The Time Finder with Paula Eder
The way you use your time is the way you live your life.
Archive for February, 2009
Finding Time by Being Flexible-3 Timely Tips!
Posted on February 27, 2009 by Paula, under Time Priorities.
Finding time by being flexible is one of the key ways that you can increase your time management skills, not to mention your daily satisfaction!
How do you approach your time management challenges? Consider this scenario: You’ve overslept, not by a lot, but enough to throw off your plans for the morning. What do you do?
- The first thing you need to do is stop and take a breath. Often the first impulse when something like this happens is to rush headlong into the day. While the impulse is certainly understandable, all it will do is increase your stress and rob you of an opportunity to review and reset your time priorities.When you stop and take a breath, you are putting yourself back in charge of your time. This is very, very important.
- Second, while you are pausing, take time to mentally assess what you have to do before your first, non-flexible, time commitment. Are there things on your list that you can let go of? Are there things that absolutely have to be done in the time you have left? Are there things that you can do later?
- Third, once you have rearranged your priorities and are ready to start your first task, pause again. This time, congratulate yourself for adjusting quickly and being flexible. It’s important to validate yourself for this, and really take it in. You don’t want to be starting your day with your inner critic on your shoulder, shaking her finger and berating you for oversleeping!
Something like oversleeping is not a moral shortcoming. It can happen to all of us from time to time. Approaching situations like this as problems to be solved, or challenges to be overcome will allow you to bring your best energy to the task. Flexibility can get you moving again and validating yourself for your choices will have a positive impact on the rest of your moments, I guarantee!
Oversleeping is a good time management challenge to start with in thinking about time flexibility. How do you handle something like that? Are there things you’d like to change? I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time with Another Twitter Tool Tip!
Posted on February 26, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Technology.
Finding time to make the most of Twitter could almost be a full-time job if you let it be. The possibilities for connection there are limited only by time, energy, and competing priorities!
I have thoroughly enjoyed the discoveries and connections that I’ve made on Twitter in the brief time that I’ve explored it. That’s why I was pleased and excited to come upon TweetGrid. So excited, in fact, that I decided to go ahead and share it with you today – rather than wait for a Cyber Monday!
TweetGrid was introduced to me yesterday by a friend and it offers a great deal of flexibility and functionality for Twitter users of all levels of experience! Basically, TweetGrid is a dashboard that will allow you to search for up to 9 different topics and display the ever-changing results in real time. You can also search for hashtags, phrases, groups, people — and get all the results right on your monitor! (If you’re like me and still trying to figure out the hashtags, this may be a help!)
You can Tweet directly from TweetGrid, and a very nice feature is the ability to send direct messages from the grid. (You can not yet receive direct messages there but apparently that is being worked on.)
Interestingly, you don’t even need to have a Twitter account to use TweetGrid.
To save time, you can bookmark the TweetGrid you create for yourself so that your grid doesn’t need to be re-created each time you want to use it. Another nice feature of TweetGrid is that when you click on a link or user name, both will open in a new window. That way, your grid doesn’t disappear and you can return to it when you’re finished exploring!
The help and information offered on the site is also excellent and doesn’t assume a lot of computer knowledge. Take a look at TweetGrid. It seems to be a wonderfully flexible tool to help you find the time to maximize your Twitter experience! I’d love to hear what you think of it!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time to Find Your Strengths
Posted on February 25, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Energy, Transitions and Time.
Did you find time to listen to the President’s address last night? There is certainly no denying the fact that we face difficult challenges on multiple fronts. Indeed, there are very few of us who haven’t been touched by the economic crisis and the many ongoing changes it continues to create.
Managing your time and your energy when in the midst of transition, challenge, and change can be difficult. This is especially so when the challenges are on many fronts, and when no end is in sight!
In times of great challenge is easy to fall into focusing on the negatives. This is a very self-defeating rut to fall into, because the more you focus on the negatives, the more your confidence and creativity are hobbled. Problems loom larger and larger, and your abilities to cope seem diminished in comparison. You can see how this would create a powerful downward spiral.
