There are many things that I’m going to say that may have seemed completely obvious to me five years ago. However, until certain scenarios allowed me the luxury of experience, I was completely unaware of their significance within an organization. Hopefully, this list of observations will help you no matter how big or small you or your organization is.

1. “Experience is what you get, when you don’t get what you want”. I think I have a stellar resume filled with interesting projects for someone my age, but if you ask me to write a ‘failure resume’ it would probably be 10 times longer. Am I afraid of failing? Yes, and sometimes the outcomes are irreversible, yet, the most rewarding lessons we learn often come from failure. I know no one who understands this better than Jacqueline Novogratz. She’s done an amazing job of collecting information from her failures. Listen carefully to her here:

2. If you do want to fail, the best way at it is either being a micro-manager or stripping everyone of decision making. I’ve once had a friend (let’s call her Anna) ask me why her organization was focused on services instead of equipment sales when the latter had much better margins. The answer was always well hidden, but here it is. Services were listed on her time-card as hours whereas equipment sales were not — management was more concerned about making their number of employees justified. (In other words, management tried harder to look busy than profitable.) Further, they stripped employees from a lot of the decision, probably unaware of the problem they were creating. If we’re diligently overseeing everything at once, mistakes are going to be made and we’ll lose sight of the bigger picture. In short, we can never lose by giving people the dignity of decision making.

3. That being said, it’s probably better to make your organization more transparent to the people within it. I believe that people want to do their best in general as long as they’re treated fairly and they’re given a chance to prove themselves. Because of that, it’s a great idea to open up some of the problems to the bottom line. After management was laid off at Anna’s company, the new management made it clear where their financial was weak — service and sales. She then developed a system of keeping track of her customers and items they may need in the near future which not only made the customers happy, but increased the company’s sales as well.

4. Someone has a problem — Rejoice! Problems are good. Solving them gives us opportunities. Because finding the problem is often half the battle, we should often embrace them. As one female CEO has said, “find problems your company needs help on, and move forward with it”.

5. Like Anna, you don’t need to be promoted to address a concern. Letting someone else empower you to tackle a problem is something they teach you in high school.

6. If you’re not having at least a bit of fun, stop doing it. The most important thing in life, is simply to be happy solving the problems you are solving. Most people you meet will convince you that their 40-hour-a-week job does not define them — that cannot be further from the truth. If you’re going to spend 40 hours a week for several years doing something, it’s probably going to define you to a great extent and is going to affect your day-to-day happiness. To that I’d say, ‘choose your work wisely, and dream big’.

7.  Lucky number 7. Sometimes I think I’m very lucky, but in retrospect, there has always been a significant action that precedes my rendezvous with Lady Luck.

8.  And yet, at the end of it all, the most important thing is to be happy and feel loved.  Without that, everything else is a moot point.

For my little sister, Crystal.

I can hardly believe it’s already 10PM. Again.

Every day, little tasks become a battle against the clock as we slowly learn to surrender our sleep, diet, and exercise. And as technology makes us more readily available, the seemingly unimportant quiet time driving can be taken up by a phone call from a colleague or a customer.

There is hope though. Thanks to New Scientist, you can finally Teach Your Brain to Stretch Time. What lovely timing.

All sarcasm aside, if there’s anything you can take away from the article, it’s that many things come before a job — simple things such as soaking up sun and cozying up next to a fireplace with a cup of hot tea with a person you love dearly. Because I’m not so sure we’re supposed to watch 40 hours a week fly by and let the stress of it spill over to the other 40 you have left. Because maybe that’s why we get fat with age and not because aging causes us to get fat. Because, shit, I’m twenty-ish and each proceeding year seems to spin faster than the last.

I think Robert Levine was most accurate when he said this:

“Time is our most valuable possession. Until the biomedical people can make us live forever, the closest thing we have is to stretch the moment.”

