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In this episode of "A Changed Mind," our host David Bayer explores the concept of time management and personal growth in this insightful episode. He challenges conventional notions of fixed time, introducing Parkinson's Law and its inverse application. David shares personal experiences from his recovery journey, illustrating how prioritizing self-improvement can paradoxically create more efficiency in other areas of life.

He delves into the psychology behind decision-making, belief systems, and their impact on our perception of time and productivity. The episode offers practical advice for entrepreneurs and individuals seeking to balance success with personal well-being, encouraging listeners to insert important activities into their lives without sacrificing efficiency.

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What We Explored This Episode

03:34 Recovery journey reshapes time management

09:39 Gandhi's wisdom on meditation and productivity

15:47 The power of timing over time

19:51 Experiment with prioritizing personal activities

Memorable Quotes

"Gandhi articulated this understanding when he said, 'I have so much to do today, I must meditate for two hours instead of one.' It seems counterintuitive, but establishing yourself within a grounded mindset allows the rest of your day to be even more efficient."

"Too many entrepreneurs are taking their health and relationships to the sacrificial altar of success, thinking they have to live an either-or life. It's actually a yes-and life."

"Stop paying attention to how much time you have and start making decisions about how you want your life to be. If you're willing to do that, life will reorganize and accommodate."

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There's a law called Parkinson's Law, and Parkinson's Law basically says the work that you have to do will expand to the allotted time. Parkinson's Law actually works the other way too, and that is that if you give yourself less time to do something, you'll become more efficient in doing it. Gandhi articulated this understanding when he said, I have so much to do today. I must meditate for two hours instead of one. It's like that doesn't make any sense. And I want to explain to you why this phenomenon occurs and what you can do in order to actually create more time in your day. And I think we've misunderstood significantly how time works, and this is a way for you to get all that time back. Welcome to A Changed Mind, a journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth, to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth and relationships, to open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real lasting change in your life and in the world.

So I started this company and back then I had no idea what personal growth was. I had no idea what mindset was. I don't even think I knew what the phrase self awareness was. And I certainly wasn't self aware because by the time that business was about five years old, I realized I was in the midst of my drug and alcohol and pornography addiction and my life had become unmanageable. My business was failing. And, you know, thankfully my life started falling apart because it forced me to take a look at what was going on. And I started working with a therapist who said, listen, here's the game plan for the next 90 days. Number one, you're a drug addict and an alcoholic. That was a hard pill to swallow. Number two, here's what your game plan is. You're going to go to three 12 step meetings a week. And this was about a 30 to 45 minute drive from my house. You're going to come to therapy once a week, and you're going to come once a week to the men's group that I run here in my therapy practice. I was like, five days a week, I'm driving an hour to an hour and a half road time by the time I get there and back, plus the hour of the meeting or the therapy, men's group. And I said, there's no way I can manage this with the amount of time I have in a day. But I knew I had to do it. And so I reprioritized and I made my recovery first. And what happened was pretty miraculous. As a result of putting my recovery first, the rest of my life became much more efficient and organized. And the things that I thought took a certain amount of time ended up getting done in a fraction of the time. A lot of the things that I thought were weekly commitments ended up falling away. It turned out I either didn't need to do those things or someone else did them for me. And I was able to not only work my recovery program, but create much more in my business within the same amount of time. And at first it was a little deceptive because I was like, well, yeah, of course, because I'm sober, right? I'm no longer spending all of this time acting out in my addiction. And part of that is true, but part of it, I later came to understand, was that our relationship with time is not fixed. There's a law called Parkinson's law. Parkinson's law basically says the work that you have to do will expand to the allotted time. And maybe you've experienced this before. You know, you've got four weeks to do something. And rather than give yourself a week to do it maybe it's prepare for a presentation or you know, launch a product, or you know, do something related to your business or related to your life. And whatever it is that you have to do, that task ends up taking up however much time that you give it.

