Hello all! I am writing to you a little bit jet lagged and exhausted, so I hope this post makes sense. I recently returned from a vacation in Illinois and a conference in Colorado before flying home to Vermont. I spent yesterday relaxing and napping so hopefully I will return to normal sooner rather than later :)

My book review today is for Divergent, written by Veronica Roth.

Courtesy of Divergent Wikia

Because of the movie that just came out, I wanted to include it in my review too.

Courtesy of hypable.com

The Book 

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This week I wanted to kick off my new weekly review series titled Blog of the Week.

Each week, I will review a website or blog that I have found extremely helpful in my journey. One disclaimer: I am not getting paid to feature these blogs on my blog. I am sharing them because I believe they have wonderful content and do a wonderful job of engaging with their readers.

The blog this week is: Tranquility du Jour by Kimberly Wilson

Courtesy of Tranquility du Jour

About Kimberly 

Kimberly Wilson is the creative director of Tranquil Space yoga studios, designer of eco-fashion line TranquiliT, director of Tranquil Space Foundation, author of Hip Tranquil Chick, Tranquilista, and Tranquilologie, and writer for this beautiful lifestyle blog. Tranquility du Jour contains musings on a potpourri of my passions - style, yoga, sparkly things, vintage finds, mindfulness, all things French, do-gooding, creativity, and, of course, tranquility.

Her website is http://www.kimberlywilson.com/.

Why I Love Tranquility du Jour 

This blog was the very first blog I started following when I began my journey to really get to know my creative self.

Kimberly speaks in a very simple and direct language on topics that helped me to feel creative and inspired. I truly felt that I could be creative after reading this blog (which led me to start this blog!).

Kimberly also does a lot with mindfulness and I highly recommend her e-course Mindfulness: Tranquility Within

I also own all her books and you should check them out too! They are fantastic!

Kimberly also writes on starting your own business and entrepreneurship. Check out her e-course Creative + Conscious Business

Disclaimer

Tranquility du Jour and all related items are the property of Kimberly Wilson and Hip Tranquil Ventures LLC.

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Courtesy of melintelinas

Music. I've always loved it, ever since I was a kid. I used to play the clarinet in my elementary, junior high, and high school band. I was also part of my school's choir.

I listen to music whenever I want to be productive. I listen to rock music while I clean my apartment. I listen to music score whenever I am working on my creative projects, like writing. I even associate particular scenes in my writing with specific songs.

I encourage you to find that music that makes you happy but allows you to devote your mind to other tasks at the same time. For me, it's music scores; I can always count on getting stuff done when I listen to a music score. What music do you listen to that helps you to be productive?

I will be doing reviews of books and blogs on my blog. Why not add a review for music?

My music review for this week is: the How to Train Your Dragon Soundtrack


My rating: 5 out of 5 stars 

An excellent, excellent soundtrack. There's always a hint of the Celtic sounds but it's not too strong. John Powell did a wonderful job blending all the sounds together to give a more authentic feeling; you can practically feel the emotions in the music. I currently use this soundtrack to help me with my writing projects. Highly recommend it!

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So, I was trying to find a great way to define mindfulness and how it can apply to daily life.

Then I saw this video about baby sloths (warning, extreme cuteness alert). And I fell in love.


Naturally, I had to look further into sloths after seeing this video and I found this page What is a sloth?

I'll admit that before reading this information that I didn't know anything about sloths. Most people I've talked to just think sloths are slow because they're lazy. However, the reason that they move slow is because of their diet. They eat mostly toxic leaves that can take up to a month to digest; if they tried to digest them any faster than that they would poison themselves. Who knew???!!!!

The sloth spends about 70% of its time resting because they have to digest their food. Otherwise, it could kill them.

I would say that the sloth is one of the most mindful creatives I've ever known. It's knows itself and its biological limits. Can we honestly say the same for ourselves as human beings?

Mindfulness is defined as "a state of active, open attention on the present. When you're mindful, you observe your thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. Instead of letting your life pass you by, mindfulness means living in the moment and awakening to experience" (taken from Psychology Today).

The sloth appears to be lazy and slow to those of us who don't know better. They know what's going on in themselves and they don't feel any pressure to move faster than they're going. They know what they're doing; they're mindful of themselves :).

What pressures are you feeling in your life? How can you handle those who think you should be going faster or harder than you are? Do you know what your limits are? Are there times where you just can't give more effort than you already are? Do you ever take the time to just slow down? Are you awakening to these experiences?

If you don't, maybe you should practice some mindfulness in true sloth fashion :).

Resources for Sloths

Slothville - Headquarters of the Sloth Appreciation Society

The Little Book of Sloth by Lucy Cooke

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Courtesy of speedofcreativity.org

I can't draw. Not even a stick figure. Even when I was younger I had no talent that would magically appear in my elementary art class. And because of this, I always thought that I wasn't creative. Art is known as creativity, and if you can't do art, then how can you be creative?

