Multi-tasking
     Sent 10/11/2005

Sharing Creative Energy Newsletter
By Darla Arni

October 2005
Sharing Creative Energy Newsletter is a free monthly, or whenever Darla
can get it out, publication for clients, friends and subscribers who want to
be more creative, energetic and productive in their life and work.
Past copies are archived on our web site: www.darlaarni.com.
© 2005 Darla Arni
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In This Issue:
Multi-tasking: Reflections & Comments
Quote of the Month
Mensa Moment
What is Darla up to?

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MULTI-TASKING
Reflections & Comments

You hear it on the nightly news and network morning shows. You read about it in newspapers, self-help books and magazine covers. Everybody is supposedly doing it and wanting to learn how to do it better. So it must be a good thing-Right?

Wrong, just because it makes a good sound bite and EVERYBODY wants to say they are doing it doesn’t make it right for you. (Didn’t your mother ever give you the ‘If everyone is jumping off a cliff does that mean you should’ speech?) Are we so programmed that we are eager to jump on the latest bandwagon without questioning the validity for ourselves?

Multi-tasking sounds like a great idea but the premise is false; you cannot possibly be doing several tasks with equal attention and emphasis. If you have ever driven on the interstate and watched someone put on their makeup, tie a tie, or dive for something on the floorboard as they hurl their vehicle down the road at 75 miles an hour, you know what I mean. That being said, I have to admit being a victim of the multi-tasking mindset until I realized that I was losing focus. I was doing several things in mediocre fashion and not even remembering most of it.

There are plenty of people, organizations and companies ready to solve your time management dilemmas. I did a Google search for time management and came up with 756,000.000 sites. If you really want to multi-task and waste a lot of time, sort through all those someday! In the past couple of days I have run across the following article titles:
-11 Time Management Tips
-5 Categories for Effective Time Management
-12 Easy Ways to Organize Your Work Life
-10 Quick Time Management Tips
-Top 10 Time Management and Productivity Tools
-Learn the 39 Time management tools for Career Success
Titles like these leave me wondering, is it 10 tips or 11? If more is better, maybe I should go with the 39 tools? Is a category better than a tip? How can there be 39 tools if someone just told me there were 12 easy ways?

Time management tips, books, and articles are as prevalent as diet books and should be treated the same way. There are undoubtedly some good ideas in all of them, but that doesn’t mean every method or idea is right for you. You will have to make choices. Choices require thought, reflection and being honest with yourself.
It is often easier to accept someone else’s solution or opinion, but they rarely work for us. Multi-tasking can be a form of avoidance used to distract us from biting the bullet and doing what needs to be done.

To gain focus so you can make intelligent choices on how to best use your time try the following exercises.

1. Sometime during the day, preferably first thing in the morning or last thing at night, empty your mind. Do this without distractions and interruptions. This can be done by writing out in stream of consciousness fashion everything that is on your mind or sit quietly and mentally click through what’s junking up your brain and visualize dumping the contents into a dumpster. Experiment and find out what works best for you. As you do this you will begin to notice recurring patterns, concerns, and even worries. List them, invest your time and deal with them so you are free. Often dealing with them means changing the way you view them or your attitudes.

2. You may not realize it, but every waking moment your brain is filled with mind chatter. This internal conversation is framing the way you see yourself and everything that happens to you, and most of it is negative and judgmental. Your mind chatter, or whatever you choose to call it, makes you feel both afraid to do something and guilty if you don’t. Good news! Research shows that even a slight decrease in your negative self-talk increases your ability to respond to the world more creatively. My favorite way to combat negative messages is the rubber band trick.

Wear a rubber band around your left wrist if you are right-handed or your right wrist if you are left-handed. Each time you catch yourself thinking negatively, pull on the rubber band and give yourself a flick. I guarantee this will wake you up and make you take notice! If your wrist is red and swollen at the end of the day you know your negatives out weigh your positives. I use it myself and like it so much I had special rubber bands made to use and share with others.

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SPECIAL OFFER: Send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll send you a free Sharing Creative Energy rubber band to get you started! If you know someone else that needs one send an envelope and I’ll be glad to send it too! Please specify if you want a note included saying whom it came from.
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QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Sometimes we’re not sure who we are until someone tries to make us be something we’re not.” Darla Arni, 2005
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MENSA MOMENT
The result of adding the date of the last Monday of lst month and the date of the first Thursday of next month is 38. If both dates are of the same year, what is the current month?

The first 5 correct answers will be entered in a drawing for a prize. Winner and prize will be announced in the next newsletter. Good luck!

Last Month’s Answer:
Mr. Brown does not wear a brown or white tie. Therefore, it has to be red. Mr. White’s tie can’t be white, so it must be brown. That leaves Mr. Red with the white ties.
Congratulations to Lucy Fletcher of Missouri for winning our prize of a mini-personal journal from Write It Down!
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WHAT IS DARLA UP TO?
Sharing Creative Energy is now offering Personal Creative Consulting to a limited number of clients. So what does that mean? It means that if you need new ideas to expand your business or organization, or a long term dilemma has you at a stand still, we are available to consult, evaluate and present you with multiple solutions to get your back on track to being more productive and successful. Our creative consultation can result in new products, new services and new value. Email or call today for a free preliminary consultation. Contact Darla or 660-529-2969

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Darla Arni is a Professional Speaker, Consultant and Author of Sharing Creative Energy at Home, Life Compass for Women, and the Sharing Creative Energy Newsletter.

Sharing Creative Energy
e-mail Darla
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