How 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.
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!
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.
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?
Anne 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.
In 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
Most 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The normal human mind can only have one thought at a time.
Just think about what you are thinking about and the thing you are thinking about gets replaced with the thought you are having about that thought.
Just read the above sentence again, pause from reading this article and just check the validity of this notion.
So armed with this new knowledge about the way we think, this gives us the most amazing insight when it comes to our time management.
“If we are focused on anything else other than the task in hand, time will slip away from us.”
So just think about this for a few seconds, these are the Five Bandits of Time …
Switching away from the current task
Being diverted away from the current task
Fretting over the past
Worrying about the future
Thinking about something too much
If you read conventional time management books, they will be awash with tips and techniques on how to priortise better and how to stop interruptions. I recommend Time Management for Dummies, by Clare “no relation” Evans, to help with these first two Time Bandits.
There is nothing much out there that deals with the last three Time Bandits though – until now that is !!!!
Change the way you think and add hours to your days
Many time management systems teach you how to better prioritise and how to beat procrastination. This system is fundamentally different – it shows you how to change the speed of your thoughts, using meditative and mindfullness techniques, so you change the subjective passage of time.
Learn how to control your own Personal Time Machine – your Mind.
This ecourse contains over four hours of mind altering exercises and visualisations to take you into altered and heightened states of consciousness. The programme is simple to follow, completely safe and also very, very relaxing.
Take some Time Out to give yourself more Me-Time and you will get your investment back in this revolutionary time management programme in no time at all.
From where I am sitting and where you are reading this blog, we are completely unaware of this twice yearly event – and why should we be? In our modern day world where we are totally in control, nothing as trivial as the orientation of the Earth could possibly have any effect on us … surely?
When viewed from space however, a different perspective emerges. We can see clearly that half the world is in darkness and half in light. Well there is nothing new there as it is like that every day of the year. The difference is that the cusp between light and dark is lined up with the rotational axis of the planet.
This means that every person on the planet experiences approximately the same amount of daylight and darkness, apart from those standing right on the Poles … and of course miners and submariners.
The exact time and day of the equinox, however, is not strictly that important. What is significant is that we should use it as a time for reflection. Too often our years just bleed into each other with each one following the pattern of the last. The fact that the Earth goes around in circles doesn’t mean we have to.
It doesn’t matter so much if there is any astrological or cosmological significance to the Equinox, just that every so often we should take stock and do some forward planning and, once we’ve done that, we should take action.
Spring is a great time to start a new project – for example, I’ve written all my books in Spring – something I only realised after I’d published the fourth book !
So for the last two months I have been planning and Mind Mapping my next book – today I start to write it in earnest !!
So, whether you are planning to write a book, or not, take some time out today to Spring Forward and so the seeds of what you are going to grow over the next 12 months.
Note, although the word equinox is often understood to mean “equal [day and] night”, this is not strictly true. For most locations on Earth, there are two distinct identifiable days per year when the length of day and night are closest to being equal; those days are referred to as the “equiluxes” to distinguish them from the equinoxes. Equinoxes are points in time when the Sun is right over the equator. Equiluxes are days which can be a couple of weeks either side and can vary depending where we are on the planet.
Bending Time is a time management programme like no other.
It introduces simple mind-fullness techniques that fundamentally change your relationship with time.
By changing the speed of our consciousness, we alter the perceived passage of time. Simply, we get more done in less time when we learn how to get and stay in the zone.
The techniques you will learn also have some collateral benefits such as improving your vibrancy, complexion and attractive-ness.
When you learn to Bend Time, life becomes easier, your serendipity increases and you stop pushing water uphill.
Listen to this interview with Kingsley Offor from Infusionsoft to hear how his life changed immediately after using the programme …
… and how he’s learned, “Not to sweat the small stuff.”
Have you ever had the same thoughts running around and around in your head? Perhaps somebody upset you or crossed a boundary. Maybe you have a conversation looming that you were dreading or are rehearsing a speech or presentation.
These internal ’conversations’ can go on for days. Nothing you do can shake these thoughts from your head. This state is known as a mindfall.
Such mindfalls can be debilitating and can ruin your day. Eventually, if left ’untreated’, they can even lead to mental ’dis-ease’ such as depression or, on the flip side, even generate illusions and delusions of grandeur.
In this short video, I show how to use a single flavour to jump out of a mindfall.
Last year I wrote and published a book I had no idea I was about to write. I started writing it on the 3rd September and it was ready for publication on the 17th.
It shot into the top 10 books in Philosophy on the UK Kindle store by the end of September and the amazing reviews tell of the impact it is having on readers.
Here’s how I it came to pass …
Step 1: Have a Cracking Idea
I was watching my lovely partner snoozing on the sofa and wondered how many other people were also asleep right at that time. I also wondered how many people who were awake were also really ‘asleep’.
Step 2: Have an Immovable Deadline
I was presenting a workshop on creativity on the 27th September at Sadler’s Wells at the Transformational Media Summit and wondered if I could write a book with a big message – and get it published in time so I could use it as a case study for the journalists attending.
Step 3: Don’t Write a Big Book
To print a title and author name on the spine, you need about 100 pages or so. This equates to around 10,000-12,000 words. My aim was to write a book that could be read in a single commute or sitting.
Step 4: Learn How to Bend Time
I have been studying how we perceive the passage of time and I know some psychological and physiological ways to stretch time so we can get more done in less linear time. See Bending Time to find out how you can do this too.
Step 5: Write Short Chapters
A short chapter can be written and read in one session. What I do is meditate before each writing session for 20 minutes and I can then generate around 1000 words in an hour or so. The chapters in this book were actually around 500 words long so they could be re-syndicated in a blog.
Step 6: Review but Don’t Edit
Before writing each chapter, I review the previous chapter so I don’t duplicate and I ensure continuity and fluidity over the whole book. I only edit massive faux pas but don’t try and proof read or edit the whole. Incidentally, I normally Mind Map my books but this time it just came from ‘nowhere’.
Step 7: Know When To Finish
With epublication and print on demand, subsequent editions are easy. So when the 10,000 words or so are done and the base story is told, that’s time to wrap on this edition.
Step 8: Get Someone Else to Proof Read It
It’s impossible to mark your own homework so get professional, or a friend or colleague with an eye for detail, to read it and sanity check that it’s a Good Book and tells a solid story.
Step 9: Format It Nicely and Upload It to a PoD or ePub service
I use the CompletelyNovel print on demand service for my print books as it is so easy – and support is brilliant. Books normally arrive in 5 to 7 days. I uploaded it on the 17th of September and the box below arrived on the 20th in just three days!!
Step 10: Spread The Word
After finding a couple of other errors in the print books (so much easier than on screen), I uploaded it to the Amazon KDP platform and by the 21st September, it was available to download globally for less than the price of a cup of coffee. A few tweets and Facebook posts later and the reviews started flying in.
How many times do we get to the end of a day and wonder where the time went?
Most 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.
