1. Stop waiting for things to change – change yourself NOW! 

Most often that means changing your attitude! Too many times people have preconditions to happiness, only to find even if they reach that goal, there are even more pre-conditions to happiness. Aside for a temporary “high” when we attain our goal, we very quickly go back to a general baseline mood unless we change our thinking habits. If you tend to be a pessimist, you will continue to be no matter what happens on the outside, unless you change from the inside. Real attitude change is an inside job!  

2. Build on your regrets, rather than let them keep you stuck in the past.  

All too often, we use the past as a hitching post rather than a guide post. What’s done is done, and you can’t change it now. Use lessons from the past to improve your life NOW!  See even failure as feedback, not as a referendum of your self worth. Regrets can propel you forward, make you wiser and help you develop empathy for others. Regrets give us many useful lessons to build upon if you do not let them weigh you down. Forgive yourself for now knowing everything when you were six! We are all works in progress. Use your regrets as stepping stones towards a better future, rather than rocks in your emotional backpack.

3. Learn something every day.

The end of school does not mean the end of learning. We are learning all the time, even if we are not aware of it. Life gives the best lessons of all, and it constantly teaches us lessons no one ever could. If you open up to the wonder of growing and learning, even if the lessons are something you never wanted to learn, you will keep moving in a forward direction.

4. Stop lying to yourself! 

People who are the most honest to others are often the biggest liars to themselves. They feed themselves all sorts of fiction that they are not good enough, not smart enough, not attractive enough, to the extent that they feel at times like “failures”. The critical inner voice is hard to quell, especially if you learned early on those messages that were judgmental and critical.  People who lie to themselves treat fact like fiction.  Change your self talk from statements like “I should be further along in my life than now” to “I am disappointed at where I am in my life, and I have learned many lessons to build on to make different decisions now.”  

5. Forgive…for goodness sake!

Forgiveness does not mean condoning behavior – it means you give up the bitterness you harbor that eats at you and robs you out of happiness in life.  People who wrong us are not inherently evil, but rather more likely unhealthy and maybe very very, very unhealthy. Switching from seeing from being “bad” to being “unhealthy” can free you of the resentment and bitterness. Whether it is your parents, coworkers, friends, or as a result of a love relationship gone sour, forgiveness will help you open up your heart to try again.  Of course, the most important person to forgive is yourself, and keep in mind you are a work in progress.

6. Think straight to feel great!

Irrational thinking lays the foundation for a lot of unhappiness and helplessness. Irrational thinking can be so automatic, that it is hard to catch, as our thoughts become solidified into “truths.” Our perceptions shape our reality, and that is what determines our attitude. As you become more aware of irrational patterns of thinking and change them into more rational thoughts, you will be empowered to change your attitude to change your life. “I can’t stand this” is irrational – nothing makes you melt into the ground! A more rational perspective is, “I am having a hard time with this”. The less you immobilize yourself with judgmental thoughts, the more you will feel empowered and optimistic.

7. Try to change what is in your control, not what is out of your control.  

Who is the only person we can change? Ourselves!  Who do we often try to change? Others!  Even trying to change someone else’s mind, however well meaning, can lead to frustration as people do not change just because you want them too – they need to want to! If you find yourself trying to change others, you will tend to be aggressive rather than assertive.  Bossiness and insensitivity will limit your ability to be accepting of others, flaws and all.  Of course, accepting people does not give them a “carte blanche” to say or do anything they want – it is up to us to set limits on how much we let them into our inner world. People who tend to be negative and focus on changing others rather than themselves are more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives.

8. Make peace with the fact that life is not fair.

We all know that life is not fair, but all too often we still expect it to be!  Expecting that life and people in it should be fair is the source of countless pain. Life gets quite tedious with that type of entitled mentality. Life is really more like Swiss Cheese with all its holes. It is not smooth and predictable like cream cheese or American.  It is actually the holes in our lives that offer us challenges that make us stronger and develop depth of character.  If we embrace the holes in our lives and grow through them, we become healthier in mind and spirit. Try as hard as you can to make life fair, and accept the rest and work around it.

