It is amazing just how slowly kids move when you are in a rush to go anywhere. It is almost as if they are the Universe’s reminder to slow down and smell the flowers, coffee or something.
I had to laugh when my wife shared this video with me on Facebook the other day. We have a running joke that our daughter is slower than a snail moving backwards, up a hill. This is pretty close.
Image credit: Pixabay (sourced from Unsplash)
I don’t really buy into New Year’s resolutions but Eric Kim’s “25 Photography New Year’s Resolutions” contains a number of things I’d like to do a little differently when it comes to my photography.
I think the first 6 resolutions are probably right up there on my list of changes to make to my habits and mindset:
On a related note, I found his suggestion to spend an entire year shooting with a single lens to be intriguing. I mostly use my f1.8 50mm lens but I occasionally switch to one of my kit lenses, particularly when I find myself becoming a little too complacent with my 50mm lens.
If anything, I’d really like to move closer to merging my photography and writing in some form or another in the coming year. I’m not sure what’s holding me back there but I have these two passions and I think they would work well together.
Image credit: Pixabay
HubSpot has a great post titled “9 Willpower Workouts to Maximize Your Productivity” which is worth reading. There are a couple mental workouts which could help you give you a productivity boost:
Studies show that our willpower is similar to other muscles. If little time is spent working on your self-control, you won’t see any improvements. However, unlike your other muscles, you only have a limited surplus of self-control: As our day progresses, our willpower depletes.
If you’re struggling with diminishing willpower, below are nine ways to improve your self-control and max out your productivity.
Two things which are becoming more and more important to me are making sure I get enough sleep (especially because I start work at 7am these days) and exercising enough. On the exercise front, I started running in the mornings and I’ll probably need to adjust that schedule with my early starts.
Image credit: Pixabay
I’ve been thinking about our kids and their quirks and triggers a little more lately. In one sense it’s always on my mind because we interact with them daily, obviously, but what I mean is that I have been thinking about the little opportunities to understand our kids better as if they represent codes we can decipher.
Our daughter is not a morning person (she takes after her mother in this respect) and virtually every morning involves an argument with her at various stages of the process of getting her ready for school. As is probably the case with most parents and their kids, kids don’t respond to circumstances the way we do or would expect them to and it is easy to become frustrated with them, particularly when we are running late and like to miss that train to work.
It’s not that we don’t want to understand them, it’s more that when you have 30 minutes to feed and dress yourself and kids and still get out the door on time, your tolerance for delays is pretty low and, yet, that is exactly when every little thing involves a 10 minute debate.
I noticed that even once my daughter is out of bed and sitting at the breakfast table with a bowl of cereal in front of her that she likes (I did a lot of A/B testing to narrow down the shortlist of favorites), she has this habit of stabbing at her cereal with her spoon quite aggressively for a few minutes before dropping her spoon and sobbing. Telling her to eat her food, predictably, doesn’t work and she just becomes more frustrated (and so do I).
One morning I had an idea and asked her if she wanted more milk in her cereal. She was already sobbing and nodded so I added more milk and that seemed to resolve the situation for her because, now, she could dunk all of the chocolate balls in milk before eating them. At least, that mostly addressed her frustration. She also seems to expect the cereal not to float on the surface of the milk and doesn’t realize that if it all floats then it doesn’t all float uniformly because she hasn’t eaten any of it to spread the rest out more evenly. On the other hand, I think I at least made progress so she has fewer tearful, cereal-stabbing moments before actually eating her cereal.
This is just one of the many challenges I face in the mornings while we are rushing to get ready for school and work and most of these challenges seems to be another little code to crack and a little strategic time to spend to make future mornings a little more efficient. That said, an analytical approach rarely works with kids who tend to be pretty irrational and lateral for the most part but, then again, I don’t remember anyone telling me this whole parenting thing would be easy or boring.