Episode 10 - Top 10 Time Traps That Steal Your Potential

In episode 10 of 'Life After Fear: Redefine Your Limits,' Courtney Schoch discusses common time-wasting traps and how to avoid them to lead a more fulfilling life. Courtney emphasizes the importance of mindful time management and shares her personal struggles and tips. She outlines major time traps, including social media, multitasking, worrying, complaining, trying to understand someone else's actions, consuming too much news, gossiping, misplacing items, dead-end relationships, micromanaging, long meetings, and handling emails. Courtney also provides practical strategies such as using time-tracking apps, eliminating distractions, and prioritizing tasks into 'urgent,' 'important,' and 'would like to do' categories. The episode concludes with a reference to next week's topic, the benefits of taking a tech break.

MENTIONS

TOGGL APP 

FREEDOM APP 

Franklin, Benjamin. Poor Richard's Almanack. 1748.

Learn more about your host Courtney Schoch

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone. I'm Courtney Schoch. Thank you for joining me for episode number ten of Life After Fear, Redefine Your Limits. This is where you confront your fears and transform your life. 

Last week we explored toxic relationships and this week we're going to waste some time. No, not by listening to this episode.

But the fact is, is that we all waste time. Do you have enough time in the day? Do you feel like there are enough hours to get your stuff done? Are you thinking about the ways that you spend your time? Do you go to bed at night wondering what happened to the day? Are you mindfully thinking about the way that you use your time.

It's kind of like how we eat food. Do we pay attention to tracking our food, to tracking the empty calories? Do you consume empty time like the empty calories? Your tasks, your behaviors, your actions, do these all support a healthy relationship with the value of your time? Remember, everyone has the same amount of time on this planet 24 hours in a day. The beautiful thing is, you get to choose how you spend your time. 

Time is big on my list. I can get really irritable if my time is wasted intentionally or if I allow it to be wasted because I'm not able to manage it. I'll miss deadlines, and that stresses me out, or my back gets pushed up against a wall. Sure, I can do some great work, but I'm rushed, and I like to be prepared. For me personally, being prepared prevents panic. It can be an issue if I don't have time to prepare.

I'm not a fan of the hair on fire, going 120 miles per hour, trying to scramble across the finish line just to get a box checked. Sometimes it works for me. But if I can mindfully move through my time, I feel much more at ease and I feel much more accomplished. 

So, I'm going to share my top 10 time traps that steal potential.

Number one is social media. Oh, at the red light. Oh, in the bathroom, sitting at the dining room table, in between meetings, sometimes even when I'm on the phone, I'm scrolling through social media. At the end of it, what do I learn? Um, not a lot other than the fact that a lot of my friends like to post reels and selfies about things that do not make a big difference in my life, and I typically get off of social media feeling like I am not measuring up to other people. So, my overall feeling is less than when I got on social media.

If I wouldn't have gotten on it at all, I would feel much better. Social media is a big, big time trap for me, and sometimes I think that I'm on social media for 10 minutes, and then I notice I've been on it for 30 minutes. That's 30 minutes that I could have spent doing pretty much anything else that would have been more productive or more enjoyable or more healthy.

The second thing is multitasking. I read an article from Forbes that says that when you multitask, you switch back and forth between multiple attention demanding tasks. And every time you switch, that requires your brain to reorient or re familiarize itself with the task at hand, which takes up a lot of time.

That time could be spent working and working, producing better quality results as opposed to switching back and forth. Multitasking also stifles imagination. When you switch back and forth between tasks constantly, that does not allow your thoughts to flow. And this could be one reason you have the best thoughts when you're doing routine tasks, such as taking a walk, going on a run, or taking a shower.

Your thoughts are your creative thoughts. Give your thoughts an opportunity to flow. Don't multitask when you're trying to be creative. 

Number three is worrying. How many of you have thought about the worst possible outcome just to not have it happen? You've lost sleep. You've created a lot of stress, and it just didn't happen. So try not to worry about things and if something does happen, then you'll handle it because you're equipped to handle it. Have some confidence in that. 

