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Life by Design
Great article with very useful tips to "create" more time with 5 Simple Steps.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/05/productivity-time-management-tips/
How can you get a team to manage its time more efficiently and productively? Give them a time-off goal. That’s according to Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow, who writes ... (read more here in full article, recommended)
Having a sense of purpose may add years to your life, regardless of what the purpose is, research suggests.
Not only does it contribute to healthy aging, but it may also stave off early death, according to a study of 7,000 Americans.
This is my all time favorite saying when it's time to start a new endeavor. What's your favorite?
Download sign to post here:http://rickbrinkman.com/filechute/ftp/Rule_of_Aquisition_173.pdf
When ever I am faced with adversity or doubt, this is the sign I look at in my office, (and then I "Spring into Action").
Download the PDF to print here:
http://rickbrinkman.com/filechute/ftp/NASA-Failure-is-not-an%20option.pdf
When my mother, Auschwitz survivor was up against adversity she would say, "It's time to spring into action!"
That philosophy led to her and her sisters to escape a death march in January of 1945 and served her the rest of her life.
One of my favorite motivational signs. "Perfection" is one of the five reasons people procrastinate. Download the PDF here.
This time of year we tend to put our attention on manifesting the future. I have found the #1 reason people set goals and don't achieve them is either they haven't clarified values or don't have a specific enough plan. Here is a gift to you from the book Life by Design, (Brinkman & Kirschner, McGraw-Hill) and my audio Life by Design (Brinkman, CareerTrack), the chapters on clarifying values.
Everyone can use more time. The truth of it is, there is no time. There is only right here and "Now." When you woke up it was "Now." As you read this it is "Now." And in an hour it will still be "Now." In each precious moment of Now many things will ask for your attention. They will not all fit in the here and now. What you choose to allow in your Now quickly becomes your past. Success and fulfillment is making choices in your Now Moments that are based on your highest priorities.
To create more time in your life the first step is finding out what you are "saying Yes to" in the Now moment. Because every time you are saying "Yes" to something in the here and now, you are also saying "No" to a whole lot more.
Without knowing your specific situation, I would say one of the two most important action steps that can be taken to be more organized and effective are clarifying values and doing a time log.
Download the complete Time Log PDF article here.
Download a Time Log spreadsheet here.
MyEvent Log, an iPhone app that you can use to do a time log.
I have some motivational signs posted in my office, mostly to do with focus and belief. I shared the Rule of Acquisition #173 in the last post. Here is another favorite of mine that most visitors to my office seem to gravitate to:
HALF ASSED ACTION
IS BETTER THAN
PERFECT PROCRASTINATION.
Yes, I'll admit it. I'm a Star Trek fan. And of all series and generations. I appreciate a vision of an era where humans can get over their BS with each other and cooperate so that they can experience the same old BS with aliens.
For those of you who may not be fans, the Ferengi race is all about acquisition and profit. Their "bible" is the Rules of Acquisition.
There is one rule I have had tapped to my wall for sometime that relates to living a Life by Design. I share it with you to support your fulfillment of what is important to you.
Rule of Acquisition #173
- Dream
- Plan
- Believe
- Act
Go for your dreams. You can do it.
Today is my mother's 90th birthday. She passed away last year, 5 days before her 89th. She was an incredible person, always positive and embracing life even though when she was 25 she spent six months in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. She also was an identical twin who survived Dr. Josef Mengele.
Dr. Mengele was a German SS officer and physician at Auschwitz-Bireknau. He gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, and for performing human experiments on camp inmates, amongst whom Mengele was know as the Angel of Death.
Dr. Mengele was always looking for twins on which to perform his horrific experiments. My mother (Simone) and her sister (Diana) would try to keep far apart so they wouldn't be recognized as twins. One day as Mengele was gathering subjects one of the prisoners came up to him and said, "Dr. Mengele, I have another set of twins for you." And pointed out my mother and sister as way of gaining favors from the Nazis. Simone and Diana were brought to the back of a parked army truck to be loaded in the back. The guards who brought them there left. Then all of a sudden the truck just drove away leaving Simone and Diana standing there. Needless to say they didn't stand there very long.
For the rest of her life my mother kept the book "Mengele" on her bookshelf. If she ever felt bad about anything, sorry for her self, or upset she would simply pull the book off the shelf, read a paragraph or two and then the present circumstances didn't seem so bad.
Thanks Mom. You are an inspiration. Happy Birthday.
PICTURE: 1941 Lodz Ghetto, Poland, from Left to Right; Simone, Arie (currently Distinguished University Professor Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park) Diana
“I could not llve the rest of my life knowing maybe I could have done something.”
After escaping from a Nazi death march in 1945, these are the words my mother said to herself right before she purposely let herself get captured again, so she could tell her sisters about how they might escape. She found her sisters among the 1000 girls in the march, explained how to escape and the next day they all did.
She passed away earlier this year and I spent most of December and January living with her and enjoying her in Arizona. This July my father (also a concentration camp survivor) was hospitalized for a month with a life threatening disease. When he was released August 8th I thought I was going to be in NYC for 5 days to help him get set up. Now thirty three days later I am leaving him for the first time.
Luckily I had space in my schedule to be there for him, although even when I am not traveling there are still plenty of work prioities. Just in the creative category alone there was 5 articles, 4 blogs, 3 podcasts, and a Tele-seminar oh my. Unfortunately they didn't all get done. But what did get done is everything I could possibly do for my Dad. This included de-cluttering his apartment (a six day process), organizing his home so he can function even with impaired short-term memory, taking him to Portland for 2 weeks of concentrated naturopathic therapies, having great quality time with him, organizing home care support and a whole lot more. But today I finally had to leave. So I tagged his ear with radio transmitter and released him into the wild of NYC. ;-) And as I sit here on a plane bound for seminars in the United Kingdom I can hear my mother's words and know for certain that I can live the rest of my life knowing I did all I could. Sometimes priorities are simply black and white.
PS: During the second week following his release from the hospital my father and I went out to our local Chinese restaurant. My fortune cookie was the fortune you see superimposed on the picture to the left. His fortune was, "Forget the stock market, invest in family." So he bought dinner. ;-)