Ever wish there was more time in the day? You want to read your Bible, have a clean house, get the kids to school on time, and be productive at work. And when you think you’ve got it all figured out, someone asks the dreaded question: “What’s for dinner?”
Ever wish you could have just a few more hours in the day? There’s so much to do and you just don’t have enough time to get it all done. With all the commitments and tasks on our plates, it’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed.
No more! I’ve found the #1 hack and solution to managing your time well, and it’s has nothing to do with calendars and to-do lists.
Resources Mentioned:
Make More Time Free Workshop: https://ashleyvarner.com/time
Highlights From the Episode:
Have you ever wished for more hours in the day? You wanna read your Bible, have a clean house, get the kids to school on time, be productive at work and just whenever you think that you’ve got it all figured out somebody asks that dreaded question, what’s for dinner?
We all wish that we had more time in the day to get all the things done. There is so much to do and you just don’t have enough time for everything, right? Well, with all of the commitments and obligations that are put onto you, it’s no wonder that you feel overwhelmed. And so I have found a hack to manage my time really well. I’m a wife, a mom, a foster mom, I own two businesses, and I have found a way to just try and get everything on my plate finished. And this hack has nothing to do with calendars or to-do lists and I’m gonna tell you all about it in today’s episode.
Let’s jump in. Hey there and welcome back to The Renewed Mind. I am your host, Ashley Varner. Thank you for being here. I am so glad that you are back for some more mindset tips and teaching that is biblically-based. And today I wanna talk to you all about time management. Now, each month of this year, we’re going after a certain topic and all of this month we’re talking about time and managing our time well, creating more time in our lives and I wanted to start off by talking about how you can manage your time more efficiently.
Now, some people might not think that this has much to do with mindset, but the way that you manage your time is a reflection of the way that you manage your mind and your thoughts. And so, if you want to really transform your life by renewing your mind, it is definitely going to impact the way that you spend your time, your productivity, all of it.
The Time Problem
So let’s talk a little bit about the real problem facing us right now. If you have ever said things like “I’m so busy” or “there’s just not enough of time in the day” maybe you say, “I wear so many hats” or you even find yourself putting the things that you love and the tasks that you really enjoy on the back burner because everything else is stacking up before them. Then the problem is this idea that we have of time.
So, so often we see busyness as a badge of honor and we see it as something that is sought after, like, if you’re busy, then you’re being productive, if you have tons of stuff on your calendar, then you must be contributing something to the world.
And so the first thing that we need to do whenever we are looking at managing our time well is to really pay attention to the things that are causing our busyness.
Now, I have seen in my life something that happens whenever I give a specific amount of time to work on a project that’s usually the amount of time it takes to complete it. I tried this out with my kids this week as I was getting prepared for this video and they normally do the dishes after dinner, it usually takes them usually, about 15 or 20 minutes to complete everything. Well, it was about, I wanna say like 6:54 and I told them, “Hey, let’s try and get this done by seven o’clock, six minutes, do you think we can do it?” They rushed around, got everything done and it worked and they got done with the dishes in six minutes.
What that showed me was that as much time as you give to a task, that’s how much time it’s gonna take. So as you start looking at your life, your priorities, your commitments, and the tasks that are on all of your to-do lists, I want you to start paying attention to how much time you’re allowing for those things.
We all know that if you put a task at say 4:45 on a Friday evening, you’re gonna get that task done way faster, you’re gonna be more focused than if you just set it up in the middle of the week. So really start thinking about that.
And whenever we talk about time management, I really wanna help you in this area because I believe that whenever you manage your mind well, you manage your time well, like I said. So I have created a free workshop for you.
It’s only about 20 minutes long because I know that you’re time is important. So I’m really condensing all of this information into about 20 minutes of teaching. It’s called The Make More Time workshop. And this is gonna be perfect for women who, you know, you dread coming home to a messy house, you’ve had a full day of work, you have no clue when somebody asks what’s for dinner, and it just feels like you’ve got so much going, you can’t juggle everything. This is for you.
If you are juggling work and elderly parents, this is for you if you sacrifice sleep and the things that you wanna do, like maybe finishing that favorite novel, so that you can get everything else done. And this is for you if you have ever wished that time could just stop for a second so that you could catch up. If any of those sound like you then I really want to invite you to this free workshop.
It’s called Make More Time. I’m gonna teach you the method that I use to get all the things on my list done, to make sure that my priorities line up with my obligations. And it is a 20-minute video that you can watch and implement, there’s gonna be a workbook that goes with it.
Make More Time Free Workshop: https://ashleyvarner.com/time
Just to give you some quick, really deep, practical tools to start managing your time. Because really, the truth is that we all have a certain amount of time and we tend to think that time is outside of us, when really it’s the way that we manage ourselves within the time that we have, that really matters.
Your Real Priorities
So let me talk to you about one of the biggest hacks that I started using whenever I was managing my time. And that is, I really took a look at my real priorities.
