The Time Finder with Paula Eder
The way you use your time is the way you live your life.
Archive for July, 2009
Find Time to Relax This Weekend!
Posted on July 31, 2009 by Paula, under Time After Time.
Finding time to wind down and relax is one of the most rejuvenating gifts you can give yourself – and also one of the hardest to come by, it seems. As we finish out the month of July and head into a weekend, I thought this would be a great time to talk about relaxation and share a couple of quick tips.
On her site “Too Much on Her Plate” my friend and colleague Melissa McCreery writes (and coaches) about challenges faced by smart, busy women … women just like you! In one recent post, she shared about “The Art of Relaxation,” noting that while it may seem simple, “for busy women who have established a habit of juggling a lot and being “in action,” relaxing often does not come automatically. To make matters worse, many of my clients tell me they feel guilty because they have a hard time relaxing.”
Does that describe you? There are two issues here:
- Carving out the time to relax, and then
- Using that time in a truly relaxing way.
The first step involves setting time boundaries. Whether it is a week-long vacation or a 15-minute break in a busy day, carve out the time and set it apart for relaxation.
The second step involves quieting your mind and letting go of the clamor of the “shoulds” and “to do’s” (not to mention the guilt) that can swirl there for each of us. It is helpful to expect that these distracting thoughts will rise – and to know that you can gently set them aside. Don’t empower them. Just recognize what is happening and let them go.
Over time, and with practice, these voices will quiet and you will be able to breathe and relax into your moment. Practice is important. Like so many other things, this is a skill that you will develop over time. And as for the time you devote to it – it’s not the duration so much as the quality of the time that matters. As Melissa writes:
I’ve set a goal to be more purposeful about creating more of this kind of space in my life throughout the year. I’m planning on making more retreats to the beach (in all seasons) and I’m making more space for down time in the day-to-day of my life. A few deliberate minutes every day can remind me how to really be present in my life.
Try practicing relaxation over the next two days and see how you feel! Set aside the time and start practicing. (And remember to call it “practice” – that helps relieve some of the pressure to get it right!)
Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear about your experiences!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 Go For It!
Posted on July 30, 2009 by Paula, under Time Choices.
Finding time for what matters most is a worthy goal, and it is also a daily challenge. It’s important to remember, as we negotiate our daily priorities, that the power to make time choices is always in our hands! No matter what comes our way, we always have choices about how we respond – and there is a world of empowerment in realizing that fundamental fact!
On her blog Go for Your Dream, Kimberly Bohannon recently wrote about discipline, focus, and the role that excuses can play in getting us off-track and keeping us stuck. The post is titled “The Habits of Achievement: How to Eliminate Excuses and Remain Focused on Your Goals.” She writes:
You have to take responsibility for your actions and realize that YOU are responsible for making your dreams a reality.
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.”
If you watch her video, you’ll hear more about this, and about the debilitating effects of excuses. In the end, there is nothing external to us that can “hold us back.” Our own focus and discipline are all that we need to move forward toward our goals.
I would add that there is nothing magical about discipline. It isn’t a character trait. It is a moment-to-moment choice.
The good news is that this means the power is entirely in our hands! Since being disciplined and staying focused are choices that I remake for myself in each moment, there are plenty of opportunities to exercise these qualities. AND, the more I practice, the more I habituate myself to making disciplined time choices. It’s always a choice – but with practice it gets easier and easier to make it!
On the path toward realizing your goals, each time choice you make is a step. When you choose discipline and focus, you will be moving yourself forward along your path. When you don’t, you’ll be stuck. It’s that simple.
What gets in the way of your focus and discipline? How can you make different time choices for yourself? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear about your experiences!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 for Acceptance
Posted on July 29, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Energy.
Finding time to accept what you cannot change is one of the fundamental principles of 12-Step Programs, and a key ingredient in making wise and well-grounded time choices.
Many know this concept through its expression in what has come to be known as The Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Acceptance is important in a wide range of situations. Maybe you are responding to a sudden (and unwelcome) change as we did recently at Finding Time, LLC. Or perhaps you are dealing with a more everyday annoyance like a string of rainy days while you are on vacation.
In either case, accepting what is provides the base for moving ahead in your life with full access to your energy and creativity. Cindy Loughran, in her Blog New Leaf Touchstone has written with insight and humor about people’s struggles with the current weather situation here in New England.
What do you do on a rainy day while on vacation? Do you suffer and complain or do you make the best of it and create your own good time?
Like many things in life, we can’t control the weather but we have complete control over how we deal with it!
Check out Cindy’s post titled “… accept the things I cannot change …” where she reflects on the profound ways that the energy we bring to a situation affects how we see it and what it becomes for us.
Acceptance moves us powerfully from fighting against reality toward freeing up our creativity and energy for adapting to and exploring new terrain. This was certainly the case with our changes at Finding Time, LLC – where our choices helped us transform a scary crisis into new opportunities!
Of course there is often plenty of work involved, too, in transforming crises into opportunities. Acceptance reframes the entire situation so that the work can become proactive, expansive, and creative. What a huge difference that makes!
Do you sometimes struggle with acceptance? Are there particular areas where you find this challenging? What gets in the way? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear about your experiences!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 When You’re Betwixt and Between
Posted on July 28, 2009 by Paula, under Transitions and Time.
Finding time and maintaining your energy and focus during times of change can be a challenge.
Here at Finding Time, LLC we had a major change over the last two weeks – a process you may have read about in some of our recent posts. While the most pressing work of change is now completed, we continue to be in a time of transition management. What does this time entail? What is its particular flavor and quality?
Times of transition are, pretty much by definition, unsettling. The older and more familiar ways are no longer accessible, for whatever reason. The new ways have not yet become familiar. Life feels different.
This unsettling quality can be very uncomfortable, especially if you fight it and/or feel victimized by it. As Ann Gottlier has said:
It’s so hard when I have to, and so easy when I want to.
That simple statement is so on the money! (If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that it’s also one of my favorite quotations to tweet!) It succinctly expresses one of the most fundamental truths I know about time, energy, and transition management.
If we fight against our transitions, we will find them burdensome and constantly challenging. We will feel drained and discouraged. On the other hand, if we embrace the change and open ourselves to the opportunities that it presents, we will find each moment looking entirely different.
It’s not that each moment is concretely or objectively different – it’s that our eyes are seeing the possibilities rather than the losses. This is the fruit of choice. Sometimes, especially when change is pretty new, this is a choice that needs to be made repeatedly. (In addition to choice, it is also very important to work with your feelings of loss so that you can authentically let go of what was and embrace what is!).
What do you focus on when some facet of your life is in flux? Are you able to embrace change and see it as opportunity? What gets in the way of your doing that? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear what you think!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 Augment Your Twitter Feed
Posted on July 27, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Technology.
Finding time to keep your Twitter feed interesting and fresh can be a big challenge, and there are many applications in the twitterverse that can help you keep up. We’ve explored quite a few of them here on Cyber Monday – things like TweetLater and TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop and TweetGrid, to name just a few (and I really do mean just a few.)
There are an ever-growing number of Twitter applications available out there. Keeping up with that, in and of itself, can be a major undertaking. That’s one reason I find it helpful to subscribe to Darren Rowse’ Twitter blog, Twitip. It offers daily snippets of information and tips relevant to Twitter users of all stripes.
In a post a little more than 2 weeks ago, Lara Kulpa profiled some new tools, including proxifeed. What proxifeed does – admittedly a big time saver – is pull content from the web and post it as tweets to your Twitter account. You enter keywords of your choosing to specify the information that will be tweeted.
Use keywords to define the area of interest that you want to tweet about – e.g. for your Twitter account on “clean tech” use “solar energy”, “hybrid cars”, “wind power”,… – the more specific terms you enter the more specific the tweets will become and draw attention.
Of course, there is much debate about the use of automated tools such as this in the Twitterverse. I have not entirely made up my mind about it all, but it does seem that if you can find ways to add meaningful and interesting content to your Twitter feed, that is not a bad thing. It can form a base for your real time interactions on Twitter.
