Tips, Tricks and Tales: Infuse Your Time with Extraordinary Purpose by Paula Grieco

Creative commons photo credit: Angie Nan

“A dream without a plan is just a wish.” Katherine Paterson

When I left the corner office of a high-growth tech company to work for myself, my biggest fear was that without external deadline pressure, I would never complete tasks again. Not one. Ever.

What I discovered was that checking items off of my “to do” list was still relatively easy…even with the distraction of social media.

The bigger challenge was ensuring that when all those completed tasks were strung together, I reached a meaningful goal – a dream even. There are an abundance of tech tools and sophisticated systems available to help you manage your time. But if after checking off all your tasks for the day, you feel no closer to reaching your goal, try this really simple method that has worked for me.

1. Start with your no limits list. Write down your biggest dreams and aspirations. Make them as measurable as possible and write down as many as you want.
2. Pick your one big meaningful thing. Really just one. Not saying that you won’t work on others, but many of us fail to reach our goal because we are trying to work on too many directions at once. Good goals distract great goals. So pick one. Really, just one.
3. Have a place for all your other brilliance. Creative and entrepreneurial types tend to have an abundance of amazing ideas. Have a place (one spot) to save all those brainstorms for the future.
4. Create a space for your one big thing. Get a box or clean out one drawer or empty a shelf to keep that one goal you just wrote down. This space is sacred so only items related to your goal are allowed in your box. Nothing else. Ever.
5. Underwhelm yourself with easy actions. Break your “big thing” into small actions until there is one step that feels easy. Make one phone call. Write 100 words. Some days, when you can, do a little more.
6. Dedicate a day a month to your dream. One day a month – blow it out of the park. Devote a whole day to working on your one meaningful thing. Every day, but especially on this day, get prepared the night before. Make a list of what you would like to accomplish. Even set out your clothes. Research shows that we have limited decision making capital everyday so take care of all the insignificant decisions.
7. Set a deadline. Only after working on your goal for about a month, set a deadline. Then multiple it times two.
8. Don’t dream (or write or make art or..) alone. Join or create a closed Facebook or face-to-face group meet up. Not negotiable.

Distractions will still happen, but they won’t derail you. (Though when you are writing a blog on time management, it is not advisable to begin your day by studying a tobacco body infographic – particularly if you don’t smoke.) Tasks will be hard, but not insurmountable.

Basic systems work. Save the complexity and sophistication for your dream – not the tools to manage it. 

In the comments, tell us how you make your time count for what really matters.

Author Bio

Paula is a former tech exec turned – entrepreneur and writer. She released he first book in the spring of 2013, Take 5 for Your Dreams. She is co-founder of What’s Your Brave?, a writing and media project that empowers girls and their parents to be brave, dream big, and take bold action.

Her work has been featured in: The Boston Globe, Online Christian Science Monitor, Tinybuddha, The Good Men Project, SheHeroes, and She Can’t What. It matters deeply to me that every person — that means you — on this planet has the opportunity to be who they really are and live what deep-down matters to them.

Sign up for Paula’s blog at: www.justbewhoyoureallyare.com.

Requesting Hosts for Blog Tour of STORM anthology

The Pretoria Writers' Group is requesting hosts for a blog tour of the STORM anthology.
It is an anthology to be published in two volumes (I for fantasy/scifi/dystopia and II for contemporary stories) intended for an adult audience (no erotica).

The tour will be from 11 to 24 May 2014.

If you are interested please email your preference for hosting to blog.tour.info@gmail.com

Notes:
1. This is NOT my personal email and only messages with STORM HOST in the subject line will be attended to.
2. Please indicate which Volume of STORM you would like to host (or both)
3. Please indicate if you would like to review (either or both) of the Volumes (a limited number of ARCs in PDF will be provided before the tour commences)
4. Please indicate if you would like to interview any of the authors on your blog (please provide the name(s) of the author and your questions in the email)
5. The authors are: Linzé Brandon, Vanessa von Mollendorf, Natalie Myburgh, Carmen Botman, Charmain Lines and Richard Wheeler.
6. The covers, buy links to both volumes, short excerpts of the stories in the relevant anthology (I = 6, II = 4) and the Smashwords author profile links for all the authors will be provided by 7 May 2014.

If you have any questions please include them in the email - thank you.

Guest Post: Time, the Great Equalizer by Dale Lavely

  In one currency, we are all given the same amount; time. Rich or poor, old or young, talented or not, we all get the same dole of time each and every day that we are alive. Once spent, we can’t retrieve even one second of time once it is gone. It doesn’t matter if you’re the President or a blue collar worker, you will all be given the same precious commodity of time.

