One of my favorite authors and podcasters, Greg McKeown, talks about how he visualizes the way people budget their time and energy. He sees the areas that we budget time and energy to as concentric circles. In the middle, the bullseye circle is self. The next ring around the bullseye is important relationships: family and close friends. The outermost ring is other. Greg observes that many people, when budgeting their time and energy, start from the outside of the concentric circles and move in. But what if we reverse the direction and start at the inside and move our way out?

I have a very realistic and manageable to do list every day. On days when I overestimate the amount of time my tasks will take or if a meeting gets canceled or if it’s just one of those days when my mind is on fire and I’m completely in flow, I’ll work ahead on tasks that I don’t have planned until future days.

If you have taken our training, you may be witnessing the guilt of having and maintaining balance on a team or in an office where frantic show and speed working long hours is the norm.

When I was in my early years of high school, I was still figuring out my time management habits. In Mondovi, Wisconsin, where I grew up, there was a TV show called TV-13 Outdoors that came on later in the evening on Sunday nights. And every time I heard that show’s theme song, I knew that my procrastination period for that weekend was over, and I had to do start my homework then or I wouldn’t get it done.

I'm listening to an interview with one of my favorite comedians (JP Sears). For those of you who don't know him, he's got this huge red mane of hair which he often likes to make the subject of his content. In this bit, he was playing the role of the lion (with his hair all up and crazy looking like a lion's mane). With his razor sharp wit, he discussed how lions need to wake up other lions with their influence.