Camille: We talk about strategy and planning and goals and measurements like KPIs. Those are kind of the big blocks. And then this is like the mortar in between.
Camille: This business isn't gonna stand up if you don't also get the mortar laid in between all the bricks right. And that's when I think about this topic of time management. It feels kind of like that this is what's holding it all together well.
Camille: It's as important as the big blocks. And it's all connected.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it.
Camille: But mostly we're bringing practical solutions. So you and your business can thrive.
Camille: Welcome to episode six of The Belief Shift. Today we are going to talk about time management. Maybe you're rolling your eyes because you're like more discussion about time and like people talk about time management a lot. But I wanted to talk about it because we talk about it a lot.
Camille: So I'm hoping this will be a more useful, helpful way to think about time management, cuz it's just a big bugaboo when it comes to how we work. So we're gonna walk through this today.
Camille: But before we get into it I wanna say good morning, big brother, George.
George: Good morning. How are you? Morning you today. Younger sister, Camille. I am doing we're great.
Camille: We're starting a little early today, but yeah, you look nice and chipper. And we have producer Katie with us as well. Hi Katie.
Katie: Hello.
Camille: She's in a whole different time zone so she's like in the future right now. She's on the east coast.
Katie: Way more manageable for me.
Camille: So I'm gonna walk through a bunch of stuff about time management today and I might get on my soapbox a little bit about this.
Camille: And so I'm going to invite George and Katie to also join me on the soapbox as we talk about time management. I'm just gonna share my perspective and my experience from this. I probably read a bajillion books and done a ton of researching over time management. Just like any normal human who wants to be really productive and efficient and being the weirdo planner than I am, I sort of look at all of that stuff. Is there a better way to do this? I want a better way to do this.
Camille: And in all of that, it sort of got me rethinking how I think about time management.
Camille: I used to be in that space of, I'm trying to get all the things done in my job. And when I quit my job and I started running my own business, that's really when I started to rethink how I think about time and management and how I work.
Camille: So a lot of it is just coming from that. That transition into being my own boss and actually having control of my schedule and that really changing how I was thinking about how I do this.
Camille: So let's start though with what is the definition of time management: the ability to use one's time effectively or productively, especially at work.
Camille: And this idea started with the industrial revolution back in the 19th century when we moved into factory mode. So we got out of working in the agricultural based work, where we were managing our work by the sun.
Camille: And now we had to manage by the clock because we were in a factory in that kind of environment. I'm totally oversimplifying this little history of time management. But I think it's important to found it and like, where does the idea even come from? After that, we have all these inventions happening that are basically all about saving us time.
Camille: Whether it's the invention of the car or all the bajillion things and the Innerwebs. Everything is just about how we're going to save time. And you would think that doing all of that would just make us more efficient and therefore make us a little more satisfied humans. But it turns out that's not really the case. A lot of this stuff is just giving us an expectation of being able to get more stuff done.
Camille: So I was listening to some podcasts, I can't remember who it was, but they had commented about how it just takes them two clicks to get to watching their favorite show on Apple TV Plus. But with Netflix, it's like seven or eight clicks.
Camille: And so they much prefer Apple. And I just realized, wow, we're making choices based on than a second of time of clicking. That's where we've gotten to when we think about time now, like it's down to these little microseconds. And I think that matters in some ways, right? It matters in terms of like what we're valuing in our day and what we're going for.
Camille: I mean, I love watching apple TV plus cuz I like the content, but , the clicky thing could be your reason for watching it. And I've been guilty of this too, where I'm watching something and I get really annoyed, like why isn't this loading faster? Or why isn't this thing happening faster? Once you've had it load faster, then when things get slowed down, you just get impatient.
Camille: There's three parts to this and how I think about what the problem is with time management.
Camille: It's not necessarily that it's inherently bad for us to want to be productive or efficient. I think it's how we're going about this that is causing us a lot of problems.
Camille: Part of it starts with how we're defining time management. I came across this funny little saying it was this definition of tomorrow, which is that tomorrow is a mystical land where 99% of human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored.
Camille: I love this idea. Yeah. That's how it feels, right?
Camille: Back to the definition. The definition of time management being the ability to use one's time effectively or productively. Again, good. Like we should want to do that, but there's some things in there that I think when you start to unwind them can be problematic.
Camille: So this idea of using time for maximum output, and it makes me think like, is that really all we're here to do? It kind of makes me feel like we're just machines, right. That are supposed to do maximum output. The other part of this definition is around being effective. So what do we mean by that? Are we saying that simply producing for production sake is effective?
Camille: Cause sometimes we get caught in that trap, right? Just running on the hamster wheel is supposed to be doing effective, being effective at work or being productive. Why don't we consider thinking without producing as something that is productive or effective? So there's some things in just how we think about those definitions of productivity and effectiveness that I think sometimes get a little messy.
Camille: And time management is actually supposed to be about planning and prioritizing and using our time wisely, which we should all be wanting to do. But I think what's wrong in how we define time management is that we don't necessarily think of it that way all the time. We've started to just oversimplify it to mean getting more done than everybody else.
