There are a few cornerstones that help me to live my best life. One of them is called My Time and I try to do it daily.

During this time I explore ideas for future services, sometimes work on new articles, speeches, or the book, & sometimes work through confusing situations to determine a good course of action. Often, this time evolves out of my daily check-in (introduced in the article Cleansing Our Time) What is present in every My Time session is pen and paper.

You can imagine my delight when I saw Merlin Mann’s post recently about Catching the Brain Rain on his 43 Folders blog. He introduces this as “a way of setting aside a few minutes each day for firewalled creativity through idea generation and capture.” A techie way of saying, “time for you to develop and play with ideas.”

He suggests 10 minutes a day. For me, it takes 5-10 minutes to just get out of “get stuff done” headspace. I recommend 30 minutes. That said, I realize that people have different needs for this Brain Rain time. Because so much of my work is based on idea development, 60 minutes a day is preferred and more often allows me that feeling of, “aaah, I’ve made progress!”

Merlin’s post includes a list of suggestions for your daily practice. I’m adding the following:

Do what you need to do to establish this as Your time.

• turn your phone ringers off
• close your email program
• close your door and put a sign on it asking for privacy (mine says, “please leave a note or come back later”)

Of all the various tools that can help you live a simple life, I cannot emphasize enough how powerful this one is. And it is so Simple!! Fundamentally, what do we all want? We want to speak our truth. Our truth doesn’t come out when we are running around like “chickens with our heads cut off.” Taking time daily to let our soul speak out (because that is what we are really talking about above!) gives respect to that voice.

Enjoy.