I had a question from a client who said he finds it easy to be well organised and uses a prioritisation listing for smaller daily tasks but gets bogged down in all the "little bits".

I think I am in danger of having too much on at the moment and I know other people who feel the same.

I’ve been discussing this with my coach, yes, of course I have one. We have coaches to help in different areas, and whilst my career goes just fine, at times my life gets a bit out of balance and so it is not a career coach but more life coaching that I need and have.

One reason I have too much on is that i like to say yes – I like doing new things, and getting involved, and learning new stuff.

However, with my book its all getting a bit too much, and I also need to start work on my second book – did I tell you? well, more to follow.

So now I’m looking after myself and not squeezing any more appointments in when I know the diary is already full.

Have a great weekend, the phone is now on divert!

Sometimes we arrange to meet someone and it’s hard to decide where to meet, so you end up meeting at service stations and hotels close to motorway junctions.

There’s a brilliant site – www.meethalfway.com that helps you to find a location between the two of you.

You can decide to meet at a restaurant, bar, bed and breakfast or morwe and meet half way in terms of distance or time.  Sounds great!

 One of my chief executive clients said this to me the other day, and I love this quote.

When people talk about time management they think of people wasting time, but this person, like me, is phenomenally busy. We both cram a lot in to a day, and sometimes the day runs out.

So the article in my head to write today will need to wait till another day. But I’m ok with this thinking back over all the things in the day that I did achieve, including all the essential and important ones!

Have a nice weekend, Denise x 

It’s so tempting isn’t it, to check on each email that comes through, but it distracts us from doing tasks where we need to focus our energy and has us nipping into side journeys to explore the content of different emails.

It can be so helpful to limit the time we spend looking at emails – to perhaps two or three times a day.

There’s a very interesting post about this from Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist http://www.grahamjones.co.uk/2008/08/check-your-email-quick-another-one.htm where he makes some good suggestions for how to stay in control of our mail.

Thought I’d share a tip – you know how sometimes emails sit in your inbox because you intend to deal with them one day? Plus there are all the things you want to read when you get a quiet moment?

What I’ve been doing over the past few weeks is setting up rules to move all my "reading" emails into a separate folder – READ AT NIGHT and any new non work emails  that come through get routed to this folder.

I therefore only have important stuff in my in box.

I’m now closing Outlook down and only opening it up once an hour, eventually I’ll move to every 2-3 hours. It’s much easier to deal with a batch of emails than just one and this means that I can concentrate on a task.

When I look at my emails I aim to deal with them right away if they are quick, if they will take time I’ll either plan to deal with them later that day – and add it to my to do list, or if it is something I plan to do in a few days time I’ll electronically file it away but set up an alert so I get a reminder 24, 12, 8 and 4 hours before it needs to be done.

So I now have an empty inbox, and will not look again till 9.15.

Why not try this, and let me know how you get on

Denise x