Time Challenge - Old for the New

After what it seems like months, I’m back to writing daily here on my blog.

To my partners in the Time Challenge, I would like to apologize for my absence and almost two weeks of silence. The Challenge continues, because like I said in January, it will last until I completely change, and I haven’t completely changed yet. So, let’s continue moving forward!

To the followers of this blog, please forgive me for not posting the movie reviews you voted for. Will dedicate this week to do just that.

If you were following the series about Twilight, know that it has not ended. There are actually 5 more chapters to go and I will post the third one this Thursday.

Good Oldies Tuesday - Shutter Island

This is an R rated movie

Do you know those movies that you have to pay a lot of attention in order to understand it? Well, such is the case with Shutter Island. And even if you do, you will still be a little bit confused for the most part lol. And this is precisely what makes this movie so good, because you end up having to solve the mystery :)

This movie is about two U.S. Marshals played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. They are assigned to solve a case where a woman went missing on a psychiatric hospital/prison.

This hospital only treats people who have committed horrible crimes and have been declared insane. So what happens is that this female patience simply disappeared from the hospital facilities, even though it was a maximum-security hospital on an Island where people can’t really escape from, unless they had a boat or could swim for hours in freezing waters.

When the two Marshals get there, everybody looks suspicious and no one knows or can explain how the woman could have escaped. Meanwhile all this crazy things start happening there and you don’t really know whom to believe in anymore.

This is an excellent movie, the kind that makes you think and think but still doesn't help you make sense of what’s going on. And the best part is, you may be very, very smart, but I don’t believe you can guess what’s going to happen in the end.

I remember that towards the end, when the mystery is finally solved, I went ‘NOO, I can’t believe it!!!!’ So, expect lots of surprises throughout this movie. All I can say is that it’s really, really nice, not predictable at all and a little bit scary.

If you like the kind of movies that make you think a lot and keep you on the edge of your seat, you will really like Shutter Island… trust me ;)

Time Challenge Step # 5 - The 10-minute tactic

This week’s step is very simple and yet very practical.

If you’ve been following the steps of this challenge, then you have already begun to see lots of results. Your life is supposed to a little more organized, but still you might notice that some of the things you need to do are always left undone.

Do you know those little things you need to do, but because they are not as important as your everyday frogs, you never get to do it? Like organizing your documents/papers, organizing your closet, replying to a friend’s email, organizing your bathroom cabinets or organizing your husband’s sock drawer lol?

The problem with little tasks is that at first you think ‘this is not so important right now, so I’ll leave it for later, tomorrow, next week’, and when you see, the little task has become a big one or even a frog but with everything else going on in your life, you just can’t separate an hour or a few hours to work on it.

And here’s where Step # 5 comes in. We will start creating ‘chunks of time’ from this week on.

Starting   today, you will separate 10 minutes everyday to do some kind of little task. All you need to do is choose a time during the day and work on it for 10 minutes only.

The secret is doing that everyday. E V E R Y D A Y.

By the end of the week, you will have worked on your little task for 1 hour and 10 minutes without having to separate 1 hour during your busy week to have it done! There will be progress on the task you are working on (who knows, maybe you will even have finished it) and the great thing is that it doesn’t feel like a task at all!

Choose one task, separate 10 minutes of your busy day and get to work. Once you finish the one you will start today, choose something else and something else after that  :)

Let me know how it goes by leaving your comment here.

P.S.: I’ve already left a comment saying what little task I’ll be working on. What about you? Come on… II really want to know!

Colombiana

This is the story of a woman who witnessed the murder of her parents when she was a little girl. Her father had crooked business with a crook in Colombia and after some business that you don’t really understand in the beginning, her father’s ‘boss’ comes after him and kills him and his wife but is not able to kill her, because she escapes.

And here’s where the movie started stinking for me.

Cataleya (the girl we are talking about here, played by Zoe Saldana) couldn’t have been more than 10 years old, but she manages to escape a gang of armed and trained men. She is very clever and finds a way to get to the United States and although she had never been there before, she easily finds her way to her relatives’ house… Come on! I know that movies are fictional, but they have make up better stories than that!