As I've gotten older, the best thing I've learned about art is that there are so many different kinds of it. So my talent wasn't drawing or painting. I found it was writing.

There's no wrong way to be creative or to be an artist. The most important thing is that you love doing it. Explore different kinds of art to find your niche.

There's also no magical talent that goes into being creative. In fact, being creative takes a lot of practice and a lot of work to polish your skills.

Don't be afraid to practice and fail. Failure almost always happens at some point but don't let the fear of failure keep you from pursuing your creative interests. Learn from your failures and allow them to build you up.

Look for my later posts on building your creative confidence :).

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Welcome to part two on lifestyle design! While researching lifestyle design, I came across this post on the Small Change Project website about what lifestyle design really means.

What really struck me was the response to what lifestyle design even means:

"We figured out what we wanted and then we ACTUALLY did it."

AND

"Lifestyle design is knowing what you want and then lining up your daily practices to make sure you get it now, not in 10 years, today." 

I just love this post and it made me realize how PIM (personal information management can fit into lifestyle design). 

My own formula is: 

Lifestyle Design = Personal Information Management + Action

Never underestimate the value of finding information that contributes to your life but action is just as important as finding information.

All the information in the world won't help you if you don't use it :).
So find information that can contribute to your life and then act on it!

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Courtesy of John Liu

Ahhh, this is such a great question and one I had a difficult time finding the answer to. A lot of other people out there apply lifestyle design to designing your life (particularly your job) to fit you and your personality. Timothy Ferriss first coined the phrase in his book 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.

 The premise is that people must determine what is most important to their lives and design a (sometimes uncoventional) work life around those values rather than working 40+ hours for 40-50 years. And see, while that definition works, my problem is that I don't think life is all about work. I think it's something a lot more than that.

Obviously lifestyle design is about designing the life that you want. But what goes into designing that life? It's a combination of things and there is no simple answer. When I was finally done going through high school, then undergraduate, and then graduate school, I realized that I realllllllyyyy needed to work on my life because I had nothing in it besides school.

The first thing I did was develop some hobbies and this is where I suggest you start too. What hobbies do you enjoy doing? What makes you feel creative and inspired? What do you love doing? Never take these things for granted and make time in your life for them :)

I'll talk more about lifestyle design and what goes into it in my next post. Until then, what does lifestyle design mean to you?

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Personal Information Management (PIM) is known as "the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use personal information items". I like this definition; it's simple and efficient. However, I wasn't entirely happy with it as it completely leaves human nature out of the equation (we aren't robots after all). Gathering information isn't so methodical; it can be messy and frustrating.

While doing research for this post, I could not find enough information on personal information management that thoroughly explained to me the thought processes that go into actually managing personal information. I found plenty concerning the actual technology tools you can use to organize your information but nothing on how to actually process information or find what is relevant to you.

If you want a good introduction to personal information management, I recommend William Jone's book Keeping Found Things Found (even though some of technology mentioned is outdated, the concepts in the book are still good).

Courtesy of tametheweb.com

Why should we care about personal information management? PIM goes beyond just organizing information. Look at the role PIM plays in lifestyle design. You gather information every single day in your life. You are constantly processing information whether you are consciously thinking about it or not (which is why I find the brain to be the sexist organ in the human body.  How can you not love that power?).

Anyway, how do you find information that is relevant and important to you? And how did you react with that information? What emotions did you feel? How is this information going to impact your life? Obviously, you may not ask all of these questions when you find information, but in the context of lifestyle design,  these are some extremely important questions to ask. I will continue to explore PIM and its relationship to lifestyle design in later posts.

Until next time!

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Looking at the title of this blog, the word that will probably stick out the most is "librarian". Yes, I am a librarian and I deal with information constantly. It's my job and I absolutely love it. And I want to share my love for information.

Why did I start this blog? 

Because I have some topics that I'm really passionate about. My blog looks how to explore information at the crossover of five main things: personal information management, lifestyle design, technology, creativity, and nerdy stuff. I want to help you find the right information and resources for these topics. I also want to talk about my passion for manga, anime, and science-fiction (just to spice things up).

Join me on my journey!

I have been in school for the past 20 years of my life (and I'm only 25). This blog will chronicle my adventures as I begin to develop my life after not having much of one :). I'm going to explore personal information management, lifestyle design, technology, creativity, and all things nerdy.

I hope my information will be useful to you and please connect with me!

Welcome to Nerdy Mindful Librarian!

Topics on my blog include:

Personal Information Management

Lifestyle Design

• Wellness 
• Career/Entrepreneurship 
• Blog of the Week 
• Mindfulness
• Minimalism 

Technology

• Tutorials 

Creativity

• Writing 
• Blogging 

Nerdy Stuff

• Manga 
• Anime
• Science-Fiction and Fantasy 
• Book Reviews

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