Create a to-do list.

I personally find it satisfying to make a list and then tick off the completed tasks at the end of the day.

It can be applied at work or at home.

You will get a high from knowing you accomplished things on your task list. It may even fuel some of us who are particularly competitive in nature.

It may be due to its shared similarities to gamification, where it can be akin to point scoring when you get to complete your lists throughout the day. A somewhat mini competition with yourself to get work done.

Either way, if it works, it works.

Basically, it serves two purposes.

One purpose is to remind you of what is needed to be done that day and help you to prioritize the urgent and essential tasks. This then keeps you on track and on top of things.

Another outcome of building a to-do list is to keep you motivated to get things done.

Some tasks that require more time may be carried forward to the next day, but you may have already started some progress in it today, and that’s a win too.

I have been using my Google Keep to make my to-do list, but you can use whatever app you choose or even the traditional pen and paper method.

Just make sure that the quality of the work done is not forsaken along the way.

Hope this helps and have a productive day!

It’s a common trend here in Asia, where working long hours was viewed that you were more hardworking, responsible, productive, and committed to the work.

Though I do agree that employees who work overtime hit most of the checkboxes above, I do not agree that working longer meant being more productive.

Instead, I prefer working efficiently, making use of the hours at work optimally, and trying to finish my work at a reasonable time.

Of course, there will be days where the work requirement needed me to stay back, and these occasions are understood and accepted. It’s the nature of my job.

But in general, I try to accomplish the work relatively fast, and this requires high concentration and keeping the focus on the end goal, especially for those higher complexity tasks.

What are the drawbacks?

I tend to cut down on my lunch break hours to work more instead, and I spend less time socializing with my co-workers.

I lose out somewhat on forming deeper connections with those at work, and on some days I do have a tinge of regret about this. Especially the older I get, I start to value relationships even more.

Just to add, I have the added motivation of going home to my 3 young children every day, and there lies my other responsibility as a mother.

How do you prefer to work?

Which work style is suited to your personality?

I plop myself down in front of my computer, and I almost immediately start to feel guilty.

After resting for a few minutes, checking my phone and Facebook account, I got up and begin to make early preparations for the family’s breakfast meals the next day, placing the buttered cinnamon rolls into the oven for a quick toast in the morning and selecting the fruits to be cut and consumed in the morning.

I went back to my laptop and started to draft out two stories on my blog, and I then made some snacks for my husband and me.

I checked out a 5 minute Youtube video of a contemporary dance to Adele’s Easy On Me, then I proceed to scan some receipts to be saved as documents for taxation claims the next year.

I begin an episode of Netflix’s Riverdale, however 20 minutes into the show, I began reading through my son’s foreign language homework papers to learn some of the new words myself, as a way to encourage his speech and written work for this subject.

This is a problem I face almost every night.

My issue is that I needed to intentionally tell myself to relax, to watch a video or a movie till completion.

Otherwise midway through any leisure activity, I get restless and guilty for not being productive or doing ‘productive work.’

In the day I busy myself at my job as a materials engineer and mothering three young kids, from early morning exercise on the treadmill, cleaning after meals, preparing the kids for school, fighting the weekday traffic to get to work, to washing up the kids at night and reading bedtime stories.

After hours, I spend time writing content on my blog and planning the next steps for the kid’s educational needs and discussing our family’s finances with my husband.

On one hand, it makes me feel fulfilled getting work done.

But on the other hand, I seem to have lost the ability to kick back and do nothing, and I’m trying to relearn that.

Do any others feel the same way as me?

How was your experience with being too consumed with productivity?

Be warned, there may be potential side effects of personal growth after reading this post.

This is a sharing of a perspective and an important skill set, one that was learned over time from personal experiences.

Over the years, I have learned the one critical step to making progress in your personal life and overcoming problems is to have emotional stability, or as explained in a more defined description, having emotional maturity, and control over how one reacts to difficult situations and problems. This is the ability to not let emotions get ahead of your thoughts and overwhelm you.

