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    Work Smart Play Smart: Stress-Free Living In The 21st Century
    Work Smart Play Smart: Stress-Free Living In The 21st Century
    Work Smart Play Smart: Stress-Free Living In The 21st Century
    Ebook90 pages1 hour

    Work Smart Play Smart: Stress-Free Living In The 21st Century

    By James Mallinson

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    About this ebook

    For all the benefits that come with the 21st century, the modern world has resulted in a society riddled with time wasting, procrastination and ennui. People - from enthusiastic school children to aged business managers live their lives, do their work, pursue hobbies and aspire to greater goals and dreams based around age-old ideas on how to manage their work, their time and themselves. The only problem is those ideas date back to the Industrial age and, to put it bluntly, they don't work any more in the fast paced, hectic 21st century. The result? Those hobbies, dreams and goals remain frustratingly unfulfilled. For a modern society that says you can do and aspire to be whatever you want, it sure doesn't back it up with modern ideas on how to achieve any of it.

    Over the last century society has changed rapidly. The old advice doesn't work, conventional wisdom is lacking, the status quo is flawed and an increasing number of people are waking up to this fact. They are beginning to question how they approach life, with it no longer being enough to just work hard and play hard, blindly taking on more and more, with stress levels increasing in turn. A more sophisticated, intelligent approach is required for getting things done without all the added burdens of stress, lack of time and lack of focus. I call this philosophy Work Smart, Play Smart, and in this book I've collated five key principles for achieving stress-free living while surviving and thriving in the modern world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames Mallinson
    Release dateAug 20, 2015
    ISBN9781311005663
    Work Smart Play Smart: Stress-Free Living In The 21st Century

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      Book preview

      Work Smart Play Smart - James Mallinson

      Introduction

      Welcome to the 21st century. You're living in a special time! You have so much choice, countless opportunities and so many options of what you can do in life, with a seemingly endless stream of information and entertainment to feast on. Music, films, books, games, magazines... whether it's nights out or days in, you should never find yourself feeling bored.

      What's more, you live in a fast moving, highly mobile society, no longer restricted to the few miles outside of your town or village that you can comfortably walk to and from. Cars and trains allow you to choose where you shop, where you work and what schools your kids go to. Plus, planes allow you to travel the globe, experiencing different countries and cultures and enjoying more than just the yearly trip to Scarborough's beaches.

      All the statistics, figures and research show you are likely to be financially better off, smarter, healthier and with an overall higher standard of living that what anybody in any other generation as ever experienced.

      It sounds great. In fact, it sounds incredible. But for some reason, it sure doesn't feel that way. Are we a generation of ingrates, unable to appreciate the huge strides that have been made over over the last century, or is there something much deeper going on here?

      What's so different?

      Let's look at this a bit more deeply. So much has changed over the last fifty years – heck, even the last ten or twenty years if you really wanted to analyse it. Only half a century ago life was much simpler, we had less demands on our time and less responsibilities to contend with... basically just less stuff that was vying for our attention. Society hasn't just evolved gradually into the madness that we have today, there's been a sudden and sharp shift in the way we live our day-to-day lives. You can blame it on technology manifesting itself in everything we do, you can blame it on globalization, blame it on free market capitalism or just blame it on your grumpy old boss if you like, but this cultural shift won't be slowing down any time soon.

      Perhaps, the first and best place to look at examples of this is with the world of business. The modern ethos of most companies nowadays, in a world dominated by shareholders, CEO's and massive conglomerates, is radically different. The industrial era has given way to information and creative fields, thoughts, ideas, branding and marketing. This makes work more challenging and eventually more satisfying if you are willing to play the game, but at a cost. Productivity as we know it is no longer about how quickly you can mindlessly crank widgets from a machine in a factory and get them down the conveyor belt. It's about how much you, a human being, can give to your company, how much your boss can squeeze out of you and how happy the shareholders are at the end of it all.

      But what about other areas of your life? Socializing is no longer about knocking on your neighbour's door for a cup of tea, it's about the always available, always open world of Facebook, mobile communication, social networking, instant messaging - an everything-up-for-the-world-to-see culture. Your best friend could ring you at any moment, distracting you from your work. Another friend may share a funny video she found on YouTube that pulls you into a wasted hour of idle browsing. In essence, you become of part of a social whirlwind that can suck you in at any time and in any place.

      And forget about having only four poxy TV channels and a small handful of radio stations, which served as your source of entertainment. The days where a good book or a jigsaw puzzle might keep you satisfied for several weeks are long gone. Nowadays you've got thousands, if not millions, of entertainment sources from which to choose from, and trying to fit it all in is a challenge of all of itself. We have to flick from one distraction to another, unable to really relish what it is we are reading, watching, playing or listening to, in case we miss something else.

      The result of all this is that our lives represent a turbulent mess or distractions and inputs, coming at us from all directions. It's great that we have those distractions and inputs, but the modern world has seen fit to turn the dial up on how much of them there are, and we haven't figured out how to handle it all without getting a massive headache. We now live in a complex world but the transition has been too faced for us to adjust to.

      Think I'm, exaggerating? Just ten years ago, you wouldn't have been bombarded by emails, voicemails, text messages, tweets and status updates (and that's just while you're at home). Before the internet, you'd just have had a phone, snail mail and maybe a fax if you were lucky. And none of it would have been flying at you at such a fast pace as it does nowadays either (even if your postman had once been a successful sprint runner). You wouldn't have had to juggle such a massive bunch of wishy-washy projects at work that your boss felt like delegating your way and you wouldn't have been expected to get it done five minutes after you walked through the door every morning.

      Sure, there's always been targets and goals and deadlines. There's always been things to do and work that needed your attention. There's always been friends that wanted a chat and a relative on the end of the phoneline wanting a catchup. And there has always been something on the TV that you fancied watching, or a play on at the theatre you were keen to see. But it didn't usually mean drowning or collapsing under the weight of 'stuff' in order to achieve any of it.

      Of course, I don't want to sound like an old, grumpy man lamenting the loss of The Simple Life. I'm not looking for a return to a time when things like computers and mobile phones were inconceivable, and I don't want a return to the good ol' honest hard work days before free market capitalism changed our town centres and living rooms forever.

      After all, at the time of writing this book I'm nowhere near even turning thirty yet and I've yet to start using the In my day... line (though you are free to argue as to whether that's what this entire book represents). Email is an integral part of how I communicate, at work and with friends. Social networking is a great accessory and extension to how I keep in touch with those very same friends. The internet gives me access to more information, entertainment and promotional opportunities than anything that has come before it. Then there are the little things, like having an iPod with you during a long, boring, flight or having a mobile phone so you can check the football scores while you're out and about. The problem isn't what the 21st century has to offer, it's how we cope with it all.

      Crawling Into The 21st Century

      So that's where our problems lie. Yes, a lot has changed but our attitudes, it seems, are still stuck in the 20th century, and we are only just starting to crawl out of it.

      But it's not a simple matter of reading some self-help book or even taking a course on good personal management and organization. It's a systemic problem in society in general. Our kids our brought up with these old fashioned ideas and Victorian concepts that barely prepare them for life in a work environment, never mind about how to live a happy, successful life in general. Businesses too follow similarly Victorian ideas on

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