In the beginning, it’s easy to be excited about your new business. You can’t wait to get started and tackle your new venture with an abundance of optimism and motivation. It’s usually well into one’s entrepreneurial journey when the reality sets in; building a business is hard – especially when you’re trying to do it […]
The post How to Stay Motivated to Grow Your Business While Working Full-Time appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
Amazon gift cards are kind of great.
You can choose to treat yourself to a new gadget or a snuggly sweater, or you can stock up on toilet paper and toothpaste.
Either way, you can’t lose.
Here’s a list of simple ways to get up to $55 in Amazon gift cards this week.
It seems like a million paid survey sites keep popping up online. But so many of them have lousy customer service, or it takes forever to get paid for the surveys you take. It’s hard to know which websites are worth your time.
Here’s a survey site that’s been operating since 2007: PrizeRebel. Since it started, it’s given out more than $15 million in cash and rewards. It processes rewards within 24 hours (or instantly if you’re a “gold†level user), so you get paid fast.
You won’t get rich using PrizeRebel, but it’s a legit site — we’ve tried it ourselves. You earn points by taking surveys. You can cash in as soon as you earn 500 points, which gets you $5.
You’ll redeem points for cash or gift cards from more than 500 brands, including Amazon, PayPal, eBay, Walmart — plus stuff you won’t find everywhere, like Buffalo Wild Wings, Uber and Nike.
One Penny Hoarder writer was immediately offered dozens of surveys after signing up. Each paid out up to $4 and took between 10 and 35 minutes to complete.
Eric Hanson wanted a cleaner energy source, but didn’t have the option in his Maine home — and didn’t want to install pricy solar panels.
So he went with renewable energy company Arcadia Power, which helps you offset your monthly energy consumption with 100% renewable sources.
“On a fundamental level, the power that I use in my house is coming from renewable sources,†Hanson says. “By providing financial support for renewable energy sites, I can disrupt the market. I’m willing to support green growth.â€
And, because you’re such a good person, the company will throw in a free $20 Amazon gift card.
You can sign up to qualify for your free gift card in about two minutes.
We know it sounds strange, but Ibotta will pay you cash for taking pictures of your grocery store receipts.
Here’s how it works:
Before heading to the store, search for items on your shopping list within the Ibotta app. When you get home, snap a photo of your receipt and scan the items’ barcodes.
Bam. Cash back.
Ibotta is free to download. Plus, you’ll get a $10 sign-up bonus after uploading your first receipt.
Some cash-back opportunities we’ve seen include:
Once you hit $20, you can cash out in the form of an Amazon gift card or cash.
No karate skills required for this trick. All you need to do is download the Shopkick app.
Once you sign up, the app pays you in “kicks†for walking into certain stores (including Walmart, Target, TJMaxx and more). You can redeem these kicks for gift cards to a number of retailers, including Amazon, Target, Walmart, Starbucks, Sephora and Best Buy.
It pays you even more kicks for photos of receipts that include qualifying items you purchased in-store with a connected credit or debit card. You can also earn kicks for online purchases, including Amazon. You don’t have to do anything; your linked cards will automatically apply your kicks.
Once you accumulate 1,250 kicks, you can cash out for that $5 Amazon gift card.
It’s no secret that survey sites are a great place to snag some free money and gift cards, thanks to their awesome sign-up bonuses. MyPoints is no exception.
When you sign up for the survey site and complete your first five surveys, you’ll pocket a $5 bonus. Cash that bonus out for an Amazon gift card. Simple!
Then keep filling out surveys and taking polls to continue to earn some simple money.
Now, what are you doing still reading this? You’ve got $55 worth of Amazon gift cards burning a hole in your digital pocket!
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
The Penny Hoarder Promise: We provide accurate, reliable information. Here’s why you can trust us and how we make money.
Living in California, you know driving in the Golden State is rather like the reality shows they shoot out there: unpredictable and a bit over-dramatic. OK, maybe more than just a bit.
Difficult driving conditions mean solid car insurance is important. But you don’t want to overpay for that coverage. How do you find the right mix? You know, get A-list celebrity coverage at B-list price?
We found a company that can help you do that. How? It just does things smarter so you don’t have to pay for stuff you don’t need.
The problem with big, outdated insurance companies is that along with their big names comes a lot of big expenses.
