Ep 11_ Time Off and the Efficient Life_ How Taking a Break Elevates Your Game -
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[00:00:00] Hey, welcome back to the Productivity Genius Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Fifield,
and I help you master your schedule so you can create extraordinary results.
In today's episode, we're talking about time off.
Time off is one of those things that I think most of us really think we want more of. But when we look closely at the way we think about time off, it's no wonder we don't take as much as we believe we want.
So before we get started, I wanted to ask you a few questions so you can access your own thoughts and beliefs before I started giving you some of my ideas to kind of, see exactly where you stand on it right now.
if you're in a safe spot where you could stop this, you're not driving or something like that, and you want to listen to each question and maybe just pause after I ask it and then just give a brief answer. There's no need to journal on this for hours. Just kind of let's get a basic idea of what your thoughts, feelings, beliefs about time off are.
what words do you use to describe the hours [00:01:00] you spend at work versus the hours you spend not working?
Like, do you call work time, work time? Do you call your time off, time off? Or do you call it free time? How do you describe those hours? Do you break up time with your family differently? Do you have like family time, time off, work time, me time, creative time? What words do you use to describe the different types of time in your day?
What determines the number of hours you have in each of those areas? Like how do you know going into your day how many hours you're going to invest in maybe work time or family time?
If you don't know going into your day, well, then how do you transition from one to the other? Like what are the triggers that make you go from one to the other?
Do you know someone who has much more time off than you do? And what do you tell yourself about that or that person?
do you like the distribution of your hours? Do you like how you are currently [00:02:00] spending the hours of your day?
If you don't like it, what do you think is in the way of it being different than it is?
If you had an extra 20 hours each week, what would you do with those hours? Why?
the topic of time off is really important for my
regular listener. If you're like most of the people that listen to the podcast, you're a high achiever. You may be a teacherpreneur or an entrepreneur. You probably identify yourself as a hard worker. You've been praised for accomplishment. You might tie accomplishment to your self worth. You might judge yourself or others based on how much you're producing or your output.
And we often believe that if we had more time we could accomplish more and get more done and that would be better. Getting more done, accomplishing more would make our situation better. When I asked you that question, if you had an extra 20 hours each week, what would you do Did you [00:03:00] think I would get all of these things done that I want to be getting done?
here's where the big problem is, in my opinion, in the clients that I work with. If we really value the time we're working, if we think time that is spent. Accomplishing things and getting things done is a very valuable use of time, Then we're going to naturally expand that time to live into our values. Follow me here for a second. If we believe that time spent getting things done. is the best use of our time, then we'll want lots and lots of hours to be dedicated to getting things done.
Now, if this seems like, well, yeah, of course that's a great use of time, then notice that you believe that. And that isn't necessarily terrible or anything like that, but what I'm suggesting is that if that is a great use of time, then you're going to want lots of your time to be spent doing that.
Now, what I'm going to suggest is that we don't [00:04:00] actually value the time working on something versus free time.
That would actually make us less efficient, right? If we believe lots and lots and lots of hours is a great thing, then we are naturally going to use lots and lots of hours to get things done. Instead, we want to value outcomes, maybe efficiency, potency, like impact, results, creative thinking. Those are the things that we want to celebrate in order to reduce the amount of time we spend working.
We want to try to get away from the time connection, which is funny, right, because I say I'm a time management coach, but that's just because that's how we talk about it. I don't actually think you should be managing time and focusing so much on time, but because of the way we talk about it in our society, that's just the best way for me to describe what I help with.
So I'm suggesting we don't focus on time as the [00:05:00] important piece, as the piece that we use to gauge whether we had a successful day.
We want more of our opinion about our day to have something to do with the results that we're creating. Not necessarily just at work, but for sure if you're listening to this podcast, that's one of the things that you want to get lots of results in is work. You want to accomplish lots of things. And I'm not suggesting that we accomplish less.
In fact, I'm suggesting we accomplish lots more, but use less time.
The way that you think about the value of your time, if you think time is valuable when it is spent working, if that seems like less wasteful time, right? So many of us think, Oh, I, did this thing and that was such a waste of time. I could have been getting these things done. We connect time and the value of time.
We judge our time based on whether we were [00:06:00] working or not. And that's the connection I'd love for you to start to break apart.
Now it's not your fault if you currently think about working hard equals long hours, or time spent working is more valuable, or you should be working more, should be getting more done in your hours.
That's the message that's getting sent to us by all of these self-proclaimed successful people.
But it can be a really harmful mentality and it can lead to burnout. So it can lead to the exact opposite of what you're seeking in doing that. You can work yourself so hard and for so long that you don't want to do the work anymore. You don't want to accomplish the things because of the way you're going about it.
