Where Does the Time Go?

Time RunningHow many times do we get to the end of a day and wonder where the time went?

Despite our best intent, our To Do List appears to have grown longer, not shorter.

How can we begin to control the flow of time?

Well most time management techniques use goal setting, prioritization and management of interruption as their basis. These principles are laudable and useful but there is something else we can do which is much more powerful and that’s to take better control of our own personal time machine – our mind.

1. Many people are only 33% efficient

A clue to where some the time goes lies in an often over-looked aspect of our consciousness. The normal human mind is only capable of experiencing one thought at a time. Just think about what you are thinking right now and notice how what you are thinking about gets replaced by a new thought. You may need to think about that!

In a normal day, our thoughts often wander. We might think about what we are doing in the future, like what we’re having for supper or rehearsing a speech. We might dwell on the past and repeat a conversation that we wish had gone better. When we mull over the past or fret about the future, this has the result of disrupting our efficiency in the Now.

Time Tip #1 : when thoughts of the past or the future pop along, just ask them politely to go away and come back when you are ready to deal with them. A thought cannot resist being thought about and will vaporise when we ’talk to it’ in this manner.
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2. Slowing Down is the New Speeding Up

Before I started meditating in my mid-40’s, I thought it was a waste of time. I was far too busy to fritter away even 10 minutes a day and there was no way I could make my active mind go quiet.

Nowadays I know that if I miss out on some form of daily meditative practice, I have a worse day. I am less able to make wise decisions and I miss spotting serendipities.

Time Tip #2 : make sure you take at least 10 minutes of ‘me time’ each day, even if it’s going for a walk in the park. Guard this time with passion and note it’s reckoned that meditation extends our longevity by reducing stress and fostering good health. This will give us more time!
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3. Being In Two Minds

It’s an urban myth our left brain is logical and our right brain is creative. A closer analogy, for most people, is that our left brain sits inside space and time and our right brain sits everywhere and ‘everywhen’ else. Both experience the flow of time in different ways.

Something magical happens when we get both sides of our brain working on the same thing at the same time. Time takes on an ethereal quality and stretches out. Good examples of whole brain tasks are doodling and mind mapping. When we enter this Whole Brain mode, we also seem to emit an Intention Field which prevents interruptions coming our way.

Time Tip #3 : before embarking on any creative task, hold your left nostril closed with your index finger and breathe through the right nostril five times. Then close the right nostril and breathe through the left five times. Repeat as necessary.
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4. Create a To Love List

The To Do List can become a weight around our necks, dragging us down and backwards. They can contain a mix of things we want to do and things we feel we ought to do. They may also contain tasks we do out of habit.

Time Tip #4 : go through your To Do List and make two columns on a separate bit of paper. Label the first column as a To Love List and transfer over all the things on your To Do List that you love to do, in the order of those you would like to do first.

In the second column, labelled To Don’t List, add all the other tasks. Next what you do is go through all the tasks on the To Don’t List and either delegate them or delete them. Optionally, you can also think about what would have to change so you could love doing them instead and then move them over into the first column.

When we combine these four tips together, our days begin to take on a magical quality. As they are all free to do and simple to try, what do you have to lose but even more time if you don’t give them a test drive?

Create as much time as you need and get more done

Start Living Timefully

Living Timefully

Talking Temporally with Anne Jirsch

pic_anneAnne Jirsch is a London-born professional psychic with a large worldwide following. Her client base includes heads of industry, politicians and celebrities from the world of film, music and sport.

She is an internationally best-selling author of four books – ‘Instant Intuition,’ ‘The Future is Yours,’ ‘Cosmic Energy’ and ‘Create Your Perfect Future.’

Anne is a leading world pioneer of Future Life Progression and runs the only training school for FLP in the world with 250 practitioners in 8 countries. She is the Chairman of The Past & Future Life Society.

In this conversation on The Zone Show, we explore the healing and creative possibilities open to us in The Now when we explore our true relationship with the past and the future.

Anne also takes us on two guided visualisations – the first to cut the cords that hold us back and the second to help us create the perfect world collectively.

 

Find out more about Anne and her work and her writings

Anne Jirsch

Future Life Progression

Anne’s books on Amazon UK

Anne’s books on Amazon.com

 

How to Make a Book Trailer

46-movie2We’re used to trailers for films and TV programmes. They tantalise and tease us to the delights the main feature will hold.

Nowadays multimedia trailers are being increasingly used to promote books and the technology to do them is accessible to all.

