I remember when “don’t push the river; it flows by itself” was a pop-wisdom phrase on everybody’s lips. A hippie catch-phrase gone viral in the 1960s and 70s, it was likely to be used to browbeat somebody who was tense or anxious or downright scared and getting naggy behind it. Commonly, back then, the phrase usually kept company with words like “uptight” or “square” and prefaced shaming statements about being some kind of whiny stick in the mud. The river…
It occurred to me that the most effective “time management” stance is basically saying “no” to all the things you’re asked to do – either by your own self or by other people — until you get to a thing to which you can or want or have to say “yes.” The “yes” is your “Go.” Ideally whatever task pulls that “yes” from you is one that you think will make some sort of difference in your life – one…
Another IPS (Inner Peace Symptom): a tendency to choose to do what is important to you. [If you know what’s important to you, you can free up your time to consider how to get THAT just right by letting go of spazzing about your trivia.]
Poet Carl Sandburg once pointed out, “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” There is a multiplicity of methods and products that are supposed to help you manage your time. The problem with most of them is they don’t work all that well any more as our world speeds up and our…
I don’t remember where he originated. He was a character in one of the potato-chip (you can’t just eat one) books that I like to read. In the book, Frank-the-Mechanic was a retired assassin who gets sucked back up in leftovers from his previous life. He was a super-casual sort of businessman who had a number of interests that he kept up, all of them suitable as a single career. He did each one – a little bit every day…
I felt silly the first time I tried this. I had to talk myself into it over and over again. I mean …REALLY. You set a plastic mechanical timer (preferably one that is shaped like a tomato because it’s traditional) for 25 minutes, and then you go do a thing you’ve been putting off (like writing a blog or a poem, for instance). When the bell rings, you stop and rest for at least five minutes. Repeat, repeat, repeat. (It’s…