Time is our most valuable commodity, and how we manage it can significantly impact our lives and businesses. Abigail Barnes shares her insights on the 888 formula, which emphasizes the importance of balancing sleep, work, and personal time to create a fulfilling life. She discusses the necessity of understanding our individual circumstances and setting long-term goals while remaining adaptable to change.

The conversation also delves into the deeper narratives we tell ourselves about productivity and time management, highlighting the importance of self-awareness and personal choice. Abigail emphasises that true productivity stems from aligning our actions with our values and recognising the stories that shape our perceptions of time.

Key Points:

• Time is our most valuable commodity, and how we manage it shapes our lives.
• The 888 formula suggests we allocate eight hours each to sleep, work, and life.
• Understanding our values and goals helps us make better choices with our time.
• Sleep is essential for productivity; neglecting it leads to long-term health issues.
• Self-awareness and reflection are crucial for identifying time-wasting behaviours and patterns.
• Human design can help us recognise our unique strengths and how to manage our time effectively.

Chapters:

• 00:00 - Intro: The Value of Time
• 00:02 - Understanding Time Management
• 00:13 - The 888 Formula Explained
• 00:59 - Setting Goals for the Future
• 00:23 - The Impact of Sleep on Productivity
• 04:03 - Identifying Personal Time Wasters
• 42:54 - The Inner Child and Time Management
• 44:46 - Overcoming Limiting Beliefs
• 48:15 - Conclusion: Making the Most of Your Time

Abigail's BIO & Information

Abigail Barnes is the founder and CEO of Success by Design Training, an award-winning entrepreneur, author, speaker, and corporate trainer on time management and productive wellbeing. She is a qualified coach, creator of the renowned 888 Formula and host of The Time Management Podcast.

Success by Design Training is on a mission to teach 1 million people how to Become more Productive using The 888 Formula by 2025. 

Abigail holds a BA Hons Degree in Business & Marketing Management, a Professional Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing, DipM ACIM, a certificate in Neuroscience Professional Development, and is a qualified coach.

LINKS

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigailrbarnes

The Time Management Podcast: https://bit.ly/LISTENEPISODE

Website: www.successbydesigntraining.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/successbydesigntraining

Free Chapter: Time Management for Entrepreneurs & Professionals: https://bit.ly/YOURFREECHAPTER

Our time is our most valuable commodity.

So from my point of view, it's how we can make the most of the time that we have to create the life that we actually want to be living.

When we think about time, how do you think about time?

We all get the same 24 hours and these 24 hours need to be allocated to certain immovable bookends.

We call it the 888 formula.

We need to sleep.

This is one immovable bookend.

So how we utilize time and what we're doing with our time, if that isn't vetted against a really important metrics, say your values, what you care about, what impact you're making, then are you going to make the best choices with time?

I love this question.

We fundamentally have to recognize that every single one of us is in a different set of circumstances.

And as you were saying earlier, our life is constantly evolving.

So what worked yesterday won't work today, might not work tomorrow.

We need to set 3 year, 5 year, 10 year goals so that we have a direction.

Welcome to Mindset, Mood and Movement.

A systemic approach to human behavior, performance and well being.

Hello and welcome.

I am joined by Abigail Barnes today and Abigail is a specialist in time management and productivity.

Now those of you who are busy business owners are going to want to hear this because time management and productivity, they are so important, but there's a deeper level to this, so we're going to get into that.

And I leave that dangling carrot hanging there, but I want to welcome Abigail and yeah, perhaps Abigail, you can say a little bit more about you, but welcome to the show.

Hi Sal.

I am so excited to be here.

Thank you for having me.

Very welcome.

Time management productivity, it's a big field and it can cover a lot of things.

Perhaps you could say a little bit more about how you deal with this area of activity and work.

It is such a big field.

And I came to this after 10 years working in finance in marketing.

I have a degree in marketing and postgraduate marketing and I now run my own business.

But from that time management productivity point of view, our time is our most valuable commodity.

So from my point of view, it's how we can make the most of the time that we have to create the life that we actually want to be living.

Amazing.

And I hear a lot of requests from my clients about being more productive and time management being fundamental to how they run their businesses and do things.

And it makes a lot of sense.

What I'm intrigued in is that I don't think it's the end of the question, I don't think it's the end of the point because why be more effective with one's time?

Why be more productive?

I think there's an, there's a, there's a point after that.

I know you and I are going to talk to, to some degree, but perhaps we can start at the beginning when we think about time.

How do you think about time?

Because it's, it's an abstraction.

So I'm curious, how does your.

Has.

What's your interpretation of time?

How do you think about it when you're working and working with clients?

So let's start here.

We all get the same 24 hours and these 24 hours need to be allocated to certain immovable bookends.

We call it the 888 formula.

