Things that go on your body or inside your body deserve the most attention. Things which you use a lot of time deserve a lot more attention. Things that are in your immediate surrounding deserve enough attention.
Buy something only if it is absolutely necessary.
If it is absolutely necessary then do your research and buy a version of that thing that serves your purpose the best. Even if it is a little more expensive.
With no phone attached to the charger, it consumes about 0.5 Wh.
When a fully-charged phone is attached to the charger, it consumes about 1 Wh.
When a partially-charged phone is attached to the charger (aka when the phone is charging), it wastes about 4.5 Wh as heat and delivers about 2.5 Wh to the phone.
PS: 1000 Wh costs about 10 pence in the UK and is equivalent to 0.52 kg CO2e.
The key to better living is forming better habits. Leo Babauta’s now famous blog Zen Habits started with that motto. Forming new habits or getting rid of old habits is difficult and we know that. Past experiences have taught us that lesson. But it has been shown by many that a period of about 30 days is enough to form new habits or break old ones.
We make sense of the world around us with help of numbers. They are everywhere. Not just in critical things like your body-mass index, the credit card debt or the speed limit on a highway but also in things that don’t affect you so much you like number of calories in that steak, the number of likes received by your latest status update or clinical trials data on a new drug. But numbers on their own mean little. They need to be put in context.
We do well in being able to put some of them in context (for eg. comparing your current speed with the speed limit) but most of the numbers that don’t directly affect us we don’t put in context. For example, what does a £15 billion cut in the UK defence budget over a decade mean? Looks like a big number but in actuality with a defence budget of about £45 billion per annum, over 10 years it’s less than 4% overall cut. Is that good or bad? With a £175 billion budget deficit and £1 trillion public debt, I’ll let you decide.
Anyone who’s ever ironed their clothes will know that one needs to remove the creases on any piece of clothing before actually laying the hot iron down on it. It’s that short preparation that one does before the actual event which makes the effort in the event worth the time. Similarly, I have found that spending a few moments before diving into any activity to remove mental creases and prepare for the activity makes the time spent on the activity much more productive and fulfilling.
Being said to whom, where and why? What is the message that needs to be conveyed? How much time do you have?
In any conversation, from telling others what you do to convincing others to buy what you are selling, three things need to be given special attention - Context, Content & Quantity.
Context: Make it as relevant to the listener as possible.
Content: Make it as simple as possible.
Quantity: Conveying the content in as little as possible without affecting the context or the message being conveyed adversely.
We human beings are terrible at risk analysis if we let our sub-conscious mind do it. Take the example of public speaking. Most of us are terrified that we’ll make a fool of ourselves except what really makes a bad impression on stage is being nervous. If we are able to ignore our sub-conscious mind’s flawed risk analysis and instead consciously analyse the risk of the critical situations we find ourselves in then we should be able to come up with better approximations to the real world.
Our belief system underpins every decision we take. We rely on it from helping us to understand the meaning of our life to helping us decide whether to steal our neighbour’s car or not. We must focus on adopting better belief systems and when we do we should ensure that we update them as we learn more about the world we live in.
To be able to do something really well, one must develop the instincts to do it. When most things needed to get the task done are done instinctually, it frees up the time for us to think about how to do it better. The old adage that says practice makes perfect works because the practice betters our instincts.
On a day when the world mourns the death of a visionary, I ponder about the words that he left behind:
For the past 33 years, everyday in the morning I’ve looked in the mirror and I’ve asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” and whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
To deal with any situation we rely heavily on models that have been built based on previous experiences (irrespective of how similar or different the current situation is from the previous one). These models or mental shortcuts are commonly known as heuristics. With that realisation, it seems obvious that one must pay adequate attention to these models and do what one can to improve them.
Consider anything you do as public.
It’s that simple. I don’t think you will ever again worry about your social network content if you treated all the content you post to social networks as public.
Facebook keeps changing it’s privacy settings. Google creates Buzz and gives away loads of information. People post things publicly that were considered private by the author… you won’t have to deal with them any more.
Just consider everything public while on social networks. Period.
Readability is free and simple to use.