And this is really a great cause of procrastination. In fact, procrastination is the explanation oftentimes as to why it takes so long. But Parkinson's law actually works the other way too. And that is that if you give yourself less time to do something, you'll become more efficient in doing it. And so what ends up happening is we've got this list of current obligations. They fill our week, 20, whatever it is, five days a week, seven days a week, eight to 12 hours a day. You've got in your mind all these tasks that you need to do. It might be managing your team, it might be writing email copy, it might be be putting together a course. It might be actually working with your customers or your clients, or optimizing your e commerce store or whatever it is, right? Growing and scaling your business. And so you have this idea of, hey, my week is full, and it's full of these activities. And so now you think about trying to insert something into it and the math simply doesn't make sense. You go, look, I know I've got these eight things I need to do every day and it's an hour to do each of these things and I have to do them every single day. That's my 40 hour workweek. There's no time to add in writing a book. There's no time to add in improving my hiring process so that I actually can hire even more qualified people into my business. I know I should do it because I know that the return on that investment, you know, is a multiple of the effort that's required, but I just don't have time to do it. Or again, as I mentioned, you're wanting to do personal things that may improve your business efficiency or just allow you to source energy from your life to spend time with friends, to go to the show, go to the theater, go scuba diving, take the vacation that you haven't taken in a long time, but it doesn't fit into the mathematical equation of I have X number of things to do. They take Y amount of time and there's nothing left over. So I can't insert anything else into it. And so as a result of thinking that time is fixed, we actually don't insert anything new into the equation. We don't start working out, we don't start meditating. We don't start working on our business. We don't start enjoying our life more. But what actually happens when you decide to reprioritize and add something in? It's not even really a reprioritization because you can still actually do all the things you've been doing, plus this new thing that you're inserting. But whenever you decide to insert something new into the mix and you do not have a relationship with time where you believe that it is fixed and limited, your life reorganizes in order to accommodate the new thing. Okay, so I'm going to break this down for you, by the way. This is not woo woo. This is not new age. This is not vegan. This is not Kumbaya. It's not any of that. It's actually understanding behavioral psychology. It's understanding neuroscience. And you know what, if you want to throw in metaphysics and understanding the nature of reality and how we interface with it, that's fine too. But for some of you, that might feel a little bit too fringe for me to get you to buy into it. And I want you to buy into this because it can change your life.

Gandhi articulated this understanding when he said, I have so much to do today, I must meditate for two hours instead of one. What did Gandhi mean by that? It's like that doesn't make any sense. If you have too much to do today, you shouldn't be meditating at all. That's what most of us do. We know that a mindfulness practice would serve us well. Or journaling or meditation and visualization. Despite a lot of the fun poking that morning rituals have had recently in social media with other influencers. These are practices that help set our emotional resiliency for the day. They help build our nervous system down, regulate our nervous system. They help us heal the limiting beliefs and the childhood traumas that are still expressing themselves through everything that we do and creating friction and drag on our life. Important to focus on yourself if that's what you feel you need to do. Or important to spend time with your family. Because you know what, there are going to be plenty of business opportunities. But being the father of an 18 month old son right now, there aren't going to be plenty of opportunities for me to experience him at 18 months. And so we want our lives to be yes and lives. We don't want to have to choose between a success in our business or health or success in our business and relationships. Too many entrepreneurs because of not understanding these principles that I'M about to share with you are taking their health and their relationships to the sacrificial altar of success, thinking that they have to live an either or life. And it's actually a yes. And and what Gandhi was saying was like, I have a lot to do today, so let me establish myself within a grounded mindset and within a down regulated nervous system and within a spiritual connection so that the rest of my day can be even more efficient. Now, Gandhi probably looked at it more from a spiritual standpoint. I'm going to explain it to you from a behavioral psychology standpoint and understanding how your brain works. But and I've talked about this in other episodes. You can go back to our foundational episodes back in episode two where I talked about the difference between personal development 1.0 and personal development 2.0 and how beliefs actually work and how mindset is a fundamental rewiring of our brain. You can go back to episode three where I talked about how thoughts become things in a very grounded, practical way that we all should be taught in school. But whatever you decide, that's going to inform the thoughts and ideas you have access to. So for example, if you decide that you're not good enough, then you're going to have a lot of thoughts and ideas or observations related to the fact that you're not good enough. You're going to be self critical, you're going to be self judgmental, you're going to have low self esteem. If that's what you've decided, if that's what you believe, if you decide that anything is possible and that you're capable of creating any type of result as long as you put your, you know, energy and attention and effort towards it, then you're going to have thoughts and ideas that are in alignment with that. You're going to start thinking about opportunities that you could pursue and create success with, opportunities to make more money, opportunities to build more friends, opportunities to find an intimate relationship. And so whatever it is that you actually decide or believe, because I believe that the same thing, I believe that beliefs are decisions. But whatever it is that you decide, you're going to have thoughts and ideas in alignment with whatever it is that you decide. So what that means is that our decisions inform our thought process, both our conscious thought process and our unconscious thought process. You're making thousands of unconscious decisions every single day, whether you hit the snooze bar or not, what time you decide to go to the restroom, what time you log on to social media, which determines what posts you see and advertisements you see in your newsfeed. And all of these unconscious decisions are being driven by, by the beliefs you have about the world or the decisions that you make. And so if you decide that you don't have enough time to insert these important, if not critical, activities into your day because your day is already filled with your current obligations, then you're not going to have any access to more efficient thoughts that could reduce the amount of time that you're spending on your current task list.