We need to sleep, this is one immovable bookend.

And we need to work, this is another immovable bookend.

Science says we need to sleep between seven to nine hours, so we call that eight.

Society says that we need to be working eight hours.

So what is left is eight hours for our life.

Now obviously if you're an entrepreneur, it is going to be a different allocation of those hours that you have every single day.

The 888 formula is not a prescription.

The 888 formula is a recommendation for where to start.

Are you feeling rested?

Do you need to focus on sleeping more or resting more?

How are you allocating your time when it comes to work?

And what the formula does is it helps you to look at and audit where everything is going in order to create what it is that you actually want from the life, from the time that you have.

An example from myself is that I used to spend maybe 14, 15 hours of working.

I then slept for four or five hours because that's what I had.

And then the rest was my life, which meant that I had no life and I was always tired.

This was when I was in my corporate job in the corporate days and then obviously when I started my own business it was a similar ish.

But you get to a place and a stage where you ask yourself, is this what I want to create?

Is this what I want to live?

And the answer to that question is personal, yes or no.

And from there we can then start to make the changes.

And that's when we're tweaking where the time is going and what activities are getting the time.

That's a lovely description.

I'm thinking about how I work with clients when I'm coaching and we have to do a practical things to attend to like strategy activity, what are you doing?

All the stuff that's happening now.

But if we don't have an eye on the future, an intentionality, what are we doing it for?

What are we growing?

Who are we going to be?

Who are we not going to be?

Then we're not as aligned, I would say, and we're not as clear on our objectives.

So how we utilize time and what we're doing with our time, if that isn't vetted against a really important metrics, say your values, what you care about, what impact you're making, then are you going to make the best choices with time?

And I think there's an elegance around what you said there, around looking at what are you trying to achieve and then bracket it into these different areas.

Now sleep is a favorite of mine.

I really love sleeping and I've missed a load of sleep recently because I've got a poorly pooch who's kept me awake at night and I've noticed just how much is affecting my cognition and my ability and I'm having to take little rest points in the day as I'm looking after him.

And sleep used to get a bad rap, didn't it?

Like it was a waste of time.

If you're an entrepreneur, you should just be, you know, smashing it.

All these terrible terms and yet we now know in a lot of fields of sleep, psychology and sleep science, sleep is the bedrock of energy management and of course then time management.

How do you work using your 888 formula with someone and first say, well, let's have a look at the sleep piece of it.

What, what do you do with that?

So every client will come to me with a different requirement.

A client might come to me and say that I am feeling burnt out and tired and how can I make changes?

The first step that we start with Sal.

So once people have understood the 888 formula, we then move into the actual action taking.

So this is where you audit your time for seven days.

I cannot make it any sexier than that.

The data drives your decisions.

So when it comes to sleep, what is impacting your sleep?

What is taking away from you, getting to bed at the time that is beneficial for you and waking up at the time that is beneficial for you.

And once you are aware of those activities on your time sheet that you don't want to be there, you can then start to remove them.

And some of them might be over caring for people.

So in my book I've got six archetypes.

One of them is the Care Bear.

This is the person who is seen by their family and friends as the fixer, let's say, and is forever giving out fish rather than teaching people how to fish.

The question to ask yourself is, how much time am I using on a daily, weekly, monthly basis doing things for people rather than coaching them and asking them that question, what do you think you should do?

Because you would be so shocked at how this is coming up again and again and again in people's timesheets where they are then saying, but I couldn't get to bed because I was on a call helping so and so with their xyz.

Then my question is, and how often does this happen?

And then the next question is, and would you like this to keep happening?

And then the next question is, and what do you think you could do about it?

Lovely.

Yeah, I love that.

Looking at.

I mean, I'm all about patterns, patterns of behavior, thinking patterns of how people operate.

It's.

It's the space to work at where I see, anyway, that I see those connections between things and archetypes.

Oh, it's.

I love working with archetypes.

They're really important, and we often don't see them.

But I'm sure, like you've just alluded to there, if you drop something such as, are you the Care Bear or the Savior, what pattern or archetypal pattern are you operating from?

It can really wake someone up.

I had a client who was a savior, archetypal pattern, and he hadn't seen him, and he had a lot of, you know, demands, and he was really, really stretched.

And I challenged him in a similar vein, which was, okay, why, you know, how come you're doing this for this person?

What's the reason for that?

And there was all these excuses like, well, they needed my help and they couldn't do it.

But when we actually pulled it apart, they could do it.

What they wanted was his confidence, and perhaps they wanted his trust to say, yeah, you can go do this, and if you make a mistake, you'll learn.

But what he hadn't seen is he'd been stuck in the savior archetype and hence was getting massively drained.

And the irony was he was getting really upset by him.

It's your archetype, so it's your call.

