This is a story about how planning and tracking your time will give you more control and power. Simple though it is, planning and tracking gives you insight into this grand adventure we’re all doing: L I F E. Knowing how you spend time gives you an honest view of what your life is actually like in the units by which we measure each day: minutes and hours. Time tracking and its best friend, time planning, let you know yourself and your life more intimately.

They give you the dose of realism you might need to make big changes. They give you the cumulative data you might need to advocate for yourself.

They say time is our most precious commodity. And unlike money, it’s nonrenewable. Too often we find ourselves wondering where time went. How did it get to be five o’clock with so many tasks left to do? Time tracking will tell you if it’s because you overestimated how many tasks fit in eight hours, or spent two hours puttering around on Facebook (perhaps a combination of both!). Time tracking gives you knowledge. And knowledge is power.

It only takes 30 minutes to plan

Last Friday I finally did something I’d meant to do for ages: I spent thirty minutes planning the following week.

If your eyes just glazed over in boredom, bear with me. You know you’re supposed to plan in advance. You’ve read the science about decision fatigue. You know that you will feel better and get more done if you hit your desk on Monday morning with the day already planned. You don’t have to spend any time deciding where to start. You did that last Friday.

In addition to this efficient and feel-good-hack practice, week planning gives the benefit of a much needed reality check. Let’s say you have the idea that next week you’ll write two articles, serve seven clients, keep up with emails, listen to a podcast, and read up on your industry. Think again. Planning forced me to *actually* select times when I would get to all my tasks, which quickly led me to the realization that there weren’t enough hours to write those articles AND listen to the podcast AND read industry news. I had to prioritize. What happened as a result? I felt less behind! Instead of being overly ambitious about what I’d achieve in a day, I was realistically ambitious. Instead of constantly feeling behind, I felt like I was doing enough.

Meet the guru of time tracking

However, as that first planned week wore on, I learned that I was still overly ambitious. What made that obvious? One of my favorite time tricks in the book: time tracking.

I started time tracking in 2013, after meeting Laura Vanderkam at a conference. Laura is the empress of time tracking. She’s written the books and done the studies and offers tremendous insight into the lies we tell ourselves about time – and how we can transform our relationship with time into an honest, if not loving, partnership. How we remember or feel about time is notoriously unreliable, but numbers can’t lie. When the amount of time you spend sleeping or exercising is neatly tallied on a spreadsheet, you have to reckon with reality.

Laura’s system is simple: she recommends using a spreadsheet to track how you spend your time, with each cell counting for thirty minutes. I use this system to plan AND track. When I was allotting time for my Monday tasks on that Friday afternoon, I was filling out cells on my spreadsheet. That’s the planning part. When the day came and things don’t go according to plan, I refilled the cells to reflect how I actually spent my time. I use color coding for planning and tracking, for a quick visual overview of what I’m doing and when. The colors also make me happy:

How does this help?

Why would you track your time? If you work for a salary, start noting how long each of your responsibilities takes you. You may be surprised to find that some low-impact tasks take a lot of time, whereas tasks with high ROI go quickly. You may find that unnecessary meetings take up a quarter of your working hours each week. This information gives you the knowledge and data you need to go to your boss and suggest some changes. Companies don’t want to waste your time. If time tracking shows that you could be a great contribution by replacing X task with Y task, that’s good for you and the company! I would be impressed if an employee said, “I’ve been tracking how long it takes me to find, comment on, and save Pins. I think it would be more effective to use half of that time pinning unique content to community boards.” Hell yes! That is valuable feedback and insight, and shows how much my employee wants to move my company forward.

If you work for yourself, the benefits are equally compelling. If you sell your time by the hour, time tracking is an obvious way to monitor how much you’re working for each client and how much you’re working for yourself. Even if you sell products or packaged services, time tracking gives you insight into how effective those packages are products are. Your spreadsheet tells you if you’re spending twice as many hours on one client as another, for the same package price. It tells you how long it took to develop and write the sales page for that product, compared to your other products. I also track how long each type of task takes for my clients. This data lets me estimate how long different marketing efforts take, which helps my clients budget. It also lets me measure the ROI of different tasks. If it takes three hours a month to write a marketing email, and the open rate is only six percent, well, something needs to change.

