Episode 15 – Flip the Script on Time: Reclaiming Your 168 Hours

Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders to help support you on your journey to Super Connecting to the life of your dreams. Hello friends, and welcome back to episode 15 of Super Connections Podcast, where we help you to Super Connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. One of the biggest things that I find distracts people from Super Connecting to themselves and their purpose Is time, how we use our time, where we invest it, how much of it that we perceive we do or don't have. So time seems to be a common constraint, whether I'm teaching executives and leadership programs or coaching individuals. One of the biggest complaints I hear is how little time people have. So I'm going to share with you one of my favorite tools that I learned from one of my profound teachers, Arthur Samuel Joseph. who taught me the 168-hour method about 12, 15 years ago when we started working together. What is it? If we stop for a moment and imagine, we all technically have the same amount of time in a week, whether you're the CEO of Google or Warren Buffett or somebody who's a mother who has 3 children. Each one of us has 168 hours That we get to spend and invest in our week. However, the reason so many of us get frustrated and angry and upset with this idea and construct of time is because we feel like there's not enough of it. There's just not enough time in the day to get everything done. How many times have we all heard that adage before? What if I could teach you how to flip time on its head so that way you could expand time and utilize the time that you've been given in a more meaningful way. Does that sound worth it? All right, cool. Let's dive into today's topic, time. So in order to have a discussion on time, we should first probably digress for a moment and talk about time in its quantum physics standpoint. Many of you may know I had an episode, a series before this called Regarding Consciousness, where I had the privilege and honor of interviewing a lot of quantum physicists, Deepak Chopra, Don Hoffman, Jude Cervin, and many others. And I do want to give the context of how I see time based on the studies and the research that I've done with some of these wonderful thought leaders in our conversations. So one of my favorite ways that Don Hoffman explains time is he says it's a construct. If you want to think of space-time, which is what we call it in quantum physics, if you want to think of space-time, As a theater that we get projected into as human beings, that then begins to give us a way to talk about time. It's interesting. I found this mind-blowing when I started studying this several years ago and learning a little bit about quantum physics, that time, actually spacetime, is not fundamental to reality. Don Hoffman does a lot of really fun research on this in his books and in his papers. I encourage you to check out his work if you want to go down the quantum physics hole of time. But today, for practical purposes, let's talk about this theater we call spacetime that we each have 168 hours and are projected into and gives us the experience of our human lifespan. The reason so many of us have beef with time, so to speak, is that we have this perpetual story of there's not enough of it. Or sometimes time can feel to go on and on forever if you're sitting at the DMV or waiting for that deal to go through, or the person to call you back who you have a romantic interest in, right? So we can see that time plays out in many different ways. So let's go back to Arthur's 168-hour exercise that he taught me years ago. We all have 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, which equals 168 hours in a week, and those hours equal the minutes and seconds that we get a chance to spend. However, how many of us actually take time to audit where we invest our time? Many of us may have financial planners who help us audit where we put our financial resources, but so few of us actually take the time to reflect and look at Where do we invest those 168 hours, those minutes that we have that add up every single week? Here's how the exercise works. I invite you to take an average week. I wouldn't do this on a week where it's a holiday or a week where you have business travel. I would just take a standard average week, whatever that looks like for you, and begin doing this exercise on a Sunday through a Saturday. And here's how it works. You can create a Google spreadsheet and it's very easy. I even, one of my coaching clients years ago put together one that I now share with people because it's so easy to do. You could have ChatGPT do one for you. If you wanna go ahead and find me on jenniferkhill.com and message me there, you can sign up for my newsletter and then you'll be, you'll get my email address from that. And I'm more than happy to share with you this 168-hour time exercise that I share with clients now. And what you do is you look at and you reflect on where do you invest your time, from the time you spend brushing your teeth to the time you spend on social media to listening to podcasts to taking care of the kids, running your business, whatever it is. You take a week in the life of whoever you are and then you audit that time. And to the best of your ability, the more granular you can get, the more effective this exercise will be. A lot of people ask me, how do you have the time, Jennifer, to spend 2 hours a day in prayer and meditation every day? The reason is because of this very exercise on time. Years ago, when Arthur had taught me this exercise, I was probably just as unaware as many of you are about where my time was being invested or where it was not being invested. And I was shocked and amazed, to my delight and surprise, to find out at the end of that 168-hour exercise I did at the end of that week, I actually, back in the day, had 8 extra hours every week that were unaccounted for, that I could do whatever the heck I wanted. I could sleep more, I could nap, I could dance, I could paint, I could do whatever I wanted with that time. But step 1 is getting related to the reality of your time and where it's going and how much or how little of it you actually have at the end of this audit. So step 1, spend a week and to the best of your ability, as granular as you wanna get down to the seconds, minutes, 15-minute, 5-minute increments, write down where you invest your time. Then at the end of the week, this is where it gets to be a lot of fun. I invite you to reflect back. You can do this with an accountability buddy. If one of you out there, maybe 2 of you are listening to the show, And you have, you wanna do it to support each other. You could then go ahead and write down what it is and share your 168-hour exercises with one another and help each other with step 2 of this. So step 2, once you have where you've invested your time for the week before, is you then color code it. You code the things that are green for the things that bring you joy and light you up. Maybe it's playing with your