I’ve previously posted some great blogging tips I found at Blogging With Amy.  My move for this week was to read and start to apply her advice from her eBook Tell Your Time.  Yes, I actually started and finished, and started to apply a self-improvement book!  Ok, Amy Lynn Andrews made it doable by keeping her book short, to the point, and practical – all in about 30 pages.

Right from the beginning, she provided a very basic, and yet so profound, statement that made me stop and take notice of how off-track I have been:

How we live our days, of course, is how we live our lives.

- Annie Dillard

What an eye opener!  I live my days running around chasing my tail.  What I want is to be able to say I have/ had a good, happy and purposeful life.  Am I happy?  I have been too busy taking care of the responsibilities and people around me to even think of what that means, let alone, actually make an effort to be happy.  I feel happiness when the people around me are happy (especially my husband and children) and even more so when I have had a hand in doing something that helps them feel happy.  But, would I describe myself as being happy in general?  I pray daily for my children to grow strong and healthy in every way and have happy lives.  Am I really modeling that for them?  To be able to answer these questions the way I want to, I need to make changes!

I went through the first 60% of the book in 1 sitting.  By the next day, I found myself thinking about my approach to life in a very new way.  There has been a big disconnect between my approach to life (living in the here and now, doing the best that I can with what I have) and the dreams I have for what I want to do in my future.  This book shed light on a basic recognition and system for connecting up what I do with where I want to go.

In her book, Amy proposes looking at time similar to looking at finances (something else I have not been very good at).  We have a finite amount of time.  Everything we need to do and want to do has to fit into the limited amount of time we have.  When we “spend” too much time on one thing, or get distracted into “spending” time on something mindless, that leaves less time to do the other things in our day… and our life.  Managing time can be looked at just like people who use an envelop system to budget their finances, dividing up their available money into separate envelopes for their different expenses.  They soon realize that to spend extra $ on one category after the envelop is empty, they have to “take” $ away from something else.  If we don’t “budget” any time for taking steps to reach our dreams, we aren’t going to get there.

As I am presently “spending” part of my time allotment that should be used for sleep, I will end this post with a high recommendation for the Tell Your Time book and an eagerness to finish developing (tomorrow) the schedule it is guiding me to create.

Wishing much success and happiness to you, in your days and life!

************************************************************************************

PS.  My links to Amy’s site in this posting are now “Affiliate Links” – I did not write this post to get paid for promoting her book, but rather learned how to make an affiliate link (from “Blogging with Amy“) after writing it.  More on that to come…

As our lives are getting increasingly busy with the conclusion of the school year, my move for this week is to better utilize (and share with you) the online Cozi Calendar that I found out about from The Flylady – www.flylady.net. last Summer.

So what is a “Cozi Calendar”?  For us, it is an amazing (and free) tool to coordinate schedules of a busy family!  It has all kinds of available tools for sharing information with each other – to-do lists, shopping lists, a family journal…  but the one we mainly use is the calendar!  Just for starters, Cozi allows us to:

• add calendar items and specify which family members each pertain to
• select a color dot to represent each person on the calendar to easily see
• choose to have a reminder sent to each person’s mobile device or email
• set appointments as repeating or singular
• access our calendar wherever we are – (rather than only when we are within sight of the one on the fridge)
• add downloadable internet calendars to include in our calendar – I added a Jewish calendar that even tells us when the Sabbath candle-lighting time is each week

Any one of us in our family can add an appointment to the calendar for all of us to see, set up reminders of events, or have a message sent to the rest of us to our phone or email.

It is a great tool for families and one that I plan to make much better use of for mine as we continue to grow and face new challenges.

Have a great a successful week!

- DebBee

As I have been doing more and more with putting images on the web, I’m learning the importance of resizing images.  I’m getting better at it, but it has been tedious for the quantity of images I’d love to put up – especially with adding images to my DD’s online artistic portfolio and my aspirations of posting online demonstrations.

Not wanting to let my lack of training [college education in occupational therapy didn't exactly cover this area ]  to hold me back, I did a little searching and found a great freeware program for resizing multiple images: Fast Image Resizer Thanks to SimpleHelp.net for the info and cnet.com for the confirmation that it is a good (and safe) program.

Resizing a batch of pictures was as simple as selecting them in their folder and drag-drop a copy of them to the resizer – it automatically set up a ‘resized’ folder for them and resized them in seconds.  Wow!  Online picture stories and tutorials, here I come!