Tom Evans | Monthly Archives: February 2015

What’s It Like Living Timefully?

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Tom Evans Posted in Timing Leave a comment

This year, I have launched a philanthropic initiative to share the Living Timefully resources with people with life shortening conditions.

It’s with great pleasure that I am able to share (anonymously) the feedback from one of the first people who took the program under this scheme.

If you know someone who could benefit, they can apply for complementary access here …

1. How did you come across Living Timefully?

Through Lea Woodward who gave me the link to your free Be Calm meditation. Then from there I got to learn and discover more about your work.

2. What did you hope to gain from taking the course?

To reduce or try to handle my stress better. After using the Be Calm meditation, I felt it could be most helpful with handling my stress. That is when you started generously offering the Living Timefully program to people who like me need help to handle the little time they have. It felt like really timely indeed.

3. What did you learn from taking it?

I learned a lot about myself and my relationship with time. Starting with discovering and putting on paper where time goes was a life changing exercise, literally!

It has allowed me to see and come to terms with different aspects of my life as it is today, that were previously blocking me from moving forward with my life and projects or that were keeping me in the same loop.

I have confirmed something I knew yet did not know about the past, future and present. With the meditation from the Future Time week, I was able to actually get messages in and from time that have proved really useful.

4. What was your favourite take away?

Would you believe before your Be Calm meditation, I was not much of a meditation kind of person? I had tried meditating in the past but was never able to get deep with it. That free introductory meditation really made a difference.

Second the feeling that the threatening pressure of time has greatly receded in my life.

5. How would you describe it to somebody if you only had 30 seconds in an elevator

It is an online program over 10 weeks, every week you receive access the videos and audios giving you a greater outlook on life as we see it. You gently, slowly get to realise there is not only more to life than meet the eye there is deeper, higher, wider and then more too. It is a soft, gentle, step by step journey that releases its effect over time as you build the routine in your life. It is very practical with manageable steps everyone can apply and enjoy.

Creative Scheduling

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Tom Evans Posted in Timing Leave a comment

We can be very creative about not being creative. When we schedule time for our creative activities, quite often other more pressing tasks pop up. As a result, our books don’t get written and deadlines move from being comfortable to being tight.

There is a knack to scheduling creatively which involves going with the temporal flow. When we block out creative times wisely, we find we can get more done, more easily.

One of the factors which mitigates against us is the modern calendar. Our modern time systems are brilliant when it comes to allowing us to operate in a sophisticated society. We don’t want all planes to arrive at an airport just when they feel like it. It’s nice to be able to turn up to the theatre and for it to start on time, on the date that we’ve booked.

We should be minded though that seconds, minutes, hours, weeks and months don’t exist in nature, they are man-made. Likewise the names of the days of the week and the division between working week and weekend are arbitrary. Not everyone on the planet has Saturday and Sunday as their weekend, for example.

The varying lengths of the months are made up too. The only real time constants are the day and the year which are of course driven by the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun. Even these vary quite a bit and our 24 hour days and 365.25 day years are only averages. The tugging and pulling between the planets in our Solar System make everything a bit fluid and variable.

When we superimpose false deadlines inside our time system, it is often hard to be at our creative peak just at the perfect time. Of course, we can use tools and practices like meditation and mind mapping to help us out of our creative log jams. The best way by far to be superbly creative though is for us to schedule our creative tasks around the times where we are most productive.

Firstly, we can easily identify when we are most creative in the day. I am a morning person and I always write between 8am and 11am, as I am doing with this article right now. I also meditate before each writing session but that’s just a practice I use to tune into my Creative Muse.

The second trick I use is to give the days of my week my own names on which I focus on different aspects of my business. You can have some creative fun making up your own.

See the blog, My Magical Week for more on this and to see how others have done it too !!

Once we get our days sorted, we can superimpose two other overarching slants on our creative output.

Moon Phases The first is to tune into the phase of the Moon. I have noticed I get much better results if I plan between the New Moon and Full Moon and act and deliver between Full Moon and New Moon. I also believe that it doesn’t matter if the Moon affects our creativity or not but that the oscillation between planning and action gives us space to breathe, reflect and measure how we are doing. There are more subtle divisions to use with the quarter phases of the Moon but this simple method is very workable.

By the way, if you don’t know what the Moon phase is, there are loads of free smartphone apps these days. I’ve also found that inspirational talks and workshops work well when timed on or around the Full Moon. New concepts and product launches on the New Moon seem to swimmingly too.

Seasons The second aspect to bear in mind is which season we are in. Only after writing my first three books did I notice that I had created them all in Spring. So now I plan and research my next book in Autumn and Winter and start writing it in earnest on the Spring Equinox.

Now if all of this sounds a bit wacky and you think I have lost my marbles, let me add some caveats. Firstly, each of us is free to tune into our own creative cycles. There is no creed or religion to follow here. Secondly, any system like this works exactly because it gives us a framework to follow. Our outputs are the only measure of its efficacy.

We should never limit our creativity either. My iPad is always to hand to capture words, speech, art, maps of my mind and images or even video, should the Muse call.

To find out more about how I schedule my day, check out my interview and loads more fabulous articles in the latest multimedia edition of Time Management Magazine.

Subscribe today for iPad or Android here …

Talking Temporally

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Tom Evans Posted in Timing Leave a comment

One of the great bonuses about running your own podcast is the wonderful conversations it leads to with people you could otherwise never meet.

If lack of time is something that gives you some concern, these interviews will give you some insights on how to make the most of it.

Inventor, horologist and philanthropist, Dr John C Taylor OBE, shares his wisdom on innovation and all things temporal.

Find out more about John and his amazing time-eating clock, the Chronophage, at http://www.johnctaylor.com/

listen to ‘A Man for Our Time’ on audioBoom

A temporal chat with Glenn Watt, the editor of Time Management magazine, on simple ways to get more done in our days.

listen to ‘Glenn Watt & Time Management Magazine’ on audioBoom

For another interesting conversation on time, Glenn interviews me on my left field approach to time management in the latest multimedia edition of Time Management Magazine.

Subscribe today for iPad or Android here …

How to Find Your Soul Mate

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Tom Evans Posted in Expanding 4 Comments

Our language gives so much away. What we say, and our body language as we say it, give us an insightful picture of what is really going on in our minds and our bodies.

We say things like, “My heart’s not in this” or “I wished I’d followed my heart”.

It’s becoming clear that our neurology, and sentience of the world around us, is not just limited to our head and the five classical senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

Our gut senses danger and also informs us if something is a good idea or not. Our heart feels too. It can be broken, it can feel luke warm about something or positively glowing and besotted with a person, a situation or an idea.

What neuroscientists are just discovering has been known by the ancients for thousands of years. We have active mind centres all over our body. The seven primary centres are sometimes referred to as our chakras.

Most people are unaware of them and their function but everyone has experienced imbalances and blockages in them at sometime or other.

One of the most powerful is the heart chakra – and like all other points, it emits an energy field which can be picked up by others. The field naturally beams out in a spiral in front and behind us. It both emits and receives love.

When we take it under conscious control, we can perform amazing feats which may seem a bit like magic. We can heal with it, we can soften tense situations, we can also use it to both locate and attract our our soul mate.