Camille: And we live in a culture that for the most part, it celebrates the hard work heroics and the firefighting that happens in the workplace. And it's rarely celebrating this slowing down, reflecting, planning, or doing genuine problem solving. I definitely see this happening with my clients a lot where the idea that we would slow down and either do a lessons learned or just sit down and really get to the root cause of a problem is very problematic for them.
Camille: And a lot of what's happening is their employees. They've recognized, oh, I'm rewarding employees for the heroics of overcoming some really challenging problem. And I'm not rewarding the employees that actually prevented problems in the first place. So we kind of struggle with this in the workplace.
Camille: And then there's a million tools and life hacks for how to improve your time management, such as there's the parade analysis. There's the Pomodoro technique. There's time blocking. There's a million things I could name that are all of these great tools for how to be better at managing your time.
Camille: And there's a million books. There's Getting Things Done by David Allen. There's Atomic Habits by James Clear. And most recently, I just read 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Berkman. I love all these books, by the way, I am a fan of all of these things. And I've used all these, not all, I've used many of those tools. Definitely used the ones that I've named.
Camille: But what happens is that they become more things for us to fail at, as we try to do them. And it actually starts to add to our time management problem, cuz it's more things for us to do on top of the work we have to do. Cuz we try to do too many of them because there are so many solutions.
Camille: Even if you just read one of those books and try to do all the things, it's a lot of work. So it's kind of this little self perpetuating problem. This never ending quest for us to get it all done is kind of creating more work for us, which makes us less effective.
Camille: Instead of using those tools to help us do our work better, we're just trying to win the game and be more productive to the next guy. There's no game actually at all. We've sort of made this up because we also have a culture of competitive nature. I wanna better than the next guy.
Camille: And so it's this game that isn't even in existence, so you can't even win it. So it sort of becomes this futile effort.
Camille: That is my end of my soapboxing. I'm gonna invite George up to the soapbox and see what you have to say about all of this, George.
George: I have a question first. So when listening to you, you said you had changed your thinking about time. Do you remember when you changed your approach to time? Like, did you do this when your girl, as an adult, when.
Camille: This thinking I have now about how I think about time, it mostly shifted when I transitioned from being an employee to being a business owner.
George: Oh really? Huh.
George: Say more about that.
Camille: And it was... so when I left my job there, I had no structure anymore. I had to make my own. And the only structure that I knew was what jobs provided you, which was you showed up at work early and you stayed late and that's how you proved your worth. And you work, work, work, work all day and you didn't take any breaks.
Camille: Like that was my life. So I brought that with me into my business, but then I was like, but wait, I wanna have my own business because I didn't like that. I didn't like what I was doing before and that I wasn't spending time on stuff that was really important to me. Like spending time with family and doing things that I really enjoy.
Camille: I was sacrificing that stuff for the work because I wasn't owning my schedule. So for me, it was a little bit of a process and a journey and I still work on it cuz I still have these old ways of thinking about work. So that's really when it happened, that's when I started to shift and be like, maybe we're just thinking about this all wrong.
Camille: Who am I even competing with to get more done? Just me. It's just myself.
George: See everybody there's hope for you. Even my sister, one of the most organized people I know only recently changed her thinking this way in the last five years. She's like 90 years old.
Camille: What! I know. And that looks so good.
Camille: Yeah. You look great for 90, for 90? Woo! Yes, thank you.
Camille: It might be hard to even shift your way of thinking because you're boxed into a certain environment of what your work is. But as a business owner, you do have more control over this than you think you do.
Camille: And that's my big message to business owners is you get to redefine what this means for you.
George: So I have some thoughts about this, besides just the curiosity about when you made this shifted your thinking. Like, so first of all, I'm gonna push back. Not really. Look, we do live in space and time, time is a thing that exists that happens around us.
George: You can't avoid time. It makes sense that we would think about time that we pay attention to it. We have schedules and things that we have to adhere to. But I think for me, like there's also no. There's no good reason to waste time.
George: So like two clicks versus eight clicks. That's pretty minutia to pay attention to, but in the aggregate, if you're designing a process for somebody then millions of times, like that does wasting time enough to count. So I mean, sure. It's reasonable to think about if I could do something more efficiently or faster without freaking myself out, why not?
George: For me, time management is a core habit. It's a core skill. So some trick that I do in my job, I've done for years. I'm a software guy.
George: If I just look at how I'm spending my time with physical activities, I'm either reading something or I'm typing something, a lot of the time. So if I'm spending most of my time doing those two things, I'd better be good at it. Well, so I took typing lessons a long time ago. I switched to a more efficient keyboard, gave me about 40 words per minute speed boost.
George: But after a while, I start making mistakes again. So once a year I go back and refresh my typing lessons so that my efficiency and speed goes back up.
George: Those are important things to do, their core skills. And time management is another one of those core skills. So I try to be at least decent data. From the perspective of little habits I need to have that help me overall for me, time management goes in that bucket.
George: It doesn't go in the big strategic bucket, if that makes sense. What do you think of that?
Camille: I would say first of all, I do think that you are one of the people who is better at not falling into this trap of 'time management is a competition'. And that's basically what I'm saying.