And I think when we start to own that and understand the pattern and why we have it and what it is, what's invested, then we can start to loosen it.

But, yeah, that's such a powerful one.

Right?

Energy management around sleep.

Are you giving it all away.

Perhaps you could say a little bit more.

I was really intrigued what you said there about what's in the way.

And when I think about sleep, you know, people say I can't get to bed early enough or, you know, I'm so much on what's in the way.

I think is an interesting one because rather than adding to someone's life, like, I don't know, do a meditation before bed, do some breath work, rather than adding, I wonder if there's more in subtraction, such as less screen time, boundaries around timeout with, you know, communications, whatever that is.

How, how do you work with that, that subtraction, addition thing.

So either adding in some skill and pattern or breath work and subtracting something negative.

How do you work with that?

Nothing is ever about what it's about.

It's what I have discovered on this journey.

And maybe you resonate with this also.

If somebody says, I want to get to bed earlier, we have to explore why they are stopping themselves getting to bed earlier.

And I'll give myself as an example, because this is a pattern that I noticed in myself recently and I call it sleep sabotage, where I know what time it is good for me to start getting ready for bed and what time it is good for me to be in bed.

And I also know, Sal, that if I start reading a physical book within 15 minutes, even if I love that book, I am finding that I am starting to go into the tired, tired, tired, put the book down and then I'm asleep.

Because these are my specific times.

And it really comes down to the stories I'm telling myself in my head.

And those stories start way, way earlier in the day, as you were saying, screen time and all the things.

So in these conversations, some of the what we're doing is actually a subconscious consequence of what we're actually telling ourselves.

The story I was telling myself was that I needed to work longer, I needed to address these, I needed to reply to these things as soon as they came in, even though I know I didn't.

The question I then had to ask myself, Sal, was where did I pick this up?

Where was I being triggered to feel like this?

And it was things that I was consuming in the outside world.

So your environment creates your reality.

News that I had been reading, things that I had seen on social media, on LinkedIn, on other social platforms, et cetera, where people were talking about how fast should you reply to an email and what time you should start working and stop working.

And it had activated something in my brain.

Now, when we were doing our prep for this podcast episode, we were talking about human design.

And perhaps we can talk about human design a bit on the episode today.

But something that I have recognized is in my clients, who have an open head center and an open ajna, maybe they are taking in more of the information from the outside world, processing it, and it is triggering childhood things within them, which is then leading to actions that they're taking.

Maybe now we're getting a little bit more esoteric here, but what I had noticed, just for the benefit of this example, is that this is my own design, and I was being triggered to look at what do I believe is enough work to make me able to own the title of being a successful business owner.

Now, for some reason, that narrative was in my head, as you said earlier, of how hard you work, and way back when, you can sleep when you're dead.

So sleep.

No, you need to be working.

And these were narratives that I had picked up in my younger days.

These were from movies.

This was from society.

This was from the way that the world was in the 90s, and it had no bearing on business or how I was even running my business.

So when it comes to working with my clients, when it comes to observing myself and habits and patterns, I'm always going to the deeper, deeper, deeper root.

Because otherwise, if you put in a new, well, just go to bed.

Just.

Just start getting ready for bed at 10, you won't, because there's a hurdle.

You have to explore what that hurdle is.

And fundamentally, you also have to understand, is that hurdle there to keep you safe?

Why do you believe you need that hurdle for safety, which then comes into neuroscience, which then comes into a whole nother rabbit hole.

As I said, nothing is ever about what it's about.

I love that.

Thank you.

A couple of points I want to pick up on.

There is.

Firstly, I resonate with that because I also was consumed by that worldview.

Just a note on worldview.

So it's a word that sometimes isn't understood, so I'll elaborate.

Worldview is all that we understand as each individual, and that is curated and built from when we were a child, through the world we grew up in, through the triggers, the environments, and the messages.

And we all get different messages for all sorts of reasons.

And what we often don't do is look at our worldview and understand that that is a construction and it's editable.

There's a plasticity to it, but it takes a conscious mind and a brave person to go is, do I want to operate like this?

Whose rules are these?

Am I making my own choices?

Or am I, you know, subscribing to the entrepreneur burnout ethic, whatever it might be?

So that's the first thing and two points you said there.

And I hear this in my coaching work a lot.

One success, and the other one was enough.

Now, they were in what you said there was really elegant, but I saw those two signposts, language or signposts.

And firstly, if we don't define success by each our own metrics and definitions, then it's someone else's definition.

So, firstly, if you want to be more productive, certainly when I coach people, we need to understand, what are you trying to do and why?

What is your definition of success?

Can you measure it?

And as you already alluded to, you need to measure this stuff.

The second thing is enough.

And that's a slippery little word.

It sneaks in somewhere, but a meta pattern when we pull it apart.

