Article by Paula Eder

Time management tips can provide amazing arrays of benefits to perfectionists. Each time you exercise positive control over your time, you demonstrate that you hold absolute power over your decision-making. How you spend your time is no longer held hostage to some arbitrary standard of “perfection”. You free yourself up to direct your life effectively, even in difficult circumstances.

Overcoming perfectionism requires ongoing balancing. You assess your standards of excellence according to how they affect your overall effectiveness and quality of life. Overcoming perfectionism always calls on you to shift some priorities. Happily, you build decisivenes in this process. Overcoming perfectionism will improve your life in ways you can’t yet imagine! But let’s survey how your life will improve, starting with 3 significant advantages you will enjoy:

3 Benefits of Overcoming Perfectionism

1. Replacing Perfectionism With Realism Reduces Procrastination.

Perfectionism can prevent you from doing something new, because you fear not doing it well enough. By replacing sky-high expectations with a realistic goal, you mobilize yourself.

Furthermore, as you realign your perspective, you can relax, engaging more fully in the here and now. Focusing on the actual process of involving yourself in a project, rather than nervously worrying about the final outcome, is always empowering! The more you ground yourself in the present moment, the more flexibility and creativity you bring to your work.

2. Asserting Power Over Your Perfectionism Makes Succeeding More Enjoyable.

Do you feel that success means you have to continually meet higher standards? If so, you suffer from “Raising the Bar Syndrome”.

In this syndrome, each effort seems only to lead to demands for greater effort as the bar is raised. Eventually, you face an impossible challenge, and are doomed to fail. When you conquer perfectionism, you can assure yourself that you remain in charge of your time and your goals.

Instead of dreading elevated demands, you can reward yourself and chart your course as you choose. Your health, your relationships, and your outlook on life also improve as you pace yourself more effectively.

3. By Discarding Perfectionism, You Can Make Friends With Your Own Mistakes.

Instead of judging mistakes as bad, you can welcome them as valuable avenues for evolution. In reality, you are expanding your understanding of the world by incorporating fresh information.

Consider creating an affirmation for yourself, to help remind you how valuable the process of ongoing learning truly is. Clients of mine affirm that the lesson learned from a mistake is always worth the cost. This is because as their horizons expand, their sense of possibility broadens. They can revise their approaches, and also refine their goals.

So ultimately, overcoming perfectionism gives you much more than time. Replacing old, rigid standards with friendly guidelines allows you to enjoy the freedom of engaging wholeheartedly and savoring the thrill of discovery!

Now ask yourself: How can you replace perfectionism with productivity today to make the best use of your time?

Article by Paula Eder

Time management tips really help you manage yourself when you are stressed, rushed, and caught in a time crunch. Those are, after all, the times when it’s hardest to make your best time choices.

It’s hugely helpful to know your particular stress profile. What are you most likely to do when pressure mounts? Do you freeze, plunge ahead blindly, revert to old work habits that don’t work so well? The better you know your patterns, and the more you are prepared to treat yourself with respect and compassion, the sooner you can step in and replace old default settings with a fresh approach. Add these techniques to your mindfulness based stress reduction regimen to broaden your effectiveness.

Here are 5 Stress-Reduction Steps to Take the Crunch Out of Your Time

Stress Reduction Step #1: Work Within Your Limits.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? It is not so easy. You want so much for this project to reflect your full range of talents. Take a deep breath. Recognize the reality: you lack the time to accomplish all that you had hoped to. Straightforward as it sounds, you need to let go of important options! In The Road Less Traveled, author Scott Peck counts “balancing” as one of four essential disciplines that can solve all life’s problems. Balancing requires letting go. There are significant gains, of course, that accompany this loss. You assume more positive control by reducing demands on yourself to a workable level. Having simplified your demands, you can succeed!

Stress Reduction Step #2: Prioritize Decisively.

Prioritizing also strengthens your skills at letting go. You must say no to any number of possibilities to create one constructive outcome. Quickly make or revise your to do list (on paper) with “must do” items at the top and things that you can let go of at the bottom. This assures that you don’t miss a key task. Why do I stress writing (or keystroking) your priorities? Recent studies confirm that your brain is simply not engineered to store lists. Translating your plans into written, easily implemented “next action” steps is a priceless stress reduction tactic.

Stress Reduction Step #3: Assertively Ask for Assistance.

Are you surprised to see this on the list? Don’t be! It’s OK to ask for help, and it’s important to be calm and clear when requesting it. Remain firm and friendly, not frenzied, as you reach out. This keeps the stress level at a minimum for everyone (yourself included). Know that you may be called upon to give help in turn, down the road. This reciprocity helps create social capital for all concerned, if done well. If assistance can’t be obtained, return to step one and reduce your list further.

Stress Reduction Step #4: Give Thanks.

Once you’ve completed whatever was possible, given the time available, be sure to thank everyone who pitched in. If you carried the day on your own, validate yourself warmly for your outlay, and thank yourself too. It was a choice, after all! Expressing appreciation provides an opportunity for gratitude to restore balance and perspective. Balance and perspective are great stress reducers.

Stress Reduction Step #5:Review and Revise.

This step is often overlooked. But reviewing and revising rewards you richly. When you have a moment to yourself, review what happened that left you in a situation with too much to do in too little time. Then, ask yourself these 3 questions in a non-judgmental way:

* Was procrastination involved?

* Were there unexpected changes in your day that threw a wrench in the works?

* What can you do to avoid a situation like this in the future?

