Tag: work

Work Is A Motivator

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Exciting times, so it is. Working on a Saturday has me tuckered out, so I am lazy on the couch watching nonsense TV. It’s times like this I appreciate being able to sit and relax.

That’s why I like to keep myself busy. As much as I sometimes say I would like to lazy around and watch TV forever and a day, I honestly don’t think I could hack it.

I like going out, even for a walk, makes me feel so much better than watching TV all day. I just can’t sit and watching hours and hours of TV. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the Internet. I swear the Internet can eat up my whole weekend without me even realising. And the issue is, I might not even be doing anything specific, I am just looking at things.

So, so that I don’t do that, I try to make myself do things. I might read, walk or go meet friends. I think it is important to keep your mind active and do something. That’s why I am happy to work. Although I do complain, I think that having something to do helps me keep motivated. As low motivated as I can be, I know that I would be a lot worse if I didn’t work. It’s like it gets me off my arse and gets me moving?

What about you? Do you think that you would remain motivated if you didn’t have education or work to fill your time?

Set Your Goals

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Things are never easy.

If they were, I guess there would be no real point of anything. You wouldn’t need any effort. I think the driving force through life, is the satisfaction that you get when you reach a target. So if the target wasn’t there, and you just got everything you wanted, would anything get done? I don’t think so. I think people would get lazy, as everything would simply come to them.

It’s a thing that I use to remind myself, when I do struggle with life. That these are there to keep me moving. That’s why a person dreams, to keep them active and motivated to be productive. And that reassures me. It helps me see that everyone else is doing the same thing. Just working towards their own targets that they have set themselves.

The difficulty is, some people make it look easy. But that’s all it is, looking easy. It doesn’t mean that person isn’t having a crap ‘ol time, it means that they do not let it effect them. And if other people see them having things ‘easy’ , then they can say to themselves that it isn’t all bad, and amble forward.

Everyone has different goals, ideas and what they want from life. The secret is to remember yours goals and focus on them. It’s very easy to be distracted by someone who seems to skip through life carelessly, but try not to be concerned about them. And how you become that person who can smile away, despite having an up-road struggle.

Smile! It makes everything that litte bit brighter. 🙂

Things Are A-Changing!

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I am trying to change a few things over here. Which is why from today you can also find my blog at https://sueriot.wordpress.com, as well as ol’ Rgraphics. Everything else I run online, bar Youtube, all runs of the same username. So it made sense.

Rgraphics is the name I picked before I really tried to get all my social networks working together. I am trying to forge an online identity away from my personal, offline life. That involves me changing a few things about, and taking away the mention of real details. Whilst this doesn’t have a lot of relevance to things like this blog, it does have more to do with Facebook. Yes, a useful tool which has been inundated with nosey relatives, and ex-friends. While I’d like to say I was able to go and fix my security settings accordingly, Facebook make it hard, and I am far too lazy, so it doesn’t happen.

Because I plan to get back into the interwebs ‘full tilt’, I felt that some of my personal side should be hidden. Mostly, because people seem to think that because I use a lot of social media under my real name, I will tell all their secrets, and people will pry about them. Or something. I don’t know what people are so scared about, because this isn’t anything I have ever been worried about.

So for the moment. I have taken Riot (from Riot Graphics), and shall be calling myself Sue Riot online. Not a very smart alias, but hopefully enough to force a division between internet Sue, and IRL Sue. I am the same person though, so really it shouldn’t make a difference. It also keeps my ‘details’ secure. Though in one of my dumber moments, I am pretty sure I told most of my details to Facebook already.

Hooray!! I r so smart.

Initial Aspirations

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

When I started this blog, I had many ideas and thoughts of what I would use it for. It would be a creative blog, where I would post images of what I had made, and use it as a promotional tour for my business. In retrospect, I think I aimed a little high.

Firstly because being at college, and struggling through a few years of forced creativity, has lead to me going from one artistic mental block, to another. Secondly, I just am far too scatter brained to make my blog about one thing. I maybe should organise it better, but nothing in my life is very organised, so it maybe wouldn’t reflect ME if it wasn’t a bit of a mess. Some excuse, right?

