How to multiply your time

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Hey Jims, we'd love you to come in work with the organization to help us be more productive. Honestly, I have to tell you, I hear that so many times. Whether that's by email, whether it's people lifting the phone or at some of my workshops. James, the big thing we need to do is just be more productive. Well, to me that's not a complex challenge. It really isn't. It comes down to knowing what you want, why you want it, developing a plan of how you're going to get there, and then putting some structure in place to make sure that you're not going to be distracted, that you're not going to procrastinate or follow all the opportunities, the shiny objects, and you get to work and you have accountability wrapped around that. You do not need.

$200,000 program for your thousand employees to be more productive. You simply don't. You need a simple system and actually deploy it, follow up with it, evaluate it, and ensure that everyone knows where they're headed. So I wanted to talk today a little bit about how to multip your time. Some people are incredible with time management. I'm going to challenge you to go one step further. If someone said, do you want to be a time manager or a time leader, what would you prefer? Well, look, I would much rather operate in the field of time leadership. Lead your time with purpose, lead your time with passion, lead your time with processes. Actually have processes that help you to manage your time. Now I'll go back to my childhood, my Grandfather, granddad, Jimmy. What an incredible man. He was a super hard worker. He left school at 14, had a horse and cart in Belfast where he delivered coal in the back of his horse and cart. So super hard worker. He then went on to deliver Guinness all around Ireland for the famous company Guinness. And again up super early 4am and maybe not back till 8 or 9pm each night. Doing that five, six days a week. He wasn't shy of hard work. And I'll tell you something, I got to spend a lot of years with him when he retired. But the one thing he really, really valued and the one thing he was super committed to was time. He appreciated time, he valued time. And I always wondered why. Now people that are close to me will know that I really value time too, to the minute. So I work with a very small number of one to one clients each year and if their call, their coaching session is at 11:00am, as soon as it goes from 10, 59 and 59 seconds and it ticks over to 11, boom, that call gets sent. I really respect and value time. And some would say it's quite annoying to be around me. Come on, we got to leave. It's a 23 minute journey. Let's leave 27 minutes. So we've got a little bit of time up our sleeve in case something happens. Look, I would rather be a whole hour early than a minute late. Some of the great leaders that I've got to interview in person, I would get to the studio or to the place that we're recording maybe 20, 30 minutes early. I'd find them there reading or I'd find them there journaling, or I'd find them there catching up on something important to them. That was a common trait. The majority of the really high performers that I've met in my life have always been early. They've always, they're not in a panic, they're not flapping and saying yes to too many things. They know what they're about and they stick to their knitting. They know what they're good at, they know what they're trying to achieve. Let's not get distracted is their mo. So I want you to think about for you, you know, what's your belief around time? Who in your life did you have when you were young that influenced your idea around time? Do you really not care about time and you don't mind being 10 or 15 minutes late? You're pretty easy going with that. Do you end up being late to most things? Maybe rushing a little bit? Do you leave projects to the last minute, because it motivates you more to get focused. And I want you to ask, you know, who was your granddad, Jimmy? You know, who was that in your life? Mom, dad, auntie, uncle, teacher, grandparents, doesn't matter who it was. But who was the most influential person when it came to time? And that idea of managing our time, because let's face it, the seconds that tick by right now, they're gone. We don't get them back. So every moment that we have to maximize those seconds and those minutes and those hours, that's really valuable use of your life. This is not just use of your time, it's use of your life. And I want you to really think about how am I using my life time, right? This is your lifetime right now. And I'm going to just share a few things with you that might really help. If you don't have a personal growth plan that you could actually bring out and show show someone right now, then what you do have is a personal decay plan. And that might be quite affronting. But at the end of the day, you're either growing or you're decaying, right? You're either growing or you're not. If you don't actively plan for growth and learning and development, then you are planning to decay. You're atrophing. Because if you think of, say, interest, you know, if you put your money in the bank in a simple little savings account, well, we both know that inflation is going to mean that that money's worthless as we fast forward each year. But if you put it in a higher return investment, well, you're going to beat inflation. And that money's actually going to be more valuable over time. It's the same with your time. What are you doing? What are you putting in to those minutes? When I look at your calendar right now, I did this recently with an incredible human, actually. He had me on his podcast, was interviewing me and we were chatting afterwards and he said, you know, I'm struggling with this or I want to work towards this and what do you think I should do? I says, well, let's get your calendar right. Let's look and see how many think times you have on your calendar. His face just broke into a huge smile. He got his iPad, I flipped it around, and every single day for one hour, he had think time, think time, think time. One hour. Every single day I high fivedom. I had a big smile on my face and I said, you're one of the very few people that has ever done that. Most People, when I say think time, they go, what? What's that? Why would I spend an hour of my day thinking? Well, let's face it, most humans will do anything to avoid thinking. And that's why we look at people who are successful and go, well, look, it all landed on their lap. Aren't they so lucky? They're so privileged. Well, yeah, there's a bit of that. But more I would say is they thought a lot more about the problems of the world and how they could solve them. They spent more time thinking about how to strategize, to move forward, how to get the right people in place, how to solve those challenges. Think time is your most valuable asset. So if you want more time in your day, more time in your life, you want to multiply it, please do one thing. It might not be a whole hour, but start with 20 minutes, even a week. 20 minutes a week. Will you put on your calendar Think time. Now, during that time, it's important that you have a question like a prompt. Some people might call it a journal prompt, but a think time prompt. You know, what's my greatest priority? Great question. To have some think time on and write it. Write down. What is your greatest priority? What do I value in life?

