Janice Reynoso

Today’s world is a constant swirl of noise, distractions, demands, interruptions, and decisions. Even if you work from home, your attention is still caught in a tug-of-war between work and home life with hardly any space between one task and the next. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, stressed, even helpless.

This is where taking a mindful pause can help. Mindfulness simply means being fully in the here and now. Mindfulness guru Jon Kabatt-Zinn explains that it “means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” This may sound simple, but it’s challenging given the constant chatter in your own head about a million things you should be doing at the moment. Mindful pauses help you silence that chatter and focus on the present moment. It keeps you from being controlled by your own automatic responses, biases, expectations, and negative emotions.

By continually practicing mindfulness, you’ll gain a sense of calm, clarity, and control. It eases your stress and helps you manage your emotions. As Kabatt-Zinn says, “If we don’t really know where we are standing—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations.”

The beauty of mindful pauses is that there’s no right or wrong way to do it. It can be adapted to your present activity. You can sit or stand, be in a quiet place, or in the middle of a busy commute. You can be bored, or sad, or mad, or happy. Simply watch your thoughts and feelings, good or bad, and realize that you are not what you think or feel. 

Here are a few mindfulness exercises you can adapt to your circumstances. 

You may take a mindful pause during natural breaks in your schedule, like washing your hands, resting in between video calls, or during an evening regimen before sleeping. As an option, set an alarm to remind you when it’s time to take a short pause.

 

Start with your legs, then your back, then your arms. As you do, pay attention to the sensations you feel. Try to sense your heartbeat from a pulse point. Listen to each breath as it enters your lungs.

If you’re eating lunch, savor each flavor that goes on your tongue. If you’re taking the stairs, feel the weight of each step as you climb. 

Breath deeply for 10 to 15 seconds, focusing on your diaphragm. When you take a deep breath, be aware of it. If your mind wanders off to other things, bring it back to your breathing. 

Rather than blowing up at the source of your anger, take a step back from the emotion. Observe your thoughts and negative emotions. Tell yourself, “I am feeling anger, but I’m not an angry person.” Later, as your thoughts calm down, the way forward may be easier to see. 

Always remember that mindfulness is a marathon, not a sprint. Keep taking mindful pauses as you go on, and you’ll soon gain a peaceful, focused, and energized mind.

Taking Mindful Pauses is an online course that explores our overall mental wellbeing and taking care of it through a practical approach. 

 

Even before Covid-19 threw the planet into a tailspin, freelance work had been a staple of the world economy. In the Asia Pacific region, 84% of hiring managers have reported outsourcing work to freelancers, with 79% saying a more flexible workforce gives industries a competitive advantage.

Now that the global pandemic has grounded everyone at home, people are flocking to the gig economy in droves. Competition has made this type of business even more complicated. 

If you’re a new freelancer attempting to navigate this way of working, here are three steps to help give you an edge.

 

• Accept that it’s going to be tough

Even at the best of times, freelancing isn’t easy. Part of your job is finding and keeping clients. You also have to ensure you get paid on time, have your own insurance, and file your own paperwork. 

With the pandemic, it’s even tougher for current freelancers to find work as their regular clients may no longer be able to pay them. Moreover, quarantine measures have ensured that the freelancer market is currently bursting at the seams with new workers.

Being a freelancer at this time means going on a continual hunt for the next job, hoping that this is the one that will last you more than a couple of weeks. This means an adjustment and buffing up your mental fortitude. Accept that things won’t get easier over time; you just get used to it.

As such, when getting into freelancing, level your expectations. You won’t turn into an instant success overnight. You need to build up your name and your career—and for some, it may be from the ground up. 

Given all this, what can a new freelancer do?

 

• Assess Your Skills, Select your Niche

 

 

Take time to review your skills thoroughly in order to answer this question. Some answers may surprise you. For example, you may find your niche in teaching your skills remotely to others. Whether educating children in music or mentoring new digital marketers, this can be a viable source of employment. On the other hand, you can act as a consultant for businesses in your particular industry. Both of those avenues only require an Internet connection and your expertise to get started.

