Making Minutes Matter: Your Guide To Being Content With How You Spend Your Time

Introduction

If it seems like every year time is going faster, it’s because it is. Maybe not literally, but it does feel that way. Here’s why the feeling is so palpable.

When you were four years old a year was one quarter of your entire life! But now, you’re older. I’m 57 so a year is 1/57th of my life! That’s a much smaller piece of the pie that is your time on this earth.

If you feel like time is going a little too quickly for your comfort and you want to make the most of every day, you’re reading the right book.

I talk with business people every week who are tired. Some are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of things they need to get done personally and professionally. Their To-do lists are never-ending and feelings of accomplishment are few. Mostly because for everything that gets crossed off, three new tasks get added.

From the moment they hit their desk chair in the morning they go non-stop. Sometimes accomplishing what they set out to do but not as often as they’d like. Every day is a blur of busy-ness and yet the results they experience don’t indicate the progress they want.

Leaving the office at the end of the day often feels like an escape rather than a thoughtful wrap up to the day.

Work is often taken home to be done with some resentment or ignored accompanied by guilt.

Falling into bed at night, exhausted, thoughts turn to what didn’t get done and how quickly another day is going to dump more responsibilities in their lap.

If this sounds familiar—a lot or even a little—stick around. Because it doesn’t have to be this way. Many, many people who had these same feeling are looking at life and work very differently today because they did the things you’ll read in this book.

In this book you’ll find little or no fluff. I tried to keep it simple because that’s how I like things. A short story here, a quick example there, is all I added in order to help concepts make sense. You’re busy enough as it is. If it wasn’t critical to the content, I left it out to save you time.

You’ll find no secrets and no tricks. People call ideas and tips secrets and tricks to catch your attention and that doesn’t feel authentic to me. By definition, secrets aren’t meant to be shared. You’ll find straight talk and real-world solutions that work.

I’m not promising you that this book will fix your time management challenges once and for all. That statement is hype and not my style. Life is constantly changing and evolving. You go through busier and less busy eras that need to be noticed, assessed and adapted to.

You will, however get foundational strategies that can impact the rest of your life in ways you may not have imagined. I can confidently say that because it happened for me and for the many people who have gone on this path before you.

What you will also find is relief from overwhelm and something refreshingly positive to replace the feeling that your efforts never seem to be enough.

Are you ready? Then let’s get going before another minute passes.

CHAPTER ONE

Ready to Take Back Control

My Story

It was 2015 and I sat at the kitchen counter with tears welling up in my eyes. The feeling wasn’t remarkable because I was slowly falling apart in the days leading up to this day.

My business at the time could not be described as successful and had been on that track for more than two years. I had some clients and a little revenue but was constantly in fear of not being able to pay the company bills that came in every month. Bills I was incurring because I kept trying tactics to help me be successful. I built a new website. Hired a coach to help me brand myself and figure out what I should say on sales calls. I joined a group to help me with accountability, so I would actually make those calls. All of those strategies cost me money and none of them solved my not-enough-revenue problem.

The tears came from frustration as much as from fear. I knew I had a very important message to share with people struggling with overwhelm, but I wasn’t sharing it. And I wasn’t getting any closer to figuring out why.

But let me back up.

I started my business in 2001 and built it steadily over the years. In 2012 I lost my biggest client. I had done a very dumb thing in allowing just one client to be the majority of my income. I knew it was a bad idea and a lousy way to run a business, but I let it happen.

I didn’t actually lose my biggest client. I resigned my biggest client.

At first, spending almost all of my time with this one company was a joy because they were different than any other company I’d seen. It was so refreshing! I ditched corporate America to start my own business because I was so fed up with the dysfunction where I worked.

So, I had this wonderful client that changed the paradigm I’d experienced. As much as I liked the work I was doing with this innovative organization, I knew I should start filling the pipeline again and onboarding new clients.

But before I could make enough progress, the bottom fell out. The company started changing. Changing so dramatically that I could no longer continue the work I had been doing with any integrity. Though I didn’t realize this at the time, they were no longer aligned with my core values, so I had to go.

In Chapter Four we’ll talk more about Core Values. Knowing what yours are is vital in order to make good decisions about how you spend your time. When I defined mine, it became clear why I’d made decisions that sent me in good—or not so good—directions.

