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Browse every published article connected to Paula Eder, with exact attribution and full-archive search.
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Browse every published article connected to Paula Eder, or search within this exact expert archive.
Anger is one of the most challenging time traps there is. But once you recognize the traps, you can begin to free yourself and boost your effectiveness! Let's explore 3 anger traps that may be familiar to you. Then I'll share a powerful exercise that can free you in just 3 simple steps. 3 Anger Traps
“If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily.” Gerald Good Gratitude is always a choice that enriches your time and your life - always. And it’s anything but sentimental or irrelevant. Gratitude is grounded solidly in the realities of life – and sometimes those are hard realities. Coming from a place of gratitude, you take the full measure of your gifts, knowing that anything you now possess can be taken away. Anything, that is, except your commitment to do your best. With a grateful heart, you make the best of what is.r
Time management strategies aren’t just about overcoming procrastination, creating schedules, and checking tasks off your To Do List. In fact, time management is an approach to tasks and time choices that can be beneficial in ANY area of your life. From the loftiest questions of life’s meaning, to the most mundane of daily tasks, as you hone your time management skills, everything changes for the better!
Finding time works best when you are organized and efficient. But, as I am sure you know, it takes a lot more than to-do lists.
Using your time wisely and finding success is founded on self-knowledge and self-respect. You might think that it requires organization skills and discipline - and those things are certainly important. But even more important to your time success is being your own best friend. In everyday practice what that means is finding time to listen, understand, and stand up for yourself. When you are in your own corner and you know that you can count on YOU, there's not much that can stand in your way.
Finding time and staying on track when you need to should not be so hard, right? When you have something that you need to finish, or someplace that you need to get to, my guess is that you are alert to the really big distractions that can trip you up. But maybe it's the small time wasters that are more likely to throw you off and pull you away from your planned course. These are the ones that you hardly notice, until you are late for an appointment or have missed a planned deadline. Here are some common, “small” time wasters that may sound familiar to you:
Finding time is easier when you put yourself in a position to be able to focus. That may seem like a simplistic statement, but in our increasingly plugged in, socially-networked and information-saturated world, focus can be difficult to come by – let alone sustain. And yet, when it comes to productivity, focus is one of the most remarkable inherent strengths you can ever develop. Whenever you need motivation to take a breath, quiet your mind and concentrate, remember these three key advantages that focus will ALWAYS give you:
Finding time to accomplish your goals is a challenge in this busy world. It gets that much harder if you feel like your day is hijacked by others’ priorities or cluttered with others’ crises. Take a moment and take a breath. How do you feel inside when strong personalities make demands or confront you with 'surprise' deadlines? Maybe you immediately feel responsible. Or maybe you feel annoyed or frustrated - or even paralyzed.
Time management tips couldn’t be more important than right now - just in time for the holiday season! How would you like to transform the stressful parts of holiday get-togethers into truly celebratory occasions for yourself? Well, you can do it … and you can start right now by creating a holiday plan that’s geared to your comfort zone.
Heart-Based Time Management™ can give you keys to open new doors and explore new possibilities. Use these 3 Timely Tips and see how letting go can help you step into your own, unique power. An excellent first step for simplifying your life and for freeing yourself up to focus on your top priorities is to revamp your to-do list. Take a good, hard look at it, and consider stripping it down to its bare essentials, using these 3 Timely Tips:
Time management tips can be excellent tools for increasing your efficiency and effectiveness … but they are at their most powerful when they enhance your quality of life, too! Just stop and think about it for a second: What if you could relate to your time in a more open-handed AND more effective way? And what if you could do that right now? The key lies inside of you. Cultivating a vision of time that springs from abundance affects how you approach every task and every challenge that comes your way. It enhances your productivity and helps you make better decisions.
The keys to amazing productivity are in your hands. Like a garden that’s been fallow all winter and is ready to burst into bloom, you harbor a wealth of ideas just waiting for the right environment to flourish. Time management skills can move those ideas from seed to harvest and provide you with untold opportunities to enrich your life.
Do you feel like you are always running behind and then playing catch-up with yourself? Every time you attempt a new task, do you end up feeling frustrated and overwhelmed while the clock just keeps ticking? Can you feel yourself getting anxious, even just reading this? Well, it doesn’t have to be that way for you. But the thing is, there’s no magic wand that you can wave to find yourself more time. Instead, what is required is that you learn more effective planning skills. So let’s look at a better way of allocating your time. Have you heard of the Times 2 Rule?