Knowledge is power

We are ambitious people. We have Big Audacious Goals and many things we want to do. Yet the daily grind can distract us from making progress on those goals. Weeks pass in a blur of working, relaxing, and socializing, and unless we intentionally make time for our goals, they don’t happen. This is where planning and tracking are especially powerful: holding you accountable for the things YOU want to do. Laura Vanderkam often emphasizes the importance of planning your priorities first. If it’s important to you to get more cardio or write a book, plan that for Monday morning – not for Friday night. Then track how long it takes you, and watch those numbers grow over time. There’s nothing like seeing the tangible evidence of progress toward your goals in little numbers on a spreadsheet.

Planning and tracking are most gratifying when they show me that I’m doing what I need to do and what I want to do. One of the greatest benefits of being an entrepreneur is having flexibility to decide where I spend time. The knowledge that comes from planning and tracking gives me power: power to make changes if the way I’m spending time doesn’t align with my goals or values (business-related or otherwise). For example, this winter I knew I wanted to get as much sunshine as possible. So I schedule daily walks on my spreadsheet around noon, and I treat them with the same respect I treat a client meeting. If I didn’t plan those walks, they wouldn’t always happen. If I didn’t track them, I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing how many hours I spent outside each week or feel the radiant energy of that burning ball of gas in our sky.  

(Image by Glen Carstens-Peters)

What’s one of your goals? How could time planning and tracking help you achieve it? Share in the comments!

The post Planning and Time Tracking For More Power and More Sunshine appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

“I have a question about your post-grad experience: Did you ever feel frustrated and worried you’d never achieve your future goals? How did you deal with that while you were trying to establish yourself as an adult out of school?

Do you ever feel frustrated or worried you’ll never achieve your future goals?

Yes. It would be too much to say that I’m frustrated and worried all the time, but I worry a lot.

Although I have a lot of friends doing wildly different things with their lives, one common thread I notice in our conversations is the persistent weight of anxiety. What are we so worried about? Or is anxiety just part of being an adult? I recently talked about this with a friend: why don’t we feel like we’re doing enough? Why do we feel like there should be… more? Is there such thing as being content? Is it okay to be “good enough” at something, instead of super amazing at it?

You’re not the only millennial worrying

It turns out that high levels of anxiety are common among millennials. The combination of our propped up self-esteem + an increasingly competitive economy + the ability to compare ourselves to every other millennial on the Internet has led to dauntingly high expectations of life. “Experts agree that the high hopes and heightened ambition of the millennial generation have led many of us to despair, depression, high anxiety, and a wide gulf of meaning in our personal lives,” notes Katherine Schreiber in Expectation Hangover: The Real Reason Millennials Are Disappointed With Life. “Failing to land your dream job, getting rejected from your top choice school, or approaching your 30th birthday with no prospect of knot tying in sight can lead to these let-downs… [b]ut so can checking off all of the above only to feel meh—like something’s still missing.” Does this resonate with you? We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Yikes.

As Molly Sprayregen puts it in The Brain on 23, “we zone out in grad school classrooms or type away in junior offices or teach English in Rwanda, all the while wondering if we are supposed to be somewhere else…. We have few obligations, yet we are always stressed, wondering if life will ever be more certain.” Things were more clear in school, when the next step was fed to us (high school! college!) and we received grades for completed assignments. Learning to run a career is very different. There’s no external structure and no syllabus, and there seem to be a lot of people our age doing much better at it than we are.

Molly again: “when a friend does something as simple as cooking a food more complex than pasta, we applaud her, yet we berate ourselves for not yet having a corner office or a bestselling memoir or a thriving startup.” We have very high expectations of ourselves and our futures. Yet when it comes to doing those things, we realize how much time, energy, and money they take. It’s easy to worry that we’ll never write that novel, start that company, or travel to that country because we have to work our jobs and cook quinoa and get enough sleep. It’s easy to worry that we’re not doing the right things, and that we’re squandering our precious youth working long hours instead of building the next Pokemon Go. Double yikes.

