Category: tactics

March 19, 2015

Taking Control of Your Money Isn’t Complicated

A large number of individuals and families don’t have budgets, and the reasons are understandable: They find tracking details of their spending complicated. It makes them feel guilty. It takes...

General / tactics

March 12, 2015

How to Take Charge of Your Perfectionism with the 99% Rule

Is 99% good enough? If you make it through college with the equivalent of a 99% in GPA, then you’d easily make the Dean’s List. If your credit card is...

General / productivity / tactics

March 5, 2015

The Ultimate Guide to Recording Your Fleeting Thoughts

Ever find that you’ve got too much going on in your head? Ever have some unusual and creative idea pop up in your brain only to forget it hours later because...

Evernote / General / productivity / tactics

February 19, 2015

If Staying Organized is a Headache, Try Evernote

When I started grad school back in 2005, I bought a file cabinet. I was pretty fed up figuring out how to organize the countless papers in my life so...

General / principles / tactics

February 5, 2015

Tactics vs. Principles

There’s a ton of good advice out there on the web and published in books. (There’s also a ton of bad advice too but that’s a post for another day.)...

productivity / tactics

February 2, 2015

How a simple kitchen timer can beat your procrastination.

When I was in college, I had a particularly bad habit of procrastination. I would not complete most assignments or study for exams until the last minute, often resulting in...

These are all of my posts discussing various strategies that have helped me solve specific problems in my quest for self-improvement and increasing the overall quality of life.

Tactics are strategic pieces of advice that help solve a fairly specific problem. (Principles, on the other hand, are general and higher level ideas that convey the right mentality to solve a problem or achieve a goal but do not delve into specific actions.) Unlike principles which, in theory, are applicable to a wide range of people and situations, tactics will only be effective "as is" in highly specific situations.

In reality, most tactics discussed here will only have a high chance of success if your situation and background happen to be similar to mine, but having a flexible and creative mindset will go a long way in adapting my specific tactics for your situation. A good question to ask yourself is "what are the principles behind the tactic?" Once you have that answer, it's a matter of applying that principle to your situation. In a way, although tactics seem to be more direct and specific, they may end up requiring more ingenuity and creativity before being implemented successfully.

For further explanations and examples, please see the "Tactics vs. Principles" tab on the header toolbar.