Category: Mind Space

Printable Guide to Help You Have a Good Work/Life Balance

The Day Grid Balancer is a printable guide to help people who work too much bring back some living into their life. The author is open about the fact that it won’t work for everyone so he encourages you to download the source files and edit the document to reflect your thinking, luckily he posted it under a creative commons license.

Now could be a good time to review your life/work balance so you can make sure that everyday is a good day.

For my initial pass, I created a single sheet of paper to act as the focus of your day throughout the entire week. It’s really just a glorified to-do list, designed around the idea of noting when you’re doing the kind of things that you’d like to be doing every day. By the end of the week, you should get an idea of whether or not you were successful. Since it’s a single sheet, you can keep it on a handy clip-board and carry it around with you.

People are Optimistic

Not much to add to this: study proves that people are universally optimistic.

“These results provide compelling evidence that optimism is a universal phenomenon,” said Matthew Gallagher, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas and lead researcher of the study.
At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New Zealand and lowest in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria. The United States ranks number 10 on the list of optimistic countries.

Fairness is an Emotion

Well this is neat, some researchers are arguing that fairness is a hard-wired emotion.

The belief that things should be divided fairly among members of a group isn’t just a matter of culture or reason — it’s an emotion that’s built into the human brain.

That’s the suggestion of a new study that posed the question: Is it better to give food to some hungry children while others go hungry? Or is it better that every child get a share, albeit a smaller one?

“People prefer equity, when all things are equal, to efficiency,” said study lead researcher Ming Hsu, a fellow at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

And different regions of the brain are involved when making decisions involving fairness or efficiency, he said.

“In terms of the brain, we find areas of the insular cortex are activated when people were choosing the equitable allocation of food,” Hsu said. “Given the involvement of the insular cortex in emotions and fairness judgments, we conclude that emotions are underlying equity judgments.”

Other areas of the brain are activated when people are making judgments about efficiency, he said.

TED Talks: What Makes us Happy?

TED gets a lot of neat people to talk about the neat things that they do. Lucky for us they post these talks online once the conference is done for the rest of us to enjoy. TED has compiled some themes, and one of them seems made for this site! Find out what makes us happy.

“The Pursuit of Happiness” was 2004’s conference theme, but TED speakers over many years have found themselves driven to understand the nature of happiness.

Daniel Gilbert’s astonishing talk shows how we humans are poor predictors of what will make us happy. Stefan Sagmeister shares how great design contributed to his happiest moments, suggesting that the secret may be attention to detail. And Malcolm Gladwell, tongue in cheek, explores what we might learn about the pursuit of happiness through one man’s quest to make the perfect pasta sauce.

But suppose we understand happiness. How, then, do we find it? Carl Honore says the key is, simply, to slow down. Pastor Rick Warren appeals for a life of spiritual purpose. And Barry Schwartz thinks a little less choice might do us all a lot of good.