Doing enough work, and my invitation, if that comes up in my mind and clients minds, and perhaps your mind, Abigail, is what is enough.

Because if you don't know what enough is, by default, it will never be enough.

It's like a.

It's an unfinished loop.

So when we say, oh, you know, doing enough work, got enough done today, rather than I got, I don't know, 10 coaching clients done, or 10 podcasts done, or whatever, the definition of clarity, then it becomes this abstraction which is, as you said, like a rabbit hole you can't get out of.

Not enoughness.

So I would invite us all to think about what is enough.

Got to name this stuff.

Otherwise you're on the treadmill and you're not going to get off because you're not running it.

So that's a.

I just wanted to kind of pull that point there, which I think dovetails with what you're saying about going deeper.

Because why be more productive?

Yeah, why have more clients or more workflow?

Why?

And I know a lot of clients I've worked with have said, well, I just, you know, I need to be more productive.

And they haven't really thought through why.

Now, the obvious answer normally comes to, well, I need to make some more money.

Yeah.

But then if we ask, well, why?

Because money is, again, it's not a finished loop.

Money allows us to do things, so why do you want more money?

And there might be A valid reason, and that's tangible.

We can work with tangibility.

Otherwise, if we're always chasing the proverbial carrot, the carrot runs you.

You don't run it.

And I think it's really interesting about how we run our mind when we think about productivity, which is from a coaching dimension, is to be really interested in, like, where are we going and why?

And those deep questions.

Now, you mentioned in your 88 model.

We spoke about sleep to some degree and we sort of spoke about work to some degree.

And the middle bit, the sandwich, that's the yummy bit in the middle.

Tell me more about the bit in the middle, the life bit, you know, the bit which might say, oh, you know what, I'm free to do what I want to do.

Say more about that, please.

The middle eight is where we buy the food, cook the food, eat the food, clean up after the food, buy the clothes, wear the clothes, wash the clothes, do it all again.

We do the hobbies, we start the relationship, we invest in the relationship, we build the relationship, we end the relationship, we start another relationship.

It's also the time where we are spending it with our families.

If we have them, we're spending it with our pets.

If we have them, we're spending it on ourselves and our own personal development.

And out of that middle eight as well is also our commute, which is why I feel like there is a bigger conversation around the work from home.

Now, that again, is another great big rabbit hole that there probably isn't time to go down today.

But just feeding into something that you were talking about earlier, it really, bottom line, comes down to what are your goals?

What is it that you want to achieve from your time, from your life?

And I did a podcast episode recently about goal setting because I'd had a conversation with a client who had been talking about how they didn't feel like they had achieved a goal from something that they had done recently.

Now, my question back to them was, did you know then what you know now?

And in their particular position, something had happened and they'd taken a new path and discovered more information and then got to a place.

And now, looking back, they don't feel like they had a clear goal, but at the time, they were going down a new path and so were unable to set a goal.

So it's very interesting in this world where we're ever changing and ever evolving to understand and give ourselves some grace, that at points in time, the goal might be less grandiose than we are led to believe a goal needs to be and a goal might just be to take the next step on this new journey.

Nice.

Yeah, really nice.

And it speaks to the mindset of iteration rather than absolution.

So it comes up in coaching all the time.

Everyone wants to achieve something and that's completely natural and absolutely fine.

And we need those structural forward, forward positioning goals.

That's great, but it's not a done deal.

You don't set up your vision 5 year, 10 year map, which is why my clients.

And then we go, well, we're done.

That's all we do.

You know, it's an iteration process because the future is fluid, everything is moving.

Evolution.

And by designing everything from civilization to business to how we think is an evolving process.

So if iteration isn't put into those goal setting processes, then the goals often could become obsolete.

So not only you're working for an obsolete goal, then when you get that goal, it's probably going to feel not what you want because it isn't relevant any longer.

So I think there's something really salient about assessing how you're going all the time.

Really looking at like, what am I, why do I need to be productive, what I need to get done, how am I managing my time, my sleep and you know, my workflow and my boundaries.

And that's not a done deal.

Like, you know, you do your Abigail's process once and then you're all fixed for life.

It's, it's a, it's a revisit, revive, a revisiting of that process and iteration.

That's what I'm hearing now.

One thing that strikes me, you said it earlier, we get 24 hours in the day and it's funny, isn't it?

The world's unequal for a lot of reasons, but it's not on time.

There are 24 hours delivered to each human being and no one gets any more or any less.

What we do with it is our choice to some degree.

And there's a lot of things that aren't our choice.

Now you spoke about this and we've spoken this just a little bit beforehand, how you make, how you, how you own your time.

And I was really interested in that, that concept because I hear sometimes people saying, oh, you know, I've got so much on, I've got this client wants this and it feel very at effect from the world.

The world's is all happening to them and I'm very much trying to get as much cause.