Upon arriving at her uncle’s house, she says she doesn’t want to study, she wants to become an assassin, because… you guessed it, she wanted to avenge her parents’ death.

From then on, the whole movie is very predictable.

She grows up, becomes this super woman who fights and kills all the bad guys who cross her path, and on she goes with her vengeance. She lives her whole life to get revenge and all her efforts are not able to make her happy. This is what happens when you seek revenge; you may even succeed but it doesn’t make anything right, it doesn’t fix things, it doesn’t bring you peace or makes you happy.

But going back to the movie, all I can say is that you don’t really need to watch until the end to know what happens. And if you don’t need to watch it until the end, you don’t need to watch it at all.

I do not recommend it :(


Don't forget to vote for next Friday's movie review.

Good oldies Tuesday - Coach Carter

I don’t really like watching sports on TV but strangely enough I love watching movies about it. I don’t really understand American Football, but really enjoy watching movies where they show it, the same with baseball and basketball… go figure.

This is a movie about a High School Basketball Team that after losing most of their games in their past season, decides to hire former basketball player Ken Carter (played by Samuel L Jackson).

Carter has very different tactics to train his players and one of them is by teaching them respect. Respect towards others and themselves. After months of practice and really hard training, they learn how to play well and sure enough their team start winning all the games.

Although this is a very interesting part in the movie, it’s not what I liked the most. What I liked the most in this movie is that the coach didn’t want to only have a successful basketball season; he wanted to teach his players that there’s more to life than the here and now.

Most of the students of his school either dropped out, went to jail or ended up dead and he wanted to change that, at least for the players on this team. He does everything in his power to show them that if they chose to, they could have a better future, they could be someone in life; they could go to College and do things they never believed they could.

And the whole school really admired him for that… well, not really.

You see, whenever you are trying to make a difference, you will face opposition. You are misunderstood, misinterpreted, judged and even criticized and that’s exactly what happens with Ken Carter. He was trying to help but people didn’t understand it that way.

Coach Carter is based on a true story and that’s probably why I like it so much. 

So, if you haven’t watched this movie yet, you should. It’s really inspiring and definitely one of my favorites.

Time Challenge Step # 4 - Learn to Prioritize

The last few weeks have showed me what challenging myself really means. Some of my plans didn’t work as well as I would have liked them too, others went down the drain completely. For a while it seemed that my frogs were the ones controlling my time lol.

A lot has happened, especially in the last few days, that brought the idea that perhaps this Time Challenge doesn't and will never work.

But this is my heart talking, because if I use my head (and I did), I will see that I have accomplished in the month of January things that I haven’t be able to do for months, some for years, and others that I have never been able to accomplish.

So, even though the last couple of days didn’t go so well, I must say that the results I had were incredible and I should be satisfied... but I am not. 

Last week I wrote a passage that says there is a time for everything and everything has its time. I believe that 100% and that’s why I am here. That’s why I have determined that February will be even better than January and so it will!

Now one thing that you need to understand is that although there is a time for everything, you will never have time to do everything. That’s right. You will never have time to do everything, because if that were possible, everyone would already have achieved everything they want in life, everything will be done. But the truth is, there’s always something to be done, even if you go through your whole list if to-dos today, there’s always something to be done still.

But that doesn’t matter… as long as you do what’s really important.

If you come to the end of the day and you have done all your most important tasks, will it really matter than you haven’t done everything on your list?

You need to determine what your most important tasks for each day are.

So let’s do some exercise here, shall we?


Write on a notebook everything you need to do today.
Highlight your frog or frogs for today.
Now see which of your tasks are really important.
Write 1, 2, 3, 4… in front of each one, according to their order of importance.
Write your list again, following the order of the numbers. 

By doing this exercise, you might see that there are some tasks that can be left for tomorrow or that your frog was actually towards the end of the list, when it should be first or even that some tasks are not really that important and don’t need to be done at all.

We will do that everyday this week, starting today.  Make a list tonight of all the things you need to do tomorrow following the steps I just gave you.

This exercise will help us prioritize so we can spend our time in what's really important. And that will make all the difference this month.

I’m moving forward, what about you?

P.S.: Partners who haven’t received my email yet, don’t worry. You WILL be receiving it this week ;)