grandkids, maybe it's running your company, maybe it's listening to podcasts. Whatever it is that fulfills you, that leaves you feeling more energized than when you began that activity, we're gonna color code those green on whatever spreadsheet you're using. Then you have things that are yellow. Things that are yellow are net neutral. It means it doesn't enhance and it doesn't detract your energy, right? It's not too much, it's not too little. It's neither here nor there. So that's yellow, meaning net neutral. And then you're gonna color code any of the activities. Maybe eating isn't particularly joyful for you. For me, eating is one of my favorite things, but that would be green in my books. But maybe it's yellow in your books. So you're gonna code those things yellow. And then there's the red things. What are the things that are red and that actually sap your energy, that you actually feel more drained than you did before? I was doing this with a coaching client lately, and as we were reflecting on his week before, we looked at the things that actually drained his energy. And it was funny, he loved boxing. I think it was like Thai boxing was green for him, but the drive to get to the Thai boxing and back was red each way because he was annoyed with the traffic and the things. So you begin to look at, okay, you might have to do something in the red to get you to the green. But then the conversation this coaching client and I had was, What if we could even turn that red activity of getting to the thing that brings you green into a yellow or green activity itself? For example, we suggested instead of driving— it's very close for him to get to the gym— maybe he could go for a run instead to the gym, or go for a walk. Or maybe he could take an Uber instead if it's causing that much of an energy depletion. So step 1, you audit your week for 1 week. And you audit all 168 hours, even including the time you sleep or don't sleep, right? Step 2, you color code the spreadsheet with green for things that give you energy, yellow for things that neither take nor give you energy, and red for things that deplete your energy. The next step then is to look at the things that are red on your calendar and ask yourself, is this where I'm committed to investing my energy? Maybe it's spending more time on social media than you want. Maybe it's spending time with people who drain your energy. In fact, I'll digress for a moment here of something that another friend of mine, Mark Fujiwara, taught me and Randy Molen. They came up with this formula called Plus 2, and actually very similar to this. Mark had a funny thing happen where one day his little 2-year-old Stella— he works in his house and his office is downstairs, and his little daughter Stella is upstairs with his wife. And he comes upstairs one day on a Thursday after work and he says, hi baby, how are you? And his little 2-year-old looks at him and says, Daddy, why do you have a fake smile on your face? And Mark looks at her, he's like, Stella, this is a real smile, sweetheart. What do you mean? She says, no, Daddy, it's a fake smile. And so he finds himself scratching his head and he goes upstairs to where his wife is and he says, my love, my Stella was just saying that I was fake smiling at her. Is that true? And she said, yeah, you always fake smile on Thursdays. And he said, what are you talking about? And she said, we have this particular client that zaps your energy and then you never have anything left to give to Stella and I on Thursdays. So that actually inspired Mark to do something similar to this 168-hour exercise where he audited his time. But where it gets to be even more fun is then a friend of ours, a mutual friend, Randy Mullen, decided to do this with meetings. I don't know if any of you out there have this where maybe you meet with lots and lots of people every week. What if you could keep a running spreadsheet or a CRM? I do it in a spreadsheet with the person whose name you're meeting, the person who referred them, because it's important to track who's sending you good referrals, and then rate your energy +2, +1, 0, -1, -2 after each call. So this is what Randy and Mark and many of us now affectionately call the Plus 2 Formula. And then you can begin to look at what gives you energy and who gives you energy. Are there clients you have that are depleting your energy? Are there maybe old friendships that it's time to let go and audit and to release those? So when we're doing this as friends, we all track our Plus 2 energy, and we have an agreement that we refer each other Plus 2 people. Now, it's not a judgment of the person. Right. It's more judgment of your energy. One person's +2 could be another person's -2. So when you begin to do this, you begin to take accountability for your life, for your time, for your energy, for where you're intending your energy to go and where perhaps your energy is being depleted. So when you look at whether it's the people who are the -1s or -2s that deplete your energy, whether it's the activities like the client of mine, Who didn't like driving to and from the gym. We want to look at our lives and begin to design our lives instead of living reactively, live proactively, and ask ourselves, where can I be more accountable with where I'm investing my time with people and my time with activities? And the final thing I'll leave you with for today's show on time was something my business coach, Julian Adler, taught me years ago. And that was the idea of expanding and contracting time in the moment. Remember how we began today by talking about sometimes it feels like time is going on forever because you're waiting on an important check or a deal or a phone call, and other times it feels like time flies by? So sometimes if I've been running late for a meeting or trying to catch a flight, I literally just imagine slowing down time. Again, this is getting more into the fun quantum physics side of things. But I imagine that slowing it down so that way I have more time to get there, or speeding it up. So depending on, you can just imagine slowing and speeding down time, but that's more of a fun quantum physics sort of thing that you can do. Like, for example, if I'm running late for a meeting, I'll imagine just seeing all green lights and getting there with ease and effortlessly. And if you want to really enjoy and savor something, like I've had many a wonderful dinner Where I might really slow down and imagine that the time is just expanding and that whoever I'm enjoying this wonderful meal with, that it and time itself has been expanded so I can enjoy it for longer. So this has been a really fun, bizarre episode on quantum physics, the idea of time, the practicalities of time. And regardless of whatever you heard in this episode, I encourage you To put the harness, put the reins of time back into your own hands. Stop handing your time to social media or to things that just fill up your life in a mundane way. And instead, I invite you, take control of time back into your life and invest it wisely. Thank you so much.