Just who pays for clunky PCs and unnecessary office space, anyway? You guessed it: the people who buy their policies.
What you want is to pay for coverage you need in case you have an actual claim. That’s what Clearcover does. The company avoids wasteful spending on its end so you can pay less for your coverage. Simple, right?
Clearcover works through a mobile app, so you can access your account quickly at any time and get paid fast when you need it. Plus, it does a lot of cool things you won’t find at other auto insurance companies, including:
You know how new tech devices get cheaper after a while? As technology develops, we learn how to use it more efficiently and keep costs down.
That’s what Clearcover does for insurance by using today’s technology and weeding out excessive advertising, celebrity endorsements and clunky equipment. You’re not paying for corner offices, just the coverage you actually need.
If you’re braving the roads in California and wondering if you could be saving money by switching, it’s time to find out. Sign up today, and you can save 20% to 40% on your premiums simply by not paying for the stuff you don’t need.
Tyler Omoth is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder who loves soaking up the sun and finding creative ways to help others. Catch him on Twitter at @Tyomoth.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
The Penny Hoarder Promise: We provide accurate, reliable information. Here’s why you can trust us and how we make money.
We’ve all been there at some time or another.
You feel somewhat disengaged from a lot of the things in your life. Work, even if you enjoy it, seems like a burden. Maintaining relationships seems like a burden. You fall back to the most basic of your life routines. You feel tired and perhaps not all that optimistic about things. Depressed isn’t the right word for it – maybe melancholic is closer to the truth, or mild seasonal affective disorder. You’re just in a funk. You know you’ll probably get out of it in the future but for now you feel like you’re just going through the paces.
I feel this way in the winter due to mild seasonal affective disorder. I also tend to feel this way during the month or so following a period of extreme stress – I usually pull through the stress, but find myself in a funk if I don’t have a period of true downtime to refresh myself. Honestly, to an extent, I feel that way as I write this.
There are a number of big, expensive ways to break out of a funk. A big, low-intensity vacation is a very common one. I have a friend who breaks out of a funk by going to a ten day meditation retreat out in the woods somewhere, led by monks and costing a pretty penny. Sometimes people respond to short-term funks by making major life changes, like switching jobs or careers, that ends up causing a lot of long term financial damage. Lots of people resort to retail therapy to break out of a funk.
My toolkit is a little bit different. Here are twelve things I do that cost virtually nothing that help me to break out of a funk.
I exercise. I simply do anything that gets my heart rate up, gets me sweating a little, and gets me out of breath. I usually do sets of bodyweight exercises – pushups, planks, squats, and so on. I also often do repeated kicks in the air, sometimes holding them when my leg is extended. The goal is to get to a point where I’m panting and try to stay there while also exercising muscle groups enough that I’ll feel a bit of soreness the next day.
You don’t have to do anything that intense, but anything you can do to get your body moving or get yourself breathing a little heavy is good. Not only is it good for your health, it’s also good for improving your sense of well being. I find that exercise usually provides a pretty big temporary lift, and doing some form of exercise every day tends to bolster those temporary lifts.
I go on long walks. This is a mix of low intensity exercise and time spent outside in the sun. I love to hike when the weather supports it (but I’m not a huge fan of long cold weather hikes), but when I don’t have the time for a hike, I just go on walks around my neighborhood.
Simply getting outside in the fresh air with sunlight on my face and arms is a mood lifter. I tend to find that going on two or three short walks (around the block) and one long walk (a mile or two) is a good fit for me.
I stretch. This might seem strange, but I swear that it works. I spend some time each day stretching, and by that, I basically mean a mild yoga routine focused on stretching and flexibility. This is pretty close to the routine I do most mornings, and I do even more than that when I feel like I’m in a funk.
This is a very low impact way to make my body feel less lethargic when I’m feeling down and out. It doesn’t require as much from me as doing a lot of exercise, yet still leaves me feeling better for a while afterwards. I find that doing some stretching daily for a few days tends to lead to enough motivation to get some exercise, and that tends to be a big part of my road toward getting out of a funk.
I eat lots of fruits and vegetables. I find that when I get into a funk, I tend to rely on carb-heavy foods like pasta and breads more than I should and I eat less straight fruits and vegetables. If I make a conscious decision to reverse that trend, it usually helps.
