by Tom Evans | Nov 19, 2015 | Timing
Quarter 1 : Five Temporal Takeaways
This is the first of four sneak previews of what’s inside my forthcoming book, Managing Time Mindfully, being published on the 11th December
Temporal Takeaway #1:
It is thought that space and time were formed from the seed of the Big Bang. It took many billions of years though before time-as-we-know-it really got going. What we now refer to days and years only started when 3rd generation stars with rocky planets formed.
Temporal Takeaway #2:
On planet Earth, at least, time-as-we-know-it only started ticking when life formed around 3 billion years ago. The clock of time only ticks with the presence of an observer.
Temporal Takeaway #3:
The first pocket watches were only created in the 1675 by Christiaan Huygens. They were accurate to about 10 minutes a day. The accuracy of an Apple Watch is around 50 milliseconds.
Temporal Takeaway #4:
The need for global harmonisation of time came about from an increase in international travel by steamship and cross-continental travel with the railways. Time zones were created at International Meridian Conference in 1884.
Temporal Takeaway #5:
Seconds, minutes, hours, weeks and months are man-made and do not exist in nature. Although they allow us to run our modern world, some of us have become enslaved by the ticking of self-imposed clocks.
p.s. this blog was posted live exactly at 6:27 GMT on the 19th November, the 1st quarter of the Moon Phase
by Tom Evans | Jan 26, 2015 | Timing
In the UK at least, as the 31st of January looms quite a few hearts pounding as personal tax returns have to be submitted. It’s thought that nearly 10 million people in the UK must submit a self-assessment return each year. Filing a return late and you’ll get an immediate £100 fine.
Just imagine though if you could learn to get more done in less time and that you could generate enough hours in the day.
Well bizarre as it may seem, our left and right brains experience time in different ways. It’s an urban myth that the left brain is logical and the right is creative. The picture that is now emerging is that our left brains sit inside space and time and our right brains experience everywhere and ‘everywhen’ else.
If you have to make the numbers add up by the end of the week, take a few minutes out just now to take your left and right brains on a workout. Follow these simple numerical exercises and, at the end of this Timeful Task, you will have both sides of the brain working in harmony.
Your relationship with numbers will change slightly, especially with the number 9. You will also find your experience of the passage of time will subtly alter and remember of course that it’s the thought that ‘counts’.
This short video is a sample from over 6 hours of mind opening multimedia resources in the Living Timefully self study program.
To find out more about how we can change our perception of the passage of time and how we can create as much time as we need, start Living Timefully
p.s. the best time to start Living Timefully is yesterday, the second best time is today
by Tom Evans | Aug 26, 2014 | Timing
The days of our week are pretty arbitrary. Only humans use them and they are based on the names of gods as explained in this short video.
As they are arbritary, as per the example in the video, we can hijack them for our own individual use. So, I’ve come up with a yet another way to run my week using a different tack and leaning that I will adopt each day.
Note that I won’t spend all the day on each tack, just the core. This is mainly because each morning I meditate and write. Late afternoon and early evening, I will network and schedule exploratory conversations and podcast interviews.
In addition, I modulate phases of my projects with the seasons and the Moon phases. So my daily theme might take on a different flavour at various times of the year and each ’moonth’.
For the coming months, here’s what my new weeks look like and I throw down the gauntlet for you to re-define yours 🙂
Mends Day : each Monday I have reserved three healing slots for clients between 11am and 6pm. I will also be mindful to mend and repair things that need attention in my life and world.
Tools Day : Tuesday is the day I spend all day building new tools for personal transformation and spiritual development. The aim is to build my customer portal into a huge repository of wisdom – I call it The Adytum, it’s quite possibly the world’s first De-mystery School
Weeds Day : Wednesday is another client day. Between 11am and 3pm, I have scheduled 3 client unblocking sessions to weed out those internal gremlins that stop us being magnificent.
Surge Day : Thursday is my day to spend on marketing. I have two slots for podcast guests and love to learn how to get more and more out of my CRM and ecommerce system, InfusionSoft.
Free Day : Friday is my treat. It’s the day I spend writing my fiction. Note that I write and create most days but this is where my creative spirit is set free to explore, dream and expand.
Sitter Day : Saturday and Sunday are somewhat transposable but this is generally the time to sit around, relax and socialise.
Sunny Day : again this might happen on Sitter Day but being outside gardening or walking the dogs is a big component of the week. To dogs of course, every day is a sunny day, a sitter day and a free day. Perhaps they know something that we don’t.
by Tom Evans | Jun 21, 2012 | Timing
If you run a business where you charge by the hour, there is a fundamental limit to your annual turnover based on your hourly rate.
Let’s say you could work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and 48 weeks a year and you charge £50 an hour. If you were lucky enough to have 100% client bookings, you could earn £96,000 a year. This is not a bad level of income but you might burn out in the process.
This also leaves no time for client acquisition, any admin or even a tea break! Those that are lucky enough to have a full client diary end doing their admin and marketing in the evenings and weekends and end up becoming their own employee.
