Thoughts from “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work”

I've just finished reading "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff at Work" by Richard Carlson and wanted to post some of my favorite concepts from the book. This book is an easy read and broken down into 100 small chapters, each only 2-4 pages in length. Lots of great ideas in there and I highly recommend this and Richard Carlson's other books for motivational reading.

• Happy people are almost always the ones who love what they do. People who love what they do are highly motivated to continually better themselves and their performance.
  
• We dramatize deadlines. A lot of the stress comes not from the deadline itself, but from thinking about it, wondering whether or not we will make it, feeling sorry for ourselves and complaining.
  
• Bragging about how busy you are reinforces, to yourself, how stressed out you are. It keeps you overly focused on the most negative aspects of your work. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  
• Tell yourself you are going to learn something new from each meeting. Search for new wisdom, new insight, or a new way of doing something.
  
• Join the TGIT (Thank God It's Today) club. Members of this club are happy to be alive; rejoice in their blessings and expect each day to be full of wonder, surprise and opportunity.
  
• Everyone loves to be acknowledged. People remember acknowledgment and appreciate it.
  
• Brighten up your work environment. You spend an enormous amount of time at work. Why not take a tiny bit of time, energy and money to brighten it up a little?
  
• Pay less attention to what other people aren't doing and put more emphasis on what you get out of your own level of productivity. It's helpful to admit that you prefer to be a highly productive individual – it's your choice.
  
• Stay focused in the now – A focused mind is more relaxed, creative, and efficient than one that is scattered. A single hour or truly focused work is a least equal in productivity to a full day of distraction.
  
• Accept the fact that, every once in a while you're going to have a really bad day.
  
• Stop scrambling. When we're scrambling we waste precious energy and make mistakes. Because we are moving so quickly, it's easy to get stressed out, nervous, and agitated.
  
• Vince Lombardi once said, "When you're doing something wrong, doing it more intensely isn't going to help."
  
• It's easy to lose sight of the fact that we thing thoughts, not reality. We begin to treat our thoughts as if they were the real thing, allowing them to stress us out.
  
• Get it over with. Do you most difficult or uncomfortable tasks first thing in the day and get them out of the way.
  
• Prevent burnout – have a life outside of work.