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Work better. Live better. |
 This article was originally posted February 15, 2015. It has been the most read post on this site so I am re-posting it in the hopes that it may help someone. Steve Montador, aged 35, died today. He was a well liked and respected professional hockey player. News articles are indicating a possible connection to his long battle with depression. During the pre-game skate at my weekly hockey game tonight, I noticed the sign above. Rick Rypien died on August 15, 2011. He was one of three NHL hockey players that summer to have their life cut short due in large part to depression. It is true that there is a strong link between concussions that many hockey players suffer and depression. Still, it got me thinking about how if such successful, talented, wealthy, physically strong men, in the prime of their lives can have such serious battles with depression, surely it can affect anyone. Experts claim that mental health issues affect at least 20% of people. The thing with depression is that it also affects the people you have relationships with. So a lot of you are dealing with the fallout of depression...
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It was a strange feeling.
Friday at 2:00 pm and I was clean, sitting quietly paying attention to a speaker, surrounded by business people from diverse fields. Last week I took an afternoon off of the tools and spent about 5 hours at an event hosted by our local Chamber of Commerce. It featured networking opportunities, a trade show, panel discussions geared toward small business owners, talks about the local economy and some presentations to help business people to deal successfully with the many challenges they face. It was difficult investing the time and money to attend an event that had no clear ROI. But I'm enjoying getting out of my comfort zone this year and I figures that just meeting one person, or learning and implementing one thing, could make the investment very worthwhile in the long run. I had to create some space in my regular routine for this event. And it turned out my biggest take away from the day has to do with space...  It's been a while since I wrote a post on this blog. I've just needed a break from the blog while I focused on other things for a while. If you've stuck around, thank you very much for your patience :) The last couple of years have been full of challenges and there is always so much to do. The over-whelm gets to me sometimes as I struggle to tread water. Just the other day as I was commuting to work it occurred to me...am I so conditioned to work and life being difficult, that I have just accepted that it has to be that way? I know it isn't constantly hard for everyone. I work for a lot of people that have a pretty sweet life. But I also know that adversity finds everyone sooner or later, in one way or another. There is no escaping it. Maybe some of us get extra practice. Anyway, this is not a woe-is-me article. My life is pretty good overall, I know that, and I have much to be grateful for. But I'm always looking for ways to make my life easier and it usually involves some type of simplification. Simplicity is often the answer when nothing else seems to be working. Back to basics! Just finished reading the book Born For This by one of my favourite authors, Chris Guillebeau. It is a good read and I may do a review sometime. But I wanted to share one simple and effective tool that I learned from this book that I've been able to use with success when it comes to managing multiple tasks on a given project... |