How Do You Deal With Stress?
howtosplitanatom.com
howtosplitanatom.com
We've all run into this problem at some point: We sincerely want to put something out on the web that people will link to, helping us generate ad revenue. But not all of us have something useful or meaningful to say. This is something you can overcome if you just put a little pluck and perserverance into it. Here's what some others had to say...
howtosplitanatom.com - "A good approach for me has been to identify a universal problem and get my friends to relay truisms about said problem. If they're not available, I can Google up a list in less than 10 minutes!"
zenhabits.net - "Pasting universal truisms is great, but I like to throw a little twist in by enumerating them."
And remember to make sure to network with other vacuous blogs so you can upvote each other and downvote the competition on social sites. Happy po$ting!
Not every post can be a treatise on HMM based speech analysis. Nor should it be.
As always, if something isn't meaningful to you - no one forces you to read it. If you had suggestions for stories you feel are more interesting, feel free to reach out to me (I can't speak for Zenhabits, but I imagine they would say similar).
I agree that not every post should be a discussion on the problems and merits of academic subjects, but every post should be interesting enough that the smart guys here want to read it: be that a PG essay, a story telling that Prosper verifies that poor people must have high interest rates or this year's Berkshire Hathaway letter to shareholders. Boilerplate news can be found anywhere, whereas a highly concentrated feed of stories is a precious rarity.
Isolation.
Time.
Tea.
Find someplace isolated and quiet, and make a hot cup of green tea. Hold the cup in your hands for a while and just breathe in the smell of it. Drink it when you feel good and relaxed.
Spend less time online and use that new free time for a little more exercise or rest.
Do something that takes you out of the quotidian flow of time and deadlines. Read a book, play a video game, watch a movie, take a walk, but procrastinate in a way that forces you to stop, and deliberately dedicate a couple hours to not doing what you should be doing.
What you don't want to do is spend all that time in 5-minute intervals of "just one more site"; "just one more refresh of reddit"; etc. That will keep you feeling like you have to do something now, and you will quickly, efficiently, and stressfully grind your way through a whole bunch of sites and articles without getting anything done or actually relaxing.
If I am really good, I deal with stress like this:
- stop doing what you are currently doing
- analyze the situation
- make a list of what you have to do in no special order (this includes also private activity like dates in the evening, pick up kids from the kindergarten, buy food etc. Private life often sets me under more pressure than work).
- define priorities
- think about what you can delegate and delegate it
- think about what you can cancel and cancel it early (dates, movies)
- start work
- if more disaster happens, iterate this list again
Works like a charm. For me the pressure relaxes most of the time already when I have my list done. I think the real trick is that writing the workplan gives you back control about what you do.