046: Time Margin—Are You Drowning, Treading Water, or Gliding?

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and.

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Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome back to Free Time. This is a truth False Fresh episode. I sat down to record yesterday in a podcast studio that I had rented here in New York City and I had complete talker's block. I was staring at my laptop, staring at GarageBand, an empty sound wave file, and I thought about renaming this.

I have the title in mind.

I thought about renaming this episode the Intersection of I'm a Fraud and Imposter. Because as I went to speak to record anything at all, I just heard the overwhelming chit chat from those 11th hour creative gremlins that I talk about in episode 31. I'm coming at you in a week where I'm feeling particularly overwhelmed. In fact, I said to Michael earlier in the week, I'm drowning. And as soon as I say that out loud, even here to you, even here now, I feel terrible. I start beating myself up because I go, well, Jenny, you just wrote a book on free time. So you're either a complete fraud or you need to take your own advice. And it can be frustrating to intellectually have concepts in mind for how to free our mind time and team, myself included. And so I'm here to tell you that I'm only human.

I hope you know that. I certainly hope you know that by now.

And why did I write a book called Free Time? Because I do say this in the book that I've spent my life feeling confident, kind of harried and stressed and overwhelmed. And when I worked in a startup, when I worked at Google, this was the norm. It was just running around with my laptop in the crook of my arm from meeting to meeting to meeting with tons of work and OKRs, objectives and key results and responsibilities. And now, 10 years into running my own business, things get more complex in that I am not just running my own business, which would be stressful enough in Covid times that we're in with such variable income and schedule and meanwhile tackling a huge project like a book. But I find also that my time and energy management is so different having multiple people in the household that I'm thinking about. So it's not just how am I doing, what do I need, what rituals do I want to create, but how's my relationship, how's Michael doing, how's Ryder doing? So this scanning every day of what does everyone need? And trying to dole out appropriate energy. Part of the reason I said to Michael that I felt like I was drowning. And to be honest, in this moment, I still do.

I'm just troubleshooting.

I'm also recording this at a wework.

Near my house as my continual quest to have quiet for podcasting. But alas, no such luck.

In fact, someone just walked by with two cops trailing behind for some kind of community meeting.

Meanwhile, they're looking at me wondering what's.

Going on because I'm sitting on the floor, I have my laptop and my mic on a pretty low to the ground table, and in order to get my mic in the right position, here I am sitting cross legged on the floor recording a podcast. So I guess I was part of their show and tell today too. Alas, I digress.

After I had that conversation with Michael where I told him that I feel like I'm drowning, I wrote down all the roles that I and playing in my life and basically feeling mediocre at every single one of them. Whether it's author, podcaster, business owner. These are on the work side, colleague, let's say professional colleague. And then on the personal side, wife, dog, mom, daughter, sister, friend, family member, neighbor, homeowner, house manager. I'm looking at this piece of paper and I just go, I feel utterly mediocre at every single one of these roles. That's a terrible feeling. Part of this is compounded by the fact that just as soon as I finished recording the Free Time audiobook, which was a big effort on day three, I was pushing through tremendous pain with an ear infection. So. And I I know I said this.

On previous solo episodes, but of course.

There'S a connection to getting sick and our body saying, hey, you need you to do something differently, but came down with this searing 10 out of 10 pain for 5 days with the ear infection and no sooner had it healed that Michael had a friend from Lebanon in town, so we were helping him get acclimated to New York. And that was the next week. So the day that I said I'm drowning came after two weeks of very full time with audiobook ear infection guest in town. And then sure enough, of course, on the next what I called a meltdown Monday, I melted down. That was Monday of this week, in fact, when I tried to understand why.

Am I feeling like this, what is going on?

Of course it can just be accumulation of things and having self compassion and permission and easing the guilt and doing the best that I can on any given day. Part of it also strikes me as time margin issues. So just like with finances, for any stage of life, whether it's the stage of family life or one's age, we have a capacity for that season, that stage. As I was reflecting on this and where these feelings are coming from, it struck me that if we're filled to capacity, there's no margin for when new elements or twists are introduced. If I was already filling my available free time or my work time to capacity, and I would say struggling a little bit at that. So yes, it was filled to capacity. And still I wasn't quite managing all the pieces that I have going on right now very well. Then getting taken out by recording an.

Audiobook for three days that I could.

Have planned around, but taken out by an ear infection, by having company in town and not wanting to be rude.

In the mornings and afternoons and actually conversing with them and being a good.