Time management skills can’t address every eventuality. You will, of course, be faced with demands to squeeze too much activity into too little time. Still, your best is more than enough – doing your best will strengthen and direct you in difficult times to come.

Now, what is your next move towards stress-free effectiveness?

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Article by Paula Eder

Time management tips deal intimately with the same kinds of choices that can lead to lasting happiness. But what if you, like most of us, tend to make choices based on common illusions about happiness? A Harvard psychologist offers some amazing results from extensive tests. See how you can combine these with some commonsense home truths about time. The results will lead to greater happiness and far less stress!

Let’s start by envisioning time in a way that supports tough decision-making:

“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.” Sidney Howard

Time management strategies for achieving goals require you to make lots of time choices. Some of them are quite difficult. You must also develop good, substantial time boundaries. This takes skill, discipline and knowing your priorities inside out.

To strengthen your resolve, take a moment to picture your day as a basket. This basket holds all the time that you have to work with for the next 24 hours. Each activity that you put into the basket, obviously, takes up space. This limits what you can include.

You probably have a basket that is full, if not overflowing right now! What that means in practical terms is that in order to add something new, you need to take something out to make space for it. This can be a challenging and even painful choice. By choosing consciously, however, you give yourself a great gift.

Otherwise, your basket will overflow. Because time is concrete and absolute, there is no way around this.

Think for a minute. What has been falling out of your overflowing basket? How does this, in turn, add to your stress level? When faced with too many tasks and priorities to juggle, you may begin to forget things and drop the ball on commitments. Your effectiveness and efficiency decrease, even as your stress skyrockets.

So, think back over your stress level and effectiveness the past few days. This is an excellent way to determine whether it’s time to reassess and simplify your commitments. Few rewards are worth subjecting yourself to daily, exhausting stress, are they?

Does your basket overflow because you attempt to control more than you can realistically manage? Does your stress mount as you try to squeeze in plans for an “ideal” personal event? Then, consider 5 findings of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, as featured in his bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness:

1. People frequently overestimate the long-term emotional effects that certain events will have on them.

2. By and large, people tend to possess a “set point” of happiness, to which they revert, eventually.

3. People are notoriously inaccurate in guessing what will make them happy.

4. Dreaded events and outcomes may, once they materialize, prove to be fresh opportunities for happiness.

5. Happiness is rarely the peak experience we anticipate, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will.

6. Equally mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness, as well.

In other words, the stakes are rarely what people imagine. The implications of this are huge! This may change most of the daily equations you make as you try try to jam one more commitment into an already full and overflowing basket of time. Seldom is it truly worth the stress. Keep these insights about happiness in mind the next time you assess your options!

Better by far to reduce the contents of your basket to a manageable amount, and to appreciate this moment. The results far surpass attempting to overbook an unknowable future. Instead, support your health and your sense of wellbeing. Redirect that emotional energy into savoring right now, and reflect upon all you feel truly grateful for already. This reinforces your inner sense of security, and helps you remain self-referenced.

By modifying unrealistic expectations and cultivating gratitude, you give yourself two gifts. You clear out your basket more easily when you reject illusions about happiness. And you fully appreciate and enter your present moment, where the heart of time resides.

So, how can you immediately translate these insights into rewarding activities while planning your time choices?

Article by Alfred Winston

High drug prices have led people to seek alternatives in buying medications. Some people, led by the cheaper drug prices in foreign pharmacies, order drugs from online Canadian or Mexican pharmacies, only to find later that they have been duped with counterfeit drugs. A majority of others resort to generic medications as a viable solution and end up with impotent or over-potent drugs. Generics cannot always be trusted and the brand-name drugs for some chronic illnesses have no generic alternatives.

If you are stuck in such a bleak scenario, don’t panic. Contact your company’s Pharmacy Benefit Management agency, they would be able to get drugs for you at reduced costs. What is PBM ? Pharmacy benefit management services (PBM services) help by administering prescription drug benefits to people who are on prescription drugs or who want to save money on their monthly drug costs. They mediate between drug companies and reduce drug costs for people who are liable to drug benefits in their health plans.

What does a PBM company offer? A PBM service provider helps its plan members get access to a wide spectrum of drugs and other medical products at minimal costs.

How does a PBM company work? A PBM services company partners with the pharmacy manufacturers or giant pharmacy chains to render medicines at minimal costs to clients. Primarily, a PBM services team develops the formularies, which is a list of prescription drugs that comes under a specific drug benefit plan. These formularies are based on broad evaluations of safety and cost-effectiveness of medicines. Most formularies include drugs of all kinds – from prescription types and over the counter drugs to generics and brand-name medications.

Some PBM services adopt to cost-containment measures like the involvement of aforementioned authorization or documentation from the doctor before a drug prescription can be filled. Globally, most of the PBM services work with the insurance companies to maintain drug costs as low as possible. Pharmacy Benefit Management companies also collaborate with doctors to maximize their members’ pharmacy benefit plans and improve its clinical outcomes.

PBMs also are taking a proactive approach, discussing with doctors and patients on therapeutic alternatives for people who buy lot of prescriptions and adopt to pay-for-performance (P4P) incentives around the Rx benefit.

Benefits of PBM servicesPharmacy Benefit Management services

Save prescription drug costsSave time and search for prescription drugs.Include personalized medication services. Offer variety of plans, like group medical coverage, disability program coverage etc. In brief, your PBM services company can secure your and your family’s health at minimal costs, without headaches.

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