Great question. How do I want to be spoken of at my funeral? You will start to really think about what matters during those think times. It could be strategic. You've got a massive opportunity or a massive challenge in your business during think time. Go. Okay, Whammo. What are my options? That little acronym has helped me out so many times. Whammo. What are my options? So think time is this consistent behavior, this time blocking that. All high performers I've met, they create think time. It could be a walk in the hills where they think. It could be sitting down and meditating. The thing, it could be sitting down with a journal. People who are very close with me, friends and family, will know the greatest gift other than time that you can give me. You know, looking at the love languages, time is my number one. The next gift that I love is getting a journal. Oh, my goodness. I geek out over journals. Why? Because I used them and I fill them. They're blank pages. There's nothing. There's no gold in there. When you pick them up, the gold should be there at the end where you've learned from your mistakes and you've wrote about your dreams and you've redefined and redefined your values. So the thing I'm going to ask you to do is get yourself a journal and please make it a physical one, not a digital one. I'm not going to go into the neuroscience of that right now. I'm sure we can do another episode on that. But the neuroscience shows that when you write rather than type, it just makes such a difference in terms of it getting into your subconscious mind. You're inscribing it in there. So I want you to think about that now. A few other tactics that really help you. One, you're going to have a personal growth plan. I know you are. I'd like you to have at least a five year vision, right? A five year plan, that's more like a strategy, right? So a five year vision for your health, for your relationships, for your career, for your wealth, right? Those are four. There are others. But start with that. A five year vision. So I want you to write down, it is now whatever data is five years from now, it is now such and such a date. And I have. And write down what you've achieved, what you've developed, how you're feeling, how you're looking.

For those key areas. That's a starting point. If you want to multiply your time, you need to put a little bit of time investment in now. And that is the planning, the strategizing. Then we'll work back from that. Once you've got your five year vision, then we look at, okay, 12 month game plan. What over the next 12 months do I need to do and I'm excited to do, to help me step towards each of those five year visions for the different parts of my life? Then break it down, okay, this quarter, this month, this week, today.

When I look at my calendar and some people will laugh, you know, up until almost October, it's almost at full capacity and I've got my think time in there and I've got my growth time in there and I've got me going to see my coach in there. So I want you to look at your calendar and go, is it white space? Because white space is not where we grow. Yes, we need rest and that should be scheduled in too. But we need to make time to think, we need to make time to plan. We need to make time to be accountable to the visions we've set. And are we actually reverse engineering them and ticking them off? What I'm saying right now applies not just at a personal level, this applies totally at a team level, on an organizational level too. So get yourself a good system. I have the success planning method and I have a journal, a digital journal for companies and teams that I, anybody I work with. I just give it to them because I want to see them succeed with what matters most to them. I want them to lead on purpose. And it's a very simple but powerful system. So I'm going to really challenge you to create five year vision, your 12 month game plan and then what each quarter is going to look like and then once you've done that, just write, okay, what does this month look like? What do I need to achieve? What are my top three priorities in my life and my work? I want to leave that with you. And as you know, I've had some phenomenal guests this year. We've got some incredible ones sitting in the wings waiting to be published over the next couple of weeks for you. I know you're going to love it. And I just want to ask you one simple favor. If you enjoy the show and you continue like to continue listening to the show, please do me a favor and share this show with two friends and just tell them why you enjoy it. Because when we have more people hitting play and listening, we get more rankings and chartings which allows us to get in front of more incredible people like you get in front of your eyes which then a lot us to keep running the show. And I'm so passionate about you. I'm so passionate about the people I get to interview. And you know what? I'm really so passionate about the people that you get to impact from something you might have picked up on here in one of the episodes or with a guest that really fires me up. So a huge thank you to you for gifting me with your time today. But for now, please get out there, lead your life on purpose.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.