So people have autonomy.

But how do you work with this?

How do you see this like making your choices around time.

I love this question.

We fundamentally have to recognize that every single one of us is in a different set of circumstances.

And as you were saying earlier, our life is constantly evolving.

So what worked yesterday won't work today, might not work tomorrow.

We need to set 3 year, 5 year, 10 year goals so that we have a direction.

Otherwise we are just going to be an airplane in the sky going all over the place.

But we also need to understand that things are going to change.

And just to come back to that airplane analogy that I'm sure people are aware of, that airplanes are constantly adjusting their path on a journey from A to B because they are encountering wind, for example.

So they cannot start a plane out on the journey and then just leave it to fly from point A to point B.

They have to tweak it and trim it and make sure that you get to the destination that it is that you want to go to.

So when it comes to your time and your time management, you are able to look at, well, these are the circumstances that I have, these are the responsibilities that I have right here, right now.

And the 888 formula is going to change with you throughout your life as maybe you have a young family, maybe you have a new business, maybe you have a year end, maybe you have just bought a business, maybe you're onboarding a lot more clients.

But it's about recognizing with the bookends, with the fact that scientifically our bodies do need to sleep and to rest.

If we are not long term looking after our health and our wellbeing, we are inevitably going to need to make time for our illness.

The body, like a car, needs to be maintained.

Everything needs an mot, everything needs to be rested.

We charge our mobile phones every single night.

So yes, in the short term you can not get as much sleep as your body actually needs, but it is not a long term strategy.

Such a powerful point.

And my own experience of life, my own journey, personally and professionally has looked at how we, well, we have embodied cognition.

So all our thoughts are embodied.

You cannot have thinking and the experience of being you or me or any of us without a body, it just doesn't work.

The brain is the structure, the mind is the process.

The mind is also fed by all the somatic signals from the body.

So if our body is not slept and it hasn't got rest, the brain hasn't rest and refreshed and cleared out all the detritus between the neuronal pathways, all these sorts of things which are well studied now, then we are sub functioning.

And there's a, there's a point when that will go bad for all of us.

And the interesting thing is it's not normally the next day.

I mean, you might feel a bit tired.

I know I do if I miss sleep, but it will probably go wrong the next decade and then, and then you can't buy that back.

So it's really, really important to have utter respect for the functionality.

And I want to speak to something which is a bit more sensitive and I know that you had an episode around 12 years ago which made you experience the world very differently, which was health related.

Are you okay to share with us a little bit more about that experience?

So I said at the beginning that I worked in finance for 10 years and that my 888 formula was very much long hours of work, short hours of sleep.

Now for transparency, it wasn't the direct result of the work schedule, but the work schedule did impact on my general health and wellbeing.

And I share the story to reiterate to people that we never know what's around the corner.

I was 32.

This happens to one in a million people.

The doctors were telling me and Sal, it's really helped me to recognize the value of every single moment, every single minute, every single opportunity that we get on this rock that we call home.

Amazing, well, profound experience.

I'm glad to hear that you are well and got through it.

And it reminds me of the prominent story by Jill Bolt, I believe the author was, who was a neuroscientific researcher and she had a stroke and she wrote a book on it called Her Stroke of Genius.

And it's a very powerful account which she actually amazingly remembered the experience because no one's actually documented this.

It's fascinating and I was really, you know, blown away when I read it about the left brain experience and the right brain experience.

But to come through a health experience like you have is an awakening, right?

I guess it's an awakening.

Jeopardy and near death experiences can really sharpen our attention of our mortality.

And I did some training years ago with an existential coach and we was using existentialism in coaching.

Now existentialism can seem a little bit hard edged and kind of a little bit morose, such as you're all going to die and nothing has meaning.

It's not as simplistic as that.

But what my guide who was teaching me at the time was like, look, if you know you're going to die, what are you going to do about the time when you're still here?

You know, because you don't get forever.

The life is precious like a diamond because it is rare and it's not this superfluous.

Let's be machine like and get more done.

Because that's operating like a machine, not a human.

And if you tune into your finality and be all right with that.

No, no, no one wants to go.

Right.

We all want to be here because it's great fun being alive.

But you know, okay, we don't get forever.

So what am I going to do while I'm here that is really present and what matters.

And I think that's such a profound thing to come through a stroke and to have your focus of life sharpened like that.

And perhaps for, for those of you who haven't had that experience, what are some of the emotive lessons that you took from that experience?

How did you redefine the way you think about time and productivity after having the stroke and coming back from that?

I'd say the biggest lessons that I got from the stroke.

The first one would be gratitude.

The second one would be enjoyment.

The third one would be living.

The fourth one would be finding forgiveness.

The fifth one would probably be making the most of every single thing that you have, whether it's what you want at that moment in time or not.

