Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting and communication as well as relationship
development all over the world through the lens of self-government and in this video
I'm going to be talking about what wise parents understand about time.
One of the most powerful sources in the world is actually time. Think of it. Think how many people
rush and worry because of time. Think of how people hurry and get stressed because of time. Think of
how people start to shut down because it's time to sleep. Time runs a huge portion of our lives.
It is a power and it can control us or we can control time. So what do wise parents understand
about time? In this video I'm going to talk about four things that you can do to maximize your time
and some personal lessons that I learned from a dear friend that changed the way I saw my time
forever. I think it's fair to say the majority of people are time challenged. They don't know
how to get everything done in the hours of the day that they have. This is definitely a modern problem
because we do not like to slow down. We like to get as many things done as we can and we don't
have as much patience as generations before us happen to have. So, people are constantly telling
each other that they didn't have time. They didn't have time to whatever, read that email, they didn't
have time to cook dinner, they didn't have time to get the laundry done, whatever it is, they
didn't have time. I find that statement interesting because we all have the exact same amount of time.
Every single person has 24 hours in a day, think of that. What a gift. Every single day 24
new hours in the day. But there are some people that jam those 24 hours with just tons of stuff
and then there are other people who for one reason or another feel like the time just slipped past
them and they didn't end up with the time that they thought that they would have. So, ask yourself
what usually happens to you? I think many people think I think I can get all of these things done
today or maybe I can at least get these few things done today and then at the end of the day, they go
where did my time go? How come I didn't get those three things done that I wanted to accomplish
and sometimes it's not really the time that slipped by, it's our attention that got diverted
and then the time just kept on going. So, we all have the same amount of hours in the day and
so we have to make sure that we govern them appropriately. I teach about self-government.
Self-government is being able to determine the cause and effect of any given situation
and possessing a knowledge of your own behaviors so that you can control them.
So, what that means is that I take a problem, maybe my problem is I keep not having enough time
and I say to myself how am I going to have more time? Well first how do I spend my time?
Aha, that could be a thing in and of itself. Let's see. I have 24 hours in a day times this many hours
in a week and maybe I figure out okay, I sleep this many hours a week because that's required.
When I eat meals, it takes about this many hours in the week. When I shower, it takes this many hours in
the week. You see what I'm talking about? You could back everything up and at the end of the day you
may be sitting there looking at all of these hours, it could look like a mountain of hours in the week
yet for some reason, those hours seem to go away. What I found is it's because there's some things
that people don't actually factor into time usage which are actually taking a ton of time such as
phone calls, texting, surfing, gaming, social media, all those kinds of things that we do on our phones.
The phones suck our time more than anything else. In fact sometimes that's what we want them to do
and then we wonder why we didn't have any and it's because we wanted a break for a minute and then we
never came out of our break or at least we didn't come out soon enough to have time to get the other
things done. So, an interesting way to look at time, I hope so. Sometimes we make excuses when
in reality the answer is staring us right in our face. And so if we're a self-governed person and we
do all of that math and we figure that out then we say to ourselves okay well how am I going to get
more time? I've got to stop looking at social media or I have to put my phone down or away for certain
hours the day and I'm not taking calls for these hours in the day, I won't. We have to govern our
time otherwise we always don't have enough. I've got four great ideas to share with you about how
you can better maximize your time but before we do that, leave me a comment of when you struggle
the most with time slipping by. In fact if you can identify right now how come you keep losing time
then that's going to put you way ahead when it comes to trying to secure time later.
Leave us a note and let's see how many of us have the same problems in common. Years ago I
attended a youth event with my son who at the time I think was probably about 9 or 10 years old. While
attending this event, I ran into an old friend of mine. I hadn't seen her for a really long time
and for some reason she knew the names of my children that she had never really even met that
much before and she came up to me and she said oh hi. How are you doing in this she immediately
looked at London who was a little toddler and she said oh well London. It's so good to see you and
she said my name is Diane and she started talking to her and this woman who was my friend completely
ignored me. She started talking to London and playing with London and we were at a
park and so she said London do you want to go play with me over there, that could be kind of
fun and London says yes and she lights up and she goes with my friend Diane to play on the park and
I'm sitting there with Porter at the time who was a little baby and I'm watching my friend play with
my daughter and it's this surreal moment where I realize it should look like that when I play with
my children. Why doesn't it look like that when I play with my children? Oh, because I'm always
trying to think of this and this and this and this and I'm not connecting right to them. Now here's a
neat thing about my friend. My friend Diane had to speak somewhere within minutes. She was the guest
speaker at this event and what was she doing prior to speaking to everybody that was there to see her?
