Author: Jennifer Louden

Publisher: New World Library

ISBN: 1-57731-554-5

 

Are "time monsters" gobbling your calendar? Are "shadow comforts" suffocating your goals and dreams? 

If you're a woman who juggles conflicting roles and schedules -- a full-time job, family meal planning, fitness, dinner parties, and kids' soccer games -- Jennifer Louden has a book for you.  A columnist for Body & Soul magazine and bestselling author, Louden decided to create “an intuitive planner” for herself, and later shared it with others in her workshops. Amazed with the results, she published The Life Organizer: A Woman’s Guide to a Mindful Year (New World Library).

 

As Louden explains in her introduction, “time monsters” are anything we pretend is a constructive use of our time, “but is actually a way to dodge doing what we really want to do.” Louden says she has coached many women whose lives revolved entirely around time monsters -- because they actually feared following their real dreams. A “shadow comfort,” on the other hand, can be anything that “masquerades as a self-care technique but in fact drains your energy,” Louden explains.  She cites the example of cramming a whole bar of chocolate into your mouth without really tasting it, as opposed to savoring one small bite at a time.  Or chatting on message boards or answering e-mail for hours as a way of avoiding that novel you want to write, or avoiding a much-needed face-to-face talk with your partner.

 

Louden's colorful organizer provides 13 planning sections with four weeks of theme-based questions. It’s also laced with true stories of other women who’ve used the program to improve their lives and discover their soul’s purpose. Illustrated with cheerful graphics and original artwork, this book is a lot more fun to use than an ordinary day planner.  But I’m especially impressed with the way Louden coaxes our creativity while allowing us to trust our own desires and intuition. Along the journey, she reminds us to accept “our perfectly imperfect selves.” 

As Louden notes in her introduction, The Life Organizer is “one way to bring down the Berlin Wall of busyness, the ever-growing belief that to be successful, we must do more and do it faster, a story that is killing us.” If you need help knocking down roadblocks on the highway of good time management, this book is for you.