WTVS News

Archive for April, 2010

It has been said that budgeting is like dieting, it just doesn’t work without additional insights and effort. If all you are willing to do with your diet is plan it out, then you won’t get very far. If all you are willing to do is stick to your diet until it is no longer convenient, it won’t work very well either. If add exercise to a healthy diet that you stick to all the time, you will lose a lot of weight and may even gain some muscle tone.

How then do you bring that back to budgeting. Well, if you have a lot of loans out, you may be a bit overweight in your spending. This can be differentiated from if you take out a cash advance loan once in a while. If you only plan out your budget and don’t enact it, it won’t do you any good, and if you only stick to your budget until there is something you really want , it won’t work out very well. If you write up a budget, stick to it and hold onto what you have to do, you may even be able to save up enough money that you may not need loans, even when an emergency happens , and you will be able to get out of debt.

Part of what you will need to do is start to record everything that you spend money on. If you went out and bought lunch while you were at work, or dinner when you came home from work, record that, keep track of even the smallest things, like a soda from the machine down the hall. This will give you the knowledge of what you are really spending your money on, as well the knowledge of what your habits are doing to your money. Make sure that after you have done this for at least a week that you also tally up all your mortgage, car loans, utilities, and other loan payments. This will tell you the things you can’t cut out of your budget and how much you have to work with. From there you need to reallocate your money, and only spend on each item as much as you say you are going to spend on it.

You need to remember though, this is only a temporary fix, and if you think about it constantly as something that you wish you could be doing without because you want more money, you won’t ever get out of your habits. If however, you reform your thinking to spending less money, and want it to work it will be more effective.

It’s a new era, and a fine time to change some of the old ideas and replace them with ones that work. As the structures are changing, many organizations are changing to meet the needs of a new time. With any new era, there are new challenges, and fortunately, innovative ideas are always coming to help organizations meet those challenges with enthusiasm and determination.

Taking some of the central tenets of Dale Carnegie’s simple and effective ideas, there are corporate team building programs that can be enormously useful in helping to point the direction toward a future that is bright. Meeting challenges with optimism seems like an easy task, and perhaps at its most elemental form it is easy. To get there, however, takes a little bit of old-fashioned elbow grease and common sense, to get rid of the old and make room for the new.

Training programs are an excellent means of getting groups together so that they can honestly begin to assess their strengths and weaknesses, and begin to make real changes that are beneficial to everyone. There are plenty of specific courses designed to meet specific needs, but all of the group work has the result of unifying the team. It is an era where it seems more necessary than ever to stick together. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts , and the difficult task is working to unleash its real potential.

The truth of the matter is that every group has hidden and unlocked potentials, and getting to these centers can take some time and some work. It’s somewhat connected to that old maxim that the more you put in, the more you get back. That’s absolutely true when it comes to developing strategies for teamwork. Because it doesn’t just help to make teams work more efficiently, but builds them up as if they were independent units, making a team that is in harmony , and able to face any task with efficiency, confidence, and optimism.

London is a place for art, and it’s a place where the laws of gravity seem to be particularly strong. It’s not as though the people who live here weigh more than in other places, although in some neighborhoods and on some mornings, that is certainly the impression. It’s more connected to the weight of history, and particularly during the last big conflict to tear through Europe where the weight of falling objects was palpable, and it still bears its share of scars in the shape of memory.

There are artists who acknowledge it and those who don’t, and the separation between them might seem negligible. In some instances, it is that, and in other instances, it’s hard to wonder whether this would be the perfect moment to understand radical acts of compassion. In the art of Simon Faithfull , this is so light, that the touch sometimes even seems to be absent, but any second, third, or subsequent looks at the work reveal that it is there, and there is a force running through here that is as strong as the hands that made it.

However, the central fact behind the work is absolute refusal to form a central fact, and this is what makes his Recent Findings such a delightful and jarring break in time.

The works are breaks in time, because there are moments of great simplicity that are coupled with the method of the projects, revealing a design that is so complex that no one could be aware of every implication, or sometimes even half of one single implication. The work on latitude is in itself a reason enough to leave the comfort of a lovely hotel simply in order to enjoy a new kind of loveliness. The UK artist is finally showing some of these works here after having shown them elsewhere, and that’s a weight that falls to earth all on its own, and adds another level of meaning to the extraordinary work.