Volume 11 | subscribers | 1 different countries | 20 February 2009 Contents Part 1 - Welcome! Dear %$firstname$%, Welcome to the first newsletter of 2009. I hope that you have all had a good start to the New Year and survived the big chill. Fortunately March isn’t far away and spring is peeking around the corner (well, that’s what I keep telling myself). Someone emailed me recently as she hadn’t received a newsletter. It seems that the beginning of this year has run away with me, so I thought it was high time to send one out. It is said that time is an illusion and we are all in the eternal moment of now. That may well be, but clocks, watches, timetables and deadlines rule our lives nonetheless. Is that the time? Must fly!
Leda Sammarco It's a book thing. Part 2 - Feature Article Are You Running Out of Time? One of the reasons I didn’t send out a newsletter in January is that I ran out of time. Or did I? The fact is that we never actually run out of time, we just manage it badly. As someone pointed out to me recently, even if there were 48 hours in a day, we still wouldn’t get everything done. Even if you are passionate about writing your book, finding time to do it can still be a problem. I recently attended a seminar led by Mark Forster, an expert on time management. He spoke about the three degrees of urgency, which can help you to be more focused. Immediate: this is something that requires your attention straight away. It is tempting to think that emails need immediate attention. Remember that the urgency depends on the message, not the mode of delivery. Same Day: these are things that you were not aware of beforehand, but need to be tackled today. Deal with the most urgent ones first of all. Everything Else: these are tasks that you can plan. Arrange them in batches and work through each one systematically. Don’t cherry pick, as this is more time consuming and some things will get left out. There may, of course, be deeper issues that are preventing you from making time to write, such as fear, procrastination, lack of support or your inner critic. If so, I highly recommend Stephen Pressfield’s ‘The War of Art’. In it he says: “It’s not the writing part that’s hard.
What’s hard is sitting down to write. To inspire you, here are some stories about how writers, artists and other creative people organise their days. Remember, “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.” Brian Tracy
|
|
Copyright © Leda Sammarco 2008. All rights reserved.
|
