Kitchen Magnet Wisdom

by Skip Cohen

It's not really written on a magnet, but it's in the category.  It's a contemporary illustration framed on the wall in our kitchen.

"Everything changed the day he figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in his life."

Think about that statement for just a second and now think about everything you're hoping to accomplish next week.  I woke up at 4:30 this morning thinking about everything I want to do today and was already worrying about whether or not I had enough time to get it all done!  Time isn't our enemy, we are.  We spend so much time worrying about things we need to get done that we lose sight of the fun of the process.

We live in a world of deadlines.  The clock is always ticking - and I actually have an old analog clock in my office and I hear it ticking all day long, reminding me that I'm running out of time in the race to the finish line!  Finish line of what? My self-imposed pressure cooker to get everything done - but I'm the one creating the challenges.

The truth is, like many of you, I have a lot I want to do today.  The truth also is, there's time to get it all done and whatever I don't get done is still going to be there tomorrow.  My good buddy, Julieanne Kost at Adobe has a great line when somebody asks her to take on a project.  If her plate's full the response is simply, "Sorry, I'm out of bandwidth!"

So, I'm going to just kick back and enjoy this weekend. On Monday morning I'm going to focus on the most important things first.  Then I'm moving to the things I just love doing.  We all know how to focus our cameras, but why is it so hard to focus on projects and our own lives!  Time to go read that illustration one more time...

"Everything changed the day he figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in his life."

© koya979 - Fotolia.com

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