Practicing this mindset is very much easier said than done, especially for a person who is by default naturally fearful and emotional, someone such as myself. My first reaction, when faced with difficult and complex topics in the past, was to be fearful, and that sometimes can proceed to become anxiety and panic.

To be clear, being emotionally mature is does not mean the lack of fear, but the ability to rationally and objectively view a subject or situation, and derive the best and most effective plan to resolve it, without panicking, giving up, or breaking down.

After thinking through it, you can conclude on the options that can be taken, then put these thoughts in a mental ‘box’, compartmentalize them, and don’t let them overwhelm the rest of your mind throughout the day.

This mindset and ability will also greatly help you at work where you may be frequently presented with some new challenges and under time pressure or have limited time to resolve them. To be able to think thoroughly as to what are the options to be taken and selecting the best approach to these situations and topics at work does help solve problems faster.

On the other hand, panicking, will mean game over for you even before you start to try.

Another keyword is try.

Start trying, earnestly. If you do not try, you do not even have a chance to have an outcome of actually winning, or overcoming the said problem on hand.

Do consider what is the worst-case possible outcome in these situations, and then what will be the best-case outcomes instead, when making decisions. This will prepare yourselves, and set your expectations, and lead you to choose the option with a potential outcome you are willing to accept.

I am still perfecting this method and my own emotional maturity. The journey continues for me, and at the very least, I can say that progress has been made.

An objective, rational and level-headed attitude and thought process is always more effective.

Some may say this mindset appears to be similar to the modern Stoicism movement. to be clear, stoicism is not equivalent to being emotionally mature, but the ability to be emotionally mature is a pre-requisite for being a ‘stoic’. Alternatively, some may even find that it is closely linked to the concept of emotional freedom. As you can see, there are popular philosophies and cultures that are built around the idea of controlling one’s emotions well.

Self-control, is an important requirement to have a functioning society.

Final take away on this topic, is don’t let your emotions control you, but you control them instead and use your logic and rationale to make better decisions in your personal life, increase your productivity and get you to achieve your goals faster.

Share your thoughts, and how you have grown in your own path to being emotionally mature. Its a journey, and even taking ‘baby steps’ in this direction is still progress.

Mental health awareness and the support for individuals who need it is an important aspect of society that cannot be overlooked. However, it doesn’t help that in Asian families, mental health and any topic pertaining to it is usually a taboo subject when I was growing up and even up till today. When one talks about mental health topics such as depression, anxiety, or personal breakdowns and even having suicidal thoughts, it is often thought to be embarrassing and should not be talked about openly. As the saying goes, it would be akin to “airing your dirty laundry in public” for others to see and make judgments on you, and your family. That a person affected by mental health issues would be deemed unfit to function and should be demoted.

We should note also that there has been a higher strain on people’s mental health due to the Covid pandemic stretching way over a year, and it has not been easy for most people, be it our medical staff who battled daily cases of casualties and chronic illnesses suffered by Covid patients, to loved ones being separated from each other due to lockdowns, or the lack of outdoor and physical activity for many families, especially those with young children cooped up at home, that may cause an increase in fights at home and anxiety among parents.

When someone talks about mental health issues we immediately think about someone who has schizophrenia, multiple personality disorders, or is totally incoherent, and yes I acknowledge that there are some extreme cases such as these. However, most of the time it presents itself in more common forms that should also be checked out by professionals and get the support needed.

In my personal opinion, people are not always 100% ‘sane’ or lucid, in whatever sense you may call it, to be within the normal operating range, or fit a mold of expected behavior. Ignoring someone’s feelings and shying away from them when it appears ‘abnormal’ does not help and tend to contribute to more mental health issues around us. Instead, the understanding of why and how someone may be affected mentally would be better, as we can then choose how best to treat and support them. As mentioned above, many of us are also affected by some form of mental health issue as it can come in many forms, that can range from any of the below types.

