Further Your Lifestyle

EP.115 Your Time is Your Progress (stop wasting it) | Further Your Lifestyle Podcast

May 28, 2023 Your Host: Chris Furlong Episode 115
Further Your Lifestyle
EP.115 Your Time is Your Progress (stop wasting it) | Further Your Lifestyle Podcast
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Watch on YT: https://youtu.be/32yBqzWAOnY


Ever felt like you're just spinning your wheels when it comes to making progress on your goals? You're not alone! Join me as I get real about my own struggles and share some actionable insights to help us all move forward. We'll kick things off by addressing the small things that hold us back – from pesky procrastination to that ever-present fear of failure. Then, discover a simple trick that can help you win with progress and make the most of your precious time.

But wait, there's more! We're also taking a hard look at the impact of screen time on our ability to make strides towards our goals. Prepare to cringe as I reveal my own embarrassing screen time stats and discuss how we can better manage the time we spend on our screens to prioritize what truly matters. So, let's dive in and tackle these challenges together, because it's time to make some real progress on our goals!



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Speaker 1:

Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the further your lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hassles. My name's Chris and I'm your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you, episode 115 today, and we are diving into a conversation around a very, very common question of how do I actually achieve my goals and make progress. Now this, this is one of the most commonly asked questions that I say all the time. I get asked it all the time. But I mean, even if you go into Google and if you do a quick search and if you look under videos, there's been hundreds, if not thousands, of videos made And actually it says there's 5.2 million results when you search this on Google under videos, which is it's just ridiculous. But why do we continue to have the conversation? Why are we having this conversation again? It's because people continue to ask the question or people aren't getting the information that they want. Now, i'm not saying that I'm going to give you everything that you want to hear. I'm going to give you two elements that I believe are interesting perspectives with this whole conversation around how do I make progress with my goals, and I'm actually going to step it up a little bit, or take it back a little bit in the terms of I don't want to go too narrow and too deep, but really just focus on these two perspectives around making progress in general and how we can change some perspectives to actually make this happen for you. Of course, you got to go do the work, and those two areas that I want to dabble in today are one, the small things that are stopping us, and two, a small trick to win with progress. So that's what we're discussing today. So buckle up, let's dive in. So the first one is small things that are stopping us. Now, naturally, this is a very broad topic. It is something that we can. We can, we can go very wide, or we can go very, very narrow and niche down into some very particular topics, which is probably what I'm doing a bit more today.

Speaker 1:

Now, what I did off the bat is I asked chat GBT of what are some of the small things that are stopping us from actually making progress, which just gives us the generalized cliche types of ones. We've got procrastination, we've got fear of failure. We've got lack of clarity. We've got feeling overwhelmed. We've got perfectionism. We've got a lack of accountability, distractions, negative talk, lack of prioritization. we've got waiting for the perfect moment. So these are all the cliche ones around mindsets, perspective and even psychologically as well, and I know, look, i can put my hand up for plenty of these of where I struggle with, and I'm sure there's some there that resonated with you as well.

Speaker 1:

But what I want to address today are some big elephants in the room of when it comes to distractions, and that was one of the areas that was in that list before. But I don't want to just talk about distractions in general. I want to talk about the big bad word of screen time and how much time we're spending on our screens or having that time just go down straight down the drain. Now I'm not here to say you shouldn't be on the screen, that you shouldn't be on your phone and all that jazz. You know there's, there's a time and place for it, but I am wanting to make sure you understand how, how bad this can really be And what you do with your time is on you. But again, i want to make sure you understand, yeah, how, how, how bad, how bad we really can be when it comes to syncing our time into just screen time or, nonetheless, not actually for any reason other than just because it makes us feel good, which is part of the point I'm going to show you right now.