Are you suggesting I lower my expectations?

No. I don’t think having “high hopes and heightened ambitions” is the problem. It’s exhilarating to create lofty goals and work towards achieving them! We have unprecedented access to knowledge, people, and resources – it is an exciting time to be alive. But these endless possibilities can lead to option paralysis. So what do we do? We learn and practice how to manage our expectations better.

Ways to deal with worry and woe

Thankfully, there are many things we can do besides Netflixing and drinking to manage our anxiety.

• Talk to people. Whether peers (solidarity and commiseration) or parents (perspective and comfort), it helps to talk. Sometimes conversations with peers become an echo chamber (aaaahhh we’re all freaking out!) but it helps to know you’re not alone.
• Write. If you have a billion awesome ideas but not a billion hours, write down your ideas. Get them out of your head. Put them on a physical or digital “someday, maybe” list so your brain knows you’re keeping track of them. I use 2Do to keep track of my ideas.
• Plan. If it’s important to achieve goals methodically, plan them. I love the way my friend Lauren does it.
• Therapy. Seeing a therapist has really helped me manage anxiety. There are professionals out there who are anxiety management experts.
• Meditation. I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW will everyone please shut up about meditation? That was my attitude until about a month ago, when I downloaded the app Insight Timer and started listening to guided meditations. They’ve really helped me be less anxious, more compassionate, and more grateful for the things that are going well in my life.
• Help others. The science is in that shows why helping others makes us feel good. A dose of altruism can go a long way to giving us perspective and meaning.

Do you want to do all the things?

My dad once asked, “why do you want to do all these things? Do you think they will make you happy?” It’s a good question. A lot of times humans think, “I’ll be happy once I achieve X,” and that’s a backwards way to go about it. But your answer might be, “I want to do these things because they sound awesome!” Our ideas are precious. They are our unique contribution to the world. How can we choose some and forsake others when we love them all?

Our resources are limited. Time and energy must be budgeted. We do ourselves a service when we view our ideas with curiosity rather than attachment. Not all of our ideas are good ideas, and we must decide which ones deserve our attention and energy, right now. The others can wait. As noted above, keep them in a notebook or spreadsheet so that your brain knows they’ve been captured, then put them on the back burner. We won’t do all of them, and that’s not failure: in fact, saying no is an important part of success.

You have your whole life to do stuff

When I graduated from university, I thought I had to do everything interesting before turning 30/becoming a parent. That meant moving to Latin America (an idea I have since let go), traveling to multiple countries, starting a business, making six figures, writing books, living alone, living with roommates, getting married, and more. It was stressful.

Thankfully, my friend Julie set me straight. She had her first child in high school, and went on to complete college, graduate school, and law school while parenting her daughter. It wasn’t until many years later that her husband joined the Foreign Service and they started living internationally. While visiting Julie and co. in Armenia, Julie pointed to an elderly couple at the U.S. base where we were celebrating the 4th of July. “See that couple?” she said. “They waited until they retired to join the Peace Corps. You don’t have to stop doing cool things just because you’re old, or because you have kids, and you don’t have to do everything cool before then, either!” What a relief to hear.

Jennifer, thank you for reaching out and asking if I feel frustrated or worried about achieving future goals. The answer is yes. A lot of us struggle with frustration and worry, and are learning to manage our expectations. You’re not alone on this bus.

(Image by William Iven)

The post The Millennial’s Future: Managing Worry and Woe appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Lesson 2 of the course is choose a focus – one of the great hurdles in creating a good blog. Rather than writing about everything under the sun, finding a niche develops your expertise, clarifies themes that readers can identify, and determines what to write. The homework for Lesson 2 was straightforward: “narrow your list of topics to 10 items or less and feature your new list of categories in your sidebar.”

But what if you’re passionate about many disparate topics?  I posed this and other questions to the badass Babes community.

