Episode 773 Eliminate Intentionally
[00:00:00] Thanks for joining me on episode 773 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Joe Saul-Sehy from the stacking Benjamins podcast. I encourage you to find ways to be inspired, to find financial freedom. And one way I do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend Scott meter.
[00:00:29] own your own business. It doesn't matter whether you work in a corporate environment. It doesn't matter if we're not even talking about business, but talking about our home life. How can you simplify things that you do over and over again? So that you can get more time to spend on the things that are harder, but more important.
[00:00:52] Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the [00:01:00] person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself. Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.
[00:01:24] And today's episode about impacting the world by stewarding your time. I talk with you about why saying yes is also about saying no, I share why you have to intentionally eliminate things from your life. And I also talk about how this is really the way you can progress. As we talk about stewarding your time.
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[00:02:11] You've probably heard the expression that every yes is guarded by a thousand nos. I think the biggest problems that we make when it comes to productivity, when it comes to doing things that are important to us, when it comes to serving out and working in our life and getting the right things done.
[00:02:32] Is that we find it really easy to say yes to things. And I think we find it pretty hard to say no to things, or at least I think most of us do. People ask us to do a favor for them. People ask us to spend some time with them. People ask us to do things all day, every day, and we put things on ourselves.
[00:02:51] There's things we need to do for our business. There are things we need to do around the house. There's chores, there's activities. There's [00:03:00] recreation time. There's literally a million things that you can add to your list each and every day. And it's almost harder to say no than it is to just keep saying yes and adding to your list.
[00:03:15] But the truth is if you keep saying yes, and just adding to your list and adding to your list and adding to your list and adding to your list, you're never going to actually get. The right things done. You're never really going to live out your calling. You're never really going to make an impact. You're never really going to serve the people around you.
[00:03:38]Because you're going to be doing so many things that you're not going to be doing anything with excellence. I've seen it happen time after time. I've seen people who spend all of their time doing the urgent things, the things that are on fire and because of that, they never step back and do the things that are really [00:04:00] important that really build on the future and allow them to make a bigger and bigger impact.
[00:04:08] So saying yes is really about saying yes to the few things that are key and important for you and saying no to literally everything else. And to do that, you have to be very deliberate about eliminating things from your life. This isn't about just Willy ne daily saying no to everything. This is about identifying and targeting and finding the things that you need to eliminate so that you can really spend the time and energy doing not more things, but the most important things.
[00:04:47] This is about looking to make sure that you're in alignment. If you say your family is important to you, are you spending time with your family? If you say that church is important to you, are you spending time in church of your [00:05:00] clients are important to you? Are you spending time making their lives better?
[00:05:06] And if the answer is no, then you need to look at what are you doing instead? Where are you spending your energy? Where are you spending your time? And you have to ruthlessly eliminate things that are keeping you from doing the things that are the most. Important. Yeah. You heard Dan talk on Monday about eliminating about 15% of the stuff he does every single year.
[00:05:32] And by trimming that back and trimming that back, he's always refocusing on what's most important. And you can do this annually. You can do this monthly. You can even do this daily. But the key is to be intentional about doing it. The funny thing is by focusing in, on doing a few things better, you can make more progress that doing a lot of things, [00:06:00] not very well at all, whether this is about narrowing down in a business, whether this is about eliminating some things from your life so that you can spend time with the people that are most important to you.
[00:06:13] Whether this is about maybe letting the laundry go for a day so that you can work on something else. That's a bigger project. That's much more important. And even though the laundry is urgent, it may not be the most important thing. It's about identifying the things that are really going to move the needle for you.
[00:06:32] What are the things that you can invest in today that payoff down the road and more time? Th, this is one of the things I've heard whenever I was in corporate and I was leading a team is people would say that they didn't want to give the task over to the admin. We had an admin that could do certain tasks and they would say I don't want to give it to them because I have to take the time to train them how to do it and how to [00:07:00] do it right.
[00:07:00] And how to do it well and what to check for. And because of that, I might as well go ahead and do it myself. But the funny thing is if you could get, yeah, you get the understanding, get the mindset that if you can identify the things that you could train this person one time, and then they could do this task that you had to do three or four times a week with consistency and with excellence.
[00:07:27] Yes, it would take you two or three times as long, the first couple of times, because you need to check behind them. You need to make sure that they're doing it right. You need to train them. You need to give them feedback. But after that, it would pay off in dividends. At this task, took you an hour and you could outsource it.
[00:07:46] And you were doing it three to five times a week. That's three to five hours every single week, across a month. That was literally. Hundreds of hours, it could add up very, very quickly. [00:08:00] It would be 20 to 30 hours a month. And then across a quarter, and then across a year, very quickly, you could add this up and free up huge amounts of time for you that you could then use to do other things.
[00:08:14] It doesn't matter whether you're a small business person, whether you're. Own your own business. It doesn't matter whether you work in a corporate environment. It doesn't matter if we're not even talking about business, but talking about our home life. How can you simplify things that you do over and over again so that you can get more time to spend on the things that are harder but more important?
[00:08:42] That is why you have to eliminate intentionally. That is why you have to guard every single year. Yes. With a thousand nos. Thanks for listening.
[00:08:59] thanks so [00:09:00] 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 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.
[00:09:42] Until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact the world.