00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 743 of the inspired stewardship podcast. Hi, I'm Ella Hawkins, author of cracking the leadership code. 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 lead well is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this,
00:00:31 the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader, Just identifying the work, but identifying the why behind the work and in doing that and doing that, you end up really viewing time. The way it should be viewed as the resource that you spend, but you spend it like it's gold. You spend it on the most efficient, effective, and important things,
00:01:06 and you don't waste it on the things that don't matter. 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 in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself,
00:01:29 invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And today's episode about investing in others. By stewarding your time. I talk with you about why, how we view our time is as important as how that time actually passes. I share why all too often, we think about time wrong and why even though time is finite. Our view of it.
00:01:56 Doesn't have to be 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. Just that quick.
00:02:18 If you enjoy the show, when you are ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. One of those things about how we use our time and utilize it is oftentimes it has more to do with how we view it than just how much time we have, or sometimes even what we do in the time we have is affected by how we view it.
00:02:45 Let me give you an example. Have you ever had one of those days where you maybe didn't have any deadlines, you didn't have anything scheduled, you didn't have anything on your calendar. It was a wide open day and you thought to yourself, Oh, use this as a day to get a lot of things done. I'll I'll really clean up some messes and I'll,
00:03:03 I'll work on a whole bunch of things. I'll, I'll clean out a bunch of projects. And then you find yourself, you get up a little bit later than normal because you know, after all, you didn't have to set your alarm and you needed some rest and that's fine, but then it takes you a little while to kind of get started for the day and you kind of wander through.
00:03:22 And eventually you sit down to get started and you begin on one project, but find that that's not really interesting, or you're not making much progress. So you shift to another project and then another, and then it's time to take a break and eat lunch. And before you know it, you get to dinner time and you've gotten absolutely nothing done. And then on other days you,
00:03:44 you get up and maybe you do have those deadlines and you begin to, to work very quickly in the breaks in between them. And you get a lot of things done and you feel really efficient and effective and you feel like this is awesome. I got so much done today. And so you begin to think to yourself, well, it's deadlines. I,
00:04:03 I need deadlines to be able to work. And so you begin to try to establish artificial deadlines that force you to work. Even when you don't have things to do. And you set up your, your willpower and your systems in that way. And pretty soon you've decided that you work well under pressure. And so you put things off and wait till the last minute and tend to overfill your calendar with too many commitments and too much to do.
00:04:29 And the truth is the real problem. Wasn't the lack of deadlines that one day, the real problem. Wasn't the fact that you thought about that day, or it's not even that you didn't get as much done. It's how you thought about it. First off, when you got up that morning, you thought, because I don't have any deadlines. I have no time pressure.
00:04:51 There's nothing artificial. That's pushing me to get certain things done. And therefore it's easy to put them off. You thought about that and unconsciously, you did acted it out. The reason that so many of us think we work effectively with deadlines is because those deadlines actually force us to get things done. But here's, what's interesting. Sometimes when you work under deadlines like that,
00:05:16 you get a lot done. But then if you look back on it, you find out that what you spent all your time doing was busy work instead of work, that really moved the needle instead of deep work, that effectively cause you to do something big and it all comes back to how you're viewing it and what you're looking at. It, it isn't how much time passed or even how many things you accomplish in that time.
00:05:42 It's are you accomplishing the right things? See, we often think about time and one breath as if we have all the time in the world. And then in the next breath will say, we have no time at all. Obviously time is finite is it's a finite resource. And in fact, in some ways it's the most finite resource on the planet.
00:06:05 Because if you've use time a certain way, you can't go back and create more time. Even if you waste money or waste other finite resources, you still many times can recover them are, go back and reverse it or do something else that generates that resource again. But in the case of time, you really can only multiply time by scaling it, or by creating more efficiencies or getting others to do things.
00:06:35 And this sort of thing, you, you can't directly scale the time you have. So it's absolutely one of the most finite resources on the planet. But it's funny because in one breath we know that we acknowledge that, but then we fill that time with stuff that is unimportant stuff that we really don't care about. Stuff that doesn't move the needle. I'm in the midst right now of doing a review of all of the different things that I've been spending time on over the last year.
00:07:06 And I'm doing it with the intent of eliminating certain things. I'm doing it with the idea that I'm going to cut some things out of my life, that the result of this is not going to be discovering more things that I need to do. But instead discovering that there's less things that I need to do. And this is one of those activities that I strongly suggest people go through because the truth is the way we view our time.
00:07:35 As infinite, we've got plenty of time is important and it's good. Yes, you should say to yourself, I've got plenty of time, but you need to finish the sentence this way. I've got plenty of time to do the things that are the most important to me, but only eliminate and say no and guard that time so that I don't fill it up with the things that don't really matter in that way.
00:08:04 What's interesting is if you're really focusing on doing the things that you really want to do, you'll get up on one of those days where you have nothing on your schedule. And one of two things is going to happen. Either. You decide, you know what? Today is a day that I am going to use for rest. It's going to be a Sabbath day.
00:08:22 It's going to be a day of recovery. I am going to, without guilt, without anger, enjoy my day. I'm going to spend time with my family. I'm going to spend time in nature. I'm going to spend time relaxing, whatever it is. And you're going to be able to do that without guilt and without worry or alternatively, if it is a day that you need to get things done,
00:08:44 what you'll do is you'll get up in the morning and you'll find those things that are the most important things to get done. The things that jazz you up, the things that increase energy and make you feel like you really made a difference and built something and done something that's effective and exciting. What's interesting is sometimes that effective and exciting stuff can even be work that you don't really enjoy doing,
00:09:10 but it's work that you've determined as important. And you've done the hard work of not just identifying the work, but identifying the why behind the work and in doing that and doing that, you end up really viewing time. The way it should be viewed as the resource that you spend, but you spend it like it's gold. You spend it on the most efficient,
00:09:35 effective, and important things, and you don't waste it on the things that don't matter. 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. If you liked this episode on the stewardship of talent,
00:10:08 you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent. Or if you're in the us, you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips. That's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures,
00:10:36 develop your influence and impact the world..