Uncategorized

Twenty-Five Words To Conquer Thieves of Time

Bardees, , Leave a comment

I listened to author Juliet Funt as she summarized the big ideas from her book A Minute To Think: Reclaim Creativity, Conquer Busynss and Do Your Best Work on the Next Big Idea app, and this part resonated:

“There are four key drivers that cause companies, teams, and human beings to become overloaded. They are actually all assets that simply overgrow. We call them the Thieves of Time: drive, excellence, information, and activity. Despite being positive and helpful in their basic nature, these forces are also the biggest reason that white space disappears.

When taken to extremes, the Thieves of Time become corrupted:

  • Drive becomes overdrive. 
  • Excellence becomes perfectionism. 
  • Information becomes information overload. 
  • Activity becomes downright frenzy. 

Our job is to notice which one or ones tend to carry us away, and then reclaim control of that process. We want them to serve us.

We need a tool that will directly disarm them. That reductive tool is Simplification Questions. They are twenty-five words that I use just about every week, and each question maps back to one of the Thieves’ risks and becomes its remedy:

  • Drive: Is there anything I can let go of?
  • Excellence: Where is “good enough,” good enough?
  • Information: What do I truly need to know?
  • Activity: What deserves my attention?

Each person finds resonance with a different question and that’s their charm. We’re drawn to the ones we need most. The questions can be used at the individual level or at the team and organizational level. They endlessly and nimbly allow us to amplify the best by removing the rest.”

Twenty-Five Words To Conquer Thieves of Time

Did you walk today?

Bardees, , Leave a comment

The highlight of the previous week was moving my body more than the week before.

I started with a short Wednesday walk right after work. I planned this walk by bringing the appropriate shoes and socks.

On Thursday, I participated in a fantastic team-building event with my work colleagues. I played, moved, and laughed.

On Friday morning, I walked while my kids were in their weekly math class, and later in the day, I walked some more during our family trip to Ajloun Teleferic (highly recommended).

Seeing those steps add up on my watch made me feel great as I was using my body for what it was built for: movement, as opposed to the unnatural sedentary life most of us lead by working at office desks for long hours.

Last week, I distinctly felt the need to move, like I had an excess of negative energy that journaling could not help me let out. Walking was what I needed. I was right.

Walking has been a part of my life since the quarantine days. Although many things could come in the way of taking a nice walk, like the shortage of pavements, there are good places to safely walk and enjoy the beautiful architecture of houses and the splendor of trees, especially at this time of year.

I don’t walk every day as I wish, but even if I start on Wednesdays, it’s still way better than walking zero times during the week.

When will you walk this week? 

Did you walk today?

How to Overcome Note Overwhelm in 10 Simple Steps

Bardees, , Leave a comment

A good chunk of my weekly review goes to processing my handwritten notes, and this is how I do it: 

  1. During the week, I collect notes in one place. I write any task, idea, or insight on the daily pages in my planner. 
  2. As the week goes by, I process some tasks by crossing off done items.  
  3. At the start of the new week, during the weekly review, I read all my notes from the past week. 
  4. I cross off done tasks. 
  5. I do tasks I wrote that need a very short time, like sending a text or a reminder email. According to David Allen’s GTD, these actions take less than 2 minutes. 
  6. I add digital reminders to my task app with due dates where applicable. 
  7. I copy insights or good ideas, like a sentence I read and wrote or a post or a podcast idea into my task app in a proper list, such as “Instagram content” or “podcast content”.  
  8. Or I copy ideas to one of my favorite note-taking apps: Google Keep and Evernote.  
  9. As I review my daily pages and process them, I cross off every single word. 
  10.  I then write in a colored marker the word “Reviewed,” which means I will never read or even visit this page in the future, and it was successfully processed.  

I genuinely enjoy this process, and it gives me an immense sense of clarity and relief. As David Allen says: “You can only feel good about what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing.” 

As I wrote this post, I realized that I need to work on better processing my digital notes. I do this randomly, not systematically. I need to account for processing the digital notes, perhaps every month and see which of these notes are still relevant and which need deleting or archiving.  