Now there are some conventional ways out of this quagmire:
- You can outsource your admin
- You can of course put your hourly rate up and do less hours for the same turnover
- You can take on other consultants, train them in your methods and take a percentage of their earnings
- You can even write a book, or design an eproduct or three, and make money while you sleep
There is though a radical and revolutionary way to get more done in less time and, as a result, become more profitable. This method is initially useful where you are billing for work commissioned by the client and not in face to face meetings. When you get confident in the techniques, I will explain how you can pull this trick off in front of a client too!
It’s a common misconception that time is fixed. If you’ve ever been in a waiting room with nothing to read, minutes can stretch into seeming hours. Conversely busy weekends can fly by and Monday come around all too soon.
What and how we think directly affects the perceived passage of time. Spend time fretting about the past or worrying about the future and you will at least half your efficiency and output right now.
On the other hand, when you ’get in the zone’ however, you can double, triple or quadruple your output. So, rather than increasing your hourly rate, you can keep it the same but more of the same work in less time. The client will be happy too, not least as the quality of the work we do when we are focussed increases several-fold.
The secrets of how to pull off this magical feat are revealed in Living Timefully, a revolutionary time management programme. This self study course turns time management on its head. Note that it’s not yet another methodology on how to better prioritise and how to manage interruptions. It shows you how you can change the speed of your thoughts so you can get more done in less time.
The proof of how it works is in tasting the pudding but just imagine if it’s true, how could you use possibly use this in face to face interactions?
When you learn the simple mindfulness techniques, something amazing happens when you switch your internal time clock, the ’clocks’ of people around you also switch to match yours. So, for example, if you have a non-chargeable sales or project scoping meeting, you can reach consensus in half the time. This way you can get back to billing work more quickly.
When you are in a chargeable session with a client they get more from the session and feel they get great value from you. They value their time too so your seeming efficiency, focus and clarity gives you an edge over your competitors. You might even consider putting your rates up when the inevitable testimonials come flying in.
So what are you waiting for? As for planting a tree, the best time to start creating more time is yesterday. The second best time is today!
Create as much time as you need and get more done
by Tom Evans | Jan 2, 2012 | Timing
One of the most common complaints you hear nowadays is that there is not enough time.
The world is speeding up – we are being bombarded by TV, news, social media – how is it possible to keep up?
Well it’s a common misconception that the march of time and it’s ticking clock is both fixed and immutable.
You hear people saying things like, “You can’t change the past” and “There are simply not enough hours in the day.”
Both these statements are not necessarily true.
It’s also said that, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. I even heard someone say once that they didn’t have enough time to read a time management book !!
Well there’s two books I recommend highly both that take a different approach, mentioned at the bottom of this blog … but even they don’t really show how time can be bent, managed and stretched.
It’s all in mind
Now this might seem far fetched, or in the realms of Doctor Who or Back to the Future, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that our reality – our space and time – are linked to our consciousness. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that it’s our very consciousness that actually creates our reality and space and time. So all you need to do to change time is to make a change in your consciousness.
A fly and an elephant both perceive time differently to us … and I for one have noticed a difference in peoples’ cognitive reaction time. Have you ever tried to swat a fly only for it to seem to know where you are about to strike? It’s nerve signals don’t have to travel as far as ours so its physiology and neurology means it reacts quicker.
I am sure you have heard about athletes who have been “in the zone” – a sort of timeless place – or perhaps you have had a light bulb moment where in less than a second, you get a flash of inspiration – a whole picture for a new idea. If you were able to MRI scan your brain at this moment, you would see both the right and left hemispheres light up in synchronism. For that split second you were Whole Brain (or even Whole Mind) Thinking. A brain scan would show that your brain was generating alpha and probably even theta waves.
It is now thought our left brain sits in space and time and our right brain everywhere and “every-when” else. By making our left brain go silent and work in harmony with our right, our perception of the speed of time changes.
Now you can access this state while meditating. When I mention this to people, their first reaction is that they don’t have time to meditate. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I can testify that 20-30 minutes meditation before any creative session will deliver not only the time back by a factor of 3 or 4 but also produce the most sublime output that appears to have come from nowhere.
“But I can’t make my mind go quiet,” is normally the next protest swiftly followed by, “I’d like to meditate but I don’t have time to learn how.”
Well, if you hear yourself saying this, help is now at hand. You don’t need necessarily to enter an ashram for two months. Although, if you did, it might well be time well spent …
Have a listen to this audio track to learn a routine you can use anytime and anywhere – great also for getting back to sleep in the early hours – but not as one client of mind did for listening to while driving !!!
By practicing getting into this state while your eyes are open, you will find time changes its speed … and you will get more done in less time !!!
Create as much time as you need and get more done
Recommended Reading
If what I’ve written above it just too whacky and you just want to better manage your day and “claw back” time, then read Time Management for Dummies by Clare Evans (no relation).
I also recommend getting hold of a copy of Steven Taylor’s excellent book called Making Time – it explains in some detail how consciousness and time are interrelated and how you can start to control time to your advantage.
These themes and more are explored in the first quarter of my new book, Managing Time Mindfully, which is published on the 11th December — the exact date of the next New Moon.
In the UK at least, as the 31st of January looms quite a few hearts pounding as personal tax returns have to be submitted. It’s thought that nearly 10 million people in the UK must submit a self-assessment return each year. Filing a return late and you’ll get an immediate £100 fine.