9. Let yourself smile from within.

People who are grateful for what they have instead of comparing themselves to others, feeling bitter about what they do not have, tend to feel less hacked by life. Pre-conditions to gratefulness is like pre-conditions to happiness – gratefulness will never happen unless we learn to be grateful for things in our life now.  Life can be tough and it is easier to find faults with it, but it will be an easier journey if we stop to smell the roses, slow down, and enjoy beauty in your world today.   Immerse yourself in nature, breath in the fresh air, slow down and savor each bite of food, and stop to lovingly gaze on those close to you.  Don’t take them for granted.  Are you too busy for that?  Let yourself be a human being instead of a human doing. 

10. Don’t wait to change your life – do it today!  Start right now!

You want your life to change?  Don’t wait!  Tomorrow is forever put off, and today is the day to start.  You can empower yourself by using “victor” language instead of “victim” language.  Replace “I should” with “I will”  and “I hate to” with “I don’t like”. The more flexible your self talk, the more you feel empowered and will be proactive.  Proactivity is one of the 7 habits of highly effective people according to Stephen Covey. Those who are proactive are more likely to be masters of their destiny, as opposed to those who are reactive, who allow others to control their moods. Make an action list of things you want to accomplish, and start today!  You do not have to do things all at once, and breaking large goals such as losing weight, can be broken down into little sub-goals.  The important thing is to begin today!

Each day that you choose to remind yourself of these ten skills to hack life rather than let life hack you, you will increase your sense of self-mastery and enjoy life more.

I welcome ideas of how you hack life!

(Photo credit: A Better Life Sign via Shutterstock)

Is checking email the first thing in the morning for you? Do you receive tons of them? Does an overwhelming feeling grasp you when you log into your email account? If all your answers are yes, you are definitely someone in desperate need to get assistance for monitoring emails. If you are unable to hire a back-office staff, well SaneBox can do the job for you for just a petty amount. Let’s see how good it is at doing that.

SaneBox Goodies: Clear Inbox Clutter

SaneLater: Folder For Less Important Emails

Sign up for a free account with the email address you wish to use SaneBox for. You will then be redirected to a page where you will need to allow the app to access your Google account. Once the account is set and all your unread (existing) emails are being monitored and sorted as per importance, you will notice a folder named SaneLater which from now on will hold all the emails that can wait for later. And the important emails (as per SaneBox) will stay in your inbox. Since the maximum clutter is created by the unimportant emails, your Inbox will be reduced to only the important and most likely fewer ones.

Now every time anyone or any service sends you an email, SaneBox will put them into your Inbox or SaneLater folder accordingly. The sorting may not be accurate at first but will quickly adjust as you keep on using it. If you think any email in the Inbox is of less importance you can move it to SaneLater by drag and drop; mails of that kind will never end up in your Inbox keeping it clutter free.

Email Summary:

At a scheduled time(chosen by you), you will get an email with a summary of emails added to the SaneLater folder. If you find an email that deserves to in the Inbox but is wrongly placed there, you can move it to the Inbox from the summary email itself and similar emails will never get placed in the SaneLater folder.

SaneTop, SaneNews, SaneBulk, SaneArchive, SaneNotSpam:

Those are a few services that are not active by default but can be used by turning them on from Settings. SaneTop is a finer layer over Inbox that only shows MOST important emails in Inbox and not all the important emails. SaneNews tracks newsletters and mails to mailing lists. SaneBulk hold the receipts and reference mails. SaneArchive archives your oldest emails and SaneNotSpam rescues emails from Spam folder and restores them to the folder.

Defer Emails and Reminder Service

This is perhaps the best bet among all the features the app has in store. Simply forward an email you wish to follow up at a later date and the email will bubble up to the top of your inbox at the scheduled time. So forwarding an email to nextweek@sanebox.com will add a reminder to bubble up the email on Monday next week. This feature can also be used to follow-up an email sent to someone. Simply add the reminder email (say, nextmonth@sanebox.com) as CC or BCC and Sanebox will track if your email has been replied to and if it wasn’t, you will be reminded by placing the email thread at the top of your inbox. The support for scheduling on Google Calendar has also been added lately.