Host, then that creates a tremendous amount of stress on the system.

I was just listening to a podcast with Martha Beck and her partner Rowan Mangnon. They were talking about spoon theory, a metaphor to describe the amount of mental or physical energy a person has available for daily activities and tasks. This theory, according to Wikipedia, was developed by Christine Miserandino as a way to express how it felt for her to have lupus. So. So she was explaining to a friend and she used spoons to lay out a visual representation of how many units of energy that a person might have in a given day, and for her, how having a chronic illness removes spoons that she has even at the start of the day, and then every little thing she does takes a spoon. So she wrote that essay in 2003, the Spoon Theory. I'll link to it in the show notes. And I guess a whole community has cropped up around this called Spoonies.

So. So I learned that from the Bewildered Episode.

And I thought that is really a perfect way to describe on my end, a shift in how many spoons I.

Have available and I wonder if I'm.

Not alone in this, but that adding complexity to family structure, adding Covid a global pandemic, adding a big new project and adding an unknown health thing I'm dealing with at home. With we have finally I have done my proper adulting tasks of calling a.

Plumber, calling a handyman, getting a mold.

Inspection set up for next week. Uh, so one by one trying to tick toward a solution, but nonetheless, the spoons are getting dished out every day faster than I can count, faster than I have. It's just taken a lot of spoons to run my life in a way that it didn't take quite so many previously. I read a fantastic book by Bridget Schulte as I was preparing to write Free time. Her book is called Overwhelmed. I'll link to that in the show.

Notes and she talks about coining a new diagnosis in our age of overwhelm.

Which is OBL overwhelmed by life. That's pretty apt to describe how sometimes we could get OBBL overwhelmed by business. That alone, if you're entrepreneurial, if you're self employed, can be its own bucket of challenges. And those can go in waves. Sometimes things are flying high and then other times they're super challenging. And then OBL overwhelmed by life. As I was reflecting on this, I thought about three different buckets. Think about which one fits you right now. So there's drowning to keep our swimming metaphor. There's treading water and then gliding. Drowning is feeling completely overwhelmed, can't keep up. There's not enough available time to tackle what's on the to do list. The way I've been describing it is as if my to do list eyes are bigger than my capacity or available energy stomach. So it's that constant recalibrating going, what do I think I can do? And what is my actual available time and energy? And then when there's low margin around that, any interruption, any thing off the plan can wreak havoc on the plan. So if I'm waking up in the middle of the night with asthma that I haven't had since I was a kid, already not getting enough sleep or getting really broken up sleep is going to affect what time I wake up in the morning and how much energy I have and how how my mind can work. Yesterday when I went into this podcast studio, I got so frustrated because I'm almost a year into this new show, desperately trying to find a quiet place.

To record and nothing is working. I don't know why this is so difficult, but I'm in this studio.

I've paid to be there, but my brain is all scrambled because I didn't get good consistent through the night's sleep. So I'm sitting there just staring at my computer, frustrated as hell that I want to record a solo episode, this one. But I was so tired and so scrambled and feeling like such a fraud for even having these issues. Meanwhile, I have a book coming out.

About the solutions to these very issues.

That I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. And today I'm recording in a wework that's loud as hell. I'm just hearing noise all around me.

Even though I'm in the one soundproof room that they have here.

If I record at home, there's a.

Dog barking, doorbell ringing, toilet flushing, etc. So this is one of those things where I just go. This is taking a lot of capacity.

To try to solve.

So I either need to give up.

On the idea of quiet and going pro at some point, having tried just about everything. Who knows, maybe I pause the podcast or record in seasons, or maybe the next solution is just around the corner, something as tiny as this. Where to record a quiet podcast takes available time, space and energy during a window where it feels like there's not much of it. As an aside, I knew that when I committed to do weekly solo episodes that in a way True Falls Fresh would be built in because there would be no escaping the reality of any given week. If I only do a solo episode once a month, I can forget how hard a week was, or I can kind of gloss over it having solved it.

But when I committed to weekly, I knew that I would be holding myself accountable to showing up when things are not perfect because of this cadence, and.