It’s key to remember that much of this is happening only in your mind! The power is in your hands, and it’s very important to exercise discipline at those times when the negatives seem to be all that you can see. As much as self-care is a personal responsibility, so too is maintaining perspective. Your time and energy are not infinite. When you spend them on worries, you have less of each to use proactively and creatively to address your problems!
In my recent article Time Management Tips – 5 Essentials to Transform Tough Times you’ll find some tips on how to avoid feelings of overwhelm in challenging times. Focusing on your strengths and validating yourself will lighten your burdens, no matter what!
The way you think about things really does affect how you feel about them, and the quality of energy that you are able to bring to bear. Shrinking from a problem will always make it larger. Approaching a problem with interest, curiosity, and courage will always bring it down to size! The power is in your hands. Really!
When you see problems looming on your horizon, how do you feel? How do you approach them? Drop me a line — I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Finding Time to Stay Healthy
Posted on February 24, 2009 by Paula, under Self-Care Time, Time Boundaries.
Finding time to stay healthy isn’t always the first thing on our to-do lists, is it? Many of us often put other things ahead of self-care. Whether it’s planning, preparing, and eating healthy meals, getting enough rest, getting exercise, tending to health issues, or finding time to relax, these things often get bumped to the bottom of our priority list.
In my coaching practice my clients often speak about their struggles to find the time to maintain a healthy, self nurturing schedule. They talk about how great they feel when they are on track — how much more energy and focus they have, and how much more productive they are. Indeed, self care is one of the most powerful productivity enhancers going!
Sometimes people think of self-care as a self-indulgence. I think that is quite often one of the reasons that it gets set aside. Women, in particular, are socialized to put their needs and wants second. This makes it all the more likely that a commitment to exercise or meditate or relax will lose out to the demand or need of someone else.
I encourage people to begin to view self-care as a responsibility rather than an indulgence. In fact it is the primary responsibility — the most basic fundamental one that you have. When you find the time and take the time to care for yourself you enhance your ability to be responsive to whatever life brings your way.
Finding time for self-care is a matter of:
- Identifying what you need,
- Figuring out how much time you need to do it, and then
- Creating the time boundaries that will give you the space to care for yourself.
If you’re not used to setting time boundaries, this will be a challenge at the start. It will be a challenge for you and it will be a challenge for those around you. Don’t worry if it feels strange at first. Keep plugging away — you’ll get there!
Remember, think of your health as your most fundamental responsibility. Everything else springs from that – the quality of your connections, the quality of your time, and the quality of your life!
Do you feel like you find the time you need to take care of your self? What kinds of changes would you like to make? Drop me a line or write a comment here — I’d love to hear from you!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time by Managing Your In-Box-5 Tips on Cyber Monday!
Posted on February 23, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Technology.
Sometimes finding time to manage your e-mail is the last thing on your list. Yet, isn’t it true that your stress level is often directly related to the number of e-mails in your inbox?
This Cyber Monday, I’d like to share 5 simple tips that can help you get your inbox (AND your stress level) down to size!
- Make your choices about received items as quickly as possible, and avoid letting your inbox become a catch-all. When you receive an e-mail the rule of thumb and is to read it quickly, and then either reply immediately, forward it (if you want to share it), save it to another folder (if you want to keep it for future reference), retain it for further action, or delete it.
- You should be able to see everything that’s in your inbox without having to scroll down. The things that you can’t see have the potential to get lost. The unseen will likely generate stress for you, too. It’s a good idea to clean out your inbox at least once a week. This may not always be possible, but if you can get it down to even just two or three messages that will be great. And if you can do this more than once a week, even better!
- Create additional folders, either for storing e-mails that you may need later, or for categorizing them for easy retrieval. You may want to create a folder for things to do. (The only down side to that option is that if you don’t open that folder, you won’t see your list!) I suggest using your inbox as the place for holding your “things to do.” That way you’ll know that items in your inbox are things that you need to tend to. Once they are done, if you still need to retain them, you can move them to one of your storage folders.
- Remember that in most e-mail systems when you send an e-mail, a copy is retained in your “Sent” folder. Likewise, when you delete something it doesn’t immediately disappear. It is simply moved to your Deleted Items folder. These folders can eventually get to be quite full, and so I strongly recommend that you clean them out regularly. Schedule a time for doing this weekly.
