The deadline is your best friend
Victims think of a lot things they “should” be doing to
improve their lives, but then they think are just too busy to do them now. They
are soon focused on their troubles.
Warriors focus on the nest quantum leap of success. [In
life, what you focus on grows.] The time warrior does surprisingly good things
NOW.
His ruthless sword cuts through all the nonsense of
impressing people and leaves only love and service in its wake.
The deadline is
your best friend
And now is when it all happens. And if it can’t literally
happen now, the warrior sets precise deadline. Sets them up now. He sets the
deadlines NOW, so that they are still in the NOW. Deadlines soon become the
warrior’s best friend: “We’re our changing our price structure January 1st,
we are hiring our new marketing director and made over by April 30th
and we will have the whole neighborhood papered with our new flier by noon
Friday.”
The more seriously you regard your deadlines and the more
you keep your word on meeting your deadlines, the stronger you get internally.
The higher your self-esteem becomes. The more you trust yourself.
I can never feel
stress because I’m always working within my day.
I experience a stressed-out feeling whenever I think about
the deadline for a creative project. But my stress comes from having that
project be in the future.
Non-linear time management doesn’t allow that line that
stretches into the future. Because the linear thought process always produces
stress. Unreasonable stress.
Here’s what always works for me. Creating my perfect day.
Figuring out what I’d have to do in one day [today] to automatically meet the
deadline.
So if my book is 220 pages, I know that if I write two pages
a day I can finish it in less than five months [my deadline]. So I have a new
project. It isn’t a book, it’s two pages. Today. That’s all I have to do, and
it’s all I ever have to worry about. Two pages. It’s fun. It’s exciting. And
it’s very satisfying.
Some days I get on a passionate roll and write ten pages!
Nothing can stop me! So I’m way ahead of deadline. I can sometimes het ahead. I
can never, ever – wish this system – fall behind. It’s a system called “today”.
I can never feel stress because I’m always working within my day. I don’t
stretch a linear into the future.
Can you see it? Non-linear time management doesn’t ever have
a long timeline. It has two choices: now or not now.
No more overwhelm
Sometimes people think radical, innovative time management is
something they are going to have to get into later. Right now, they are dealing
with a difficult situation. And they are feeling overwhelmed. They don’t
realize something important.
Situations – even “dramatic” situations like bankruptcy,
divorce, death and economic recession – canonot directly cause a feeling of any
kind until the brain interprets and creates a story about said situation.
Right now, they
are dealing with a difficult situation. And they are feeling overwhelmed. They
don’t realize something important.
Your problem is not that you are overwhelmed. Your problem
is an attachment to the story of overwhelm. Truth-fully, are you overwhelmed or
do you just feel that way? Let us really, really look at your last five days.
Let’s just isolate one of the hours. Let’s take a look at this “overwhelm” and
see if it’s really there.
You are not, in this hour we’re chosen to look at, at all
overwhelmed, are you? Not in this particular hour.
But your story is that you are.
You can drop that story. You can tell a different story, try
this story: “I’ve only got one thing to do! How liberating. It’s the thing I’m
doing right now.”
Sadness, depression, frustration, upset, and anxiety can
only be produced by seeing a situation and then producing an interpretation of
it and then believing that interpretation. So, therefore, you and I can only be
overwhelmed by our thoughts about something, never the thing itself.
In a simple life
in which you only what’s in front of you, there can be no overwhelm, ever. That
life is yours to create.
I keep daydreaming a scene I’d like to put in a book or
movie. A mad man [Me? Why not?] lives in a mental ward. [Me? It fits.] Each day
they let this man into the recreation room. He’s in his pajamas. He sits down
at the circular table. The attendant gives him a big blank pad of paper and a
box of crayons. He takes out the crayons and draws the head of a monster. He
stares at the monster, screams, and runs out of the room.
The whole thing looks funny to the attendant. It looks, shall
we say it … insane. The poor mad man is scaring himself to death!
And crazy as that lokks, we ourselves do that each day. We
use our crayons [our imagination] to scare ourselves instead of to create.
When we imagine [perceive] that we are overwhelmed by outside
events [or options, or tough choices, or situations, or ways of making money,
etc.] It is an illusion, because the brain doesn’t even function that way.
Only a thought believed can produce a feeling of overwhelm.
Something happens, and we add the meaning of it. Circumstance carries no
meaning by itself.
In a simple life in which you only what’s in front of you,
there can be no overwhelm, ever. That life is yours to create.