It's very common, maybe one of the thoughts that came up to you when I was asking the questions in the beginning. It's very common to think about earning time off. What if you didn't have to earn it? Why would you need to earn [00:07:00] time off? Where does that idea even come from?
What if your normal part of your life was the time living your life, and then there was this little piece where you worked?
Because it's usually the reverse for us, right? Do you ever think, Oh, my work is all done. I have nothing else to do. Probably not. But if you believe you need to earn your time off, then that probably means you don't get a whole lot of it. Right? Because you always have these thoughts. Oh my gosh, I have so much to do.
I'm so behind. Oh my gosh, if I hear that one more time, I'm so behind. It is so common for all of us to think, right? I'm so behind. And if when you feel behind, if you think you need to earn your time off, you're just never going to take it.
Because if we don't make time off a priority now, tomorrow turns the next day and then the next day.
But what if your time off was your status symbol? What if you were super proud of all of the hours you weren't working?
What if your goal was to still accomplish exactly what you're [00:08:00] accomplishing now or twice that but in half the time?
This is now how I challenge myself. I challenge myself to create results in the least amount of time possible.
I know that when I talk about limiting hours at work, it's very natural to think that I'm implying we should get less done. And the exact opposite is true. I love getting things done. I have big goals.
I don't want to stop achieving things, but I know there's a better way to do it. And I'm practicing that now. I'm getting better and better and you can too. I don't think I'll ever stop getting more efficient.
I think I'm still at the bottom, at the beginning of my exponential growth.
But I've spent my whole life with a whole different set of thoughts and beliefs and so they still pop up all the time. Of course, when you spend an entire lifetime believing one thing, You're not going to be able to immediately just switch your mindset and never think the way you used to think before.
Those thoughts are [00:09:00] habitual, they are based on your belief, and there's going to be this time where they keep coming up, of course. So like my go to thoughts in the past were things like, I have to earn or deserve time off. Time off comes after working. I should only have time off if all my work is done.
People who have lots of time off aren't hard workers, they're lazy.
If I have free time, I should use a little bit of it to get some things done.
I believed that eight hours of work per day was normal, and if you worked more, that was probably better. I believed I needed more time to make more money.
And I also believed people who worked long hours are more driven.
so the results of thinking those things, of course For the majority of my life where I worked tons and tons of hours And then I felt guilty and anxious when I wasn't working. I was always worrying and thinking. Oh, I should be getting these things done.
And finally, in my journey, though, to kind of rid [00:10:00] myself of those thoughts, to become someone who got a lot done in very little time, someone who has Lots of time off, I started looking into coaching. I got coached. I did my personal work with my coach to start peeling back those layers and identifying my own limiting beliefs.
And it's so exciting because the more I do this, the more I gain in every area of my life. I have more free time and I create more results at work.
And I'm working on breaking that connection between time and accomplishment. My ability to accomplish things just keeps growing, and I really don't think there's a limit to what I can do. I just keep getting more efficient and powerful as I get coached myself. I pay for coaching for myself. I believe in it so strongly.
I also coach myself, and I just keep asking great questions to access what I know is my endless wisdom, and you have that too.
You can challenge your brain to think hard and creatively. You can do this on your own or you can [00:11:00] supercharge it with a coach. That will just help you move along more quickly and probably get to some deeper things you have going on, which of course I'm a fan of because it speeds up the process.
If you're still kind of in those early stages and you still think of time spent working as a more important thing and you see time off as like a luxury, to kind of start to turn that a bit too, you might want to consider that rest time can actually make your work time more valuable.
If you think about like the analogy of going to the gym, right? If you just stayed in the gym all the time, you would just be breaking down your muscles, breaking down your muscles, breaking down your muscles, and there'd be no time to build. It's that time off, that free time that actually supercharges.
the time at work. So you need those breaks. Your brain was designed for those breaks. Your brain was not designed to work efficiently for the number of hours that you're likely pushing it to [00:12:00] do. And when you give it some breaks, it's actually going to work better for you during those hours where you do decide to work.
So I would love for you to just take a few minutes, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, put on your calendar to think about your beliefs about taking time off.
If you'd like a list of questions you can ask yourself, there'll be a link in the show notes and you can grab those questions.
Now I'm so excited for next week's episode. You're actually not a procrastinator. Why you delay and how to overcome it.
If you identify yourself as a procrastinator, then this is definitely an episode you don't want to miss.
I'd be so grateful if you would subscribe or rate or share the podcast. If you have someone you love who definitely needs help in time management and getting things done and is working too many hours, it would be such a kind thing to share with them. I hope you have an amazing week.
