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Effective Time Management Exercises - How to Use Short Visualizations to Add Value to Your Day
- By Paula Eder
- Published October 22, 2008
- Time Management
- Unrated
Paula Eder
Coach Paula Eder, Ph.D., The Time Finder, has 35 years of success helping clients effectively align their time choices w/values. Receive free weekly Time Tips & our monthly, award-winning Finding Time Ezine: http://www.findingtime.net/ezine.html/ And visit our blog at http://www.thetimefinder.com
View all articles by Paula Eder
Time Management can be dramatically improved by tapping your power of visualization. The visualization can be short, and no prior experience is required. In fact, one of my favorite exercises, "Your Ideal Day Visualization" takes only 15 minutes. You can start right now by participating in creating "Your Ideal Day".
This simple, quick visualization helps you make fulfilling time choices, because you immediately focus your energies on 2 essentials:
1) You clarify, through daily experience, which time choices genuinely increase your satisfaction in your life, and which you can let go of with few regrets.
2) You introduce necessary changes in small, easy steps over time. These are the kinds of changes that can be sustained, fine-tuned, and perfected. You can also revise them whenever your circumstances change.
Do you ask why the first step is even necessary? And have you wondered why most people don't feel that 24 hours a day really is enough? A recent book entitled "Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile" offers surprising answers.
Author Daniel Nettle, a biological psychologist, conducted extensive research to discover what truly brings life satisfaction. A review of his book in Scientific American reports his findings: human beings are simply not hard-wired to instinctively grasp which pursuits bring ongoing contentment. This confusion leads to time wasted by going down blind alleys for years, and sometimes for a lifetime. What a needless tragedy this is.
Thankfully, you can find your path through daily "happiness experiments" offered in this visualization. You will be rewarded with much pleasure in small pockets of time. You can also clarify common misconceptions about what activities deserve your valuable time. All you need is to engage in the visualization and to keep an open mind.
Participating in the Ideal Day visualization will help you answer these questions:
1) What do you want, above all else, to do with your time?
2) What do you care about so much, that you are willing to change old habits?
3) What time choices can you look back on, at the end of your life, with satisfaction?
Here's the visualization. Simple, short and sweet:
"Your Ideal Day Visualization:"
1) For a month, set aside 15 minutes a day.
Select time when you will be uninterrupted. If needed, divide this exercise into three five-minute segments.
2) Sit back and relax for the first 5 minutes. Imagine your ideal day.
In 5 minutes, you can imagine a lot! Envision yourself waking up, stretching, and going about your ideal day. What are you doing? How are you feeling? The more vivid your imagination, the better! Sense the
sounds, the tastes, the smells, and the sights as the day unfolds before you. Most important, experience the pleasure!
3) In the next 5 minutes, pick out portions of this ideal day when you are alone.
You are selecting these images because they are completely within your power to bring about, without other people's participation.
4) Then identify a 5-minute time slice that you can duplicate today.
Select something that you don't currently do, or something that you generally don't allow yourself to fully enjoy.
5) Take the third 5-minute segment and do it.
Let yourself be totally in the moment. Pick the time of day when it will be easiest for you, and when this activity (or even lack of activity) will mean the most to you.
Does this seem simple? It is! Yet engaging in this exercise provides you with 5 profound benefits:
5 Lifetime Benefits from Practicing "Your Ideal Day Visualization"
1) You develop your powers of visualization.
As you open to your power to visualize, you will experience firsthand why even the traditional medical community now explores the mind's potential to create a new level of wellbeing. You can call on this skill to reduce stress, enhance creativity and even promote healing, in tiny slices of time.
2) You clarify your values about how you want to use your time.
The more often you visualize, the more you learn about what time choices fulfill you. Become the expert on your happiness. And experience for yourself how much pleasure you can cultivate today, in just a short period of time. Enjoying yourself now is one of the best ways to undercut human's hard-wired, destructive tendency to perpetually yearn for something just out of reach.
3) In just 15 minutes a day for a month, you create a pattern that's easy to maintain.
A month of continuous daily practice establishes a new life pattern. What an easy way to add daily pleasure to your life! You can, of course, continue to use this visualization to modify more and more segments of your life. Successful small risks and experiments prepare you to take more new steps. And you have built the discipline to carry them out.
4) You demonstrate your power to improve your life through basic time choices.
