00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on Episode 5 48 of the inspired Stewardship podcast. I'm Bob Logic from seed time, and I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent in your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to grow your money like a seed is key to learning God's way of handling money. In one way, to be inspired to do that is to listen to this the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend Scott made her.
00:00:30 I think we're really bad at it will almost always underestimate the time. And it'll take so that the new task that you're doing for the first time I like to use the three x or five X rule, which is just this. You estimate how long it will take you and then you multiply. Bet that by 3 to 534 or five times I tend to do towards five because it usually takes me a lot longer than I thought. 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.
00:01:11 Then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired sturgeon podcast will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the way in today's episode about developing your influence by stewarding your time I talk with you about how bad we are at estimating the time that things take how bad we aren't really knowing what we really spend our time on and a simple trick that you can use to start identifying how you spend your time to free up more time for actually investing in others and developing your influence as we talk about Stuart in your time.
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00:02:30 One reason that people push back against spending the time that it takes to develop their influence. Well, there's a few reasons one of them is.
00:02:39 Oftentimes, people are looking for the magic button or the thing that will cause it to happen instantaneously. And I'll tell you,
00:02:44 I've been looking for years and I don't think any such button exist. But the other is that they just really and truly feel like they have absolutely no time to spend helping other people and doing the things that it takes to build influence.
00:02:59 I mean, they really want to, but they just don't have the time. And let's face it,
00:03:05 we're really busy. In today's world, we run around from thing to thing. We work, we sleep,
00:03:10 we eat, we spend time with our family, and we do all sorts of hobbies and activities, whether it's watching Netflix or whether it's mountain biking and playing soccer.
00:03:21 Running the kids around if you have kids takes a huge amount of time out of your day, and the truth is that most of us are really terrible at estimating the amount of time that something will take us to do.
00:03:34 You know, you sit down at the beginning of the day and you make your to do list. And almost always people put way too many things on their to do list me and pleaded,
00:03:44 and often it's because we look at something. We go that only take five or 10 minutes, and then it ends up taking 40 or 50 minutes.
00:03:51 You know, we're really bad at looking at a task and identifying how long it will take. First off,
00:03:57 if it's a task we've never done before, then we're really bad at. It will almost always underestimate the time that it will take.
00:04:06 So if it's a new task that you're doing for the first time, I like to use the three extra five X rule,
00:04:12 which is just this. You estimate how long it will take you, and then you multiply that by 3 to 534 or five times.
00:04:21 I tend to do towards five because it usually takes me a lot longer than I thought, and over time that that means that you'll give yourself a little bit more time,
00:04:30 a little bit more grace to get those things done. Now, if It is a task that you've done over and over again.
00:04:36 You do it all the time. It's a routine task. You're still likely bad and estimating the time it will take because you've never actually paid attention to it you've never actually tried to track.
00:04:47 How long does it take you to get into your email and clean out your inbox every day? How long does it take you to do other routine tasks that you spend and you do every day?
00:04:57 How long did you spend on your morning routine? How long do you spend getting ready to work? How long do you spend driving to work?
00:05:03 We oftentimes don't even really know how long those things take. And therefore, when we're trying to put them down into our schedule again,
00:05:13 we're bad at estimating the time it takes and it comes down to. We just don't pay attention and really and truly neuro biologically.
00:05:22 Our brains are bad at doing this. This is not a skill that were very good at so. One of the tricks is again that three extra five X rule generally overestimate the amount of time it's going to take you to do something,
00:05:36 but the second piece is actually measuring and paying attention to what you really spend your time on. See.
00:05:45 The truth is that when we sit down and we begin to look at it, we will discover inevitably that a take things have taken us longer than we expected and be.
00:05:55 There are a lot of things that we're spending time on that maybe aren't really getting us what we want.
00:06:01 They aren't the most important things. They aren't the things that we should be doing. Instead, we're just doing them on autopilot.
00:06:08 And so if you need to know how long you really spend on various task, you actually have to set up a system and a process to find out.
00:06:18 And really and truly, it's relatively simple life. I've shared a tool before, and I'll share it again.
00:06:24 It's called The 15 Minute Miracle, and what you do is you set a silent alarm on your phone or on your watch or something where it'll vibrate in every 15 minutes.
00:06:34 You wanted to go off and vibrate the reason we don't use an out loud alarm, and so it doesn't interrupt the people around us.
00:06:40 But when that vibrates you on a sheet of paper or in a spreadsheet, something that's easy toe access.
00:06:46 Jot down real quick two or three words about what you were doing for the last 15 minutes. Check Facebook.
00:06:53 Read three e mails. Don't get obsessive about it. You don't to spend a long time on this.
00:06:57 This isn't about writing a 17 paragraph essay about what you did the last 15 minutes. Instead, it's about catching down the two or three most important things.
00:07:07 What did you spend most of the time on during that? 15 minutes. Do that for a day,
00:07:13 or even better, do it for two or three days and then sit down with all of that data and put it into ah spreadsheet or onto a piece of paper and reflect on it.
00:07:24 Pay attention to it. Look for the patterns. Are there repeat task that you've been doing time in and time out?
00:07:29 How long do they take? You are their task that you're doing? That is not a good task for you to do.
00:07:37 Are there things that you're spending your time on? That you want to eliminate and free up more time to do other things.
00:07:44 See, this often happens when people are trying to build a dream business or a side business. They feel like they have no time to do it.
00:07:50 But the truth is, they have time. They're just not using their time wisely. And because of that,
00:07:58 they end up running out of time. So you begin to identify in this 15 minute miracle tool how you're actually spending your time if you then reflect on it,
00:08:09 it allows you to then begin to change that behavior. You can begin to identify the things that you want to eliminate.
00:08:15 You can build new habits. You can begin to more accurately estimate how long various tasks are going to take you.
00:08:22 And as you do all of these things, it allows you to then free up your time to do the things that you really feel called to do so that you can begin to develop your influence.
00:08:36 Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener,
00:08:48 we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen. But act on what you've heard and find a way toe live your calling If you like this episode on the stewardship of time,
00:09:02 be sure to sign up for our stewardship of time tips. Siri's by going to inspired stewardship dot com slash time or texting 44222 time tips and that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time until next time investor time,
00:09:28 your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact world way.