Time Flies: 5 Ways To Make Sure You Enjoy The Ride

Image courtesy of: Julia Kim Smith/Shamim Momin, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria

‘Tempus fugit – time flies. Life is short. I can’t believe another year’s gone by…’

People say all sorts of things about time, usually about how little of it they have. Many of us genuinely lead busy lives and do find it hard to fit everything in – work, family, hobbies, exercise. But leading a happy and fulfilled life and achieving all our goals does require the skill of handling our time well. Time is a resource and must be managed.

Keep a record of what you are doing with your time.

Keeping a proper record of what you’re doing is a really important first step in managing your time and hence being more productive. When I tried this for myself, it turned out that there were vast swathes of my time that weren’t being used productively at all. Although I always regarded myself as having no time and being far too busy to do any more than I was already doing, in fact there was plenty of time spent on pretty meaningless things such as watching TV, surfing the Internet (not in a productive way), or just lying around. Read the Rest of This Article »

Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life

“Mosk” courtesy of Maciej Mizer

Our life is what our thoughts make it. Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil. ~Marcus Aurelius

A belief is something you consider to be true. You cannot decide to believe one thing this week and another, opposing thing, next week. You might think you can, but it really doesn’t work like that. I read recently that baby circus elephants are tied to a strong metal post with a heavy chain because they will try to escape and expend a lot of energy on pulling at their tether. After some time, they accept that they will not be able to escape and so stop pulling. The adult elephants are tethered to a wooden stake with a light rope: they could easily escape, but they believe they are unable to do so, and so the light tethering works as a kind of symbol of their bondage. It is clear that whether your beliefs are true or not is irrelevant. What matters is what you regard to be true. It seems to me that this is a good definition of ‘belief.’ Read the Rest of This Article »