For me, one way to do that is to eat a piece of fruit whenever I eat anything. I have an apple or an orange or a banana to accompany any meal or as a snack. I also make an effort to have some kind of vegetable at each meal and make sure that it’s at least half of the volume of the food I eat, measured roughly by making sure I have more vegetables on my plate than anything else. This practice tends to help tremendously with energy level and feeling less lethargic.
I drink a lot of water. Another thing I notice is that when I’m in a funk, I don’t drink as much liquids, period, and when I do, it’s in the form of coffee or tea. Making sure that I drink a lot of water helps a lot with that, too.
For me, the best way to do this is to make water consumption easy by keeping a filled water bottle with me pretty much everywhere I go. I’ll fill it first thing in the morning and then fill it again when it’s low.
I take a few specific supplements – vitamin B12, vitamin D, and iron. Those supplements tend to address potential deficiencies due to two things in my life: eating an almost entirely plant-based diet and not going out in the sun very much during upper Midwestern winters. Taking them tends to help alleviate the feeling of being in a funk, whether it’s a placebo effect or not.
As always, check with your doctor before taking a dietary supplement of any kind. My doctor actually suggested these due to my diet and due to a long history of seasonal affective disorder.
I write in my journal. This is a strategy I’ve mentioned a lot in recent months. Journal writing has been a lifelong habit for me, but I’ve found that when I use it to really dig into what I’m thinking about and what’s bothering me (more than just listing life events), it’s a profoundly helpful thing.
My strategy is the “morning pages” technique I learned from Julia Cameron. Sometime in the early morning each day, I pop open my journal with the aim of filling at least three pages, and I just dump whatever’s on my mind. What’s drawing my thoughts? I find that almost every sentence I write helps me clarify a thought, and that tends to almost always lead right into another one, which is another sentence, and before I know it I’ve filled at least three pages. When I stop – and sometimes I have to make myself stop – I feel like I’ve unclogged my head and that leaves me feeling much more prepared to tackle the day and tackle my life in general.
I spend time with friends and in social situations. When I’m feeling in a funk, I tend to retreat into myself and spend time at home rather than out and about. Consciously choosing to not do that and instead make myself engage socially makes a giant difference.
I’ll make myself go to a meetup or a community board game night. I’ll touch base with my friends and see if they’re up for doing anything social. I do this even if I don’t feel like it, and I strongly urge myself to go even if I don’t really want to. Why? I feel tremendously better when I get there and get involved in something with other people.
I make my bed, shower, brush my teeth, and put on clothes that make me feel good. Another thing that I often do when I’m in a funk is stay in my pajamas all day. It’s easy and feels comfortable, but it tends to add to a state of feeling in a funk.
If I start off my day – or at least do this in the morning – by taking a shower, getting dressed in something that feels good (like I’m engaging with the world), and making my bed, I tend to feel like today’s going to be a pretty good day and that carries on throughout the day.
I meditate. I mention meditation and prayer often, but it’s because it’s probably been the most profound thing I’ve discovered in terms of improving my life over the last few years and it’s free. The trick is that you really have to do it every day for a long while to start seeing the effects of it, because at first it doesn’t really seem to do a whole lot.
Just spend five minutes a day focusing on your breathing or on a single phrase or short prayer. If your mind wanders from it, bring it back to that focus point. Just do it every day. What’s the benefit? For me, it becomes easier to focus. It becomes easier to have a grip on my emotions. I sleep better. I work better. Everything just gets a little bit better. It happens subtly over time so that you don’t even notice it.
I block off a few days in the near future for a “stay-cation.” For me, knowing that I have two or three days coming up to dig deep into a hobby or take care of a project that’s been bothering me, I feel way more motivated to step up to the plate with all kinds of things in my life. I know that I have to get work completed by then and I usually want to get a bunch of other personal tasks done by then, too, and I feel motivated to do them.
This is more of a “time motivator” or “time reward,” really. By setting up this reward, I strongly encourage myself to be more engaged today and in the next few days, and by being so engaged, I often lift myself out of a sense of lethargy.
I go to bed early enough so that I can wake up naturally without an alarm clock. One of the most surefire ways for me to feel burnt out is to get up excessively early every day to take care of tasks. I can do it for a while, but then I need at least a day or two where I can sleep in without an alarm and get up when I feel like getting up.
Waking naturally rather than due to the sound of an alarm clock means that your natural sleep cycles finish when they should rather than being disrupted. This helps with wakefulness and energy level throughout the day and can help quite a bit with turning back a tide of low energy.
