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Clay

This morning I woke up in silence, smiling in the wake of a great dream I can’t remember. I woke up mid-stretch. My eyes opened and I immediately got out of bed. There was no hitting the snooze button, there was no grogginess, there was no loathing my morning routine. There was also no being ripped from slumber, mid sleep-cycle, against the better judgment of my body. There was just peaceful morning silence.

A week ago I ditched my alarm clock and after a week of alarm clock-less nights, I don’t think I’ll be looking back, at least for a very long time.
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Editor’s Rating: 8.7

Editor’s Note: This review is a fifth entry in a series of e-book reviews.  The review is by Thursday Bram of ThursdayBram.com.

One page into Alexis Dawes’ e-book, “Desperate Buyers Only,” I was fully prepared to hate my reading experience. I noticed a typo, and for someone who has worked as a proofreader, a typo in final copy can be the kiss of death.

I was more than pleasantly surprised as I made my way through “Desperate Buyers Only,” however. I can tell you know that I’ll be rereading it multiple times — the sheer quantity of information Dawes has collected has made her e-book the go-to resource when thinking about selling a report.

Dawes goes far beyond simple advice on how to prepare such a report: she guides her readers through every step of the project from brainstorming a topic to affiliate marketing and targeting keyword ads. She’s written to a level of depth that I can’t help comparing to John Chow’s blogging but his depth comes from years of blogging on the topic of how to make money online, while Dawes does it in less than 100 pages. Dawes manages this by drawing on her own, highly successful experiences — she has reports that have been selling for years but still bring her in a daily income of at least $200.

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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Good goals are living breathing statements of who we are becoming, they should not be static and rigid representations of what we once longed for. Still, many of us have had the experience of writing down goals, only to feel alienated from them weeks later, as if they were a historical document from the past.
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"If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting."
-Benjamin Franklin

Today in Madison, Wisconsin, it was -35 °F degrees; needless to say, the heating bills for this ol’ home-on-an-isthmus have been excruciating.  Here are eight killer tips from J.V. Endres: they’ve helped him reduce his annual heating bills from $1,000 to $500 in a 35-year-old house! Check ‘em out.

1. Do not heat any unnecessary rooms. Close and seal heat registers and air returns. Be sure to whether-strip doors to these less-heated areas.

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Whether it’s someone smacking their gum or an acquaintance who won’t stop calling, everyone has to deal with frustrating distractions getting in the way of their goals.

Tennis player John McEnroe was a master at leveraging his frustrations (usually directed towards chair umpires) to motivate him to battle through difficult matches, helping him win 17 grand slam titles.

McEnroe went too far, but he teaches us that frustrations can be harnessed to increase performance. The trick is to know when and how frustrations should be leveraged.
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Among the normal array of equipment in David Allen’s office, one item stands out. It is an hourglass with two minutes of sand. Any clock would serve equally well to mark the strict interval GTD gives us to process something the first time we handle it, but Allen’s hourglass is as much a talisman as a practical tool. In a medieval painting, it would symbolize death. Here, the hourglass is a symbol of virtue. It regulates our attention. It guards our self-esteem. The guru of Getting Things Done is living by the standards of the future, and his hourglass is an icon of an emerging civilization whose exacting demands we may all someday be expected to meet.

-Gary Wolf

Like an 800 calorie bag of potato chips unwittingly polished off during CSI, we often scarf down large quantities of time when we are unaware. Psychologists have demonstrated that the brain has a terrible sense of time when it is paying attention to something else, and as a result, we are most likely to mismanage and misuse time when we are the busiest.

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People whose internal clocks are tuned enough that they always wake up on time, without an alarm clock, are generally on time and on the ball. I know a few.

As a heavy sleeper, the alarm clock has been an enemy throughout my life. I associate it with breaking my sleep cycles at all the wrong points and with prematurely waking others in the house.

I’ve experimented with getting up without an alarm clock for a while, but I’m committing myself to doing it this week. I’ll report back on the experience at the end of the week, and then again at the end of the month. My goal is to decrease dependence on the alarm clock without missing important events.

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The hours of a wise man are lengthened by his ideas . . .. [His time] is long . . . because he distinguishes every moment of it with useful or amusing thoughts–or, in other words, because [he is] always enjoying it.
- Joseph Addison

In the throws of daily living we are constantly racing against time.  To many, time is the enemy, it is a property of the universe that makes us old, makes us late, and makes us insufficient.

Here is an affirmation video from us, created to help us savor time (for more information about affirmations, see here).

The affirmations are made to be read from the perspective of the first person. For example, if you read "time is on my side," you should understand the sentence as applying to you.Enjoy!

[tags]time is on your side, manifesting time abundance, time awareness, time management, life affirmations, productivity, purposeful living, video affirmations, daily living, savoring time, self awareness, video[/tags]