Use heuristics (rules of thumb) for decision making

Streamline your workflow so you can get simple things done without significant willpower.

For example, instead of having a container for pens and scissors in only one room of the house, have these in three different rooms to ensure better tidying.

Strategies like these s...

Sabotaging yourself and your relationships create unnecessary pain and self-generated stress.

To stop sabotaging yourself, you must first recognize when you’re getting in your own way. You need to figure out your patterns of behavior and then find creative ways to counteract them and...

• Use project to-do lists to outline every step involved in a particular project.
• Shrink relatively unimportant tasks to the bare minimum required for getting them done. 
• Try “last things first.” Sometimes the typical final steps in a task are easier to sta...

“Seemingly irrelevant decisions” comes from treatment for addiction: a recovering alcoholic might decide to call an old drinking buddy, just to say hello or for a game of basketball, and soon finds that this minor decision takes them down the slippery slope of resuming alcohol abuse.

Our personality and life experiences predispose us to dominant modes of thinking, but these can be biased in ways that are unhelpful in the majority of situations.

Maybe you tend to worry people are angry at you when usually this isn’t the case. Or you tend to hesitate ...

A paradox perfectionists face in trying to reduce self-sabotage is their tendency to have inflexible standards and be dismissive of incremental gains.

When you start to appreciate the beauty of making incremental improvements, you’ll see easy solutions that you’d previously been overloo...