Time is like the wind, an endless source of power and energy if only we can harness it instead of letting it blow us around.

How we think about time is probably just as important to changing and improving our lives as how we use our time.  In fact, it’s probably more important.  Maybe the only important thing we need to do to change and improve our lives.

I’ve been working with time in my own life for many years, Mary Allen writes, first and foremost as a writer who needs to make space for writing among the crowd of daily tasks and other people’s needs that always seem to call out to me so demandingly, in increasing numbers over the years. At some point I developed a way to be peaceful and productive at the same time, to get everything done, including daily writing, no matter how busy I was. I called it harnessing time and began writing a book about it. (The book is still in process.)

I’ve learned that harnessing time is not just about fitting everything into your day that you need and want to do.  It’s about not fitting things in too, about creating space to not do things—space for silence and rest and emptiness, for filling back up and recharging.  And it’s about becoming mindful of what you’re doing while you’re doing it, so you can notice and enjoy the activities of your day instead of just writing them on a list and then doing them, joylessly, painfully. Harnessing time is about using your intuition, listening to your deepest inner voice and paying attention to what it has to tell you about what you do and don’t want to do.   And it’s about working with boundaries, making decisions about what and how much you can do on any given day as well as what you can do with and for other people so you can make more room for yourself.  It’s about learning about yourself and making space for yourself and nurturing yourself on a daily basis, getting peaceful and happy with the decisions you make every day about how you spend your day, about accomplishing big goals as well as small goals, taking small steps to accomplish big goals.  It’s about feeling good about yourself, about knowing what you want in life and doing something on a daily basis to get it.

For more about Harnessing Time go to www.harnessing-time.blogspot.com