Depression.

Postpartum depression.

Anxiety and panic attacks.

Anger management.

Hoarders (of physical items).

Shopping addiction.

Sex, pornography, and alcohol addiction.

Body dysmorphia.

Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Feelings of worthlessness.

Grief.

Loneliness.

Does it hit closer to home now?

Maybe, just maybe, we are all a little, ever the slightly loony, but we managed to perform according to society’s acceptable level of normalcy.

What I mean to say is, you do not want to box these people into a corner of society and leave them there to stagnate. Think about it, what if one day you or a family or friend crosses that ‘sanity’ border or threshold you set up in your mind over to the other side, wouldn’t you want yourself and your family member to be supported instead of being talked about in hushed tones and given a side-eye from others when they pass you by?

So, how do we help?

For starters, train yourself to recognize the warning signs, in yourself and others.

Acknowledge their thoughts and situation, talk about openly and matter of factly with less judgment, and if needed, direct them to health care professionals, or try to be supportive and see where you can fit in to help them.

We may not be trained to handle some of these cases, and in those instances, we need to be careful not to overstep the boundaries and cause more harm to them, or get dragged down ourselves. But ‘boo-hoo-ing’ and gossiping about someone who needs and seeks mental support during a rough patch in their lives, really has no benefit to you or others, other than painting yourselves as an ignorant speck of a person.

Lastly, keep a check your own mental health, do you have risk or have a tendency to slip down the slippery slope of your mind? In my case, I realized I have a predisposition to be anxious and panicky, and I had to literally walk myself step by step in my head via my internal monologues on why I feel the way I feel, then objectify it and put it into a compartmentalized box (one of many) to be dealt with accordingly with the appropriate methods.

How do you derive this method of resolution? By getting support and learning from others on how they managed their anxiety, and this can only come about if people are open to talking about mental health topics.

So, please do yourself and others a favor, stop stigmatizing mental health topics, and start talking about them openly and support your own and others mental health needs.

Why get such a basic model? Because my husband and I are not fitness people. Actually, we are quite the opposite, we are what some people may call foodies or food lovers (like the majority of Malaysians are), and being parents with young kids, we have less time to exercise, so who are we kidding getting a fancy expensive treadmill with all the bells and whistles that we most likely won’t use or maybe use at most 5% of the time.

Fast forward to now, another lockdown has been imposed due to rising infection rates in our city, and so outdoor group exercise has been banned in our area. Even if this was not so, we did not want to take the risk of bringing our three children out as the parks can be crowded on the weekends. At this rate, we didn’t know when the pandemic will subside down and when it will be safe to go outside again. If I were to guess, it will only get better after vaccination rates are at least 50% or ideally at 80% of our country’s population.

So, consider the below equations:

Staying at home = Lack of physical activity = Weight gain

Having young kids = Stress eating = Weight gain

Fun fact, in my opinion, the amount of weight gain will increase with the number of children you have, so in my case, I have three little kids, so it’s either I’ll balloon up in size or I’ll shrivel down to a raisin due to having no time to eat while juggling their needs and working a full-time job.

Logically, weight gain will be inevitable. Unless you are one of those people with a naturally high metabolism and can eat a lot of food and still remain thin. But for the majority of us sadly this is not so, especially the older we get, our metabolism does slow down.

Therefore, here are some proposed unconventional methods to lose weight, and do not worry, dieting is not involved.

1. Place your exercise equipment in a central location in the house
Put it in a location you can’t miss, the more eyesore that piece of equipment is, the better. In our house the treadmill is placed in our living room next to our wall-mounted television for two reasons:

a) It will stare back at you, reminding you to reap the return of investment (ROI) from it Daily, when you eat, when you rest, when you watch the TV, you can’t help but notice it. You may even imagine it whispering into your head, words such as “Use meee…else you wasted moneey…“

b) Watching a show or short Youtube video while jogging/walking takes your mind off the time and physical pain of exercise
A distraction to numb your physical pain while you run, akin to alcohol to a stressed-out mind or a heartache, is a TV distraction to jogging. Before you know it, you have reached 20 mins of running time quota or your target number of calories burned. Exercise accomplished for the day.

