pure:edge success blog

I’ve just realised how behind I am in this blog! Isn’t it amazing how easy it is to fall out of a good habit. I had blogging once every week day down to a fine art – it was a first thing in the morning job. Then a few early morning meetings and some so called ‘pressing’ jobs and bam, it’s been 5 days since I blogged.

This reminded me about the ‘constant battle’ it is to manage ones time effectively. Personally, I must praise myself because I’ve been brilliant and gotten rid of the stress my never ending list was causing. Here are some things I did which you may find useful:

1. Stop seeing it as a time management battle! I started to see time as a blessing – I am blessed to have the ability to fill it effectively. The word ‘battle’ is negative and filled me with stress but telling myself I have the ability to fill my time effectively empowers me and makes me feel good and capable.
2. Carry a diary – always! For me, it’s a good old fashioned one I can write in. For others it’s a phone of some sort. It does not matter as long as you can schedule things in effectively as a result of having an overview of days and weeks to come.
3. People understand you can’t see to their every wish, they actually understand that you have other customers and responsibilities! So, you can say, “This week is not looking good for me” even if you say it on Monday. You don’t have to do everything right now!
4. Balance your week between meetings, networking, family time, you time and work time. Very often it’s easy to be flying about doing lots of so called important things but if you have no work time allocated, you’ll get stressed as your ‘to do’ pile literally piles up. You’ll also feel tired and frustrated if you have no family or you time!
5. Monitor your thoughts and accept only that which feel good. Stress and worry feels bad so when you have a stressful or worrisome thought think of something nice instead to something you can appreciate. In time it will happen naturally!
6. Forgive yourself when you slip up and ask yourself what you can learn from the scenario – like I’m going to forgive myself for not blogging for 5 whole days!

Posted by Sara Brown, 11/03/2009