Where does the time go?

6 Hidden Time Thieves Catholic moms struggle with.

Episode Highlights:
The Top Six Time Thieves: Kelsey discusses the six major time thieves that sabotage our productivity, leading us to wonder where our day went. These include avoiding feelings, neglecting health, multitasking, resisting reality, focusing on unspoken goals, and being stuck in reactive mode with urgent but unimportant tasks.

1. Avoiding Feelings and Unintentional Behaviors: Discover the link between avoiding emotions and resorting to unintentional behaviors, such as excessive smartphone scrolling. Recognize the importance of processing feelings and addressing emotional avoidance to regain control of your time.

2. Neglecting Health: Neglecting your health can hinder productivity and lead to fatigue and mental fog. Kelsey shares her personal experience with nutrient depletion and emphasizes the significance of self-care and replenishing nutrient stores.

3. Multitasking: Learn why multitasking is not as efficient as it seems. Our brains switch rapidly between tasks, leading to decreased focus and lower-quality work. Embrace single-tasking to boost productivity and efficiency.

4. Resisting Reality: Instead of resisting reality, accept situations and adjust your plans accordingly.

5. Recognize unspoken goals: These are the goals that silently drive your behavior-- assess if they align with your true priorities.

6. Shift from Reactive to Proactive: Break free from the tyranny of the urgent and prioritize important tasks over reactive responses. Plan specific times for activities like responding to texts to regain control of your time.

