Your Best Year Yet

Your Best Year Yet

2016

As we embark on a new orbit of the Sun, it not only pays dividends to make plans for the next year ahead but also to reflect on what unfolded in the year just gone.

That was 2015

For me, 2015 was a year of generation where I produced this little lot :

To find out how I managed to create such output, listen to this podcast.

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This is 2016

To hear about what I plan for the 2016 on the back of all of this in what will be a year of consolidation, listen to this podcast.

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Now it’s your turn …

And if you want to bend time, tune into your muse, discover your soul purpose, manifest enough money just when you need it, tap into light bulb moments, connect with your Muse, heal old ‘wounds’, meet the love of your life and much more, then checkout this special offer …

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A Trip Around the Cube of Light

The Cube of LightI had the great pleasure a month ago to be introduced to a new tool for personal and business transformation called the Cube of Light.

My tour guide was Gary Plunkett and I know I can claim to be the first person ever to travel around this gem because it came from mentoring work I was doing to help Gary.

As you will hear in this interview, pulling ourselves up with our own bootstraps in this manner is part of the brilliance and ‘insight-full-ness’ that comes from using this tool.

Links to resources mentioned in the podcast

Book yourself a session with Gary

Email : gary AT garyplunkett DOT com


How Judith Morgan got a 200% return on investment

A Spiral of Abundance


Learn the secrets of money alchemy

Abundant Thinking


Take a journey to awaken all your mind centres – created after my tour of Gary’s cube

Heart-full Living


To discover how you too can embrace and develop powerful tools for transformation – for both you and your clients

Awaken Your Inner Magician

Creative Scheduling

Creative ZoneWe 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.

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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.
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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.
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Moon PhasesThe 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.
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SeasonsThe 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.

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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 …

Deadlines Don’t Have to Be Taxing

Tax-Time-Fotolia_74492695_XSIn 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

Living Timefully

p.s. the best time to start Living Timefully is yesterday, the second best time is today

Creating an Interruption Barrier

Interruption BarrierIt said that every time we switch away from a task, it takes around five minutes to tune fully back into what we were working on. This means if we get just 12 interruptions a day, we lose around an hour in productivity.

Obviously, we can relatively easily remove self-inflicted diversions by switching off email, cell phones and social media. There’s an added bonus to be gained here. When we read less emails and interact less on social media, we create less noise in other peoples’ worlds and in turn they create less in ours.

I am currently having a self-imposed week of reduced social media involvement and I am amazed at how much more time I have to get more done. I also feel less anxious about checking in to see who’s talking about what – and me! I am just checking emails three times a day and only replying to everything in one session. It took a while to wean myself away from constantly checking in but now I am on the ‘other side’, it is strangely calming.

Even if you manage to tame the inner desire to divert your attention from the task at hand, external influences can darken your door just when you are fully engrossed and immersed in the creative zone. This is especially true in open plan office environments where conversations and other peoples’ phone calls can so easily disrupt our concentration.

Quite possibly, the worst type of interruption is that gentle knock on the door and a voice saying, “Have you got a minute?”

We never say, “If I had a spare minute, I would have sought you out and offered it to you.”

Instead we acquiesce and invariably that single requested minute morphs into several.

To prevent this kind of unrequited attention sapper, we can set up an interruption barrier. Like all strong defenses, it is best if it has several layers to stop the most ardent of penetrators.


Layer 1 : Physical

The first layer can be physical. When we are working on a creative task that needs our undivided attention, we can either work from home or lock ourselves in an office labelled ’Do Not Disturb’.


Layer 2 : Cultural

The second layer is both cultural and temporal. In smart organisations with intelligent employees, the time and space of others is respected. Simply announce the time and space you like to be interrupt free. A good practice is to designate the first working hour of the morning or after lunch as the time you need your own space. If everybody adopts this practice, nobody is therefore free to interrupt anyone else.


Layer 3 : Mindful

The third layer is slightly esoteric, yet the most potentially the most powerful.

It is postulated, by Carl Jung and other, that all thought permeates through a collective field. So if a person pops into your mind, it is possible that they are thinking about you just at that instant.

The reverse is also true. While you are working on a creative task, if your attention wanders and you think of somebody or other, then they might just think, “Ooh, I wonder if so and so is not busy and might be able to help me on this.”

So it is possibly our thoughts of others that cause them to interrupt us.


Over the years, I have noticed that the phone never rings when I am writing a chapter of a book or a blog. Yet, just a few minutes after a finish, it does. I realised I must have been doing something to stop my thought forms from leaking out.

The clue is this. Every day before I write, I meditate for 10 to 30 minutes. When I start writing, I remain in the meditative state. This means my internal dialogue is silent so I am not radiating any thought forms. The only ’words’ passing through my head are those that are passing through my finger tips typing these words.

This is especially true right now.

To create as much time as you need and get more done, start Living Timefully

Living Timefully