Dealing with your inner critic

And the 2-minute time management Excel trick

April 27, 2023

Hey hey! Hope you’re having an amazing end to April and tax season wasn’t too painful. I just found out that in some EU countries, such as Spain and Sweden, the government does citizens’ taxes for them. Can you imagine?! Moving to Mallorca as we speak (jk).

P.S. From today until April 29th, I’m hosting free Excel & AI tools training, so you can leverage resources such as ChatGPT to be more productive! If that sounds right up your alley, you can register right here. 😎

You After Learning This 2-Minute Time Management Trick

Ready to test your time management skills? 🤓

Let’s say you head into the office and spend 2 hours in a morning all-hands meeting. Later, you spend 35 minutes in a meeting with HR, then another 55 minutes meeting with your boss.

How many hours did you spend in meetings?

If your instinct is to manually turn the two hours into 120 minutes, then add those minutes with the afternoon meetings, then convert back to hours—let me show you an Excel formula that can simplify this whole thing. 😅

This formula is applicable to other useful scenarios:

⏰ Managing a project. Adding the start and end times for each task tells you how much total time you spent on the project (this is great for freelancers who need to know if they’re charging the correct amount).

💻 Adjusting work schedules. Calling all my managers and HR professionals! If you’re in charge of scheduling, adding time in Excel ensures shifts are properly staffed and employees are clocking in the right number of hours.

✍️ Handling personal time management. Excel can calculate how much time you’re spending on your own tasks. For example, you can see how many hours a week you’re really spending in meetings (the answer might scare you 🙃).

Let’s say you’re planning for a Monday event agenda and want to calculate end times. Here’s how we’d do it in four easy steps.

Step 1) Select your start time. In our case, we’ll go to =B3. Then, add the TIME function. Our formula is now =B3+TIME(

Step 2) Then, add “0” for hours (since your duration is 30 minutes and it didn’t go up to an hour) followed by a comma, which makes our formula =B3+TIME(0,

Step 3) Select the cell with your minutes to be added. In our case, that’s C3! Our formula is now =B3+TIME(0,C3

Step 4) Lastly, add a comma and a 0 for seconds as we don’t have any seconds to calculate. Close out your equation and click and drag to apply it to all! Now, our final formula is =B3+TIME(0,C3,0)

And voilá! You’re now the time management expert of the office. 🤓

How to Deal With Self-Criticism

If you had to guess, how many thoughts do you have a day?

A couple hundred? 2,000? Nope—according to a 2020 study published in Nature, it’s more like 6,000. 🤯

Out of those 6,000 thoughts, you probably deal with some not-so-nice ones. And we tend to place more emphasis on these thoughts due to negativity bias, that pesky phenomenon that makes us more likely to remember the bad than the good.

So, what can you do when you get negative thoughts such as…

“Why post on social media when everyone will make fun of me?”

“I shouldn’t go out tonight because no one wants me there anyways.”

“I’m not good enough at my job, and my boss was lying when she complimented me.”

Let’s stop right there. ✋ As someone who grew up with a pretty serious anxiety disorder, I’m no stranger to negative thoughts. But after some inner healing, I’ve managed to reprogram my process of what happens when self-criticism arises.

Here’s my three-step rationale:

1. Realize those thoughts aren’t always yours. The most influential programming of the subconscious mind begins from age 0 to 6, according to Dr. Bruce Lipton. During this time, we can download limiting beliefs that materialize years in the future. If a discrediting belief such as “I can’t do that,” pops up, it might be your conditioning (and not reality).

2. Create space. When a negative thought arises, I reframe it from “I am” to “I feel” to change it from a permanent state of being to a temporary experience. So, “I’m anxious” turns into “I’m feeling anxious right now.” This allows me to be realistic about setbacks or negative feelings—they’re fleeting and the right mindset can will them away.

3. The Paper Shredder technique. Envision your thought written on a piece of paper. Then, visualize yourself sending that piece of paper straight through the shredder. This stops the thought in its tracks instead of allowing it to take you down a rabbit hole.

These techniques might seem tedious, but they’re a great way to mitigate those 6,000 thoughts so we can take care of them—instead of them taking care of us.

  • My meditation group is having a free webinar this Sunday, April 30th! We’ll be going over three meditation techniques to help you relax, reduce stress, and boost focus. Hope to see you there!

  • Are you sharing your screen in PowerPoint the right way?

  • Here’s a free Excel plugin that lets you prompt ChatGPT with cells as variables in your prompt. 🤩

  • Are you free on May 22-25? Alteryx’s analytics event, Inspire, is taking place in Las Vegas complete with killer keynote sessions for all analytics enthusiasts or experts. Sign up today!*

  • I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: spending free time is the best way to recharge your creative battery!

  • Have the perfect picture for a headshot but your outfit isn’t office appropriate? Canva’s AI can help edit it into the perfect pic for LinkedIn!

*This is sponsored advertising content.

If you’re planning on jet setting anytime soon, the best way to cure your jet lag is to get a ton of sunlight in the morning. This will help reset your circadian rhythm way faster than a nap in your dim hotel room in the middle of the day (your girl has been there).

Hope this helps! ✈️

Stay Exceling,

Kat