Resources:
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Kelsey

Hey guys. So today I wanted to introduce the concept of time thieves. And these are the sneaky little things that come in and make us go, Where did my day go? What did I actually accomplish? And why didn't I hit my goals? And what's really interesting about this, I'm actually, my backgrounds in economics. I've mentioned that before, I used to build productivity systems for nonprofits. And that was what I did for the whole first half of my career. And systems are so important for getting things done. I think it was atomic habits that the author said that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So they are incredibly important. They're definitely the baseline. But what have you already have good systems? What if you know how to do things in you know what needs to get done, but for some reason, you still keep getting sidetracked things are not happening the way you want to. And at the end of the day, you just don't know where your time went. So let's talk about the top six time thieves. Okay, so the first one is actually, we went into this in the episode with Denise Jelinek, which was episode number 37. And that is avoiding our feelings. And when we don't take the time to deal with and address our feelings, we actually start to do a lot of unintentional things that use up our time, things like scrolling on our smartphone, and other avoidant behaviors. So what I want you to do, I want you to pull out your smartphone and just notice how much screen time you're getting. Because most Americans, the average American is on their phone for four and a half hours a day. That is more than 30 hours a week. And a good deal of that is unintentional, and comes from just not being ready to handle our feelings, wanting to avoid feelings like overwhelm, and anxiety, and worry, all those things that are so uncomfortable to sit with and process. So I'm not going to go into that too much more in this episode, because I think you really should go back and listen to the episode with Denise that's number 37. And hear a little more about what she has to say on it. Okay, guys, the second time thief is neglecting our health. Now you can have the most amazing cleaning plan, you can have closets that are organized down to the absolute, you know, nitty gritty like, you might have a house that has no junk drawer. And if you've been neglecting your health, you might still not be getting all the things done that you want to be doing. Because you won't have any energy, you won't have mental clarity. And guys, we're moms, right? We have so many people that we're trying to take care of all the time, and so many things that are coming at us all the time, that we just feel like we don't have time for this. And that's actually a huge part of my own story. Part of my story is I had eight pregnancies in 10 years. I you know, for kids on Earth and foreign heaven from that. But that takes a huge mental and emotional toll to do things like that. And I didn't understand about the importance of rebuilding my nutrient stores, taking care of my body beyond, you know, the obvious things. But actually making sure that things like my hormones were balanced, that my nutrition was balanced, that I was actually replenishing those nutrients stores. And not and not being so depleted, and not letting myself become so depleted. And it took years to come back out of that. Something that was very preventable was this nutrient depletion that just zapped my energy and my health for quite a few years where I had like terrible brain fog, and I needed a nap every day. There were days I couldn't even drive right because my brain was so foggy. Don't let this be you is my point. neglecting our health. I'm not talking about things like cancer that just come our way. And that we can't really do anything about I'm talking about the health things that if we were taking small and basic steps every day, to take care of those kinds of things that are in our control we should be doing and it feels like it's taking time in the moment but it takes way more time to climb out of the hole of self neglect. Okay, third one. This one might catch you by surprise. This is multitasking is a time thief and here's why. So scientists have actually shown that the way the human brain works is we cannot truly multitask. It might seem like We are but what our brain is doing is it's not holding two ideas at once, it's actually switching quickly between them. And there's a cost to every single transition, there is a time cost, there's a cost in the quality of our work, which means that our work takes longer and in our focus, and in that buffer space between the two tasks that we're trying to do, or the three or the seven, if you have a lot of kids, maybe 12, right? There's all these different things. And so for example, let's say that you're trying to help your kid with their homework, or you're homeschooling them, and trying to order groceries at the same time, you're actually less efficient and going to take longer to do those two things, and probably end up with a worse result from them, than if you were to do just one of them at a time. Like, if you took 15 minutes to focus on the schoolwork, and then took 15 minutes to focus on the groceries, you would be getting some you would be getting more done, than if you spent 30 minutes trying to do both at the same time. So we try to squeeze things in, right and do them at the same time as other things. But it's actually coming at a cost. So the fourth time thief is resisting reality. Now what do I mean by this, this is where we are basically repeating the same unexpected thing every single day, because it's actually we're just failing to accept that we have a situation. Here's an example, let's say, every night, you go to put your three year old to bed, your three year old throws a fit every night, no matter what you've tried. So you have it on your schedule, that you're going to be spending 30 minutes doing bedtime routine. But every night, it's 30 minutes a bedtime routine, plus 30 minutes of your child crying and not going to sleep and maybe getting out of bed 100 times. So what can you do about that? Well, we have to move from a place of resistance in these cases to acceptance and start to say, Hey, look at that bedtime routine actually doesn't take 30 minutes, it actually takes an hour. Because part of bedtime routine right now, during this phase, for whatever reason is that there's a 30 minute meltdown. And once we do that, once we start to plan for it, we actually start to use our time better because we say okay, that means that I need to figure out how to fit in this extra half hour somewhere else, I need to figure out what's going to move around and be a little more efficient and more intentional with it. Okay, the fifth time thief is having unspoken goals that are more important to you than the ones that you've decided on. And what do I mean by this. So an unspoken goal is something that is internally really important to you. But you haven't actually said it out loud. You know, we have our goals, New Year's, we write down our goals every year, the things we want to accomplish, we have these other ones that we would put on paper proudly and say, Yeah, I'm working toward that, like, I want my kids catechized I want to be a better meal planner, I want to have a cleaner house, these are all goals that we would be writing down. But then we actually have also these unspoken goals. And those are things like looking good on social media, and impressing my parents, and all these things that we actually spend more time on than we had planned to, because they mattered to us. So I call this climbing the wrong mountain. You know, if we're putting all our effort toward the goals that we really have prayerfully decided are the most important, we have to not only set those goals, but we have to look at the other things in our life and say what am I kicking out? What doesn't fit on this journey up the right mountain? What is actually sending me off to the wrong mountain because we don't want to climb that one. That's a waste of our time. That's a waste of our effort. And you know, this looks like instead of you know, four o'clock rolls around instead of starting to do your meal prep, so that you can put a healthy, nutritious meal on the table. Instead, you're taking photos and posting them on Instagram, because you want the likes you want the dopamine hit. And it's feel so rewarding in the moment to get that compared to just this. This more important goal of giving your kids nutritious food that doesn't have an instantaneous reward. It might even be negative, right? They might complain about the food you made. So it can be really frustrating but you know that that's your long term goal is you want healthy kids and you want to be healthy. So we waste time on these smaller unspoken goals.