How to Overcome Note Overwhelm in 10 Simple Steps

Are you ready? Your fresh start awaits.

Bardees, , , , Leave a comment

Today, October 1st, 2023, is the start of a new week, month, and quarter.

Do you know when was the last time this happened? It happened once this year, on January 1st, which was a public holiday. And October 1st is the last time these three beginnings coincide this year.*

To make the best of your fresh start, spend time as soon as possible this week planning the habits you will track and the most important goals you want to achieve this quarter. Decide your last 90 days of the year ambitions and the problems you want to solve. A wise person in a podcast called problems “projects.” Your problems are projects you want to work on and take action steps to improve. Brilliant, no?

Do you plan to commit to the weekly reviews in the next 12 weeks?
Do you plan to track your weekly expenses and save for the holidays?
Do you plan to sleep at a reasonable hour most nights?
Do you plan to start journaling a few days a week?
Do you plan to move your body?
Do you plan to check on the people you say you care about most?

After you decide what you want to do this month:

  • Write your habits and goals on a post-it note in a visible place to keep them on top of mind because the days will get busier, and the list of goals will be forgotten if not present in your space.
  • Track your habits on a habit tracker like the one in the spark below, or create your own. You will feel discouraged sooner than expected if you do your habits without tracking them. Tracking makes you feel great about progress before the changes in your life become tangible. Track the total number of days you commit in October to beat your record in November and be realistic in December because it would be different from October and November.
  • Open your calendar and book action steps for your non-daily habits and goals, such as a coffee date with a friend, walking times, budgeting days, and weekly review days… you get the picture. It would help if you saw them in your calendar to make sure they make sense with the rest of your commitments.

One last tip: my friend told me about a journaling exercise called Remembering The Future, in which you write how you want to feel at the end of the year like it happened already, e.g., “I am so happy I finished that project, passed the exam, and improved my relationship with my mother.” Cool, huh?

So tell me, what will you say on December 31st about the year 2023?

Let’s end it with a bang, shall we?

*P.S. I learned this when I was designing my 2023 calendar. If your workweek starts on Monday, a new week and month collided once this year; on May 1st. These small facts are a lot of fun for a goal and time nerd like me!

Are you ready? Your fresh start awaits.

Can you meet me halfway?

Bardees, Leave a comment

If your workweek starts on a Monday at 5 am, can you guess the mid-week point? 

According to Laura Vanderkam, or with a bit of calculation, your mid-week point is Thursday 5 pm. Were you right?

If your workweek starts on a Sunday at 5 am like me, then Wednesday, which happens to be the day I am writing this post, is the middle of the week.  

Many of us get it wrong because we think the week is over when the workweek ends and the weekend starts. 

Why am I telling you this? 

Because it is such a relief!

We can’t get everything we care about done in 24 hours. We roughly spend 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, 1 hour eating, 2 hours driving, 1-2 hours on screens, and 2 hours taking care of home and family. So, that leaves only 1 hour to read, journal, connect with loved ones and work on a meaningful personal project. 

But, when you remember you still have half of the week ahead of you, you feel hopeful that you can create more time for these activities if you plan with a weekly perspective of 168 hours instead of the limited 24 hours. For example, you can exercise, read or visit your parents on weekends instead of feeling guilty you have not done any of these things during the workweek. 

Does not this give you a sense of renewed determination? 

I believe that creating weekly and even monthly plans is an act of genuine self-care, and I encourage you to try it.

You got this!

P.S. Laura is releasing a new book in October, and I am sure I will love it as much as I loved her previous ones.  

Can you meet me halfway?

Do you Believe in Writing in Seasons?

Bardees, , , Leave a comment

Remember when I said I would write four days a week this year?

That has not happened since April, during the holy month of Ramadan specifically, when working hours changed for a month. Then we had a family trip then I focused on using the writing time I had to prepare for my first public habits workshop. Then summer happened. 