When You’re Passionate about 164,743,765 things: 

Sarah’s lesson asks us to consider which topics we enjoy writing most, our readers enjoy reading most, we have the most ideas for, and are shared most on social media. These are great questions to ask and ask again. But if you don’t have many readers or social shares, or if you have lots of ideas on lots of topics, you may need more help.

The Badass Babes recommended “What to Do When You Have ‘Too Many’ Topics to Blog About or Teach” by Regina. It’s an excellent video. Regina says, “sometimes we’re only passionate about our ideas in theory–it’s like that guy/gal you have a crush on that you don’t even know.” Her advice on how to niche down is practical and effective.

Categories vs. Tags: 

I’ve been using categories for organization and navigation (with categories such as “Me,” “I’m Reading,” and “Videos”) even though I don’t write often on these topics. As a result I have 19 (YIKES) categories to pare down. Should I switch some categories to tags? Combine categories? Take some out all together?

The Badass Babes community suggested switching to tags as second-tier organization for topics I don’t blog about often but still want to group. WP Site Care agrees: WordPress categories are used to create groups of content that fit the primary topics of your site…. tags are best used to create groups of content that apply to multiple categories.”

Back-end Category Organization:

I’m hesitant to eliminate categories and lose the organized post groups I’ve created. I asked the Babes: is there a way to hide categories so they don’t display on my sidebar, but I can still access them on the backend for archive/organization purposes?

The Babes said, “yes!” and recommend using a text box in my sidebar to manually link the categories I want to display (rather than use the “Categories” widget which draws on all categories).

Next steps:  Tackle those categories and think hard about what to keep writing. Lesson 3 is in my inbox!

Do you struggle to narrow your focus?

(photo by Eva Jannotta)

The post Choose a Focus (For Your Blog) appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

“There’s never a task too great or too small, because the only task to accomplish is the one in front of me. It might appear that there are a thousand things to do, but in fact there is never more than one.”

We can only complete one task at a time. There is never more than that one thing to do, the thing right in front of us, whether it’s to put on pajamas, proof a pitch, submit an application, or give a hug.

There’s never more than one thing to do.

(photo by Eva Jannotta)

The post Never More Than One appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

I know plenty of professionals who say that semi-jokingly, and are unsure how much longer they will stay in their current jobs, or who work in a different field than their previous one. But perhaps it’s more accurate that everyone has multiple ideas of what they want to be. People are interested in more than one thing. We have many (sometimes competing) goals, and our choices and extenuating circumstances determine what we end up doing.

But having one million ideas makes it hard to get things done. Here you are, energetic, tenacious, brimming with ideas. How do you choose one focus when you want to DO THEM ALL? When they’re all full of potential? How do you divide your time between your goals?

A lot of career advice is to specialize: become an expert in something and create your career around it. This makes sense, but there are so many things to choose from! Sometimes the options lead to paralysis.

I have ideas all the time. Do I focus on financial education? If so, where do I start? How do I package what I offer? Do I focus on my organizing business? Do I focus on designing and building WordPress sites? Something else? I don’t know yet, and sometimes the lack of focus feels scattered. How to decide what to do everyday? How to set goals if they all compete with each other for time and attention?

Part of the challenge is that it takes patience to make this kind of decision. Sometimes you need to mull over the options until the answer becomes obvious. Maybe you need to try a bunch of things to eliminate some. I’m not suggesting avoidance, but patience and a methodical way of trying out the options.

The Internet, as always, has ideas:

How Successful People Achieve Goals: Write down your goals. Be flexible with them – except that they will change. Schedule your goals daily. Be open about them for motivation and encouragement. Dig Deep: how do your goals relate to your values? What’s the why? Use “If, then” statements to keep yourself accountable to your goals.

Find Your Purpose: Look around you: what could you make better? Probably lots of things, so focus on one or two of your values. Then, take small, strategic steps.

Be More Decisive: If your answer isn’t a clear yes, say no. Take your time – are you rushing a decision out of a sense of urgency? Ask who you’re trying to please. Don’t rehash past decisions ad nauseum.

