#097 – Invest Your Time Wisely | 52 Life Lessons – Lesson 18

[00:00:03] Welcome back to The Working Well Podcast, an episode 18 in my 52 Life Lessons series. Here's a question that's going to sound ridiculously simple. Where are you right now? Now I don't mean your physical location. You may be driving or walking, sitting in an office or pretending to pay attention during a meeting while listening to this through one earbud. But I mean, where is your mind right now? Are you actually here for a significant portion of my life?

[00:00:33] The honest answer would have to have been no. I was everywhere except where I was. When my children were young, I was deeply focused on building a business and becoming what I considered successful. I told myself I was doing it for my family. I was creating opportunities, providing for them, and building something meaningful. And all of that was true. It was also an incredibly convenient story.

[00:00:58] Because there were countless moments when I was physically with my family, but mentally, I was still at work. I'd be out with the kids, supposedly watching what they were doing, while answering emails on my phone. I'd be having a conversation with my wife, while part of my brain was reviewing a proposal, replaying a difficult client conversation, or calculating some business problem. Sure, I was technically present. But I wasn't really there.

[00:01:25] And the equally ridiculous part was that when I was working, I would often wish I was spending time with my family and friends. So at home, I was thinking about work. At work, I was thinking about home. I had somehow created a system where I could feel guilty in two locations at once. Apparently, this was my version of efficiency. And looking back, one of the hardest realizations has been acknowledging how many moments I squandered while trying to build a better future. Not because working hard was wrong.

[00:01:56] Not because ambition was wrong. But because I had allowed thoughts about tomorrow to repeatedly, or yesterday, to repeatedly steal the experience of that moment. Sadly, I don't get a do-over for those moments. My children will never be that age again. That particular conversation with my wife will never happen again. The family dinner, the walk, the bedtime story, the ridiculous joke someone made in the car.

[00:02:24] All of those existed only once, and then they were gone. When that realization first hit me, I was crushed. But then I came to see that regret is only useful when we turn it into tuition. I'd paid the hard cost of tuition. It's true, I can't reclaim those moments. But I can allow them to change the way I use the ones I have now. And attention is the real currency of time.

[00:02:49] Research by psychologists Matthew Killingworth and Daniel Gilbert have found that people's minds wandered during almost half of their waking activities. More importantly, people tended to be less happy when their minds were somewhere other than what they were doing. Essentially the whole basis behind mindfulness. And it described my life perfectly. The issue wasn't simply that I lacked time. It was that the time I had was being diluted by divided attention.

[00:03:18] We often talk about giving people our time. But without attention, it's a pretty hollow gift. And I guarantee your spouse knows when you're pretending to listen. Your children know when you're watching them through the top two inches of your phone screen. And your employees know when your eyes are on them. But your brain has moved on to the next meeting. In one set of studies, researchers found that merely having a mobile phone visible during a meaningful conversation

[00:03:45] reduced feelings of trust, closeness, and empathy. The phone didn't even have to ring. It just had to be present enough to change the interaction. And that's pretty humbling for anyone who's ever placed their phone face down on the table and congratulated themselves for being fully present in the moment. Face down is not the same as gone out of the picture. And this matters at home. But it also matters enormously in leadership.

[00:04:15] Attention tells people they matter. When a leader stops typing, puts the phone away, looks someone in the eyes, asks a thoughtful question, and genuinely listens to the answer. That intention becomes much more than a conversation. It becomes a signal of respect. And wasting time can be a brilliant investment. And there's another part of investing time wisely that took me much longer to understand.

[00:04:40] And that's that sometimes the wisest way to use time is to do absolutely nothing that appears productive. For years, I was one of those people that had to fill every available gap. If I had two minutes between meetings, I would send an email. If I was waiting in line, I would make a call. If someone was a few minutes late, I would pull out my phone and attack one of the 17,000 items on my growing task list. Email, by the way, is a very resilient species. It reproduces faster than rabbits.

[00:05:10] And at one level, this habit of filling every single second, it made me feel efficient. I could squeeze work into almost any opening. But it was terrible for my focus, my creativity, and my ability to regulate stress. Eventually, I realized that I'd turned busyness into a personality trait. Even my vacations were uncomfortable. Because while my body was sitting beside the pool,

[00:05:36] my nervous system was still pacing around the office at work, solving problems, finishing tasks. Doing nothing felt lazy. Being unavailable, it felt irresponsible. And rest, well, it felt like something I had to earn. And unfortunately, the human performance system doesn't work that way. Human physiology, neuropsychology does not work that way.