 In summer, I stayed up late to spend time with my family member visiting from abroad. I traveled. I went to parties and weddings. This summer was a lot similar to pre-covid times; only my kids got bigger and were not going to daycare/summer camp every morning. This time, they stayed with their grandparents to play with their cousins. So, I did not have to wake up until the last minute possible while I would still make it to work on time. That meant I arrived past my writing time. So I did not write in the summer. 

What gave me so much comfort is that I learned that I can write in seasons and still be a writer. Cheryl Strayed shared this in her fantastic interview on Marie Forleo’s podcast. She mentioned she was a binge writer and shared a story of a Dear Sugar questioner, her famous advice column, who said she could only write once a month when she sends her kids to her mother’s house. Cheryl told her she was still a writer even if she wrote once a month. This answer relieved Marie Forleo, who, like me, admires Seth Godin and his advice that encourages writing daily. Seth and Rohan were, in fact, the main reasons I attempted to write daily last year. 

Lucky me, it’s September again, and schools have been back for almost a week, so I am arriving early to the office. My writing context is back. 

During summer, while the writing space remained the same, the writing time and, with it, the writing habit disappeared. This personal proof aligns with everything I read about habits; the importance of context for keeping them. 

I am so glad I am back.

I recommend you check that interview.

Here is my favorite part:

“You know, there were many times for 3 months in a row I wrote every day. But there are also many times for 3 months in a row I didn’t write a word. And what I’ve found is when, like, I make an appointment with myself and I don’t look at each day. I look at the calendar ahead. And it’s been really helpful for me actually also to decide when not to write, because I can look sometimes at my calendar and say, “I’m gonna be really busy for the next month,” or, “I just gave birth to a child,” or, you know, I have to work really hard at this other project because that’s important to me too. And then I just put the writing aside and know that I’m not going to feel bad about it, I’m not gonna get into some sort of shame loop about I haven’t written. I tell myself you’re not going to write now and then you’re going to write then. And then what I do is I make good on that promise. That’s the other piece of it. This isn’t about being, you know, using lazy excuses. It’s not using this methodology in order to not write. It’s actually the opposite. It’s saying this is when I work best or when I can work best.

….One of the most moving comments I got after one of my talks is just during the Q&A afterwards. Somebody had asked me what my writing process was and I said about this binge writing: I don’t write every day and sometimes I write once a month. And this woman came up to me afterwards and she was crying, and she said, “Thank you so much.” She said, “I have always felt like I wasn’t a writer. I’m a single mom, I have 4 kids, and I can write once a month, the day my mom takes my kids. And I think you’re the first person who told me that I can still say that I’m a writer even though I only write once a month.” And I just grabbed her and I was like, “You are absolutely a writer. Because if you write once a month, guess what happens by the end of that year? You’ve written 12 days. And I know you can do a lot of beauty in 12 days. Because I’ve done it too.”

How to Become a Writer, According to Cheryl Strayed

Wow.

Do you Believe in Writing in Seasons?

How to not let a new idea ruin your good-enough old ideas

Bardees, , Leave a comment

Last month I decided to try batching in recording two to three episodes at once for my podcast in one sitting, especially since the topics were ready due to consistently writing on this blog. Afterward, I thought, I could try batching sessions for editing. 

When it comes to creating podcasts, Michael Hyatt always advocates batching : 

“Batch processing is the grouping of similar tasks that require similar resources in order to streamline their completion.”

Amy Porterfield agrees, John Lee Dumas swears by it in his interview with Hala Taha, and my consistent content creator friend swears by batching for doing reels. That is why I was so excited to try it.

One month later, however, I created zero podcast episodes instead of the usual target of two. This mishap was a juicy topic in the recent weekly review call with my incredible accountability partner. When she checked- in with me about the reason, my answer-read “excuse”- was: “I did not have enough time for a long recording session.” So, she shared this gem of advice with me: 

“You don’t need to implement a good idea right when you hear about it or think of it or like it.”

She added, “Your normal podcast process worked well enough, and now because you want to try this new “better” process, you halted your good enough process and ended up with nothing to show for it”. 

Aha moment, yes? 

