Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The big thing that I struggled with when it came to time was definitely people pleasing. I would really encourage my 31 year old self to feel okay with saying no and creating boundaries and even like creating a to don't list. Just being really clear about where I'm not going to put my time and energy. It makes it so much easier to kindly say no.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Hey there billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire.
Not in money, but in the real measure of wealth, time. That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds. But most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments. The 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive. Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: This is a two part episode. If you want to check out the first part, listen to the previous episode of Time Billionaires. Well, having it open by the holidays is more important than e commerce. For your example. Yeah, but it's easy to say we
[00:01:21] Speaker B: need all of it.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: I need to do all of it and then have 80% of these activities delivering 20 if that percent of the returns. Oftentimes my understanding is it's more like 90 10. Is that so all of this energy and effort going into activities that don't actually move the needle, but you're basically saying no.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Really?
[00:01:40] Speaker C: Can I force this? But I think this is interesting because a question I often get when I'm speaking is, is it better to be over scheduled or underscheduled? And I know that the research shows that rushing is really highly correlated with anxiety and worse outcomes. So how do you think about padding?
Not padding in a way that makes your days perpetually inefficient, but having enough realistic space to not be rushing between things and compromise the outcomes.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think this is so incredibly important to have open space on your calendar, to have transition time in between meetings. You know, I always talk about have like at least a 10 minute buffer. I mean for me the worst thing is jumping from meeting to meeting to meeting with like with no breaks in between.
And so this is why, you know, I think this is actually another reason when we, we talk about like freeing up space and pockets of time on our calendar.
If we're padding things, we're, we're, there's too much time that's blocked out on the calendar right when we're padding.
So I really believe in, in keeping things open as much as possible. I also, you know, one of the parts of. One of my favorite parts of the book is actually the last chapter when I talk about the. This idea that there's like kind of three natural rhythms throughout the day with respect to how we work with time and how under. How understanding those rhythms for yourself are really important. And that the three rhythms are peak performance, creativity, and restorative time. And so peak performance is when you're at your like, highest mental alertness. Like for me, it's like 6 o' clock in the morning, you know, until maybe like 8 or 9. And that's when I'm like doing my writing and I'm doing my strategic planning and like critical thinking. That's the best time for me. And then creativity for me is usually later in the morning, like kind of 10 to 12 is when I love to do team meetings and we're brainstorming and we're talking about marketing and social media and all that kind of stuff. And then my restorative time, like, I know mid afternoon, like around 3 o' clock, is when I just start feeling really depleted and I need a little bit of time to just reset. You know, it might be just, I don't know, having a cup of coffee or going for a walk or what, whatever it is. But understanding what those three rhythms are for you and then making sure that like, you have that time blocked for each of those things is. And then filling in around those three time blocks with, you know, other tasks and administrative stuff and meetings and. But it. But that to me, like, really understanding how you work with time and those rhythms is really critical.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: It's so critical. And I think this resonates so deeply with me personally. I'll start with a macro of obviously, right? For most of human history, we worked in sync with the cycles of the seasons and the days and hour rhythms. The idea that we had 24 equally measured, equally spaced, standardized units of an hour was an Industrial Revolution concept. So the expectation that you could be as productive with the exact same quantifiably measurable output at 3pm on a Saturday as 6am for you on a Monday is at odds with our biology. But this took me a really long time to learn. Really long time. And I mean, Honestly, probably like 12 years of working to feel like I just needed to work harder. In the afternoon, I hit that slump. I need more coffee. Maybe I just need to do some Push ups. Really feeling like there was some personal failure that I just couldn't write the new email campaigns at 3pm that's my admin type.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: That's right for myself.
[00:05:41] Speaker C: But it really, it was a slog and it made my whole the rest of the day less efficient. It didn't work well. Right. Something that could take me in a burst of peak creative time. For me it was more like 9 to 11am I could do that in 15 or 20 minutes. I could slog through mediocrity for hours because I just thought I had to work harder, push harder. And that was somehow accountability for myself. I had to be more disciplined. But you just have to odds with the biology and there's this intuitive knowing of the data we're getting in which is I'm not that creative to write at 3pm okay, that's now admin time. That's batched email blocks. I have three admin email response times a day. That's one of them. That's usually my crank out the most of them.