Now the last one and this one I think is the biggest one And this is focusing on urgent tasks instead of important ones. This is where we're spending our day in reaction mode. So, for example, when we're in a situation where you know, the baby's crying, dinner's not made yet another kid saying I have to go potty and other kids, you know, badgering you, because dinner's not made yet and they want to snack. And if we get to a point where we have all these things coming at us all the time, first of all, that's extremely stressful. But second of all, a lot of these things that are urgent are not important, we have to sort through and figure out which it is. I'll give you an example of something that's urgent, but not important is when you get a text message. Now, you hear your phone go off, what do you do? You feel this compulsion to answer it right? Right away, it feels like something that you need see it, you need to respond to it. But very, very rarely is a text message going to be something that's more important than whatever task you were already focusing on. And by that, I mean, it feels urgent. But if you were to wait to answer it, with something major happen in your life. Now something that's urgent and important is something like when your stove is on fire, you need to stop and everything and deal with that. You don't need to stop everything and deal with your phone. You don't need to stop everything and get your kid a snack. You know, they might think they're gonna die, right? For the 10 minutes or so it takes you to finish whatever thing you're focusing on, they might feel like they're literally going to die and they're starving to death. But you know, they're not. And they will learn that they're not. When it comes to these things, when we're just constantly focusing on the urgent I think there's actually a term for this Stephen Covey coined it's called the tyranny of the urgent when the urgent is ruling our life, what we have to do is we need to actually step out of the chaos, not necessarily in the moment, but in a calm moment. And we need to look at where these things are that keep cropping up over and over these urgent things, and say, Is there a plan we can put in place to stop this from stealing my time and attention all the time? Can I have a specific time in the morning and in the afternoon, where I answer my text messages. Let me give you an example from my life that we recently were dealing with. We have goats. And we love our goats, their little Nigerian dwarf goats. And they're adorable. And we have enjoyed having them so much, except for this one goat. And he was an escape artist, this guy was like Houdini, he was always escaping. And it was super stressful, because I'd be working on something and I'd look up and they're darting past the window is this blur of a white goat headed for the road. So I'd have to drop everything I was doing, go out and catch the scope, put him in the milking pen, and then go and figure out where in the world he was getting out. Now this is what he would do is we have wire fencing, and the grass would grow. And it would push up the bottom of the wire fence. And then the goats would come along and they'd eat it back down. So it'd be like this two or three inch gap. And he would lie on his side and slither under any of those gaps. So every year, this was a thing. The spring was the biggest time where the the grass grow really quickly push it up, the goat would escape. And we were always having to walk the perimeter of this fence and seal it up. Well, I could deal with it pretty well. But it was really frustrating. We'd even have to, you know, drop what we were doing. Sometimes we were out and head home and catch the scout. If he got out again, I never knew when it was going to happen. And it was taking up a lot of time and attention. Well, one day, he figured out how to escape the milking pen as well as the regular fence. So I caught him after he escaped. I put them in the milking pen like I usually did to hold him while I patched up the fence wherever the hole was, wherever the gap was. And he was suddenly right there with me sneaking back under that gate as I was trying to fix it. And I said enough is enough. I'm tired of always being in reactive mode with the scope. So I went to the longer term trouble. It was you know, harder to do this which was to sell him. And it was more work in the short run to do that than to just figure out this hole and patch it. But it took so much stress and interruption out of my life so much risk. Because let's just face it a goat that's always getting out it was just a matter of time before he got hit by a car and got seriously injured or injured someone who was driving that car I think it just wasn't a good situation. It wasn't a safe situation. And it was really stressful. And it was taking so much time and attention. And it was so worth it. To figure out how to stop that from happening again, that was an important thing to do to prevent this urgent emergency thing from coming up all the time. Alright, guys, so in conclusion, I just want to go back through the six time thieves, and you can just look through your time. And if you feel like it's getting zapped if you don't know where it's going, check and see if it's one of these things. So the first one was avoiding your feelings and doing avoidant behaviors. So things like scrolling your smartphone to avoid negative emotions. The second one was neglecting your health. Because if we don't have our health, we're less productive or less efficient. And we just we don't have the mental clarity and the energy to do things. Well. The third one was multitasking, because our brains can't do as well when we're trying to do that. And we're less efficient. The fourth one was resisting reality. So that was where if there's a situation that keeps cropping up, over and over, we're not stopping and adjusting and moving to a place of acceptance. The fifth one was climbing the wrong mountain. So that's when we're giving more time to those unspoken goals that we didn't consider to be really important ones, but that are still guiding our behavior. And the last one was focusing on urgent and unimportant things too much. So I hope this episode has been helpful to you and helps you to figure out better ways to manage your time and how to notice where the big problems are so that you can put in some preventative action to reclaim your week.