Stress is part of everyone's life and work. Whether you work for someone else, run your own small business, or are a solopreneur, the better you manage your work stress, the happier and more productive you'll be in all facets of your life. So, while stress may be here to stay, it doesn't have to be in the driver's seat! Work Stress and How to Relieve It First, it's important to identify the source of your stress. Work stress usually falls into any one of four categories: • Work overload and overwhelm, • Difficult co-workers, • Overly demanding or unreasonable bosses, andr
The Heart-based Time Management™ System goes beyond conventional time management, offering tools and insights for transforming your relationship with time. This is important because, while your to-do lists and schedules have an impact on your time, so do your thoughts, feelings, and values. So let’s take a look at one energy-drain that most of us experience – the Inner Critic. As a first step toward time success, there are few things quite as freeing as learning to harness the energy that gets undercut by self-critical messages.
Clutter, whether it’s littering your closet, computer, or calendar adds a layer of confusion and stress to everything and is a stumbling block that keeps you from attaining your goals … or even seeing them, sometimes! Time management tips can open your eyes to new potentials by helping you clear out the distracting debris of non-essentials.
Whenever you find time to reduce your stress, you can be sure that you will be repaid for your efforts. Stress reduction is one of the surest ways to increase your focus, energy, creativity, and appreciation of life’s moments. And yet, when things get busy or our minds and energies are cluttered, stress reduction is probably not something that comes naturally to mind.
Time management strategies can be a challenge to implement sometimes, and when everyone isn’t on the same page, you need to call on your conflict resolution skills along with your time management tools. Keep in mind, too, that the conflicts you experience may not always be exte al. If you are ambivalent about a task or project, this, too, is a conflict that needs to be resolved. Any way you look at it, strong conflict resolution skills will free up enormous amounts of your time.
Time management tools and tips help you plan your time. But our days aren't always predictable. Sometimes life is calm, and we struggle to stay on track. Sometimes chaos rules as life throws us curve ball after curve ball. Maybe distractions swirl around you, calling out for your attention. Or maybe you're confronted with an onslaught of unexpected demands. What do you do?
Finding time doesn’t need to be difficult. So, what does your ideal day look like? Would you recognize it if you stumbled upon it? Sometimes we get so caught up in the busy-ness of our lives that we lose sight of what we most value and enjoy. Productivity is important, but if we live too long without replenishing ourselves, we become less and less productive. Our energy flags and our creativity dries up. We are depleted and out of touch with the wellspring of our inspiration and vitality … ourselves!
It’s hard to stay calm and focused when you are under the gun. Times like that, having the right time management tools at hand is a real lifesaver. So, as summer draws to a close and many of us are getting ready to get back to work or school, isn’t this the perfect time to think about how to manage the pressures of multiple priorities and looming deadlines? The skills you develop now will serve you well when you need them most.
Finding time to accomplish your goals can become challenging when others make demands on your attention and energy. Does this sound familiar? Maybe family members or colleagues confront you with 'surprise' deadlines or frequent and urgent crises. If you are not careful these kinds of requests easily erode and undermine your plans. So, how do you avoid letting others’ ‘crises’ take over your time? And how do you do it without being unresponsive or endangering your job and your personal or professional relationships?
Do you ever have one of those days when you can’t see even a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel? I bet you know what I’m talking about … it’s one of those days when to do lists and templates and time boundaries, as helpful as they are, just don’t look like they are going to cut it. You do your best, but you are still absolutely overwhelmed and starting to feel discouraged. Believe me, I know. I hit one of those days not very long ago. Even if I had been able to tack on another four hours at the end of my day, I still wouldn’t have come close to “getting it all done.”
Finding time to manage the critical voices that we all carry inside is one of the most powerful time management choices that you can make for yourself. Your first step in making the most of your time is learning to recognize and rechannel the energy that is so often funneled into self-critical messages. I’m going to share 3 powerful time management tips with you right now. Use them to curb your inner critic’s input while giving a powerful boost to your self-confidence, energy and productivity.