Camille: I'm saying the problem with time management, that that's become a competition for people to just be better at it than the next guy, instead of getting to the core, we've lost sight of why it's important. I don't think you have lost sight of that. But I think generally when we do it poorly, we have lost sight of why it even matters.
Camille: And so my point in talking about the definition is that I think we've redefined it in a bad way. If we got to the essential definition, what it's really all about, it's a good thing. But when we mess it up into, I just need to get as many things done as I can. It's not a good thing. Not about getting as many done, right? It's about getting the right things done.
George: If I had to say one thing about what time management to me is it's was really distraction management for me. Like my big problem, time management, I'm like a little dog looking at squirrels. I get distracted easily from what I'm doing. So for me being disciplined about time management is removing distractions for me. That's the root cause for my need for time management.
Camille: So yes, George, I am gonna talk about root causes next. Thank you very much for that lovely tee up.
George: Why I'm here.
Camille: This is what I think is problem number two with time management is that we're not paying attention to the root causes of why we're bad at it.
Camille: So poor time management is actually it's the result of something else going on with you or your business.
Camille: It's not just that you're lazy. I mean, I think some people actually are like, I'm just lazy. I'm not very good at this. That's not really what it's about. There's other things that are going on. So for example, it could be that your priorities aren't clear. Could be that you haven't set up an environment that enables you to focus and be distraction free.
Camille: As you were talking about George focusing on distractions or maybe you don't even know what that environment should be for you. You haven't figured that out. It could be that you're not planning properly. It could be your goals aren't clear, or they aren't even very motivating for you. You might be addicted to the adrenaline rush of getting things done in the Nick of time.
Camille: And this is a real thing. Maybe you're doing that and it's causing you to not consider how those actions are then impacting other people. Cuz it's just all about you because you've got this adrenaline rush happening. If you are a perfectionist, it could be that your perfectionism is creating a lot of unnecessary work.
Camille: You might also not be great at delegating. Maybe you're abdicating and not delegating well ,is also not great. You could conflate being busy with being productive. And like I said before, there's this working as the hero, the firefighter or being the master of chaos could just become part of your identity.
Camille: And you're just like, Hey, this is just who I am and how I work best. I hear that a lot. And George, you had said something recently that stuck with me. It was in a previous podcast. You had said that we often confused time with effort. And I was like, instead of this whole bullet list, I probably could have shortened it up and just used that for most of those. But I wanted to be all soap boxy and talk about it.
Camille: So what are your thoughts about this?
George: Well, first of all, time with effort, which one of us is the physicist. It's not me, right?
Camille: Look taking some physics classes does not make one a physicist. Let's just, I don't have a degree in astronomy. I don't either.
Camille: I have a degree in humanities. What George is referring to is that back in the day, my dream was to be an astronaut or to study astrophysics. And then when I got into quantum mechanics, I realized my brain doesn't work that way. And so here I am doing business stuff.
Camille: So that's why he teases me about being a physicist, which I am not.
George: So I got a bunch of thoughts here. Everything that you said, I'm just gonna add something that I see in big businesses.
George: And this's the term KPI, key performance indicators. And big businesses we set these annual goals. And then we talk about how we wanna measure our progress or the goals, or how can we tell things are going. And a lot of times people will introduce this concept to KPIs. What are the KPIs that lets you know, you're on track with this goal?
George: And the first analogy I always hear is, think about your car's dashboard and your speedometer on the car. Your speedometer is a KPI performance indicat. Okay. Everybody gets that. That's all good. Somehow people still make the mistake of confusing the KPI for the goal. And so they focus on the KPI. And I think what I'm gonna claim here is time management is a KPI, not a goal it's so easily observable.
George: It's so easy to track. There's so many ways you could address that time that we somehow confuse time management for the goal, which is what you've been spending all this time disambiguating. What do you think about that?
Camille: Oh, spot on. I'm so glad that you brought up this concept of KPIs. Cause I do think we're gonna have to do a whole episode on KPIs and OKRs and how do you actually set the right goals to measure the right things? Leading indicators versus all of this stuff that you need to do in business and just sort of demystifying all of that.
Camille: Cause I think you're right. We tend to use key performance indicators in the wrong way in business. And yeah, I like this idea. I hadn't thought about this as actually being a KPI for you and your business. So I love that. I think it's a really important one to think about, but then it gets back to, again, one of the challenges when we comes to setting those kinds of measures is are you measuring the right thing that's going to create the right type of activity? Because if you start measuring the wrong thing yeah, which is how many hours of work I put in, that's not gonna make you the most productive human, because it's what work you do in that time that matters.
Camille: There's definitely like stuff we could get into and we'll have to nerd out on that on another whole episode.
George: In an earlier episode, we were asking about simple questions you can ask yourself to tell if you're on the right track. And I wonder if the simple question here is, are you using time as your KPI? If you are, you're doing it wrong, stop using that KPI entirely. Whenever you see I'm measuring my time to do something, stop that think hard about something else to measure instead. This is just thought that came outta my mind in the moment.
Camille: And measuring how long it takes to do things. On paper, that sounds like a great thing that we should do. But I think especially if you are just running a small business, it's so important that everybody's using their time effectively, but also can have these unintended consequences of the mindset that it creates, which is you're just here to output.
Camille: And we're humans. So like that's not all we're there to do. I think that's a whole other tangent that we could go off on and we will at some point, because I think it's really important to balance. It doesn't mean don't measure any of those things, but how do we create the balance of, I need to measure the right things, but also have a balance of, I cannot expect the humans in this workplace to be 100% cranking out output all the time.
Camille: Part three of the problem with time management is that it makes us devalue planning. This is the problem that vexes me the most because I love me some planning.
Camille: Time management is supposed to be about planning, prioritizing, being decisive, being focused and valuing your time, but we don't, or at least we don't do this well because culturally, again, we have jumped to that short version.
Camille: I just need to get more things done. So instead of seeing the solution to better time management, as slowing down to plan, to prioritize, to make key decisions, we are falling into that trap of that game. Again, of I'm gonna get more done than the next guy. And so we go straight into doing the work and planning is just so critical to building a business that makes a nice, steady profit runs the way that you can most easily manage and sustain.
Camille: And yet we're skipping that step.
Camille: Every business owner I work with has room for improvement in this. Most business owners I work with aren't really doing this at all. Planning is what I mean by this. So if you're scrambling all the time, how long can you sustain that way of working?
Camille: And again, most of the reason people are starting businesses is like same reason that I serve, which is I don't wanna work that way anymore. I don't wanna be scrambling to sort of meet some crazy, ridiculous schedule of work. I actually want more control over my time.
Camille: And I know business owners who are far too young to be burnt out on their businesses, but they are like, I need out. I want a two year exit plan, I need to go do something different. And it's because they haven't created a plan that goes beyond today, this week, or this month. They don't have anything that's like pulling them forward or a plan that's even creating a more sustainable way of working. They're still firefighting.
Camille: They're still just reacting in the moment to what's happening. And they're not problem solving properly because they don't feel like they have time to slow down and do any of that stuff because they just need to get the next thing done. What do you think about planning George?
George: I think that's great.
George: And there's this great resource to help you think about planning.
George: It's called The Belief Shift.
Camille: Insert advertisement here.
George: Seriously.
George: I was thinking about this though, because, say you decided I'm not gonna read about time management. I really have a planning problem. Ugh. Planning. Planning can be its own time. Sinkhole. One of the things I actually really enjoy about talking with you about this is your ability to get people out of that sinkhole and get started.
George: And so I just wanted to make this comment about, if you've tried planning as a way out and you found yourself stuck or paralyzed, Camille can help you with that too.
George: I just wanted to point out that thing and it could be satisfying to retreat, back into time management, cuz at least you're getting something done and you're not stuck anymore.
George: So maybe there's an addiction to, or satisfaction with that planning, if you don't do planning right. Or you get paralyzed by it.
Camille: I do know. And it's almost as if you read ahead into our outline here about the podcast and belief shifts.
George: This is all of the cuff.
Camille: I want to make the connection to the belief shifts, cuz I think this is really, really important to understand because time management doesn't just sit out here alone as this singular skill that you just need to improve on. It is related in so many ways, as we've been talking about to ultimately how you build a high performing business. You do have to figure out this time management problem to have a high performing business.
Camille: And that's why we're talking about it. So when we talk about The Belief Shifts, here's how it relates. I'm just gonna take the top four. As I just mentioned planning, so planning it over winging, it is one of our belief shifts go from winging it to planning it, please that's the shift go in that direction.
Camille: And the reason that we're winging it is because it means that we're doing stuff winging it is doing. I'm active, I'm making things happen. And when we care less about whether those things are the right things, then we're caring more about just getting them done than whether they're the right things or not.
Camille: Because our definition of time management has been muddled and it's telling us to just be busier than the next guy. So if you're caught in that way of thinking, then you're just gonna wanna wing it and do stuff and not slow down and plan. And the essential problem here that I see, and I hear people literally say this to me is, oh, I never really thought of planning as work.
Camille: I think that's a really core idea in all of this. And it comes up for me a lot when I start talking about planning with people. Yes. I know George is looking perplexed.
George: I truly don't get that. What do they think it is? It's not playtime time.
Camille: It's the stuff you do before you start working.
George: Oh wow. That's messed up.
Camille: I know. If you actually are one of those people listening right now, that's like, I didn't think of it as the work don't feel bad.
George: You're you're just punishing yourself. You're not giving yourself credit for the time and spending planning.
George: think about this then I would say army generals, military general spend a lot of the time planning to send people in the battle to go get messed up. Is that planning not work? Of course it's work. It has to be done. You gotta count it.
Camille: Planning is work. That's a big mindset shift. Gotta get into planning it over winging it. Cuz planning is work.
Camille: The other belief shift that this relates to: foundations over quick fixes. So we are so busy trying to just do more with our time that we have lost our ability to just slow down.
Camille: And this means we don't do good problem solving cuz good problem solving does mean we gotta sort of study some things and look at some data and actually start really thinking about what's really going on underneath the surface of this problem. And we're racing so fast to just find a solution so that we can like, yay, move on and go do our things that any solution will do as long as we can just get moving. So that we're not getting down to the foundations of solving core problems, which means that problem wasn't really solved and it's gonna keep coming back.
Camille: We're just constantly working on like solving the same problem over and over again.
Camille: Number three: process over outcomes. So we don't view slowing down as a creative force for us. We just see doing as being the main thing that is important.
Camille: So we see problems as impediments instead of as opportunities for improvement. So we're trying to not have problems and that's the wrong way to think about it.
Camille: You will always have problems. You can't eliminate problems. In fact, your job as a business owner is pretty much every day solving problems and you might be like, yeah, and I wanna stop doing that. Well, I have bad news for you. It is your job. Your job as a business owner is I gotta come in and solve problems.
Camille: But when you shift your thinking to, oh, the process of problem solving is a good thing for me because I'm growing and I'm learning and it's opportunities for me to improve how my business is running.
Camille: Then you're focusing on that process of problem solving over the outcome of, I just want stuff to be done. That's when you really start winning the game as a small business owner. So don't be so driven by the outcome of just completing a task that you skip the process of getting it done right.
George: One thing that teaches me this lesson that will never forget rid of problems is ants. Because in our house we have an ant problem and I could tell you that problem is never completely gonna go away.
Camille: And the root cause of the problem is probably so mystifying over there. Like how do you actually figure that out? You're not an ant expert.
George: We did hire one though. Now that you mentioned it he did show us the root cause.
Camille: Yes. That's why you hire an expert.
Camille: Oh, you're also leading into such another great topic, which is sometimes you need an expert to help you get to the root cause.
George: Thanks ants.
Camille: So one more belief shift I wanna relate this to: micro moves over massive action.
Camille: When we push ourselves to be highly productive or to take massive action, we might actually be building up a lot of resentment and we don't even know it.
Camille: So if you're like, I've got to take this massive action. I've gotta be highly productive.
Camille: I've gotta just be super effective and efficient with how I use my time. What happens is we can end up dreading it the next time we force ourselves to do it. And it just becomes an unsustainable way of working. So it's one thing to get into flow, we've all had this experience right?
Camille: When you get into working and you're just like, I'm in flow. And the next thing you know, you're like, I just spent two hours on that. That's a beautiful place to be. But when you're trying to force that every time, it can make it harder to get into that space the next time.
Camille: Instead, focus on your micro moves in order to keep your momentum going. It doesn't mean you never take massive action. It just means you don't prioritize that so much that it becomes a block for you.
Camille: So Atomic Habits, that book is great for thinking in this way, because what he focuses on is building habits in these small increments, thus atomic.
Camille: So it's a great way to think about like, oh, I'm, I need to build habits, but make it as easy as possible for me. That's the whole concept of micro moves. I need to make this hard work really as easy as possible for me to get into so I can build up my way toward doing more bigger work.
Camille: The book 4,000 Weeks, he says, embrace radical incrementalism. Oh, I love it. Cause it's like it's small is just more feasible. So I think this idea of micro moves as a way to be more efficient is a great way to think.
Camille: I do have a caveat here. So one of my friends, colleagues also one of my coaching clients, he has a way of taking things that I coach him on and miraculously, he weaponizes them. And so he started to talk about this with micro moves.
Camille: The other day we were talking about like, how can you start planning in small increments? Cuz he was like, I think of planning is I have to carve out all this time. And I was like, no, what if you could just do it in small pieces? He was like, yeah, maybe I could just do it instead when I'm waiting at line of the Starbucks, I could use that time to be on my phone doing da da, da, da.
Camille: And I'm like, that's not actually what I mean when I say micro moves.
George: That's awesome.
Camille: So I just wanna clarify here that micro moves do not mean every second you have free, like I have to go to the bathroom, I'm gonna take my phone with me and do some work. No! I'm sitting in my car and I'm at a stop light. So I'm gonna asnwer- no! Just be present in the moment.
Camille: We're gonna talk a little bit more about this in a minute, but I just wanna clarify it. Micro moves are not about taking every second you have available and putting it to use to do something. Micro moves are about setting aside time that is smaller than the time you usually would set aside in order to just make some small progress.
Camille: I'm scheduling 10 minutes to go work on this task. When otherwise I would think, well, if I don't have an hour to do it, then it's not worth doing. It's changing your mindset from that to, I could actually get a lot done if I just spent the 10 minutes doing something.
George: I love all of these connections. They make perfect sense to me. I actually had another thought and that you just mentioned, and it's about mindfulness and being present. As you were talking most of this time so far, they've been coming back to me. I was gonna ask you, what do you think about the whole movement toward thinking about meditation and mindfulness and presence?
George: To me, it's very appealing because it seems to be addressing, , just doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, you're not really stopping it and thinking. And everything you talk about here is a way of getting people to stop and think about what they're doing and being present. So what, what do you think about all this?
Camille: I love that you bring this up.
