Category: Get things done

Managing Ebbs and Flows

Life moves in ever-expanding circles. Sometimes it moves incredibly fast, and sometimes it moves extremely slow. And though you would swear time has stopped completely, it is not.

We need to get used to the ebbs and flows of time. If we are smart, we learn to control those ebbs and flows by always having something to do when something else has slowed to a crawl. It is not hard to accomplish.

It isn’t easy to know exactly where you’re going to find an ebb or a flow. You can, though, always know where you are and what small tasks you can squeeze into 15-minutes while you’re waiting for a computer to reboot, a cleaning routine to complete, or the 10-minute delay in a zoom. Just have a list of those small minutia jobs you must do and usually would not have time to complete. While you are waiting for one significant thing, maybe you can kick a couple of those small things out and still be ready for your meeting.

Speaking about downtime and not much to do, if you are free on 2 February at 2:30 mountain standard time, grab a ticket from Eventbrite In join us for some communications training. It will probably run an hour and a half, and it has some good things that we’ve been working on a long time.

To grab your free ticket, please go to:  

https://www.eventbrite.se/e/your-journey-forward-tickets-131452358543
Please join us 2 February 2021, at 2:30 PM (MST) (9:30 UTC).  You will get to have some fun and hopefully learn a little something about communications.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

What To Do Now

Our news cycles seem to get worse and worse each day. Everything from pandemics, to civil unrest, to military disasters, to warehouses blowing up overseas. What are we going to do? Well, we could bury ourselves in the bed covers and pretend none of it matters, or we can get up and live our lives. I am all for leaving this rut and moving forward.

There are things that we can do in safe ways in which we can protect our selves. Yes, we have a terrible plague, and yet at the same time, we have been handed marvels of technology that will allow us to work our way around it. There is a difference between not doing something because you don’t have the where-with-all and not doing something because you are rapt with fear or held back in a cycle of procrastination.

I will grant you, in the beginning, it took a little getting used to the protective gear. And getting a slow start back in February through April might’ve been OK. We are now in August. No more excuses, and it’s time to do what you do. All the lawyer ads and game shows on TV will have to entertain themselves from now on because you have things to do. 

The airplane came to be by two guys in a bike shop. The Automobile grew out of Mr. Fords Garage. Trains, the cotton gin, the apple computer, and many other of our everyday items of today did not come to be because of geniuses in ivory towers. Their births started in garages and old work sheds.  You may have the next significant innovation we need—time to get to work.

Sit down and make a list. Write down out what you need to do and start it. If you aren’t sure how to get it done, email me, I will help you. You can do this. I have faith in you. You could also stay in bed all day, walk around in your jammies, and lose precious time in your life. I don’t have the time left in my life to get everything I want to do done. I need to work at this, and this lecture is not only for you, it’s for me also.

Everything I need to do to earn money, to help people, and to get my message out there can happen from my computer. It does n0t have to be a fancy computer. I bought mine in 2011; it’s not as elaborate, yet it is a great workhorse.

Start putting your ideas and thoughts on paper. Figure out what you would like to do, which will relieve the tensions and maybe pay the bills. And don’t just think of them in your head, put them down on paper.

If you have everything written down on paper, then you can go through it and arrange it so that the things that you want to do and the things that you would like to do are in the appropriate spacing for when to do them. You don’t fill the bathtub for a bath until after you put the plug in the drain.

 Number the list you have created, so you know what needs to happen first, second, third, etc. Now, ensure you have supplies or suitable substitutes to put everything into action. If you don’t have everything figure out what you can purchase online without leaving the house or what you might be able to borrow from the neighbor. If you use something from a neighbor, be sure to replace it for them. There also may be new habits needed. Tomorrow we will talk about building those new habits.

Thank you for being with me today, and hang in there. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Back in the Electronic Age

I often make a joke about what would happen if all of our modern electronics suddenly stop working. Do you know what would happen? We would be thrown back all the way to the 1970s.

Some people feel that modern electronics is more of a hindrance than it is a convenience. I was able to decide for myself this week as my incredible four-year-old phone’s battery died. As I began to miss important calls, and meetings with my accountability coach, I started to feel the years melting backward.

 Four years is not a long time, yet I started by looking at getting a new phone. Because I was in the middle of a plan change, I was not authorized to purchase a new phone online. I was told to go to a local store.

I went to a store in the mall, and the clerk advised me to go to the repair center for a new battery. The repair center was amazed that the phone’s battery had lasted the four years and they asked me what I wanted to do. It turns out four-year-old phone batteries are not always available, even at the repair center.

The people at the repair center were very kind though.  They checked out my account online and helped guide me to a phone that would do what I needed and fit into my limited budget.  They made the transition fast and even transferred my apps and data from my old phone to my new one. 

I truly appreciated the folks who helped me, and I am in a far better place than I was two days ago.  For now, I am comfortably back in the electronic age and ready to move forward into Tomorrowland.

If you have a chance, please give me a call.

I hope we can be together again tomorrow.

 

Needed Improvements

Have you ever had an irritating problem that just threw you off your whole day’s activities? Something significant enough to be a thorn in your side and yet should’ve been small enough that you would handle it in due course? I had one of those this morning. And it disrupted my whole morning routine.

My cell phone died. The end had been coming for the last few weeks. And although with technical help, I had been able to breathe life back into it for a little while, it had died. It had been an excellent 2014 phone which had lasted me just shy of four years. It’s the longest time I had ever had the same cell phone.

There was no reason to get hung up about the problem. It was just an inanimate object whose time for replacement had come, and yet it started my whole week off by having to cancel the weekly call with my accountability partner. And although I’ve had problems like this before, I don’t know why this one took me over the edge.

I think it might have been the fact that, I believe I should’ve been more active in staying ahead of the problems and not letting them come to fruition. Rather than trying to squeeze every penny out of every item in use, I need to pay closer attention to functional lifespan and staying ahead of the curve on needed improvements.

Our business, personal, and family life, all deserve upgrades as needed.

I do not believe I’m the only one to ever face the need for positive change either and what I use or what I do. If you have a story about a needed change, please share with us. I would be glad to see that it gets posted.

Thank you for being here. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

No Games Here

This weekend I took all the game apps off of my iPad. You may think that that is an overreaction of spending too much time playing games. And, the day after I did so I would’ve agreed with you. Yet, it had to be done.

Games do have a tendency to reach the inner psyche and in time become habit-forming time-stealers. And it is not easy to kick the habit. Yet I have to little time and too much which I feel it is vital for me to do. Therefore, I had to make a stand, and this is it.

Right now, I am redoing a pilot course on mapping your future which I plan to have out by the end of the week. I also have another class on getting employed which I’m cleaning up and hope to have out in the next three weeks. I am studying with the NeuroLinguistic Program (NLP) Acology to start offering life coaching, and I am rewriting some of my earlier books to bring them up to date and republish them. Right now, I have way too much to accomplish and almost no time to play games.

The truth is, I like it that way. I have always been that way with any job I worked. And as I face retirement, and delve into my interests, I see no reason to change. And, although I am not trying to be the voice in the wilderness, I would like to make a recommendation.

If you have things you want to accomplish and yet have little time to do so, take a look at where you want to go and what you want to do. Try to figure out what is important for you to do, and what can be put aside. Sometimes the things we think we cannot do without, are the ones we have to set aside momentarily to make way for the larger endeavors.

With your permission, and please comment one way or the other, I would like to tell you a little bit more about what I do during this week. Some of my work might help, I would be glad to share it with you.

Until tomorrow, Have a great day.

 

 

 

 

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