Another thing to consider is the universal fact of how a shorter work week and frequent breaks can actually increase productivity. From an article in Zenhabits:

“This no-rush attitude doesn’t represent doing less or having a lower productivity. It means working and doing things with greater quality, productivity, perfection, with attention to detail and less stress. It means reestablishing family values, friends, free and leisure time. Taking the “now”, present and concrete, versus the “global”, undefined and anonymous. It means taking humans’ essential values, the simplicity of living.”

With all this in mind, here are a few ways to help you slow down, increase productivity while simultaneously increasing enjoyment you can get out of our short little lives:

1. Can’t get out of bed in the morning? Purchase an alarm clock that gradually wakes you up via your favorite tunes or morning radio program. During my college years, I had mine tuned into NPR. It was a great way to jump start my brain while staying in touch w/headline news, and a great alternative to the standard obtrusive alarm clock beeping.

2. During business travel, I always request a free room upgrade with a jacuzzi. 4 out of 5 times, I get what I want because I’m one of their elite members and you can too if you’re a member of their hotel. When that’s not an option, simply soaking in a bathtub at home is a surefire way to relax.

3. Clean as you go. Every time my brother leaves our apartment, he takes trash bags with him and throw them along the way. There is never more than a couple dishes in our sink. We take a few minutes out of our every day to clean our clutter. Containers are your friend. Space is peace. And your mail (and email) should always be sorted. I learned this the hard way.

4. Take a tea break, and eat lunch outside and away from your desk if you can.

5. Cook in bulk. If your cooking is good enough, you’ll enjoy having it three consecutive nights a week. Hey, the boyfriend doesn’t seem to mind.

6. Listen to something stimulating when you’re stuck in traffic. Audio books, NPR, Forum, and itconversations rank pretty high on the list. At least for me, it makes sitting in traffic a pretty exciting time of day. (Sometimes, when i’m parked outside my apartment after sitting in traffic for the past 30 minutes, I’d continue to sit in my car in order to finish a program)

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Other fantastic links on living slow and simple:

Think Simple Now shows you the basics on how to live an uncluttered and simple life.

Zen Habits shows you how to take control of a crazy life.

Slow Down Now says multi-tasking is moral weakness. (Stay in bed! Get that extra hour of sleep!)

It’s one of those articles that I think should be included in a Manager’s handbook: New York Times Article .

Here’s a little snippet from it:

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”

Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on his face and on the table.

There are certain qualities that I think are innate to us, including the quality of anticipating cliches. Need I explain any more? Do I need to tell you that power somehow eludes us? However, I do think most of it comes from giving people too much credit to begin with. The problem is with us, putting up with this behavior instead of scoffing at it.
And right after I say this, Paris Hilton decides to make a spectacle of herself.

For those of you who always compliment me on my timeliness, thank you! It is never easy to jump out of bed in the morning, especially not after 4 hours of sleep, but it is definitely better than hitting snooze 5 times. Well, after mastering this method, I finally decide to unveil my secret so pay attention little ones! :

Long long ago, when I had 7am classes in high school, (ok, so about 6 years ago) hell would be raised as my mother tried to wake me up for class. Sometimes I would go as far as pretending to sleep through her yells just so she would leave me alone. My mother was obviously distraught by my behavior, and I would always go to school feeling very guilty and very late– it’s a lose-lose situation. One day, feeling fatigued from both my sleepiness and my mothers anger, I decided to write the words “wake up bitch” (can be replaced with pther equally derogatory term if you like) on a big piece of paper and placed it somewhere in view of when I wake up. So when the alarm clock sounds off, the sign would be there to remind me that it’s better to be early than to hit snooze 3 times. Strangely enough, this method worked very well for me as it sort of shocked me into a state of awaked-ness every time and sometimes it would even make me laugh my way to the bathroom sink. It must’ve been such a ridiculous sight for my poor mother and I think would’ve rather hear an angsty teen scream than laugh in the morning. I was really creepy; Sorry mother!

So there you have it. this was 6 years in the making! Cherish it!