[00:06:01] From my athletic background, I understood that you can't sprint 100 meters at full speed and just decide to simply continue that pace for a marathon. Yet that's what I was asking my brain and my body to do every day. An elite sprinter doesn't improve by sprinting continuously. Performance comes from the intelligent combination of challenging yourself, training, nutrition, sleep, recovery.

[00:06:27] The rest between sprints, it's not separate from performance. It is the performance. Or it's a part of the performance. Now, research on workplace micro breaks supports this. They found that short breaks during demanding tasks are associated with a lower fatigue and greater vigor. The evidence for immediate performance gains is more mixed and depends on the task. But the well-being and the energy benefits are absolutely meaningful.

[00:06:56] And the same thing applies to working hours. Research on working hours challenges the assumption that more hours automatically produce a proportionally greater output. Beyond certain thresholds, output rises at a decreasing rate and fatigue accumulates exponentially. In plain English, working longer and longer doesn't necessarily mean producing more and more. Sometimes you're just simply taking longer to produce worse work.

[00:07:24] We see that so often in businesses and companies and leadership teams where bums in seats or sitting at your desk for a set number of hours each day, week, or month is measured versus the actual quality of the output. I began experimenting with those one and two minute gaps between meetings to try a different type of reset. Instead of firing off another email, I would sit and breathe.

[00:07:53] I might stand up, stretch, move my body, open a window, or step outside. Not outside the window. But simply maybe stand on my front porch in the sunshine for a minute or two. None of those actions looked productive. Yet they helped me enter the next conversation with more patience, clarity, and energy. Those pauses, they helped me down-regulate my nervous system rather than carrying the stress

[00:08:22] of one meeting directly into the next. And I also became more deliberate about ending the workday. This one was particularly important for me. And I've seen it with leaders who are working remotely or in hybrid environments because work is always available. We have an endless amount of work we could do. But there's no natural finish line. So we have to draw that finish line for ourselves, for our performance, our productivity, our mindset.

[00:08:52] There's always going to be another message to answer, another document to review, or another problem that requires your attention. And it doesn't require your heroic intervention, or the large majority of them don't. And at some point, you just have to decide that work is finished for the day. Not because it's complete, but because continuing would cause a greater cost than benefit. Research on psychological detachment shows that mentally disengaging from your work

[00:09:22] during non-work time is associated with much better well-being and fewer symptoms of strain. There's also evidence that leaders influence whether their employees feel permitted to disconnect. When a leader remains constantly attached to work, their teams follow example. That means the late-night email is not only an email, it's a cultural communication. You can write in there, no need to respond until tomorrow,

[00:09:50] but repeatedly sending messages at 11pm, midnight, 1, 2 in the morning, still tells people something about what commitment looks like around the office. Leaders, they don't simply manage workloads, they model relationships with work. And the actions you're taking speak volumes. I know I learned that lesson the hard way in my business. In order for me to change that output from my team, I had to actually model that myself.

[00:10:20] And it took me a while. I wouldn't say it was not pretty, but eventually people saw that I was modeling what I was saying I was doing, and it made a tremendous difference. One of the most famous corporate examples of purposeful downtime, I think comes from Bill Gates. And during his years leading Microsoft, Gates was known for taking what he called isolated think weeks. He would step away from all the regular meetings and the daily operations

[00:10:48] to read, reflect, and consider what he thought was the future of technology. And during one of those periods in 1995, he wrote a memo called The Internet Tidal Wave, which helped accelerate Microsoft's strategic focus on the internet. Now, I'm not suggesting that every executive needs to disappear into a cabin in the woods with a stack of technical papers and a yoga mat. The most important principle is that some forms of strategic thinking

[00:11:17] require space that normal operations don't provide. It's not the same to just step out of your office and go into the common room for a few minutes and think. Sometimes you just need to get out into a completely different spot. If every minute is filled with meetings, messages, and decisions, leaders find it extremely difficult to be efficient at managing today, and they can completely miss tomorrow.

