Parkinson’s Law says that an activity will take all the time that you allot to it. If you have a report to write and you think it will take two days then you’re right – it will take two days. If however you get a sudden phone call from the boss who says that he needs it by the end of today – hey presto – magically you get it done today.

You can’t defeat this law – but you can play it to your advantage. Use Parkinson’s law to decide how long you want a specific activity to take. Decide that you want to finish preparing course material by the end of the day. Decide that you will catch up on some emails by lunchtime. Decide that you will return five phone calls between now and your next meeting.

In making the decision you are thinking about what you need to get done, stating an intention and then focussing your mind on getting it done. This means that you are more likely to be successful at completing the task or tasks within the given timeframe than if you hadn’t made the decision and just allowed yourself to drift through the day.

When life is throwing one challenge after another at you how can you keep moving forward and win through each day?

The key words here are ‘each day’. In challenging times, if you are facing illness, stress at work or money problems, you can determine each morning to have some kind of victory, no matter how small. You don’t have to be Hercules, make all your problems go away or solve the woes of the world; but if you can just generate and recognise one small success then your day will have been valuable and you will feel that you are gradually winning with your battles.

A small success may be:

• dispatching your CV to one new potential employer which is a step on the way to escaping the hell of your current job
• completing a project at work which removes at least one item from your overcrowded to-do list
• finding a 2 for 1 coupon at your favourite café so you can have a cheap lunch with a friend
• finding a cheaper mobile phone tariff which then allows you to pay off extra money each month on your overloaded credit card
• coming across a blog that gives some great tips on how to manage a health condition from which you are suffering
• finding the right health practitioner who can help to reduce the physical pain you are experiencing

These successes may not make all of your problem go away but at least you can then see that you are making some positive progress. You are going to feel a lot better if you focus on what is going right rather than what is going wrong.

Looking for small improvements also makes each day more manageable so you don’t feel as overwhelmed by circumstances. Knowing that you can find a way to advance even a tiny bit may make it easier to get out of bed in the morning!

Finally, reflecting on what has gone well, even if it is something small or a seemingly insignificant event, cultivates an attitude of gratitude rather than complaint. This helps you to see where your difficulties are making you into a better, stronger person rather than feeling worthless because everything seems so hopeless.

When I give time management training one of the tips I suggest is to recognise when you just don’t have time to do a particular activity, you stop trying to shoe-horn it in to an already stressed and busy life and say – “I just don’t have time to do this at the moment.” The three words “at the moment” are important. They mean that you are not admitting defeat to ever getting around to a task; instead you are making the decision that you just don’t have space right now or are not willing to prioritise it. These three words leave the door open to the fact that you do fully intend to do the activity at some point in the future. You can then stop exhausting yourself trying to do it all safe in the knowledge that this is just a temporary hiatus on the activity.

For me this meant that I could not continue to do all of my marketing and networking activities for Lead The Life and have enough time to devote to writing a book. Now that the manuscript is more or less complete I am really enjoying picking up the marketing activities again.

American coach, Michael Neill, uses an analogy of fitting rocks, pebbles, sand and water in a jar to illustrate how to prioritise our time. The challenge is to fit as much of the rocks in the jar as possible. It all comes down to in which order you put them. If you put in the water and sand first then there isn’t room for the pebbles and the rocks. If you go for the pebbles first then you still can’t get the rocks in. The trick is therefore to put the rocks in first then let the pebbles fall into the space between the rocks. The sand can then fall into the remaining spaces and you can top up the jar with some of the water.

As far as time management goes, the rocks represent the activities that you really want to do. Fit those in your day and your week first. Then fill up the remaining time with less important or less fun activities. If you let your time get filled up with the wrong stuff then you won’t be able to fit in what is most significant to you.

One of my rocks has been writing the book and my pebbles have been other ’should do’ activities. The book was such a large rock that I had to make some tough decisions on the other pebbles. Of course, if I stopped my marketing activities forever then my business would grind to a halt but for the time it took to get the book written they were a necessary exclusion.

What are you trying to squeeze into your life right now that just doesn’t fit? Would it be less stressful to say – “I just don’t have time to do this at the moment?” Can you make plans for when it is more possible in the future?

I saw the latest Sex And The City movie a few days ago. My verdict: not impressed! I don’t want to get into a rant of how bad I thought it was (bearing in mind that I am a huge SATC fan and loved the last movie) but my main exclamation at the end of the film was: “What on earth were they thinking?!”

Then last night, after I arrived home from the theatre, I was doing a spot of light channel flicking on the telly and came across the very first episode of the TV series. 1998 seems a very long time ago. I was 32 at the time, the same age as Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte, and as a single girl living in Central London some aspects of my life were not dissimilar to theirs.

