Episode 1023: Redirect the Time You Already Have

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1023 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:07] Caroline Boudreau: I'm Caroline Boudreaux. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasure to live out your calling. Having the ability to impact the lives of children is key.

[00:00:24] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.

[00:00:31] Scott Maderer: it's one of the reasons why I always tell folks there's always more than two options. Say I either have enough time or I don't, I either have enough money or I don't, everything is black and white. Yes. Or no, a dichotomy, but the truth is there's always more than two possibilities. There's always more than two options.

[00:00:53] There's always more than two ways of looking at any situation. [00:01:00] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:01:16] We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:25] And today's episode about investing in others by stewarding your time. I talk with you about why you likely have more time than you did. I share why you need to evaluate and redirect the time you already have before you say you don't have enough time. And I also share why most of us avoid doing this as we talk about stewarding your time.

[00:01:48] Wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without just taking too long, it turns out. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. [00:02:00] When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show. Just that quick. If you enjoy the show, when you are ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/.

[00:02:14] I've been working with a client for a while on their money habits, and we'd been making progress on it and things were going real well. And they asked, could we also work a little bit on my time? And I said, absolutely, we can do that. I work in productivity as well. Where are you struggling? And the answer that came is I simply don't have enough time.

[00:02:40] And I think we've all said that at one point or another, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time to do all of the things that I want to do or need to do. And yet I pointed out to him. You probably have more time. Then you think, and the first activity we did is I asked him to keep a [00:03:00] time log where he actually set a timer on his watch and did the thing that I've talked about before, of every 30 minutes or so it went off and he made some notes about what he'd been doing in that last half hour.

[00:03:12] And he did that for a week. And what was interesting is two things happened. One, he said immediately, he began to recognize that he was spending time doing things that weren't really getting him what he wanted, that weren't really giving him any sort of direction or pay off. But instead were time-wasting activities that he really wanted to eliminate.

[00:03:35] And two, he actually began to do less of those things, even by the second day. Because the funny thing was, he said I know I'm going to have to send this time, log over to Scott and that accountability to himself, seeing it in front of him in black and white and the accountability of sending it to me as his coach made him start to modify his behavior.

[00:03:59] He said it would have been [00:04:00] interesting to have had a camera from the week before and then compare it because he already started making changes before he'd captured all of the results. And I said, yeah, that's very normal actually, because the truth is to begin to get more time. You usually need to evaluate and redirect the time you already have.

[00:04:22] Remember, we all have the same amount of time. We all have 24 hours in a day. We all have 168 hours in a week. That's a fact. It is the ultimate finite resource because you can't really make more of it. Yes. You can get more efficient with the time that you use. Yes, you can eliminate certain things you're doing.

[00:04:46] Yes. You can even scale your time by hiring or paying or delegating or finding ways to automate things and put things being done in ways that don't cost your time. But the truth is at the end of the [00:05:00] day, you still have a finite amount of time each and every day. It is the ultimate equalizer. The ultimate finite resource.

[00:05:11] And because of that, it's really less about having more or less time and more about what do you prioritize? Where do you put your focus and redirecting the time you have to gain more of what you want, more value, more results, more efficiency, more whatever. And yet most of us. Don't ever go through this kind of exercise.

[00:05:42] Even my client initially was like, why should I do this? I already know how I spend my time. I go to work. I work on my side hustle. I spend time with my family. I know what I already spend my time. But the truth is you probably really don't know [00:06:00] what you already spend your time on.

[00:06:02] Most of us avoid doing it because we believe we already know this. And because we believe it, it becomes true. We create truth out of our reality perception is reality. If you believe you have no time, then you're right. You have no time. If you believe that you can be more efficient or more effective or develop other ways of doing it, then all of a sudden you will find other ways of doing it.

[00:06:38] It's one of the reasons why I always tell folks there's always more than two options. We tend to say, I either have enough time, or I don't know. I either have enough money or I don't, everything is black and white. Yes. Or no, a dichotomy, but the truth is there's always more than two possibilities. There's always more than two options.

[00:06:59] There's [00:07:00] always more than two ways of looking at any situation. But we often lose track of that. It's the same reason we avoid doing that because we're avoiding looking at the truth of our time because often that feels uncomfort. That feels difficult. It even sometimes I've had folks say it's a waste of time to keep the time log, but it's actually not.

[00:07:28] If that little bit of time you spend doing that gives you huge gains on the other end, people will even say it's a waste of time to take an email and move it over to a task to review it at a set time. But w I could I can just review it right now, but it's going to take me 30 minutes to do that.

[00:07:50] And what's more during that you end up checking other emails and spending other time. And before you know it, two hours have gone by, and you actually haven't been working on what [00:08:00] was supposed to be done in that time, but you don't recognize these things until you evaluate. The time that you already have, and then once you've evaluated it, you actually have to review and reflect is the way you're spending your time, getting you what you want.

[00:08:16] And if the answer is no, what are you going to do differently? How are you going to change where you use your time? What are you going to eliminate? What are you going to say? No. What are you going to restructure and do in a way that perhaps is more efficient and more effective? How are you going to work through what you're already doing so that you do it in a way that gets you closer to where you really want to.

[00:08:47] If you don't redirect the time you already have, you're always going to be saying I don't have enough time. The truth is it's not about how much time you have it's about where do you put the [00:09:00] time that you have, where are your priority times? Where are the times that you're setting aside to do the things that are actually important?

[00:09:11] And the truth is if you're never doing that evaluation review, reflect and redirect kind of exercise with your time, then you're trapped in all ways, not having enough time because you don't spend the time. You have the right way. Thanks for listening.

[00:09:33] Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of time, be sure to sign. For our stewardship of time tips series by going to [00:10:00] inspired stewardship.com/time or texting 4 4, 2, 2, 2 time tips.

[00:10:11] And that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time until next time. Invest your time. Your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact the world.