I love spending weekends up at my parents’ place to re-energize my entire being. There’s time to enjoy home-cooked meals, nature, and undisturbed sleeping in (no honking, sirens, jackhammers, roommates). In addition, I spend a lot of time catching up on reading (blogs, mostly) and knowledge building. And best of all, it’s far away from work.

I think that I’ve been working way too much as of late. It’s taking a bigger toll on my energy level, mood, and all around sanity than probably realize. But fortunately, this weekend helped me assess what was wrong with the picture and I pinpointed it down to two things: productivity and simplicity.

My work habits are pretty good for a starter, but as of late, they haven’t been able to keep up with the increasing amount of things that need to be done. I found myself not having enough hours in a normal business day to finish everything that needed to be completed. Staying late at work has become the norm for me and I hate that I’m not phased by staying past 8PM. It just has to change.

So, this weekend, I re-visited Merlin Mann’s talk on Inbox Zero. His tips about how to manage the email beast were really helpful and it inspired me to find more tools, like his, to help wipe my mental slate clean.

Through a combination of pure random blog-hopping and Googling key words from Merlin’s talk, I found another great website: Zen Habits. This site offers a lot of literature on obtaining a healthier, simpler and happier lifestyle. Something that I desperately crave right now…

Other fabulous little gems: