I have a routine that keeps me productive. Basically, I get to work the same time most days, even drinking coffee at the same time and such, as well as taking breaks at the same time.
It's a little repetitive but it works great to keep me productive as I'm self-employed.
I worked for some time as self-employed.. The hardest part was to maintain discipline.
And I've got to the same conclusion: routine.
What makes your life seem boring when you're an employee, is what keeps you from procrastinating all day when you are self-employed.
But, to be honest, I’m not that impressed. I can’t recall ever studying more than 3 hours for a test (usually about 2 hours) and just graduated an Ivy League college with an ~A average.
Now I did usually start studying 2 weeks or so in advance in multiple 20 minute sessions. I did so because last minute cramming doesn't work for me, but it did result in high grades with not so much total time spent.
I did that. Computer Engineering at Purdue. The only classes I ever studied for were the ones that I didn't pay attention to in lecture. I never took notes (this drove my teachers crazy in high school). There were only a few classes in which I got less than an A-, and only one of those was an ECE class (statistics; I couldn't make myself pay attention). All I did was go to lecture and do the assignments.
Your college? Your major? (Yes, I already checked your HN profile.) I'm curious about how your experience compares to the experience of Scott Young reported in Cal Newport's blog.
To break down what it says, and offer my own thoughts, often, the path to doing something at first challenging is: thought -> action -> habit, belief/better life or outcome.
Achievable steps is also key. Trying to rush the process and immediately reach the endpoint results in frustration.
So, "I want to learn to swim" => Spend 15 minutes practicing => Spend 15 minutes practicing 3 times a week... and so on, gradually ramping up is likely to work, while, "I want to learn to swim" => 3 practices weekly of 1 hour is likely to fail, in my experience.
I'd add the tried and useful technique of having your first email be purely relationship creating: say, respond to a recent post with a useful thought, or point out a minor bug somewhere on the site
Having sent a decent bunch of emails to bloggers, I've also noticed that smiley faces increase response significantly, but using them makes me feel a bit cynical, so I usually don't ;-)
Last I checked, and this was 6 months ago, there isn't really a comparable ad service to AdSense in terms of quality. Nothing else I've seen manages to serve such targeted, high quality ads.
That said, you can make good money from other approaches like affiliate marketing, products, and so on.
I'd figure out how to make it look higher end. It's nice, but it feels like a low-end site, imo. See http://www.saksfifthavenue.com for how a high end clothing store looks. Good luck!
It took a while, but I've come to realize that affiliate/product marketing can make a lot more money. Think about your audience, can you sell them a book explaining how to do something, and what existing affiliate products like those on Clickbank could you sell them?
No, there are many, many strains of HIV virus. One person's infection evolves into a wide variety of strains during an infection due to immune system pressure.
I've written a lot of articles in the health field (around 200), and, iirc, the efficacy data for therapy of psychoanalysis and CBT is similar, actually, again, now that I think about it, iirc, any psychological type of therapy (within reason) is roughly as effective as the other.
As such, from the insurer's side, which is preferable: one that lasts something like 12 weeks and has limited amount of sessions, or one that lasts years and can have 4 sessions a week?
People need to feel listened to, cared for, important - in one form or another.
This. CBT works as well as any other talking therapy, but is orders of magnitude cheaper.
As the article states, most talking therapies show the same efficacy, whether they involve six one-hour sessions or a decade of intensive analysis. To me, this is a clear indicator that nobody has beaten placebo and we really need a different model.
If we practiced surgery the same way we practice psychiatry, we would be routinely trepanning people if they seemed 'resistant to conventional treatment'. There is no sense in psychiatry that it is unethical to administer unproven treatments without clear informed consent. This has to stop. Psychotherapy needs to develop a firm framework to prevent patients from being subjected to pseudoscience, or it should be abolished and reformed from scratch.
To be blunt, psychoanalysts are vampires, extracting huge fees from vulnerable clients with absolutely no evidence justifying the time and expense. I see them as no different to psychics or faith healers. They obfuscate the argument by debating the merits of various therapies with no basis in neuroscience and no strong evidence of efficacy. We look back at the history of psychiatry and are horrified at what we see. I fully expect that our descendants will be horrified at how we practice psychiatry.
If we practiced surgery the same way we practice psychiatry, we would be routinely trepanning people if they seemed 'resistant to conventional treatment'.
And if we practiced psychiatry the same way we practiced surgery, we'd give people MRIs, CAT scans, and plenty of other expensive tests every time they said they felt a bit sad.
I don't know about that. It's not like people aren't "processing information" either during or after the therapy sessions.
And is 4 sessions a week really "excessive"?
Remember that most therapy sessions are only 1 hour long (sometimes as little as 45 minutes, or even 30 minutes long).
It can feel very rushed to have to cram a description of and then a discussion of everything significant that's happened to you in the course of a full week in to just 1 hour of therapy, especially if you are going through a very rough time where there's a lot going on (both external and internal).
That's why many therapists prefer "intensive therapy" (ie. more frequent or perhaps longer sessions) for people going through a crisis, and then advise less frequent sessions as their lives stabilize.
That said, I think 1 hour per week is the norm in most types of therapy. 4 hours per week is relatively unusual.
Not to tell too much about my life and the lives of those close to me, but two hours a week is the crisis setting. If a therapist tells you anything of value about the way you think or behave, it takes some time to think about what that can mean for your life.
It's a little repetitive but it works great to keep me productive as I'm self-employed.