ļ»æEpisode One: It's not your fault
[00:00:00]
Hello my friend. Welcome to the Productivity Genius Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Fifield, and I help you master your schedule and achieve extraordinary results. In this first episode, I want you to know that I see you. I totally understand where you are, if you are not killing it with time management, I was exactly like you for my entire life.
Until very recently as a kid, I was a total mess. Studying all the time, pulling all-nighters, always anxious and overwhelmed. In college, I would often sleep on my disgusting concrete floor because I pulled so many all-nighters that if I were to sleep in a comfortable bed, I would just sleep through my alarm.
As a new teacher, it did not get any better. I was always the last teacher out the door. It would be dark out, the lights would be on in the parking lot, and there would be my lonely car as a new mom, of course, with all of the extra responsibilities, that didn't help anything either, and that just gave me more things to do, and I was [00:01:00] just, Always trying to get work done in the little cracks of time, feeling like a failure at work and a failure as a mom. So I won't go into my whole story cause I'm dedicated to keeping these episodes short, but. I decided in 2017 that I was going to master time management. I had spent a few years before that really studying the brain a lot, being super fascinated by it, and once I learned about neuroplasticity and how amazing I.
Our brains are and how they can change. I said, well, if I'm gonna change my brain, it's a like a supercomputer that can master this skill. What skill do I want? Like what skill would knock down all of the other dominoes? Like if I could master this one skill, what would be the most useful thing in achieving my goals?
And I decided that that would be time management. If I could be amazing at time management, then I really believed I could do anything. So in 2017, I said, I'm gonna give myself a full year to figure this out. And so I read every book I could find on time management. I bought all the planners [00:02:00] and it did take me a little bit longer.
In fact, it took me four and a half years to finally master time management.
So I decided to create this podcast. Little bit meta to save you time. I don't wanna take you four and a half years to master time management. You're on the fast track.
You can do this. This is for anyone. I'm a full-time teacher, a full-time director of operations. I'm a life coach. I'm a mom, and I'm a wife. I'm proud of what I do, what I accomplish, and how I show up in all of those roles. Most importantly, I'm not overwhelmed. I'm not worried all the time. I don't have that constant questioning and chatter in my head like, what am I forgetting?
Or what needs to be done? So with this first episode, I wanted to think of like, what could I share If like you only listen to this one episode and you never listen again, what is the one thing that I wanna share? What I'd love to everyone to know about time management,
and the most important thing for you to understand is it's not your fault [00:03:00] that you aren't good at time management. There's two reasons. People generally believe that they can't be good at time management. One is that they believe there's something wrong with them, right? They're just not designed to be good at it.
Their brains just don't work that way. They see other people who are like relaxed. And organized, and they're on social media and they're vacationing and all their work is done. Their house is beautiful, and they're like, they're killing it. What's wrong with me? And these people may like, you might try all the things like, oh, I've tried the planners and the books and the digital things and the programs.
I've tried getting up early. I've tried staying late. I've tried timers. I've tried working faster and harder. Maybe I'm just not disciplined enough. So , that's one reason that people think they can't do it. The other reason that people believe they can't be good at time management is they believe that there's too much going on in their life.
They're too busy, they just have too many responsibilities. It doesn't matter how amazing they are at time management. There's no way the list is just too long. It's physically [00:04:00] impossible to, to do it. They just don't have enough control. I'm here to tell you, neither of those things is true. There's absolutely nothing wrong with you, and you actually aren't too busy if you aren't skilled yet at productivity and time management.
It's just because you have a human brain. Now I know you might be thinking, yeah, well, doesn't everyone have a human brain? And yes, they do. But if you haven't trained your brain, To function in a way that is useful when it comes to time, manage management and productivity. That is the area that you're lacking.
Our brains evolved over thousands of years, and basically we have like two brains. We have our primitive brain, which is amazing and strong, and it is what is running the show in the moment usually. Then we have our prefrontal cortex that was built on top of that. And sort of unfortunately, I guess sort of cuz there's still our functions of our primitive brain that are fantastic, they want to keep.
But if the primitive brain had been [00:05:00] replaced by the prefrontal cortex, all of this time management stuff would be very easy. But it wasn't. It was built right on top of it. So both brains are operating in the moment and our primitive brain's job, you'll often hear me refer to it as your toddler brain is to seek pleasure.
Avoid pain and conserve energy, and it is what made us survive. So it's very good at convincing us to do those things, and it believes those things are very important, but it doesn't really care about your goals or your dreams. Or your plans. It's just concerned with what's going on right now, and so this brain has been running tests and gathering data on you for your entire life, and it knows how to manipulate you to get you to do the things that will.
Ensure your survival. It wants you to do fun things, seek pleasure, avoid pain. So things that are literally painful, like physically painful or emotionally painful, wants to avoid those things. And conserve energy. It doesn't wanna do [00:06:00] thing. Hard things. So my go-to pri brain messages that loves to send me, to keep me from doing things that are like, say, scheduled, are thoughts like, I think I'm hungry.
I definitely need a snack right now. Uh, maybe someone sent me a message on Instagram or email. Before I do this task, I should really check and make sure that there isn't something else I should be doing. And we usually don't even notice our brain sending these thoughts or even know that these are optional or that this is our brain trying to trick us into not doing the thing it sees on our calendar.
And it's not trying to Be mean. It's trying to protect us. It's trying to get us to do something that we probably in the moment don't really want to do
knowing this one thing can totally change the way you view yourself and the choices you make with your time. It's not that you lack willpower or discipline, you aren't lazy. There's nothing wrong with you. You just haven't learned how to manage your mind and your thoughts, and this is absolutely an area where you can reach [00:07:00] expert status.
The skills required for advanced productivity and time management absolutely can be learned, practiced, and mastered. But the key is mind management. I'm so excited you're here that I can share this with you. Tune in each episode to learn how to work less hours while accomplishing all your goals.
I know. That seems like ridiculousness. Like Kelly. Hello. I don't have time to tackle the laundry. Nevermind tackle my wildest dreams. I know it seems impossible and maybe even counterintuitive that working less would be useful or helpful for getting more done. But for now, since we're just starting this journey together, I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.
Or at the very least, just consider that it might be possible. Like if it were, wouldn't that be freaking awesome? Subscribe to the podcast, you never miss a new episode. I promise to keep the episode short and easy to consume since I know currently time is an issue. Thanks so much for tuning in my friend.
See you next time.
