00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 733 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Heather hymen from sweet tea, social marketing. 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 treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to reach others is key. And one way to be inspired to do just that is to listen to this,
00:00:31 the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader, To make sure that your business continues to function. If you have a family, there are certain things that you have to do. Sometimes those things are doing laundry. Sometimes those things are doing something like building a relationship with a dear friend. It doesn't matter whether it's the sort of thing that you have to do.
00:01:00 That's just sort of around your time. But the truth is what you can do is you can choose when 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 call in the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:26 We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. Today's episode about impacting the world by stewarding your time. I talk with you about why you probably don't really know how you use your time and what you can do about it. I share why busy and productive do not mean the same thing and why you have both discretionary and mandatory time,
00:01:58 but often sort of confused, which is which 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, it turns out you can. 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, we'll come back to support the show.
00:02:21 Just that quick. If you enjoy the show, when you are ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. No, the truth is most of us have no idea how we spend our time during the day. I mean, yeah, we've got vague ideas of, we, we spend a certain amount doing this or doing that, or we work on this and we work on that,
00:02:46 but we really have a terrible time knowing exactly how we spend our time. The truth is we don't really have a clue of how we spend our, because we don't actually track it. And our minds are actually really bad at estimating time, really? And truly they are. If you don't believe me, try this experiment, simply start a timer on your clock,
00:03:12 on your watch. And don't look at it, put it to one side where you can't see it and try to reach over and stop it. Or look at it after exactly three minutes of past or five minutes or seven minutes without looking at a clock, we have a really hard time of knowing how much time has passed. And so almost inevitably people will tell me things like I don't do very much of this.
00:03:39 I don't check social media that often during the day, I don't spend that long on email. I don't watch that much TV, whatever it is. They'll talk about how they don't spend very much time doing that. And yet when we investigate, when we pull into it, when we really look at what we do, they do spend more time than they ever thought possible doing that thing,
00:04:02 because the truth is in less, you've tracked your time. You don't know how you spend it and you don't have to track it every day and you don't have to track it down to the last iota of the second. But the truth is if you'll do an exercise, like what I call the 15 minute miracle, which is simply taking a sheet of paper,
00:04:22 dividing it into 15, 20, 30 minute increments, whatever it is for you. A lot of times, I like to do 30. Sometimes I'll do 15. It depends on how much detail we want to know. And then set a timer that goes off every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes, whatever increment you're using and jot down on that piece of paper.
00:04:42 Exactly what you did during that 30 minutes or that 15 minutes. What did you spend that time doing roughly? You don't have to again, do every single detail down to the most infant testimony point. But if you spent most of that 15 minutes checking social media, jot down social media. If you spent most of that, 15 or 30 minutes doing something else,
00:05:06 jot down what you were doing. And if you'll do that for a couple of days or a week, you'll have a really good snapshot of how you actually spend your time. And the first step to making any change is awareness. It's knowledge. It's having a measure of what your baseline is because without that, you can't identify what the real problems are.
00:05:30 And so you end up spinning your wheels. You end up spending time, just doing things and not knowing what it is that you do because the truth is the problem is almost all of us. Nowadays are incredibly busy. We spend our days doing lots. It's not like you're sitting around 16 hours a day, just vegging doing nothing. You spend your time running from item to item,
00:05:57 emergency, to emergency, putting out fires all day long, playing whack-a-mole, whatever term you use for your time. You're really busy. But the problem is busy. Doesn't mean productive. They don't mean the same thing. Getting a lot done is not the same as getting the right things done. And all too often, we let getting a lot done getting in the way of getting the right things done because we're so busy being busy.
00:06:28 We never stop and ask, are we being productive? Are we saying no to certain things so that we have the time to say yes to the things that are most important to us? And if we're not, well, then the problem isn't that you don't have enough time. The problem is that you're spending your time all wrong. And when you do that day after day,
00:06:51 week after week, all it does is lead to frustration. It leads to exhaustion. It leads to burnout because the truth is being busy is one of the fastest ways to lose all emphasis on really getting what you want done, done, and getting yourself exhausted and burned out and feeling like all you do is beat your head against the wall and run from fire to fire and never really make any progress.
00:07:19 See, the truth is one of my pet peeves is the expression I had to. And whether that's with your money, I had to spend my money this way. I had no choice or whether it's with your time. I had to do that. I hate that term because the truth is you always have a choice. The truth is even if someone held a gun to your head and said,
00:07:39 if you don't do this, I'm going to shoot you. You still have a choice. You always have a choice. And I believe that we try to make the best choice we can at the time we have with the information we have. But all too often, what happens with time is because you don't actually consciously think about it because you have no insight into how you spend your time.
00:08:00 You end up just reacting. You say yes to everything. And because of that, you end up saying no to the most important things. The truth is you have some level of time, always that is quote mandatory and some amount that is discretionary. The truth is you always have some time where you have more freedom than you believe. And then there are some things that actually are sort of mandatory things.
00:08:29 You know, the things that you have to do, you have to eat. Now, you may not have to eat three meals a day and you may not have to eat so much or so little, but you have to eat. You have to drink water. These things are mandatory. You have to do them to survive. And the truth is,
00:08:47 if you have a business, there are certain things that you have to do to make sure that your business continues to function. If you have a family, there are certain things that have to do. Sometimes those things are doing laundry. Sometimes those things are doing something like building a relationship with a dear friend. It doesn't matter whether it's the sort of thing that you have to do.
00:09:06 That's just sort of around your time. But the truth is what you can do is you can choose when to do those things that you have to do. You can choose to put off laundry today so that you have that time to do something that's more important. You can choose how you spend that time. And then there's a ton of time. That's actually discretionary.
00:09:30 You have much more control than you may believe over how you spend that time. You have the ability to say yes or say no to a lot more than you give yourself credit for. And that's where doing that exercise like the 15 minute miracle or the 30 minute miracle and identifying how you're spending your time and looking at those patterns can be so powerful because as you gain insight,
00:09:54 you'll recognize the things that you want to be able to say no to so that you can say yes to what's most important. Thanks for listening. 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.
00:10:29 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 until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world..