Camille: There were two ideas that I wanted to introduce that we should think about instead of time management. One of them is related to what you're talking about, which is energy management.
Camille: And I think about that a lot in terms of how we're showing up in our presence and one of the ways to be more present and think about the energy is what you're talking about.
Camille: Being more mindful, meditation, learning how to be silent and still. And not always hurried and, and running to just get the next thing done. I think that's really important. I think we have to calm our brains for a while just for general health. And I think it also helps us be more productive than when we are working.
Camille: So people who don't take vacations and actually take a real vacation when they don't work. Versus taking the work with them, those kinds of ideas of just resting and not working. I think it's really, really important. I think about it when I relate it to the idea of just your physical health too, in that you can't be working out and building muscle constantly. You have to give your body time to rest and recuperate.
Camille: I think your brain needs the same thing. Your brain's constantly working on work. But it's a muscle too, and it needs to just have a moment to rest and calm and reflect.
Camille: I really like that idea, cuz I do think that it's not something that we think about when we think about being good at time management necessarily, but we should be. We should be thinking more about that mindfulness aspect of it and that's another way to think about in this moment, what's the best use of my time?
Camille: Oh, maybe it's not to get stuff done on my to-do list, but it's to try and meditate for five minutes.
George: Yeah.
Camille: So since we're talking about this energy time meditation thingy I'm just gonna go right to that and talk a little bit more, expand on this idea of energy management.
Camille: So this is my way of saying if you're struggling with time management, if you are not George Drapeau, who actually knows how to work time management into his world, but you are struggling with this concept of time management and you have found yourself trying to run the little rat race, or you find yourself like, why am I just trying to be more efficient? And I've lost sight of the purpose and what I'm trying to do. I have two ideas I'd like you to shift your thinking to.
Camille: One of them is this energy management idea. Most of the time when my clients are asking me to help them with this, I start having them instead think more about energy management, because it's how we show up every day that matters. At the end of the day, when you're all done with your business and you're passing on to whatever you think is happens after we die, nobody's thinking about all the work you got done. They're thinking about the kind of human that you were and how you showed up.
Camille: And so I think thinking about our energy and how we show up is so much more important than just all the things we're getting done. So think about how you need to show up in any given event or activity or thing that you're doing and deciding where you wanna put your energy as well.
Camille: So making choices about, do I wanna put my energy into whether it's relationships, types of work or goals, what does it matter that I put my energy into? And then do the work that sort of matches the energy as much as you can.
Camille: Now, you don't always have control over this. But I think being conscious about that and thinking about it is important and recognizing that different activities in your day require different energy.
Camille: Your spouse requires you to show up with a different energy than your employee versus your client versus your dog. Everybody needs different kinds of energy from you and you need different types of energy as well. So what kind of energy do you need coming in?
Camille: I think we should just think about managing how we show up and the energy that we're both putting out, but also that we're taking in.
Camille: Thinking about how I wanna spend my time as I'm transitioning from one thing to the next. Just taking a minute to think about how do I need to show up for this next meeting, this next conversation? How do I need to show up for me? And for other people.
Camille: It's still moments in time, but it's the energy I put into it, as opposed to the production value I'm gonna get out of it. Instead of thinking about what am I gonna produce out of this time? The one thing I'll say about this is I don't mean this in the way of, you should just always do what feels good because that's not realistic.
Camille: Right? Sometimes we have to go do stuff that we don't really want to go do. I mean, if we always do what feels good, we just all be sitting around eating bomb bonds on the couch. Well, that's what I'd be doing.
Camille: So we have to recognize that sometimes you have to create the energy you need, but also you can do that. You can create the energy that you need in any given moment. So if you feel low energy, do whatever you need to do that builds up your energy. That could be movement, could be about nutrition. It could be some music. Like everybody has a different thing that helps them boost their energy. Right? Other scenarios you might need to calm your nerves and be like, I need to, I need to chill out a little bit.
Camille: I'm a little hyped up and I need to just calm myself. Maybe you're having a tense conversation with somebody and you realize like I'm starting to get a little heated. I need to calm myself down. So then what works for you? Like this kind of comes back to what you were talking about, George, that like, maybe I need to meditate.
Camille: Maybe I just need some time to myself. Maybe I need to take a walk. Maybe I just need a breathing exercise.
Camille: That's something we have probably more control over than time. And it's also a more fulfilling way to think about how we're moving through time.
Camille: What do you think about that, George?
George: Real quick story, couple weeks ago, I was at Avi's elementary school campus and was talking with the principal, like get back to school stuff and what I could do to volunteer.
George: And my wife was with me and I was very excited. And so the three of us were kind of talking and was being all excitable and the principal just kind of laughed at me. She went like. Bring it down. She shouldn't even say anything.
Camille: So all you're doing is listening on the podcast, George is his hands and he's like lowering them.
Camille: Just remember we're an audio medium. First of all. Yeah. So he is lowering his hands, like in a calming gesture.
George: I'll add one thing to this, about energy management, something that's helped me and that is to keep in mind try to observe your own energy profile, acknowledge that our energy changes over the course of the day.
