“Do what you love.”

We’ve all heard this advice before. It’s great advice, though not many peo­ple truly take it to heart.

But some­times doing what you love isn’t enough to keep you going. Inspi­ra­tion, pas­sion, and moti­va­tion are dif­fi­cult things to hold on to. They always seem to slip away right when you need them most.

I am a stick­ler for effi­ciency and effec­tive­ness. I want things done bet­ter, faster, in fewer minutes/hours/days. Where I work, our pas­sion is in know­ing and find­ing out that there is a bet­ter way to do things. A nuance is impor­tant here though. Effi­ciency for efficiency’s sake is noth­ing but a bag of hot air and ambi­tion. Effi­ciency ought to be done for some­thing more. It is done so that a bet­ter stan­dard of liv­ing, a bet­ter all around life is attained. Hope­fully, we strive to be effi­cient so that we can be more disponible for other things. (I love that word: DISPONIBLE! It means to be avail­able for other things. For greater things. For “deeper” things.)

I per­son­ally think this app is heaven sent! Along with Get­ting Things Done (GTD), the Pomodoro Tech­nique ranks up there in one of the great inven­tions of mankind. I’m not kidding!

Life­spy has got a lot of short arti­cles on tips and other stuff. This is one of them. Have you ever won­dered why some things you think are com­mon­sense you real­ize is not really “com­mon” at all? Here are “com­mon­sense” tips on using the phone:

I am rehash­ing this post I made sev­eral months back because I think it is good to read it again (for peo­ple who have read it); in any case, it is good to high­light this now, spe­cially after I gave a retreat to col­lege stu­dents around three weeks ago. The last time I directed a silent retreat was three years ago. It was great to have joined that crack group of Jesuits and lay peo­ple who did one-on-one spir­i­tual direc­tion to stu­dents for five days! I directed some col­lege seniors who were about to spend their last semes­ter of col­lege and enter into a dif­fer­ent world. This post is ded­i­cated to them.