Fuck me it’s hot!

In my book that’s a good thing. I’d much rather be hot than cold, and I love working outside, which is exactly where I am while I write this email.

Do you prefer the heat or do you prefer a colder temperature?

When I was younger everybody I knew used to love the heat, these days I find more people prefer the cold. Maybe it’s a sign that my friends and I are getting older!

Either way, while I’m enjoying it, it’s not making the most pleasant sleeping experience for our two children, who are most definitely not used to it.

Max particularly sleeps hot, and every night is drenched in sweat. A problem? Not really, except that being hot when he sleeps tends to give him nightmares, which isn’t great.

A fan pointed towards him is the obvious solution, but for some reason it freaked him out so much that last night was the first night I could get him to be happy with me leaving a fan running in his direction.

But enough about the weather and more about time management.

I used to think I was pretty good with time management, now I’m not so sure. It seems to be a near impossibility for me to get everything done each day. 

Which leads me to conclude there is one of two issues (or possibly both):

1. I am shit at time management

2. I am trying to fit too much into a day

My gut feeling says it’s not trying to fit too much into a day, because I’ve always been very good at assessing how long something will take me. Instead, I think the main issue is that my day gets interrupted with a lot of phone calls at the moment.

I don’t mind that, but I’m not factoring it into the amount of work I am planning for myself each day. 

If half the day is taken up with unexpected phone calls, then I am going to need to reduce the amount of work I try to complete in a day by half. Which is going to be challenging.

Prioritisation I guess is the best way. My issue with prioritisation is that the low priority things almost never get done. 

I guess the solution is to re-prioritise them the longer it goes without doing them?

I’m not sure. But it comes down to me needing to get better at time management.

There was a time when I would talk about which country was next on my hot list to visit. How long I could reasonably stay out of the country for, and whether it made sense to go somewhere else afterwards or come straight back home.

These days I talk about time management and dog piss.

Yes, dog piss.

We have an artificial lawn, and it looks amazing. It’s particularly amazing because it’s not that big, and was previously churned mud where the dogs were running around it in circles. 

That has now gone, in its place a beautiful manicured lawn now stands.

However, there is the faint smell of dog piss starting to come from it. 

In order to combat this we bought a small bottle of cleaner, as a test, it didn’t go very far and I’m waiting for it to dry, but initial impressions are okay. If you have an artificial lawn, and dogs, any suggestions gratefully received.

The best news I have this week is… we’ve booked a summer holiday!

I don’t know why, but we seem to be pretty slow at making decisions, life seems to be very busy. But we finally decided on Edinburgh. It will be our first holiday with the kids since Lyra was born, and I can’t wait.

That’s at the end of August and there’s a lot to do before we get there, including booking holiday insurance.

It may seem weird to get holiday insurance for a holiday in Edinburgh, but we never know when one of our children may be in hospital. Lyra, for example, has been in hospital most of this week. If that happened, then we’d lose all our accommodation costs without insurance, so it’s worth having even if we’re holidaying in the UK.

But it does seem like an effort to start looking for it. Sometimes I wish there were less choices. I don’t need to have an option of 50 insurance companies. It doesn’t really make sense since most of them are underwritten by the same handful of underwriters anyway.

What I will need before the holiday is a new book. I never go anywhere without a book. The last few books I read have been business books, and so I want to get a good fiction to take with me.

Reading is my perfect relaxation. I could sit anywhere, preferably somewhere serving food and drinks, and read all day.

Usually I’ll go for fantasy or faction novels, but I’ll read anything I’m recommended. So if you have a recommendation please hit the reply button below and let me know.

And with that, I will leave it for this week. 

By next week I hope to have our holiday insurance, have purchased the book you recommend, and have a list of all the things we’re going to do in Edinburgh.

I’ll also be building out a self-liquidating funnel for an awesome movement of women. I love this kind of thing, so I’m hoping it will be self-liquidating sooner rather than later.

Until then, have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week.

All the best,

Michael Wilding