Some freelancers may not have skills that are easily adaptable to work-from-home. If you’re committed to freelancing, you will need to take the chance and learn new skills that you CAN apply. And the best source of that will be other freelancers who have skills they want to share.

 

• Put Yourself Out There 

There is no going around it—you need to market yourself. Set up your portfolio, then: advertise, network, ASK. With the enormous influx of new freelancers, you can be sure that clients won’t come to you; you will have to go to them and make sure you stand out.

One quick thing to try: contact old clients and ask if they need your services. After all, you already have a relationship, and it’s far easier to maintain current clients than to look for new ones. Even if they can’t provide you with work now, they may recommend you to others who can. 

You can also try email marketing, creating your own website to advertise your skills, and building up a social media presence. And you can always turn to friends and family to refer you to would-be clients.

Another viable avenue is to sign up with freelancing websites such as Upwork, Freelance.ph, and Fiverr. These online platforms provide freelancers with worldwide access to potential employers, a webpage to showcase your portfolio and experience, and a payment system. However, they charge hefty fees for this service, so keep that in mind before signing on.

 

• Remember to Rest

It’s easy to lose track of time in the freelancing business, so slow down now and then to take care of your mental and emotional state. Job hunting and completing projects are taxing and stressful, so carve out some time from your schedule to take breaks and do things that make you happy. Remember, you won’t be any good to anyone (yourself included) if you’re burned out.

Do you have your own tips for new freelancers? Sound out in the comments below. 

 

The global pandemic means that individuals and organizations alike must take on enormous changes in a ridiculously small amount of time. Simply put, the line between home and office has blurred as people move businesses online—and this impacts their workflows.

A workflow is defined as interconnecting tasks where you turn raw data into a finished product. It can apply to a single person or to a company with hundreds of members. For copywriters, a workflow can consist of getting an order, writing the copy, sending it to an editor for review, and turning it over to the client for final approval. Another example in terms of businesses would be a purchase requisition workflow, which would entail multiple checks and approvals before a final request can be sent.

Going digital with your own workflows may seem daunting at first, especially for companies used to the familiarity of paperwork and face-to-face meetings. But provided it’s done properly, a digitized workflow gives several immediate benefits. In a nutshell, digitization:

• Lowers the number of steps to complete tasks
• Raises collaboration between workers
• Collates and centralizes data, reducing the hassle of having to look for it
• Removes the need for paper documentation
• Allows for automation, which saves time and removes repetitive tasks
• Tracks results and performance

Here are four steps towards digitizing your processes: 

Assess Your Workflows

Nobody likes the word “audit”, but it’s a critical step to review your existing manual processes prior to digitization. Firstly, it lets you identify which processes need improvements and what should be prioritized for digital migration. Examples include:

• Workflows that must be shared with several people
• Workflows that can be combined or summarized
• Workflows that are prone to error, such as those needing manual computation
• Workflows that need approval from multiple authorities
• Undocumented or wrongly documented processes

Secondly, an assessment also helps you identify what digitization tools best suit your organization’s needs.

Choose a Workflow to Digitize

After reviewing your processes, select the first workflow to undergo digitization. It would help to choose one that isn’t too difficult to migrate, but will generate a dramatic improvement on the process itself. 

Let’s use our earlier example of purchase requisition. In this workflow, a purchase request needs a series of approvals from managers to be completed. Pre-quarantine, you probably would have to approach these higher-ups one by one to get them to sign off on some paperwork. In a digital approach, that process would be automated, with managers being notified through their mobile device that a step needs their approval in order to proceed. This would immediately cut down waiting time and streamline your workflow. Not only is digitizing this process taking the low-hanging fruit, but it will also convince hold-outs in your organization that digitization is the way to go.