I thanked her so much for turning on the lights for me one more time. I did not realize it was that all-or-nothing mentality again, stopping me from my best work. Therefore, I decided I will try batching soon enough by properly scheduling it and hopefully live the ease it promises of sharing more consistent podcast content. Meanwhile, I will keep my existing process of working on one episode from start to finish.

So there you go; if you get a great idea, write it down and put a date to try it in your reminders app to ensure you wouldn’t forget about it like you are so afraid to. But, don’t stop your good-enough ideas or processes (in my case) until you first try the better idea! Waiting to try a new tool or software or an app or a process for your creative work could turn into a trap for not shipping it to the world. 

I fell for it, but now I know better. You do too.

How to not let a new idea ruin your good-enough old ideas

How to Troubleshoot a Positive Behavior into Becoming a Habit?

BardeesLeave a comment

When I was doing my monthly review for March to prepare for the new month and the new quarter, I noticed that I had dropped the habit of my 5-minute morning stretching. Dropping a habit that I care about usually means that I need to start up my habit troubleshooting mode. I enjoy this mode a lot with all the knowledge and experience I got from studying the topic of habits and giving several training workshops on it.

First, I asked myself what changed in March? 

The answer was the steps of my morning routine; 

My previous routine was:

  • Skincare routine.
  • Brewing coffee while doing the 5-minute stretching.
  • Meditating for 15 minutes.
  • Then, having my coffee and doing the rest of my routine such s journaling and so on.

In March, however, I decided to start a round of a few weeks of morning pages, a particular type of stream of consciousness journaling created by Julia Cameron. It entails writing three A4 pages as soon as we wake up and takes about 45 minutes. 

My March routine was: 

  • Brew coffee while doing my skincare routine.
  • Write my morning pages while having coffee.
  • Then meditate and do the rest of my routine.

Only at the end of my routine, when I want to check off my morning habits, do I notice that I had skipped the 5-minute morning stretching. 

So what happened here?

In my previous routine, brewing coffee was a prompt for stretching and meditating. But how come I still kept my meditation habit after the prompt changed but not workouts? The critical difference is that meditation has already become a habit after nearly two years of on and off practice. The proof is that I don’t even think about doing it or not. On the other hand, working out has not become a habit yet, because I still debate doing it in my mind, totally ignore it, or even forget it until it’s time to check off the habit tracker.

Why are morning workouts not a habit yet? 

Although I made exercising very easy last year by applying the 2-minute rule according to Atomic habits, and it helped me grow some visible, albeit shy, muscles on my bony arms, the behavior disappeared at the slightest change in my routine because it is not clear enough. I sometimes do pushups and setups; other times, burpees and squats, you get the picture, so I do not have a fixed pre-decided routine that I follow. 

Thanks to an insight I received from a friend facing the same problem, I figured this out. My friend decided to select a video and follow it every morning; no thinking or even counting is needed. I can do the same or print out the workout steps I’d like to follow, like 10 pushups, 10 burpees, 10 squats, etc. However, I am leaning into videos because they give me the company I need in those quiet and sleepy morning hours. All I need is to decide on the video once and then keep going. That’s it. 

In addition to making the habit clear with a video to follow, I can use the habit stacking strategy to ensure I commit to working out by placing it between two strong habits. Accordingly, on the days when I would like to write morning pages, my routine will be:

After I do my morning pages, I will work out for 5 minutes with a video,

After I work out for five minutes, I will meditate.

This sounds like a plan I’d like to follow, and like many other posts in this blog, it is about experimentation and tweaking my routine to do the things that matter most to me. I will keep you updated on how it turns out.

What about you? 

How can you tweak your routine to achieve the results you want?

How to Troubleshoot a Positive Behavior into Becoming a Habit?

Your Kids Should NOT Listen to You, Here is Why

Bardees, , Leave a comment

I have taken a six-week course with my favorite parenting coach and author, Susan Stiffelman called Parenting Without Power Struggles.

One of the tools she reminded us to use is the turnarounds, which is part of the beautiful exercises created by Byron Katie in her books and website thework.com.

