Life's a balance

Well don't we all know it but it's a whole other story to get the balance right.

I was going through my book shelf and picked up, 'Cultivate a cool career' by Ken Langdon today. This book contains 52 brilliant ideas for reaching the top and on flicking through the content pages, number 51 caught my attention - Life's a balance. Well what I read astounded me. It really made me think.

'There are 168 hours in the week of which you spend 56 in bed. this leaves 112 for living in.

OMG! I didn't wake up until 10.30 this morning and I'm an 8 hours a night girl. So I'm down to 102 this week already!!!

This idea encourages you to draw up how you spend your 112 hours using a nine box matrix. You leave some boxes for the areas you never get to but would like to so that you can evaluate how you spend your hours. You then create a new matrix and reduce the time in some areas so that you can start working on those areas you currently never get to. An interesting tool which I'd forgotten about.

From my matrix I realised that I could spend a little less time pottering around the house in the weekday mornings and fit in going to the gym before work instead. Now that's a plan to stick to. Tidying the bedroom and kitchen or body balance. Surely body balance will win everytime? Or will it be 30 minutes extra in bed?

Working under pressure

It's amazing what you can complete when you are working under pressure. I've not completed a post here for a few weeks because of the fact I'd set myself a deadline to finish unit 3 of my homeopathy course before I went on holiday.

For some valid and some less valid reasons I still had a lot to do the day before I went away. So on Sunday 4th September I worked like a demon from 9am until 7.30pm. Thankfully it all worked out and I had the pleasure of sending all my essays and diagrams to my tutor that evening. The good feeling that went with that lasted for the whole holiday. I was so pleased with myself. It was such a relief to know that I could start a fresh unit of study when I got back but more importantly that I could relax on holiday knowing that I'd achieved something.

Unfortunately I still don't know quite what I've achieved. Our holiday cottage had wireless which was a bit of a pain as almost every day I visited my hotmail account hoping to see an email back from my tutor with that special word 'pass' included within it. I'm still waiting!! I think it's time to drop her a note as I'm not sure I can hold out waiting much longer.