My professional muse Jen Dziura made a great suggestion in the webinar Better Brain, Better Life: choose a goal for every quarter or month. I’ve written about themes for the year, but this is different. If you assign an idea or goal to each month, you automatically know what to do with your free time and what to include in your agenda each day. It ensures that you give each idea/goal attention, and may help you decide which ones aren’t worth your time. I want to try this!

I’m focus-finding – I’m testing the waters and don’t know what will happen yet. How about you? Did you decide how to steer your career? Do you feel torn between ideas and goals?

(photo taken by Eva Jannotta)

The post If You Suffer From Acute “Lack of Focus” appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Everyone wants to do a lot of things. This year I decided to do more art. I want to hand letter the quotes and words I love. So I created a space on my bookshelf for art supplies, in plain sight. Easy access.

Then my art supplies got covered by one million pieces of paper. My designated art spot became a catch-all for loose papers.  It became easy access for my working notes and projects, because there was nowhere else to horizontally stack the papers I need too often to file. My art supplies quickly became out of sight, out of mind. I had to make some storage system changes.

I had the right idea and wrong execution. Do you want to do something? Start a new habit or activity?

Put your new thing in plain sight: create an honored, accessible, visible place to put what you need for your project. Maybe it’s in your kitchen, living room, or office. I created a section on my shelf just for art supplies, which ended up being overtaken by work notes. To change this situation, I created a second spot for work notes. Give a place of honor to your new project so you see it and are reminded that it’s important to you.

Lower the activation energy: put the art supplies by your bed if you want to do the project in the morning. Put them on the kitchen table if that’s your workplace. If you tend towards TV, put them on the couch and hide your remote. Make it easy for your Future Self (your this-afternoon-or-evening self) to pick up the project and do it. Do you need a certain playlist? Reference books? Colored pencils? Whatever it is, set up your supplies now so it’s almost effortless for your future self to get to work.

New habits take time and discipline to adopt. Make it as easy as possible on yourself by lowering the activation energy and putting what you need in plain site.

(photos by Eva Jannotta)

The post In Sight, In Mind (Make It Easy To Do What You Want) appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

I resisted for three reasons: 1) the self absorption that seems inherent in documenting and publicizing your thoughts and moments, 2) the addictive quality of being glued to social channels during all hours and types of experiences, and 3) the voyeurism and lack of privacy that comes with following peoples’ lives and displaying your own.

I deactivated my Facebook numerous times, recently for several years. I noticed a tendency in myself towards competitiveness and insecurity in comparison to Facebook friends. I would lose time scrolling people’s walls and pictures, silently judging them for seeming self-obsessed and myself for caring and wishing I had their clothes and vacations. It felt toxic and gross, so I quit.

I loved not using Facebook. Getting online felt less like falling down a judgmental rabbit hole without the temptation of my newsfeed. My cousin once remarked that she didn’t feel insecure compared to her Facebook friends because she was secure in herself. That wasn’t my experience. Facebook led to compare and despair, regardless of how I felt before logging on.

But when I started my business, I knew things had to change. I knew that sharing my brand and services through social media was important because it’s all about connections. It’s about relationships with people, working together and supporting each other.

Although social media channels can be self-aggrandizing and voyeuristic, people have those tendencies already. Humans love to compare. Social media may enhance these qualities, but it doesn’t create them. You can use social media without feeling like a creep or failure.

Use social media without hating it
Social media allows you to share your content, but more importantly to share others’ content. It’s about relationships (sometimes it’s even about job hunting!). You can exchange resources, images, or funny content to connect with your followers, mentors, and community.

Use a tool: social media can be addictive, but it doesn’t have to be. Tools like Hootsuite let you schedule content weeks in advance, so you can connect with your followers without being in front of a screen 24/7.

Treat your social media channels like everything else: Set limits for your usage. Organize your time and schedule social media like you would email or a project for a client. The strategies you use to segment your workday, complete tasks at home, prioritize your to do’s, all these can be applied to social media. If you’re socializing and it’s a bad time to Instagram, excuse yourself to do so or wait. Set boundaries.

