Episode 028 – HOW TO MANIPULATE TIME

Subscribe on: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE | RSS

Note: This blog post serves as an accompaniment to the corresponding podcast episode of A Changed Mind, where we’ll distill down the core ideas of this week’s theme, along with additional distinctions and insights. If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, you can go here to do so.  Enjoy.

If there’s one thing that we never seem to have enough of, always want more of, and would trade just about anything to reverse – it’s time.  But while most people are convinced that time is a limited and fixed asset in our lives, I come from the camp of believing that time is actually completely flexible and we can manipulate it in our favor.

So if there’s things that you’ve been wanting to do, but keep putting off until all of the other things get done, in hopes that you’ll have more time in the future – stick with me.  Today I’m going to unpack why this phenomenon occurs and what you can do to actually create more time in your day, so you can accomplish more in your life.

How I Transformed My Relationship With Time 

My relationship with time started to change when I first entered into recovery.  I began working with a therapist who laid out a game plan for me, designed to support me through my recovery journey.  He told me that I needed to go to three 12-step meetings a week, come to therapy once a week, and attend a men’s group once a week.  That totaled five days a week for about an hour each day, each requiring an additional hour and a half of driving time.  At the time, I was a struggling entrepreneur trying to keep my venture backed business afloat, so my response was simple: there’s no way I can manage this with the amount of time I have in my day.

However, despite my skepticism that I could make all of these requirements happen, I knew they were something I had to do.  So, every day moving forward, I made these meetings and sessions my priority.  I put my recovery first.  What happened from there was pretty miraculous – the rest of my life became much more efficient and organized.  The things that I had previously thought took a certain amount of time ended up getting done in a fraction of the time.  A lot of the things that I’d previously believed to be important in the day-to-day of my business and life ended up falling away.

Not only was I able to not only work my recovery program, I was also able to be much more productive in my business within the same amount of time.  At first it was a little deceptive because I thought to myself: “Of course, I’m sober now.  I’m not wasting all of this time in pursuit of my addiction.”   That was partly true, but I later came to understand that our relationship with time is not fixed.

Parkinson’s Law

There’s a concept called Parkinson’s Law that states that work expands to fill the time given to complete it.  Maybe you’ve experienced this before, where you’ve got four weeks to complete a task that would really only take you a week if you were to concentrate and get it done.  But rather than take the week to do it, you allow it to expand for the entire four weeks allotted, or otherwise cram it into the final week of the deadline.

What I’ve found is that Parkinson’s Law also works in reverse, meaning that if you give yourself less time to complete a task, you’ll become more efficient in doing it.  Now, all of us have a million and one things we need to do every week.  If you own a business, that could mean check-ins with your team, writing copy, putting together a course, doing fulfillment work with your clients, and so on.  That’s on top of all the things we have to do in our personal lives – kids, bills, groceries, household tasks, and the like.

Most of us think our days and weeks are so full of activities, that the idea of trying to insert something else into our schedules is impossible.  There’s things we’d like to do – personally and professionally – but there’s just not enough time, right?  Because we believe time is fixed and finite, we don’t add anything new into the equation.  We don’t start working out, even though we know we should.  We don’t do the things required to grow our business, even though we know we should.

But what actually happens when you decide to insert something new into the mix and you do not have a relationship with time where you believe that it is fixed and limited, is that your life reorganizes in order to accommodate the new thing.  This gets amplified when you decide to start doing something that ultimately improves your physical, mental, and emotional health.  Because when you decide to prioritize that actually gives you more energy, improves your concentration and focus, and restores your general sense of wellbeing, everything else gets a little easier as a result.

Be Like Ghandi

Gandhi famously said: “I have so much to do today, I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”  For the average person with a long to-do list, the last thing they’d want to do is meditate for an hour, let alone two.  But Ghandi was onto something.  He realized that by dedicating his morning to his mindfulness practice, his body and mind would be more primed to take on the rest of his day.  Most of us would benefit from doing the same.  Am I saying you need to start your morning with two hours of meditation or an intensive mindfulness routine?  No, but I am suggesting you do something to help set up your emotional resilience for the day.

