My New Book Is Here

My third book is live today, Waiter, There's an Elephant on My Plate: How to Do Big Things One Bite at a Time. It's available now on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited.

For years, people have asked me some version of the same question. How do you do it all? I teach college courses, I write, I'm finishing a doctoral program, I run a financial planning practice, and I still make time for the people in my life. For a long time my answer was vague, something about staying busy or not sleeping much, and the conversation would move on before I ever gave a real answer. This book is me finally sitting down and working out what my daily processes really looked like and how I approached getting things done.

The answers turned out to be simpler than I expected and harder than they sounds. I do one thing at a time. That sounds almost too plain to be useful, and on its own it is, there's a lot of nuance underneath it. The real work isn't a scheduling trick or a system with color-coded calendars, it's identity. Before anyone can manage their time well, they have to understand what they're actually working toward and why, because no amount of organizing fixes a life built on the wrong foundation.

That's why the book is built in two parts. The first half is about identity, understanding where your energy goes, what you let influence you, and what you practice without meaning to. The second half moves into the daily execution, the habits and principles that let a person move through a genuinely full week without losing themselves in it.

I wrote this book for anyone trying to hold a lot at once. A mid-career professional advancing their education while working full time. Someone building a business on the side without walking away from the job that pays the bills. A parent trying to show up fully at work and at home in the same day. If that's you, I wrote this with you in mind.

I dedicated this book to my grandmother Ozella (Oz), who raised me and gave me the understanding that worry doesn't fix a damn thing, and feeling sorry for yourself is a waste of time. Both of those conditions are huge time thieves. If this book helps even one person find an hour in their week they didn't know they had, or see an hour they were already spending in a new way, it did what I hoped it would do.

Thank you to everyone who has followed along while I worked on this one. I hope you find something in it you can use.

Jay Sexton is a finance instructor, doctoral candidate in Personal Financial Planning, and owner of Sexton Finance. He writes about the behavioral and emotional dimensions of financial decision-making at sextonfinance.com.