The Original Lux Egg Timer

This is the original Lux Minute Minder that I was raised on.

To the right is an egg timer in action. The photo was sent to me from a friend the day the book came out.


The Lux timer has been around since 1914, almost a hundred years ago and long before my mother introduced me to its multi-uses. Notice it is not in the shape of a egg. In fact, most "egg" timers are not, nor are they used for cooking one.


Of course, most are probably not used as a time management tool. At least not yet. Not until the owner has read my book.

Note: The 3-Day Free Kindle promotion has taken the book to #1 on Amazon's Free Kindle Bestseller List in the Time Management category!!

Thursday, June 21, is the last day to grab your free copy!

My thanks to all who have helped so far to make this promotion such a huge success!

Lazy, Hazy and CRAZY FREE Days!!

I'm a summer girl. I always have been. So it should come as no surprise that I like to celebrate the summer solstice. That first official day of summer, the one we like to call the longest day of the year. The one that conjures up images of midsummer night dreams and fairies dancing around open fires late into the night.

The truth is it's not any longer that any other day.  It just tricks us into thinking that, because what it does give us more of, is daylight. Preferably filled with sunshine. Which is why we live in the illusion that we have so much more time in the summer. We don't really. We have the same amount of time we do on any day of the year. It's just how we choose to view it and ultimately use it.

To prove my point and in celebration of this wonderful day, the Kindle version of It Takes An Egg Timer, A Guide to Creating the Time for Your Life will be able for free, yes FREE now through June 21 at midnight!!

So go...... download your copy now!
And tell a friend or two or three!



It's as easy as copying and pasting this tweet!

It Takes An Egg Timer: A Guide to Creating the Time for Your Life." FREE until 6/21!#Kindle #freebooks #amreading http://ow.ly/bDxqr







This year  the Summer Solstice occurs on June 20 at 7:09PM EDT in the Northern Hemisphere.  How will you be celebrating?

Fatherless

I knew something was different that first November when my birthday rolled around and there was no card in the mail addressed “To my one and only daughter, xxoo, Daddy.” Then there was Thanksgiving which marked my first attempt to cook a turkey, the one he was not there to carve. And that first Christmas when I had one less gift to buy. But I don’t think it really hit me full force until the following June, that first Father’s Day when it seemed like everyone in the world but me had someone to buy a silly tie for. Up until then it felt like he was away on a trip and any moment I would hear his voice on the phone, “Hi honey. It’s me. I think your mom’s mad at me. Any idea what I did?”

I was fatherless.

It hit me like that big wave that crashes over your head just when you thought the ocean was calm. The one that throws you forward and leaves you gasping for air. Except I wasn’t on the beach with my toes sinking in the sand. I was in the card store surrounded by people who weren’t like me. People that had a father to tell funny stories you had heard a hundred times before but still made you laugh. A father whose big bear hugs made you certain that everything, no matter what, would be okay.

Up until then I had a brave face in public. I had been riding on a wave of numbness since that September day I got “the call.” The one that had me driving that familiar stretch of i-95 knowing what was on the other end, even though no one had told me he hadn’t made it.

He had died too soon. 64. An age that seems even younger now than it did then. And he had left me fatherless. To stand in that dreaded card store on that June day, surrounded by rows and rows of sentiments from jokes to proclamations of “Best Dad in the World!” feeling more alone than I ever had before.  For the first time in my adult life I didn’t have my Daddy to buy a card for.

That was when I felt it from the tears welling in my throat to the weakness in my knees. He really was gone. This was not a bad dream I was going to wake up from. I was going to celebrate Father’s Day 1987 and every Father’s Day forward with just his memory.

I kept my Ray Bans securely over my eyes and got out of that store as fast as I could.  The wound I felt was not like one of those boo boos he put a band-aid on when I was a kid, kissed it to God and promised me would be gone by the time I got married. This was the kind that time would heal, but would always leave me with a scar. The one I still feel almost 26 years later. The one that continues to have me avoiding card stores in June and hitting delete on every message that includes Father’s Day gift suggestions.

Some might call that denial. I call is survival.

I prefer to use this day to think of the joy my father brought into my life and the lives of everyone who knew him, than the pain of his loss. I like to think of his silly jokes, how he loved to dance, and that he was one of the few people I have ever met who could make any kind of real progress with the Sunday Times Crosswood Puzzle. I like to remember him as the man my mother fell in love with on a boat trip around Manhattan.

If I close my eyes today and remember the wonderful memories he left as his legacy I really will feel the warmth of one his giant hugs. The kind that still make me believe it is all going to be all right. No matter what. And I remember what it took me years to understand. I am really not fatherless. I never have been. Spirit lives on long after our physical selves leave this earth. And his spirit was so strong I can call it in whenever I sit still long enough and ask . Which is what I will be doing this Father's Day, as I avoid those card stores!

One of my personal favorites!

My brother posted this on FB. I think it captures the essence of who Dad was!

What I Learned At BlogWorld 2012

That was the tweet I sent as I entered BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2012 last Tuesday. I admit that I did not start the conference with a lot of enthusiasm over the prospect of spending three days sealed away with no windows. While the distance I traveled was much less than those who came on planes and trains and crossed oceans to get there, I am a very typical New Yorker in that I wince when trying to figure out the path of least resistance to get to that most inconvenient of locations that is the Jacob Javits Center. So, yes, I was a little cranky upon  start and yes....feeling a bit jaded.

I am no longer a newbie blogger. I can navigate social media better than most people I know. And now being a self-published author, the lure that my BlogWorld ticket was also giving me  access to the floor of Book Expo, was just not as appealing. And so I wondered, why was I here and  what was I going to learn?

