The Real Reason It Won't Work

If you have ever tried something new and different, gone off on an unconventional path, endeavored to make a difference in something, big or small, you'll notice one recurring theme. 

Most people won't tell you why it will work. 

They'll tell you why it won't.

They'll say something like:

• It's too soon
• It's too late
• It's too big
• It's too small
• It's not sustainable 

• It will take too much time

• No one will care in a year

• It costs too much
• It doesn't cost it enough
• It's too obvious
• Someone else is already doing it and they'll do it better
• Why bother? No one will care.

They'll roll their eyes. They'll add a huff or two. They'll change the subject to something more interesting to them. Like how they've given up on ever losing those ten pounds or how much they hate their boss because really, there is just nothing they can do about it.

My very practical advice is to stay away from those people.

Especially if you want to: 

• try something new and different
• are ready to take an unconventional path
• are endeavoring to make a difference in something, big or small

You see the thing they forgot to tell you is the real reason it won't work. 

You believe them instead of you.

Gaming The System

When I started selling many moons ago one of the first things I was taught was that the easiest way to build long term business was to establish good relationships. If a client thought they could trust me, not only would I get the first sale, but renewals in the future. Trust was not something bestowed, but something earned. Know my product. Know my competition. Say what I would do and do what I said I would. Over time that would work. I would make money. So would my client. All would be happy. Everybody would win.

This approach still works, but a lot of us think it takes too long and too many are concerned with only winning for themselves. So the search begins for ways to game the system.

People have tried to make a science out of SEO so their sites get more hits, but if their content is not good, those people will never come back, no matter how great the keywords that got them there. This past week eight badminton athletes were disqualified from the Olympics for being caught purposely losing matches in order to face easier opponents down the road. Jonah Lehr confessed he made up quotes for his Bob Dylan biography, no doubt in the hopes of garnering more attention and more sales. Now found out, he is forced to resign his job at The New Yorker and his publisher pulled his book from the retailers. And then of course there is the construction site outside my window. It is against NYC ordinance to be creating noise on a weekend without a special variance and only then after 10AM. That did not stop the workmen from hoisting cranes at 5AM this past Saturday. They don't care about the small fine they pay if caught. As long as they stay on schedule

All are trying to game the system.

There are times when gaming the system might feel like the only choice. Most of the time it's not. When you do opt in, you take the gamble that you might get caught. The odds are on the house that most will.

The illegal scene Saturday morning. 

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.

Not Practicing What I Preach

I hate when I don't listen to me!

There I was. Tuesday afternoon. I set my trusty egg timer. Ready to get to some serious work. The space was set, or so I thought.

It was as though I'd forgotten the basic rules and I was the one who wrote them!

I didn't shut down my email program. Worse I didn't turn the sound off my mobile so I wouldn't hear  the lovely little chime it makes every time someone texts me. That day it was as though I was the most popular person on the Upper West Side. The texts kept coming. And as though channeling my demons, I chose not to shut it off. I could have. But I didn't.  An hour later I wondered why the project I was trying to complete still sat unfinished.

Duh? Did I not just write a whole book about this? Have I not been tweeting and Facebooking its arrival all over cyberspace? Isn't the reason I suggest good old-fashioned analog egg timers instead of digital devices to eliminate those intrusive distractions? To form a safe and quiet space to focus on creating?

Yes, I know better. But I slipped. And like all modern day tech addicts, it can be hard to restrain oneself once those nasty intrusions have infiltrated one's space. They are, after all like crack. It's as if you are rendered helpless to their power. As though they are the ones who have strapped your hands behind the chair in some new variation of Fifty Shades of Grey keeping you out of  reach of all those buttons that say OFF.

It happens. Even to the best of us.

You let the distractions mire your thought process. You are unable to focus on anything but what you might be missing. And not only do you get nothing accomplished, but the hangover that ensues in the aftermath, that mixture of guilt and lack of productivity. It will make you swear on whatever tickles your fancy, never, ever to stray again.

But you will. It happens. Even to those of us who literally wrote the book. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes it all works out. Point in case, this blog is a direct result of my going off the wagon. So I was, after all that, actually accomplishing something.

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Test Driving My Time Theory

I’ve been in absentia. Tucked away writing my next book, a part guide and part manifesto on how to create the time for your life. If I said that left little space for me to write much of anything else, that might seem a bit hypocritical to the premise of my book. But it’s not. It’s called triage, a tool I use in assessing what needs to be at the top of my to-do list. My newsletter has not been there, nor this blog, until now.

