Southwestern Advantage Blog

We aren’t as busy as we think.  Have you ever noticed how some people seem to have extra hours in the day? They go around being involved in about five million different things, plus have time for work, school, church, family, and a social life. And here you sit, just trying to figure out how to make time for getting your laundry done between the homework, the job, and having a least a little bit of a social life. What gives? The answer is SCHEDULE (or as business gurus call it, time management). Those people who seem to accomplish everything and then have time left over have a schedule and they stick to it. Now, a lot of people react to the word “schedule” the way they react to the word “budget.” It seems to reek of constriction and suck all the fun out of life. But the reality is just the opposite . Being on schedule, like being on a budget, simply means knowing what you are doing with your time and making intentional choices about how you want to use it. Just as a good bu...

I follow a lot of people on Twitter. It’s kind of like my daily headlines—if it’s important, it’ll show up. But it’s better than just having a newspaper because I can create the atmosphere of news I want to be exposed to; I can make sure that most of my headlines will take me to things that will help make me a better person today than I was yesterday. That means I follow a lot of people like Dave Ramsey ,  John Maxwell , and of course Southwestern Advantage . (I also follow Mental Floss because I love trivia.) Another one I follow is Inc.com , and last year, they tweeted a headline titled “Want to Be More Effective? Try a Mental Detox.” Intriguing, right? After all, who doesn’t want to be more effective at what they’re passionate about? So of course I clicked. Now, if you can, I recommend reading the whole article: the author lays out four things you can do on a regular basis to keep yourself focused on the important things and to do them better. But I just want to focus o...