- That two-step process for deletions can actually be quite helpful. If you’re nervous about deleting something, I suggest that you let it stay in your deleted items folder for a longer period of time. Once you’re sure that you don’t need it, you can then delete it from that folder.
If you’re a subscriber to Finding Time Tips, you may have already received some other e-mail management ideas. Managing your inbox is a wonderful organizational, time management, and stress-reducing tool. Do you have other tips and tricks for managing your e-mail? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time to Start, AND to Finish … Every Day!
Posted on February 20, 2009 by Paula, under Time Boundaries.
Time Management isn’t simply about getting things done. It is about your time choices, time boundaries, time values – and how managing all of that affects the quality of your life (of which productivity is one piece). Too often, time management experts focus on efficiency, to the potential detriment of the rest of life.
My focus is on the whole of your life. I help you recognize and make time choices that will deepen and enlarge your moments, no matter what. I call it heart-based time management.
Time management is definitely NOT simply about filling your plate with more things to do. Saying “No” to one thing may be necessary in order to say “Yes” to another. Establishing and maintaining time boundaries is key to a healthy, fulfilling AND productive life!
For those of us who work at home, managing the time boundary between work and home can be challenging – and especially so if you are busy and love your work! There was a helpful post by Michele Connolly on The Get Organized Wizard this past week titled Home Office Productivity: Let Your Goodbye be Goodbye that offers some good ideas about ways to set (and keep) that key time boundary. Especially important is the boundary that ends your work day.
For any time boundary to work, it needs to be in sync with your values and priorities, and it needs to be something that you follow through on! Don’t be discouraged if you miss the mark – just try again, and keep trying. Tweak your boundary if necessary, but don’t let go of the thread!
How do you manage the time boundary between your home life and your work life? How do you put closure on your work day? This weekend is a good time to think about it and perhaps establish some time boundaries for next week.
What do you come up with? Leave a comment or drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time to Appreciate Your Many Communities
Posted on February 19, 2009 by Paula, under Time After Time.
Finding time for appreciation is a key component in nurturing relationships and nurturing yourself. Indeed, seeing life through a lens of gratitude is one of the most powerful moment changing and life transforming forces there is.
This has been a busy and week at The Time Finder, and in my practice. It’s easy to let stress take over when you’re busy. So I’m pausing, as another NH snowstorm sifts through the trees this morning. I’m finding time to feel how much I appreciate my friends and family, my clients, my mentors, and my virtual community!
When we discovered the issue with my blog this past weekend, my VA first searched the web for answers. The world wide web community came through with flying colors, and she was able to track down some very helpful ideas and begin to pinpoint the problem.
I next reached out to people I knew would probably be familiar with the issue and be able to help … people like Cathy Perkins, The WordPress Wizard. Cathy was immediately responsive and addressed the problem we’d identified within moments of its coming to her attention. Thank you Cathy!
I wrote about my experience on Twitter, and received numerous responses that either offered ideas or gave support and understanding. All of those Tweets were wonderfully warming. I feel very grateful to my Twitter friends … folks like Wendy Battles and Connie Ragen Green, who managed to “inject” a refreshing note of humor into my tale of woe! Each Tweet lifted my spirits.
Finding time to offer support is wonderful gift. It is a warm reminder that we are surrounded by ring upon ring of community. There are the neighborhoods, towns, cities, and nations in which we physically live and move. There are the communities that we create out of common values and common interests. And woven through it all, more and more, there are the virtual communities that we connect with.
I so appreciate all of my communities, and the ways that we all find time to reach out to one another and connect!
What are your communities? How do you find time to nurture community in your life? Leave a comment or drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time to Celebrate Who You Are!
Posted on February 18, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Energy.
Finding time to acknowledge what we value and hold dear is a worthy pursuit! In her Life Attractions Blog, Dr. Alice Vlietstra recently wrote a very interesting post titled “Celebrate Your Strengths.” In it she talks about the importance of celebrating yourself and recognizing the values that you hold close to your heart. She offers the idea of using some of our holidays — like Presidents’ Day — to remind us to do that.
