What a pastor said about time management

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I was mesmerized by this sentence that a Lutheran pastor named Amy shared with Cal Newport, “Time management is a core spiritual practice.” It deeply resonated with me and my increasing interest in time management.

Planning our days helps us appreciate how finite time is. Practicing digital minimalism helps use our time and attention better. When we plan our day we can be present with whatever task we have; it’s the task we planned to do and this is the time allocated for it and that’s how our monkey brain can quiet down.

Then, we can experience the dimension of presence and flow in our work.

It also reminded me of what Nir Eyal said, “Time management is pain management”. Can you stay with your uncomfortable feelings long enough without initiating distraction?

What a pastor said about time management

Radio Crush Encore

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It was such a beautiful morning.

I wanted to request a song on the radio for a music artist I love, this rainy morning just begged for it. To my utter surprise, the next song they played was by him. I turned up the volume, enjoyed the song and then sent the radio station a voice note to thank them, because that’s how radio stations engage with listeners these days, voice notes instead of phone calls. I thanked them because listening to songs you love on the radio has its magic. Even if we can simply play them on YouTube or a music app. It does not feel the same. Plus I love this radio station, for many reasons, like I was once a guest in this morning show.

I admit that I also love the customized music mixes on YouTube, Anghami and Spotify. The algorithms have gotten so good that I feel like yelling at some point while listening, “How did they know?!”. That’s magic right there that can’t be denied. Still, maybe I’m old school, but I think nothing beats the rush you feel when you hear your favorite song on the radio.

Songs on the radio are like little signs from the universe. They say: “You are aligned. Keep going”.

Anybody feels the same?


Radio Crush Encore

No highlights in your week?

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What were the highlights of your week? If nothing was your first answer, think again. 

I am sure you made some kind of progress, received an insight or kindness from others, or were kind to others who needed it.

Maybe you were more patient than usual or smiled to strangers or shared something powerful with your friends.

Maybe you saved money or called someone or visited someone sick.

Perhaps you spent good time with your family, or homework time was easy for a change, or your kids(s) slept at 7pm or pulled an all-nighter for the first time (yeey!) ?

I hope you did well in your exams or studied hard for them.

I guess you might have had an exceptional meal or two? Or someone cooked for you?

It’s possible you got sick, and you can’t really remember anything about last week, but you really appreciate your health more, and will make sure your body would get the rest and nourishment it needs from now on. 

There is a lot to be grateful for, the key is to notice those moments right when they happen, which will double their positive impact. You feel good when you become aware of them AND when you reflect on them.

Note: I shared this first in my newsletter The Sunday Spark, see archive and subscribe here

No highlights in your week?

Guilt & Light

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I skimmed through my copy of A Course in Miracles this morning hoping to find a relief of the heaviness I was feeling.

I noticed my recently highlighted passages in chapters 12, 13, and 14 and realized that the feeling was guilt. I brought yesterday’s events to today and couldn’t forgive myself for how I behaved with other people in my life. I complained, I was aggressive and I even gossiped. But A Course in Miracles says God always sees us as innocent and when we hold on to our guilt we cannot see our light. We are not our mistakes, although that does not mean we don’t own them or try to rectify them. We take action while having the conviction that our mistakes do not diminish our worthiness of love.

An affirmation that I keep repeating is: “The more I love myself tenderly, the more love I have to give to others & feel God inside me”. My guilt made me harsh on myself and deemed me unworthy of love from myself or from others. In this state, even If I receive kindness or praise, I brush it off. I don’t believe it, because I don’t even like myself at the moment. And what happens next? Becoming even meaner to others. What a vicious cycle.

Beware of such lies that your ego would have you believe with the purpose of separating you from the feeling of oneness with your fellow humans. Love yourself up and show it the tenderness it needs so that you can be loving to others. Otherwise, you will project your self-hatred outwards. You will see in others only the darkness that you think is inside you. Your belief in guilt obscures your light and your perception becomes clouded with judgment.

Remember my friend, only when you truly believe that nothing can touch your light that you can begin to see light in others.

Guilt & Light

Don’t Hoard The Chips

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I enjoyed the new short LinkedIn course that Seth Godin created about decision-making where he approached the concept of sunk costs in a whole new way. It’s a concept I first learned from him in this blog post and his signature altMBA course which I took in 2019.