Do not place it in a room, hidden from view, and forgotten, to collect dust balls and spider webs. If you are not a person who is into fitness, and especially if you have kids, you will most likely neglect that piece of exercise equipment for work, house chores, or the kid’s 101 demands and sleep.

2. Get a health screening done
There’s nothing like a health check report telling you that you have high cholesterol or are borderline hypertensive (at risk for high blood pressure) to motivate you to change your lifestyle and exercise more. More so if the doctor threatens to prescribe you daily medications to keep your blood pressure and cholesterol in check. Sometimes the medications prescribed are to be taken for the rest of your life, becoming a long-term health problem.

Fortunately for me and my husband, our employers subsidized our health screening / medical check up every two years to ensure its employees are fit to work ( and to expect the maximum productivity levels from us at work in return).

So we recently went for one in March of this year. Results, one of us was diagnosed with high cholesterol. The doctor then recommended my husband to exercise, since we are still relatively young, and then requested my husband to come back again a year later for another check up. If his cholesterol levels are still high, he will potentially be prescribed with medications to control his cholesterol levels. That was what triggered us to make exercise a regular routine, as we have kids to care for and no one can replace their mummy and daddy. Of course, it is always better to prevent then to treat via medication.


3. Walk everywhere, even when you don’t have to
This is simple, if you are relatively healthy and are able to do so, walk as much as you can. Quick story, when I was at my first job after graduation, I gained 8 Kilograms over the span of three years working there. This was not only because I was working long hours and stress eating after work, it was also because the work I did there didn’t require me to move around much. I can say that 80-90% of the time I was in front of my laptop doing reviews of technical drawings from customers and following up with process engineering for the feasibility and cost to produce the new products.

Then I changed jobs to another field of work at a larger manufacturing company, which was large both in factory size and surface area literally. I had to walk a lot at work. At the minimum, it required us to walk for at least 10 minutes daily just to get to my office from where we parked the car, and then another 10 minutes walk back to the car after work. Additionally, as an engineer I had to go into the production area frequently, so even more walking. I then lost the weight relatively fast and kept it off. I did not significantly eat less, nor did I exercised more. I just HAD to walk more, way more than I did before, and it was 5 days a week.

So, I encourage you, if you dislike running and jogging, just walk. Park your car further away from the shops, or take the stairs whenever you can. That can be your extra calories burned for the day.


4. Don’t diet, enjoy food instead and rely on exercise to balance off the weight gain
This is a little controversial, and it sounds counterintuitive, but it is logical. I’ve never dieted because I enjoyed food too much to diet. I get really grouchy aka ‘Hangry‘ when I cut down food or don’t eat enough or restrict my diet. In my past three pregnancies, the hardest trimester for me has always been the first trimester especially when I had morning sickness and bad nausea from weeks 8 to 14. This is because I couldn’t enjoy food in those months.

What I meant to say is, by not giving up food, your only choice to keep the weight off is to increase physical activity / exercise. It’s like dangling a piece of chocolate or Lay’s potato chip in front of you while you run, thinking that after you finish 20 minutes on the treadmill, I get to eat what I want, that kind of thing. It may sound drastic, but if it works, it works.

Anyway, sustainable weight loss is gradual and takes time. You need to incorporate a lifestyle that is not too drastic of a change from the current one and one that you can keep to daily, then even when you’re stress at work or busy with kids, you should be able to maintain the routine.

