about whether or not they are serving you well. Could changing some of your routines make you happier?

Probably so.

This is a great video about the surprising science of motivation by career analyst Dan Pink, thanks to one of my favorite websites, TED.

This video is only about 18 minutes long, and is a must for anyone who owns, manages, or ever plans on managing a business.

If you have any trouble playing the video, click here for the original on the TED website.

Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I opened a Yahoo email account. I quickly used it to sign up for every imaginable website, and it quickly go to the point where I would receive several hundred emails a day, most of which blasted right through the wimpy spam filter Yahoo had back then.

When I got one of the first Gmail accounts, I vowed that I would only give out that account name to my close friends, and would therefor avoid spam.

Fast forward to today, and even in that nice pristine Gmail account, I get easily 10-20 emails a day, all of which are to some degree important. For instance, I can’t very well block all emails from Amazon, or I might not get the confirmation email when I buy something.

My email box was quickly filling up, and I was not sure what to do about it. I tried using filters to sort mail into individual folders, but became excessive quickly.

It was then that I found this great article about email organization from Lifehacker. I put it into place, and my email box is once again a pristine space where the only emails are ones I haven’t read yet.

So check it out, maybe it will help you as much as it did me.

If you have ever wondered where money comes from, you are not alone. Until recently, I did not understand the theory of money at all. I knew that once upon a time, our currency was backed by a “gold standard,” and I assumed that this simply meant that if someone took a dollar to the Federal Reserve, they could get a dollar’s worth of gold out of the national gold reserve. I figured that it was just easier to carry around paper money.

However, for my whole life, there has been no gold standard. Our currency is backed by faith in the United States Government. I never really understood how that worked.

Until yesterday, when I watched the videos below. There are 5 videos, about 10 minutes long each, and they are by far the best explanation of the way money actually works that I have ever seen. In the last couple of clips, the video talks a little about monetary reform, and I try to stay away from anything political here, but the information is great whether you agree with the author’s ideas about reform or not.

Everyone should watch these videos. After all, you use money every day. You have a responsability to understand it.

If you are in the market for a new job, this nifty bit of research from indeed.com (a job searching website) might help you figure out where to look.

The study is not exactly scientific, just a comparison of the number of unemployed vs. the number of job postings, but it does give a general view of the national job market by metro area.

You might notice that Washington D.C. tops the list…I’m not surprised. After all, the bailout money is coming from there…

Take a look at the full list here.

Thanks to indeed.com for this bit of info.

This awesome website by the New York Times has a flash chart of what Americans are doing with their time, by hour of the day. It is also broken down into categories, like male and female, enployed and unemployed, etc.

Check it out here.

Ever wonder just how far your salary would go in another city?

Ever wonder how people are able to afford living in those expensive apartments in Manhatten?

Ever wonder how they make Raisin Nut Bran taste so much better than Raisin Bran?

Well, I can’t help you with the last one, but this is a great website for checking out how much you would have to get paid to maintain your current standard of living in another city. (continue reading…)

If work was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it, right?

A problem that almost everyone faces is working at something they enjoy…after all, we spend something like a third of our lives at work. Actually, we spend another third asleep, so we are really at work, or driving to work, or getting ready for work, for around half our lives.

Might as well make that time tolerable.

Bud Caddell over at WhatConsumesMe has come up with a nifty little ven diagram about how to be happy at work.

It is really rather simple, but it makes a lot of sense. After, all of us have things we love to do, things we can get paid to do, and things we do well. Trying to get all of those to overlap is the real trick.

So check out the full article here.