My first thought when casting my mind back to 1998 was that although I had enjoyed an exciting, high octane lifestyle I was quite often depressed about the fact that I was single. For me 1998 was the year of a significant heart break brought about by unrequited love.

Back then I used to obsess about the factors that made me unhappy on a constant basis for weeks or months on end. When I look at my life today, I don’t do that anymore. If something bothers me now it only lasts for a day or two and then I get back on an even keel. I think that over the years I have learned to be happy as I am and I enjoy a much deeper level of self acceptance. That has, at last, brought the most wonderful man in my life and I have a much more fulfilling working life now. Ironically when we constantly obsess about what we don’t have we seem to prevent those desires from entering our lives.

Yesterday my Mum sent me an email containing the following story. I don’t know who it is from but it is very good and I wanted to share it:

Ducks Quack – Eagles Soar

No one can make you serve customers well….that’s because great service is a choice. Harvey Mackay, tells a wonderful story about a cab driver that proved this point.

He was waiting in line for a ride at the airport. When a cab pulled up, the first thing Harvey noticed was that the taxi was polished to a bright shine. Smartly dressed in a white shirt, black tie, and freshly pressed black slacks, the cab driver jumped out and rounded the car to open the back passenger door for Harvey .

He handed my friend a laminated card and said: ‘I’m Wally, your driver. While I’m loading your bags in the trunk I’d like you to read my mission statement.’

Taken aback, Harvey read the card.. It said: Wally’s Mission Statement: To get my customers to their destination in the quickest, safest and cheapest way possible in a friendly environment…

This blew Harvey away. Especially when he noticed that the inside of the cab matched the outside. Spotlessly clean!

As he slid behind the wheel, Wally said, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee? I have a thermos of regular and one of decaf.’ My friend said jokingly, ‘No, I’d prefer a soft drink.’ Wally smiled and said, ‘No problem.. I have a cooler up front with regular and Diet Coke, water and orange juice…’ Almost stuttering, Harvey said, ‘I’ll take a Diet Coke.’

Handing him his drink, Wally said, ‘If you’d like something to read, I have The Wall Street Journal, Time, Sports Illustrated and USA Today.’

As they were pulling away, Wally handed my friend another laminated card, ‘These are the stations I get and the music they play, if you’d like to listen to the radio.’

And as if that weren’t enough, Wally told Harvey that he had the air conditioning on and asked if the temperature was comfortable for him. Then he advised Harvey of the best route to his destination for that time of day. He also let him know that he’d be happy to chat and tell him about some of the sights or, if Harvey preferred, to leave him with his own thoughts.

‘Tell me, Wally,’ my amazed friend asked the driver, ‘have you always served customers like this?’

Wally smiled into the rear view mirror. ‘No, not always.. In fact, it’s only been in the last two years. My first five years driving, I spent most of my time complaining like all the rest of the cabbies do. Then I heard the personal growth guru, Wayne Dyer, on the radio one day.

He had just written a book called You’ll See It When You Believe It. Dyer said that if you get up in the morning expecting to have a bad day, you’ll rarely disappoint yourself. He said, ‘Stop complaining! Differentiate yourself from your competition. Don’t be a duck. Be an eagle. Ducks quack and complain. Eagles soar above the crowd.’

‘That hit me right between the eyes,’ said Wally. ‘Dyer was really talking about me. I was always quacking and complaining, so I decided to change my attitude and become an eagle. I looked around at the other cabs and their drivers. The cabs were dirty, the drivers were unfriendly, and the customers were unhappy. So I decided to make some changes. I put in a few at a time. When my customers responded well, I did more.’

‘I take it that has paid off for you,’ Harvey said.

‘It sure has,’ Wally replied. ‘My first year as an eagle, I doubled my income from the previous year. This year I’ll probably quadruple it. You were lucky to get me today. I don’t sit at cabstands anymore. My customers call me for appointments on my cell phone or leave a message on my answering machine. If I can’t pick them up myself, I get a reliable cabbie friend to do it and I take a piece of the action.’

Wally was phenomenal. He was running a limo service out of a Yellow Cab. I’ve probably told that story to more than fifty cab drivers over the years, and only two took the idea and ran with it. Whenever I go to their cities, I give them a call. The rest of the drivers quacked like ducks and told me all the reasons they couldn’t do any of what I was suggesting.

Wally the Cab Driver made a different choice. He decided to stop quacking like ducks and start soaring like eagles.

How about us? Smile, and the whole world smiles with you… The ball is in our hands! Ducks Quack, Eagles Soar.

I’ve always been fascinated by time, and my use of it. Part of this comes from the fact I help others with their time management, but mostly it is because feeling that I have enough time for everything I want to do is very challenging for me to achieve.