These tools are incredibly helpful for me personally when turning back a period of melancholy or low energy in my life. They are not a solution for clinical depression, vitamin deficiencies, or other deeper problems. If you feel a strong sense of low energy and low mood that isn’t alleviated by these techniques, please see a medical professional or at least talk to someone in your life about your struggles. People do care and will listen.
Good luck!
The post Twelve Low Cost Strategies for Getting Out of a Funk appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Five years ago I left my full-time job to enter the freelance writing world. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to best organize and manage my days so they were productive and meaningful. At some point during that first year, I discovered the Bullet Journal methodology, and while I’ve picked it up and put it down a couple times since then, I recommitted to the analog process earlier this year, around the same time I chose to intentionally disconnect more from my phone.
If you’re looking for a new way to approach 2019, the pen-and-paper-notebook-based system is best visualized through this five-minute tutorial video found on the Bullet Journal website. But if you’re curious to know even more about how to make it work for you, founder Ryder Carroll published his first book, The Bullet Journal Method — now a New York Times bestseller — this fall.
I spoke with Carroll earlier this month and asked him, with all the available apps and technology out there, why develop an analog system?
“For me, it’s not about digital versus analog,” he said. “It’s about figuring out what the best tools are for the job. I found that over the years putting everything into apps was not in fact making me more productive and I realized that it was a lot easier for me to clarify my thoughts and to get organized on paper first.”
Once his thoughts are organized on paper, he may find a digital home for that information — for instance, scheduling a needed phone call into a calendar app.
“It was the process of disengaging from technology that allowed me to re-engage with technology a lot more effectively. For me, I think one thing technology is really wonderful at is helping us connect with the world around us. Technology provides us with unlimited ways for us to be more productive, but also it’s a double-edged sword because it’s also an unlimited amount of distractions.”
Our time and energy are incredibly limited, Carroll said. If we’re not careful, we can waste so much more time than we should being distracted – but journaling can help disengage your auto-pilot.
“It activates us differently and we interact with it in a way that requires us to slow down,” he said. “I think that a lot of times we mistake convenience for efficiency. Yeah, it’s much faster to type, but maybe it would behoove us to slow down, especially when it comes to figuring out what it is that we will be investing our time and energy into.”
Part of that slowing down is choosing a writing utensil and notebook that works for you. BuJo, as it’s often called, doesn’t require fancy or expensive products. Once you’ve selected your tools, then you’ll learn to apply a system of daily, monthly, and future logging to a practice of reflection, goal-setting, and meaning-making.
And no matter how many creative and artistic Bullet Journal page examples you find online, Carroll said that the only thing that matters is the content, not the presentation. When Bullet Journal started becoming popular, he explained, a lot of the people who first adopted it were creatively gifted and their form of expression was sharing it online. He was clear to state that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. They’re proud of their work, and many times they’re coming up with creative visual solutions to organization.
Over time, though, he said, it started to feel like it was becoming a competition. “The problem with that to me is that it takes the emphasis off of what it should be, which is about self-learning and figuring out what you need to become more productive.”
Start with the basics, which you can find on the website, or in his book, and if you want to become more creative from there, go for it. “If you see my own,” he said, “it’s filled with illegible chicken scratch and it’s black and white. It’s always about how effective of a tool it becomes, right? You can have a beautiful pretty hammer, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t help you sink the nails, it doesn’t matter.”
And it can be a really effective tool, beyond basic logging of to-do list items. Custom lists, which Carroll calls “Collections,” can be used to track everything from what books you’ve read in a year, to what kind of vacation you want to take next (and exactly how you’re going to budget for it), to various types of financial management, such as:
“Every to-do item,” Carroll said, “is an experience waiting to be born. So if you see it in that context, the to-do list all of sudden becomes like a time machine. It allows you to peek at the future that you’re looking to build. If that’s a future that you don’t want, then chances are you should probably address that in the now. If that is a future you do want, then you can be a lot more intentional about the steps that you’re taking toward those futures.”
When we start looking at what we really want and what we really need on an ongoing basis, he added, “it becomes a lot more focused and relevant so you can actually pipe your resources into something that is much more meaningful.”
More by Kirsten Akens:
The post Finding Order and Meaning in Your Life Through Bullet Journaling appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
