Karl Edwards presents Working Matters

Tag: rhythm

  • Loving Monday: Rhythms of Newness

    loving_mondayHappy New Year!

    Another warm, sunny day for the Rose Parade. A thrilling or disappointing Rose Bowl game depending on your loyalties. Any late night festivities are but a memory.

    This morning most of us fortunate enough to be working are back at it.

    New Year

    In one sense, we’re picking up where we left off.

    In another sense, it’s a brand new year and we’re at the start of something.

    We might be tempted to conclude that New Year’s is a day like any other. We’d be right, though, only in the one sense.

    More importantly would be the opportunity to use the calendar with its annual and seasonal cycles to help us stay fresh, start over, and/or change course. As satellites use the gravity of the planets to propel themselves forward, so we can use the spirit of freshness the New Year brings to propel ourselves forward.

    New energy, new ideas, new perspectives, new attitudes, new approaches, new relationships, new strategies. And on and on we might go. On and on you should go! The new year is an opportunity to use the annual cycle to structure a rhythm of newness into your routine.

    It’s too difficult to be endlessly creative and energetic all of the time. It’s too easy to let busyness and urgencies dictate your priorities year after year while time slips through your fingers.

    Start this year off by choosing to begin or renew three values, projects or attitudes. There’s no need for a huge laundry list of “good” ideas. Neither should you sell yourself short by taking the easy “way out.”

    Seize the initiative. Tap into the spirit of newness that the New Year offers. Design your own rhythm of newness.

    How might you use the New Year to catalyze or renew your priorities?

  • Loving Monday: The Summer Season

    loving_mondayJust two more weeks of school for my kids. Some of your kids are finished already.

    The summer season requires a number of adjustments in our schedules, approaches and attitudes. The kids are off school. The vacations start picking up in earnest. The traffic patterns themselves change.

    Everyone is affected. Even if you don’t have kids or already went on vacation, the fact that so many others around you do and are will have its impact on you.

    If we have a seasonal approach to the working year, summer adjustments are experienced as an expected acquaintance rather than an abrupt intruder. It’s a matter of perspective. It’s a decision about attitude. Keeping the seasons in mind is a form of preparation.

    You know what to expect when summer arrives and are ready. You have methods for adjusting schedules to accommodate vacations. You know who is away dropping kids off at day camp. You are not thrown off guard by the afternoon telephone calls arbitrating sibling warfare or helping someone deal with their boredom.

    Seasons. Rhythms. They are our reality. The sooner we accept them and work alongside instead of against their flow, the sooner we can find our own productivity rhythm .

    Two more weeks and everything changes. I’m getting ready. Are you?