She wasn't prepping notes. She was playing on the park with my daughter. She chose to spend her time
connecting with my child and making a memory for herself and a moment
with my child instead of going over stress and anxiety about presenting. Now, I mean she was a
good presenter. She probably didn't have a ton of stress or anxiety but still, I felt like this was a
lesson for life. Connecting with people is always the top priority and so we've got to give it
our time. This leads me to probably the number one tip I'm going to give you about time and that is
people come first. People come first especially the people that are the closest to you. Your family has
claim upon your time more than anybody else. So, if your people need your time, put down the device,
shut the computer, pull yourself away for a minute. I've written 11 books and the biggest of
those books I wrote when I had tiny children but I told myself the people were the most important so
what I did was I decided that when I was writing, I would give them permission to interrupt me at any
time and that I would take those interruptions because they were the most important even if I
was in the middle of phrasing a sentence and what I would do is I would say a little prayer in my
heart and in my mind that I would remember exactly where I was when I left to pay attention to the
people who were more important than the book at that time. So, they would come and say excuse me mom
and they would interrupt me and I would say my little prayer please, help me remember where I was
and then yes, Porter. What can I do for you and I would talk to the children and then I would
come back sometimes with another little prayer in my heart. Please help me remember what it was that
I was thinking right here and then boom. I would start typing again. Putting the people first makes
all the difference and it made it so that mom writing a book wasn't a burden on everyone else.
In fact it turned out to be quite a connective moment some days. This next tip this should be
a no-brainer but sometimes we forget. So, just to hit it one more time, devices are tools, not toys.
Tools, not toys. Remember that because often times when we start treating our devices as a toy,
that's when we end up misusing our time. So if you want your device to be a tool then a
super good idea would be to say I need to make a post on social media, I think it will take me
about 10 minutes. I'm going to set a timer on my tool for 10 minutes to go off and hopefully I
get done in that much time. That way you don't go on the social media, start surfing around forever
not remember why you're there and then all of a sudden an hour goes by and then you
go oh wait a second, I didn't do my post. Now I need to go back and I need to do it again.
Oh, then you could be in there all day and not accomplish anything. So, setting a timer, holding
yourself accountable, this is going to be a way to use that as a tool instead of a toy. Tip number
three, scheduling is good but effectiveness is better. So, even though we should schedule our time
definitely so that we make sure that we can accomplish all of the things that we need to.
Don't forget that sometimes the need to things are staring you right in the face. Remember the
people are so important, well sometimes there's other things that are also important too
and they're more important than the to-do list. So what is effectiveness? Effectiveness is the
opposite of efficiency. So many people when they're caught up in their schedules, they're caught up
in being efficient or getting every single thing done. Effectiveness is when you do things well. It's
when you do things well or you connect with the experience in a meaningful way. So, if I am going to
be effective instead of efficient then that means that I'm going to make sure that the things I
do with my time are done well, even if it means that I have to move some things to another day.
But at that point because I'm doing everything well, I can accept the "no" answer that I didn't
get everything done because I know I used my time the most effectively. Time tip number four, it's
not about what you got done, so the checkoff list, it's about the fact that you're going
through the time. Okay so this is the important thing. Allow yourself to experience the time. If
you want to make the most out of your time, if you want it to feel like you had more time in the day
then truly use the time. Make sure that you are having moments where you study
things that uplift you, not just the half twos. Make sure you write in your journal if that's
something that's meaningful to you. Talk to the people in your life that are meaningful to you,
that's when you're really using your time to become the best version of you. What I've noticed
for myself because I'm a scripture studier is that if I study my scriptures in the morning before I
do anything else and I write about the aha's or the thoughts that I've had while doing that study
then everything else that I do the whole rest of the day seems to speed up. It seems to be
easier and it's because I've nurtured myself with that bit of time. Some people say to fill your
bucket or sharpen the saw, those things are what we do when we really use the time to become our
best selves. So if we're only in crisis mode when it comes to time, we'll feel like we never have
enough but if we're using the time for productive things that make us a better person so that we can
handle future crises, then we will actually be better off with the way that we spent that time.
Shakespeare was enamored with the concept of time. In many of his plays, he would give the word time
to syllables time he would say because it was that important. He would talk about the seasons
of life, the phases of life and how much time went by. People have always been fascinated by
time how much we get, how come some people get more than others and how come it seems like sometimes
time stands still and sometimes there's just not enough of it. Time is an amazing thing to consider
and as we are thinking about time, I hope we're thinking mostly about time with our families
because that is the best place that we can spend our time.
It will nurture us for the future. If you've enjoyed this video about time, I know you'll like
my next video called nurturing the heart of your child. Click on the link to that video now.