Hey everyone, I’m back from holiday vacation and first up on the schedule is a set of free vectors. These are flower silhouettes that would be very useful in a lot of different ways. It’s pretty cold where I live right now, so I felt like making something that reminded me of warmer weather. I hope you like them.

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Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Sorry for little silence here – I switched my Internet providers and had no Internet connection for several days. It was strange, I was so used to my Internet related daily work flow, I didn’t know at first what to do! It was like I have no business, no blog, no connection with outside world. I called to several of my friends and when I told it to one girl I know, she suggested interesting article idea.

She said: “Well, why you don’t write about that as well? Your site is full of roundups, some tips in such cases could be useful as well!”. Right and so I took paper and actually wrote down my ideas! This is very short article, but I am expecting you to add your ideas as well! What can we do to get out from daily work flow, from struggling, get organized and feel good?

1. Take a rest

Take a walk out to breathe some fresh air and get work a little bit out of your system or even better look at all from aside to rethink your strategy, future goals and things you could change or do to get better what are you working on.

2. Read design related book

I bet you have several books in your bookshelf you always wanted to read but never got time! At least I have a lot of them, now is a great time to remember about them and use your free time to do what you love to do!

3. Watch Video Tutorials

Again if you are obsessed designer like I am, you certainly should have to be 30-40gb video tutorials you downloaded a while ago, but never got time to learn them! Usually in busy work-flow we forget to learn tools first, we just need to get job done, but if you continue to learn and evolve your skills, you will suddenly discover some more different ways and techniques, how to achieve necessary outcome much faster! It’s amazing how much we still don’t know after many years working in design niche!

4. Create a new design, artwork

It really helps if you store your favorite designs, photos, artworks on local hard-drive for later use, so you can get inspiration also when you have no Internet connection. Anyway you can spend hours playing with effects, fonts, textures, artworks – to perfect your skills.

5. Take a pencil, paints and paper

Take your time and enjoy how creative you can be while sketching or drawing – do something different to enjoy your life even more!

6. Go And Meet Friend

Such things happen to everybody – in all rush, sometimes we forget about really great friends, so this time be first to call them out! If you have some good friends in your own design niche, it’s even more useful – you can meet up, exchange opinions and get fresh ideas. I really evaluate such friends, where we both can contribute in some way from each other.

7. Get out and start to do some sport

We spend a lot of our time in front of computer, but we shouldn’t forget about our health – it’s more worth than anything! Start to do yoga, play football, volleyball, swimming, run or find out where is the nearest gym from your home! You will definitely feel better each day, I assure you!

8. Listen relaxing music

Get lazy, relax, watch movie, listen music – you earned it! Whole life doesn’t consist from rush, struggling from lack of time. Take your breathe slowly and enjoy selfhanded free time!

9. Go out to museum, exhibition – any creative and inspiring place!

Find out if there are any interesting exhibitions, design conferences happening in your town and again get out!

10. Organize, clean up your workspace

It may happen to all of us – while we are working hard, we are creating mess around us and slowly it’s affecting our work-flow as well. Our environment changes us as well as people around you. Maybe you need to change also how your furniture, computer, lights are organized?

11. Organize, clean up your desktop

Sounds obvious, but you cannot imagine how much you waste time while searching through numerous folders necessary file or image, when you could easily organize everything! Clean up desktop, create folders, move files to appropriate directories! Very helpful in daily work-flow!

12. Create organized schedule

In all rush you sometimes forget things you must do? Create schedule and get used to it, definitely will help to organize your daily workflow and you will feel much better, it’s about organizing your life! Article I created a while ago could actually help you as well – Plan Your Daily Schedule: Useful Resources.

13. Don’t do anything!

If you are always running and running you should enjoy something different as well – watch movie, sleep a little bit longer – don’t make it as regular habit, but from time to time it’s really relaxing!

I would love to hear your advices how you enjoy and spend your free time, what you do to get out from struggling in your work and where you find inspiration to keep on doing what are you doing!?!

