Archive for April 2009

What my love-hate relationship with gardening is teaching me about time (or trying to)

I belong to a community garden, and when I joined four years ago, I thought, what a glorious escape this will be for a city-dweller. It hasn’t turned out that way. I expected to love gardening. It’s one of America’s top-ten hobbies! My mom and my stepmom have beautiful gardens. My community-garden neighbors have lush and […]

When other people’s bad habits get in your way

When I teach classic time management in corporate settings, a question that comes up a lot is, “How can I get other people to manage their time better, so that I can manage my time better?” (Sometimes it’s phrased as, “How can I make the people I work with stop acting like jerks?”) My coaching […]

Writing doesn’t have to hurt

As a longtime writer who finds the process excruciating much of the time, I’m always on the lookout for ways to make writing less of a battle. (So far, I’m finding blogging to be more engaging and less painful than writing for others for pay, but I still need strategies to manage longstanding habits of […]

Impatience, meditation and page loading

One of the differences that daily meditation has made in my life is that I’m more patient. Am I the soul of patience? Nope. But I’m more patient than I used to be. I don’t finish other people’s sentences as often. (I still do it, but not as often.) I interrupt people less. (Or, later […]

The pre-deadline that worked

TurboTax sent around a catchy press release today naming San Francisco the “Most Tax Procrastinating City in America.” We file our online tax returns at the last possible minute—moments later than Houston, New York and Chicago. It could be fun to speculate about the reasons—we’re so wired we can afford to be lackadaisical? We’re such […]