Tag Archives: #timemanagement

Yes or No

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Yes or No – two strong words that can direct the way we live our lives. Here we are at the end of January, and I haven’t bugged you about goals for the year. Yes, mine are written. But one thing that was considered as much as what I’d like to accomplish this year, is how I’d like to spend my time.

KHRAuthor

Time rolls forward. We’re either running with it or watching it pass. In the broadest terms, when an invitation comes or an opportunity arises, we are given a choice: yes or no. Saying yes to one thing is saying no to another. It could be argued that saying yes to one thing could also be saying “not now” to another.

Throughout your day, week, or month, making these yes or no decisions ultimately shapes your year. It also shapes who you are, but we’ll talk about that another day.

So, here we go into a week inwhich we all are given 168 hours. Let’s subtract 65 hours for sleeping and getting ready for work or school. And let’s take another 40 hours for work. That leaves 63 hours. Yes, there are many other responsibilities we have that take up our time. The point is that we have choices to make with what we do with time as it rolls forward.

Is your use of time rolling you forward to where you want to be, the people you want to be with, and the things you want to do?

All the best,

KK

Designs for Nora available on Amazon

Check out Karen’s latest novel, Designs for Nora, available on Amazon.

Not enough time

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I’ve started thinking of time in relative terms. As an author with a full-time career, I’m intentional about my #writing #time. While it’s wonderful when I have entire days on a weekend to write, I’m often grabbing a few hours in the evening or an hour at lunch to bang out a few paragraphs. It’s easy to feel defeated when you think a novel is over eighty thousand words and I’m picking at it an hour here or there. Like other monumental tasks, it’s imperative to take it one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. In doing so, the book will be completed.

The longest I can sit and write productively on a novel is about five or six hours. What could you accomplish in six hours? Let’s look at a typical evening. If you’re home from work by six in the evening, you have dinner, settle into your evening by seven, and you go to bed at eleven. Assuming you don’t have chores like house cleaning or laundry, you have four free hours. You could drive from Kentucky to Georgia in four hours. Other things that could be done in four hours include painting a small room, running a couple of marathons, or assembling furniture for the living room.

Let’s look at time from the other side, what if you only have an hour, what could you accomplish? A workout, fold and put away laundry, pick up the house, or make a home-cooked dinner are among a few things that could be accomplished in an hour. Writing this post will take me about an hour but will hopefully have you thinking for many hours.

The next time you think you don’t have enough time to complete something on your list, think about that hour, or two, or four, whatever you have free, and add a little perspective. What can I complete or move toward completion in the time that I have?

All the best,

KK

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