So I want you to sit down and make a list of say five priorities in your life. Just think about the things that really matter to you. Now, I want you to get a list of everything that you did yesterday.
If you have to pause this, to write down this list, do that, but really just sit down with a piece of paper and write down all the things, all the ways that you spent your time yesterday. Whenever you’ve done that, I want you to compare the two lists.
Do the things that you say are priorities in your life, is it showing up in the actions that you’re taking? Because we know that our actions are taken out of our emotions and our emotions come from our thoughts.
And so, if your actions, the tasks that you’re doing, the obligations that you have, the commitments that you have, if they’re not ultimately lining up to your priorities, then there’s a misalignment there. It’s really important whenever there is that misalignment to consider planning. Planning is essential if you wanna manage your time well.
Whenever you plan ahead of time, you’re using the part of your brain that is the prefrontal cortex but what it is, is it’s the part of you that is the decision-making part. It’s the logical part. Whenever you plan, and you’re planning ahead of time, what you’re doing is you are using that part of your brain that’s saying I’m going to make decisions that are gonna better my future.
Now, if you are someone who just tries to get things done whenever you feel like it, or you really love the idea of that phrase flying by the seat of your pants and you don’t really plan things out, you’re using the part of your brain that’s more like the primal part of your brain. So it’s the part that is just focused on survival.
So think about the kind of life that you wanna live. Do you wanna be someone who is living intentionally and deliberately? Or do you wanna be someone who is just surviving and reacting to your life and to the obligations that you have?
Whenever you plan, what you’re doing is you’re deciding to do things on purpose. You’re making conscious decisions to do the things that you really, in your heart, and in your mind, that you really wanna do from a logical perspective.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking if I plan, there’s always going to be things that come up and we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that in a future episode this month but what I want to encourage you to do, is to see those things as few and far between.
There are always going to be the times when you have something planned, say you wanna take a run at six o’clock in the morning and at 5:30 in the morning, your child comes in and is sick and so that run has to be postponed. There’s always gonna be those kinds of things but I want you to see those as the exception and not the rule. So we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that in another episode, so make sure that you subscribe so that you know whenever new videos are up.
How you manage your time is a reflection of how you manage your mind.
The last thing that I wanted to share is something that I’ve kind of already alluded to. And that is the idea that how you manage your time is a reflection of how you manage your mind.
So we sometimes think that time is out outside of us. We end up saying things like, “well, there’s not enough time.” “I don’t have enough time.” Like, it’s a fact, right?
We tend to think that it’s like that circumstance that we are just reacting to, but really there’s just time and time is something that someone at some point created months and days, and years and seconds and minutes, somebody at some point created that structure.
So it’s just, we tend to see it as something outside of us when really, it’s just how we manage ourselves, within the time that we’re given. Now, the proof of this is whenever you see other people who are accomplishing huge things, right?
They have the same amount of time that you have. It’s not that successful people are stealing the time from you so that they have more of it so that they can get more done. It’s all about how they’re managing their mind within the time that they have.
So how you think about time, how you think about yourself, like your time identity, so to speak, if you consider yourself a procrastinator or an early bird, whatever those identities that you have on yourself, those matter, the things that you think about time, the things that you think about yourself in relation to time, really matter. That’s what makes all the difference.
Just like the mindset work that I teach all the time about how our circumstances don’t directly impact our emotions and how our thoughts are really what determine our emotions, the same is true with your thinking about time.
The circumstance might be all of the tasks that you have to do and the way that you think about those tasks changes the way that you feel. So if you are constantly feeling overwhelmed by the tasks that you have, if you’re constantly feeling like you want to procrastinate, or there’s just too much to do, realize that those are thoughts and you can change your thinking about time, you can change your thinking about your tasks.
So it is your thoughts about those tasks that are creating your feelings of overwhelm. And that’s really good news because you can change your thoughts. So if you’re feeling really overwhelmed by all the things that you have to do, make sure that you jump into that Make More Time workshop that I’m gonna be teaching and really just understand the way that your mind works and how your mindset is affecting your time management and your productivity, because it’s all kind of combined.
Whenever you begin to renew your mind, realize that your thoughts matter and you start to manage those thoughts, you begin to create more time. And what happens with that is you begin to transform your life. So all of this comes back to the teaching that I do all the time, about how if you want to transform your life you have to start by renewing your mind.
The same is true time and your calendar. If you wanna transform your calendar, if you wanna transform the way that you think about time, the way that you spend your time, it has to start with your thoughts first.
Make More Time Free Workshop: https://ashleyvarner.com/time
So like I said, make sure to sign up for that Make More Time workshop. I am so excited to teach you the steps that I take to really accomplish a lot in the amount of time that I have, that we all have. So it doesn’t matter if you have one child or five children in the house, if you’re a business owner, or an employee, or whatever, these steps can work for you. I’m so excited to share’em with you. So make sure to sign up. You can look at the link in the description or you can just go directly to ashleyvarner.com/time to get signed up. And I will see you there. Thanks for watching.