Play around with the Settings entries to tune the app to suit your needs. Add your social accounts to help the app better judge your emails for importance. SaneBox is compatible with Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Apple, Outlook and many others but only GMail enjoys all the features. Good things come for a price. SaneBox will cost you $4.95/month or $55/year(SaneBox pricing page). If you are willing to try it before investing any sum, go ahead and try it first for 14 days. But if you are still stuck to the FREE notion and reluctant to spend a dime, OtherInbox is a good choice that will help you organize emails gratis, but I can assure you the latter lacks a lot of functionality which Sanebox offers but for a simple price. So next time you are worried about how to handle email overload you know what to do.

Related posts:

1. How to Enable or Disable Gmail Priority Inbox
2. Unsubscribe.com: Clean Up Useless Newsletters From Your Email Inbox
3. TheFriendMail: Get Facebook Delivered To Your Email Inbox
4. Lost Emails From Gmail Inbox ? You Are Not Alone.
5. Laytr: Schedule Emails And Set up Email Reminders

Sanebox Sanitizes Your Inbox That Gets Stuffed Insanely originally published on Ampercent

Rogue applications are malware that try to fool the user in believing that they are legit programs. The most common form are rogue antivirus applications that are disguised as antivirus software, when in fact they are the exact opposite of that.  It can be quite difficulty to remove rogue applications once they have been installed on a computer system, as they are often protected from being simply uninstalled. Another issue that comes with many is that they make modifications to the system, with the Windows Registry as the main target.

ESET’s Rogue Application Remover has been released yesterday. The free program has been designed to remove rogue applications from a Windows system and to remove changes that they have made to the operating system’s Registry. According to ESET, the application focuses mostly on “rogue applications that affect the operating system in a negative way ” and that ESET products may have difficulties removing thoroughly.

The portable program can be launched right after it has been downloaded to the local system. Windows users do however need to make sure that the program is launched with elevated rights.

ESET Rogue Applications Remover’s does not require an active Internet connection to scan a system for malware, but will be limited in its detection efficiency in this case.  Several command line switches are available that the program can be run with. This includes options to restore changes using the /r switch or /? to display the help file listing all supported command line switches.

You can download the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the rogue applications remover from the ESET website. The program itself can be started in safe mode or normal mode.

Probably the biggest issue at the time of writing is the lack of information when it comes to the program’s cleaning abilities. It is for instance not clear which, or at least how many, different rogue applications it supports. Still, if you suspect your system to be infected with rogue malware, you may want to give ESET Rogue Applications Remover a try to scan your system for traces. (via JKWebTalks)

Want a cheap computer that runs Android on an ARM processor and isn’t a Raspberry Pi? Now you can have it. I’m talking about a new system, called AllWinner, that is now shipping out of China.

This tiny, inexpensive Android PC has impressive specifications. It uses an ARM A10 dual-core running at 1.5 GHz, a Mali 400 GPU and offers 512MB of RAM. This puts it about on par with last year’s best tablets and today’s best smartphones. It has HDMI output and claims 1080p capability. Only a review could verify this, but on paper it looks like a valid claim, as there are much less powerful ARM systems that can do the same.

You’ll only need to pay $74 dollars for the device if you buy it from Abi Express, the only retailer currently offering the device outside of Asian markets. The description is typical of a product made in China by a company that can’t pay for proper translation to English – there are plenty of typos – but it claims 802.11b/g/n wireless support and USB connectivity. Better still, the mini-PC comes with Android 4.0.

It’s worth pointing out that the mouse and keyboard support of Android isn’t great. It’s also difficult to see how a user would connect both without a USB hub, because this mini-PC only has one USB port and you’d need two to connect a USB mouse and keyboard.

Even so, the price is low enough that Android and alternative OS enthusiasts should check this computer out. It looks like a fun gadget to experiment with even if it’s unlikely to replace anyone’s desktop, HTPC or Roku.

Source: Ars Technica