  Many talented people make the most of their time and find ways to be productive. Some wastefully squander their allotment of time. Whether you value time or waste it, it marches on. Time ticks on and most aren’t even aware of its passing. The problem, especially for highly distractive, busy, or uncaring people, is that we aren’t aware of the gift of seconds, minutes, and days. I think that’s the attraction of sayings like, “carpe diem”, (the quote is usually translated, “seize the day”) was taken from a poem written in the Odes in 23 BC by the Latin poet Horace. Wikepedia also included the translation, “trusting as little as possible in the next day”. In odes 1.11 had another saying,” Whether Jupiter has allotted you many more winters or this one”.

  None of us knows how much time we really have, so we need to find the treasure of time and guard it. Keeping the reality of a limited resource like time will require watch care, attention, focus, and an ability to prioritize how we will fill our elusive container of time. Each of us much choose what we will spend our time on. This task of time allotment, is both the most delicious and yet daunting task any of us will have.

  There are so many choices to make in our modern society. If we even look at the possible food choices we make each day, around 200 according to researchers at Cornell University, we can get overwhelmed. How can we be intentional about how to use our hoard of time? One tip I learned from Michael Hyatt is to weed out things in your life that compete with your main priorities. There are things that don’t get us closer to our goals and waste our time. We need to take a hard look at where we want to spend our days. Without goals we are like a ship without a destination. No one but ourselves can decide what is important to us. We are all driven by different values, priorities, and expectations in life.

  As I write this there is a PBS special on Stephen Hawking. He lived with the specter of death for most of his life. He decided to spend his life trying to figure out how the universe began. What makes life worth living for you, may not make sense to me. It is a worthy use of time to think about our goals in life. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Life in Socrates’ days was much less predictable and probably not as long as ours. The quest to deal with time valuing issues is timeless.

  It is a treasure that normally can’t be taken away from us. While it is in your power to decide I hope you and I will choose well.

 Author Bio

You can connect with Dale on her blog http://dalelavelyatthewell.com/WP/ 

Mayhem in March: Guest Post by Khalid Muhammad

The story behind Agency Rules: Never an Easy Day at the Office

“When you are so hungry for peace that you are blind to atrocities, you are no longer sovereign or free.”

What’s it like to live in a country where you live in fear every time you leave the house? To live in an urban city under siege from criminals and gangs that operate under the unbridled support of political parties and terrorists alike, with police taking their share to the look the other way? Where bomb blasts and terrorist attacks become part of the nature of the country and people become desensitized to the blood and carnage with each passing day? What’s it like to have 90 million people suffering from Stockholm Syndrome believing that negotiating and agreeing to terrorist demands, the country may become safer, while the other 90 million are screaming for military action?

This is today’s Pakistan and the place that I call home. What I have just described to you is not all of what Pakistan is today. It is a nation that is fighting for its existence in the community of nations, but it is also a nation full of hard-working, educated, honest people that want to see peace returned to their country. And there lies the rub…

Over the years, Pakistan has been infiltrated by traitors to the nation, more interested in bolstering their offshore bank accounts and assets, than they are in building a better country. The repercussions are felt like shockwaves throughout the country every day - an economy in tatters, education non-existent for those without wealth and employment opportunities unavailable for those without approach. It’s the same Pakistan that the religious extremists use to recruit more followers into their holy wars.

Agency Rules – Never an Easy Day at the Office, rather than picking up from today, stumbles

backwards to the 1990s, right after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the beginnings of the extremist/terrorist camps within the tribal areas. Fresh from a successful war with a superpower, the Mujahideen fighters that had traveled from Pakistan returned home. A segment of these fighters with more militant leanings looked to change the country that had neglected them and their religious beliefs in favor of a liberal agenda that allowed women to attend schools, men to dress in Western clothing and Islam to be sequestered to Friday prayers and religious holidays.

The book will take you through the 90s and the networks that were created within the country’s madrassahs (religious schools) that today funnel fighters into the al-Qaeda and the fight against the NATO forces in Afghanistan. It will give you a picture of Pakistan through one man’s eyes as he fights for his own identity and place in society. He is the embodiment of the Pakistani that the world doesn’t see in the headlines or the evening news. As the honorable soldier, the precision sniper, the intelligence operative and the conflicted man, Kamal Khan takes you through one of the greatest adventures before the War on Terror started to a Pakistan that is at war with itself.