This time, Seth Godin focused on the idea of chips, the ones we earned by working hard or paying a lot of our money or/and time. An example could be the certificate we worked hard to achieve and paid so much for. We look for a job that matches the certificate we earned (the chip). If the job that this certificate provides for me turns out horrible or makes me miserable, I don’t make a decision about leaving it because I am hoarding the chips I earned. The chips weigh me down from making a new decision. A good decision about my happiness. Although I have new information: “I am miserable doing this job”, I still choose not to make a decision based on the past price I paid to get here. Which is irrelevant. It’s already a sunk cost. Seth calls it a gift from your past self to your current self that you don’t need to accept. You can simply say no, thank you.

Make your decisions based on the information you have now and the logical consequences that would follow. The longer you hold on to something that does not serve you, the more you will get attached emotionally to the chips, to the identity, to the status. Along the way, you hoard more chips that will stop you from embarking on new paths and new decisions.

Check the course out. You have 24Hrs to preview it for free.

Don’t Hoard The Chips

The 101 to Personal Budgeting

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How many of us really know what goes on with our money? For some people, our money is like an airplane black box. It’s a just a mystery to us. If we were to live successful lives we need to work on our finances and the first step in this journey is learning how to create a budget.
Yesterday I hosted a Live session with the super money coach Christeen Haddadin for the second time, where she shared with us a step-by-step guide to budgeting.

Highlights from the Live:

  1. We need to change our mindset about having a personal budget, budgets will free us up, not limit us. They will put us in charge of our money instead of having our money run itself, which means we would run out of it needlessly.
  2. Creating a budget is setting jobs for every Dinar we make. These jobs will help us cover our expenses on nonnegotiable needs, and also differentiate them from wants that we could do without.
  3. We start a budget exercise by adding up our annual income including bonuses, and any planned returns we expect. In case it’s a non-fixed income, we look at last year and take 2 scenarios, the average monthly income and a more conservative one based on the income worst 3 months of that year.
  4. We lay out our fixed monthly expenses like rent, car fuel, groceries, phone bill.
  5. We lay out our quarterly/semiannual and annual expenses such as car license & insurance, family birthdays, tax, life insurance and so on, and let’s call these the annual payments
  6. We save money every month to the above account of annual payments, so we would not be shocked when it’s our daughter’s birthday again, and we need to spend money on a little party for her. Example if we have car insurance of 500$ due in June we need to save 100$ every month from Jan-May to the annual payments account in order to be ready to seamlessly do the payment in June.
  7. It takes time to build an emergency fund, and it’s up to us to decide how many months it should cover, 3, 6 or even 12 months. It depends on the stability of our income, the less stable, the higher the emergency fund needs to be.
  8. We also talked about bad debt and good debt, where good debt is what you pay for assets like mortgage or land. Bad debt is what you pay for consumer loans like car loan or credit card interest rate. We need to check online debt calculator to see how much interest we are truly paying and look into increasing our monthly payments to reduce the interest amount that we are paying.
  9. Last tip we discussed was about engaging with our money on a daily basis, especially since most of us are not using it in cash, by logging in to our bank applications and checking the status of our accounts.
The 101 to Personal Budgeting

Did you make a promise?

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Last Sunday I did not go Live on Instagram as I promised in my newsletter. I said I would go live every Sunday of September and I went on Live for 2 Sundays in a row, however, the third Sunday did not work out because of my lack of coordination with my planned guest. I also admit that I wanted to visit my parents that Sunday evening because I couldn’t do it over the weekend as usual. So, I simply did not do a Live. I did not apologize for it in my newsletter. I did not apologize for it in an Instagram story. I thought to myself “people are busy already, it’s not like they are waiting for it, I only mentioned it in my newsletter 2 weeks ago, oh and at the end of the 2nd live too when my guest and I said we’d continue the subject the week after…”.

Maybe it is true. Maybe people were actually too busy to notice I did not show up Live as promised. But, I knew. I made a promise. I should have honored that promise, or at least given an explanation of why it wouldn’t work out. I could have checked with my guest and found out she wouldn’t be able to make it early enough to be able to invite another guest or prepare a topic to talk about on my own.