In a case of what can only be life imitating art, or is it art imitating life, I have been thrown curve balls in the last week or so that challenge the very core of what the book is all about. And so I found myself in the last days before this book hits Amazon, forced to test drive to the extreme what happens when the really big curve balls hit. I had to listen to my own advice on managing, organizing and creating the time for everything I both wanted and had to do.

This is where I was last week.

It Takes An Egg Timer: A Guide To Creating The Time For Your Life has been written and edited and is with my very brilliant interior book designer, Jamie Kerry. The cover is under construction with the extraordinarily talented cover designer, Wendy Bass. My official release date of May 15, auspicious in that it happens to be my brother’s birthday is two full weeks away. More than enough time to read through, yet again and again this short, inspirational, motivational, informative, and at times entertaining guide/manifesto in that way authors do as they strive for perfection.

I am walking rather proud. This is after all my second self-published work. And I am feeling pretty good how ahead of schedule I am this time and consequently much less nervous. Well maybe. I don’t think I will ever not be on the edge before a new book is birthed into the world. But confident enough that I was able to relax and enjoy a four-day weekend spent in a Robert McKee Story Seminar from 9A-7P every day.

And then the calls started. From my mother. My 89 year-old, fiercely independent mother who still lives alone, an hour and forty-five minutes south on the New Jersey Turnpike, and yes, on occasion still drives to the grocery store. Her leg is bothering her, but this time it is not just the osteoarthritis and absence of all cartilage. This time she says she can barely walk and the pain is excruciating until I suggest she call 911. Then the pain subsides.

My brother goes to her apartment. Things settle for a bit. He leaves. In between I am trying to concentrate long enough to read as well as prepare for all that marketing and outreach that goes into a book release. Yes, I use my trusty egg timer in sixty-minute windows just as I suggest in my book. It is the only hope I have of getting anything done. The ticking sound really does calm me. 

I clear my schedule and on Wednesday take Exit 6 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike to find my mother crawled in a ball in her bed. She is in too much pain to walk. She has not been drinking enough water because she is too afraid she will not be able to get herself to the bathroom. She wears her medical alert necklace, the one she has never been afraid to push to get help. Until now.

I don’t ask, I tell her I am taking her to the ER. Except I can’t get her out of bed to get dressed. We’re going to need the rescue squad but not, she informs me before I help her dress and she puts on some lipstick. To some this might seem like a good sign. To me, it is just my mother’s vanity, her elixir to staying young.

I mask my worry in crisis management.  I’m good at that.  All those years of working in a corporate office and having to draw on my testosterone reserve while squashing my feminine energy to survive come in handy at moments like this. I compartmentalize the excitement for my book. My attention and my time are nowhere else but with her.

At Abington Memorial Hospital they start running tests, drawing blood and ordering x-rays. A team of doctors and nurses in what might be the nicest ER I have ever been to, attend to her. There is some sort of infection in her blood that they need to get to the source of. It was good, we are told, that she got here when she did.

I sit in the chair next to her, and she looks frail. Once standing at five–five and three quarters she has shrunk to five-two. I want to burst into tears but I save them for later.  Seeing me cry will only make her more afraid.  At this moment she needs my strength.

I worry that maybe this is it. That maybe this infection has taken hold of her and we are at the end.  Her time. But could it be? Just two weeks from my brother’s and the book’s birthday? A book on how we have more time than we think we do? Why do beginnings always have to be so inextricably connected to endings?  It’s all too much to think about. So I force myself not to. Not until the results are all back and we know what we are dealing with. I close my eyes and concentrate on the movement of my breath. I am so grateful that breathing and meditation are no longer foreign concepts to me.

I watch her fall asleep. She is tired. A combination of meds and all this attention and excitement. I see a tiny opening here. A few moments for me to be there for me. And I seize it.

I find the PDF in my iPad and I open my new book. It is dedicated to her, my mother and her ever-faithful egg timer, the one she showed me how to use. I read and I can’t help but smile.  I ground in my own words, transported to the original egg timer in the kitchen I grew up in. My worry shifts to profound gratitude for this woman I have been lucky enough to call my mother for all these years. She will like this book. Like that she and the egg timer were the original sources of inspiration. I know she will stay at least long enough to celebrate its grand entrance to the world.

I am right. I love it when I am right. By the next day the infection is under control. The swelling has subsided. A therapist is helping her walk.  A few days in the hospital and she is home, this time with a walker as her personal assistant as well as the help of visiting nurses. And of course,  an advance PDF copy of my new book.

I know her strength and her will. I have after all inherited that.


She is not ready to go. Not just yet. Not before a party. For her son and this book. Neither of which would have been possible without her.

It Takes An Egg Timer, A Guide to Creating the Time for Your Life will be available on Amazon, in print and Kindle on May 15. If you wish to be added to my mailing list for updates, please click here.