What a wonderful suggestion! Holidays provide us with a built-in pause in our schedules. And many of the holidays also offer reminders about values and/or role models that we can reflect on. Any opportunity to pause and reflect is an opportunity to find greater depth and new insights. It is also a chance to refresh and energize yourself — all in the brief span of a moment!
Indeed, finding time to give yourself messages of self-validation is a very powerful and accessible source of energy. As much as the voice of the inner critic undermines and depletes you, your self validations are like vitamins for the soul!
Think about what Dr. Alice Vlietstra suggests in her post. How do you celebrate yourself? What qualities do you most value in yourself? Don’t be shy. The more you validate yourself and recognize your good qualities the more energy and resilience you will bring to your life!
When’s the last time you paused to reflect and celebrate who you are? Leave a comment or drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time by Working Ahead
Posted on February 17, 2009 by Paula, under Time Management Skills.
Finding time and managing your work when the unexpected hits can be a big challenge. Readers of The Time Finder may be aware that we had some challenges with the technical side of things over the weekend. This is an excellent example of the “unexpected” – and one that is no doubt familiar to many!
You can’t always know the challenging situations that may confront you, but it’s a very good idea to expect the unexpected and to build in some time for it in your life. How, you ask?
One of the best tools that I have found is to work ahead, when I have the time. It’s very similar to saving up for a rainy day. Think of it as a cushion or a savings account. It’s something that you can fall back on when your time and energy and focus must be applied to the unexpected, rather than your usual tasks. Aside from providing you with the ability to have a quick and agile response to any situation, it will also reduce your stress level. Any way you look at it, working ahead, whenever you can, is a great time choice and an excellent energy investment!
Generally I like to plot out my blog posts ahead of time, and write them in “chunks” whenever possible. This practice, also known as “batching,” is a great use of time anyway, because it contributes to focus and enhances efficiency and productivity. It was especially helpful yesterday, because as we began to notice the odd things that were happening with the blog, I knew that I already had a collection of blog posts ready to go. That left me with some flexibility to deal with the situation that had arisen.
I am experimenting this week with a new way of finalizing my posts. When I’m ready to get to my blogging work, I am reading through my draft and then hopping on the treadmill (with my trusty digital voice recorder in my pocket). I mull over the post, get new ideas, and exercise at the same time – a great way to multi-task! I often get ideas while exercising, but have never tried to formalize it this way – will definitely let you know how it goes!
Are there special ways that you have found to make sure that you have room to maneuver when the unexpected hits? I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
Find Time and Find WordPress Spam Injection Solutions on Cyber Monday
Posted on February 16, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Technology.
This Cyber Monday I am writing about one of the dangers of on-line work – spamming and, specifically, spam injection. As a nuisance that eats up untold time and energy – not to mention money -spam ranks quite high in my book – especially right at the moment!
It appears that the Time Finder Blog has been hit by a spam injection. We’re not sure when, but we discovered it on Friday. Let me walk you through the process – a cautionary tale for anyone whose work and livelihood is on-line!
On Friday, I had asked my VA to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to check and see what keywords were associated with my site. What she found was extremely disturbing! None of the keywords had anything to do with time management, time choices, time boundaries – nothing to do with time at all. Instead, they were all terms having to do with pharmaceuticals.
Needless to say, this was upsetting! With more research, we turned up a number of blog posts describing similar problems. David Mihm, in his blog Mihmorandum, wrote in great detail about his encounter with WordPress Spam Injection in May of this past year.
This led my VA to check the code in the footer of the WordPress Theme that we use for The Time Finder. There she found line upon line upon line of spammy code.
Further searches revealed that this is not an uncommon experience, as Tiffany Washko’s spam tale also illustrates. One of the main solutions is to upgrade to one of the newer versions of WordPress ASAP! The blog Linux by Examples offers some excellent technical suggestions for rooting out and removing injected spam. We have contacted Cathy Perkins, The WordPress Wizard for technical assistance, as well!
I highly recommend that you check your site with the Google AdWords tool, as we had no sign of our problem until we did so. I am sure it has been affecting our stats and our SEO for as long as the spam has been there.
Have you had experience with a spam injection? It surely eats up time and energy. Leave a comment or drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
Other Posts You Might Enjoy!
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