Here is my late apology. I will show up on the 4th Sunday as promised.

This is your gentle reminder to work hard at keeping your promises, too.

Your word is your promise.

Did you make a promise?

Redefine your obsession

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I woke up last night and couldn’t get back to sleep, so my brain decided to get active solving a current problem for me; what to wear to the employees awards event at work. I started mentally scanning my clothes to figure out just the right outfit that looks special enough to wear as the event MC and also comfortable enough for dancing, without the need to get something new. I nominated 2 outfits and checked with my friend today, who in turn helped me make the cut.

I am telling you this story because I noticed that I have been lately obsessing about a relationship in my life. Whenever there is an idle moment in the day, I start thinking about what they said and what I said, and this started to annoy me. The outfit story, however, made me finally realize that it’s simply not an obsession. My brain believes this relationship is a problem to solve. It keeps running scripts and what-if and if-only scenarios to help me reach peace about it.

I felt relief when I got this. It’s clear to me now. I have two choices; I either start a difficult conversation with the other party in the relationship or accept the fact that mistakes happened and things changed, maybe forever. I need to decide how important this relationship is to me and act accordingly.

Meanwhile, I can pray on it and put my mind to peace. It’s a problem at a whole another plane. The spiritual plane. Thinking it over will not make it disappear.

Redefine your obsession

Empathy Stretch

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Last Sales Talk Tuesday, I shared with the team the beautiful word Sonder, which I first heard about from my mentor Seth Godin. Connecting with people is easier when we understand Sonder.

This definition by the dictionary of obscure sorrows is my favorite:
Sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

It perfectly aligns with a beautiful compassion exercise I learned from the amazing teacher Pema Chodron called Just like Me which the spiritual teacher Ram Dass explains below so eloquently:

  • This person has a body and a mind, just like me.
  • This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.
  • This person has experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me.
  • This person has at some time been sad, disappointed, angry, or hurt, just like me.
  • This person has felt unworthy or inadequate, just like me.
  • This person worries and is frightened sometimes, just like me.
  • This person will die, just like me.
  • This person has longed for friendship, just like me.
  • This person is learning about life, just like me.
  • This person wants to be caring and kind to others, just like me.
  • This person wants to be content with what life has given them, just like me.
  • This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.
  • This person wishes to be safe and healthy, just like me.
  • This person wishes to be happy, just like me.
  • This person wishes to be loved, just like me.

Now, allow wishes for well-being to arise:

  • I wish this person to have the strength, resources, and social support they need to navigate the difficulties in life with ease.
  • I wish this person to be free from pain and suffering.
  • I wish this person to be peaceful and happy.
  • I wish this person to be loved . . . because this person is a fellow human being, just like me.

So powerful.

Empathy Stretch

Digital Wish List

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This could be a wish list or simply a list of digital nagging tasks that I’m dumping here, maybe to say you are not alone thinking about them, or to get my affairs in order in power hour(s) as Gretchen Rubin says.

  1. Spend time reading and enjoying all my email newsletters with no guilt
  2. Unsubscribe from content I don’t read or enjoy or open.
  3. Clean up my following lists on Instagram and Twitter
  4. Upload all my mobile photos and fix that recent memory issue in my phone.
  5. Go through all items in my downloads folder and order them properly
  6. Go through documents in my OneDrive and clear it up.
  7. Read all my Kindle books and listen to all my audible books, or simply make peace with the idea that I will never read some of these books after all, as long as I am always interested in new books.
  8. GTD old tasks on my favorite to-do app Any.do, delete irrelevant tasks, and really decide the next action for each task that I decide to keep.

I found that most of these tasks can’t be done on phone. Unless apps are properly locked, we can get easily distracted and forget the original task we started. Moreover, no matter the phone model, phone screens are too small for focus. That’s why we rarely send important emails on phones.

For these tasks to happen, I need to dedicate some time for them. Maybe none of them will directly move my goals forward, I even could be using them as means of productive procrastination on my most meaningful goals.

On the other hand, getting through them would enhance my feeling of clarity, I will have easier and more searchable digital life, in addition to making sure that the important is distinctly saved from memory fading or trash.

Digital Wish List