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Hunkering Down for Winter

(Time to read: ~ 2 minutes) I’ve been watching myself with some amusement lately. When I was a child we used to spend our summers at the farmhouse that my great-great-grandfather Rory MacLean built in the 1800s on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.  It was a wonderful place for a child – away in […]

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Avoiding the Hamster Wheel

(Time to read: ~ 2 minutes) I call it the “hamster wheel nightmare”. When I feel that I’m constantly behind. And I run and run and run, but the goal keeps getting further and further away. Does this feel familiar to you? I have discovered an amazing simple yet powerful approach that has dramatically minimized […]

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The “Love” Project

(Time to read: ~2 minutes) This is a technique I use for working on multi-day projects that involve tasks that, while discrete, need to have a consistent or “hang together” quality. For example, writing a multi-part report. Where there are separate sections that can be worked on independently, but it’s important that they have a […]

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Are you using the right brain for that?

(Time to read: 3-4 minutes) I love to live in flow. When I’m feeling fully alive, and one activity just flows smoothly and naturally into the next. I’ve discovered that this is a right-brain state. And that being on time for meetings is a left-brain task. My right brain operates in a timeless, limitless universe. […]

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Example – Finishing the Whole Task

(Time to read: ~ 2 minutes) I took my cat Midnight to the vet today. When we got home, I finished this whole task by covering four common aspects of many tasks: 1 – Products / Envirocare Put away the cat food and two medicines I’d bought from the vet, along with the bag I’d […]

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Return to Ready

(Time to read: ~4 minutes) For me, this is one of those “obvious” principles that was not obvious to me – and yet has made a huge difference to my ability to live a balanced life. Simply put, it refers to returning objects to their “homes” when you are finished using them for a particular […]

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Rest – The Final Frontier

(Time to read: ~ 5 minutes) I find that many people I encounter have difficulty in taking time “off”. There seems to be such value placed on “doing” and accomplishing and being “busy”. I myself find it very difficult to stop and “not do” during the day. There are always so many things that I […]

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Manager’s Schedule, Maker’s Schedule

(Time to read: ~ 2 minutes) This is a celebration and appreciation of what someone else has written on this topic – Paul Graham. Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer and investor. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia de Belle Arti in Florence. I’ve […]

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Overcoming The Biggest Barrier to Getting Anything Done

(Time to read: ~ 1 minute) What is the biggest barrier to getting things done? It is trying to tackle a task that feels “too big”. One characteristic of “too big” tasks is that they are usually not very clearly defined. For example, I ran into a barrier like this just today. I sat down […]

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The Most Powerful Time Management Question

(Time to read: ~1 minute) In seeking spacious balance, I’m asking myself a new question these days. It seems incredibly obvious now that I’ve started, but it certainly wasn’t obvious before. Well, maybe it was obvious, but just asking it made me so anxious that I didn’t do it. The question is “When?” As in […]

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