Another Quarter Billion Miles
The Earth travels over a half billion miles each year as it orbits around the Sun.
The Earth travels over a half billion miles each year as it orbits around the Sun.So today, on the Winter Solstice, you can think of as being the end of one orbit and the start of the next. It’s a good time to reflect on this orbit’s highlights and what’s coming up on the next spin around our home star.
Here’s what’s been happening since this blog I wrote at the Summer Solstice :
The journey so far:
- Published the first illustrated Just for Today book with the most delightful and talented co-creator from Norway, Siri Stiklestad Opli
- Created a 10 day meditation course for Insight Timer called The Art of Timefulness – due out Q1 2018
- Passed an audition to become a Vistage speaker
- Delivered two 30 minute keynote sessions as a paid speaker
- Helped two first time authors, Penny Waite and Siobhán Mullan, publish their books
- Wrote 35k words of my new novel – 15k to go by end of December!
What’s already planned for the next 1/4 billion miles:
What’s already planned for the next 1/4 billion miles:- Write another batch of Just for Today’s – with some differences!
- Get at least four more authors out in print, ebook and audiobook
- Rationalise and stream my products into three tiers – free, economical, premium
- Start the Awakening process for some more Like Minds
- Deliver the first of many Vistage presentations
- Publish my novel to celebrate my 60th year
- Lead the meditations at the Guildford Wellness event at GLive
p.s. If you want to know how to produce this volume of creative output, take the Mindfulness-based Time Management self-study course
Just a Month
There’s something intriguing happening to time that I feel I should share with you. Time as we know it is a’changin’ and the speed of its passage becoming controllable by our state of consciousness.
While many people claim to be time poor these days and need another hour in the week but I have uncovered some of the secrets of why time isn’t as fixed as we think.
I’ve just looked back at my last month and all of this has happened when I have also ‘spent’ loads of time caring for some family members and had every weekend off. It all comes down to learning to #LiveTimefully.
Here’s what I have generated in the last 30 days :
#1. Produced the audiobook version of Freedom From Bosses Forever
It’s written by the brilliantly maverick and wise Tony Robinson. Apart from being an enjoyable romp of a story, Tony sprinkles the story with nuggets of business wisdom, called Leonorisms, designed to help microbusinesses both survive and thrive, with a Terry-Prachett style of humour.
Listen to Freedom from Bosses Forever today
#2. Recorded and produced six new Zone Show podcasts
Chantal Cooke on Marketing your Business Book
Helene Segura : The Inefficiency Assassin
Dr Jamie Turndorf on Why Love Never Dies
PMH Atwater on Children of the Fifth World
Sally Francis on Remembering Who Truly Are
Dr Karen Tate on the Voice of the Sacred Feminine
#3. Published three new blogs
After a bit of a hiatus, I am blogging again every Friday – this blog being a fourth!
Mindblowing Indecision
Living in the Loving Zone
Streams of Thought
#4. Recorded four new meditative visualisations and remastered three more to create a new seven day meditative experience
In just one week, spending just 10 minutes a day, learn how to calm your mind and create a new world where magic happens.
Just for Me meditations
#5. Remastered and published four new meditative journeys to the Insight Timer app
I’ve deepened and widened the scale of my free meditations on the Insight Timer app to share some of my more esoteric explorations.
Insight Timer free for iOS & Android
#6. Written two and a half more months worth of Just for Today daily nuggets of mindfulness
At the start of May, the 180 nuggets I wrote last summer ran out, so I’ve written a whole set of new aphorisms. Note that when I get to 365, I will publish a book of them – an example of how to write a book slowly!
Get Just for Today nuggets of mindfulness free today
#7. Written a brand new 20k word book I had no idea I was going to write
By way of contrast, I started writing a new book in Sue Richardson’s Authority Guide series last week and yesterday sent off the first draft of around 20,000 words. The trick I use here is to channel my future self who knows the words I have yet to write. When we do this, we jump outside time and space and time-as-we-know-it disappears.
p.s. this was also in a month when I had a cataract removed and replaced so I can now ‘half-see’ what I am doing (2nd one done next week).
I really am not making this up, or trying to brag, and I genuinely have not put in 25 hour days or 8 day weeks. I would love to share the secrets of how I manage this so more people can make the most of their time by getting more done with less of it.
So, for the rest of Summer, until the Autumn Equinox, my Living Timefully self study programme is available for just £99 – a Summer Saving of £100.
As for planting a tree the best time to start Living Timefully is yesterday, the second best time is today !!
Just use MYBESTSUMMER on checkout to take advantage of this offer and to start taking control of your Personal Time Machine – your mind !!