Curate: this year I unsubscribed to almost every individual on Facebook. My newsfeed now consists of businesses and organizations I want to hear from. If your social media channels lead to comparison, remove the temptation. Unfollow people.

Connect with influencers: if you want to invest in your field or community, or network in a new one, social media is a place to start. Find and follow influencers on Twitter. Engage with them. If you want to make a name for yourself or share your brand in the field, start by making connections on social.

You can share information with unprecedented speed and ease using social media. You can build community, rapport, and humor through images, quirky observations, and suggestions. It’s about connecting with people, supporting them, learning from them, and having conversations. This was the part I didn’t get when I fell down the competitive rabbit hole. Now using social media as a brand, I feel focused on information, ideas, and learning rather than myself.

Are you considering social media for your personal brand or business? Feeling overwhelmed? Let’s talk. Also, consider Your Social Media Strategy, the 5-3-2 Rule, and Small Businesses that Instagram Well.

(photo source here)

The post I Used to Think Social Media was Stupid appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Tomorrow we’re realizing a goal we’ve had for fifteen years: to go to Italy together, and visit the town where our great-grandfather Alessio was born and raised.

Years ago we promised each other that the first time we go to Italy it will be together, and it will be to see where our family is from. We talked about it during college breaks, but it was never the right time. Sometimes I wondered if we would ever make it happen. This year though, the timing was right. Or we made the timing right. Goals don’t happen because the stars align, they happen because of dedication, prioritization, and patience.

I’m thrilled to be making this goal-of-years happen. This trip is meaningful not only to discover where my family is from with Liz, but to get some distance and perspective from my current situation. A change in routine and new surroundings often help us reevaluate our lives and see them in new light. I want to consider: what goals are next?

Travel-wise, the strategy is to travel like a gentlewoman and pack like I live. This is what packing looks like so far (it’ll be a busy evening):

And this is where we’re going:

Here’s to achieving goals!

(1. Me [l] and Liz [r] with our grandpa. He was born to Italian immigrants Alessio and Carmella in Brooklyn; 2. photo taken by Eva Jannotta; 3. photo source here. You can follow our travels on Instagram!)

The post I’m Achieving a Goal! appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Last Thursday I enjoyed Jen Dziura’s (Get Bullish) webinar “Better Brain, Better Life: Get Clear, Organized, and In Control.” We can all relate to feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of things in our lives: physical and mental and professional. Jen offers suggestions for how to manage your things and your mind for a better life:

Maybe You’re Not Actually a Lazy Procrastinator: Sometimes what you’re doing is not in line with your values. Other times there are parts of achieving your main goals that suck. For example: if you’re an artist and creating art is your goal, but you hate marketing your work. In that case, compartmentalize the work you hate, and reward yourself for doing it. Instead of doing it a little bit every day, do it once a week and treat yourself afterwards.

Do Nothing Sometimes. Reflection is mandatory for learning. With our desire to be productive constantly, we don’t leave time to stare into space while our mind makes connections. As Jen put it, “you are accomplishing something by doing nothing.”

Be Reasonable. Accept that you’re not going to do ALL THE THINGS tomorrow. Every time you expect that of yourself and inevitably fall short, it makes you feel bad. Jen reminds us that people don’t think about you that much. They just don’t. It takes a while for people to realize you’re not doing all your work. If there’s not enough time to go around, focus on the big things that will earn you recognition and advancement.

Few Skills Are Inherent. Performance comes from hard work. Whether you’re good at math, know all the world countries and capitals, or play wicked piano, it probably took effort to get good. Practice isn’t always fun, but you know what IS fun? Being very good at something. Interestingly, Jen pointed out that there is not a gender gap in math performance in other countries. The messages about math in are practice, not boys are better at math.

Distraction Is The Major Problem. Information is free. If it were humanly possible, we could all teach ourselves everything because it is informationally possible to do so (thank you, Internet). Yet people still pay for classes and teachers. Why? One, because it feels good to connect with people. Two, because we like attention and the idea that something is being tailored for us. Three, because we want someone to pare down and present us with the basics of information. We want something smaller and more clear than what the Internet offers. We want a curator.

