All articles, tagged with “time”

A very nice quote appeared in my e-mail box this morning. Perfect timing, because I was just about to blog about this very topic. Check it out . . .

“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.”

This quote comes from Earl Nightingale, a well-known motivational author and speaker who started the Nightingale-Conant Corporation of personal improvement products.

Last night, a student came into his lesson and admitted that he lost motivation to learn his new piece for one reason: he looked at all the pages he had to learn.

Have you had this happen? It’s not uncommon.

If you’ve ever made a “to-do” list with great excitement (or with good intentions), you’ve probably noticed that the excitement wears off quickly when that list becomes overwhelming. Suddenly procrastination, excuses and stress replace your well-meaning intention to get things done.

The reason the list can overwhelm you is because you couldn’t completely foresee the details of your day as you made the list. If you write down 5 things to do, it seems quite manageable. But, the day begins to unfold with unexpected phone calls, work events that demand your attention, childcare, meals, etc.

You get the point.

What can you do?

Focus on the first item on the list and completely engage in it! That’s right, forget about the remaining items on the list until you complete the one right in front of you. Maybe it’s the task that is most important, maybe it’s the one to do first in the day because it needs to be done before you can do anything else. Whatever the reason, you can certainly decide which activity is worthy of your full attention at any moment.

The problem comes along when you start to look over your list and imagine how you won’t be able to do it all. Then you get fearful and stressed. In fact, you spend more time worrying about the ways in which you can’t complete the tasks then actually getting something accomplished.

With our students, we have them practice just 1 or 2 measures at a time with full care and attention, even if it’s a 75 page piece with 800 measures of music.

Why?

Because if you do a good job on those 2 measures the first time, you won’t need to keep coming back to them to repair unfinished business. In fact, if you gloss over those first two measures and miss details, you will later have to unlearn the details that don’t even belong in the music.

I don’t think I need to spell out the life metaphor here.

Just focus on what is in front of you with full care and attention because the success in this moment will lead to success in each subsequent moment. You may even finish all the items on the list because your focus level is high. You’re unencumbered by fear and procrastination when you adopt this principle.

I’m thankful to Earl and my student from last night because I need this reminder on a regular basis!

So, my hard drive on my 2 year-old MacBook was acting up. Since July, there were signs that it wasn’t functioning properly.

I took about 2,500 photos this summer and thought to myself, “I really need to back these up soon.” For some reason I kept putting it off.

The laptop was starting to function slowly when we were making audio recordings, so we decided to buy a new computer with more capacity and speed. In addition, we could finally do that much heralded backup.

Now you’re caught up.

Last weekend, we bought the new MacBook Pro with a 17” screen. Sweet specimen indeed. The first order of business when I returned home was to transfer the data from the old computer to the new laptop. Sounds good, right?

Well, I was eagerly anticipating the use of my new toy. So, I went through the process of migrating data from one computer to the other and all seemed to go well. But, when I began searching for documents, I found none on my new computer.

In my concern, I attempted to turn on my old computer. No luck. I tried every troubleshooting trick in the book. That hard drive was not going to mount for me.

Do you know that feeling? It’s not fun.

But, here’s the key.

I took a deep breath and left the room to collect my thoughts as I gently pondered the thought of not having the data from my old computer…all 80GB of data! I actually managed to stay detached.

I went back to the new computer to search for my pictures and music and found them on the new hard drive. What a relief! But I couldn’t access them at the moment because of permission details.

Went to the Apple Store the next day and the Genius Bar dude shook my hand like we were at a funeral as he pronounced our hard drive to be deceased. I remained calm in my response and pictured that another solution was possible.

To make a long week short, we have not yet recovered our documents. Yet, because all of our photos and music are with us, we feel tremendously grateful!

We are currently going through the process of having Disc Savers recover our information. The prognosis is pretty good. We are optimistic but not attached to the outcome as we have already begun the process of retrieving hard copies of many important documents through our students.

But, here’s the deal…

If you ever wish to find out what’s important in life, this kind of experience can take you there quickly. My experience is that loss of data is more of an inconvenience than a disaster. It’s not fun and an organized way of life quickly turns into chaos when you realize that you have no schedule, no business telephone numbers, no current financial records, etc.

At earlier times in my life, I would have totally freaked out about this and it would have ruined much more than one week. My new approach is more about getting still and letting solutions come to me. Letting go of the need to control made this experience much more pleasant as I connected with a lot of great people who helped us in the process. This experience taught me many valuable lessons.

Did you know that hard drives normally work well for about three years? I wasn’t aware of that until this experience.

If anything, I shared this story for all of you who have valuable info stored on your computer that you don’t back up. There is definitely peace of mind to be experienced with regular data backup.

The new Macs have something called Time Machine which automatically backs up all info on your computer — I hooked it up to my big and burly external hard drive.

We’ll be back next week with new music and a new Water film. Enjoy one of the rescued photos below. I was pleased when I captured this split second opportunity which presented a lizard hanging out next to a colorful flower.