George: It's absolutely the true lots of studies on this and try to think about what things match your energy profiles. Like for example, my wife gets up quick and easy if she does her best work in the morning.
George: I'm the opposite, and my peak since high school or earlier has always been around 9:00 PM.
George: And to this day, my best thinking seems to be around that time. So acknowledge that, try to figure out what your energy profile is and try to think about matching to that as best you can. Some people might say, well, during the day I've gotta have the same energy all day. I say, no, you don't, there's interactive energy and there's quiet time energy, and they're different.
George: So, spend some time thinking about that is what I would say.
Camille: Oh, I love this advice, George. I think this is a really big one, cuz so many times you hear life hacks are about getting up earlier and then jamming a bunch of stuff into your morning before you actually start your day kind of thing.
Camille: Yep. That will never work for me. I am also not a morning person. I get up early, but I've learned like I'm best at, in the morning, which is not talking to people. I do my most like internal sort of thinking and just processing and it has to be quiet. So my husband knows, don't say more than a few words to me in the morning.
Camille: And don't say them right away, like I need at least 30 minutes. So usually it's best if he walks the dog first and then can come back and maybe say a few words, but we don't really talk in the morning cuz I don't have any words yet. So, which is my idea as an introvert, I only have so many words in my word bank a day, so I don't start using them until later in the day.
Camille: And then I will quickly run out of them depending on what's happening.
George: We're exactly the same. And I'm an extrovert, but I'm the same. Like don't talk to me the first hour of the day. It's not that I get mad. You're not gonna get anything.
Camille: I might get a little grumpy. Just saying.
Camille: But I do love this. I think the point that you're making is so, so important, which is we need to understand ourselves. And when we do our best work. What type of work we're doing. So, is morning, good introspective time. When is your best time to do creative work?
Camille: Knowing that about ourselves, I think is really important. There's so many, just here's your morning routine and your schedule and how your nighttime routine and make something that works for you. Like the whole thing is just experiment and figure out your own way of doing that because you're your own unique human and everybody has different lives going on.
Camille: Some people have kids, some people don't. There's so many factors that you're working around to make all of that work too, that you don't necessarily have control over. So I think everybody's just gotta figure that out for themselves. So, yeah. I love that you brought that up, George super important.
Camille: We're getting to the end and this last point I wanna make, I'm not gonna dwell on it a whole lot because I'm gonna be dwelling on it for the entire length of the whole podcast for years to come.
George: What is that?
Camille: Which is planning. We're gonna dive into planning much more next month in October. We're gonna talk a lot more about this, but I wanna bring this whole conversation back to planning as a way to start thinking about this a little differently.
Camille: So this is my part, two of how to think about time management differently.
Camille: In addition to thinking about energy management, also start thinking about planning differently and it starts with what we said earlier, which is planning is work. So that's mind shift. Number one, if you don't already think about planning as work. Yes, it is. And I will say, if I was gonna say I was expert in anything, that would probably be it.
Camille: So definitely trust me. It is part of the work. And I find that the challenge that we have with planning is that we have a lot of misconceptions about what planning actually is and what it is not. And it's causing business owners to either avoid it or to overdo it. So we're usually on one end of the spectrum or the other.
Camille: So this means we basically don't know what good planning looks like or how to do it. But it's a skill like anything else, and you can get better at this. And that's what we're here to help you do. One of the most essential things, foundational things that I wanna help business owners get good at is becoming better planners and project managers, strategic planners.
Camille: Because that's the essence of building this long term sustainable profitable business that you want. It really lives in that space. Getting good at that is really important.
Camille: I read this Medium article recently. The essence of it was planning is just guess work. So stop planning and just get to work.
Camille: And I was like, what? How dare you, sir. But I think what he was trying to say is his point was that your plans are never gonna work out. So why bother? And most of you are spending too much time planning and not doing, which is fair. There are people who are spending too much planning and not enough time doing. But the solution is not to just not plan.
Camille: Any time you get into that space of black and white thinking, it's either this or this, stop and question yourself. Maybe there's something in between. And I think this is a great example of that.
Camille: Because the solution really is to get better at planning. If planning isn't working for you it's cuz you haven't gotten good at it yet. And to be a good planner, you first need to know like, what do you want to accomplish with the plan? To often people create a plan, they're just like, here's my pile of things I have to go do.
Camille: That's not a plan. A plan actually should have an objective. There's something you're trying to get out of the plan. So that's one space where I think our thinking about planning is a little backwards.
Camille: The other point I wanna make is that the plan itself is not actually what matters. The plan is not what's going to make the difference for you in the long run. What's going to make the difference is the thinking and the work that it takes to create a plan in the first place. It's the effort of creating the plan. Back to what you said, like it's about effort, not about just the time, like the effort that I put into this.
Camille: That's actually where the good stuff is. The work of creating and improving the plan, cuz it requires you to do critical thinking, make key decisions, evaluate risks. All of these things are part of making a good plan. And that's what the value is. It doesn't matter whether your plan is actually in fact, you can't make a perfect plan.