Recently I have been doing some consulting on a three day a week basis. While this has been great for cash flow, it has been less great in terms of the time I have to devote to growing other areas of my Lead The Life business. When I take into account the travelling time each day to my consulting client there isn’t much of the day left. Evenings have tended to be get home, make tea, do my Buddhist chanting, watch TV for about forty minutes and then it’s time for bed. It feels like there is no time for anything else. The commute to this client is slightly longer than I would prefer and I feel that I am short of one hour in the day. If there was a way of conjuring up that additional hour it would make a huge difference to my creative output and general sense of well-being.

However, over the past few days I have decided that I no longer want to be defeated by this situation and have banned the phrase “I don’t have time for that” from my mind. Instead I am determining to do one small thing towards my creative output or my business on each of these busy days. I have discovered that this provides an excellent opportunity to send out follow-up emails to those where I am pitching for business as well as to re-connect with people with whom I have formed a relationship in the various networking circles to which I belong. I’m also spending a few minutes here and there developing a new marketing plan for Lead The Life. This is quite naturally resulting in a series of tasks to be performed that I can then carry out as my daily ‘do one useful thing’.

This morning I was fulfilling one of my most loved Christmas traditions – watching the film It’s A Wonderful Life. I first discovered this film in 1996 and have watched it every year since.

For those of you who haven’t come across this movie, it was made in 1946 by Frank Capra and stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a frustrated man living in a small town in America called Bedford Falls. As a young man George had huge aspirations to travel the world, become an engineer and construct amazing buildings. However, one set of circumstances after another mean that George has to remain in Bedford Falls and grudgingly take over a small family run savings and loans association.

I have watched this film many times but what really struck me from this year’s viewing was the pent-up rage that George feels and his resentment at being trapped in what he calls “a crummy little town”. Over the years his peers and his brother get to leave the town and make something of themselves whereas George continues in his humble but valuable role of allowing the people of Bedford Falls to buy their own home.

The crux of the movie comes when, on Christmas Eve, a mistake causes George to have an $8,000 shortfall in the bank’s accounts and he faces being carted off to prison. Clutching a $15,000 life assurance policy he realises that financially, he is worth more dead than alive.

George is saved when a guardian angel arrives and helps him to see how his life and his continual acts of kindness have made a hugely positive contribution to his friends, family and the town in general. He is finally convinced that the value of his life is far more than dollars, cents or glamorous achievement. In his hour of need the townspeople rally to help him and the film ends with his brother Harry declaring him the richest man in Bedford Falls.

Sometimes in our own hour of need we too can overlook our true worth and focus only on the negative or what we lack. At these times we need to make remember our treasures of the heart – our capital in terms of friendship, love and humanity. Like George Bailey we can find it hard to grasp the positive contribution our life makes to our families, our places of work and our communities. We may not realise it but each one of us would leave a huge hole in the lives of those around us if we had never existed.

I can heartily recommend It’s A Wonderful Life particularly if you struggle with the Christmas season or if life is not currently panning out as you would wish.

So let’s go forth in peace, love and hope until we meet again in 2010. My best wishes of the season.

This week sees the tenth anniversary of when I started to write. In this newsletter I would like to celebrate that anniversary and share some of the lessons that I have learned along the way.

Back in 1999 I felt very unfulfilled. My work as an IT consultant was incredibly well paid and I was living the life of Riley but I didn’t have an outlet for my creative talents and my dream of being an inspirational speaker seemed a million miles away. Thankfully, while I was on holiday in New York, I got into a conversation with an astrologer who talked a lot of technical astrology and numerology stuff that I didn’t understand and then said, “Ah, you’ve got Gemini in your mid-heaven. That suggests you could be good at writing.” This for me was like a light bulb igniting. He recommended that I buy two books by Julia Cameron called The Right To Write and The Artist’s Way and work through the exercises in them. He also suggested that I keep a journal for a year and see what emerged from that process.

I was very excited by the concept of writing and raced straight off to Barnes & Noble, a bookstore chain in the USA, and bought the books and a spiral-bound notebook. A couple of hours later, while I was waiting at JFK airport for my flight home, I did my first writing exercise.

That day was 24th August 1999 and it was the start of an amazing creative journey. Looking back over the last ten years I feel I have achieved so much. I have written a novel, several short stories and for many years I wrote articles for a Buddhist magazine called The Art of Living. In response to my dream of being an inspirational speaker I set up Lead The Life You Want To Lead, have coaching clients and now give my own talks and workshops. I no longer work full-time in IT though sometimes I do part-time consulting work. This suits me very well because it is a good income stream yet still leaves time for my creative endeavours and for Lead The Life. Finally, after years of living life as a Bridget Jones singleton, I now have a wonderful partner.

I would like to share some of the lessons I have learned during these last ten years. Firstly: start! Whatever your heart’s desire may be in terms of hobbies, creative pursuits or a future occupation, start taking small steps of action towards it. I worked through Julia Cameron’s books and then began working on my novel while I was still working full time in IT. If your dreams lead beyond your current day job then don’t give it up straightaway but see if you can make the job fit your needs, rather than vice versa – and keep taking action towards your future.

