Grow With Soul: Ep. 99 - Rethinking and Reclaiming Your Time
Today I want to talk about time. At the beginning of every year I do a survey, kindly filled out by my newsletter subscribers and some of my Instagram audience. This year I took all the responses to the question ‘what is your biggest challenge’, and I could see that the word used the most as a challenge was ‘time’ - it’s something we’re clearly all feeling acutely at the moment. This is why my first Make It Better workshop of this year is going to be all about time, and as I’m preparing for that workshop I thought that in this episode I would share some of the methods and resources that have been crucial in me changing my thinking about, and ultimately reclaiming, my time.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
How outsourcing can free up time and mental space, and justifying that cost with how it makes your life feel better
Being realistic about your time and how to approach planning it
Changing your focus through radical prioritisation
Goal focused working
The focus of time in the first Make it Better workshop
Listen to the full episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 99 of Grow With Soul. Today I want to talk about time. At the beginning of every year I do a survey of my newsletter and Instagram audience, and this year I put all the responses to the question “what is your biggest barrier?” into a word counter software – and the word used the most was “time”. More than connectives and generic words like “business” and “work”, “time” came out on top. It’s something we’re clearly all feeling acutely at the moment, in lots of different ways – whether you’re on your own and it all feels pointless or you’re desperately homeschooling and juggling like never before.
This is why my first Make It Better workshop of this year is going to be all about time. As I’m preparing for that workshop, I thought in this episode I would share some of the methods and resources that have been crucial in me changing my thinking about, and ultimately reclaiming, my time.
OUTSOURCING
I want to start with outsourcing because the truth is that outsourcing made it much easier to do the other things I’m going to talk about in this episode. I know that you may be thinking “ok well that’s not for me” and be about to switch off but stay with me for just a second. Sure, if you’re right at the beginning of your business, you may not know what you want or need to outsource, and that’s fine. But as I said to a client recently, the time most of us start to think about outsourcing is about 6 months after the point we really need to. I think about outsourcing differently, and this perspective might help you too.
I started outsourcing certain admin tasks at the beginning of 2019, and really this very much was 6 months after I needed to, because I was on the brink of collapse and urgently needed to make space in my week. I had come to an impasse where the day to day of my admin and my full client load meant that I didn’t have the mental space or the time to develop new ways of making the business more sustainable, so I was caught in this closed loop that was burning me out. I needed to outsource the admin of publishing blog posts and podcast show notes in order to clear some space to get my head above water.
Doing this bought me back about four hours. Now, of course, my head is above water, but I still continue to outsource to a VA not only because I want to stay above the waves, but also because it’s what helps me have a less crowded life. Outsourcing is now one of the very last things I would give up doing in my business.
There is a sense that if we outsource we have to be able to make back the money we spend on it; kind of like eating a donut when you’re on a diet and thinking you have to exercise off the calories and get back to zero. This is why I put off outsourcing for a long time, and might be why you’re not considering it – will I be able to increase my income enough to make back the money I’m spending on the outsourcing? I, however, don’t look at it like that.
I would, and do, continue to pay for my VA as my income fluctuates and drops. Because I don’t think of it as a cost I have to make sure earns me back more rewards, I think of it as buying back my own time from my business. I think of it as paying for the freedom to do more of what I want.
Think of it like this: if you subscribe to a magazine, or you’re the member of a gym, or you get a takeaway every Friday, you don’t think you need to earn back the cost of those things – they are something that you love, and that makes your life worth living, and you are happy to pay for it even though they “lose” money. I don’t have any of those things, I have a VA. That’s how I think of my outsourcing; something I am happy to pay for because it makes my life worth living. A cost I am happy to absorb because the intangible, non-financial results are so much more worth it to me than the alternative. So perhaps if you’ve been thinking of outsourcing, whether it’s a VA or a cleaner or babysitter, imagine how it feels to think of it as something you’re paying for to make your life worth living in the same way a cake is. Even if it’s just an extra hour a week, how much better would you feel?
BEING REALISTIC ABOUT TIME
One of the main reasons we feel like we never have enough time is that we’re totally unrealistic about it. We’re unrealistic about how much time we actually have, and we’re unrealistic about how long things actually take. This comes from a place of optimism and hope because we really want to do this work and we really want to spend our time doing it and get as much done as we can. So at the beginning of the week we look at our calendars and think that we could probably get up an hour earlier on Tuesday and definitely work for a few hours after dinner at least three days and also spend all of Saturday on your business, and that all feels hopeful and very do-able, so you create a to do list according to those hours you’ve wrestled out of your week. Then on that Tuesday morning, you only get 20 minutes of meaningful work done because you didn’t sleep well, so you’re already “behind” on that list. And then after dinner on Thursday, you can barely keep your eyes open and you sit behind the laptop for a few hours, but really, you’re mostly watching Netflix and fiddling around with something on your website. The list is getting less ticked off and more added on so that by the time you get to that Saturday and all your body wants is rest, your list feels so overwhelming and full of guilt at how unproductive you’ve been all week, and it’s just not fun. And it all started because you were unrealistic about the time you’ve actually got.
It sounds counter-productive, but plan for less time than you might have. If you think you can squeeze five hours out of the week, plan for two. This makes you feel less crowded, it allows you to feel like you’re making progress and achieving things, and you get an extra boost if you actually manage three and a half hours. And you’ll probably get the same amount done in reality.