In some cases we can pay for a curator, but in others we must curate ourselves: by doing one thing at a time, by leaving our phones in another room, by only opening a few tabs at a time.

You Need A Place to Put Information That Isn’t Your-Head-Right-Now. Some suggestions: Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket. Do you feel guilty when you don’t read every article about social inequality or productivity? Don’t. Try to remove moral judgment from not reading everything. You can’t store everything in your head, and if you’re going to read something but not doing anything about it, maybe it’s not worth your time to read it right now. Instead, schedule “reading time” every week, or save articles for reading on a beach.

How to Single Task: Jen recommends physical solutions for our tendency to get distracted. Instead of opening a new tab while waiting for a form submission, Jen dramatically lifts her hands from the keyboard: “hand’s off! I am waiting now.” This ensures that tasks are fully completed, and minimizes attempted multi-tasking (which all evidence suggests does not work).

Exercise. For Your Mind: One of my professors suggested that we need to exercise our bodies in proportion with exercising our minds. Most of our lifestyles and jobs are not conducive to this balance. Part of the problem with exercise, Jen says, is we don’t know our goals or when we’re done, which makes it hard to get started. There is a ton of evidence that exercise helps brain performance: maybe “to improve your mind” is a better goal than “to look like a certain celebrity.” So pick a thing: is it number of pushups? Amount of time spent running? Distance? Jumping jacks?

Jen’s webinars are an enjoyable blend of chatting, anecdotes, advice, and sharing resources. Want more? Here is a list of upcoming webinars.

For a great review of the webinar I missed in May, see Simplify, Declutter, Cut the Crap & Find Clarity by Jessica Says.

(photo [screenshot] by Eva Jannotta)

The post Better Brain, Better Life: #GetBullish appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

What do you want?

Mel Robbins says to be selfish. Don’t make it sound good, and don’t think about what would impress other people. Be honest. Is it to lose weight? Volunteer abroad? Stay home with your kids? Learn to cook?

Mel also says, pick something. “People don’t pick.”

I asked my roommate how to tell what you really want. He said, “the thing that won’t let you sleep because you want it so bad.” I rarely have trouble sleeping, but I think I know what he means. It’s the thing you’ve had in the back of your mind for years, maybe since you were a child. It’s the thing you daydream about while commuting or falling asleep. Maybe it’s the thing you’ve never told anyone, because it’s so important.

I was mulling over this topic when I came upon an excerpt from Gala Darling’s interview with Danielle LaPorte. Perfect timing. These stellar women talk about what to do “when you don’t have a clue,” and how to take the first step.

From Danielle:

“Clueless [about what you want to do]? I don’t think so. Somewhere inside of you, you know what lights you up…. Believe that you already know… in your body, your fantasies, the people you envy, your journal, your childhood, your longings, the things you would do if you were fearless, if money were no object… What you want to do is there… and every time you deny that, you shrink a little bit.”

She also talks about option paralysis, and echoes Mel in saying, “pick something. Just pick anything. Eventually you will fail, so get it out of the way… You’re going to learn the same kind of lessons you need no matter what you choose.”

But it’s hard to pick, isn’t it? There are dozens of things to do. If you feel stuck, consider the following:

Fearing of commitment: “Renaissance Woman” is a compliment, but the mindset to try everything could be fear’s way of preventing you from doing anything. Not doing something is still an action. Danielle says, “remember that motion is better than stasis. Doing something is better than doing nothing.”

It’s all an experiment: View your ventures as experiments, not absolutes. You can change gears any time. With equal parts curiosity and commitment you can try things to see how they work, and avoid devastation when some things inevitably fail. Shrug. It was an experiment! On to the next.

What’s your business model? It’s simple to think about what you would do if money were no object. But money IS an object, and buying groceries should be factored in to your decisions. So consider where the money comes from when you choose what to do. If it means working part time while you build to your goals, go for it.

Be selfish, be brave (you don’t have to tell anyone): what really “lights you up”? That’s what you want.

(photo source here.)

The post What DO You Want? (Just Pick Something) appeared first on Medusa Media Group.