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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Baker of Man Vs. Debt . Every time we automate a process in our lives, we trade a piece of consciousness away for a piece of convenience. This can be fantastic, as long as we ensure that we automate positive, sustainable habits. The problem with automation comes when we try to apply it to areas in our lives that need more consciousness. We run into trouble when we try to solve a problem by automating it. Automation itself doesn’t fix anything. In fact, automating a undesirable process only buries the problem even further. “Problems can’t be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” -Albert Einstein. We cannot solve problems by trading away consciousness. We need to reverse this trend. We need  unautomation . Unautomation is the act of deliberately trading back pieces of convenience for increased consciousness in return. In our financial lives, there are plenty of examples were we can benefit from unautomation : Creating a list of every item you own. While far from convenient, this will drastically increase the awareness of our clutter. Using a 30-day list for wants. Waiting 30 days to purchase an item can be a drag, but we’ll likely realize how little we really desired it in the first place. Tracking our spending with pen and paper. Carry a small pocketbook and record every purchase by hand rather than just on your plastic. Converting the cost of items into time we’ll need to work. This can be a tough exercise, but will put things in perspective quickly. Purging 2 items for every 1 you bring into your life. Yet another inconvenient (at times) rule-of-thumb that can raise awareness around just how much clutter we bring into our lives. Quit signing contracts. Until you’ve ever tried to quit signing them, you don’t realize how fundamental contracts are in our society. Spending with cash over plastic. Going without plastic isn’t easy, but you can’t get much more aware than we spending cold, hard cash. Taking public transportation. You may have to leave early or plan a little more in advance, but taking public transportation will open your eyes the other side of your daily commute. These examples are only a handful of hundreds of money instances where we could benefit from a path of less convenience and more consciousness. The next time you look to change a set of behaviors in your life, don’t turn to automation. Start with unautomation. Registration is now open for You Vs Debt , Baker’s 6-week online class with daily videos, challenges, and accountability forums to empower your battle against debt.

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“It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.” ~Robert A. Cook Editor’s note : This is a guest post by Barrie Davenport of Live Bold and Bloom . Simplicity. It is a lovely ancient spiritual tradition that has seen a recent resurgence in popularity. As we try to make sense of our erratic economy and the accompanying financial anxiety, it is natural to leap to a less risky lifestyle extreme — stop spending, scale back, live lean. If you are a regular reader of Zen Habits, you are probably intrigued by the idea of simplifying. In fact, you may have even given up many material things and actively live a very simple life. People who have adopted this level of simplicity, especially in the land of consumerism, are incredibly inspiring and fascinating. But let’s be real here. In spite of embracing the concept of simplicity, most people really love their stuff, and they love acquiring more stuff. Like our attitudes about a healthy diet, our feelings about material things are complicated. We know what’s good for us, but we just don’t want to give up what we like. Our stuff makes us feel good. Is it possible to live a simple life and still love stuff? How much letting go of stuff really counts toward simplifying anyway? Living simply and detaching from material things will make you happier. There is real research and lots of anecdotal evidence to support the truth of this. But is it possible that some material things can add to our happiness, sense of contentment and joy in life? If so, how do you go about deciding what’s good stuff and what’s bad? Perhaps the deciding factor is motivation. Do the things that you own or wish to buy support your ego, or do they enliven your soul? Some material things can afford you a sense of warmth, coziness, beauty, fond memories, or comfort. There are other things that offer only that fleeting rush of acquisition. If you infuse mindfulness into your ideas and actions around material things, you can create a gentle balance between loving stuff and living simply. Here are some thoughts that might be useful. 1. Look around your house now. Walk from room to room. Do you see things that you never use and don’t really care about? Why not give them away or sell them? Clear physical and psychic space by removing the “dead wood” in your environment. Someone else might really need these things. 2. Examine why you are hanging on to something. Is it truly useful or meaningful, or does it feed your ego in some way? Are you holding on to it just to impress others or to make yourself feel better or more important? 3. Look at how you spend your time. Do you have things you own for hobbies that you never pursue? Do you have a kitchen full of gadgets but you rarely cook? If you truly think you will come back to a hobby or activity, box things up and put them out of sight until you do. Be realistic about how much time you have to use your extraneous stuff. 4. Are you in a career that is thing-focused? Decorators, car dealers, retailers and others involved in creating, buying, selling and marketing merchandise, can have a hard time detaching from material things because they are always surrounded by the newest and best. There is beauty and art in many things, but consider this: you don’t have to own them all to appreciate them. Eckhart Tolle once suggested to Oprah Winfrey that she not buy everything she likes or wants — just savor it for the moment in the store. 