The other reason to plan for less time than you might actually have is because, as I mentioned, we underestimate how long things take. I am often asked “how long should it take me to write a blog post?” and how on earth am I supposed to answer that question?! It depends on how confident you are with writing, whether or not you’re dyslexic, or have issues with attention and focus. It depends whether a teacher once told you you were no good at writing, or whether you’ve done a lot of writing before. It depends what mood you’re in, it depends on the topic you’re writing about. I have, in one job or another, been consistently writing weekly posts for seven years – it is something I have a lot of practice in, something that I love, and something that I’m good at. Sometimes it will take me half an hour to write a blog post; sometimes it will take me two hours. There is no point in you giving yourself an hour to write a post because you think that’s how long it “should” take, when you generally take two hours. That becomes another way in which you feel you are falling behind your already tight schedule.
Accept how long things take you. Over time, as you get better, they won’t take that long, but for now they do. Plan for the time you really have, not the time you wish you did.
RADICAL PRIORITISATION
An exercise we’re going to do in the workshop in more detail together is radical prioritisation. Perhaps it is a mark of our society that we managed to turn priority, a word with its roots in the Greek for one, into a plural. We are not supposed to be able to have multiple priorities because the word priority literally means “a thing that is more important than others”. But I’ll bet you have about fifteen priorities, right? And hey, I also have four priorities this week! I just think it’s important to bring the weight of this into a discussion about prioritising, because the meaning is diluted now. You can sit and circle eight things that are a “priority” by our modern standards but if you were to think “ok well I can only pick one by the true definition of the word” how does that change your focus?
This is the basis of radical prioritisation. We give ourselves an out when we open the door to multiple priorities – everything can become a priority. That thing someone asked you to do becomes a priority, that strategy you heard on a podcast becomes a priority, spending an hour on Instagram a day in the name of growth becomes a priority.
It’s easy to get to a place where you have more priorities than non-priorities, when it should be the other way round. Radical prioritisation asks you to start again with that list. Now you can only have one, two or three priorities, what are you going to choose? And that’s important: you choose.
So many of our priorities become our priorities because someone else wants or says they should be. But you know yourself and your business better, so you get to decide. What has the impact, what makes you actually enjoy sitting down to work, what are things that kill two birds with one stone? And what would be different in your business, in your life, if you only did those things and let the rest fill in any gaps?
GOAL-FOCUSED WORKING (WHAT’S THE RESULT YOU WANT?)
Holding hands with radical prioritisation is goal-focused working, because it helps you to find your real priorities. I feel like I have talked about this lots of times in coaching episodes, and I know I have talked about it in The Trail and with clients, but the fact that I keep talking about it proves that it bears repeating.
We often start with a Thing we’re going to do. We’re going to start a podcast, put more effort into Pinterest, pitch to be featured in the press. And so we go about researching how to do that thing and we get a plan together and we go headfirst into doing the thing. But then once we run out of that initial burst of energy we feel a bit lost. We’re not getting results (ie, we’re not overrun with customers or internet famous), we don’t know what to do next, and it all feels like it’s slipping through our fingers but we don’t know what we did wrong. We did the Thing and we researched the best practice so why isn’t it working?
Because we didn’t define what “working” meant for us and our business. We didn’t start with what result we wanted. This is what goal-focused working is about. Rather than looking at all the things you can possibly do, it’s looking at what your goals are, what you want to achieve, and figuring out the best things to help you achieve those goals. And then you only do those things. Because if something’s not taking you where you want to be, then why are you doing it?
So rather than say “I’m going to start a podcast”, start with the goal. Now, if instead you say “I want to reach a broader audience”, then starting a podcast probably isn’t the best way to do that as it’s a busy marketplace and it takes time to grow a podcast audience. So to achieve that goal, perhaps saying “I’m going to pitch to be on other people’s podcasts” is the best action to take to achieve that goal. If, on the other hand, your goal is “I want to help people feel more connected to me and get a sense of what it would be like to work with me”, then there’s probably nothing much better to do than start a podcast (incidentally this is why I started Grow With Soul). Do you see the difference here? The answer doesn’t lie in the thing you’re going to do but the thing you want to achieve.
If you are feeling that you need to change your relationship to time, I would heartily recommend the book Do Less by Kate Northrup. One reviewer said that “there’s nothing in this book that my single mom working two jobs couldn’t have done”, and I think that’s a really great endorsement of it, because it doesn’t assume you have resources but it helps you redefine time and work with your natural rhythms.
So if this is something you would like to go deeper into, then that book is a really great place to start. You can also join me in my Make It Better workshop about Time on March 3rd – we are going to go deeper into the concepts I’ve spoken about here, there is a workbook to support you before, during and after the workshop and obviously we get to talk about your own time issues in real time. There is also the option to add on email support and a small group call after the workshop too if you’d like some more support and accountability.
But for now, I want to leave you with the fact that while there is so much you cannot control, there is also much that you can. Be on your own side with regards to time – be realistic about it and give yourself the opportunity to feel like you are accomplishing and making progress even if it’s tiny. Don’t do that never ending to do list guilt to yourself – you know it’s not helping. Choose what’s important and do that – don’t listen to anyone else, don’t listen to me! You know, even if you don’t think you know. Trust that what you think is important (if it feels scary but also wow exciting too, it’s probably important). Do those things, and know why you’re doing them. Focus on the result you want, and cut out the things that bog down your calendar that aren’t getting you the result. Not forever, necessarily, but just while you need the room and to get some progress done. You get to decide. You get to decide.