Shrouded in political expediency, hampered by internal power struggles, international espionage and doublespeak that makes Washington’s spin doctors proud, Kamal’s mission is a nightmare of rampant militant fundamentalism that threatens to choke and take Pakistan hostage. For him, the fight is not just for freedom, but the survival of a nation.

Mayhem in March: Agency Rules by Khalid Muhammad

Find it on  Amazon  Smashwords  Kobo  Barnes and Noble 

Synopsis
Celebrated as a ragtag force that defeated and broke the Soviet Union, no one predicted the

Mujahideen would bring with them a plague that would spread like wildfire through Pakistan in the years to follow. When the battle-worn fighters returned with no enemy or war to fight, they turned their sights on the country that had been their creator and benefactor.
From the same battlegrounds that birthed the Mujahideen, a young Kamal Khan emerges as a different breed of warrior. Discarding his wealthy family comforts, Kamal becomes a precision sniper, an invincible commando and a clandestine operative bringing intimidation, dominance and death with him to the battlefield. Ending the plague is his prime directive.
Shrouded in political expediency, hampered by internal power struggles, international espionage and doublespeak that makes Washington’s spin doctors proud, Kamal’s mission is a nightmare of rampant militant fundamentalism that threatens to choke and take Pakistan hostage. For him, the fight is not just for freedom, but the survival of a nation.

Excerpt
Nine months ago, the Muslim League government had won a surprising mandate across Pakistan on a manifesto that was full of promises that would be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver. One of their core promises was returning Karachi, Pakistan’s largest metropolis and economic hub, back to a peaceful existence.
Since his party’s election victory, Prime Minister Azam Shah had struggled with difficult questions on the actual implementation of his manifesto that had gotten them elected, but had never seemed to provide any clear or direct answers. One thing he had clearly demonstrated was his intense love for the cameras and media spotlight during his political events. As the opposition leader in the previous government, he had taken great pleasure in highlighting the failings and bad decisions of the sitting government. Today, however, was a different story as his government was now in power and he was regularly in the hot seat. During a tour of a children’s hospital in his native Multan, the Prime Minister was again posturing for the media. As the visit drew to a close, the newly minted Prime Minister sauntered to the podium as if he had won an award, unserious and jovial, until a staunch critic of the government posed a difficult question.
“Prime Minister, you have occupied the most powerful seat in the country for almost nine months now. Do you not see it as a failure that your government has not drafted any policy to address the violence in Karachi?”
It was not the first time it has been asked, but it was the first time the word ‘failure’ had been introduced into the public debate. As he looked around the gaggle of journalists, each thrusting forward to capture his next words on their recorders, he knew this would be the lead headline for the rest of the day, opening the door for opposition and coalition parties to criticize his inaction.
He measured his response, almost rehearsing the words in his mind before speaking. “I think it’s too early to use words like failure. When we were not the ruling party, our information was limited to what the previous government wanted us to know. Now, we have more intelligence about the situation, and I am briefed daily.”
Journalists started firing follow-up questions at him before he could complete his response. He held up his hands to try to bring the situation back under control.
“Just a minute, may I finish my response before you start your follow-ups?” he asked, trying to assert his position, but even he knew he had less than thirty seconds to finish and get away before he was cornered by the wolves stalking their prey.
“The government has had several meetings with all the stakeholders, both collectively and individually, over the past few months to ascertain the best course of action,” he continued hesitantly, knowing he had been repeating this for months now. He knew he wouldn’t win any favors by repeating himself. Just then, he felt a hand on his side and saw a note placed before him on the podium. Quickly scanning the note, he flashed a semi-smile. “Next week, we will bring everyone together to decide the final course of action.”

About the Author

When people talk about Khalid Muhammad, they talk about an entrepreneur who has helped others build their dreams and businesses. They talk about a teacher, who is dedicated to his students, both inside and outside the classroom, and they return the dedication tenfold.
Now, they talk about the author, who has written a fast-paced, action-packed spy thriller
about Pakistan, the politics, the Army and terrorism.
Born in Pakistan's troubled Swat Valley, educated and raised in the United States, Khalid returned to Pakistan almost 17 years ago and fell in love with his country. His debut novel, Agency Rules - Never an Easy Day at the Office, is a journey behind the headlines about Pakistan, the world's most dangerous place, to deliver an intense story that will challenge the reader to question what they have been told. 



 
Connect with Khalid online 
Website - http://agencyrules.com
Facebook http://facebook.com/AgencyRulesPK
Twitter http://twitter.com/AgencyRulesPK

A note from Linzé:  Come back tomorrow for a guest post from Khalid on the story behind Agency Rules.