Your Life. Organized.

"Humor Me" Tip #5

"Humor Me" Simplicity Tip #5: Schedule An Event 60 to 90 Days Out

Today's HMS Tip is for all you out there who can't commit to taking time off to do something fun, because in your heart of hearts, yo just know your business world will cease to exist if you do! The office will blow up, you'll lose your biggest client, or (horrors!) someone might send you an email and not get an immediate response! 

You know who you are. I'm here to tell you COMMIT! You'll never "find" time. But you can MAKE time, simply by choosing to block time on your calendar in advance. Then once it's in there, you just have to work around it like you'd work your schedule around any other work-related meeting or commitment.

So think of something you'd like to do -- a long weekend in the mountains, a whole day downtown at the museum, or just a Tuesday lunch and movie date with your wife and kids. It doesn't matter what you're blocking time to do; it matters that you're blocking out time in advance and committing to it.  If something for work comes up for that time slot, you simply work around it by saying you already have an appointment that day. Nobody needs to know what that appointment is, do they? Just try it and let me know how it works out! Come on, humor me!

 

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Get Noticed!

Each day across the globe, 247 billion emails are sent. I know you only send a small portion of them, but shouldn't yours get noticed and be the highest priority in the stack? If you want your emails to be noticed and get a quick response, here are five things you can do to bump up your odds...

Quote of the Week: Regret

"Regret for time wasted can become a power for good in the time that remains, if we will only stop the waste and the idle, useless regretting."

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Collage-Like Search Engine Competes With Google

Wanna know what cyberspace is saying about you? It's easy to find out in just a few seconds at Spezify. Use quotes around your search term to narrow your results and check out the additional suggested terms in the black bar at the top of your results page if you want to narrow even further.

Spezify responds to your search terms and aggregates all kinds of media -- Twitter posts, images from Flickr, ads from Ebay, and many other sources into a collage-like results page.

Give it a try yourself and let me know how you feel about it in comparison to your current favorite search engine.

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"Humor Me" Tip #3

"Humor Me" Simplicity Tip #3:
Unplug from email for an entire weekend!

OH NOOOOOOO, not that! Anything but that! Are you hyperventilating yet? Remember back in the day, when "weekend" meant NOT working for two whole days? With technology being totally portable these days, it's nearly impossible to disconnect from work unless you establish a personal boundary. Christmas Boy is great at that. Myself, being self-employed... not so much. I recently attended a workshop where the speaker quoted the following statistics from various (non-scientific) studies:

• According to Sam Geist's Quick Bites newsletter, a survey of 1908 workers revealed that 51% of employees stayed in contact with work while on vacation, and 63% kept in daily contact with the office.
• An AOL study revealed that 15% of Americans describe themselves as "addicted to email", and 41% of people in that same survey admitted they check email first thing in the morning, some even before brushing their teeth. (Ewww, come on!)
• Another study suggested that half of Blackberry users would be "concerned" if they were
  parted from their Blackberry, and that 10% would be "devastated".

Given the intrusion into our lives by technology, a great way to try a little simplicity is to unplug from email for a whole weekend! Success Guru Stephen Covey's Seventh Habit is SHARPEN THE SAW. This means keeping balance in the following four areas of your life: physical, spiritual, mental, and social.  So this week, after work on Friday, don't turn on your computer or read email again until Monday morning. Only use the phone part of your Blackberry (no email cheating!) and don't do any work-oriented work. Housework or landscaping is fine, because it's not work-related. But no calling the boss or co-workers, no email, no paper-and-pencil work, NADA.

Listen, I'm as in love with my email (and my work) as the next guy and thinking about it gives me the shakes too, but humor me. Just try it. And let me know your results! You never know, you might just like it!

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Back To School Already??

The days are brisk, evenings are perfect for sleeping with windows open, and the crunch of leaves under little feet announces that school is back in session. Oh wait. That's not the case is it? Seems the kids are going back to school earlier and earlier! Some kids here in Atlanta are back on August 3rd! Wow. Summer feels only halfway over and yet it's time to begin planning for getting the kidlets out from under your feet, uhhhh I mean back to the classroom. Here are some tips for making the transition from summertime fun to schoolwork simple and stressfree...

Actually, the Sky's NOT the Limit

Limits have gotten a bad rap over the past few years. Anthony Robbins and Jack Canfield both advise us to "THINK BIG!"  "Use The Secret to get what you want!"   "Opportunity is limitless!"   "No boundaries!"

And I agree. In the realm of attitude, self-growth and success, railing against our own self-imposed limiting beliefs is appropriate -- even necessary. However, the concept of "no limits " in the realm of organization and simplicity gets a lot of folks into trouble. The universe is wonderfully balanced, isn't it? It's interesting that while limits in the realm of attitude and success are undesirable and can hold you back, limits in the physical world are absolutely crucial and liberate you to create your greatest success. BOTH kinds of limits are necessary yet so many people get it backwards. They limit themselves mentally, while having few boundaries in the physical world. Talk about a recipe for chaos! Yikes.

We've all experienced the negative result of limitless living. For example, when was the last time you...

Humor Me Tip #2

"Humor Me" Simplicity Tip #2:
Cook dinner every night for five nights in a row.

The simple but important things in life are often the ones we neglect when we get busy. Good sleep, healthy food, drinking enough water... those things fall by the wayside when things get chaotic, but in truth, are some of the important parts of avoiding chaos in the first place. "Humor Me" Simplicity Tip #2 is about food.

Dinnertime used to be when a family would sit together, around a table and eat, ALL AT THE SAME TIME! No seriously, I mean it. I remember this from when I was a kid. Parents would actually have conversations with their kids, and vice versa. It was a relaxed time when families would reconnect and spend a bit of time together without anything electronic interrupting their attention. Crazy, I know.

Why not get out of your comfort zone and try cooking a homemade meal five nights in a row using whole food ingredients rather than from a box, bag, or can? It doesn't have to be fancy or gourmet, and here's how you do it. Plan each meal ahead of time (Sunday afternoon is a good time to plan and shop for the week) and you can make it happen. Here is a recent post where I discuss the steps of simple meal planning and execution.

Also, remember to use the Crockpot for a few of those five meals, if you have one. And if you don't, head out to Target and nab one this week. They're a great kitchen tool for healthy cooking.

As for HMS Tip #2, I know there are a hundred excuses why you "can't cook five nights", and I know it might seem like a giant pain in the behind, but just humor me and give it a try! If you won't be home early enough to get dinner started, leave some written instructions and get the kids involved. They'll love learning about food and how to cook. As usual, try it and let me know your results!

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Pulling Weeds & Pulling Chaos

It's Independence Day weekend and our good friends are coming down from Virginia to spend the long holiday weekend with us at the mountain house. The house has been empty for a few weeks, so when Christmas Boy and I arrived on Tuesday evening, we found that weeds had begun to take over all the planting beds, the stone driveway and the pea gravel walkway. Ugh. It looked awful and confirmed for us that you really can't outrun Mother Nature. Bear in mind that when I come up to the mountains, the last thing I want to do is...

When Not To Be Perfect

I don't want to be a perfectionist but since I'm a first-born AND a Virgo, I'm pretty much hosed in that department. Yeah good luck with that. I tend to have very high standards for myself and I'm competitive, which I now realize is perfectionism. In a conversation this morning with a potential new Catalyst Organizing team member, I realized that overcoming my own perfectionism doesn't mean letting it go completely...