How to Maximize Your Time Efficiency

Hi everyone,

Are you struggling to find the energy to get everything done?

To maximize time efficiency while grieving, it’s essential to find ways to increase your energy and make it more consistently reliable.

But how, when you may be:

• finding it more difficult to plan for and execute your goals

• unfocused and more easily distracted by shiny objects or activities

• darting off on tangents to avoid painful thoughts or feelings

I will give you a clue, it’s NOT work harder or add yet another item to your to-do list. Those will increase stress and drain energy, which makes every action take longer, an inefficient use of time.

I do recommend creating nets, a place to capture the many to-dos we think of that we need to get done, now or in the future.

When I had significant memory gaps, this exercise was critical to not having a mandatory to-do, like opening mail or paying the bills, fall through the cracks. If forgotten, this had significant negative, real-life consequences like threats of eviction or phone/electricity cutoffs.

In the area of time-management, fixing this kind of breakdown takes much more time than avoiding it entirely. I teach my clients advance strategies, which are designed to answer the common challenges people go through when they are grieving before they become a bigger problem.

These nets can be lists on paper, a bank of recordings or any digital app of your choice. I use Trello boards for projects or a very small notebook / pen and pencil in my purse.

It takes time and energy to remember stuff and the brain will keep pulling it up until it has a spot to live where you can see it, prioritize it and get it into the calendar to be completed. Until an action step is in the calendar, it is unlikely to get done. In the brain, it’s always tomorrow.

9 Ideas to Put Extra Pep in Your Step from NPR

This NPR Life Kit article offers, “9 energizing ideas that can put a spring in your step,”

1. Take a daily walk and make it fun with a creative challenge

2. Incorporate 3 10-minute bursts of movement or exercise into your day

3. Add music with a beat to pick up the pace on your daily walk

4. Try out WOOP (which stands for wish, obstacle, outcome, plan), a science-based mental strategy, by Gabriele Oettingen, who wrote Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation

5. Express gratitude to someone you have been thinking about with a note or a call. Don’t wait. Life is short and unpredictable

6. Do a kind act for another person, your community or the planet

7. Add play into your schedule by building creativity or self-expression practices into your schedule. Maybe take an improv class

8. Be gentle with yourself and kinder. We are our own worst critics. Ask yourself, “If you were talking to a friend, would you say THAT?”

9. Curate your environment so you are surrounded, most of the time, by people who love you.

How Prioritizing Movement Expands Time

How does movement help with time management?

First of all, movement is more than just exercise. Movement is literally anything that moves the body, which you enjoy. Some examples include:

• Pilates

• Yoga

• Dance

• Singing

• Drumming

• Walking

• Barre

• Cardio

• Strength Training

• Stretching

• Breathwork

Exercise is not something I am particularly good at. In fact, I cut so many gym classes in high school that I was almost not allowed to graduate. I wound up running the reservoir and and writing papers on how important exercise is for a month to finish with my senior class. Hilarious!

Have you ever heard the expression, “slow down to speed up?” As human beings, we are more effective when we are grounded in our bodies. Movement does that.

I joined somatic healing dance classes with Bernadette Pleasant of The Emotional Institute to move all the overwhelming feelings through my body when I was grieving so hard that they got stuck in me. First for Women magazine (Sept 28, 2020) even did a 2-page article with me on how important her work was for shifting the entropy of my depression and healing my heart.

Movement and being in my body also allows me to think better, which leads to better decision-making and saves time. Breathing more deeply and improving my flexibility makes me happier, inside and out. As I am able to do more physically, my ability to participate and contribute expands.

So will yours.

How Adding Creativity and Play Is Important?

How creative self-expression and play can help expand your energy.

As an adult, in all the busyness of life, it’s easy to sideline how important self-expression and play are for our wellbeing. It looks like there’s no time to ‘waste' because we have so much to do. It feels like acting silly.

It takes work to transition to a child’s point of view and slow down to focus on experiences like:

• making art, any kind

• writing poetry or prose

• participating in open mics or improv

• blowing bubbles

• taking photographs

I participated in a cabaret workshop before David, my husband, died of pancreatic cancer to share and inspire others with my grief journey.

In my endless wasteland of grief, where that was all I could see most of the time, the creative self- expression and vulnerability I had to bring forth to be in the show gave me a community to share with, a purpose to fulfill and a reminder of who I truly am.

The songs I chose gave me strength and courage, even as tears streamed down my face. “I Will Survive” told me I would make it after he was gone. “Everybody Says Don’t” spoke to how hard I fought to allow him to die at home, when many people told me it would be too hard for me to do. “The Secret of Happiness” was about how comfort can be found in staying present in the moment, no matter how heartbreaking that moment may be.

Click the link to see my September 6th Sing Out Loud cabaret performance. Have tissues. That was a Tuesday and David died in my arms on Saturday, September 10th at home in my arms, just the two of us, with exactly the ending we both wanted.

Why Kindness Matters

How kindness to yourself and others changes everything?