To really telling you what it's like because there's no hiding on a down week.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Treading water is a sense of Getting things done at Google, we used to call during performance evaluations, we would call something meeting expectations. Treading water is you are able to meet your general day to day expectations of yourself, of what you're responsible for in your life. It's manageable. You might not be bringing on any big new creative projects or life projects, but you're able to kind of calmly stay afloat in the water. Gliding makes me think of a swimming technique I learned from Terry Laughlin via Tim Ferriss. I'm going to link to the Tim Ferriss podcast episode in the show notes. It's episode 276 of the Tim Ferriss show and it's called Terry Laughlin, the Master who Changed My Life. I bought Terry Laughlin's book Total Immersion, the Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster and Easier. And it completely transformed my swimming technique as well, just like it did for Tim Ferriss. I remember doing a triathlon in 2009, and even though I had been training every morning in the cold while working at Google, they had one of those awesome endless pools where it's a pretty small box that you're in, but you can swim in place and ramp up the waves and the intensity up or down. So I would train there every morning before work, proudly improving my sewing. But I had not yet read Total Immersion. I don't know anything about it. And then on the day of the triathlon, I almost drowned. I talk about this in life after college where I got to the starting line, put on my swim cap and everyone starts and all of a sudden they're kicking my face, feet are in my face, hands are flying in my face, and I just start flying, freaking out, and I'm so anxious that I start almost panicking, just hyperventilating. I didn't know what to do. I was totally freaked out. So I turned on my back and started backstroking.

I must have looked ridiculous.

Everyone passed me. I was one of the last people out of the water. This was in a lake. But there I was, backstroking, just trying to get my breath again, trying to make it out of the water, let alone, I didn't care what my time was. I just needed to calm myself down. And so by doing this, everyone else passed me.

There I go. It's the one way I could get.

My energy back and my breath because my face was facing up out of the water.

I'm looking at the clouds, I'm not.

Looking at anything around me. And that is what got me to finish the swim portion of the race. Like I Said just about last and then I can move on to the bike and the run. That to me was a physical memory that I have of going from drowning, literally just panicking and drowning, into finding a calm, gliding state. What Terry Laughlin teaches in total immersion is, is similar. It's, it's like the yoga of swimming, but he actually gives you techniques for almost carving through the water. So no one ever taught me techniques like this. And he is really unique in what he teaches. But there is a way that you extend your limbs and to almost turn sideways to be more aerodynamic in the water. And therefore while so swimming, you can exert far less effort and glide through the water and carve through the water. And it really connected to what I had studied from yoga and meditation. And the way he writes is about swimming as a mindful fluid movement. He says it's not about athletic ability and that's what will turn you into an efficient swimmer. And I experience this to be true.

He shares what he calls a thoughtfully.

Choreographed series of skill drills practiced in the mindful spirit of yoga that can help anyone swim more enjoyably. I would find myself doing laps. This is now at long after almost 10 years after that triathlon in a.

YMCA pool in New York City, actually.

Enjoying myself, actually making it across the big pool with ease, getting into that beautiful flowing state that this kind of swimming can provide. So that's gliding. Gliding is finding techniques that allow you to just flip something on its head. And in this case this episode, we're talking about time in a way. Time is a man made construct. So are our to do lists, so are the expectations we place on ourselves. Gliding to me is a sense of nonlinear breakthrough. It is a sense of shifting perspective or finding just the right techniques or, or rituals or locations for things or support system. This could be delegating to a team that allow you to feel that real sense of flow and ease. And what's most important about the gliding stage is that it's sustainable. Treading water, you might tire out at some point. Whereas I see gliding as being completely in sync with the direction you're going, the pace, the technique and your breath. I have started to wrap my mind around what gliding looks like and how to get there from here.

And I know I'm switching metaphors a lot, we're going from spoons to swimming, but you get the idea. And part of the reason I like.

To share a variety of metaphors is that you can grab the one that works for you and think about it. I think sometimes just labeling things is helpful. So for me, it was helpful to say out loud I feel like I'm drowning and to recognize that that's different than treading water and that's different than gliding. So one of the things Michael had me do was an inventory of everything I do in a given week. It's not rocket science, but I hadn't done it in a while. I hadn't written down every role I play on a piece of paper and go, no wonder I feel that I'm failing at all these roles or mediocre at so many of them. You know, when I am in a mode of feeling like I'm drowning time and to do list wise, I'm not a great friend. I'm not really checking in on other people. It's what the authors of a fantastic book called Scarcity, they say that we go into tunnel vision, which I absolutely find to be true. The authors share their central hypothesis. They write because the focus on scarcity is involuntary and because it captures our attention and it impedes our ability to focus on other things. The executive is trying to focus on her daughter's baseball game, but scarcity keeps pulling her mind away. Even when we try to do something else, the tunnel of scarcity keeps drawing us in. Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, less mind in the rest of life. And they call this less mind. They say it's a concept well studied by psychologists, and they also use the term bandwidth to cover computational capacity, the ability we have to think critically and creatively about other parts of our life. So whether it's time scarcity or financial scarcity, being in that state, the state that I call drowning does limit available resources for anything else and it does tend to become all consuming. And again, as the authors call it, tunneling, where you almost develop tunnel vision around just what needs to be done right now. Or in the case of financial scarcity, not just scarcity as a mindset, as.