5. Consider experiences rather than things. On the whole, experiential purchases provide far more pleasure than material purchases. The memory of experiences improves with time, but material purchases are harder to think about abstractly. Experiences also encourage social relationships which provide long-lasting happiness. If you are itching to spend, spend on a great experience with someone you enjoy. 6. When you think about your things or want to purchase something new, consider these parameters: It brings beauty into your life and stirs your soul. It supports a passion or hobby. It helps bring family and friends together in a creative, meaningful way. It educates and enlightens. It makes life profoundly simpler so that you can pursue more meaningful things. It helps someone who is sick or incapacitated. It is useful and necessary for day-to-day life. It’s part of a meaningful tradition or a reminder of a special event. 7. You will know you are buying mindlessly if you: Buy on a whim. Buy to impress others. Buy because you feel you deserve it. Buy when you can’t afford it. Buy just to update something that still works or looks fine. Buy because someone else has it and you want it too. Buy because the advertisement seduced you. Buy because you are bored. It’s purchased because buying soothes you. It is possible to balance a simpler life with owning and acquiring material things. You can enjoy stuff without living the life of an aesthetic. The exact balance you create is a matter of personal preference. But realize there is a diminishing point of return with accumulation and materialism that undermines authentic joy and fulfillment in life. Apply mindful purging to your current lifestyle and belongings, as well as thoughtful consideration to your future purchases. Carefully examine your motivations for keeping possessions or buying new things. Once you allow things to serve your soul, rather than you being a slave to your things, your life will evolve into an artful harmony between what you have and who you are. Read more from Barrie at her blog, Live Bold and Bloom and download her free e-book, How to Live a Meaningful Life.

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‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ ~Lao Tzu Editor’s note : This is a guest post from Chris of Zen to Fitness . The quote by Lao Tzu above rings true for nutrition as well. It is a shame that so many people are obsessed with fad diets in order to quickly shed pounds and reach their desired weight. And yes extreme dieting of any form does work in the short terms but only for the weight to rebound back on and the body to regain its original weight or the weight it is comfortable at. I see people fighting their bodies all too often dieting one week then bingeing on junk the next. This is fighting the bodies natural homeostasis in every sense, one week it is getting less than it would like and releasing stress hormones to cope and the next week the body is being overburdened with processed or overly sweet foods in order to compensate for the previous starvation again putting stress on the body as it tries to cope with the overflow of food and chemicals. Others chronically under eat. Sadly this process takes its toll on your body and while it could handle it in your teens and younger years as we age the damage goes deeper and effects our metabolism leaving us on a gradual path to more and more weight gain. Contrast this with the people you know who eat practically whatever they want and stay lean and healthy — what is their secret? It is quite simply that they have never fought their bodies, never made themselves feel deprived or starved, their metabolisms never got damaged and this allows for good levels of energy and a stable healthy body weight. This is not something out of reach but rather something that we can all achieve by having a healthy relationship with food. Some readers may already have this and hopefully this article will help you stay that way! This is not to say we should eat anything we like as certain foods can damage your body and should be avoided when you can, but I do not preach a diet of deprivation rather a way to eat wholesome foods which your body has evolved to deal with. The first step is to stop seeing food as something special or magical and this can be achieved by feeding yourself well on a consistent basis starting with 3 solid meals per day. How many people do you know who skip breakfast have a mid morning cappuccino, graze for lunch then eat fatty meats, fried foods and sugary desserts for dinner. The truth is when we eat healthy, wholesome meals 3 times a day our bodies reach a level of nourishment they may have not seen in years, cravings disappear and food stops being so special it becomes something we enjoy and look forward to but not something to live for. You will naturally eat less at meal times, you will feel fuller quicker without any effort, that ferocious appetite will disappear and you will eat more mindfully. It is just a result of your body being well fed and nourished rather then having to force any portion control … The next step is to add live foods to your diet, especially if you tend to eat mainly cooked or white foods. Rather than depriving yourself of the foods you like introduce more healthful foods alongside them. I am talking about making a big salad with your meals: Chopped Lettuce Tomatoes Carrots Zucchini Celery A nice dressing of sea salt, pepper, lemon and olive oil Have this at the start of every meal you have a chance, you may not like it at first and it maybe an effort to get down but this will soon change. You will develop a taste for fresh raw foods and you will continue to nourish your body. Try and do this for at least one meal per day. Conclusions This is not about ramping up your “metabolism” by eating regularly but rather feeding your body adequately allowing health to fall into place. Once you start nourishing your body good things will start to happen. Your energy will increase, cravings for sugar and stimulants like coffee will disappear and your appetite will regulate. You will start to crave healthy and natural foods … Eating Healthfully should always be a long term vision, never look for quick fixes when it comes to health – Consistency is key . Building a good relationship with food will leave you with more time and drive to do the things you love. Chris is the author of A Simple Guide to Eating Well and writes about staying fit while living life at Zen to Fitness .

