What can creative people do when opportunities to work are so scarce? Follow these steps, and take your project from inspiration to presentation. Make technology work for you as you enable yourself to succeed.

I recently wrote about how our emotions can become tangled up with possessions and artifacts that represent past experiences and relationships; how our homes gradually fill up with ‘stuff’ — literal and metaphorical — that blocks us from moving on. But how do we actually go about clearing the clutter?

When someone is deep in thought, we say “I could see the gears turning in their head.” But what happens when those gears refuse to turn properly?

Two important principles can help you move on and create a life that is healthy instead of toxic. The first is to overcome the ‘slot machine syndrome’ left from years of emotional investment, and the second is to redirect investments of emotional energy and time away from areas we have no power to control.

Letting go of objects associated with people we’ve lost or relationships that haven’t worked out can feel like an act of betrayal, or a compounding of the loss that has already happened. By unraveling the emotions associated with those objects, and the memories (good and bad) wrapped up in them, we can find ways of moving on through the grieving process towards the next phase of our lives.

Here is the guidance I give my clients when they complain of confusion and disorganization in their lives.

Who could have suspected that the best practices for making good software also have something to say about the therapeutic process?