Welcome friends to Episode #150 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. We live in a culture of scarcity, where we feel like we’re always coming up against not having enough. One of the biggest things we feel is that we don’t have time. We don’t have time for our relationships, our to-do lists seem never-ending and how do we actually take care of our health in the time we have? Today, we’ll create more time in your life so you can take a breath and enjoy life a bit more.

I often notice that the first thing we wake up thinking about is all the things we have to do and we haven’t done. This is how I know that time scarcity is so real. Have you ever heard the saying, “You can never be too skinny or too rich?” It’s based on this premise that enoughness is always beyond the cognitive horizon.

I used to think that the reason that other people are successful is because of the amount of time they have to do the things they need to do. They have the time to answer all their emails. They have less on their plate. They don’t have to do the work that I have to do.

When people would say things like, “prioritize” or “do what’s most important” I would think to myself, “Yes, I’m doing that already.” What I didn’t realize was that behind those words were more edgy thoughts that I didn’t have when I felt time scarcity. 

Edgy thoughts like, “this is enough” or “I know I’m working on what’s most important” or “this is the right thing to be doing right now.”  What? How could this be enough? How do I know this is right? My brain was telling me all the things that haven’t yet been done and could be done. How to make this thing even better or how to make other people feel better because I’m doing everything they want me to do. Questioning the decisions I’ve made and wanting to go back and change things.

Perfectionist tendencies create not just procrastination but also a feeling of scarcity. You might not see yourself as a procrastinator, but procrastinating edgy thoughts like “this is enough” is another form of procrastination. You’re procrastinating the feeling of enough. You’re pushing it beyond the cognitive horizon. 

You’ll see this same thought cut through your whole life. It’s also one of the reasons why we eat in ways that seem like they’re tied to emotional highs and lows. It’s why we need big long breaks. It’s why we react. It’s why we swing back and forth on a pendulum of life’s highs and lows.

Creating more time is a series of steps. 

• The Awareness of Time: First, you’re looking for where you actually have time that isn’t being utilized in the way you want. You don’t have to “do things” but you see that there is time that exists. This is where tracking your time is helpful. Seeing how much time you have when you wake up and every small transition period between that and the next thing you do. What are you thinking about and how long does it take for you to wake up? What do you do after that? What about after that next thing? Then the next. You’ll often find that there are pockets of time that aren’t being used intentionally. Start there with this low-hanging fruit.

• The PAUSE and the first step: The second thing is to actually spend time the way you want in that time that exists. You found time, now it’s time to use it well. You would think this is the easy part but this requires going up against the voices of what is right/wrong ways to spend time and thoughts of what else could be done. This is where you just take the first step. You open the emails. You don’t open the emails. You put your shoes on. You sit down. You stand up. You stop working. You listen to the person in front of you. You take a breath. This is where a pause has to happen. Interrupting patterns requires stopping. It seems too simple to just stop. But it’s exactly what you need to do. You pause. Remove your figurative hands or minds off the thing at hand. Even 1 second will do it, but just pause. When you do that, you can make the transition into that next thing, on purpose.

• Keep redirecting back: You will get distracted in life, not just because something else occurs but because your mind wanders. You’ll start thinking about what else you could be doing instead of this very thing. You’ll drift and start doing other things instead. Nothing wrong has occurred. When you catch yourself not using the time the way you want, you go back. The other redirection is to tell yourself that this IS what matters. This is what you decided and this IS what you’re willing to do right now until you’re done. That you’ll evaluate and see if this works, but only after you’ve done it. This keeps you out of the inefficiencies that happen even when we’re in a place where we start doing the thing we wanted to do. We say we’ll start that hairy task but then we open it up and then start doing something else because you saw something that triggered something else. This is all normal. You aren’t doing anything wrong. You’re human. Creating more time means coming back again and again to what’s important by telling yourself that you want to use your time well and this very thing you’re trying to do IS important.

• Increase the quality of your time: Once you know that you’re practicing the redirection back to what’s important because you know what’s important, then you start increasing the quality of your time. I have found that it isn’t what you do during the time, it’s how you’re experiencing what you do in that time that matters. Time is a construct of the mind. It is a feeling. Twenty-four hours can feel long when you’re experiencing pain and suffering. That same twenty-four hours can feel short when you’re experiencing awe and joy. What can you do to release the pain and suffering you’re feeling right now? What can you do to appreciate what you have, right now? Answering these questions will increase the quality of your time because you stop thinking that whatever you’re doing isn’t good. You stop having judgemental thoughts about what is happening or not happening. You’re present and you’re in the moment. Without questioning, you end up just being in what we call flow states. Where time seems suspended in ways that feel freeing. Time flies by but it’s not a problem. Time expands and it’s also not a problem. You’re just attending to exactly what you need to attend to without questioning or creating additional pressure.

These are the steps to create more time. Start with awareness and look for the small ways in which time is adding up in your life that you would like to spend differently. Then move to taking a pause and that first step. Once you do that, redirect your attention back to what you want to do during that time and the decision you’ve made. Then increase the quality of your time by accepting how this is exactly what you need to be experiencing right now, because you are – and reducing the suffering that comes with thinking there is more and better. The paradox is that you will do more and better when you have the least amount of resistance to what you’re currently doing and experiencing now. 

Consider that time scarcity is the perfect problem for you to have right now because it’s challenging you to live life differently. To become more aware, to pause, to redirect to what’s important and to increase the quality of your experience with life. Who wouldn’t benefit from any of these things? This is why life and this work of living is a practice. You’re never done, you’re just going deeper and experiencing even more – which is a really beautiful thing. Instead of distracting yourself, you’re actually deepening yourself and it comes with realizing that some things aren’t working the way we want them to, and doing something about them.

If you’re wanting to start on these steps, start by picking one thing you really want to do if you had more time. Run it through these steps for one day. One day. To see how it does for your life and the quality of your day. If it works, you can keep going.

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That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.