Christmas is round the corner, and most of us have already filled up Santa’s bag with gifts for our near and dear ones. But some of us may be so busy with work, especially after this recession, when earning money is justifiably the prime motive even in the holiday season. Here are a few last minute holiday tips that you could use to shop effectively and save up on that extra buck.

Don’t Hunt for the Best, Buy the Best from Whatever’s Available

I understand, you love little Michael very much and want to buy him a gift that he’ll cherish for the rest of his life. That’s a fine idea! But know what to buy. It’s better to ask your kid what he likes and buy him that. Your ideas of a surprise gift maybe better than this, as you want to enjoy the thrill along with your child when he opens the wrapped gift. But now you hardly have any time for searching for gifts at different shops. Just visit a good shop and pick a reasonably good item at an equally reasonable good price and walk off with the gift. Your child will surely love it.

For Relatives and Friends Make a List and Then Budget

When it comes to the rest of the family, you should first make a list of the persons, and the amount of money you are willing to spend on each one of them depending upon your relationship If you want to buy some garments, shoes or personal accessory items, make it a point to know the sizes, feature and color preferences before you buy, so that you spend less time guessing on the suitability of these items at the shop. If you don’t have sufficient money to buy for every relative, just approach the most understanding of them all, and tell him/her about your monetary crisis and without hurting the sentiments convince that you’d like to postpone his/her gift.

Scour the Internet before Actually Visiting Shops

Intelligent shopping necessitates good research. How would you prefer to do it? By physically moving from shop to shop, or by clicking the website of one shop and another? I’d opt for the latter because I can get to see what’s being offered in different shops in just a glance! This saves me a lot of time and effort. After researching for the best deals, go straight to the shops and pick up the items of interest.

Slash your estimated expenditure by 1/5

Cut your total estimated expenditure by about 1/5 and see if you can stick to that. Even if you spend a bit extra you’ll be only spending the amount you have originally planned for.  It’s always better to set a lower target than the estimated expenditure because people generally tend to spend more than what they plan for. If you don’t slash the expenditure you’ll end up spending more than what you’ve originally planned for.

With these simple strategies you can expect to enjoy Christmas and the coming New Year without burning a hole in your pocket !

If only people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. – Michelangelo

Truly, if only people knew. But how can they, with so many blog posts, books and tutorials promising to teach them mastering a skill in just 7 days, 2 days, and some even few hours? When I was in my teens, it used to be a ‘couple of months’. The number of days to master a skill seems to be dwindling every year.

The truth, sorry to say, is not so miraculous.

There is one approach to master a skill and virtually the only one:

• Learn:

  About it. Watch, read, listen, and ask about anything and everything that’s related to it. Learning and knowledge is the first step to achieve it.

• Do it:

  Do it again, and again, and again. Here, you start understanding it. Forget about the quality or the level of mastery, because at this stage, you are miserable. But remember, you are learning.

• Keep doing it:

  and after about a year or two you will be good at it. I said good, not a master. To achieve mastery, you need to…

• Do some more:

  By the time you reach this stage, you have made most of the common mistakes and more importantly, learned from it. You aren’t anxious about committing mistakes because of two reasons. First, you are used to it and secondly, you make very few now. This is the time ascend from ‘goodness’ to ‘greatness’.

Swallow the fact that it takes about 5 to 10 years to master a skill, purely depending on how much time you spend doing it. According to few experts, it takes about 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, but I seriously don’t believe it. It vastly varies from person to person, their skills, and many other aspects.

For instance, I have been trying to master the art of blogging. I wrote my first article about 5 years ago, but I am still

learning and I know I have much more to learn. You have to try it, commit mistakes, learn, do some more, learn some more. That’s when you understand it. Gradually, you become good and then comes a time, if you are still doing it, when you are great at it.

Ask any master, any professional about his journey of mastering his skill and he will gladly disclose the fact; the fact that it takes many years of hard work, consistency, passion and learning to become a master. It demands passion, it demands aspiration, it demands doing and more doing.

So the bottom-line is: do it and do it with fun. Don’t get disheartened, you are just a beginner. Enjoy it like we all did. Do it, learn it, like it, love it, and live it. That’s they only way to achieve mastery and I declare this openly, to the world.

Get the passion and start doing it without wasting time. And do not, I repeat, do not buy the book or subscribe the post that promises to teach you a skill in a day, or even a month. They are hoaxers with a hand in your wallet.

Keep doing it without thinking of giving up. You will succeed. Brain Tracy once said “Never consider the possibility of failure; as long as you persist, you will be successful.”

So we are all very excited about the festive season, Christmas is here to bring you lots of cheers and happiness, people all over the world get their gifts on the day of Christmas, dear Santa brings in smile on millions of faces world wide but when I look over on the darker side, I become really saddened by the plight of poor children where they cannot even afford to have 2 pieces of bread each day, these kids belong to the poorest of countries, they are often not recognized by aids providing organizations, they are not heard nor do they know what is their childhood, researching over this matter over Internet, I came across this wonderful presentation, I was really gobbled by the facts given in here, tears were trickling down my eyes when I went through each of its slide.

The presentation talks about bringing in real Santa’s that are we as people who can get out of our way and help those under nourished kids who are millions in number across the globe, it talks about poor children used for slavery and human trafficking, poor kids often fall in to the trap of prostitution to feed their family members, it talks about pornography, child abuse, child labor, and lots of other matter relating to the future of these kids. I was literally touched by the given facts and I would request you all to go through it and I am even sure you would take up this matter seriously and do a wee bit to help those children in need, God Bless Us All, Thanking you!

If surfing the internet faster with minimalist approach is your idea of working leisurely in office then I have something very interesting for you, there are millions of web users but hardly 20% of them know super fast web browsing tactics, this article is specially for them coz that cuts down on their time and can do work quicker without searching for options. As you get accustomed to your key boards, some things or steps just follows automatically when you start working over it and within a month’s time you get used to those commands and shortcuts while using your computers. Similarly, even I have made up some habits while net browsing all these years and as most of my work happens over my laptop, my walking office! I have found out even more such tools which would help me to send those commands to computer faster, often while stumbling upon someone in a conference room and looking at their working I wonder, oh my god, when are they going to reach the last option now? For me, its just a matter of few seconds and for them perhaps 5 minutes, I am not trying to brag here, but given the fact when computers do allow their users with such short cut options, why aren’t people using them and instead lengthening their tasks?

This might be the common question, computer freaks may be asking in and out, although there are super human beings too, whom I call jumping monkeys doing the work in a blink of an eye (faster than me, yes!) for them its more of a play than work, its their style of work and even you can work in your own created style and doing the work even faster and

better. Today, I bring you some of my tips, which I follow religiously while browsing the net, you need not follow all of them and some might seem even common to you but there are millions on the other side of universe who don’t know even simple shortcuts for browsing the net.

1. Use a browser having minimalist approach so that you can work faster, for normal web browsing geeks I advice working on Internet explorer, depends more on the operating system you are using. For Mac users, I had preferred Camino or Opera; they are just superb in their working. For a more faster working browser, you can opt for Firefox, it is standard complaint and modern, if your office guys are not working on this, then ask them to be a little modern and switch to, what world is using.
2. I have often seen people wasting most of their time in opening a new web browser while they can open new tabs in the same window makes your work faster and easier and you can even switch between them in just one window and there is no chance of your windows getting misplaced.
3. Most of the times the shortcuts we use in our daily computer chores are the same which we use on the web browser, learning keyboard shortcuts helps greatly as it consumes less time searching for options on title bar. The Mac users can use command T to open a new tab, command L to go to browser’s location, command D for bookmark and Command W to close a window, similarly there are lots of other shortcuts you can discover yourselves by making use of help option in your PCs or laptops.
4. Setting up keywords bookmarks makes your work faster on browsers and with speed dial options; you can extract your web page in a matter of just few seconds. Some browsers have keyword bookmarks and it takes less than a minute to set up one, to make such setting, click on the properties of bookmarks and set up the keyword.
5. Besides your regular google search, you can set up a keyword search for the pages you frequently visit. You can set up searches in the websites like flickr, amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia, Ebay, Wiktionary, etc. each of your saved webpage searches, you will have a keyword for your later reference.
6. Apart from general bookmarking of the sites we usually do, bookmark the resource pages and online books pages, that is called as fast online bookmarking, even if you don’t have much time at your end to browse through the page you can refer them later and carryon with your work for time being.
7. Flash sites are really annoying, as they take hell lots of time to load on the browser, and especially sites like youtube are totally dependent on such applications. Even if you don’t refer to these sites, even the ads, banners are made in flash, which takes too much time loading, you can go and turn off in preferences in your web browser settings.
8. Make use of bookmarklets, to avoid unnecessary clutter in the pages you are browsing, it provides you with great reading experience.
9. Extensions make your browser working slow, so turn them off, Firefox have big numbers of extensions supporting the sites but if you happen to use too many it will slow down your working process.
10. Making use of tabs is a good option but don’t open too many of them as that will make your browser slow in its working.
11. Switch off the toolbars, you don’t use on a regular basis, it makes your working more clear and focused without the clutter.
12. Make use of the tools like 1password or keepass, that stores your passwords safely in the browsers, people tend to forget their passwords often with too many web accounts or have to keep the same password for even their important transactions which is not very viable solution.
13. Often we see people get distracted from their work due to disruptions made by internet applications, install the “Freedom” software which is free to download and allows you to work on your systems 8 hours at a stretch with no distractions.

Some of you might be reading all these tips for the very first time, while some have already become experts in running their hands on web browsers, as time passes, you will get used to the practice of following short cuts, prepare your short cut list today and hang it on your office wall!