“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”
Sydney J. Harris

Keeping the stress away from your life isn’t just about the big things and decisions.

It is also about the small things. About what you do and do not do from day to day.

Those small daily – helpful or unhelpful – habits add up very quickly over the weeks and can be the difference between being focused and feeling good about life or not being able to sleep or work properly and enjoy your life as much as you could.

In this article I’d like to share 10 small habits that have had a huge positive effect in my life and that protects me from both the stress out there in the world and the stress I can cause myself.

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Your social skills is one of the most important and essential things in life.

It is one of those things that make a huge difference if you work on them.

As you improve your social skills you can:

• Build more social freedom. This is truly wonderful. Instead feeling stuck or staying in your shell you can expand your life in so many ways. By building your own inner social freedom you can connect with more people in better and more fun and interesting ways plus create new and exciting opportunities romantically, in your career or with friends.
• Deepen your relationships. With better social skills and relationship habits you can explore new depths with friends, a partner, your family and the people that are closest to you in life.
• Find more happiness and self-confidence. As you deepen your relationships and create more social freedom for yourself you’ll also find more happiness in your life. And as your social skills and relationship habits improve and you expand your comfort zone your self-confidence will grow more and more too.

Those are a couple of the best things I have gotten out improving my own social skills over the past 8 years.

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One of the very best ways that I have found to make daily life easier, lighter, more positive and less stressful is to learn how to not make mountains out of molehills.

To learn how to not add extra drama or overanalyze or overthink things. To not create problems where there are none or there are simply very small issues you can fix.

Learning this has helped me to have fewer problems and worries in my work. And in my relationships. It also made my dating life more effortless and fun when I used to be single.

So I’d like to share the most effective ways that I have learned to do this.

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“How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’.”
Martin Luther

“A year from now you may wish you had started today.”
Karen Lamb

Year after year, one of the most common question people email me about is this one:

“How can I stop procrastinating?”

I am no stranger to procrastination either. I used to do it a ton when I was in college and my results, stress levels, self-esteem and happiness suffered for it.

So today I would like to share three common mistakes that I did every week back then and what to do about them.

1. You overload your to-do list.

One very common reason why you may procrastinate that that the to-do list for your day is endless. You take one look at it and feel an itch inside of you to just run away. To escape. And so you procrastinate because you can’t even see an end to all the things you have to do.

What to do instead:

To overcome this issue you have to limit your list.

Make it really short – 2-3 of the most important tasks –- and just focus on doing them and you’ll reduce those urges to procrastinate a whole lot.

So how do you reduce and unclutter the to-do list to just the most important tasks?

I usually ask myself this question:

What would I work on if I only had 2 hours for work today?

Or this one:

If I was just told that I had to go away for a vacation tomorrow and it would last for a whole week then what would I spend today doing?

Try them both and see which one works the best for you.

2. You don’t break projects or tasks down into smaller steps.

When you look at a big essay or report you have to write or a 3-month long project you need to get done then it is easy to feel overwhelmed and to give into the urge to escape onto Reddit or Facebook.

What to do instead:

Break it down. Break down your essay or project into small steps. Then just focus on taking action on one small step. When you are done with that step move on to the next one and focus on only doing that small step until it is done. The small steps will add up quickly.

If you still wind up in procrastination while trying to get started with that one small step then set a small time limit.

Focus on writing for just 5 minutes on your essay. Or spend 5 minutes on creating the plan for how the project will work.

If the 5 minute commitment still makes you procrastinate don’t beat yourself up. Take an even smaller step instead and just work for one or two minutes.

Do what you need to do to get started.

Because getting started is – in my experience – the hardest part. After that it is usually pretty easy to keep working and to find some enthusiasm in the task. Or at least in the fact that you are moving forward and will pretty soon be done with the small step you are on right now.

3. You don’t put up limits for the obvious sources of distraction.

If you make it too easy to escape onto Facebook, your favorite forum or into your inbox to see if something new is going on there then you’ll probably spend a fair amount of time procrastinating in those places.

What to do instead:

Set limits and create a small ritual.

I bunch all of my checking of email, Facebook, Twitter etc. to one small session at the end of my workday. I do all the checking and replying in those places once a day.

Am I able to do this every day? Nope. But I do it maybe during 90% of my workdays. And that prevents a whole lot of procrastinating.

Also, if possible, try working early in your day with no internet connection at all. I usually try to get an hour or two of writing done in the morning before I even connect my computer to the internet.

If you procrastinate quite a bit via your cell phone then put it in your bottom drawer while working. Or if possible, put it in silent mode and then place it in another room and just check it a couple of times a day while you work.

You can also remove your favorite places from your bookmarks and favorite apps for procrastinating from your smart phone. By doing this you won’t have your favorite procrastinating places staring back at you whenever you use your browser or phone.

And it becomes a little harder to reach favorite websites – you have to punch in the address in your browser – than it used to be. It might not sound like much but I have found that these small obstacles have also helped me to reduce procrastination online in the past few years.

One of the most common and destructive thought habits I have ever encountered is perfectionism.

It holds you back from actually getting all the way to done with a lot in life. It may hold you back from even trying to do something because you feel you have to do it perfectly.

And it tears your self-esteem apart.

So what can you do about it?

In today’s article I would like to share 3 of the most effective things that have helped me to replace this habit with something better.

Go for good enough.

Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else never being finished. So go for good enough instead. Don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.

Good enough in this case will most often mean that you have done a very good job on an important task or project. But that you do not have to do it perfectly.

And good enough will in some cases just mean that you have done a good enough job on some small task for example. There are many things to do in life or in a week so make choices so that you can use your limited energy and time in a smart way.

Reminder: buying into myths of perfection will hurt you and your life.

By watching too many movies, listening to too many songs and just taking in what the world is telling you it is very easy to be lulled into dreams of perfection. It sounds so good and wonderful and you want it.

But in real life it clashes with reality and tends to cause much suffering and stress within you and in the people around you. It can harm or possibly lead you to end relationships, jobs, projects etc. just because your expectations are out of this world.

I find it very helpful to remind myself of this simple fact.

Whenever I get lost in a perfectionist headspace I remind myself that it will cause me and my world harm. And so it become easier to switch my focus and thought patterns because I want to avoid making unhelpful choices and avoid causing myself and other people unnecessary pain.

Set your own bar and surround yourself with human standards.

Instead of setting the bar for yourself – or letting other people set that bar – at an inhuman standard set it at a human level.

We all fail. We all have trouble reaching our goals sometimes. That is OK and very human.

Don’t obey the bar that someone else have set for you. They may have set it out of the goodness of their hearts – or not, to for example maximize profits – but if the old standards do not work for you then it is time to find a better standard for yourself.

So set the bar at a level where you feel motivated but where you do not have to achieve inhuman results to like yourself and to be satisfied.

Then choose to take small steps and day by day and week by week rearrange your world so that it becomes more and more supportive of you and of human standards.

Reduce or cut out media sources that make you feel worse or like you have to live up to perfect standards. Replace them with magazines, blogs, books etc. filled with optimism and motivation but also kinder and more realistic expectations and standards.

Do the same thing with the people in your life. Spend more time with people who are kind, who like to grow and like living a good life in a balanced, positive and mentally healthy way.

This is your life. You decide. So set and surround yourself with the standards that help you to both do good and to feel good.