Back to School Giveaway!

Whew! Our first video blog post is up. September is going to be really fun! Make sure to look for us on Facebook and follow @vmealscs on Twitter to keep up with everything going on. Click through to find out how to enter our Nook giveaway.

The Vmeals team will be firing up the blender and headed to Margaritaville this afternoon to enjoy our last blast of summer.  Hope you have a great Labor Day weekend ahead.

5 Reasons You Don't Have Enough Time

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone told me they wished for more hours in the day. I’ve wished that myself – bemoaning the way the time seems to fly by (unless you're at a 4th grade recorder concert listening to Hot Cross Buns for the gazillionth time…but never mind about that).

My quote queen, Melissa, sent this one to the team this morning:

"Do you procrastinate? Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." ~ H. Jackson Brown Jr.

I remember reading that one a long time ago, and it really made me think. Time is a constant. What changes is our attitude, our language, our choices. When we adopt a poverty mentality, there will never be enough time. So let’s get real here. Here are 5 reasons you probably don’t have enough time:

You don’t know where your time goes.

Sometimes we just don’t realize how much time we spend on certain activities. You know you have to work, eat, sleep. Maybe you go to church or volunteer or have a hobby. Maybe you have kids or take care of aging parents. We all juggle many commitments, but have you ever really mapped out how you spend your time? Do a quick rundown of all the activities and obligations you have in the course of a week and do the math. Is it realistic to think you can squeeze it all in?

You can’t say: No.

Most of us are way over - committed. When you don’t have a realistic picture of how you spend your time, you are likely to keep running up a time debt. Think about it: if you never balanced you bank account, you would likely run into the red -unless, unlike myself, you have unlimited resources. You don’t do you? No, I didn’t think so. Time is like money. When you know how much you have to work with, then you can say no to some things you just can’t afford.

You really are wasting time.
Some of the loudest whiners I know regarding time management woes are the same people that spend an inordinate amount of time complaining, gossiping, over-sharing on Facebook and so on. You know who you are. Cut it out.

You are sabotaging yourself.

If you want to get real, there may be some bad habits you need to address. Do you stay up too late watching TV (a top time-waster)? Do you oversleep, run late, wait ‘til the last minute, fail to prepare, procrastinate, fail to follow up, work in a chaotic, disorganized space? I could go on and on. Something as simple as laying out your clothes the night before and arriving to an appointment 10 minutes early can give you enough margin in your day to completely change your perception of time abundance.

You have forgotten what’s important.

Ever get to the end of a busy day – exhausted - with nothing to show for it? You spend all day putting out fires and managing interruptions and never get to what really matters. Do you know what really matters to you? If you wish you could read more, maybe you need to turn off the TV. If you want to build a stronger family, maybe you need to be intentional about protecting time together. If you want to impress the boss, you may need to make an appointment with yourself for some uninterrupted time to work out that great idea or organize that strategic project.

And one more thing: I’d suggest rethinking what you think is an important priority every so often. For a long time I thought it was really important for me to run a marathon, and yet I was really resenting the time commitment required for training. Once I honestly examined my motivations and realized that this wasn’t really as important to me as I thought, I could release that obligation. Not only did I free up some time, but I freed myself to enjoy the time I was running.

Do any of these strike a chord with you? Have you found ways to restore your perception of having enough time?

What is Really Holding You Back?

[I know I usually like to talk food on Fridays, but I felt a rant coming on. Here it is. I feel better now. Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section.]

She's probably making more than you.

Recently, a friend (my lovely blonde friend) sent me this article that suggested that blondes not only have more fun, but make more money as well. We laughed and thought this would make fun fodder for the blog.

Then a few days later in the Sunday paper, I read an article (in the weddings section) that said women who kept their own last name instead of taking their husband’s name tended to earn more. Hmm. The article didn’t give any explanation why this might be and I wondered how exactly your name could impact your income. Still, I found these seemingly coincidentally related articles more entertaining than anything else.

Then I came across this article that cites a study that concludes childless women are more successful than mothers in the workplace. OK, now I’m just ticked off. I’m a brunette, married mother of three who took my husband’s last name. Is that what’s kept me from being Secretary of State (my childhood dream)? I don’t think so.

While I can certainly see a correlation between certain lifestyle choices that could impact one’s professional choices, I know that our life paths are much more complex then statistical trends might convey. What really has gotten in my craw, however, is that the proliferation of this type of article targets (one might say attacks) the choices women make.

