Time Management Is Making You Unproductive

Are you constantly chasing new time management hacks, but still feeling overwhelmed and unproductive?

You might be surprised to learn that focusing solely on time management could be the very thing holding you back from true success and fulfillment.

In this episode, I'll introduce you to the Unshakable Implementation Framework for Freedom and Flexibility - a holistic approach that goes beyond typical time management.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Why time management alone isn't enough for peak productivity and energy
• The four key elements of the Unshakable Implementation Framework
• How combining awareness, execution, vitality, and resilience leads to sustainable success
• Why physical health and stress management are crucial for peak performance
  
  BONUS: Grab your copy of the Unshakable Implementation Framework HERE.

Transcript

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Here's something that no one is telling you. Focusing on time management alone is killing your energy and productivity. And I'm going to share with you why that's true on today's episode of Own Your Calendar. Welcome to Own Your Calendar, the go to resource for online business owners, coaches, and course creators. Who want it all a profitable business and the time and energy for yourself and the people and things you love most. I'm your host Stephen Box, and I'm here to help you build the systems and habits that allow you to escape the chaos. It started living life on your terms. Welcome to another episode of Own Your Calendar, brought to you by Unshakable Habits. I am your host Stephen Box. And today we're talking about why focusing just on time management is actually killing your energy and productivity. Let me start by acknowledging that I know this can be a hard thing to believe, and it might be a hard concept to wrap your head around because number one, everywhere you turn, people are going to tell you time management is the most important thing. There are podcasts out there that this is all they focus on is time management, and there's always some new technique or hack for time management that is being put out there and is being built as the solution. And let's also be honest, if you ask most of us, Hey, what's stopping you from being in better shape? What's stopping you from making more money? What's stopping you from having a better relationship? We're going to say, I'm too busy. I don't have enough time. That's the problem. And so it becomes easy to think if we just had more time, it would solve all of our problems. But that's like seeing that you're only going to focus on communication in a marriage. Sure, communication is important, and it's one of the key elements to a great relationship, but if you're not taking your spouse out on dates, if you're not spending quality time together, if you're not being intimate with one another, your marriage probably isn't going to be as good as what it could be. This is what happens when you focus just on time management. Sure, you're going to see some improvements, but things aren't going to be as good as they could be. And that brings me to what I want to share with you today, and that is the Unshakable Implementation Framework for Freedom and Flexibility. And just to give you guys a little bit of background on where this came from. So for those of you who know my, my background. I lost 80 pounds and started coaching people back in 2010. And in that time, what I saw was, regardless of what skills I added, regardless of what new services I added to my programming, there was a fundamental thing that remained the same. No matter, even though I was getting people better and better results, the more I coached them. Things I added, the more knowledge that I gained, the more certifications I had and all that stuff, the people who, when they were with me and life was manageable, they excelled. But when things got crazy at work, when stress was high at home, or when they We'll say graduated or just stopped work with me for whatever reason, then they would fall off and I would end up seeing these people come back, you know, sometime later and they would just repeat this process and there were years where I just worked with the same people over and over and as a coach, it was frustrating. Because I felt like I was somehow failing people, even though I was giving them fantastic results, I felt like I was letting people down. And what I started to do is I looked at, okay, what is the commonality here? Why is it that people seem to be having certain struggles? And what I started realizing was, They were coming to me for very specific stuff, right? They were saying, Hey, I want you to teach me how to eat. I want you to teach me how to exercise. I want you to teach me how to get better sleep. I want these very specific things, which makes a lot of sense, but these were individual pieces of a puzzle. And even if you took those three things together, there's still a very small piece of the overall puzzle. And that's really what people are missing. And that's what the framework addresses. It's the entire puzzle. So I wanted to kind of share a little bit about that framework with you today, to help give you some clarity on why focusing just on time management It's actually killing your energy and your productivity. So I want you to picture a four square. So you have box, four squares, upper left hand corner. We have awareness right next to it on the top, right? We have execution. Directly below that we have Vitality, and in the bottom left hand corner we have Resilience. Now I'm going to break those down individually here in a second, so don't worry too much about that right now. Also, I will include a link to a PDF in the show notes where you can see this as a visual, so if you're a visual, if you are a visual person, that will be there for you. So let's talk about Awareness. Now, This is a good block to me to start in because even when I was coaching people just on things like exercise and nutrition, what I noticed was there was a lack of awareness. They were not always aware of their behaviors and their actions or the impact that they were actually having on them. So awareness to me is a huge part of the equation. If you don't have awareness. then it's going to be really difficult to make any changes whatsoever. But the next square over is execution. And when we talk about time management, time management really kind of borders between these two boxes. Because time management, you need to have a little bit of awareness, right? You can't manage your time if you don't have Awareness, but it also takes execution, right? If we're not executing the plan, then the time management, it's not really going to matter. It doesn't matter how great your time management plan or system is, if you're not putting it into action. Well, one thing that I have started to kind of shift on here is this idea. The execution really isn't about time management. It's about task management. Right? It's not our time that we're trying to manage. We all have the same amount of time. You can't change time. But what you can change is the things that you do with that