Episode 1228: Time and Confidence

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,228 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. I'm

[00:00:07] John Jarman: John Jarman, and I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the knowledge that you are redeemed by God is the.

[00:00:22] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to inspired stewardship podcasts with my friend Scott Mayard.

[00:00:30] Scott Maderer: And being able to say no with confidence is a confidence skill. And by the same token, obviously as we are more productive, and remember, productivity here is not about getting more things done. It's about getting more of the right things done. Again, confidence helps us understand and focus on what are the right things to get done as well.

[00:00:54] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If [00:01:00] 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 callout in the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, who will learn to invest in your.

[00:01:13] Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:20] In today's episode about developing your influence by stewarding your time, I talk with you about how confidence and time management and productivity can all be connected. I share how you can either feed into this loop in a positive or in a negative way, and I share some specific tips that can help you build your confidence in.

[00:01:41] as we talk about stewarding your time. Wouldn't it be great if you could support this podcast and do it without just taking too long? Turns out you can't. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon, and a small commission will come back to support the show.

[00:01:59] Just [00:02:00] that quick. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/. , we all know that. Managing our time, managing our schedule, paying attention to these things seems to be something that's important. Successful people seem to do that, and yet this is an area that many of us struggle in all of the time.

[00:02:25] If you think about it, if you're somebody who's on top of things, in control of your schedule, knows how much you can do and how long it takes you to do it, you tend to be an employee or a business owner that others can depend on. If you understand the idea that there's going to be things that happen in your day that are unpredictable, but there's things that you can do to control some of that unpredictability and control your reaction to it, you tend to be more success.

[00:02:53] and yet we don't always think about the fact that is related to our [00:03:00] confidence and how we come across to other people. Think about it. If you know somebody who seems to always be in control of their time, they seem to be on top of what's going on. They seem to not be just reacting, but able to plan and act in a proactive way and be ahead of the curve on.

[00:03:20] You automatically perceive them as more capable and more confident and what's more, They probably actually feel more confidence because they know what they can do to get the things done that they need to get done. They feel confident and comfortable that they can. Check things off their list and get things done successfully in a productive way because they've got more understanding of the future and a plan and are able to live more proactively.

[00:03:50] They feel more confidence as well. So if that's true, then there has to be a link between our productivity, our time [00:04:00] management skills, and our confidence. And I would argue there is, and like many other things, it's a feedback loop where in any one of these areas, as you get better in it, it feeds into the other areas as.

[00:04:14] It's a fact that time management is important for our ability to develop ourselves, to master ourselves, to be able to have a sense of purpose and self development, and to be able to crucially be able to do the things that we need to be able to do, and even to have the ability to make decisions around what we should do and what we shouldn't.

[00:04:38] By the same token, having confidence in ourselves lets us have that ability. One worry that we often have around our time management is in our inability to say no to things, and being able to say no with confidence is a confidence skill. And by the same token, obviously, as we are [00:05:00] more productive, and remember, productivity here is not about getting more things done, it's about getting more of the right things.

[00:05:06] Again, confidence helps us understand and focus on what are the right things to get done as well. So all three of these lead to each other. Confidence leads to more ability to manage our time, which then leads to being more productive, which leads to more confidence and in any other connection that you wanna make.

[00:05:26] These three things are connected to each other in a feedback. And you can either feed into this loop positively or negatively. If you look at how you're doing things and you begin to get less confident, then you're going to be less productive and have less control over your time. By the same token, if you allow yourself to have less control over your time, you begin to feel less confident, which leads to less productivity.

[00:05:54] So it can be a positive loop or a negative loop, and we'll unpack some of that as we talk about [00:06:00] things today. . Guess the truth is, if you wanna get better at this, if you wanna build your confidence by building your time management skills, then you have to look at what you're doing now. You have to look at your productivity now.

[00:06:13] So here's some things that you can do, some positive things that you can actually do. One, I've talked about this before on the show, doing a time. Taking something like a 15 minute miracle where you're sitting down with a sheet of paper that's divided into increments of 15 or 30 minutes, and you have a little timer that goes off after your 30 minutes, and you simply jot down what you've been doing during that half hour.

[00:06:35] You do that for a couple of days and you begin to get an idea of where you're actually spending your time. The second thing you can do, Spend some time planning ahead. Actually spend 15 or 20 minutes at the beginning of the day planning out what you're going to do during the day. Do the same thing for the week.

[00:06:54] Do the same thing for the month. Spend some time looking ahead and thinking about [00:07:00] what you want to do with your time. This includes taking some time to set your goals and task and try to get some estimates around your time in those areas. How long do you think it will take you? But then also build some buffer time around that.

[00:07:20] Build some time into your day for unplanned work. If you've ever managed to get through a day without something coming up that changed your plan, I wanna know who you are, because I've never known anyone that has that happen. We always have unplanned stuff that comes up, and because of that, we might as well just acknowledge that and build some buffer time into our day for that unplanned.

[00:07:44] And by the same token, we need to identify what on our goal and task lists are the things that we wanna keep and what are the things that we want to get rid of. Because the truth is that we probably have a bunch of stuff cluttering our task lists, that the reality is the best thing we [00:08:00] can do with it is simply saying, No, I'm not gonna keep this list on my anymore.

[00:08:04] I'm not gonna get it done. I'm just gonna ignore it. It's not important after all. It's not something that I. Or need to spend time on and getting rid of those things from your calendar and from your task list is important as well. And the last thing, As you can go in and you can identify the things that you've done that are partially done, that are half done, the things that are floating around out there and decide are these things that you need to del eliminate or you need to go ahead and just knock 'em out and finish.

[00:08:36] And I've actually sometimes had people set aside a whole day for just finishing a bunch of little tasks that have been floating around and taking a bandwidth for a long time. Sometimes they're as simple as hanging up a picture on the wall, but it's just been sitting there as an open loop. For the, for a long time.

[00:08:53] And by spending a day closing a bunch of those loops, it frees up a lot of your energy around [00:09:00] confidence in your time. Now, there's a lot more you can do as you begin to move forward, but this is a place to start as you build your confidence. Thanks for listening.

[00:09:10] 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. If you like this episode on the Stewardship of Time, be sure to sign up for our stewardship of Time tips series by going to inspired stewardship.com/time, or texting 4 4 2 2 2 time tips and that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time.

[00:09:52] Until next time, invest your. Your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence [00:10:00] and impact the world.