In the secret the book the Secret.

Scarcity, as in actual impediments to resources to do what one needs in the in one's life. You've all probably heard the research that the average American has only $400 in savings. So if they were to get hit with a $2,000 home repair, that would immediately create scarcity within their available resources. So this is a real thing. It's not just the mindset. And I actually talk about this in pivot as one of the pivot paradoxes, that there are very real cognitive impacts of scarcity that go far beyond just.

The the miracles of manifesting.

Now, of course, if we want to get out of scarcity, and in my case, let's talk about time scarcity. Sure, there are certain stories I might be telling saying I'm failing at everything, but may or may not be true. As Byron Katie would say, any thought that creates stress is an alarm clock waking you up. So if I'm saying I am failing at every role in my life, I'm not being a good fill in the blank, then I could question that. I could go through Byron Katie's the work and say, is that true? Can I absolutely know that it's true? How do I feel when I think that thought? Can I see a reason to drop that thought? And then going through some actual turnarounds. If you're not familiar with the work, you can go to thework.com and she has a free Judge your neighbor worksheet that you can run this through. I have found it very, very helpful in the past. In an upcoming episode I will share some of the strategies that I'm using to zoom out, reassess and reset up my mise en place, if you will. The way to set up a clean space the way that a chef would to create systems from here, to create process to time, bootstrap my way into a new paradigm, into a new way of doing things. I can tell you that one of the first things I did was take a page out of the book who, not how by Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan.

I'll throw it in the show notes.

And I just said okay, if I am drowning, it truly means that I am doing too much and I need to delegate.

This is in the free time framework.

Align, design, assign. I just decided to look at everything I was doing and say for any next area of my life and business and book who can I delegate to? And I set up a few meetings for later in the week knowing that those meetings would lead to being able to delegate chunks of the work. So that was step one. Again, I'll share more in upcoming episode. Today I just really wanted to lay out this framework of are you drowning, treading water or gliding so that we can name it. We can just name where we're at. And scanning through my podcast this week, feeling really down, feeling like there was nothing that was speaking to me and.

When I'm in a mode like this.

The the business podcasts I listen to are too tiring and then there was just nothing quite right. The one I saw was from Basecamp's Rework podcast. The episode is titled Scratch your own itch.

I'll throw that in the show notes.

Too, but that one gave me the inspiration to try again today.

It's Thursday. This episode will come out tomorrow on.

A Friday to scratch my own itch that okay, I'm feeling down. I kind of just want someone to just say how they're really feeling.

And as much as I feel like.

A fraud and like an imposter, that I have a book coming out about this and here I am feeling like I'm struggling that as I've shared with you here, one of my values is Truthworld's fresh. If I were to scratch my own itch, I would just speak honestly about this topic. Not by pretending to be the end all be all self appointed expert, but to say that as ever as always, I am on this journey with you and definitely I have accumulated the best that I can find and have found in 10 years in free time the book that's coming out. But there is sometimes a gap between intellectually knowing something and then being able to apply it to our own lives with our own unique circumstances, with changing circumstances around us. It's that adage that we all know.

What it takes to get six pack abs and a billion dollars. Or someone could intellectually tell us what it takes.

But that may or may not be right for us and our lives at any given time. And there may be a gap between knowing and doing. The knowing doing gap as it's commonly called in learning and development circles. I would love to hear from you. If you want to share any of your techniques for moving from feeling like you're drowning time wise to treading water to gliding in particular, anything that's not super common knowledge. Especially those of you who have kids at home and you've been dealing with homeschooling. I can only imagine the level of complexity and also self compassion that you've had to muster for yourself during this crazy time, send me a note, let me know. You can email hi's freetime.com or if you want to leave a voice memo that I could play in a future podcast, go to itsfreetime.com ask. Thank you so much for being here listening everybody.

I really appreciate it. I appreciate you letting me continue to pilot, to find good quiet space space.

And to be able to share truth while it's fresh. Even when it's unsolved. Even when it makes me cringe to come on the mic and share this with you.

Thanks again everyone.

Have a great rest of your day.

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