This blog is about leading a balanced life focusing on career, relationships and money. You can read more about balancing your life here. These articles are written for you. If you find them useful, feel free to subscribe for regular updates as new articles are posted. It's FREE. :)

One of the common reasons that people fail their resolutions is because they don’t plan for actions to make their resolutions come true. Without a plan, there is no way to translate dreams and desires into actions. As such, later during the year, it’s very easy to get distracted by other urgent, but less important issues and forget about your resolutions.

When the end of the year arrives, it’s usually too late to do much.

Sticking to your resolutions during the year is easier if you follow a systematic process to guide your actions. Before I started using professional software tools , I planned my resolutions into MS Outlook and track them using MS Excel. It had been really helpful, and I thought I like to share them today. Below are the 6 simple steps that I use to plan and track my resolutions using MS Outlook and MS Excel.

Read more… »

It’s the time of the year to review our goals and set new ones again.

For those new to A Long Long Road, I’m a firm believer in making New Year Resolutions and setting goals. When I first started setting goals, I did it with simple, old paper and pen. Later, I typed my goals into Word documents. After a few years, I moved on to goal setting/tracking software.

Goals management tools are really important to help us set goals and track them. With good tools to facilitate good goals, you’ll have a better chance of achieving them. As such, I went scouring the Internet for goal management tools for different types of users.

Below is a list of 7 tools that I think are really useful. Whether you are IT-savvy or not, you will find something useful to help you achieve your goals in 2008.

Read more… »

Photo by Ebeth

Let’s test your creativity. I am going to tell you a real story, a problem; let’s see if you can derive a creative solution to this problem.

There was a hotel; a grand, historical five star hotel established since the 1940s. Everything was great about the hotel; posh, grand, cozy and all, except for one thing. The old elevators were too old and too slow. These were the very first batch of elevators designed for high rise building installed more than 40 years ago. It was taking too long to reach the customers in the upper floors, and the hotel management was getting a lot of complaints about the slow elevators.

The hotel management called in the engineers and they proposed two solutions:

1. To change the existing elevators to the latest, faster models.
2. To add more elevators to the hotel.

Both options would cost the hotel management a hefty sum which was way beyond their budget. Can you think of any other solution to this problem?

You Are A Creative Genius

When we talk about creativity, we think of names like Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Picasso… Some think that being creative is a gift that is limited to the blessed few, but it is not. Everybody has creativity in them, and it can be harnessed with the proper process or steps, which I have learned and will share with you today.

Read more… »

Photo by charliereece

How many times have you got yourself into a fix because you did not say ‘no’ to someone’s request? On the other hand, how many times have you regretted saying ‘no’ because you got into trouble by being too forward when rejecting a request? In either case, it seems that we’re on the losing end whether we accept or reject a request.

I, for one have found saying ‘no’ to be quite challenging. Logically, I know that I need to stay focus on my priorities; yet I still find myself saying ‘yes’ to things that I regret later.

Over the years of my working life, I have learned that it is not only important to say ‘no’, but it must be said with empathy to be heard and accepted. With experience and tact, sometimes it’s possible to reject or move away from a request without having to say ‘no’ directly.

PAYING THE PRICE FOR NOT SAYING ‘NO’

In my work on project management, one constant challenge was handling clients’ change requests i.e. handle additional requests beyond initial agreed scope. When I first got into the role of project manager, I took the easy way out of acceding to most change requests blindly because it was hard for me to say ‘no’ to my clients.

Naturally, the clients were satisfied at first, but it was at the price of my team members’ welfare and support. Over time, the change requests became too much to handle, the dateline was drawing near and the project nowhere near completion. My team was overworked from the tasks piled up. I’m sure you can imagine the rude awakening to my clients when I failed to deliver as promised on the dateline.

In all my good intentions to impress and please, the final result was a great disaster with damaged reputation, lost clients and worn out team who will no longer trust my leadership.