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1. Plan Your Daily Schedule: Useful Resources
2. Wayback machine – history of Internet
3. StumbleUpon FAQ, Guides, Tools, Addons And Scripts
4. New Things Happening At 1stwebdesigner Website
5. The best RSS readers for bloggers : NewsGator’s RSS readers and more

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Does checking your email make you more productive or less productive?

Oh, sure, we delude ourselves into thinking we’re being extra-productive by obsessively checking and responding to our email, but in reality we’re attending too frequently to our own desire for gratification and sabotaging our own productivity in the process.

As Dan Ariely explains in a postscript to Predictably Irrational, he smells a rat, and so should you:

Skinner distinguished between fixed-ratio schedules of reinforcement and variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement. Under a fixed schedule, a rat received a reward of food after it pressed the lever a fixed number of times — say 100 times. Under the variable schedule, the rat earned a food pellet after it pressed the lever a random number of times. Sometimes it would receive the food pellet after pressing 10 times, and sometimes after pressing 200 times.

Under the variable schedule of reinforcement, the arrival of the reward is unpredictable. On the face of it, one might expect that the fixed schedules of reinforcement would be more motivating and rewarding because the rat can learn to predict the outcome of his work. Instead, Skinner found that the variable schedules were actually more motivating. The most telling result was that when the rewards ceased, the rats who were under the fixed schedule stopped working almost immediately, but those under the variable schedules kept working for a very long time.

If this reminds you of gambling, that’s because gambling explicitly works under the very same schedule of variable reinforcement.

Go ahead, pull the “new email’ lever. Take a chance. Most of the time you’ll end up a loser, the proud recipient of yet another spam email, a press release you don’t care about, or some irrelevant conversation someone has cc:ed you into. But not always. There are those rare few times when you’ll hit the jackpot: you’ll get an important bit of information you needed, or tentative contact from a long lost friend or associate, or other good news.

We’re so ecstatic to get that single useful email out of hundreds that we can’t keep ourselves from compulsively pressing the new email lever over and over and over, hoping it will happen again soon, like the caged rats in Skinners’ experiments.

We desperately need to ask ourselves, and those around us, to revisit the purpose of email. Given what we know about the importance of flow to productive work, and how multi-tasking is largely a myth, is it worth the constant stream of minor interruptions?

We’ve overloaded email with so many meanings that it has imploded as a communication medium. Need an urgent answer to your question within a few minutes? Fire off a quick email and demand a response! Want to have a long back and forth discussion with several people? Email everyone! Do you have a new theory that you desperately want to explain to someone? Send it to them via email! Got a funny joke or picture you’re dying to share? Email it to the office alias!

When we treat email as the kitchen sink of communication, appropriate for everything, it simply ceases to work at all.

Kathy Sierra was concerned that Twitter had the same variable reinforcement problem, but I think Twitter is in fact part of the answer to the problem.

Stop. Sending. Email.

Instead of abusing email as a “one size fits all” conduit for communication, be smart. Know when to escalate your communication to the right medium for the particular message you’re trying to deliver:

• Broad kudos? Post it on a feedback forum or your blog.
• Need an urgent, immediate answer? Pick up the phone and call.
• Got something that needs a lot of touchy feely discussion? Set up a face to face meeting.
• Discussing a particular topic or product? Post it on a public message board.
• Is this more of a friendly, social thing? Try using a social network like Twitter or Facebook.
• Business proposal? Perhaps it would be smart to approach indirectly, through soliciting recommendations of business associates.

The real solution here is to move people beyond email silos wherever and whenever possible. Some amount of email is still inevitable, though. What steps can we take to turn our email from a dangerous variable reinforcement machine to something more … sane? Predictable, even?

• Turn off all notification and interruption features in your email client.
• Only check your email at regular, scheduled intervals.
• Set up your email client to automatically highlight those emails from friends and business associates who are historically known to send you useful email.

Before you send that next email — or press the “retrieve mail” button again — ask yourself: do I smell a rat?

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