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Karol Gajda of RidiculouslyExtraordinary.com and How To Live Anywhere . If your goal is to start a small online business that replaces and exceeds your current income this may be the most important article you read this year. Brash, huh? Here’s the deal: I’ve been working online full time for almost 10 years, since age 19. I’ve had a lot of failures and a lot of successes. There is no better way to learn how to succeed than to learn from someone who has already done it. Tip #1: Focus On What’s Important What’s important? Action . In the beginning, just get started. Don’t get too caught up in details that don’t matter. Dealing with the paperwork, business cards, and other ancillaries isn’t absolutely necessary. It’s an online business for a reason. Save the time, paper, and money and don’t get business cards. If you happen to meet someone who wants to know more about you or wants to visit your site ask for their e-mail address and actively follow up with them. Handing out business cards is passive, and even more than that, ineffective. (Unless your name is Johnny B Truant and you do something really unique that gets people talking.) Other paperwork a lot of people get caught up in is registering a corporation or other business entity. That will be important eventually. But you can (in the US anyway) start a business in your own name with very minimal paperwork (a simple Doing Business As form) and cost. Consult a tax advisor for specific insights. Tip #2: Invest In Education Whatever business you want to start, be it blogging, eBay sales, information product selling, affiliate marketing, or any one of the countless other ways to make money online, there are hords of people who have done it before you. Sometimes those people will have written about what they did to succeed. In those cases, if their business aligns with what you want to do, don’t be afraid to invest money into their products. Personally, I have easily spent upwards of $40,000 on non-University education. That includes buying eBooks, print books, seminars, coaching (example: Leo’s A List Blogging Bootcamps ), membership sites, you name it. As a general rule, the most important skill you can learn, no matter what business you’re starting, is marketing. I don’t make a distinction between online and offline marketing. Once you learn marketing you can use it anywhere, with a few tweaks of course. I liken it to learning computer programming. The language you learn isn’t as important as the logic behind it. You can adapt to any language. For a quickstart, check out these essential marketing books . Some you may have heard of, but most will be new. Tip #3: Ask For Help If you’re a bit introverted like me you might be shy about asking for help. Don’t let that be a barrier to your success. In other words, feel the fear and do it anyway . You will deal with rejection. Many people won’t respond to your e-mails, phone calls, or tweets. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Starting a business isn’t supposed to be easy. That’s the filter. I promise you, if you talk to enough people, you will get the help you need. I’ve been quite surprised by just how accessible some people I was initially afraid to contact are. Bonus hint : I’ve had greater success connecting with ultra successful people than those who are just ultra successful in their heads. The key to getting a response is to send very short, very succinct e-mails. Practice the http://five.sentenc.es rule. Keep your e-mail to five sentences and make it clear what you’re asking. Tip #4: Participate In The Community Whatever niche you’re in there is a community. For example, back in the days when I used to sell on eBay, I hung out on a few eBay message boards. I helped people where I could and I got help where I needed. As an added bonus, when I decided to start selling eBay how to products (I haven’t sold them for over 5 years), guess who helped me launch that business? The same community that I had participated in freely for over a year. These days, whichever community you should be a part of is larger and more easily accessible. Take advantage of that. Tip #5: Don’t Quit Your Day Job Coming from a guy who wrote 21 Reasons You Should Quit Your Day Job and Travel The World , this might seem shocking. Your ultimate goal may be to quit your job , but don’t jump the gun. You will find tons of stories of people who quit their jobs before they had their businesses going, but there’s a reason for that. People who failed furiously because they didn’t have an income to support themselves in the lean business startup phase don’t usually write about it. And because they don’t write about their failures, you never hear about them. I want you to quit your job as much as you want to quit your job, but I don’t want you to do it before it’s time. Karol Gajda is a lifelong entrepreneur who blogs about Freedom, Health, Travel, and Life at RidiculouslyExtraordinary.com . Today he launches his excellent guide, How To Live Anywhere .