Speaker 1:

I have not looked at my screen time this week Right now of how much time I have spent on my screen time on my phone and average for this week. So I'm going to bring it up and I'm going to show it to you, just to be very, very frank, and I might have to take a screenshot of this. You can see there the daily average is eight hours and 35 minutes, and if you couldn't see it on screen, i've just taken a screenshot and I've chucked it up. So in this picture it's saying daily averages eight hours and 35 minutes, jeepers, which is actually down by 11% from last week, which is good. Today, being Sunday, it's the 14th of May of me recording this And you know I've been out running. I haven't really used the screen at all, so but if I actually look at what's going on jeepers, if I actually look at this, does it break it down? No, this is just on my phone. You're kidding me. This is embarrassing. So I'm going to break it down for you for the week what that kind of looks like. And this is a.

Speaker 1:

This is a better perspective because it breaks it down into social, shopping and creativity. And Social, for the whole week has been 28 hours and 30 minutes, like. That's like more than a day Shopping and food has been. So that's eBay, because I do a lot of stuff on eBay which is part of my job, so that's 13 hours and seven minutes. And then creativity, which is things such as, probably, the camera. Yeah, that's all it really kind of says is 6,018 minutes, but most users eBay, then Facebook Messenger, then Instagram, tiktok, camera, dropbox and YouTube They're the top categories and then it goes into some smaller ones.

Speaker 1:

But it's just ridiculous actually. It is actually quite ridiculous. Now, i've never gone through this process of actually dabbling in and seeing what's going on, the amount of notifications that come through, the amount of times I pick up my phone, all this stuff. Well, it's just ridiculous. And the reason why I wanted to share this with you is because one. You can do this too. Most smartphones these days there's an application on there that you can check, built in to the actual device, and the reason why I wanted to bring it out is because one.

Speaker 1:

It's embarrassing and it's scary to think how much time has gone from there, specifically in the social media space. Right, right here it says that social life has done 28 hours and 29 minutes. Now, tiktok alone for this week was six hours. That's bad, you know, sometimes I find myself scrolling, you know, while I'm waiting for things. But then that two minutes, all of a sudden it's been 15, 20 minutes. Right, that's 1% of your day, 1% of your day. So we have to be very, very mindful of this And that's why I wanted to bring it up, because if we actually break it down, we can see where we're actually losing our time.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes things are going to be relevant to what we need to do for work or whatever, like eBay and photos and taking photos for listing things on eBay, and then I'm on eBay answering conversations or answering questions or looking up things or doing research, which all makes sense, but then there's things there which are just irrelevant. It's just for my own pleasure and joy, but it's not actually really helping me. So after looking at that, we can start to see that, okay, this isn't a perfect example of why we're not making progress, because our time has been spent elsewhere, where it shouldn't be. Now again, i'm not here to say you shouldn't be on TikTok or spending some time and having some fun watching some funny cat videos or whatever. What I'm here is to say is like let's make it an open conversation and make sure we're aware of it, because if you want to make progress, this is the best thing that you can do is start to use your time better. So time is scarce, right, like once we've spent it, it's gone. It can't be found again. We can gain time by leveraging other people, other people's money and things like that, but you will never have that exact time back.

Speaker 1:

And what I find funny or it's a bit silly really is we tend to generalizing here. We blame our lack of progress on a number of different things. It could be I don't have the knowledge, i don't have the tech, or I don't have the skills, i don't have the money or I don't have the time. But why don't we gain the knowledge? Why don't we invest in the tech? Why don't we learn the skills? Why don't we budget the money and why don't we prioritize our time? Seems like the simple answer to it.

Speaker 1:

Right, but progress is only when we do right. It's not about whether you fail or not or whether you win or not That's progress. It's teaching you the skills and the knowledge of what not to do the next time. Thus, if you were to spend time and money again the next time, you know not to do it where it didn't work or to do it more and where it did work. That's progress, right. Progress is not getting the results you necessarily want. Making progress is working towards the end result we want, right. And because today, if I don't know how to do something and then I learn how to do it, that's progress right. But that doesn't get me to my end result, because my end result might be I want to be able to do that 10 times faster, right. So now I have to learn how do I do this faster, but now I know how to do it once, and I'm going to give you an example of this a little bit later down the line.