And when I'm saying about gratitude.

So I got a second chance.

I begged for the second chance for the opportunity to do what it was that I felt that I had come here to do, that I didn't, that, that I wasn't doing for whatever reason up until that moment in time.

And it was in those moments, Sal, when I actually thought that I was going to die that I realized and got the wake up call that I had come here to do other things.

I just didn't know what they were and I didn't know how to find them.

And I was very much stuck in the Victim mentality of the world was doing things to me and I felt like I had no control and I felt like I had no time.

And these were the stories I was telling.

And we get what we believe is possible for us.

And the stroke helped me to see things in a different way, to tell different stories, and to recognize that even when the worst thing happens, there is still a silver lining to it, because you're still here.

And I will say to anybody who says, it's too late, I can't do it.

I don't have enough money, I don't have enough time.

You're still here.

You still have breath.

There is still a chance.

Give it a go.

Oh, that's so elegant.

That's really powerful.

I'm really struck by that.

Sure, there was the famous Greek philosopher.

It could have been Aristotle, but I can't remember my Greek specialist.

But one of them was learning up to.

It could be Seneca anyway, but they were learning up to the minute of their death.

They're like, no, no, there's still breath.

We can still learn.

And there's something more really magical about that.

I know in biology there's this elegant description.

I think it's Andreas Weber, who talks about, life wants more of life.

All living systems, life wants more of life.

It's this beautiful, powerful driving force which is innate in all humans, in all nature.

It's a very elegant thing.

And what's fascinating, I find, is our conceptual mind.

You know, the mind of the director, the business owner, the coach, the time management specialist says, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm really important, I must do all this stuff.

It's really, really important.

And it's not that it's not important, but as a hierarchy, it's like, is it really aligning to the deeper, more that nourishing ness of about how do you spend your time in your day?

There's stuff to get done and yes, some people have gotten a bit of drudgery, but how you approach it is really interesting.

I want to touch on a point here that you've said several times already.

I want to really flag this.

You mentioned the stories we tell ourselves, and you're not talking about some flippant like, oh, you know, the stories of the mind, the structural stories, are the coherence that keep us together.

Whether that's, I'm a busy, I'm a busy mum, you know, I haven't got time for this, or, you know, I'm a midlifer, I can't set up that new business.

I'm too old.

The story literally becomes this repeating narrative which is then imbued through different structures of the brain and our mind works to prove that's the case.

And therein the story becomes solid.

There's a sort of solidity to it, doesn't really move and yet part of our mind can go, is that true?

Is there someone else who hasn't done that?

Is there someone else who's, you know, gone to University at 60, has someone else, you know, left a long term relationship was a flourish as a single person.

Whatever these stories might tell us and there's always an example in the world, I find that someone's done something we're interested in and that is a very powerful exemplar that we can, we can tune into when we're, when we're choosing to change those stories about, you know, we don't have time.

I haven't got enough staff found out from resources, so I want to have stories.

Now you mentioned earlier about human design.

We're talking a deeper level here.

Now I know those who are staying with this productivity hacks and strategies like, so Abigail's got them all over your website.

We're going to put links on that.

There's all these strategic process.

But while I have the gift of your time, Abigail, I want to go deeper with this stuff because the depth will nourish the practical, I believe so there's all these practical skills you teach people which are amazing and there's a lot of time for that on your website and other times.

But tell me more about human design because this is infusing some of your thinking right now.

Could you say more about.

So we understand what that is and perhaps how that comes together with how we think and deal with time on.

The journey of rebuilding from 12 years.

So since having the stroke to now, I have explored all sorts of different things out and gone around the world, found gurus, asked questions and constantly been open to information.

That's how I came across human design.

And it works on the basis of astrology, kabbalah, the chakra system and other areas, the I Ching.

And it's based on the time you were born, the date you were born, the place you were born, and the understanding is that everybody has a different design.

And the thing that I love about human design from a time management point of view is I use it with my clients to confirm their intuition, to help them to recognize that what they know is what they know and that it's not just something that they're good at.

It actually is their design and it almost gives them permission.

When I first came across it, it gave me permission to understand that one of my greatest skill sets is the ability to spot somebody else's skills and then the ability to sell it to others.

And these are the gates and these are the channels that are active within my own human design.

You mentioned earlier about how when we are looking at things in life and I just want to touch on the reticular activating system because I feel like this would be beneficial.

I love the reticular activating system.

Yeah.

So please share it.

It's good for the podcast.

I walk one foot in strategy, one foot in spirituality.

But the reticular activating system is how once we decide that we want something or we want to do something, we keep seeing it over and over and over again.

And you mentioned that I am sentence and statement as well.

I am busy.

Then your brain is going to filter for proof that you are busy.

If you are learning more about yourself, your brain is going to find you more things about yourself.