Camille: But you can work to perfect the plan and that process is what's so valuable in what you do. It's gonna require you to slow down and think, and you're gonna start with the end in mind and you're gonna do cycles of improvement. That's the work that actually matters in this.
Camille: So if your thinking, am I good at planning? Am I not good at planning? If you haven't thought about planning in this way, don't expect to be good at this out of the gate and wherever you're at with planning, you can always get better. I'm always improving how I plan all the time. Even though I consider myself kind of an expert in this space.
Camille: Look at it as just another skill that you can practice and improve. So if you're an over planner, you wanna practice just minimum viable planning. How do I do less and start taking action? Cuz we can hide behind planning for sure. It's easier to plan than to do. Do means I'm taking some risk. You're always gonna take a little risk. Have to get comfortable with that space.
Camille: If you're not a planner, then you wanna practice taking small moves towards creating bigger and better plans.
Camille: We're gonna talk much more about this and how it's gonna lead you to be more effective and productive and as a better way to think about time management than the messed up way that we've sort of started to think about time management in the world.
Camille: Is this just a small business problem? Is this an all business problem? this hesitation to plan? Who do you think about that?
George: I have a comment about this.
George: So how planning tends to look in big organizations is you look at goals, people are trying to set up the annual goals for a company and they start out well intentioned, everybody says we're not gonna focus on too many things.
George: We're only gonna focus on three to five main things, not 20 to 30. So everybody bring your ideas and we're gonna needle it down to three to five things. Okay, good. And then people will have the conversation about what are the key performance indicators we're using to measure those things. What are the main objectives and key results that we're gonna do?
George: After all this, like usually months of workshops and work streams and planning and what ends up happening is sure, there's maybe three goals, but each goal has sub goals. And each of the sub goals has cascades. Literally you have a slide deck of 10 pages of goal and you've lost sight of what you're going for.
George: You didn't really simplify. They're just overwhelming. And you roll them down to the organization, individual contributors, look at them like I quit. I can't do all that. Do you remember those days?
Camille: Yes. And I'm still in those days with clients. this is a whole podcast for us to really dive into this problem of how we cascade goals through an organization. Setting your strategic direction should help you keep all of that work focused into the most essential, bare minimum of what's needed.
Camille: And yet what happens is it explodes into what you're describing. It's like rabbits, it's just like more and more and more. We want everybody to be part of the process. So I think there's so many things we can talk about there. Part of it is that it's a one time a year process for most companies, which is totally wrong.
Camille: Part of it is the way that we cascade these things by creating more work instead of shrinking. Like it should be these five micro goal support achieving the one big goal. But they should be smaller, but they don't get smaller. There's just the same size goal that keeps going throughout.
George: You just gave me a science fiction term. These are planning tribbles is what they are.
Camille: Oh, I knew you would have a Star Trek reference for us.
George: You're right. These little tiny sub goals turn into their own big, ah, I hate this.
Camille: Yes. It also make me think of gremlins. It's like we just add water and boo boo, boo, boo. They're just multiplying and multiplying and we can't stop it. Feels like it's the right work. So yeah, I think that's the challenge of the overplanning too, is we don't actually do what planning should be doing, which is deciding what to say no to. We are not choosing what to say no to enough.
Camille: And we're just saying yes to a lot of things and it starts to become spaghetti at the wall instead of actual strategy. But we call it strategy. And so we think it's okay. But it's not. We gotta do a whole thing on that.
Camille: So take aways. I do recommend this new book that I read 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. It's called Time Management For Mortals, and he has a nice, different spin on time management. It's very much related to all the things we just talked about here.
Camille: So it it's practical time management, but also kind of has that energy aspect to it too. So I definitely recommend that.
Camille: My other takeaway for you is instead of trying to manage your time, focus on being a better planner and focus on your energy, start focusing in those two places. And if you're like, I don't know how to become a better planner or do this energy thing.
Camille: We'll keep listening to us on The Belief Shift, because this is all we're gonna be talking about. Mostly planning because I love it. My goal is to like make every one of you out there who is like rolling your eyes about being a better planner, to make you start loving planning. I have done it before and I can do it again.
Camille: I was thinking about this when we had talked about the big building blocks of business.
Camille: We talk about strategy and planning and goals and measurements like KPIs. Those are kind of the big blocks. And then this is like the mortar in between.
Camille: This business isn't gonna stand up if you don't also get the mortar laid in between all the bricks right. And that's when I think about this topic of time management. It feels kind of like that this is what's holding it all together well.
Camille: It's as important as the big blocks. And it's all connected, so that's my little analogy.
George: Awesome. Like it.
George: You'll come up with a star Trek one later.
Camille: All right, everybody. Well manage your Tribbles, make sure they don't get out of control.
Camille: That's all I have for this episode of The Belief Shift. Please follow us on Instagram and send us your thoughts, your comments. Leave us reviews by the way, if you've been listening to episodes and you are liking what you hear, we would love for you to leave us a review on apple podcast is the best place to do that and share us, please share us.
Camille: All right. Well that's all we have for time management for this week. Thank you everybody for listening and you know what? We'll catch you next week with new fun topics on planning.
Camille: See everybody.
George: Bye everybody.
George: