Every single Monday I get to start my week off right by going in and reading story time to my son's kindergarten class and this is a practice that I have called non-negotiable time and I've been preaching this idea of non-negotiable time. And I had been preaching this idea of non-negotiable time

when it comes to business for years now,

for over a decade, because it started

with me practicing non-negotiable time

when I was still in a full-time job as a teacher in

Japan in 2012 and I knew I wanted to start my own business and that the only way I

was going to be able to start my own business is if I consistently showed up at certain times over a long stretch of time.

And so for me it was every Tuesday and Thursday from 4 to 7 PM. I'd come home from my full-time teaching job and

Tuesday and Thursday from four to seven p.m. I worked on a little blog

called Extra Pack of Peanuts and it didn't matter if people were going to go to a movie, if they were going to

act to dinner, if they were having a board game night. If it was 4 to 7 p.m. Tuesday and

Thursday I was sitting on a little red couch in our Japanese apartment working on extra pack of peanuts.

Hence they gave me the name blog boy, but hey it worked out because here we are a decade later.

But it wasn't until recently that are a decade later.

But it wasn't until recently that I realized I actually had to start building a non-negotiable

time in my personal life as well.

And that that non-negotiable time had to be when I wasn't trying to do two or three things at once.

I wasn't trying to multitask.

I wasn't worried about everything else that was going on.

It needed to be a time and a place where I could just be present.

And I was given the opportunity to come into my son's kindergarten class and do story time

with them.

...