The fact that you’re reading this is proof enough that you want to live a “yes, and” life where you get to have it all.  Yet so many entrepreneurs are taking their health, relationships, and enjoyment of life to the sacrificial altar of success and choosing to put their businesses ahead of everything else.  We don’t need to be “either, or” people – we don’t need to choose.  We’ll always have a lot of things to do, but that doesn’t mean that we have to give up the things that matter most to us.

Making New Decisions About Time 

This whole idea around time comes back to the very foundational elements we teach about beliefs and how thoughts become things.  All of our conscious and unconscious decisions that we make on any given day are being driven by the beliefs we hold.  So if you decide that you don’t have enough time to [insert whatever is important to you] because your day is already full of other obligations, then you’re not going to have access to more efficient thoughts that could reduce the amount of time that you’re spending on your current task list.

If you decide that  you’re going to do all the things that you need to do and you’re also going to carve out 30 minutes for yourself for self care, going for a walk, exercising, or whatever thing you’ve been putting off, then the rest of the time that you’re working is going to completely reorganize in terms of your thought process. You’re going to think things differently. You’re going to feel things differently. You’re going to do things differently.  So you’ve got the opportunity to create a massive amount of efficiency into the current structure of your day.

What I’m trying to articulate here is that the experience you have of your business right now is based on the current business structure and what you’ve allowed into your day to day life. The misconception is that we can’t insert anything else into it without removing something from it.  But the way that the brain works is that if you insert something else into it, you’ll become a more efficient thinker and entrepreneur within your current business so that everything fits within the same container of time.  This is how the brain works.

Another factor to consider is that when you change your beliefs, make new decisions, and reorient your thought process, you put out a vibrational frequency that broadcasts information out to other people receiving it at an unconscious level.  When that happens, the unconscious minds of other people inform them to engage in micro decisions that they’re not even aware of.  You coordinate synchronicities and coincidences that allow you to meet these people to support you in accomplishing whatever it is you’re wanting to do.

Timing > Time

What this means, in a sense, is that time is far less important than timing.  Because if you can coordinate effective timing via your beliefs and thoughts, you can attract resources, people, and opportunities into your life that you wouldn’t have otherwise.  You’ll find the right joint venture partners, you’ll meet the right employees, you’ll be introduced to new consultants and mentors to support you in your growth.

If we can agree on this then ask yourself: is there a possibility that you can actually accomplish more within the same amount of time?  I’d argue the answer is a clear yes.  It comes down to putting yourself and your mindset first.  Do the things that you believe you should be doing for your own personal health, happiness, focus, and energy – even when you feel like there isn’t enough time to do them.

Make a decision to put the workout, the meditation practice, the cold plunge, the recovery meeting, the family time, the daily walk, first in your schedule.  What you’ll see is that the rest of your days and weeks begin to reorganize themselves to accommodate the insertion of that activity.  This is how you get to have it all.

Wait Until Tomorrow, Or Do It Today?

The wrap up, I’d encourage you to stop paying attention to how much time you have and just start making decisions about how you want your life to be.  If you’re willing to do that, life will reorganize and accommodate.  This isn’t to say that we want to get into a position of hustling, grindin, and burning out.  What we’re really talking about is you doing the things first that are going to give you energy, that are going to give you creativity, that are going to fuel you, rather than putting them off until sometime in the future when you think you’re going to get all of the tasks in front of you done – because that task list never ends.

We’ve all created habits within the container of our current experience of time, but the way we transform the dynamics within that container is to reprioritize and do the things today that we want to be doing rather than putting them off.  Do that, and watch how the things that are causing you to put off those things, reorganize and create a significant level of efficiency in your life.  Stop putting things off until tomorrow and start making the decision that you are the type of person who can achieve success in your business, live a good life, and still have time for an afternoon walk.