Using the turnarounds as parents and caregivers means that we need to notice the assumptions we have about our kids and then turn them around by living on their planet for a little while.

For example, if we say: “My kids should listen to me the first time I call them to get ready for bed” instead, we say: “My kids shouldn’t listen to me the first time I call them to get ready for bed” and then we add justifications why this turnaround makes sense; why, in their planet, they are right.  

Here are some great reasons why the turnaround is also true:

  • They shouldn’t listen because playing is more fun than sleeping.
  • They should not listen because they do not like to sleep while adults are still awake.
  • They shouldn’t listen because they want to spend more time with us.
  • They should not listen because their prefrontal cortex, responsible for their logical reasoning, is still developing, and it will continue to do so until their early twenties. They can’t easily associate lesser sleep with their overall wellbeing and mood the next day. 
  • They should not listen because they only live in the now and don’t see how sleeping late is a problem.
  • They should not listen because they still see it daylight outside, especially with daylight saving, so it does not make sense for them to sleep before nightfall. 

Do you see how our expectations and the shoulds we impose on our kids could make us all miserable?

If only we pause and remember why they are also right to feel what they feel and not do what we say, right away, we will be a little more patient with them and take time to acknowledge their disappointment for stopping their fun activities. We will tell them we know it’s hard to stop, listen to them as they try to negotiate their way out, notice as they express their angry resistance, and finally reach acceptance. 

Our job as parents is to let go of our expectations of how our kids should respond to our requests by anticipating their reactions and be ready for their no and non-cooperation, even taking it into account time-wise before transitions. 

I also got beneficial advice from a workshop I took with the fabulous mothers’ coach and friend Muna Shakour, who said, “Just accept the fact that you will keep reminding them to brush their teeth, possibly until they are ten years old.” “Embracing this reality”, she advised, “will remove frustration from our constant evening reminders”.

Being ready for kids to behave as kids by using the turnarounds technique is terrific and releases you from the grip of an ideal picture you are holding onto that could cause damage to your precious relationship.

What turnarounds could you apply about a belief you have? 

Think of your situation and the should you believe about it, turn the should around by negating it, then make a list of reasons the turnaround makes sense.

Thank me and my teachers later.

Your Kids Should NOT Listen to You, Here is Why

Don’t Wake Up Early: Advice for 5 AM Club Wannabees

Bardees, , , Leave a comment

Waking up at 5 AM since late 2016 is the keystone habit that has turned my life around. Waking up early, however, is not for everybody. I meet many people who complain about not being able to wake up early, and after a bit of probing, I discover that one or more of the behaviors below applies to them. 

If you still have not conquered the waking up early habit yet, you might realize the reason now.

  1. You go out almost every night and do not come home before 11 PM.
  2. You like to keep your options open for nights out with your partner or friends, and you pride yourself on being the first to say yes if someone makes plans on the same day.
  3. You like to spend an hour or two every night on your phone scrolling social media or binging on Netflix.
  4. You hate your day job and believe that nighttime is the only time to chill, so you sleep late or enjoy what the Japanese call bedtime revenge.
  5. You don’t have a big enough why to get you out of bed while it’s still dark outside. You don’t have something to look forward to doing in the morning. 
  6. You have plenty of time for self-care habits such as meditation, journaling, and reading during the day, so you don’t need the early hours to do that. 
  7. You are organized and don’t feel rushed in the morning; you usually arrive to work ready to kill it. 

If the above applies to you, stop kidding yourself by saying I wish I woke up earlier. You really don’t want to. Life, as it is now, is working out fine for you. You don’t wake up early by choice. Your daily actions reveal your priorities. There is nothing wrong with waking up at the time that suits your lifestyle. Embrace your reality.

However, if you want to get up earlier and think it’s the best time to give attention to yourself first before giving it to your world, to reflect, to move, to enjoy the quiet, and plan the day, then, could you tell me which of the above behaviors is blocking you? 

Defining the problem is the first step to solving it.

Check my 14 tips to wake up earlier here.

Don’t Wake Up Early: Advice for 5 AM Club Wannabees