Choose with the Right Tools

By now, your audit would have revealed indicators as to what digital tool would best suit your needs. You could look at cloud-powered tools provided by Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

You may venture into collaboration tools like Trello or Slack to track progress and keep everyone involved updated. Finally, you may also employ meeting software such as Zoom and WebEx to hold virtual meetings where necessary. 

Reassess, Optimize, Repeat 

Once you have completed digitizing your first workflow, review your changes to see what else can be improved with your digital process. Can you find a way to further simplify or even eliminate certain steps? If you can identify areas that can be automated, all the better! You save your team some extra time that they may use in other areas. 

Once you have optimized your first workflow, you may expand to others, applying what you learned from adapting the first process. Continue to monitor your digitized workflows to look for ways to improve.

In time, as more of your workflows become digitized, your company will reap the benefits of streamlined, centralized, and automated processes.

 

If there’s one thing the Internet will never lack, it’s information. The more crucial challenge is figuring out if the data we consume is correct or can be trusted. Nowadays, when facts are often buried deeper than that last bottle of hand sanitizer on the supermarket shelf, discerning the accurate from the erroneous is critical. 

Why Fake News is Dangerous

Wikipedia has its own definition of fake news sites (including a subset just for Philippine-based ones!), as does Politifact. Broadly put, they are sites that publish hoaxes or misleading information with the intention to drive web traffic. In the case of COVID-19, spreading fake news can create the ripple effect of people making potentially life-changing decisions based on inaccurate or false data. 

So how can you protect yourself from fake news?

1. Consider the Source: the CRAP test

According to educator Molly Beestrum, use this handy acronym to check news sources:

C – Is it CURRENT? 

Check the dates of articles—is the information current?

How long has the site been in existence? How often is it updated?

Is the contact information legitimate? 

R – Is it RELIABLE? 

What kind of information is available? Is the content primarily opinions? Does the source provide their own data or quotations?

A – Who is the AUTHORITY? 

What are the credentials of the author? Are they reputable? Are there clearly marked advertisements on the site?

P – What is the PURPOSE/POV? 

Does the author seem to push an agenda or do they cite references? Is the author trying to sell you something? Does the piece have a specific bias for/against the topic?

2. Watch out for masquerading sources. Some websites mimic the URLs of legitimate news sites and add “com.co” or “com.info.” There are also sites that allow outside writers to post for them, that don’t necessarily go through the same editing process (e.g., Buzzfeed Community Posts).

3. Read beyond the headlines. We get it—scrolling through socials, it’s easier to consume more news just by reading the headlines. An old study from 2016 claims 59% of links shared on Twitter have never actually been clicked before they were retweeted. Even legitimate news sites can over-sensationalize their headlines to make them more shareable. However, with only the headlines, we never get the full story.

4. Ask the Experts Look for resources whose aim is solely to sniff out fact from fiction. Here are a few:

• Factcheck Philippines is a coalition of independent groups and individuals who aim to combat fake news and misinformation in the country 
• Snopes started out as a site to verify urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore, but has since evolved into the Internet’s oldest fact-checking resource
• The Verification Handbook is a hardcore resource specific for journalists, calling itself “a definitive guide to verifying digital content for emerging coverage”
• Others: The Wayback Machine, FotoForensics, and Google Reverse Image Search  can double-check web pages and photos

5. Be skeptical by nature. If something is too good to be true, it likely is. Inversely, if something sounds terrible, proceed reading with caution. 

6. Read more than one source. The best strategy against fake news: Go through multiple sources to get a general feel of the facts, as well as different viewpoints to inform your own opinion. 

We can’t stop the flood of information. But we can curate our sources, think critically of what’s presented, and be responsible about the information we consume and disseminate. Let’s not be a virus to everyone on our feeds and spread harmful, incorrect information. 

Other sources:

Zimdars, Melissa. Real News vs Fake News

Keepin’ It Real: Tips & Strategies for Evaluating Fake News