I have always been an over thinker. A person who seeks importance in the most stupid and trivial things. My interests in things can get intense, but will also suddenly wane after a short period of time. I want to express my love and experience so many different things, that I always find myself looking for ‘something else’. Whilst some things such as favourite bands, movies and books will stay with me, I can’t exclusively care about a favourite thing. I think that liking new things can be a challenge, a challenge that should be welcomed.

Because I try to be interested in so many different things, I find that what I want to talk about changes every day. One day I will want to talk about Benji Madden sneaking into Scotland without my knowledge, the next day I’ll be talking about some political land mine. Whilst this leads to me being very sporadic, I like the idea that I have a place to express my thoughts in a accessible manner.

So whilst my initial plans for this blog haven’t come true, I still am happy with it. I have made this blog my online ‘home’ for the last few years, and I have become very attached to it. I find that WordPress is a great blog host, and find that is the best managed blogging site on the net. Trust me, I have tried almost every blogging site going. I like everything from the multiple platforms you can blog from, to the twitter feed. I think that the simplicity of using the service, has been crucial for me staying here for so long.

I guess I am feeling very retrospective. Whilst the majority of people I know say I waste my time writing a blog, I will always scoff in their faces. If a person has the freedom to express themselves without fear, no matter how they do it, they will never waste their time.

The Idea Of Deserve

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Some people work for every little thing they get, and some thing that they should be gifted things without work. After some thought on the topic, I was left wondering about how everyone has some kind of expectancy that they feel that they should be entitled to. But are we entitled to all we thing we deserve?

 I started thinking about this topic, after a discussion I had via Twitter, where a discussion on the Royal family, ended up with comments of ‘they don’t deserve the luxuries they have’. It made me wonder, who is anyone, to decide, whether someone is deserving of a certain lifestyle. Do homeless people deserve to rot, because they are possibly drug addicts and are responsible for the mess they find themselves in?

I like to think that people are responsible for what happens in their lives. That, what life you lead, is decided by the actions that you do. And by that belief, I have to do any task to the maximum of my capabilities. If I don’t try at something, I feel that I can’t complain if it all goes wrong, and I don’t get the result I want.

I find that a lot of people don’t work at something, so they look at others, who are ‘better off’ than themselves, and berate them. Say that they are not worthy for the privileges that they have. These insults don’t change anything, the privileged person is still privileged, and the insulter just ends up bitter about their own situation. So complaining about those with more than you, is counter-productive. It does nothing, but make a person feel worse about their own life.

Another point about people’s ‘observance’ of those more privileged people, is that most of the time, the observer knows nothing about the person they berate. They have no idea what that person does day-to-day, or what they get in return. It is a pointless and wrong observation.

More people need to be concerned more about whether they reach their potential, rather than complaining about others. If you put all your energy making yourself successful, you won’t feel the need to waste time tearing others down. Yes, it may seem a tad self-obsessed, and you may end up contained in a ‘bubble’ on your own, but it is better for a person’s well being. Being obsessed with those who has more than you, just takes your focus off your life. Think about how you are privileged and work so that the things that you admire in others, is something that you possess.

Weekend Worker.

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

For all of my working days, since starting at a bakery aged 16, I have had to accept working weekends. Because I have spent most of my days in some form of education, working weekends was the easiest way to get extra money. And even when I got away from working just weekends, I had moved on to working evenings with a Saturday once a month. Now, I am contracted to work Tuesday to Saturday. Which sounds painful, but it is not as bad as I ever thought it would be.

Working weekends is something that most workers have to accept as part of their job. And because of this, the sense of a standard ‘working week’ is becoming more unusual. The majority of people I know don’t work 9-5, and life works around that. With the change in the working week, people need to be more forgiving with friends and family when planning events. I have seen friendships end pointlessly because someone is stuck at work with no time off. It’s sad, because it isn’t exactly someone’s fault if they can’t get a holiday.