But thinking that I could just brute force creativity during that time didn't serve anybody. It's a good time for meetings for me too because hey, yeah, we can chat but I don't have to be heads down and focused. And I think that there's this unlearning of, of this conditioning because as kids we know that we want to rise when we have energy. We slow with the books when we don't. Like I see this in my 10 month old daughter. She wants to go outside and crawl around at certain times and then she wants to be still or inside with music or books. And I don't say no. We have to push swim lessons now right before.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Right. Bedtime. Exactly.
[00:07:01] Speaker C: But for yeah. And for us I think that there's this expectation or even just this. Yeah.
Crowding out of the information we've had about where we're productive. And a neuroscientist, Oren Shy brought this up on a previous episode too.
And I think it's interesting because we talk about cycles a lot as women, but for men too. All of us have different seasonal cycles and in a lot of cultures there's this concept of wintering that the days are shorter and slower and we don't push as hard when we're wintering.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: But.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: But the more temperate your climate, the more similar your day lengths, the easier it is to feel like you just need to work harder to get more done. And what I'm hearing you saying and what I'm familiar with from the research too is that it's not the case and it's not serving our ultimate goals.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: No. And it's different for each of us. You know, I have a friend who her, like she, her mental alertness is highest actually at night. Like she does her writing at night. She does it after like 9pm and that's so hard for me to relate to because I'm the exact opposite.
So it's, it's really tuning into your own personal rhythms and not trying to fight them, but, you know, really kind of work in alignment with them.
[00:08:18] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you're so right. And intentionally articulating them. Our society is set up to reward early risers, early birds. So if you were to show up at the office at 11 and leave at 10pm that would not be acceptable in a lot of workplaces. But articulating, look, this is the output that I'm going to be measuring against gets beyond a lot of the pseudo productivity that I think our modern workplaces and just modern lives are set up to reward, which is easy, can articulate. I'm not going to be the first one in the office, but this is the outcome that I'll be generating. There's power in that even for yourself to just say intentionally, this is the time that works for me and my body, not try to force an early bird rhythm into it. I'm definitely a later chronotype too. And for most of my husband's and my relationship, his being an early bird, I tried to kind of like wake up earlier, go to bed earlier, et cetera. But to your point, I was kind of going to bed or winding down when I had a little bit of peak energy. And now that we have a baby, it's fantastic because I can do nights in the mornings. Yeah, but really thinking you have to slot yourself into whatever the dominant chronotype schema, whatever it is common for a lot of it and even in time management too, if you're not an early bird chronotype, there's no benefit to you or the organization to forcing yourself into that versus just articulating. This is what I can contribute here.
But you also talked about. So you said the end of your book. The end of the book is your favorite part. Mine too. And you ended with a question that I love, love and have been using. I.
You ask yourself what do I want to do? Instead of what should I do? So if you had to answer that question now in this season of your life, do you have an answer that you can share here?
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, if if, okay, so if I have to be honest, which of course I'm going to be honest, I think my answer would be that I want to slow down.
And you know, when you're launching a book, which is where I am right now, it's so incredibly exciting, but it's also all consuming. It can be all consuming. And I'm, I'm really trying to use the principles in the book to like really apply these principles around, you know, being intentional with my time and being intentional with my energy, applying those principles to this book launch. Because this book launch could literally be 24 7, you know, so I'm so excited about getting the book out into the world. I want to get it into as many readers hands as possible.
I do see though, when I come out of this book launch, you know, I want to spend more time with my family, I want to spend more time at the bookstore, I want to read more, I want to write more for fun. You know, I don't see like a next big project or the next big, big book. Like when I come out of this book launch, I, I feel like I've been in achieving and building mode for so long that I think this next season is actually going to be more about tending.
Yeah, that's what I'm. That's what I'm seeing.