Always live a life of learning and be inspired by those around you. Celebrate the success of others, learn how they created this success and apply those principles to your own endeavours.

Persist! I have had many, many knock-backs and disappointments. However, the only way to make your dreams come true is to keep at it, no matter what.

Don’t be afraid to dream big goals. I have many items on my goal list that I haven’t yet achieved, but for the ones that have come to fruition, it is incredibly satisfying to tick them off.

In my talks and workshops my key message is always that it doesn’t matter how long it takes to achieve your goals, what matters is that you keep taking action towards them. I always stress this because it applies as much to myself as to those in the audience. For example my novel is still not published. However I’m inspired with the knowledge that Stephen King collected a huge pile of rejection letters before making it big, so I’m on the right track! This goal is taking longer than I thought to achieve but as long as I keep taking action towards it, then there is a good chance that I will succeed – even if it takes another ten years!

Looking ahead to August 2019, what would you like to achieve? What would you like to be reporting back on? What are your proudest accomplishments going to be? What action do you need to take today to make them happen?

I have recently had the privilege of doing some coaching for Woman and Home magazine. As part of this I was asked to provide some tips on what to do if your heart wants you to follow a new occupation but your bank balance suggests that you may need to stay in your current job. In this month’s newsletter I’d like to share these tips with you.

First of all, don’t give up your day job – at least not immediately – but do start taking some kind of action towards your dream occupation. Maybe there is a course you can take, perhaps you can start putting your business together while you are still working or maybe you can do your day job part-time so that you have the best of both worlds.

Often, when we are unhappy with our life we blame our job and think that everything would be okay if only we were doing something else. This is not necessarily the case. My advice is to see if there is an activity you can undertake which will give you a flavour of your chosen occupation while still enjoying the security and familiarity of your current employment. For example, if you work as a lawyer but deep down you want to be a teacher it may be possible for you to have a taste of teaching by volunteering to mentor a young person who is having difficulty with their lessons at school. You may find that this satisfies your teaching urge and makes your life feel more rounded; then you can continue volunteering and earning your lawyer’s salary at the same time. Alternatively if the volunteering does convince you that teaching would be a wonderful move for you, then you can continue to pursue this path safe in the knowledge that you’re not making a terrible mistake.

Keeping your job, at least for the time being, has many other advantages. Your employer might run some interesting charity schemes or you might be able to opt for a career break or take some unpaid leave. Many people who make the move to self employment also find that their employer and/or their colleagues become their first clients. Your employment provides you with a large network of people who know, like and trust you so find ways to use this to its best potential.

If you do decide to change career and your new occupation is not as well paid, don’t despair. Being unhappy at work can be an expensive business because you end up treating yourself with retail therapy or an endless amount of must-have gadgets. If your work becomes more fulfilling then you might find that you don’t really need as many designer clothes or technological gizmos. There may also be other ways you can downsize your expenses such as moving to a different geographic area, taking in a lodger or having a cull on subscriptions such as the gym membership you hardly use or the television package which has more channels than you ever watch.

Finally, don’t be afraid to dream big. If you only achieve half of your dreams then that’s a lot more fulfilling than not dreaming and staying boxed into a miserable life!

You can read the coaching feature on page 42 of the current issue Woman and Home. The magazine also contains a number of other articles about changing your occupation and fulfilling long held dreams –these articles may be useful to males as well as readers females!

I am coming towards the end of my month without watching television. It has been an interesting experiment.

On the plus side I have regained a sense of discipline around things that have/need to be done such as my Buddhist chanting, writing and increased levels of activity. I haven’t missed watching any specific programme (not even Neighbours to which I was highly addicted!) though I have missed the act of relaxing on my sofa while watching TV. Every week of the experiment I have particularly noticed this on a Friday evening.

I chose to eschew all forms of visual entertainment though I did watch a couple of episodes of the West Wing last weekend at my boyfriend’s house. I blipped a little this week too on Tuesday: I’d had a bit of a dodgy back during the day and really needed to relax in the evening so I watched a couple more West Wings. It was absolutely heaven to recline on my sofa and soak up some well written drama.

What happens next – will I give up TV forever? No. I think there is nothing wrong with watching some quality programming so I will be retrieving the cabling between my Sky box and the TV from my boyfriend’s house and plugging it back in next week. I will however change the way I watch. I think the secret is to record a couple of hours of decent programming during the week and then watch it at the weekend thus freeing myself from the tyranny of plonking myself in front of the box and channel surfing of an evening. I’m also going to gradually work my way through a few more episodes of the West Wing which has become a surprise winner in this experiment.

Thanks for following my journey.