Now to be fair to the guys, the first article I referenced did mention that men would do well to be tall, left-handed and mustachioed. There is also data that suggests men who are married, go to church and drink alcohol (I’m guessing not at the same time), earn more. Ladies, if you want to earn more, you should be pretty, blonde, and drink alcohol – but not too much. Just make sure that doesn't lead to love and marriage and babies.

On the surface these stats are kind of funny, until you realize that they really chip away at a woman’s worth in the workplace as well as in the world. The implication is that we are "falling behind" professionally based on some deeply personal and deliberate decisions.

Shouldn’t we be talking about the education, skills, and experiences that inform a woman’s career choices rather than ascribing outcomes based on hair color or marital status? Shouldn’t we really be talking about why we want what we want, not just how to get more?

What do you think? Is there something holding you back or are you just where you want to be? Do you feel like the choices and tradeoffs you've made have been fair, reasonable, expected?

Ever Wish for an Email Do-over?

In golf they call it a mulligan when your first shot off the tee is a dud and you get to try again.

Have you ever hit “Send” - launching an email into the ether - and immediately wished for an email mulligan? Sometimes you just realize you need to add or correct something and you don’t want to look unprofessional by sending your message out like scatter shot. Our inboxes are clogged enough already.

Sometimes you realize a split second too late that you have sent your email to the wrong recipient. This is rarely a benign snafu – there is almost always some humiliation attached. Have you ever sent a snarky email about your co-worker to that same co-worker? Maybe even your boss or a client?

And sometimes you just never should have committed that thought to electronic perpetuity. My office mates can tell from down the hall when I’m angry typing. It may be cathartic to tap out my frustrations, but then I allow reason and prudence prevail and hit “delete” – almost always.

Well, now there’s good news (for those of us who use Gmail at least): the “Undo”button.

It’s not easy to find, but this Mashable article gives you step by step instructions on how to enable your “Undo” option. Now if Google could just come up an “Undo” button for that last donut I just ate…

Lunch You Can Feel Good About

It’s no surprise that we here at Vmeals are big proponents of online ordering, and normally I would be telling you that Vmeals is the only way to go. However, I have found another place that I really think you ought to try: the Gulf Café.

The Gulf Café isn’t just any old restaurant website where you can order food online for delivery or pick up. The Gulf Café is a virtual café highlighting the best of pretend seafood.

According to their website, nearly a third of America’s seafood comes from Louisiana, and we all know the devastation that the oil spill has visited upon that region. It is an epic ecological, environmental, and economic disaster that Louisiana families can scarcely bear.

The Gulf Café has cleverly found a way to highlight the problem, celebrate the food, and provide a way for us to help. Go to their website, browse the menu, make your selections and pay. Your lunch tab then becomes a tax-deductible contribution to the Greater New Orleans Foundation, an organization that can mobilize help for affected families in the fishing industry.

Instead of lunch, you get that warm fuzzy feeling that comes from contributing something tangible to a community in need. (Of course, if after you visit the Gulf Café you’re still looking for that full belly feeling, you know where to go.)

Some of the sweetest souvenirs of summer are the friends we pick up along the way. Don’t you have vivid memories of those kids you met at camp or while spending the summer with your grandparents? Maybe even a special summer romance?

I have lifelong friends that I only saw one week each summer. Maybe the reason these encounters stand out is because they took place out of the ordinary time, place and routine. They are by definition extraordinary.

As the summer fades we want to stay connected. That’s why we are encouraging all of our customers to “Like” us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter. This way you’ll be the first to know about some pretty fun stuff we have planned for the fall: discounts, deals and giveaways that only our friends will hear about – aaaaand we really just want you to like us.

To sweeten the deal, we’re even offering VCAP points for our friends that post to our Facebook page or RT our Tweets (if you don’t know what that means, then you probably won’t be doing it). So let's keep the conversation going, shall we?

Monday Motivation-Still Weighing Your Options?

"Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome."

Planning, developing strategy, thinking things through, learning from experience – all these things are good and right and important – but not everything can be planned and accounted for ahead of time. There is a reason we admire the risk takers and innovators. Someone has to be first; someone has to be brave and try new things so the rest of us can see and know what is possible.

Even if you aren’t blazing a new path for the rest of the world, you may need a little courage to try something new for yourself. Most of us are concrete learners, which is just another way of saying we learn the hard way – through failure. That’s OK. Just remember that it is action that propels us forward, not perfection.