Seven elements that make a good trailer

1. Short – less than 5 minutes, ideally 1 minute
2. Sneak preview of book’s content – but adds something additional to the book
3. Link to buy book – but not a heavy sell but do include the book cover for recognition
4. Impactful – if the book has a point to make, this should be contained in the trailer
5. Fully informative yet enigmatic – it should be self contained in its message and encourage the viewer to want more
6. Potential to go viral – include humour or make a point that people want to share
7. Must work on mobile devices – if the trailer includes text, check that it works on mobile devices

Keen as ever to get my feet wet, I’ve had a go at a couple …

This We Know – short and enigmatic …

This We Are – somewhat longer and gives a snapshot of each chapter in the book …


– let me know how I did

Online Trailer Production Tools

Powtoon – used above
Animoto
GoAnimate
SwitchVideo
Slideshare

– let me know if I have missed any

Connecting Upstairs to Downstairs

Stephanie J KingIn this conversation, author, healer, transformational life coach and Soulpreneur, Stephanie J King shares her vision for a new way to be.

If you’ve been struggling or pushing water uphill, find out how connecting with ’upstairs’ pays great dividends. Discover how a mind shift at an individual level has a collective effect and creates a global awakening. Find out how to awaken to miracles and to allow them into your life.

Stephanie finishes this conversation with a channelled visualisation to help initiate this shift.


Find more about Stephanie, her work, her books, talks and meditations on her web site

Seven Time Management Hacks

Stretching TimeMost time management systems quite rightly focus on goal setting, intelligent prioritisation and improved interruption management. When we see time as a finite resource, with a forward arrow, this is a pretty good strategy. It is however a left-brained, orthogonal approach.

Time however is both malleable and stretchable and when we see it as something that can be manipulated to our advantage, there is a whole gamut of techniques we can use to get more done in less time. Our perception of time is a function of our consciousness and modulated by the speed of our breath.

Quite simply, when we change our mind, we change our time.

Hack One : Ending Procrastination

It is amazing how creative we can be at not getting on with the task in hand. When it comes to doing what we really should be doing, or what we would love to do, we invent excuses galore to not-do-it. In all cases, this sort of behaviour is a symptom of a deeper malaise. When we procrastinate creatively, we are masking and hiding an underlying fear. It might be a fear of failure or even a fear of success. It could be fear of the unknown or a fear of being ridiculed. Often, it has roots back to an earlier event where the wheels came off our bus.

Remove the fear and the creative spark gets redirected where it is needed.
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Hack Two : Getting in Sync

Our man-made calendar and the 9 to 5 working week, when combined with 24×7 electric lighting, has resulted in us losing connection with natural cycles. Morning people just can’t produce as well in the afternoons. Each month, the Moon orbits our planet and has a massive impact on the creative cycle. Spring-time is the perfect time to leap into action and autumn is the perfect time to harvest.

When we go with the temporal flow, we stop pushing time uphill.
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Hack Three : Kronos and Kairos

The Greeks knew this but only recently neuroscientists have re-discovered that we have two minds of time. For most people, the left brain sits inside space and time; simultaneously the right brain lives everywhere and ’everywhen’ else. Energise both hemispheres by going for a good walk, or cross crawling, or give them a task they work on together and time takes on an ethereal quality.

It is just like magic because all magic tricks are only magic until we know how the trick is done.
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Hack Four : It’s Madness not to Meditate

It is thought that every minute spent in the deep meditative state extends our longevity by an equal amount of time, or more. Not only that but our well-being and vitality improves so we lose less time being ill, or just under the weather and under-performing. What’s more, when we take 10-20 minutes of “me-time” out every day, we get it back in spades with the serendipities and chance encounters we experience by being more tuned in.

Perfect opportunities come in when we least expect them too – and always just-in-time.
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Hack Five : The Intention Field

Thoughts don’t become things, they are things. Every thought we have generates an intention field around it that sends ripples out through the collective mind that bounce back at us. Simply by engaging both hemispheres on a task, we send out a signal that we are busy. You will find the phone doesn’t ring when you are really zoned on a task in this manner.

The intention field gets generated automatically and requires no energy but a particular kind of breath – and we all have to breathe anyway.
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Hack Six : Whole Mind Thinking

Our consciousness is sited all over our body and only concentrated around major nerve ganglia. As we have billions of neurons in our brains, for most people upon awakening, our inner dialogue naturally shouts the loudest. As a result, we assume our head is where all the ‘action’ is when it comes to matters of consciousness and awareness. This has the tendency of masking signals from other important nerve centres, specifically those in our heart and our gut. From an evolutionary perspective, these mind centres are older and in some ways wiser. They also operate a few seconds ahead of our conscious awareness and they are always, always right.

When we get our head, heart and gut in alignment, we become unstoppable.
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Hack Seven : Letting Stuff Arrive

Rather than thinking we have to turn up, when you apply the six hacks above all together, all we have to do is to allow things to arrive. Life stops being a chore and we begin to enjoy a charmed existence.

Also what turns up is better than our wildest dreams and always perfectly timed.

Create as much time as you need and get more done

Mindfulness-based Time Management