Sounds strange to be coming from me, the person who advocates that every step we take is a learning experience, but I already admitted I was not having a good morning. I reminded myself what I have always done since early in my work life. If I learned even one new thing the next few days, met one new promising contact or got  even one new idea,  it would be worth it.  I entered Room 1A12 and it all started to change.

Jonathan Fields reminded me that  to be a writer today one must be willing to be an entrepreneur. It's an advantage I have that I tend to forget.

John Falchetto, in a thought provoking session on Tribes asked those questions that made me go Mmm. How do you know when you are in the wrong tribe? And what do you do about it?

There was that moment of synchronicity when on line met off line and I discovered the woman sitting next to me was Nina Amir, whose guest post I had just read on Jane Friedman's blog that morning!

I learned that just because a conference is all about New Media, does not mean cutting edge technology is going to include a consistent WIFI connection.

I seemed to be fed that constant reminder, that with all this fabulous new technology people still want to deal with people. Integrity still counts, maybe more than ever. If you put yourself out there, people will be able to sniff out, sooner or later if you are anything less than authentic.

And perfection. It was a resounding chorus of not trying to be perfect. Things are moving too fast right now to worry about it all being perfect. It reminded me of that old sales adage: you snooze, you loose. Failing is not a problem with this group. Not trying is.

Everywhere I turned I remembered why going to conferences is important. They are incubators for thinking new stuff. Even when you know the information, someone will say something that gets your creative juices flowing and suddenly you have a new idea that hits the passion button.

Take podcasting. The word has been on the periphery of my thoughts a lot. It's been suggested I should podcast chapters of my books. And of course every time I start to shake at the thought of doing videos, I think how much easier it would be to stay in my yoga pants, not worry about putting on lipgloss and podcast instead.

It was the lively Women in Podcasting Panel led by Katie Davis that got me thinking. The time to start podcasting was now. It hadn't occurred to me until then that podcasting was really just radio for the entrepreneur. Another opportunity to mix what I know from my past work experience and do something new with it. I was here to learn something I didn't before and I had found it. Like a sponge, I spent the rest of the Expo soaking up everything I could on the how tos and benefits from podcasting pros like Dan Lyons.

I met many new friends, like Laura Rubinstein of the SocialBuzzClub and got to spend quality time with my dear friend and fellow blogger, Suzi Banks Baum of Laundry Line Divine fame.

But the big moment of learning was when I ventured upstairs to the BEA floor. That room I had aspired to be a part of for so long. The event I had imagined I would first attend as an author published by a Big Six legacy publisher. There was a marked difference in the energy. The enthusiasm and willingness to connect, no matter who you were, that I felt downstairs at BlogWorld was missing. It had been replaced with an air of aloofness and inaccessibility and denial that the publishing world, like so much else, is changing.

It really hit me that my career as a writer is unfolding as it should. My intention when I left the corporate world was also to leave that tribe's way of thinking. The one that is too caught up in the way things are to move to the ways things can be. The one that pokes holes in what is new because they are too afraid it might affect their market share. The one that is slow to move because they are too caught up in meetings and red tape to effect real change. I had coveted a tribe that ultimately was not going to serve who I am. Maybe one day that will change. But for now, my tribes are elsewhere.

An "Essential Guide"

"It’s a brief but essential guide about how to get stuff done, while also helping you understand when and how self-sabotage occurs!" 


That's what Jane Friedman had to say about It Takes An Egg Timer in the introduction to the excerpts from my book that appear today on her blog.

I have been an avid follower of Jane since early on in my adventures outside of the corporate world and have learned much from what she shares. I consider her MUST reading for any writer or aspiring writer in today's fast paced world. That said, it is an extra special honor to have my book featured there today.

Stop by and read a little about the two kinds of "busy" I identify in the book. Did you know there's a good kind and a not so good kind?   A quick click right here will take you there.



Note: Tomorrow is the last day to enter for your chance to win a free paperback edition of It Takes An Egg Timer, A Guide to Creating the Time for Your Life over at Goodreads. 

The Rule You Never Want To Break

Most rules are made to be broken. In fact many can even evoke a little rush of pleasure when you do. But every now and then one comes along, you really don't want to break. The consequences are far too severe.

For example, in It Takes An Egg Timer, A Guide to Creating the Time for Your Life, I created one I call The Twenty-Minute Rule. It's designed for those things you need or want to attend to, but if not careful, will suck you in and take you away from the really important stuff you want to be working on. Like landing a new client. Or writing that book proposal.

Social media needs attending. It's got a value, especially if you are self-employed or an entrepreneur. But it can also be one of the biggest time wasters out there. It's a  Twenty-Minute Rule. It's something you must set that egg timer for. If not, hours can be whiled away looking at the 200 pictures your ex's new girlfriend posted of their recent trip to China. In the meantime  you have done nothing that will create any new revenue to pay down your Amex, which by the way is still suffering from  all that retail therapy than ensued when you broke up with him.

Give your favorite social media site  twenty-minutes each time you sign on. Anything more is too much. It's a rule you never want to break. You just can't afford the time it will waste.



This and more on the use and misuse of time can be found in my new book, It Takes An Egg Timer, A Guide to Creating the Time for Your Life , available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.

Hot New Releases !!!

Just HAD to take a screen shot of this on Amazon!! 

Having It Takes An Egg Timer be called a HOT new release....well it just warms my heart!!

Download now in time for the weekend.

Or if you prefer good old fashioned paper, click here to buy and here to enter to win a free copy. 

(contest ends June 12, 2012)

Give that Like button a little click while you're there!

Happy Weekend!