time. So the first two boxes that we have to make sure we get together is awareness and execution. And when we do that, here's a couple things that we're, you're going to get. So number one, You're going to get purposeful productivity, so you won't just be busy for the sake of being busy. You'll actually be doing things that are productive and serve a purpose. You're also going to have aligned actions. So awareness is also about not just being aware of what you're doing, but why you're doing it. What's actually important to you? What are your values? What are your priorities? So when you have that in place, now you have aligned action. And when you know what's important to you, when you have all of those things, you also have clear decision making. But what you don't necessarily have is peak performance and efficiency because you might be aware of the things that you're doing and you might be executing them well and therefore you have productivity. But it might not be peak productivity and it might not be maximum efficiency. And that's where vitality comes into the picture. And when we talk about vitality, we're really talking about physical health. So that is where now let's get into that exercise and nutrition and sleep. And here's the thing, guys, a lot of people talk about exercise and its importance or the importance of. Eating good or getting sleep. But every program that I've heard anyone talk about productivity and time management stuff, it's almost an afterthought. They focus so much on all the tactics and the tricks for tuning on management and organizing your schedule that they just go, Oh yeah. And by the way, you know, try to do some exercise, try to eat good, try to get some sleep, right? And that's it. That's like the extent of the conversation. And it annoys me because when we add that vitality piece, right? When we get consistent exercise in our life, when we start eating well, and you don't have to eat perfect. We're talking like 80, 20 even is phenomenal, right? Like we're talking 80 percent of the time you eat. Things that move you towards your goal 20 percent of the time, you live life, you enjoy, eat some cake, whatever, right? And when we do that, we get to actually perform at a peak level and we get to have peak efficiency because we are running on all cylinders. But there's still a missing piece here. And that missing piece is resilience. Because if you don't have the resilience piece. What you're missing is sustainable energy and adaptability, because resilience is really all about mindset and stress management. And when we talk about the importance of that, I don't care if you are in the best shape possible physically. I don't care if you get eight, nine hours of sleep every single night. I don't care if you're eating perfectly, if you're in total alignment with all of your values, and you have perfect systems for execution. If you put too much on your plate, and you can't handle it, and you're not managing the stress, and you're not recovering, you're going to burn out. It's just the reality of the situation. Right? So how do we avoid that? We add in the resilience piece. We learn to build up a tolerance to stress. We learn how to deal with stress better. We learn how to recover better. When you talk about exercise, one of the most important aspects of exercise is actually recovery. And I think a lot of times we don't stop to think about the fact that recovery is not just about recovering from physical exercise, recovery is a mental game as well. And so when we can add that resilience in there, we get that sustainable energy because we know how to keep the ebb and flow going, right? And we have the adaptability to deal with changes so we don't actually get stressed out in the first place. And then finally, we gotta go and tie everything back together because even if you have those, if you haven't tied the resilience back to the awareness, then what you're missing is purpose and persistence and a growth mindset. Because the resilience piece is important, right? When we are managing our stress, when we're recovering well, those are important, but we have to always be able to tie it back to those values, to those priorities, bringing it back to that awareness. And when we do that, we now have purpose and we have persistence and we start to develop a growth mindset. So when you combine all of these together, you get freedom and flexibility. To live life on your terms and really, isn't that the whole point of what we're trying to do? Isn't that the whole reason why you started your own business so that you could have freedom, so you could have the flexibility, so you have the opportunity to be able to turn your phone off and take your spouse on a date or to be able to give your children your full attention or to pick them up from school? Or be able to have time for yourself and, and go to the gym and work out. Isn't that the whole point of having your own business is so that you have the freedom and the flexibility to do those things. You want to go on vacation, go on vacation. You want to just take some time to yourself and, you know, just go sit in silence for an hour and not have to be bothered by anybody. You should have the freedom and the flexibility to be able to do that. And that to me is really what this framework is all about. It's about giving you the tools you need to implement things, but not just implement them. Right? It's unshakable implementation, meaning that even when life is crazy, even when things are really busy, you can still perform, you can still show up, you can still be consistent, because I'm going to tell you guys, one of the biggest things I see with people is they're not consistent because they don't have these four pieces of the puzzle in place. So when you're following this framework. Everything's going to work better, and you're going to have that freedom and flexibility that you desire. So I hope that gets you fired up and motivated today to go out there and start making some changes in your life. If you are a visual person, again, I want to remind you that there will be a link down in the show notes in order for you to be able to go download a PDF and get the visual of that. And if you enjoyed today's episode and That great value from it. I want to encourage you to join my insiders list where every week I'm going to send you emails and tips and stories and different things that are going to help you to start to implement this framework into your life. As a matter of fact, we're going to go one step further with that because next I'm actually going to give you something that's going to help you with one of these boxes, because one of the things I hear from people all the time is I want to be more consistent with my exercise, but I don't like exercise. I don't have time to exercise. There's all these reasons why. But the number one reason is always, I don't have the time. And so on our next episode, I'm going to give you the one strategy, just one strategy, that will change how you think about staying fit with a busy schedule. Until then, this is Stephen Box reminding you as always, today is a great day to escape the chaos and start living life on your terms.