by Tom Evans | Dec 18, 2013 | Timing
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?
by Tom Evans | Sep 28, 2013 | Timing
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 ProcrastinationIt 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.
Create as much time as you need and get more done
by Tom Evans | Apr 11, 2013 | Timing
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.
This course on bendy time is based on bendy pricing – you only pay what you can afford
Related posts:
Time Management Strategies
Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
Clocks of Money
Time Heals
Sixty Second Time Tips
by Tom Evans | Mar 16, 2013 | Timing
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.”
by Tom Evans | Aug 22, 2012 | Timing
If you are one of those people who has a To Do List which never gets done, the best way to deal with it is to start a “To Don’t” List.
Listen to this Sixty Second Time Tip to find out more …
… and when you are done, make that list and start Bending Time – it comes with a full 30 day refund guarantee so you have nothing to lose but spending a little time to create loads more!!
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