Saying mean things is an energy drain. The person we are worst to is usually ourselves. When our energy is drained, it takes longer to get stuff done. In addition, mean thoughts snowball, pulling associated negative experiences into their sphere.

IT’S PERSONAL.

How do you know if a mean statement has landed and will stay?

If it sticks, that’s a sign that somewhere deep inside, you fear it’s true. They live in the places we lack confidence. If we don’t believe it, it doesn’t hurt. We just shake it off.

It’s the difference between a characterization like, “You are… selfish / lazy / a failure / worthless / fat, etc.,” which is about who you are AND…

“You are acting… rude to the waiter / selfish for not sharing that t-shirt / lazy for not going for a walk, etc.,” which is about how the person (you or someone else) is behaving.

When we grieve, we can be especially sensitive to unkindness from ourselves or others. It’s common to hear, “I don’t feel like myself” and, we may be less productive or effective than usual. Into this gap, uncertainty can grow.

What can you do to fix it?

• Be careful who you listen to. Not all opinions are equal

• Ask friends and family what they love about you - make a word cloud

• Take it as a call to action. If you don’t like what was said, what action can you take to change how you or other people see you?

Take a Word Bath - From time to time, I offer a word bath to my clients in which I put soothing music on and ask them to close their eyes, listen and receive. I speak positive words and invite them to let the words to flow over, through and into their bodies and energy fields.

My clients experience one of 3 reactions to each word:

1. Yes, that’s true about me

2. Yes, I can see that might be true about me

3. No, that’s definitely not me

I invite them to consider that every positive word I am speaking is possible for them, if they own it and act accordingly. As we believe in ourselves, how we act changes incrementally over time. That shifts how we are seen and how others interact with us. When we are different, old behaviors no longer work.

KINDNESS, GENEROSITY & VOLUNTEERISM

When we are grieving, it can feel like a world of painful memories. Helping other people focuses our attention outside ourselves, which can be a relief. Contributing to another person feels good.

• Being kind - a small act or big one, such as thanking a bus driver, holding the door or standing up for someone against a bully, all matter. Imagine if kindness became a practice such as, try saying one kind thing a day. How would that feel?

• Being generous - My mom told me a story about 104-year-old in her retirement community who collects food scraps. She is not strong enough to carry an entire box of biodegradable bags. She leaves a note when she runs out and Mom puts 5 loose ones under a tennis ball on a box where Mom’s car is. This means the woman doesn’t have to keep asking for help over and over and Mom can be generous without going out of her way.

• Being a volunteer

  Possibilities include:

  • tutoring for an after-school program

  • cleaning up a park

  • delivering food to elders

  • playing sports with kids

  • stocking, packing and distributing groceries

There are service organizations for everything, which are city-specific, like NewYorkCares.org, here in NYC, as well as a national organizations like Habitat for Humanity (habitat.org) and international organizations, like the Peace Corps (peacecorps.gov).

Whatever matters to you, there is a place to volunteer where you can be a part of providing a solution to a problem you care about. Just search online as specifically as you can to find yours.

If there are additional topics you would like me to write about in an upcoming Life After Grief newsletter, please let me know.

Your Legacy - What Will You Leave Behind?

An Inspiring Legacy Project a Friend Built

If you are in Columbus, Ohio, you might want check out a Harmony Project (harmonyproject.com) concert.

The choir director, David Brown, whose NYC gospel choir I sang in for 10 years, started The Harmony Project in 2010, out of the belief that song and service bring people together. Approximately 1000 volunteers contribute 60,000 hours of serving the community. They bring music to schools, outreach programs and prisons.

Harmony Project Mission Statement: To build a more inclusive society by breaking down social barriers, bridging community divides, and empowering the voices of the people through arts, education and volunteerism.

I am inspired by David’s vision and how he took action to make it real.

Your legacy is whatever you say you want it to be. You may already be on your way.

For me, when I could not find the resources I needed to grieve and be supported without shame for being ‘too much’ or the journey taking ‘too long,’ I created them, began coaching others to use them, and speaking out to change the grief conversation itself globally.

Subscribe to our monthly GRIEF beLIEF podcast to tap into discussions on various grief topics.

*****

Grief raises to the surface what matters most to each of us. It reminds us that there is not infinite time to say, “I love you,” to take a stand for something you care about or to start a movement.

Everything matters. There is no ‘too small’ legacy if whatever yours is wants to be elevated as a priority in your life.

Another way of saying it is, “How do you want to be remembered?”

When would you like to start?

*****

If you find the Life After Grief newsletter inspiring, informative or helpful, please subscribe and share it with others who need .

This newsletter issue, How to Maximize Your Time Efficiency describes how movement, play and kindness can increase energy and expand your effective use of time. If you want to find out how I can support you, let’s chat.

Schedule a complimentary 20-minute zoom call to find out how to maximize your time efficiency or to move forward on your grief journey with an appointment at https://thebadwidow.com/ConnectWithAlison.