Nothing helps foster self-reference like experiencing simple pleasures you provide yourself. As you increase your own happiness, you naturally place fewer demands on others, and your relationships will proceed more smoothly.
5) You cultivate the gift of being in the moment.
You'll experience firsthand how this focus stretches time and multiplies your capacity for enjoyment. This is your moment, and all your power resides here, where you make your time choices. Remember that the way you use your time is the way you live your life.
It works if you work. What other ways can you take control of your life and your time?
This simple, quick visualization helps you make fulfilling time choices, because you immediately focus your energies on 2 essentials:
1) You clarify, through daily experience, which time choices genuinely increase your satisfaction in your life, and which you can let go of with few regrets.
2) You introduce necessary changes in small, easy steps over time. These are the kinds of changes that can be sustained, fine-tuned, and perfected. You can also revise them whenever your circumstances change.
Do you ask why the first step is even necessary? And have you wondered why most people don't feel that 24 hours a day really is enough? A recent book entitled "Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile" offers surprising answers.
Author Daniel Nettle, a biological psychologist, conducted extensive research to discover what truly brings life satisfaction. A review of his book in Scientific American reports his findings: human beings are simply not hard-wired to instinctively grasp which pursuits bring ongoing contentment. This confusion leads to time wasted by going down blind alleys for years, and sometimes for a lifetime. What a needless tragedy this is.
Thankfully, you can find your path through daily "happiness experiments" offered in this visualization. You will be rewarded with much pleasure in small pockets of time. You can also clarify common misconceptions about what activities deserve your valuable time. All you need is to engage in the visualization and to keep an open mind.
Participating in the Ideal Day visualization will help you answer these questions:
1) What do you want, above all else, to do with your time?
2) What do you care about so much, that you are willing to change old habits?
3) What time choices can you look back on, at the end of your life, with satisfaction?
Here's the visualization. Simple, short and sweet:
"Your Ideal Day Visualization:"
1) For a month, set aside 15 minutes a day.
Select time when you will be uninterrupted. If needed, divide this exercise into three five-minute segments.
2) Sit back and relax for the first 5 minutes. Imagine your ideal day.
In 5 minutes, you can imagine a lot! Envision yourself waking up, stretching, and going about your ideal day. What are you doing? How are you feeling? The more vivid your imagination, the better! Sense the
3) In the next 5 minutes, pick out portions of this ideal day when you are alone.
You are selecting these images because they are completely within your power to bring about, without other people's participation.
4) Then identify a 5-minute time slice that you can duplicate today.
Select something that you don't currently do, or something that you generally don't allow yourself to fully enjoy.
5) Take the third 5-minute segment and do it.
Let yourself be totally in the moment. Pick the time of day when it will be easiest for you, and when this activity (or even lack of activity) will mean the most to you.
Does this seem simple? It is! Yet engaging in this exercise provides you with 5 profound benefits:
5 Lifetime Benefits from Practicing "Your Ideal Day Visualization"
1) You develop your powers of visualization.
As you open to your power to visualize, you will experience firsthand why even the traditional medical community now explores the mind's potential to create a new level of wellbeing. You can call on this skill to reduce stress, enhance creativity and even promote healing, in tiny slices of time.
2) You clarify your values about how you want to use your time.
The more often you visualize, the more you learn about what time choices fulfill you. Become the expert on your happiness. And experience for yourself how much pleasure you can cultivate today, in just a short period of time. Enjoying yourself now is one of the best ways to undercut human's hard-wired, destructive tendency to perpetually yearn for something just out of reach.
3) In just 15 minutes a day for a month, you create a pattern that's easy to maintain.
A month of continuous daily practice establishes a new life pattern. What an easy way to add daily pleasure to your life! You can, of course, continue to use this visualization to modify more and more segments of your life. Successful small risks and experiments prepare you to take more new steps. And you have built the discipline to carry them out.
4) You demonstrate your power to improve your life through basic time choices.
Nothing helps foster self-reference like experiencing simple pleasures you provide yourself. As you increase your own happiness, you naturally place fewer demands on others, and your relationships will proceed more smoothly.
5) You cultivate the gift of being in the moment.
You'll experience firsthand how this focus stretches time and multiplies your capacity for enjoyment. This is your moment, and all your power resides here, where you make your time choices. Remember that the way you use your time is the way you live your life.
It works if you work. What other ways can you take control of your life and your time?
