Get the book!

Perfect for you, your useless husband or your slovenly wife!

CLICK HERE!

Action

Go on vacation

Your effectively managed home and your effectively managed life and your effectively run family and filofax system make you feel good about yourself.

  • Nothing ever gets on top of you.
  • Every day, you wake up and slip into your morning routine, ticking boxes and adding and subtracting from your to-do list. Your inbox gets to zero, then goes up to fifty, then goes down to zero again.
  • Bills are always paid on time because you’ve got a kick-ass “how to pay bills” system. Your credit-card debt has been paid off, and you can afford a couple of meals out each week.
  • You’re smug.

Now comes the fun part: the accumulation of monetary wealth.

You’ve got no debts, so you build your slush-fund.

You build your slush fund by:

  • Working a little bit longer each day
  • Taking on a second job, perhaps in the evenings
  • Walking to work instead of taking the bus
  • Giving up on some of those small luxuries: meals out, coffees, drinks with friends, gym membership, anything that makes life worth living.
  • Sending your kids out to work in a coal-mine
  • Murdering your husband for his life-insurance payout

By not taking a holiday, and not going abroad, and not leaving for a phone-free vacation, you can add to your bottom line to the tune of a grand or two a year. AWESOME!

Awesome?

No: sucky.

Gee, hon, I’m really stoked we’ve got our retirement savings up to a comfortable six-figure amount.

Yes, I sure hope we’re alive to spend it.

GO ON VACATION. TAKE A HOLIDAY. SPEND SOME OF YOUR MONEY ON THE KINDS OF THINGS THAT MONEY IS EARNED TO BE SPENT ON.

Give yourself permission to grab your sandals and bermuda shorts and hit the beach, climb a mountain, eat strange foods in strange places.

Ride a donkey.

Have some fun.

4 comments

Turn off your phone this weekend

You are a slave to your cell-phone. Your mobile is IN CONTROL of you.

In the war of man against machine, man is LOSING.

Your phone does a lot more than just ring when somebody wants to talk to you, right? It beeps when you get a message, it hums when somebody tweets you, it buzzes when you get an email, it gives you a back rub when your tired and fixes you a bloody mary when you’ve got a sore head.

STOP! TURN OFF YOUR MOBILE PHONE.

Before switching your phone off, this is your weekend:

  • Get up, beautiful day, decide to go to the park, but first check your emails in bed. BAD IDEA. Long, dirty missive from your boss about your Monday morning deadline.
  • Decide you’ll spend the whole day working to appease your employer, who is on the golf course not thinking about you even for a minute.
  • Can’t get any work done because your husband calls you every two minutes to help with his supermarket buying decisions.
  • Evening comes quickly. Treat yourself to a film and a bottle of wine, and just as you sit down your mother calls “for a chat” and you’re still on the phone half an hour later. Your pizza’s gone cold and your Chablis has gotten warm.
  • You get another email from your boss. Can’t sleep for worry.

After switching your phone off, this is your weekend:

  • Wake up Saturday, beautiful day, eat breakfast, go to the park, meet friends for lunch, play six rounds of mini-golf and finish it off with lobster and stout.
  • Sunday, repeat.
  • Monday, get into the office, deal with emails. Deadline wasn’t really a deadline.

“BUT”, I hear you cry. “BUT if I want to enjoy my weekend, I need my friends to be able to get in touch with me, right?”

WRONG

Remember ten years ago, before anybody had a mobile phone? Remember how you used to have fun, and meet friends for lunch, and get stuff done? Well:

IT’S STILL POSSIBLE.

If anything, we were more organized and more efficient when last minute changes of plan and calls for information weren’t possible.

DESTRESS – TURN YOUR PHONE OFF THIS WEEKEND.

5 comments

Brain dump

It’s time to brain dump when you’re saying this:

“Uurgh, I’ve got like one million things to do and I can’t even get started on the smallest one because I’m so, like, blinking, distracted, and as soon as I start on one thing another five turn up and even just waking up in the morning I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START!”

Sound familiar?

SORT IT OUT!

You’re not going to get anything done if you if you don’t first identify what exactly needs doing.

So what does it look like inside your head? Neat, ordered, each memory, personality trait, task to remember all neatly compartmentalised and easily accessible?

Or is it a hopeless swirl of sticky grey matter, with the really important struggling with the mundane to get to the surface and the clear light of day?

My money’s on the second.

Here’s how you remedy it:

BRAIN DUMP:

  1. Take a large piece of paper
  2. Write all the shit you have to do on it, one line at a time
  3. Take five minutes
  4. Go back and do it again.
  5. Take five minutes.
  6. One last go.

Voilà! and BANG! You now have a TO-DO LIST!!! Cross one line off when each to-do is done and you’re GETTING STUFF DONE!

Awesome! High Five!

3 comments

Get Help

Who do you think you are? Superman?

GET SOME HELP!

You don’t really believe that the best way of doing whatever it is you’ve got to do is alone, but you like to think of yourself as an “independent woman” or “a man who can”.

Your distorted sense of pride is stopping you doing one of two things:

  1. Asking for help; and/or
  2. Accepting help when it’s offered

Take the following situation, one we can all relate to:

Your prize-winning collection of Koi carp need to be vaccinated against seasonal flu. You’ve got two hundred of the buggers, and they’re slippery customers. Getting hold of them is one thing, let alone keeping them still long enough to vaccinate them.

You devise a method of doing it, and estimate that it will take you five minutes to net, jab, tag and release each fish.

(5 Minutes) x (200 fish) = Fucking Ages

On top of that you’ve had a dinner planned with your sexy estate-agent in five hours time.

Here’s how you do it:

…

Get five people to help you.

BANG! Seventeen hours of work distilled into four. Your sanity saved and the prospect of shacking up with aforementioned sexy estate-agent tripled, thus guaranteeing a life-time of spiritual harmony and breakfast in bed.

Simple, huh?

And the beauty of this trick is this:

it doesn’t apply only to innoculating expensive fish.

Shopping, housework, envelope-licking, data-entry, house-building, holiday-planning and all manner of getting things done can be made shorter and more enjoyable by accepting help.

  • If you don’t have any friends, pay somebody to help you.
  • If you don’t have any money, get some friends.

So swallow your pride, take a deep breath, and swallow it up, sucker:

You Can’t Always Do It On Your Own.

Leave a comment

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →