Tuesday Tips and Tricks - You DO have time

Here's today's tip...

Honey, you DO have time....

Here's a (possibly real) example of how "I don't have time" plays out in daily life...

"I just don't have time to clean up my office...."
So you don't. You spend your time taking care of important things like answering emails and phone calls and... checking Facebook.... cause, well, you have an extra 5 or 10 before you need to leave for your meeting...
Then you spend 20 minutes looking for your blasted keys... that were buried under a stack of papers that you needed to throw away a week ago. THEN you spend another good 30 minutes chatting with the police officer who gave you a ticket because you were speeding... because you were late to aforementioned meeting because... why?  Oh yes, you couldn't find your blasted keys. You'd have been better off to spend another 10 minutes and use that solid hour to clean up your stinkin office!

(sigh)


Here are some tricks for those of us who are a bit challenged in the "time management" department....

• Break projects down into chunks. You may naturally do things one step at a time, in a nice and orderly fashion....or you may be like me and address most everything like a you're trying to wrestle a tornado. I missed the gene/talent/gift/ability that allows a person to easily separate things into nice neat compartments in my mind. I see everything as one giant tangled up wad of yarn... or, back to my tornado analogy... you know in movies where all the stuff is just flying all over the place in a tornado? Yeah... that's how life looks to me.  This helps me: I usually have to stop and actually write down what needs to be done. Once I can SEE it broken down into separate tasks or projects, I can manage them better.

• Break time into chunks. For example, work for 1 hour at a time. Totally focused on the task at hand for 60 solid minutes. Going back to the previous point... if I have my tasks / projects written down, it is easier for me to say "I am spending the next 60 minutes cleaning my office," or (more likely) "I am spending the next 60 minutes painting/writing."

• Finally, and this is my FAVORITE....
  DONE is better than PERFECT if needing to be perfect keeps you from getting it done.

Can I get an Amen?

Big hugs y'all!
K