Finding time requires being your best friend. You need to listen to yourself, understand yourself and stand up for yourself. You may feel paralyzed by looming projects that fill you with dread. Here's how to step in as a friend and make your life manageable again. Your first step is to ...Finding time requires being your best friend. You need to listen to yourself, understand yourself and stand up for yourself. You may feel paralyzed by looming projects that fill you with dread. Here's how to step in as a friend and make your life manageable again.
Procrastination is like a prison – a self-fulfilling prophecy of denial, delay, frustration and failure. But that doesn't have to be the end of the story – not by a long shot! Finding time by overcoming procrastination is definitely within your reach. However, it requires more than efficiency tools. You will become much more effective and efficient with your time as you develop successful strategies to recognize and resolve the conflicts (both internal and exte al) that so often fuel procrastination.
When you find time to clear the clutter from your life, whether it’s in your space, on your To Do List, or even in your mind, you are giving yourself an energizing and very practical gift. What do I mean by that? Well, clutter is fundamentally debilitating. It makes every task take longer than it needs to, drains your energy, and can be discouraging … even embarrassing … adding to your stress and decreasing your everyday satisfaction. So, finding time for decluttering is one of the most sure-fire ways for making two vital and positive changes in your life:
One of the great illusions about perfectionism is that it is the pursuit of excellence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Excellence is stymied and smothered by perfectionism. As artist and writer Julia Cameron has written: “Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.”
Making the most of the time you have isn’t just about making successful choices – it’s about integrating those choices into your life so that they become positive habits. Usually by the end of a month of continuous daily repetition you will develop a successful habit that will lead you to welcome challenges and expand your energy and confidence. It’s a powerful and ever-widening spiral that enhances your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as adding to your enjoyment of each moment.
Time management tips will make you more effective, so long as you learn how to relate assertively without lapsing into aggressiveness. The line may be a thin one, but keeping on the right side of it can protect you from painful backlashes. What is your personal experience with setting boundaries so far? Take a quick quiz to see exactly where you stand: Will Your Boundaries Be Respected? T/F __ I resist setting boundaries because I fear backlashes. T/F __ I don't get mad easily, but when I do, watch out! T/F __ I count on anger to put teeth in my boundaries.
Finding time to breathe and relax may feel like the ultimate luxury, but it is entirely practical … much more practical than pushing yourself to exhaustion. And the really good news is that it’s also entirely within your control. Slowing down may seem counter-intuitive when you are stressed. But believe me: When you develop these 3 skills, you can put yourself back on track … and bring positive energy and focus to whatever you need to do in your life.
Time management tips take on new importance when technology enters the scene. The challenge becomes one of finding time to take advantage of all the fresh opportunities available while not letting the 'shiny new object' detract from your life off-line.
Finding time to stay healthy can be challenging in the midst of holiday celebrations. But whatever holidays you celebrate, you don't have to give up healthy habits. In fact, you can still celebrate and have fun while maintaining and building on the activities that sustain you and add countless positives to your life.
Time management is about productivity and it can be about so much more! That is because time has both duration and depth. It is linear, occurring in measurable increments, AND it is highly subjective. We experience it differently, depending on the feelings and events that our moments intersect with.
Time management articles offer excellent ideas for jump-starting your productivity, replenishing your energy, and helping you live as fully as you can in each and every moment. But ideas have to be put into action if they are going to be effective.
Time management, at its best, boosts your efficiency and effectiveness so that you accomplish necessary tasks and find time for what matters most. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a busy mom, a coach, a student, or anyone with a full plate, your To Do List is key to your success. But sometimes, a swiftly approaching deadline and an overflowing To Do List can become so overwhelming that you want to run and hide.
Time management skills can improve your life in ways that are concrete, practical, and far-reaching. Whenever you are able to use your time more efficiently and effectively, you give yourself the gift of more time, to use for whatever you value most. This is where one of my very favorite time-finding-tools comes into play. They are task templates – and once you start using them, I just know that you’ll find all sorts of creative ways to enhance your life with them.
Time management blogs and articles rarely discuss the idea of making use of mistakes. But wouldn’t it be great to be able to put your mistakes to work for you? That would mean that none of your time was ever ‘wasted.’ It’s a little like thinking of your life as a sustainable farm. Absolutely everything can be used and everything makes its own unique contribution to the good of the whole enterprise.