Number four - complaining. It's great to recognize the problem and then put your energy and focus into solving that problem. Everyone can find something to complain about. Misery loves company. However, do you ever really feel good inside when you're complaining or after you've been complaining? Doesn't it feel better to find a solution or understand what the lesson is that you learned in something not working out the way that you thought it should work out instead of feeling wrong and just bitching about it? Other people around you will appreciate it, too. If you stop your complaining.

Trying to understand someone else's actions is number five. You are only responsible for your actions, not others. It is not your responsibility to figure out why someone did something or what they're going to do. You can spend hours or days trying to look into the future, but chances are, you're gonna be wrong.

So why even waste your time? Don't let that occupy space in your mind. 

Number six news. I'm not saying don't listen to the news, but when we keep the repeat loop news going on and on and on throughout the day, I mean, do you need to hear it eight times? It’s important to be informed. I'm definitely not saying don't be informed, but that can also occupy a lot of your space. It's like a computer with a processor running when a program's just running and running in the background. It actually takes up a lot of energy. Therefore, it wastes a lot of time because you could be letting your mind go into a different space and be more productive, imaginative, or just mindful. So listen to it a couple of times, in my opinion, and move along. 

The next one is gossiping. Gossiping is rarely a good idea. I love a good story. However, I have also been on the receiving end, and it does not feel good and I have gossiped about other people and I've been caught gossiping.

If you have to start a sentence with something along the lines of "Don't tell Molly I told you this", "I'm really not supposed to talk about this," or something similar to those two sentences, it may not be the best conversation to have. It might make you feel important in the moment, but in the end, it doesn't serve anyone.

Then you end up spending time backtracking when Molly or whoever finds out you spilled their private information or talk trash about them confronts you. 

The next thing is misplacing items. How many of you have gone through your home searching for your keys, your wallet, your purse, a book, the mail, your cup of coffee? I do it all the time. My husband did it so much that, as a gift, I got him a smart wallet. It beeps so he can find it or he can locate it on his phone. 

Everything needs a home. So, why not just put it in its place when you walk in the door and that way, you won't spend so much time searching for misplaced items, and it'll also alleviate a lot of stress.

Number nine, dead-end relationships, personal, professional, either one, it doesn't matter. Why are you engaging in it or staying in it? If it's not working out and you've really put in as much energy and effort as you can and tried to find solutions. Perhaps it's time to give it an expiration date and move along.

How many of us have realized we should have made an exit a long time ago but didn't because we did not have the courage or the confidence? We can't get that time back. Do yourself a favor and keep it moving if it's clear, it's not serving you. 

Number 10. Micromanaging. Oh, we all want to be in control, and it's important to delegate tasks to other people if possible and let those people do what they do best. Yes, you can do a check-in, but try not to hover and tell them how to do their job or every little thing about it because then you could have just done it yourself. This sort of defeats the purpose of delegating to someone else, but it feels really good when you can let go of some of that control and regain your time.

Now, I know that we said we were only going to talk about ten different ways that time steals our potential, but I've got two more that I tossed in here. 

So eleven is long meetings and conversations. Oh boy, have you ever sat in a meeting where someone asked ten different questions, and ten of the questions had nothing to do with the meeting?

Or someone tells a story, and their story really has nothing to do with the meeting. So one helpful way to go into a meeting or to have a conversation is to have the outcome in mind before you even engage, have an agenda printed out, what you are going to talk about and set a time limit on the meeting, and know your outcome and eliminate anything that does not pertain to it. My attention span needs attention, and anything that clutters up the pathway to my brain that isn't pertinent to the outcome of a meeting or conversation makes things really fuzzy for me. So this probably should have been my number one thing.

The last and final one, which I am so, so guilty of is emails. Oh my gosh, I'm embarrassed to admit, but I have several email accounts. I probably have over 20, 000 emails between all of them. Yeah, that's right. 20, 000. I go in every day and say, "Okay, I'm gonna get rid of 500 emails".

