1) Changing places inside the house (or moving out to the garden if the weather allows it) sometimes really helps me to beat the monotony. I do have a special workplace reserved though where I spend most of my time.
2) Exercise has already been mentioned. Running works best for me, because it is done outdoors and therefore kills two birds with one stone (three if you have a dog).
3) Another thing that has made a big difference for me was starting a regular meditation practice. I have since noticed that it makes it much easier for me to control my focus and handle distracting thoughts. And there seems to be at least some evidence that I am not alone in this:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...
Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/6/829.abstract
4) Include relaxing activities on your daily agenda. Letting go is important for your wellbeing and therefore your work performance. Make room for it and allow yourself to enjoy it without feeling bad about it.
> Also, charities generally don't "turn down" people because they just got out of jail.
No, but there are many charities that serve a very specific purpose. And I would bet that there are far more who are involved in work with children than with convicts. Actually I know there are (I have my own limited experience in this specific area), but more to this later.
> Sure those like you would give it to orphans and widows.
I would be very surprised if "those like me" would not turn out to be in the vast majority. By the way, I picked rehabilitated criminals for a reason. During and for a while after university, I was living in a self sustained formerly occupied house and we has decided to reserve one floor for former prisoners to offer an easier start back into a regular life outside of social housing. Yet over the years due to people moving out and new people moving in and lost romantic ideas (who could have guessed that most people serving long time sentences are not highly educated and politically left-leaning) of how this living together would work, a majority of the house voted the former convicts out. Some of us tried to help to set up an alternative and work together with local welfare organizations or churches, but again they either lacked funding or met resistance of their members (mainly on the side of the churches). This experience let me to doubt your plans.
But something I would really love to see, and something you might probably be able to agree on too, would be some kind of mandatory community service. Maybe one or two weeks per year in an area of choice. I think that could result in more compassion and social cohesion than "just" giving money.
> The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul.
Something totally unheard of in charities or churches for that matter?
> What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to help with it.
I cannot see how this would not lead to a very disproportional distribution of welfare. Very few people, I guess, would rather give their money to rehabilitated murderers or sex offenders than to orphans or abused women for example.
Unfortunately their website seems to be only available in German. I run several services on their VPS and root servers and have not experienced a major problem yet.
"I am not disregarding humanities or history. But it makes more sense to read them when you have no other better work to do."
How is this not disregarding? Just to put things a little bit into perspective. I have an advanced degree in physics and a minor degree in maths. The most part of my professional career have I spend in various IT related positions, running my own businesses for the last 15 years. I am making enough money to lead a comfortable life. But if basically the only even remotely relevant thing (by other measures than monetary, i.e. improving the lives of anybody else) I have ever done was build a website for a global NGO and a mobile app for a local opera house. If anything I have worked for companies whose success might quite likely have made that world a worse place.
Last year I accidentally ran into a girl I knew back in college. She was majoring in sociology. She is my age(40-50), still living in a shared apartment and currently working for close to minimum wage for a local non profit that helps fugitives and illegal immigrants to get legal support and generally help them in their daily struggles.
My point is: Yes I make more money, but I have an immense respect for people like her who sacrifice this for ideals and actually improve peoples live on a regular basis. And in this regard your attitude (like "but you should have better work to do than studying philosophy and arcane trivia about the past") is not only disregarding but insulting and quite frankly shortsighted and ignorant.
If only those disciplines would not be shifting. Being in my mid 40s now I have seen shifts to and from mechanical/electrical engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, business or law degrees and many more.
Actually when I graduated from high school the safest and easiest path to employment that was recommended to us was to study a humanity and become a teacher (teachers here - Central Europe - are much better paid than in the US) or get a business degree and work for a bank or insurance company. Both of these paths seem ridiculously risky now (or at least last time I checked).
As a conclusion I would argue that there is no such thing as a "free ticket to a successful career". Chances are high that at one point or another there will be a surplus of people in everyones profession and almost everyone will experience unemployment or need to shift careers.
1) Changing places inside the house (or moving out to the garden if the weather allows it) sometimes really helps me to beat the monotony. I do have a special workplace reserved though where I spend most of my time.
2) Exercise has already been mentioned. Running works best for me, because it is done outdoors and therefore kills two birds with one stone (three if you have a dog).
3) Another thing that has made a big difference for me was starting a regular meditation practice. I have since noticed that it makes it much easier for me to control my focus and handle distracting thoughts. And there seems to be at least some evidence that I am not alone in this: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to... Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/6/829.abstract
4) Include relaxing activities on your daily agenda. Letting go is important for your wellbeing and therefore your work performance. Make room for it and allow yourself to enjoy it without feeling bad about it.