Speaker 1:

The big point here is we need to stop making excuses and stop blaming the little things that are actually stopping us, and with a lot of the time yes, pun intended. The answer is spending less time where it's not needed and where it should be. That's it. That is the answer. That is the simple, stupid answer of it is if you want to make progress in another area, just take the time where you're not being able to turn that time into something productive and spend elsewhere. Right, and I'm speaking to myself as much as I'm speaking to you. You've seen how much I've been spending on social media. I've just shared it with you. So the reality is there. Right, i don't have this figured out, but what I'm sharing with you is something that we need to be aware of and something we need to have a conversation about with ourselves. And if you're going to stand there or say things oh, i'm not making the progress that I want, well, have a look inside internally first and see where can you do better. Right, because right there, it shows you that clearly, i can be saving time and making better progress. Just calling it out as it is.

Speaker 1:

The next conversation that I want to have is part number two, and it's about a small trick of how you can win with progress, and it's really just talking about how we allocate time, how we leverage time and how we perceive time. And this might come across as something even more silly than what I've just discussed, but it works, it works for me and it works well. So one hour of the day is roughly about 4.16% of your day. 4% It's not much right. And some of the tricks that I've used over the years, especially with the running or making progress with running, and because a lot of the time, if I'm out doing training like I'm doing a 21 week training plan for a 50K ultra marathon at the moment I'm doing a lot of time-based running rather than pace or distance, it's all about focusing on okay, i gotta go out and do 90 minutes, or I gotta go out and do an hour running, and now that I think about it, it might be like you gotta do 60 minutes of hills or 60 minutes of tempo or 60 minutes of just paced out. Now the trick is to identify it as it's only one hour.

Speaker 1:

Right Now, you're probably thinking well, yeah, of course it's only one hour, but when we know how quickly we spend the time as you would have just seen, as I shared above, that we're spending our time or wasting our time in different areas just like that no problem, no questions asked then we actually start to say that, well, it's one hour, it's only 4%, it's nothing of the day, clearly, because we're giving it away all the time. And when I start to change that perspective. Yeah, okay, 60 minutes, i mean I can drive to Melbourne. I live about 60 minutes from Melbourne, so it would take me an hour to drive to Melbourne. In that same time I could have gone out and done a 60 minute run, right, and ticked off one of the runs for the week.

Speaker 1:

So, with that same mentality, if you wanna make progress but you have excuses of kind of what we touched on before, but you don't know how to do it, or you lack skills or you lack knowledge or you lack understanding or you're not quick enough for being able to do it, well, the quick answer and the smart answer is allocate time to do whatever you can in that time, and that time then becomes a better bang for buck each time. Now, what I mean by this is take one hour, right, you wanna learn how to do something. If you're learning how to photograph books on eBay, for instance, to sell on eBay, the first time doing it, you're gonna have no idea. This is in one hour, and in the first hour of doing this lesson you have to figure out okay, what's the best lighting, how do I set it up? What camera do I need to use? What's the backdrop need to look like? What are the right heights? How does the layout? where will I stand? How will it look? What are the photos I need to take for the books? What other things do I need to consider? Oh, i need to move that out of the way, or by the time you've got all that figured out, your hour is up.

Speaker 1:

You're lucky if you've done a photo for a book or two, right, but You've spent all that time learning how the prep, how the adjustment and how things need to be To make this work. So the next time that you do it in theory now, you should know how to have this set up, how to have things ready to go, how to have the backdrop, what settings to use on the camera, and there's less time on prep and more time on photos. In the long run, you might just have it set up always and you just get straight into the photos. But you see the second time, all of a sudden we're so much better at what we were doing than the first time. Our time has become more valuable, how we're spending that time. What took us an hour? now I only took us maybe 10 minutes to get set up. So now you're learning and now you're focusing the rest of the 50 minutes on learning. What are the angles I'm taking, how do I need to take the photographs, what are the things I information I need to capture to be able to put on eBay? and As you do this, more and more, you spend more time doing than having to figure it out.