This dream client that started off in such a positive and promising way shifted into dysfunction so quickly and completely, that my heart was broken. I truly believed they were different. When I realized that they would not be the exception I had so trusted they would be, I calmly and professionally removed myself from the equation.

I resigned them as a client and promptly reduced my revenue by about 80%.

I needed to get back out there and market myself as a coach, trainer and speaker. My mission up to that time had been to share the importance of being productive. Don’t waste time. Work smart not hard. Blah blah blah. As a Productivity Coach I had built up a book of business before and knew I could do it again.

Except that I wasn’t doing what I needed to do to attract new prospects and clients. I felt weirdly paralyzed.

Frustrated with myself, I started talking to smart people I hoped could help me figure out my problem.

I spoke with several successful international authors, trainers and speakers. While serving as the programming chair of our local chapter of the National Speakers Association, I had the great fortune to spend time around these brilliant and generous people when they came in town to present programs for our chapter.

I spoke to a former coach and mentor who it seemed always knew exactly where he was headed. He was then and is now a tremendous success helping clients and companies boost business performance.

I spoke to other friends and colleagues with businesses similar to mine. They could immediately relate to my challenges and also helped me sort through the mishmash in my head.

I journaled, meditated, ruminated and mind mapped random thoughts and ideas.

Finally, I went through an exercise to determine my core values.

All of those activities served to uncover the truth of my dilemma:

I didn’t care one whit about productivity.

There I was, out there calling myself a Productivity Coach and yet productivity meant nothing to me. My disinterest was clearly the thing that was holding me back from reaching out to market and sell productivity training. Primarily, because being authentic was and is one of my core values.

Telling everyone to get more productive when I didn’t care about productivity was about as inauthentic as it gets.

But what did I care about?

The answer that kept showing up was this.

I want people to be content with how they spend their time.

Note: The word content—accent on the second syllable—hits some people in a very negative way. If you’re one of those people, I’m asking you to reserve judgment until you read Chapter Two.

That was it. The words felt as comfortable as well-worn jeans. I knew that was what I wanted to help people do.

But while my mission became clearer back then, it wasn’t a smoothly paved road to get from there to here.

Because no one I was aware of was focused on that message, there was no road map. For many people that wouldn’t be a problem. They would just start creating the road themselves. But that wasn’t me.

I had been a rule follower my entire life. I wanted people to tell me the rules so I could follow them.

To that end I spent countless hours and dollars on sales training, train the trainer training, marketing consulting, website development training, PR training, training to be a better speaker, you name it. Each time what I wanted was for the expert to tell me the right way to do things.

In fact, each one of them probably did. They advised, coached or trained me on the method that worked for them. But unfortunately, those same methods weren’t always what I really needed.

I was in uncharted territory for what I wanted to share. When I firmly decided that contentment was the word that defined my message, I got LOTS of pushback. Well that’s fine and all but no one is going to buy that. You have to stick with the ‘money’ word, which is productivity. No company is going to hire you to help their employees be content. They want them to be productive.

While I wanted to shout my message about the importance of being content with how you use your time, I didn’t have the gumption to go all in. I tiptoed around sharing that idea. I would mention it, but water it down to keep people from dismissing me entirely. The rule follower in me said, What if you are wrong?

I believed in contentment at my core, but to avoid risk, my public focus remained productivity.

And my revenue continued to be dribs and drabs of what it could have been. The worst part of that wasn’t the lack of money, it was the people I wasn’t helping. Overwhelmed, stressed people who really needed this message and this information.

Too afraid to show my real message and too unmoved to actually talk about productivity, the only thing I managed to do authentically, was cry.

Until I got mad. At myself.

When that happened, I decided to throw out the rule book and go my own way with my own message. And that is what got me here, writing this book for you.

I help people, specifically you, be content with how you spend your time.

Though my commitment to sharing the importance of contentment is only four years old, the ideas have been percolating for decades. I spent 17 years in corporate America—where I learned what doesn’t work. For the last 19 years I’ve been developing and honing ideas to help smart, ambitious people like you feel good about how you spend your time. In this book I share with you what I’ve shared with hundreds of clients.

How you spend your time is key to living a contented life.

If you want that contentment, let’s get started.

If you don’t like your current results…

The very first concept I created in my business was this…

If you don’t like the results you’re getting you have two options: Change what you do and get different results; Or, change how feel about your current results.

This book is built around that concept. In these pages you’ll find ideas for new ways to do things and new ways to think. Here’s