[00:11:47] Now, not everyone's involved in strategy, but even within your current role, it's important to step out of it mentally, physically, and just emotionally. You get better engagement when you come back into it. Now, you probably already know it, but being busy is not the same as being effective. You know, an open calendar, space on your calendar, is not necessarily wasted capacity. Yet I thought that for so long. I had to fill every single gap in my calendar

[00:12:17] with something that was, quote, productive. And I kept wondering why when I would go to conferences or workshops or my mastermind meetings, I'd get out of town, get out of the office to a bit of a retreat, and I felt so much more energized and creative, and I would come back feeling full of life and energy and enthusiasm. Those are the times which are seemingly unproductive, but produce some of the greatest results.

[00:12:46] And that's often when your most important thinking happens. Now, there's one final dimension to this lesson that I want to talk over, is most people over 40 are going to attest that time seems to accelerate with age. A year when you're in your teens used to feel enormous. Now, January arrives, you blink twice, and someone's asking about your holiday plans. Now, while we can't literally slow the clock, research suggests that we can influence

[00:13:16] how full a period feels when we look back on it. Studies that compare routine and non-routine experiences have found that periods filled with repetitive activity tend to be remembered as shorter, whereas novelty, variety, and distinct experiences create more memory markers. And this might be one of the reasons that childhood summers felt endless. We were constantly experiencing new firsts. We were doing different things every day. First day at a new school.

[00:13:45] The first time riding a bike. Your first sleepover. First trip somewhere unfamiliar. First time realizing that jumping from the garage roof with a cape and a mask didn't make you a superhero. I've tried to do that. And as adults, routines become useful and necessary. I'm not saying we have to get rid of our routines because they help us function. But too much routine can cause months and years to just start to blend together. Work, meetings, commute, dinner, screen, sleep, repeat.

[00:14:15] Then suddenly, another year is gone. The answer isn't to abandon structure and turn your life into a traveling circus. It's to intentionally create new experiences and meaningful pattern interrupts. Try a new activity. Take a different route to work. Walk a different route through the office. Learn an instrument. Explore a new trail. Have dinner somewhere unfamiliar. Try a different type of food. Talk to someone you normally wouldn't meet.

[00:14:44] Create an experience with your family that none of you have had before. Novelty supports learning, growth, engagement, and memory. While you can't add more hours to a day, you can definitely add more life and variety and interest to those hours. So when I think about using time wisely now, I focus on three investments. First, invest in presence. Choose at least one daily activity where your phone is completely away and your attention belongs fully

[00:15:14] to either the people in front of you or the task you're doing. Maybe it's making dinner and you're really focused on the dinner, a walk, a bedtime with your children, or the first 15 minutes after everyone gets home. Second, invest in recovery. Protect small pauses during the workday and create a deliberate end-of-day transition. Things like breathing, moving, stretching, stepping outside for a minute, shutting down your computer at a given time.

[00:15:44] Give your brain a clear signal that one part of the day is ended and another is beginning. And the last one, the third, invest in experiences. Create one new or memorable experience each week. And it doesn't need to be expensive, dramatic, or some Netflix documentary thing that you're doing. Just simply needs to interrupt the routine and help you engage in life more constantly. These investments connect directly

[00:16:14] with the four pillars of performance that I've talked about in previous episodes. Your mindset, it determines what you believe deserves your time. Your habits protect that time from being consumed by urgency. Movement helps you reset your energy and your nervous system. Fuel includes the meals and conversations that nourish just more than your body, your enthusiasm, your vigor for life. Now, and this lesson is not simply about working less

[00:16:42] for the sake of working less. Work matters. Purpose matters. Achievement matters. Building something meaningful can be deeply fulfilling. But success loses much of its value when we repeatedly sacrifice the people, our health, and the experiences we claim to be working for. The goal is not to choose between an extraordinary career and an extraordinary life. The goal is to stop treating them as opposing teams. So look at the next 24 hours.

[00:17:13] Who deserves your undivided attention? Where could you pause instead of filling another gap with work? What could you do that would make this week distinct and memorable? Time is one investment we are making every moment, whether we're conscious of it or not. There are no refunds. There are no exchanges. And there aren't any do-overs. Invest it wisely. I challenge you.

[00:17:41] Think well, live well, and be well. I'm going to see you on the next episode. Assuming that's one of the things on your list. Hopefully it is. All right. Please reach out. Let me know your thoughts. Chat soon. That wraps up another episode of the Working Well podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Now, which guests or topics would you like to see featured on the show? Message me through LinkedIn

[00:18:09] or on the contact page of timborist.com with your ideas. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Tim Borist with Fresh Wellness Group, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. We'll see you next time.