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post from world traveller and remarkable writer Chris Guillebeau . For a long time, I focused on starting big projects. And for a long time, I had a hard time finishing any of them. Sometimes I got overwhelmed, other times I just looked at the faraway goal and thought: what comes next? How do I know which step is the right one? Only when I studied the art of breaking down big projects into very small steps was I able to make progress. It’s kind of like mountain climbing. Mountains look impossible from a distance. But if you come to basecamp and just start putting one foot in front of another, all you see is the path ahead. You can’t help but make progress—and as long as you have a trail, you know you’re going the right way. For the past few months, I’ve been conducting an intensive research project with small business owners. From an initial group of 300, I selected 15 “emperors” who had built profitable businesses with less than three employees. I wanted to find out exactly how they did it, and the key was to separate the essential steps from the optional ones. The central question was: can you really build a business around something you love to do, without going crazy—or without going broke? What I discovered was that most businesses are not built from big ideas. Big ideas are good, but it’s more important to look at all of the smaller steps that bring you to the bigger goal. The practice of daily habits—familiar to everyone in the Zen Habits family—is also crucial. Every day, you get up and do one thing that brings you closer to your goal. If you’re learning to exercise, you do twenty sit-ups—or just two sit-ups, if that’s all you can manage at first. Achieving a flat stomach is much more likely through this method than with a weekly sit-up binge. The same holds true with the business owners I studied. In a small business, here are the sit-ups you work on every day: 1. Reach out to existing customers – because it’s much easier to sell to existing customers than to new ones. 2. Bring traffic or prospects in – because partnerships and soft-sell promotion can bring in more customers than costly advertising. 3. Create new products or services – because once you have an audience, you need something to offer them. (It also helps if you have more than one thing.) 4. Find a way to expand your reach – because ultimately you’ll want to reach a bigger tribe with your message and business. More than big ideas, breaking down each of these strategies into specific steps grows and nurtures a healthy business over time. The step-by-step business system is also much easier than the caffeine-fueled startup. Startups tend to fly high and die; a lifestyle business flies at lower altitude, but flies safer and longer. Going step-by-step, you might climb a mountain, you might build a business, and you might even get a flat stomach. Today will be gone before you know it. Before it disappears forever, what mountain are you climbing, and what one step can you take to get closer to the top? — Chris Guillebeau travels the world and writes for a small army of remarkable people at chrisguillebeau.com . Follow him on Twitter . Today is the partner launch of the Empire Building Kit, a case study on how to build a business in one year by doing one thing every day. For the next 24-hours only, you can support Zen Habits and get a copy over here .

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Editor’s note : This is a guest post written by my eldest daughter, Chloe Babauta . She’s 17 and a junior in high school, and spent the day with me on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. You can follow her on Twitter . With all the distractions we’re presented with from the Internet and other forms of media these days, it can be very difficult for teens to focus on schoolwork. It is so convenient to tweet what you’re doing, text your friends, watch Davedays on YouTube , or to do an infinite number of things when you’re supposed to be researching for an essay. I’ll admit that just during the time it took to write this post, I’ve taken several breaks just to go on Facebook to see what everyone’s up to. Don’t worry – everyone will still be there after you’re done doing your work, so close Firefox/Chrome/Safari and get down to business. Here are a few ways to increase your productivity and try to break away from distractions: 1. Turn off your wireless/Internet connection. I know, it sounds crazy to deliberately cut off your connection to the outside world, but just do it. It eliminates your ability to easily open up your Internet browser and will help you to focus on what you really should be doing. 2. Set aside a specific time for using social networking/other recreational websites. I’ve allotted myself some time to use the computer from 5:30-6:30 in the evening. I know that if I don’t give myself any limits, I’m capable of staying on Facebook and “becoming a fan” of fifty more pages instead of writing an essay or doing my math homework. I’m sure many people experience this problem too, so make sure to set aside about an hour (or whatever works for you) for leisure time. 3. Take short breaks. After reading my American History book for too long, I tend to waste about half an hour by taking a nap. So to save myself from becoming insanely bored, I take little breaks by checking MySpace for a few minutes or getting a snack. I suggest that you do your homework or read for about ten to fifteen minutes at a time, then take a two to five minute break to maintain your sanity. 4. Do your work NOW rather than later. I am a seasoned procrastinator. I’m guilty of wasting hours on end watching or making YouTube videos, chatting on instant messengers, or just daydreaming. I’ve learned the hard way that procrastination is not very rewarding and almost always results in bags under your eyes and B minuses (though there are several cases in which I’ve gotten exceptionally good grades for papers I had written at midnight). Do yourself a favor in advance, and start your work ahead of time. 5. Prioritize! Ten years from now, do you want to look back at your life and realize that you spent a greater portion of your teen years sitting down in front of a laptop, rather than doing things that actually matter? Spend some time with your family or go outside and take a walk. Read a book, or do something with yourself that doesn’t involve a computer. (This is something I really need to work on too.) 6. Spend less time reading blogs like these about how to help yourself and get right to work! NOW! The only way to really live productively is to go out and start actually living! After you’ve read up on how to become more productive, put your newly obtained knowledge to use. — If you liked this article, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter . Thanks, my friends.

