Christine Corcoran argues that poor results come from misplaced priorities, not lack of time. She recommends identifying needle-moving tasks, cutting time-wasters, designing your day around your energy cycles, and protecting dopamine for high-value decisions.
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Welcome to five Minutes of Momentum. These episodes are a short five minute burst of inspiration, motivation and massive action. If you need that little kick up the butt to get things moving and to inspire you to take massive action, then every single Thursday, I'll be sending you through a five minute episode to download, digest and implement to finish your week off strong. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Welcome back to five Minutes of Momentum. Today I want to talk to you about the fact that you don't have a time problem, you have a priorities problem. All right, I'm going to have like tough love with you today. I know how hectic it can get running your business and I know how it can get caught up in using the term busy. And we're getting really reactive in our business. But if you want to be more productive and you want to create more results and you want to share more value, because really you get paid for value, right? You don't get paid for time, you get paid for value, especially in business. So if you're feeling super overwhelmed and you're thinking, oh, if I only had more time, if I only had more time, I want to challenge that. Because you don't need more time, you need better focus. The first place that I would suggest you start is identify what is actually moving the needle in your business growth. Where are you spending your majority of your time? Because I guarantee you, if your cause, if you're in the state of overwhelm and you're stressed and you're overwhelmed and you're busy, busy, busy all the time, you're most likely from focusing on things that aren't actually moving the needle and you're causing this busy energy or you're most likely at the stage of growth where you need to hire and you're still doing too much yourself. So if you are at that stage, then I would absolutely. Because the thing is too, when you go to hire, the first thing you stress about is like, I don't have any time to onboard someone or interview someone or hire someone. And that's exactly why you need to, is that you want to recognize that you're going to spend the extra time now in order for you to be able to get more time back later. Right. So we want to identify that. But first things first, I want to talk to you about your priorities because you want to identify where are you currently spending your time? Because that's what you're prioritizing. If you're prioritizing being accessible all the time to your clients. If you're Prioritizing busy work. If you're prioritizing social media scrolling, whatever it is that you're prioritizing is where you're placing your focus and that's most likely not moving the needle in your business. So where are you wasting time? You need to identify where your common time wasters are, what is causing the most time wasting, and we've got to start to just cut them out as much as possible. One of the things that I do to support this is identify where I'm spending majority of my time and think about, do I need to delegate this? Do I need to get this off my plate altogether? Is it wasting time because I'm learning something new? Because sometimes it is that and you just need to be conscious of the fact that it's going to take you a little bit longer. And that's okay, it's not a waste of time, but you're developing a skill. But the thing that I always come back to is how you've designed your schedule. Okay? You need to look at your schedule and design it to work for productivity, right? I look at your circadian rhythm, your cycle and your energy levels. Because when it comes to where you're spending your time, you're most likely wasting time on stuff where you're losing all your energy in your dopamine, on stuff that isn't as important of where you should be spending your time, energy and dopamine, right? So let me clear with this. We only have a certain amount of dopamine stores in our mind and our bodies, even each 24 hours. And we use dopamine to problem solve, to be creative, to come up with new ideas, to make decisions. So we need a lot of dopamine, right? We need a lot of dopamine. Now the only things that restore our dopamine is eating protein, eating things like sugar, chocolate, coffee, sleep, exercise, sex. Like those things are actually going to create more dopamine stores. We only have a certain amount per day and we need to replenish them, right? So which is why when we start a fresh new day, we've got more dopamine, which allows us to have more clearer thought and allows us to problem solve. So we wanna identify one, what are the things that we're doing earlier on in the day? Because you're most likely gonna have more dopamine earlier on in the morning, and where you're wasting time making decisions on things that are not needing so much of your dopamine, but you're utilizing it, right? So it might be things like deciding what to wear the morning of it might be deciding on where to spend your time. Like if you haven't set your priorities the day before, you're wasting energy and dopamine on trying to figure out what you should be spending your time on, right? So set your priorities the day before. Once you finish the day, reflect on everything that's gotten done and then set your new priorities for the next day so you're fresh, right. And focused for the next morning. The other thing I want to highlight too is that your circadian rhythm and your ability to determine where your energy is and your brain power is throughout the day is really helpful too. So your circadian rhythm is basically your brain's awake hours. So there are certain times throughout the day where you are more alert and more awake and able to be more creative and you want to use those times to, to be focused on more important projects. So if you, you can jump online, there's like a quiz that you can do. If you just type in circadian rhythm and there's a quiz like just look for the quiz and you could basically figure out what you are. And they use like different animals to highlight which one you are. And so I'm a bear, which means that I am not as creative first thing in the morning. I find that I'm actually more an afternoon person. So I leave creative projects for the afternoon and into the evening. So that's when my brain's on, right? So I don't do first thing in the morning creative activities. It just doesn't serve me. I use that to get shit done, right. So you want to figure out what your circadian rhythm is. So it's working with that. Also identifying your cycle. Cause there's going to be certain weeks out of the month where you are more creative, more able to show up on social media and be more magnetic. Like there's certain weeks out of the month where you're like, nah, I can't even string a sentence together. And so you want to identify how you're utilizing your cycle as well within designing your schedule. So all these things play into your priorities. So bring yourself back to identifying where you're spending. Majority of your time needs to be the most important needle moving activities within your business. Otherwise you're never going to make the progress that you really want to make. So I hope this has benefited you. I really want you to think about you don't have a time problem. So anytime you find yourself complaining about not having enough time, I want you to bring yourself back to. But what has my priorities been. Get clear on your priorities. Get clear on your focus and design your days to serve the growth of your business. I hope that you love this episode. Let me know. Have an amazing day.