But the way you're approaching your business right now and the tasks on a day to day basis are just one possibility. There's an infinite number of possibilities. And so if you actually decide a yes and yes, I'm going to do all the things that I need to do and I'm going to carve out 30 minutes for myself today for whatever it is, self care, go for a walk, play with your furry friend, cold plunge, whatever. It looks like the rest of the time that you're working is going to completely reorganize in terms of your thought process. You're going to think things differently, therefore you're going to feel things differently, therefore you're going to do things differently. And so you've got the opportunity to create a massive amount of efficiency into the current structure of your day. But that efficiency will not be created again. Going back to Parkinson's law, whatever you have will take up all the time that you give it. If you don't make any adjustments to what is actually inside of your day, it's like adding another ingredient into the mix. The entire meal reorganizes itself and you end up getting something much, much better than what you've got. You create efficienc and all of your other activities. And by the way, not only does what you decide or what you believe change the way that you think, so you'll start to have ideas that create more revenue in your business while you're doing less work, or you'll come up with more creative ways to get the tasks done, or somebody will reach out to you who's looking for a job, who's a perfect fit for whatever the activities are that have been taking up so much time in your day in order to make way for these new activities that you want to insert into it. But not only do you have different thoughts and ideas, but your perception changes. So you start to experience your business completely differently. What I'm trying to articulate here is that the experience you have of your business right now is based on the current business structure and what You've allowed into your day to day life. And the misconception is that we can't insert anything else into it without removing something from it, but the way that the brain works is that if you insert something else into it, you'll become a more efficient thinker and entrepreneur within your current business, so that everything fits within the same container of time. This is how your brain works. Again, going back to episode three where I talk about, you know, what it is you believe or what it is you decide. And in this case, what you decide your day is going to be like, what you decide is important to you. What you decide you can do within the course of a day or a week. What you decide is possible. Not only does that affect the way you think and the way you feel, and therefore the actions that you take, and not only does it inform the unconscious decisions that you're making on a day to day basis. And not only does it affect the perception you have of your business so that when you add more things that give you energy that you want to be doing, you create an efficiency across the board. But you're also a vibrational, electrical, mechanical being. So every time you have these thoughts about your business or about your life, you experience those thoughts as emotions. Both the neural networks of your brain, the neurosynaptic connections, as well as your nervous system create a resonance. They light up. And that resonance or that frequency or that vibration is broadcasting your radioactive information to other people who are receiving it at an unconscious level. And there unconscious minds are informing them of micro decisions that cause them to do things that they're not even aware of and that based on that communication, coordinate synchronicities and coincidences where you meet them and they help you, or resources come from unexpected places or your worst fear becomes realized. Depending on, you know, if you're having thoughts of expansion, thoughts that feel good, thoughts that are empowering, or depending on if you're having fear based thoughts, either way, you're putting out this radioactive communication, your radio frequency. And so that's how we're creating these intersections in our life with other people. And that is something that I think most people don't appreciate, which is that time is far less important than timing. Because if you can coordinate effective timing, you finding the right joint venture partners, you know, you meeting the right consultants, you hiring the right employees, and all of the cause and effects that are required in order to orchestrate and coordinate those meetings. If you can be efficient with your timing based on again empowered beliefs and decisions, it really doesn't matter what you want to accomplish or how limited your time seems. In other words, you can't outwork timing. And so a lot of times when we're working, for example, with people who are transitioning from their career to starting their own business, they say, well, I don't have time. And what we encourage them to do is make the decision and start taking the right effort and action towards starting this new business, because it'll create efficiency in the rest of their life. We can also see this again, as I mentioned before, with entrepreneurs who are already in the full swing of building their businesses. I want you to spend a moment thinking about all the different activities that you're engaged with in right now in your business and to think about whether or not those have an opportunity for efficiency or stream streamlining, whether or not there is a possibility of you being able to actually accomplish greater outcomes within the same amount of time. And realize that the way that that is achieved is by actually putting yourself first, doing