I found one on-line review of this tool by Craig Jamieson; however, this appears to be a new enough application that there isn’t a whole lot of information out there yet. It will be interesting to see how proxifeed evolves over the coming months.
Have you tried proxifeed? How is it working for you? And how do you feel about the more general question of automated feeds? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear what you think!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 for Planning … Not for Worrying
Posted on July 24, 2009 by Paula, under Time Choices.
Finding time for planning, and for telling the difference between planning and worrying, can be a challenge. It’s one that we’ve had to confront head on here at Finding Time, LLC in recent days as we’ve worked to recover from unexpectedly losing our web host, web site, and most of our infrastructure.
Yesterday we took a major step in the recovery process, as we launched the import of our mailing lists to our new provider. We planned carefully and notified a small number of people ahead of time. Now the process is out of our hands and we wait.
Meanwhile, there are lots of other things happening at Finding Time. I’m preparing for planned teleclasses and putting the finishing touches on a new product … while also working on several others at various stages of completion. This is wonderful, proactive, forward-looking work.
But even as we look ahead, at the back of all of our minds, we are pulled toward worry. What will our list look like in a week?
To improve your planning power, distinguish planning from worrying!
This is a key concept to keep in mind – especially during times of change or transition. Do what you can to make sure that things go smoothly, and then let go.
Worrying only saps your energy for other things. Let go of what you can’t control, and turn that “worry energy” into “planning energy.” Put it to good use. It’s energy! You aren’t at its mercy – it is shaped by your choices!
Transforming your worried moments into planning moments will involve letting go and making some conscious choices. It will help you use your energy more creatively and proactively! Try it – and please drop me a line – I’d love to hear how it goes for you!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 for Patience … and for Letting Go
Posted on July 23, 2009 by Paula, under Time Management Skills.
Finding time for what matters most does not simply involve getting things done as efficiently and effectively as possible. Sometimes it means knowing when to step back and let go.
If you are a reader of The Time Finder blog – or a subscriber to the Finding Time E-zine and/or Tips, you know that our Finding Time, LLC site went down last week when our web host suddenly and mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth.
We learned lots of lessons in the process of bringing our website and infrastructure back. Among them were lessons about staying calm, taking things one step at a time, and letting change unfold! We also learned about the importance of backing up everything!
This morning we are embarking on the last big piece of the work of reconstituting Finding Time, LLC – that of moving our mailing lists over to our new e-mail provider and shopping cart – Kick Start Cart. This has entailed a lot of behind-the-scenes work, as we activated all the necessary mechanisms in the new cart and got our lists ready for the importing process.
Now we wait for our preparations to be approved – then an e-mail will go out to each of our subscribers who was in the old system. (We hope that this will happen today, but we can’t control the timing of this step.) Each subscriber must click the confirmation link in the e-mail. That will tell the system that it’s okay to add that name and e-mail address to the new cart. (Our newer subscribers are already in Kick Start Cart – this only applies to those who were in the older system.)
So, this is where we need to find time for patience and for letting go! Having done everything that we can, the next stages of this process are not in our hands. For people who like to be proactive and on top of things, this can be a challenging time.
I like to think of this as an opportunity to exhale, open my hands and, for now, consciously and gently give this over to the universe.
If you’re a subscriber, be on the lookout for our confirmation e-mail and click the link when it arrives. (Meanwhile, we’ll be patiently breathing and letting go!)
How do you balance being proactive and letting go? Is this a challenge for you? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 Boundaries in Times of Stress and Times of Calm
Posted on July 22, 2009 by Paula, under Time Boundaries.
Establishing and maintaining your time boundaries is a challenge anytime – and when you are under stress, it can be even more difficult. During stressful times, time boundaries are extremely useful. They help you to maintain your energy and find the space to breathe and reflect – and thereby be more efficient and effective as you manage whatever is on your plate.
And yet, during times of calm, time boundaries are equally important. It’s during these periods that the boundaries you establish, and the time choices you make, are proactively shaping your quality of life and helping you to embody your values in your moments.