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Editor’s note : This is a guest post from Scott Belsky of Behance and The 99% . Every few minutes, more communications are being sent your way. Emails, text messages, voice mails, instant messages, twitter messages, facebook posts…and the list goes on. Your human response? You simply try to stay afloat. You peck away at the latest communications at the top of your many inboxes. And since the flow of communication never ends, you slip into a life of what I have come to call “reactionary workflow.” For those of us with great ideas and bold goals for the future, reactionary workflow is a big problem. If we spend our working hours reacting to the incoming barrage of communication, we will fail to be proactive with our energy. Our long-term aspirations suffer as a result. For the past five years, i’ve been interviewing uber-productive leaders and teams – people at companies like Google, IDEO, and Disney, and individuals like author Chris Anderson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. I’ve never asked them how they come up with ideas. I’m not interested. My fascination is how they make their ideas happen, time and time again. The outcome of this long project is MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN , being published this month. Many of the people I met have developed ways to combat reactionary workflow. Here are a few tips on how they do it: Create windows of non-stimulation. Once you open the door to communications overload, you could spend all day reacting to what’s thrown at you. Piers Fawkes, founder and editor of the marketing consultancy PSFK, reserves a good chunk of his morning – from 7-10am every day – to do research and digest the day’s trends and news prior to going through his email. Proactively blocking out time for creating and absorbing – rather than just responding – is a key tactic of productive creatives. Keep Two Lists When it comes to organizing the day’s tasks – and how your energy will be allocated – create two lists: one for urgent items and another for important ones. Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete against the urgent items that can easily consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve distinctly different periods of time for focus on each. Schedule intense periods of processing at a consistent time every day. During the research for the book, I met a number of people that swore on the benefit of “power hours.” These individuals would try to compress all response-related work into pre-determined short periods of time every day, usually 1-2 hours of un-interrupted in-box clearing. The notion of compartmentalizing reactionary workflow was a theme across the most productive leaders I met. Don’t hoard urgent items. Even when you delegate operational responsibilities to someone else, you may still find yourself hoarding urgent items as they arise. When you care so deeply about a project, you likely prefer to resolve things yourself. Say an e-mail arrives from a client with a routine problem. Even though the responsibility may lie with someone else on your team, you might think, “Oh, this is really a quick fix; I’ll just take care of it.” And gradually your energy will start to shift away from long-term pursuits. Hoarding urgent items is one of the most damaging tendencies I’ve noticed in creative professionals that have encountered early success. When you are in the position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items to others. Don’t dwell. When urgent matters arise, they tend to evoke anxiety. We dwell on the potential negative outcomes of all the challenges before us—even after action is taken. Worrying wastes time and distracts us from returning to the important stuff. When it comes to addressing urgent items, break them down into Action Steps and challenge yourself to reallocate your energy as soon as the Action Steps are completed. It is also helpful to consider whether or not certain concerns are within or beyond your influence. Often your worries are for the unknown and there is nothing more you can do to influence the outcome. Once you have taken action to resolve a problem, recognize that the outcome is no longer under your influence. How do you avoid a life of reactionary workflow? You need discipline and a dose of confidence. Recognize your tendency to surf the stream of incomings, and gain confidence in the potential of being proactive. It is easy to sit there and react all day. You’ll never run out of work to do. But your bold ideas will suffer unless you take your energy by the reigns. Scott Belsky studies exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world. He is the founder/CEO of Behance and is the author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality (Portfolio, April 2010).

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