Also, did you know dieting will cause your metabolism to slow down eventually, and this makes your body gain weight easier in the long term. Refer to this Vox article on this condition, below is a passage extracted from this report under myth number six that states that dieting can slow down your metabolism:

“For years, researchers have been documenting a phenomenon called “metabolic adaptation” or “adaptive thermogenesis”: As people lose weight, their basal metabolic rate — the energy used for basic functioning when the body is at rest — actually slows down to a greater degree than would be expected from the weight loss.

To be clear: It makes sense that losing weight will slow down the metabolism a bit, since slimming down generally involves muscle loss, and the body is then smaller and doesn’t have to work as hard every minute to keep running. But the slowdown after weight loss, researchers have found, often appears to be substantially greater than makes sense for a person’s new body size.”

Another report here basically says the same thing. So far all researches are indicating dieting alone or cutting calories will not be effective in keeping the weight off you.

That is it, my 4 uncommon / unconventional ways to encourage yourself to exercise more and to lose weight. If you have other unconventional ways, feel free to comment. Thank you for reading and I hope this written post brings you some value.

KakiRepair by KakiDIY

https://www.facebook.com/groups/kakirepair/

These are for household, plumbing, appliances, furniture or toy repairs. From how to fix the air conditioning, replace toy battery contacts, plumbing works to how to make a bathroom wall waterpoof and pretty without tiling. This is my most recent find and I’m still browsing through the topics, but we’re checking out how to repair the kids ‘car driver interface’ toy that has spoilt due to battery leakage that have rusted the electrical contacts. From the FB group sharing seems we can buy the battery contact replacements online via Shopee and replace it, or try to clean off the rust from the spring contact. Useful leh.

FIRE and Investing Community Malaysia

https://www.facebook.com/groups/FIREmalaysia/

This group I intentionally looked for last year 2020. For those who don’t yet know, FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retiring Early. Meaning instead of working till retirement age (in Malaysia the retirement age has been revised to 60 years of age) to save enough money to cover family expenses up to our old age (via EPF and savings account alone), why not choose alternative of having an early retirement as an option, by saving and investing sufficient funds earlier to achieve financial independance before that age. Here’s wikipedia’s explanation:

Financial independence – is the status of having enough income to pay one’s living expenses for the rest of one’s life without having to be employed or dependent on others. Income earned without having to work a job is commonly referred to as passive income.

I will not go into details on this as this topic can be lengthy, with some mathing required based on your housle hold income, expenses and etc, but basic notion is when you have achieved financial independance say at 40, 45 or 50 years old, you may choose to retire your day job and do side hustles or any other job of your INTEREST based on your own time and at your own terms, because YOU DO NOT NEED TO WORK to sustain an income to support y our family for the next 30 – 40 years. One question to you would be, what would you do for work if work was an option not a necessity?

Other topics in this group are mostly for good financial literacy , example the need to save up to 6 months expenses emergency fund at all times, investing options and portfolios out there, best banking savings plan, credit cards and some ‘hacking’ methods to achieve higher savings with your money.

One thing we did last year after joining this group is we started to open SSPN savings account for our 3 kids seeing as a way to save for their future education fund (with 4% interest gained yoy) when they are older and take advantage of the tax relief up to RM8000. Do check it out.

Cooking with Philips Pressure Cooker

https://www.facebook.com/groups/820578594623384/

We purchased a Philips Pressure cooker from Lazada in 2020 , in my mind to help us cook more home cooked meals at a faster speed , also due to Covid we don’t bring the kids out as often as precovid times, and anyway to bring a baby and 2 toddlers out for meals can be a challenge ( I will share what we do to minimize this hassle in a separate post, from what we bring to what methods we use at the meal table). So, what recipes did I learned from this group? How to make cake, steam fish, bake chicken, make thong sui, even cook fried rice can be done via the pressure cooker. My thoughts are if buy already, might as well make the most use out of the expensive item and get back the returns of investment right? Anyway for those of you who have a pressure cooker and looking for ideas, check out your available facebook groups to get make the most of you cooker.

Hope you got some ideas from here, and maybe you can share what are your list of FB groups? Thanks for reading.