But with banks having 24 hour phone lines and supermarkets being open all day everyday, the world no longer stops at 5pm. It’s getting harder to switch off from everything seeing as it doesn’t stop. It’s hard remembering that every so often, it’s good to step back and enjoy what time off you do get.

Converse Well?

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

What do you notice most everyday? Is it the weather? What you had for dinner? What outfit you wore to work? Do you remember the person who served you when you bought your morning coffee? Did you say thank you, or are they lost in your mind, destined to never see the light of day again?

I ask because as someone who has worked in customer services since I was 16, I have always found conversation important. Of how a little bit if effort to wish your bus driver a nice day, could make him smile and want to be nicer to other passengers. Positivity is a chain reaction, once you feel it, you can pass it on to others. It is contagious. And when you feel happy, everything that you have to deal with is a lot easier.

So why does that bring in conversation? Well, I work in a call centre, where conversations are of obvious importance. Sometimes, due to the environment, it is easy to become caught up in the business of targets and such, so that conversations don’t become the focus. Well, in my bid of being more positive, I decided to work on building a better conversation with my customer. And over the last few days, I focused on the call and the customer, and it made me feel good because the customer could see the difference. Feeling like you have helped someone, is a big personal boost, and that makes things bearable.

The biggest way to change things, is to treat everyone in your life the way you expect to be treated. Converse with people to treat the situation with a positive outlook. Try it and see what happens. It makes work better and life easier. As they say, if you open the door for positive thinking, more positive opportunity will find you.

I hope this makes sense. I am always quick to complain when life is poor, but being positive is not something I do normally. So this new thing is helping
me change some habits and hopefully change my life for the better.

Start All Over Again

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

So it’s Tuesday. The start of another week for me. And, I have to say that I am pretty enthusiastic about it.

Why are you not being faced with my usual grumbles, I hear you ask. I guess it’s because I feel good. That’s it really. Just that I feel like I am achieving something good and worthwhile. It is unusual for me, so I feel I should let the world know. I decided last week that I was going to use the next 12 weeks (now 11) to make a positive change on my life.

I am hoping to use the period to do things that I have been meaning to do for a while, such as buy glasses, renew my drivers license, etc. I have taken to writing a ‘to do’ list, and having a copy on my phone, so I can work through what I need or want to do for that day. It seems a good idea, and really helped me get prepared for the day today.

So, readers, do you have any methods that help you get tasks done?

The Excited Road of Progress

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Overselling it a little?

Yes, probably. I am really into trying to make myself a better artist at the moment. I am hoping to do this through various avenues, such as designing more things, and being more active on blogs again.

It isn’t just writing entries and articles, which is going to make me a better artist, it is more showing my work. I will look at noting my progress, and what I do, as I aim to make myself more creative and make Riot Graphics a viable business. A lot of the parts of this plan are hard, as it includes ideas such as web design, which are things that I have neglected for many months.

So lots of practice needed, but I am happy to be going to try and get better. The idea that I want to get more active, also shows that I have passed a brick wall, which had stopped me for so many months. I hope I have the drive, as I aim to make myself better both at Graphics work, and at my day job, at a call centre. I think that it will take more than crossing fingers and praying. I have needed to get my head sorted for a long time, and hopefully I have turned a corner, and will be my own future.

Being Inventive

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

The one thing that I have noticed, is that as a freelancer, or someone who tries to freelance, when you don’t get work, it is hard to keep busy. I don’t know if this has been a problem over the last few months. If I get no interest, I take it personal, because my work is such a personal thing to me. So, when I get no work, I feel like it!s because I have done something wrong. I haven’t, but the easiest way to get past these feelings, is to ignore the issue completely. Which I have done.

But I can’t carry on like this. So, I have been writing down ideas of personal projects, that I can take on, to help improve my activity levels. Hopefully, it will also make me feel better about myself and about my work. I always feel better when I am doing things, be it blogging or painting. Because I am using my time more productive, I hope that the positive change of my thoughts, will open the door to more possibilities.

That’s the PMA way of thinking, anyway. That if you experience more opportunities, then more opportunities will come your way. Or that’s the idea, anyway. I have a few ideas I am thinking of, so we’ll see what happens.