And I put this in because human design, like any of the other different modalities, maybe your audience have tried, maybe they've done the very, very strategic discs and MBTIs, and then maybe they have done astrology and maybe they have looked at the other, more esoteric end of the spectrum.

If we can get to the place where we say I am somebody who is open to change my mind, to consider new possibilities, then we will allow ourselves to be an evolving human being.

This is how we become more productive.

Because I am somebody who is willing to question my stories.

I am somebody who is willing to explore why I do what I do versus I am taking and keeping on the labels that somebody else has given me or society has given me.

I am a parent, therefore I can't.

Well, says who?

Well, I just don't have the time.

You have the time to do whatever you want to do.

Like, there is no rulebook for how we use our time.

It is personal.

And perhaps if I invest in my health and wellbeing, it will make me a better parent, it will make me a better partner, it will make me a better business owner.

If I am running my business, tired, unwell, because I don't allow myself to go and work out, how is that going to inspire my clients?

They I'm not practicing what I preach.

Yes, make time for your health and wellbeing, but I don't have time to do that, we have to live by the words that we are sharing with others.

And I'll just add into this, the energy doesn't lie.

We are all now becoming energy readers and we can feel people's authenticity and we can actually even read words in emails.

So if you're angry, maybe don't send that email, write it, come back to it and rewrite it.

Especially if you want to build the relationship.

Such valid, solid advice there.

Good point.

So interesting about the human design approach and modality.

Obviously you've shared it a little bit with me and it's fascinating.

I know some of those other modalities, but I haven't heard it coalesce like that, which is really intriguing.

What I do, what I want to add to that layer to that is the I am statement.

Now again, it's just the normal run of the mill people will say, you know, I am this, I'm that, I'm a founder with a lot of demands and you know, I'm a business owner and a parent.

But the I am statement links it to identity.

So when we have something linked to our identity, we own it.

So the terrible phrase which is literally banned in my client base, like no one's allowed to say I am busy.

Right?

Just don't.

Because it's just, it's just doesn't mean anything.

I, I'm committed, I'm productive, I'm taking a little more than I should.

I can, we can work with that.

That's accuracy, that's nuance.

I am busy is an excuse.

It's like I am stressed.

It doesn't mean anything.

You need to be accurate with your language.

I had a great master once who said the right naming equals right understanding.

And it's powerful, the use of language, because language is an expression of the mind or the mind body system expressing the sense sensory, deep level human experience.

So while we might think, oh, it's just a word, just a label, it isn't just.

Just is a diminishing word.

It is a powerful identifier and a belief structure.

And as you said about the RAs, our brain goes, oh, well that's salient.

So let's give you evidence to the fact that you are, you know, you don't have time and you are this, you are that.

So I would invite us to also think about how many I am statements linked to time and productivity, or lack thereof, we make and then look at reconstructing that sentence.

Does that, does that make sense to you?

100%.

And I'd just like to Add in a new I am statement for people who are in the situation you were just explaining.

I am open to see things differently.

That gives you, your body and your brain permission to accept that maybe you do feel busy, but you're open to see things differently.

And then now you're allowing your brain to pull in different perspectives, different opportunities.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

Such a powerful language distinction.

And what, as you say, well, that does.

It puts you in a frame of openness or a frame of receptivity rather than a frame of stagnation.

The I am busy or whatever thing.

Fascinating stuff.

So we started talking about time management productivity.

And I know a lot of people, I know your own work.

You go into perhaps actual strategic plays into this, like you said about the time sheet.

And there's steps to take.

But what we've spoken about today is more of the thinking behind it, the, the, the feeling, the more deeper quality of the why question.

Why be more productive?

Why manage one's time?

And I think that's a really guiding force to then go on.

And I invite all our listeners to connect with Abigail again.

We'll leave links in the show notes to connect with the processes to do perhaps your due diligence and do your time audits and stuff.

And I've done that sort of thing.

But why are we doing the time audit?

Why AM I using AVGA's 888 model, I think is a really powerful thing.

I've seen it with a client I was coaching recently with changing their whole business and their life and they have a challenge with the use of technology.

They're in the tech field and we were talking about, you know, locking the phone away, getting the dumb phone, all these strategies.

And my guidance was none of it will stick.

None of it.

You'll go back to at some point because your purpose is.

Needs to be bigger than your behavior.

So if your purpose is big, such as I want to enrich and have a fulfilling life because you never know when it's not going to be here.

Very different to saying, oh, you know, I'll make sure I get to bed early at 9 tonight.

And it just doesn't stick.

So there's something purposeful which is more transcendent and spiritual for sure, and greater than the individual, which I think can lead our decisions around how we choose to use time and what we do with time, which I think is interesting and I wonder what your thoughts on that.

This.

