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Increasing the Good and Taking Life to the Next Level

So many good things are happening right now, can you feel it in the air? Do you take notice how and when the good flows into your life or do you tend to only notice when things don’t go your way? And when things don’t particularly appear to go your way, do you ever notice how often something better comes along or the thing you think you needed or wanted wasn’t really it afterall?

James and I just returned from a five-day conference where we were totally inspired to take our lives and Optimum Wellness to the next level.  A few of the key strategies we are implementing include “blocking” time more effectively and sticking to it, being media-free during the work/school week (no television), and using the first few hours of the day to take care of our minds and bodies before diving into email.

Time blocking means that we plan out two or three uninterrupted blocks of time during the day that is task-specific. During that blocked time, no emails are checked, no calls are taken. It is literally a time of total focus. Write down precisely when you are blocking time and what you’ll be doing during that time and you will be amazed at the increase in productivity that you achieve. It’s like taking your “to do” list to the next level.

Although we have always had a “TV-free” policy during the school week, we weren’t always strict enforcers. It began with picking one favorite show that we all agreed on watching one evening a week, which morphed to two shows and eventually into watching reruns of “Chopped.” Really? How did that happen? All it took was a firm decision to reinstate the “rule” and we’re back on target. No more “American Idol” (though we  just heard Keith Urban will be a judge this season, making it somewhat tempting), no more “Sweet Genius” (our grain free desserts are so much better anyway), and thankfully no more reruns of “Friends,” which our daughters mysteriously became hooked on over the summer. Speaking of going TV-free, are you aware that the average American watches (wastes) on average 2.75 hours of television a day. For grins, we did some calculations (with the aid of online calculating tools) and here’s how this television watching might translate financially. Let’s say you earned an average wage of $15/hour. Watching 2.75 hours of television/day translates to about $41.25/day. Take this amount of television watching over 20 years and when factoring in compounded interest at 7%, we’re looking at a potential of $625,659 lost over those years. Now, maybe you value television that much, we’re not here to judge. We just wanted to illustrate that watching endless hours of “bad television” is not only a waste of your time, it’s a waste of potential earned income.

Finally, when we look at making something magical happen during the first few hours of our day, some of you may be thinking, the magic doesn’t happen until after my second cup of coffee. Hmm, that’s a great excuse (sarcasm intended). For us, we know that we have a limited amount of time between waking up and getting the kids out the door for school. At this point they are responsible enough to get themselves ready, but if you have younger kids at home, you really need to find a strategy that works well for you. We wake up real early – at least an hour before the kids –  get in a good workout, write down our time-blocks for the day and journal. Once we get to work, we use the first hour to do the big stuff that we really want to get out of the way. Brian Tracy calls this “eating a live frog” (from his classic time management book titled “Eat That Frog”), meaning do the thing you are least looking forward to or your most monumental task first thing and get it behind you.

We know you have it within you to create the life of your dreams – many of you are living it right now, yeah! As the leaves begin to change color, ask yourself what is it in your life that needs to transform? We’re transforming Optimum Wellness – you’ll see a new logo for 2013 and things will look a lot different. Stay tuned and stay inspired.