Speaker 1:

You actually start doing execution, opposed to learning and upskilling and figuring it out or researching or knowledge building. Eventually, you will pick out in terms of how much output you can do within an hour, and that's okay. But then But right now you get to take that one hour and you have the ability to turn it into a Better bang for buck each time, and that one hour will become super, super valuable for you down the line. Now see my point. So if you want to start a YouTube channel, if you want to start playing drums, if you want to learn to run, if you want to master chess skills, if you want to start cooking, if you want to fix a veggie garden, if you want to carve wood pieces, if you want to draw a picture, it all applies the same spend one hour. Yes, spend one hour Doesn't have to be every day. You could do it every day, you could do it weekly, whatever it may be, and then let the progress happen as you spend that time and And that one hour will become more and more valuable each time.

Speaker 1:

It's a simple little trick, right? People ask me you know, i don't know how to do this. It's like well, have you tried? it's like no, so okay, now I can teach you how to do it, like I could literally show you how to package something. I can show you how to take a photo of a book. I can show you how to run, but you're still going to have to figure it out right.

Speaker 1:

The problem might not actually be you don't know how to photograph a book. The problem might be you don't know how to use an iPhone. The problem might be you don't know how to have. You don't have a camera. The problem might be is you don't know how to set up lighting. It's got nothing to do with photographing the book. So there's a whole bunch of different things that you we need to learn to be able to apply ourselves to get the best output possible. The only way to do that is to make progress in learning, in understanding, gaining information, gaining knowledge, gaining skill, right. That's. That's the only way to do it.

Speaker 1:

I'm not here. I'm not here to give you the answer that you want. I'm here to give you some perspective, to help you get what you want, and It's going to make you be prosperous for the long run. That's really what I want. These are simple little things. I'm not going to win a Nobel Prize for this kind of stuff, but there's simple little tweaks that work for me. Whether they work for you is up to you.

Speaker 1:

Go try it the next time you're thinking about something's not working or I've got an excuse on that, or it's not working. Go try Time box an hour and see what you can achieve in that one hour. Figure it out. The next time you spend that one hour doing it, i guarantee you it's going to be more productive than the first, because you've learnt so much. It's a simple little hak ends You. The time's gonna pass anyway. Two years later, see where you're at. Two weeks later, see where you're at Right. I'm not trying to overwhelm you, but the matter of the fact is I have not gotten to where I am today and I still have a long way to go.

Speaker 1:

But I started. I figured things out. I'm learning as I go and you can ask people for help, ask me for help, get insight, get understanding, but you still have to go apply it in that one hour to be productive and see if that works for you. Just because something works for me doesn't mean it's going to work exactly the same for you. But you can take my learnings, you can apply it to yourself in that one hour, make some progress and then the next time you do it again, tweak it. You're gonna be a little bit better. That is the secret to it. That's it. It's that simple. I can go on about this. I'm gonna calm down.

Speaker 1:

So if you do have questions about this or if you've got a nice little hack that you do to manage your time better or to make progress I mean, these two were from me like these are my perspectives and my opinions. I would love to hear from you and if you do want to share, you can drop it down in the comments below. If you are here watching on the YouTube, otherwise, if you're listening on the podcast audio side of things, you know you can reach out to me on the socials or jump over to the YouTube video anyway and leave a comment. Otherwise, you can continue the conversation via SpeakPipe and that's wwwspeakpipecom further your lifestyle and you can leave a voicemail or a message of sorts where I can integrate it into one of these episodes and have the conversation. If you want to do that, that's by all means it's up to you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, i mean, this has been episode 115, short and Sweet. Keep it real and look, i've got some work to do, clearly on the screen time and I'll challenge you. What's your screen time? Because it's something that's really taking the time out of our pockets, literally, because we take it out anyway. You get my point. It's literally taking the time away from us and it's the unstated thing that we don't really talk about and I think it needs to be addressed a bit better. I clearly need to fix it myself, so we'll see, we'll see. I can talk about it all here, but whether I go do it is that's on me, all right. Appreciate you all being here again More than happy to continue the conversation. Otherwise, you have a wonderful day, cheers.

Achieving Goals
Winning With Progress
The Impact of Screen Time