00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 623 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm with st Clemons, motivational speaker and limitation breaker. I challenge you to invest yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world using your time, the talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to recognize your limitations or an illusion and develop resilience is key and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardships called podcast with my friend Scott Mader.
00:00:43 And what you do is you do that for three or four days and then look back at it and look for patterns. Look for the things that you're doing that are shallow work, that their work that is, it's busy work, it's important work, but it isn't really moving the needle. Look for things that you're doing that are deep work that generate ideas and income and motion.
00:01:02 Look for the things that you're doing that are complete waste of time. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. 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 and the inspired stewardship podcast will learn to invest in yourself,
00:01:26 invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world Today's episode about investing in others by stewarding your time. I talk with you about the difference between time planning and time tracking. I share why both are important, but they are fundamentally different things and I give you some tips to do both without actually wasting a bunch of time as we talk about stewarding your time.
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00:02:21 just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon it sounds funny to talk about the difference between planning and tracking and talk about why it's important to know the difference and understand these, especially when we're talking about our use of time. You know the real truth is most of the time people think they do a pretty good job of planning how they're going to use their time and I think most people think they've got a pretty good feel for how they actually use it.
00:02:52 And yet what's interesting is time after time when I've challenged people on that and had them actually do some exercises, help them really dial in on how they're actually using their time. They usually end up being dramatically shocked. They see a ton of things that they're doing with their time that were completely unaware of, they were blind to before because the truth is there's a difference between planning and tracking and they're both important.
00:03:22 You know, at the, at the end of the day. There's an interesting thing when when we plan our use of time, when we look forward into the future and think about this is what I want to do with my time today, these are the things on my task list. I've got a meeting at two o'clock and I've got this call and I've got this thing to do and here's some empty time and I'm going to put these tasks into that time.
00:03:48 One of the things that often happens when we block off our time like that is we end up oftentimes squirreling away and wasting a certain amount of that time. You know, you, you scroll through Facebook for a certain amount of time and before you know it three minutes turns into 30 minutes. I don't know if that's ever happened to you, but I know it's happened to me.
00:04:09 You know, sometimes we'll plan out our time and then an emergency will come up. That actually happened to me today where I've had like three or four emergencies come up in the afternoon. So this block of time that I originally planned for something I needed to pivot and use it for something else because I determined that that emergency, that thing that came up was both more important and more urgent than what I had originally planned my time for,
00:04:39 but I did actually think about it because see, the truth is I had a plan for my time and I needed to pivot and adjust it. That's part of what tracking is for tracking is looking backwards. What happened? Planning is looking forward, what do I want to happen, and the two are important because with that information, you become begin to reflect and refine and change your activities,
00:05:07 your mindset, your behavior, your habits, and improve over time. There's really two processes and one mental step here. There's the need for the process and a way of planning. There's a need for the process and the way of tracking and then there's a mental step of actually reflecting on these and making adjustments over time. They're both important because the tracking gives you the information so that you can make changes and refine things.
00:05:40 The planning is important because even on a day when everything goes crazy, having a plan gives you a target to pull back to. It always gives you something to move back towards. It gives you a norm or an attempt. You have to have a certain amount of grace about the fact that sometimes things are gonna go wrong and you're just not going to get everything done that you wanted to get done.
00:06:03 And that's okay. But using that process of planning and tracking, you can begin to reflect over time. And what's interesting is you'll begin to notice patterns. You'll begin to notice habits that you have. You'll begin to notice things that distract you and pull you away. And after time, after a while, you begin to notice these things and then you can begin to build actual habits and processes and systems that will allow you to change it.
00:06:33 That's part of what we do when we're working on how we use our time. We use the information from tracking compared against the plan, and then review and reflect. So some simple tips to do this. First off, if you've never tracked your time ever. One of the first activities that I love to do with clients is called the 15 minute miracle.
00:06:53 What you literally do is just take a sheet of paper and divide it down. The left hand side in 15 minute increments and in 15 minutes is just too short for you to do it in 30 minutes. No more than 30 minutes though. Don't do an hour of time block. So you just literally put, you know, five 15 five 35 45 six o'clock so on all the way down from whatever time you get up to whatever time you go to bed most nights and then set an alarm on your watch so that every 15 minutes that alarm goes off.
00:07:23 It just gives you a little soft vibrate or beep depending on what kind of device you have. And all you do is jot down two or three things that you did during that last 15 minutes. The kind of bulk of the things you do. You don't try to capture every moment, every activity, every second, but you capture the bulk of what you did.
00:07:40 And that 15 minute block. I mainly spend watching reading Facebook and looking at post or I mainly spend a deepened work on a spreadsheet or whatever. You just capture that and what you do is you do that for three or four days and then look back at it and look for patterns. Look for the things that you're doing that are shallow work, that their work that is,
00:08:00 it's busy work, it's important work, but it isn't really moving the needle. Look for things that you're doing that are deep work that generate ideas and income and motion. Look for the things that you're doing that are complete waste of time and when you begin to look for those patterns, you'll start to notice that there are things that you're doing. You'll even start to see an energy rhythm throughout the day and honestly for tracking your time.
00:08:26 Yeah, there's apps and there's tools and there's all sorts of things, but a simple spreadsheet will work and I actually use the same spreadsheet to both plan and track. It's available in my stewardship of time series that you can sign up for. You'll get a sample spreadsheet, kind of a simple one. It also lets you do weekly planning and kind of look at how you're spending your time in the week or how you plan to spend your time during the week so you can use these tools to simplify it because you don't want to have 72 tools involved in tracking your time.
00:08:55 You want it to be relatively painless because the truth is if it takes you more than five or 10 minutes to actually fill something out and track your time, then that becomes the waste of time. And so the spreadsheet that I use, you can do relatively quickly sign up for those tips if you'd like access to that as well. But by putting this in place,
00:09:15 it begins to let you know what's going on and knowing now I sound like GI Joe knowing's half the battle right now, knowing is the first step towards beginning to change behavior. Now there's a lot of hard work that has to happen afterwards, but knowing is the first step. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast as a subscriber.
00:09:48 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 up for our stewardship of time tips series by going to inspired stewardship.com/time or texting four four two two two time tips and that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time.
00:10:26 Until next time, invest your time, your talent, and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact the world.