the things that you actually believe you should be doing, even when you feel like there isn't enough time to actually do them. You see, what happens is the mind calculates your possibilities based on its observation of what's occurred so far. What did I do last week? How many things that I have to do, how long did they take? But the way you approached work last week was based on your level of thinking last week. And so if you can actually make a decision to spend an extra hour with your kids this week, make a decision to get a better night's sleep, take a little bit more rest, make a decision to enjoy yourself, go out to dinner with some friends, go back to church. If you're like me, go to a 12 step meeting. What you'll see is that the rest of your week reorganizes to accommodate the insertion of that activity and you get to have it all. So this is a really important understanding. Again, it's not that complicated. The current level of efficiency you have is based on your current level of thinking and what you have allowed into that space, Parkinson's law, you can actually transform the level of efficiency within which you're operating in your business, in your relationships, in your health, in your life. By making decisions to actually insert the activities that are important to you into your day to day schedule, even though it seems like they're no time. Stop paying attention to how much time you have and just start making decisions about how you want your life to be. If you're willing to do that, life will reorganize and accommodate now, that's not to say that we want to get into a position of hustling and grinding and burning out, but what we're really talking about is you doing the things first that are going to give you energy, that are going to give you creativity, that are going to fuel you rather than putting them off. Until sometime in the future when you think you're going to get all of the tasks in front of you done. Because you've probably experienced that that task list never ends. As soon as one batch of tasks get done, almost immediately another batch of tasks appears. Why? Because you've created a habit within this container of your experience of time. And the way that you transform the dynamics within that container is to reprioritize and do the things today that you want to be doing rather than putting them off. And watch how the things that are causing you to put off those things reorganize and create a significant level of efficiency in your life. So I hope you enjoyed this. Again. What I'm really saying is stop putting things off until tomorrow. Experiment with it. Pick one thing that you would really love to be doing right now and put that first. It's probably not meditating. You're not Gandhi. You don't have so much to do today that you need to meditate for two hours instead of one. But you may have so much to do today that you'd like to go for an afternoon walk for a half hour in the middle of an afternoon that usually doesn't have enough time. Watch how everything reorganizes based on a transformation in your psychology, in your perception, and the way that you're vibrating, you're making a decision that you are the type of person who can still achieve the same level of success in your business and who deserves to take an afternoon walk. And you know, I don't believe that our higher power, whatever it is that you believe, you know, God, Jesus, Allah, nature, the universe, requires us to make these sacrifices in order to be successful. I think what's occurred is that we have a misunderstanding of around how time works and how there's this corresponding relationship between the things that we choose to do and the level of efficiency of all things that we do that allows us to insert whatever would really be well serving and well meaning for us into our day to day activities and allow everything else to recalibrate. So look, that's your 36 hour day. So if you love this episode, do me a favor. If you're listening on a podcast platform, Spotify or itunes, definitely leave me a rating or review. That's the way we get this workout to more people. Subscribe so that you automatically get downloads. And if you're on YouTube watching me in the studio today, do me a favor. Subscribe. Hit that little bell icon, because you need that to get notifications as well. Drop me a question, Dispute what I'm saying here. No, Dave, my life is fixed and there's no way out. And there's a cruel creator in the universe. That's my higher power. Okay, well, maybe. But what I'm saying is just experiment with it a little bit. Because I know from my own experience, especially now, having a baby, which, by the way, takes up a little bit of time. I don't think they tell you when you're about to become a newborn father exactly what the experience is going to be like, but it completely reorganizes your solar system. But that's the point. It reorganizes everything. Life reorganizes to accommodate whatever beautiful thing that we want in it. Right? Whether it's to meditate every day, whether it's to exercise a little bit more, whether it's to spend time with our friends, or whether it's because you're bringing a beautiful baby boy into the world. Life is always working for our greatest growth, our greatest prosperity, and our greatest evolution. And it is a loving universe. And I think we've misunderstood significantly how time works. And this is a way for you to get all that time back. David Bear love you and I'll see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.DavidBear.com. you can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week, I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free mind hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies, the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.