That's exciting.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. It's a hard paradigm shift to go into though. I found that when I went from corporate work to writing a book and hosting this podcast that it was unmooring in a lot of ways. I really had constant validation that what I was working on was worthwhile because I couldn't go three months on my own little Google Doc by myself doing something that wasn't productive. And so losing that external validation that
[00:11:56] Speaker B: what I was working on, even the
[00:11:57] Speaker C: cadence of I know I have a certain amount of meetings, this stillness and the slowness was its own challenge to navigate. And so knowing that there's something that is working for you that you're in on and then you're going into a tending cycle is a powerful thing to articulate and can be hard, I find, to give up.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Yeah, look, I'll report back. I'll let you know. I'll let you know how it's going in probably November.
But yeah, no, I'm really feeling it. Going back to the beginning of this, this conversation we were talking about the feeling and like what you're feeling, that is really what I'm feeling. I want, I want to feel like, I keep using this word, spacious, like it keeps coming up, that word for me over the last couple of weeks, like, just meeting with friends and colleagues. And that's what I want to feel. I mean, like the whole. If you think about this book, if you think about 20 minutes as a new hour, on a tactical level, the book is really about creating spaciousness in your calendar. Right. It's like helping you find those pockets of time. There's. It makes me so happy when I'm doing my week ahead planning, and I'm like, shortening meetings and deciding, you know what? I don't even need to be in that meeting. Like someone else can handle that. Or as I'm, like, taking things off my calendar. It just feels so good. And I really want. I want more of that.
That's. That's. That's what I want.
[00:13:26] Speaker C: I love that. Yeah. You're making me think. So I talk about Marie Kondoing my house, but I kind of. Fran Hauser my calendar. It sounds like the same of finding this.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:36] Speaker C: Does this spark joy?
No. Is it adding enough value?
[00:13:40] Speaker B: No.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: Or could it be less padded?
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:13:43] Speaker C: I really. I'm. I'm gonna take a pass through this week, and I'll let you. Those are the questions. Fran Hauser.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: No, by the way, like, you nailed it. Those are the questions. Like, the questions are, is this aligned with my priorities?
If not, is it bringing me joy?
And then if the answer is yes to either one of those, then the question is, is it padded? Like, do I need this much time? You know, I mean, that's like, kind of perfect. You. You nailed it.
[00:14:10] Speaker C: Great.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:14:13] Speaker C: You're reminding me of, if I don't do this, what happens? That's a question I started asking after my daughter was born because I found that there was enough time that I could do things that I didn't need to. But I found I literally started asking myself that as I was unloading the dishwasher right before nanny got here, thinking, well, I don't want her to think I'm lazy and leaving the dishes for her. But my daughter was in the Nap could be 20 minutes. Nap could be two hours.
So if I spent those 20 minutes unloading the dishes, it was easy to then make up for it before her. But afterwards, it might be, if I don't write that episode, do something for work that only uniquely I can do, it may not happen at all today or this week. And so if I don't do this, what happens? The nanny does it. Can I live with that? Okay, if I don't do this, what Happens. I don't have my podcast prep doc before the next episode. I can't live with that. And so that just really helped cut through the noise of, well, it always feels like a good use of time, but if I don't do this, can somebody else do it? Is that a better use of just the general utility of time?
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
[00:15:14] Speaker C: All right, one more question. So the reason the show is called Time Billionaires is that that a billion seconds is roughly 31 years. And so if you expect to live another 31 years, you are a time billionaire.
If you've lived 31 years, you're a time billionaire. But we waste time in ways that we would never waste money.
So if you could give your 31 year old self one piece of advice, what would that be?
[00:15:38] Speaker A: My 31 year old self,
[00:15:42] Speaker C: I think
[00:15:43] Speaker A: when I go back to when I was at that, that age, the big thing that I struggled with when it came to time was definitely people pleasing.