What if you could give yourself the gift of time and space to expand, deepen, and recharge your energy? Imagine giving that to yourself each and every day. Time management can increase your efficiency and help you actualize your goals. Heart-based time management does that, too – and so much more. It offers the path to an ever deepening experience of your moments, and it opens doors to timelessness.
Finding time to "stop and smell the roses" a piece of advice that many of us have heard so often that we probably hardly hear it at all anymore. But like so many so-called clichés, this saying harbors a great deal of wisdom. So, if you have paused in the course of your busy day to read this article, congratulations! You are taking the first step toward giving yourself a wonderfully simple and transformative time gift.
Heart-based time management is all about finding time, increasing productivity, and deepening your experience of each and every moment. And heart-based time management works best when you use your time effectively, because procrastinating won't help you complete important projects, let alone live your values as fully as you can! Now, it may seem counter-intuitive to you, but the absolute best tool for overcoming procrastination is compassion. Not harshness, self-criticism or urgency, but compassion.
Finding time to outsmart procrastination, especially when a job you hate is what’s waiting for you, can be a real challenge. But the truth is that when you create a logjam for yourself, those dreaded tasks just become even more of a nuisance. So, here are 5 timely tips that will absolutely help you succeed at getting those tasks-that-you-hate out of the way … and done well … and possibly even enjoyed! 5 Steps to Change the Tasks You Avoid to The Tasks You Complete
Finding time and then using that time as efficiently and effectively as possible takes more than to-do lists, as you know. Especially when setbacks and unexpected changes arise – as they do every day - it can require enormous resourcefulness and resilience to continue along your most productive path.
Time management strategies gain their power from your skill at setting boundaries Only when you firmly say no to old pastimes can you truly say yes to new ones. But saying no can be hard, especially to those whose cooperation you'd like! Here's a helpful tip: Setting successful time boundaries = Setting specific time boundaries.
Procrastination can cause nightmares, literally. Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are in school and have a paper due or a test to take and you haven’t done anything to prepare? It seems to be almost a universal human experience. He good news is that even if you have procrastinated, you can usually remedy it. Finding time is wonderful any time – and especially so when you are running out of it! So, let’s look at what to do when procrastination has put you in a position where the clock is ticking and you are sweating each second.r
Finding time for what matters most always boils down to our time choices. We have the same 24-hours every single day of our lives … and what we do with those hours defines who we are, as well as going a long way to determine the quality of our lives. The good news is that time management tips can provide you with empowering insights to energize and enrich your time choices. If you’d like to make your wisest time choices, then my #1 time tip is to invest time up front by giving yourself time to reflect. I like to call them Reflection Points – these powerful gifts to yourself.
There are few things as overwhelming as feeling buried in clutter. Whether it’s your in-box, your To-Do List, or your kitchen cabinets, clutter is confusing, discouraging, and energy-draining. Like weeds in a garden, it can overwhelm and choke out whatever you were trying to grow! The start of a New Year (or New Month) can be a great time to make new inroads into your clutter. Try thinking of yourself as a gardener, as you survey whatever is cluttering your life. Imagine the new potentials you can open up for yourself as you clear away the non-essentials.
Finding time to really enjoy holiday festivities can be a big challenge. Why? Well, think about it. There are lots of factors that are especially prevalent during this season … and they certainly up the ante when it comes to stress. They include: • Complex feelings and dynamics generated by family gatherings; • Coping with loss and grief (often accentuated at holiday time); • Busy stores and long, long lines; • Baking, decorating and other holiday projects; • Gift buying, strained budgets, and financial stressors; and • … more!
Finding time and using it well requires self-awareness. Try creating a time map that identifies: - What gives your life meaning and pleasure, - Boundaries that establish what you will and will not do, and - How you move through the world – your pace, your style, and your requirements. Here are 3 essential steps for creating a successful time map:
Your success requires time management, and time management requires sticking to your priorities and making tough decisions every day. These days, many of us are working harder and putting in longer hours, just to get by. Do you know the feeling? The danger, of course, is that we lose ourselves in our work. You alone are in a position to decide what balance you want to strike between your work and your home. Whatever decision you make, you then actualize and maintain this choice with a boundary.