On hindsight, it’s pretty clear what a dumb fool I had been. I had since learned and moved on, but the sad truth is that I can still see or hear similar stories very often in different aspect of life and work; stories of paying a higher price later because of one’s inability to say ‘no’ upfront.

Read more… »

Photo by The dancing kids

I have always thought that I am NOT a morning person. Just 4 months ago, I was still used to waking up at around noon time on weekends and find it a challenge waking up on time for work on weekdays. The idea of people getting up at 5am was really ridiculous to me. To me, staying up late till 12 am, sometimes 1am, is not uncommon. In fact, I considered myself more effective and alert to work from 11 pm onwards when there’s little disturbance. To people around me, I am a night person, not a morning person.

In general, such labeling and lifestyle wasn’t much of an issue for me; and I never really considered the notion of ‘converting’ to a morning person.

Coincidently, 4 months ago, I came across Steve Pavlina’s article on How to Become An Early Riser. Intrigued, but not expecting too much out of it, I decided to try it out.

Amazingly, it’s been 4 months since I tried out Steve’s tips and I never really got back to my night person lifestyle. Nowadays, I go around professing to be a morning person. Well, I must admit I have been ‘converted’.

Even though it’s just 4 short months, the differences this change in lifestyle has made are subtle yet amazing. I can already see tangible results and positive differences this has done for my life. It’s great just imagining how these results will further benefit me once compounded over time.

As such, with this intention in mind, I like to share these benefits for your consideration.

Read more… »

Photo by margolove

In this information age, the ability to quickly read and acquire new knowledge is one of the critical skills necessary for success. Be it for work, for leisure or for self improvement, there are tons of materials to read; much more than we have the time for.

For myself, being an avid learner and knowledge seeker, I constantly struggle with my growing list of reading materials. Each time I enter a bookstore, it is almost predictable that I will step out with at least one book purchased. My curiosity and desire for knowledge always get the better of me, and prompted me to buy more books. However, once home, the new books are usually left stacked on my shelves as I still have to slowly finish reading books I had bought earlier.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that my reading efficiency is less than desirable. With such strong desire for knowledge and growing list of reading materials, it was apparent that I need to read faster and comprehend more. As such, a couple of months ago, I decided to take time to research and learn reading skills to improve my reading effectiveness.

Today, my efforts are already paying off; I can finish a 200 pages book at 30% to 50% of the time it used to take me, depending on my familiarity with the topic. At the same time, I am able to comprehend and remember more than what I used to remember. Below are some reading tips which I have learned in the process, which I like to share with you.

Read more… »

(Photo by bookchiq)

Let’s do a little poll here; have you ever wish that you have more time? Yes? Read on.

It’s not surprising to me. I’m one of those who wished I have more time too. The modern life today is filled with so many demands from multiple sources and people; you may be struggling to juggle demands between your clients, bosses, team members, peers etc etc etc… The buzzword at work is “multitasking”. It seems like what originated from the computing world now applies to humans as well. I see it on job descriptions quite a lot. They might as well go buy some computers instead of hiring people.

Simply because you are trying to juggle between some many roles and their associated demands, your task list grows at a rate beyond what you are capable of handling alone. So what results is some (or maybe a lot of) frustrations and disappointments. Thus it’s natural that many people (including myself) are wishing that we have more time.

Well, the mentality behind this is that having more time allows us to finish these “to-dos”. But let’s sit down and think for a second. Does having more time really help?

Read more… »

How often has this happened? You just read an article or a book about a certain subject, but yet 2 days later, you can only remember 10% of what you had read. Does this sound familiar? Effective learning is a very critical skill in today’s world, in order to stay relevant, competitive and for life-long employability, we need to constantly upgrade ourselves.

From the book “Accelerated Learning for the 21ST Century” by Colin Rose, Malcom J. Nicholl, I learnt about the 6 steps ‘M-A-S-T-E-R’ plan for accelerated learning as follows:


Read more… »