It was, you know, this like saying yes to everything. Like my default was always yes because I always wanted to be helpful and accommodating and, you know, all of, all of the things. And I would really encourage my 31 year old self to feel okay with saying no and creating boundaries and even like creating a to don't list. Like, I swear by my to don't list. I've been doing this for, you know, 10, 15 years at this point and just being really clear about where I'm not going to put my time and energy. You know, right now, for me, it's, I, I'm not investing in new companies, I'm not taking board seats, I'm not, you know, leading any PTA initiatives. Like just knowing that those are things that I am not going to put time and energy towards. It makes it so much easier to kindly say no when I get asked to do one of those things.
So I really think that would be my, my advice for when I was 31, because I did, I believe I spent so much time and energy because I said yes to things that weren't really aligned with my priorities, nor did they bring me joy. So that, that would be my, that would be my advice.
[00:17:20] Speaker C: I think it's great advice. I think it's also easy to overestimate why people are asking.
I think most things are lower stakes is the advice that I would give to my 31 year old self.
It's easy to feel like if someone's asking, can I do this? It's because it's so crucially important to them. But we can ask clarifying questions. What's the impact of it? Why are you asking? And sometimes just, oh, I was just wondering. I gave this advice to someone on my team a couple of years ago, who's probably about 31 too, that if you are always available to take on these last minute requests, you're telling people that you're not really working on anything that important because what you're working on wasn't a priority two days ago. And over time that becomes true.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:03] Speaker C: Because if all you're doing is, oh, we need this very specific one pager for this conference we're currently at this minute, can you have it by the end of the day? If the answer is yes, then everything that we decided was a priority at the beginning of the week, at the beginning of the quarter is less important than something that wasn't a priority two days ago.
And that's really easy to feel like there's so high stakes. If I don't, I'll look like I'm not reliable or flexible, et cetera. But sometimes people are just asking, is it easy to slap a different logo on this? If the answer is no, they may not care that much.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I do.
[00:18:34] Speaker C: It's.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: It's funny, I have a part in the book where I talk about how sometimes we place so much importance on like an offhand comment that somebody makes. Do you know, like, it. It literally could just be like the, the example that I use in the book is before I open the bookstore, you know, while I was working on opening it, a friend of mine said something about, oh, you should, you should be a vendor at the holiday market.
And the holiday market was like three days before the bookstore opening. And it was just this like, comment that she like threw out. And like the people pleasing part of me was like, oh my gosh, well, I should make that happen. And you know, of course I ended up coming to my senses and realizing not, this is not important. It's very low stakes, like, not important at all.
Um, and the first time that I'm actually like present with the community, I want to be in my physical space and not at a holiday market. But it's the same kind of thing that you're saying, like, sometimes we just place so much importance on asks and comments and we kind of blow them up into these things that they're really not or they don't need to be.
So, yeah, I love that. That, that's, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:19:47] Speaker C: And we're attaching stories that probably aren't there, right we don't. We assume we know why she's saying that.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: She might just be making conversation.
Exactly. Or like I don't want to look like I don't appreciate her advice, but she may not care at all. And really what she wants is for things to be helpful. Of that's any gift. Any comment is it's supposed to be additive to your life and if it's not, you can Marie Kondo or Franhauser right out of there.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Someone gave you a gift that isn't
[00:20:15] Speaker C: adding to your life, made a suggestion that isn't.
It's not additive. And that's not their goal if they want it to be helpful.
So yeah, I think I'm going to Fran Houser my calendar right after we hop off and we'll keep you posted on what that changes. But it's very energizing to think that there's a lot more autonomy in agency over getting the same things done, which really is a fundamental human need. Right. Toddlers need agency over their time. We all do. And I love this 20 minute mindset that we can all apply right now. Thanks.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks for having me.
[00:20:47] Speaker C: Thank you for being here. Is there anything I didn't ask that you wanted to make sure that we shared?
[00:20:51] Speaker A: I don't think so. I think you, you nailed it. Great job.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:20:56] Speaker C: Thank you for making it so easy to prep with that early copy of your book, which was wonderful. And we'll link to it and your
[00:21:01] Speaker A: bookstore in the show notes.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Amazing.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Thanks for spending this micro moment with me. If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow time builder billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me. Rebecca Shattucks on LinkedIn. See you next time.