Genuinely appreciating the full power of your time choices requires and builds grit. Why? You genuinely realize what an enormous responsibility you carry in your own two hands. Yet assuming that level of ownership actually creates courage, because life becomes infinitely more exciting! No more wasting energy in blaming others. Your moment-to-moment choices grow more meaningful. This brings your essential focus to here, now. “Here” is where you live. “Now” is where all your power resides.
To read more about time boundaries and time choices, check out my article: Time Management Tips – How to Establish Boundaries That Safeguard Your Time and Energy. Setting and maintaining time boundaries requires assertiveness and discipline. These are not magical qualities or character traits that we are born with. They are skills that get easier and easier, the more you practice and use them.
And the benefits are HUGE. While the implementation is incremental, the effects of using these time management tools are transformative! When you find your time boundaries and use them, you are finding yourself!
Do you use time boundaries in your everyday life? In times of calm as well as of stress? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 Reflect and Increase Your Effectiveness and Efficiency
Posted on July 21, 2009 by Paula, under Time Management Skills.
Finding time to reflect is an essential time management tool that can be most useful and important when it appears almost impossible to come by.
This fact was brought home to us at Finding Time, LLC very clearly over the past week when we lost our site and all of our infrastructure (including our mailing lists and auto responders)! It was very challenging to step back, take a breath, and reflect when there was so much to do. However, each time we did that, two things were clear:
- Our perspective widened and it felt like there was more room to make choices.
- With that feeling of more space came the ability to see options more clearly and begin to make proactive (rather than reactive) time choices.
This, in turn, led to further shifts of perspective until our crisis, while still very challenging, also took on some aspects of opportunity. This made all the difference in the world! The shift in perspective from reactive to proactive mode is a process that builds on itself. Nothing looks like an opportunity when you are in reactive mode.
Here’s one of our recent articles on E-zine Articles.com that speaks to dealing with time crunches – and highlights the importance of reflection: Time Management Tips – 5 Essential Steps to Reduce Stress During Time Crunches. Reflection after-the-fact is a key time management tool:
When you have a moment to catch up with yourself, review what happened that left you in a situation with too much to do in too little time. Ask yourself these 3 questions:
- Was procrastination involved?
- Were there unexpected changes in your day that threw a wrench in the works?
- What can you do to avoid a situation like this in the future?
In our case, one of the things that we learned, on reflection, was the importance of backing up everything! Had we not done that regularly, what was a big inconvenience would have been, instead, a major disaster. So back up, back up, back up!
Have you ever had a cyber disaster – or other such stressful event? Did you find reflection helpful, either in the midst of it or after the fact? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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 with Back-Up’s on Cyber Monday
Posted on July 20, 2009 by Paula, under Time and Technology.
Finding time to deal with sudden changes is something we wrote about last week when our web host went down and we lost our site (and mailing list). Sudden change presents challenges on many fronts, including the practical and the emotional.
The great news is that, as of Saturday, our Finding Time site is up and running again!
We are now in the process of getting our mailing list set up with a new provider. Be on the lookout for an e-mail with a confirmation link later this week. We hope that you’ll click the link and continue your association with the Finding Time Community!
If you own or manage a blog or website, our recent experience can serve as a helpful reminder about how important it is to create and maintain regular back-up’s of everything.
We maintain a back-up of our entire Finding Time site on both a local hard drive and an external hard drive. This enabled us to quickly upload all of our pages once we had established our connection with a new web host. Had we not had these back-up’s, it would have been a gargantuan task to recreate the site – a task that would have ended up costing untold hours and dollars!
The Time Finder is a WordPress powered blog. WordPress provides a very flexible, customizable platform for bloggers. One of the key plugins that can be installed on your blog is the WordPress Database Back-up.
If you use WordPress and haven’t installed it yet, do so NOW! This plugin will back-up all of the core elements of your blog at time intervals that you specify. You can even set it up to e-mail the back up to you!
As we learned recently, back-ups can be life-savers! They save untold time and money – and are an easy function to either automate or build into your routine.
Do you have back-up’s set up for your blog or website? Have you used them? Please drop me a line – I’d love to hear!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! 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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