And some days it works and some days it doesn't. Somehow, I get rid of 500 emails, and I come back in a day or two, and there's. There are 800 emails; I just cannot get a hold of them. That's something I really need to work on. So my suggestion with emails, which I am also going to practice, is to unsubscribe or, better yet, don't subscribe at all. Be aware of who you're giving marketing permissions to. If it is a company, a person, or a product that offers value to your life, then absolutely subscribe to it. But if it doesn't, just ignore it or unsubscribe.

It's important to make room for better things to come into your life and make time for great things to happen. Some ways that you can do this is by using a time tracker, which is called Toggl, that logs your time and shows you where your time goes. It can be a real eye-opener. You thought you spent twenty minutes doing something, but no, it was really two hours. Maybe you watched TV or clicked on just a few YouTube videos, but nope, it was an hour and a half later.

I mean, what could you do with all of those hours in a day that are just spent mindlessly scrolling or watching videos or having conversations that really have no relevance or complaining or gossiping, um, micromanaging?

There are just so many ways that we can get a handle on our time and not just let it seep out of our lives. Here are a few more suggestions. Set priorities. This could be hard because everything is a priority. 

I spent hundreds of hours looking for a house for probably a year or more. When we moved, we rented for a little while because I wanted to make sure that this is an area that I really wanted to live in. I didn't know what I wanted in my house in this new space, but I've been ready to purchase a home as soon as I found the perfect one.

When one popped up, the timing wasn't great at all, but it just happened that the perfect house came on the market, and it checked all of our boxes. So it was now or never. That's what we did. We rolled it into our already full schedule, buying a house. Well, now that we're here, there are so many things that need to be addressed.

Some that we were aware of and some that we weren't. And some things that we just want to do to make it our home. But how in the world do you organize and set the priority on what needs to happen first and what doesn't? What I do is I chunk things into buckets. The three buckets are urgent, important, and would like to do.

Then, I organize a timeframe. You know, is it in a day? Is it a week? Is it a month? Is it a year? Like when do these things need to happen and what's acceptable? For instance, if I don't have a hot water tank in my home that works. Well, that has moved into the urgent category and it needs to be repaired pretty quickly within a day or two.

If I want to buy new window treatments for the dining room, well, that's what I would like to do. It's also important, but it's not urgent. So, as long as I'm staying on target, I can manage my time pretty well. But when things start getting thrown at me very quickly, like I want to do this, and I want to do that, and I want to update this and, and it just stacks and stacks and stacks, it's almost like it turns into a frenzy and now I feel like I have absolutely no time.

So. I'm easily distracted and overwhelmed, and I feel like I have a total loss of time control. Of course, if something comes up unexpectedly, that needs to be addressed, and some things need to be re prioritized, but it's important to have an outline. 

Plan your day. Whether it's the night before or the morning of, what are three to five things that are a must do that day? And make sure that those things get done. 

Use resources such as Toggl. That was the app that I told you about that tracks your time, because you can't manage what you don't measure. It's important to know where your time's going. 

There's another resource called the Freedom app, and that helps to block distractions. You can also turn off or silence notifications on your phone or your watch, your iPad, your laptop. Just when you know you've got to focus on something, create that space because when you get distracted, it breaks your train of thought, and you have to restart, and that takes up a lot of energy and wastes a lot of time.

You can also take a social media day off. Yes, a whole day. Social media addiction is a thing, and if you can't step away, then you may need to explore that. And if that's the case, next week's episode is for you. It's the benefits of taking a tech break. 

We're going to wrap up this episode with a quote from Benjamin Franklin.

He said, "You may delay, but time will not." 

Once again, thank you for joining me. Next week's episode is number 11. It's the benefits of taking a tech break. And it's also about time to start bringing in some guests. Send me a message on the description page link, if you know of anyone who would be a great guest, perhaps it's yourself.

You can connect with me on social media, which is a fantastic way to learn about the fears you're facing or have previously overcome. Check out the links and resources in the 'mentions' section when you have time, of course, and then subscribe and share. Until next week, keep reaching for the sky and never settle for less than what you can be.

Take care, everyone.