I was spoken in quite a meta conversation here about that.

But the, the forces behind our decisions.

How do you use that to then align with the people you're working with to make those strategic changes.

What's your way of working with that?

In my experience, I think one of the biggest things to consider here is your inner child.

And this isn't something that we've mentioned on the conversation yet today.

And again, this is a whole great big rabbit hole that you can go down.

There is generally something inside of you that is trying to get your attention.

There is something that is afraid of the next step.

And yes, we can force ourselves to do the things, and yes, we can lock our phones away and yes, we can buy 15 different books and work with all sorts of different people.

But if we're not listening to the root cause, then we are just going to be maintaining a garden that looks beautiful, but the weeds are going to keep coming back again and again and again.

And somebody said to me a long time ago, I can help you to make your bushes look amazing, like topiary, but if there is rot in the roots of this bush, this, this hedge, then it's going to die.

And I use this analogy when it comes to the question that you were just asking.

We have different things that are rooted in our life from the past that are coming up again and again and again.

And we are trying to solution them and we are trying to use a prescription that somebody else's, and we are trying to follow a blueprint that is not our own to move past it.

And you, we started talking about what is enough and we are trying to be enough.

Now, if we would sit and spend some time to hear ourselves and to meditate and to journal and to walk outside and to ask our inner self, our inner child, whatever you want to call it, maybe this is a little bit too esoteric, but they will give you an answer the first time you ask.

They won't give you an answer because you have been ignoring them for so long.

But the more you practice, the more you listen to them, the more they will speak to you.

And it might be that they'll say, I don't want to go to bed yet because you've been working me so hard all day, I haven't had time for myself.

And what does time for myself look like?

Well, maybe actually I want to read a book, or maybe I want to go for a walk, or maybe I want to finish work at 7 o'clock on a Wednesday so that I can go to my Yin yoga class.

Whatever it is that you are not allowing yourself to do will just come back again and again and again and again.

And you will become that draconian parent teacher society that you are saying has been telling you what to do.

You become that in essence, and we're talking about this at the end of the podcast.

And again, this is a whole dog conversation, but in essence, time management productivity really comes down to how you want to manage yourself, how you want to run yourself, how you want to parent yourself, how you want to organize yourself.

And if you try and do it someone else's way, it's not going to work long term.

You have to be aligned and on the same page with yourself because this is your life and it is your time.

Beautiful.

Nicely wrapped up with such a powerful point.

I'm going to bring us to a close there because that's just absorbed into my mind, what you said there.

It's really elegant, really powerful.

And I think that's the energy and the presence of mind behind any further action.

Because if you have that presence of mind, then you can use a strategy, one of your wonderful techniques and strategies.

But with that presence of mind, that attitude, that value, that quality, you're going to get a very different result as opposed to using your strategies with an old mindset.

So, wow, deep stuff.

It's funny, I met someone recently and they said, oh, God, you go deep and talk.

I'm like, I didn't see any other way to talk.

Just.

I'm not interested in surface talk.

I'm not here for long enough.

You gotta go deep.

Abigail, I really.

Yeah, I really appreciate you going deep.

And because we could have gone into all the tactics and stuff which.

And we're going to leave just to remind of you, this listener, there are going to be links in the show, notes for all the tactical stuff, which are brilliant tool wise, but the modus operandi behind them.

I was really intrigued to get Abigail's mind and understanding.

I think we've got a good insight on that.

So thank you.

I was just going to say, if we are getting on the boat to go to Possibility island and people put you on the boat, force you on the boat, bribe you on the boat, guilt trip, you on the boat, FOMO you on the boat, you are going to have regrets halfway on the journey, it is much, much better that you understand yourself and you choose to get on the boat to go to Possibility Island.

And what I mean by that is that you are actively saying, the way I am living my life right now isn't working.

I'm ready to see things differently.

I'm ready to consider new possibilities, I'm ready to audit my time.

I'm ready to make changes.

I'm ready, I'm ready.

It's my time.

Let's go.

The Alternative Stay where you are, but nobody can force you, push you, make you make those decisions for yourself.

Thank you so much for having me on the show to share this.

Likewise thank you Abigail for sharing your time and wisdom and and just the last note for listeners.

I get to be on Abigail so keep we'll put some links on for that one as well, but they're all matters around time, mindset and human performance so that will be available for to you as well.

Until the next time, dear listener, take care.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and if a friend would benefit from hearing this, do send it on to them as well.

If you would like to get in touch yourself then you can go to my website which is Sal jeffries.com spelled S A L J E double F E R I E S Saljefferies.com hit the get in touch link and there you can send me a direct message.

If you'd like to go one step further and learn whether coaching can help you overcome a challenge or a block in your life, then do reach out and I offer a call where we can discuss how this may be able to help you.

Until the next time, take care.