Start Living Timefully today
Who’s ‘Watching’ Over You ?
watch [verb] : to observe, to keep a look out, to view
watch [noun] : a timepiece, a chronometer (worn on the wrist or carried in a pocket)
watch [noun] : a timepiece, a chronometer (worn on the wrist or carried in a pocket)
From when we are born until we leave the planet, time is superimposed upon us and someone or other seems to be ‘watching over you’.
We are indoctrinated with the notion of time from birth. Babies have times for feeding, changing, and bathing. Timetables regulate our school lessons. School-time all too quickly morphs into the nine to five of work-time. We intersperse our days with breakfast times, break times, lunch times, tea times, and supper times. Commuters just have to catch that train, right on time, so they can ‘clock in’ and ‘clock out’ at the end of their working day.
We have a bedtime and, before we know it, it’s time to get up again. Note that between these two times, when we are sleeping and dreaming, time takes on a different and ethereal quality. If you ever end up awake in the small hours, however, time can seem to stretch to eternity.
Our language, too, is littered with temporal references:
- ‘Just a minute.’
- ‘Give me a second.’
- ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
- ‘Another day, another dollar.’
- ‘That is so last season.’
- ‘Holding back the years.’
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
It seems that time is imposed upon us from birth right through to death, and that we cannot escape either its forward arrow or its grip. Yet, go back just 200 years or so, and nobody wore a watch. So this obsession with time is actually quite recent. In our so-called modern society, what is making this somewhat worse is that the world is permanently ‘switched on’. Before we had electric light, people snuffed out candles and went to sleep when it got dark.
The key to taking time back under our control lies in ‘watching’ ourselves internally. Firstly, take notice how the speed of time seems to vary depending on what we are doing and thinking. A busy weekend with friends seems to zoom by. An interminable wait in a doctor’s surgery seems to drag out forever. When we travel somewhere new, it seems to take longer than the journey back or the return trip. Secondly, reflect on days where you got lots done and on those days where you where pushing water up a temporal hill. Notice how you felt about those days before, during and after.
Synchronising with EMT
The passage of time is subjective and herein lies the clues on how we can control it, as opposed to it controlling us. The practice of mindfulness meditation is what opens the door to a new way of being that I call timefulness. Taking 10 minutes of ‘me time’ out each day is all that’s needed to slow time down and to get more done with less of it. With just a few days practice, we can enter Extended Me Time, or EMT. This is a luxurious state to be in where we become time lords, and of course time ladies.
When we sync with EMT, here’s what happens:
- We get our creative tasks done, in what seems like ‘no time at all’
- Interruptions are minimised
- External events seem to happen ‘just in time’
- Our stress levels reduce whilst our productivity increases
- People want to learn our secret
p.s. I haven’t worn a watch for years and am rarely late 🙂
If you’d like to know more about how to manage the passage of time, as opposed it it managing you, get a copy of my new book Managing Time Mindfully. It comes with free guided meditations to give you the luxury of ‘me time’.
Related Posts
Switching to EMT
A Synthesis of Time
My Magical Week
Another day, another dollar
A Synthesis of Time
As we approach the feast of Christmas, very often another temporal milestone gets missed and that’s the Winter Solstice. Both dates have their significance and their differences.
The 25th December is a man-made date that some people use to either celebrate the birth of Christ and/or catch up with relatives. The Winter Solstice represents an alignment of the Earth relative to the Sun where some have their shortest day and others have their longest.
In our modern world, with central heating and electric light, we have somewhat distanced ourselves from Natural Time, yet it still has its usefulness.
I began to use Natural Time for project management about seven years ago and have discovered my life runs much more smoothly as a result.
At the same time though, without wearing a watch, I always know what time it is and am rarely late for meetings. Our modern calendar has its place, so long as we are mindful not to become enslaved by it.
Accordingly, exactly on the last New Moon (the 11th of December), the next book in my series on practical applications of mindfulness was published. It’s called Managing Time Mindfully and the synthesis of two calendar systems is just one of the temporal delights it explores.
It’s available worldwide for Amazon Kindle and Kindle Readers and I bent some time so readers in the UK can get the print version (and via Amazon early in 2016).
Big thanks to all those who placed a pre-order, you helped me get it into the Top #100 books on time management. I’d love to get it into the Top #10 so, by way of thanks for all those who get a copy, there’s a free pack of meditations available for all who place an order before the end of the year (which incidentally is another man-made date).
If you’d like to get more done next year than this year, get your copy here …
p.s. you would make my day and my aim from the book is that is that it helps you get more done, more easily with yours !
What one reader said about the book …
Related Posts :
Publishing in Tune with the Moon
Quarter 1 : First Tickings
Quarter 2 : Perceptions of Time
Quarter 3 : Managing Time
Quarter 4 : Temporal Alchemy