Time Is Yours to Control

How are you? Well, come on in here. What is today? Today is Wednesday. It's hump day. Today we're going to kind of dig into a little bit of, well, your schedule, your space, your time, your productivity, I guess.

A simple program, but a good one. I need a boost. I need a daily boost. I need a daily boost. It is the daily boost. How you doing? Man, no matter what happens, we get out of bed every single day.

We need a boost somewhere, somehow, with some motivation, if you will, depending on the day. Sometimes you're self-motivated. Sometimes somebody else motivates you.

I know some people say motivation is not important. We don't need it. Yeah. I just don't believe that. I'm sorry. We do. And maybe you do too. You need to feel like anything is possible and you feel fired up to go after it.

And yes, you do have to find your way to do it. There's no doubt about that. I will not start anything if I don't feel motivated because a long time ago, I just kind of learned why start because I know I'm not going to finish.

Anyway, I hope you're there today. I hope you're feeling good like anything is possible because you know what? Anything is possible. You can do anything, can't you?

I personally, professionally speaking, will say this on the backside of that. Yes, you can do anything. But I think that's part of the problem. Because when you can do anything, what are you going to do, right?

Got to figure out what it's going to be. And timing and how you live your life is a big part of that. We'll talk about that today. How you doing? It's me, Scott Smith.

Good to have you here today. Kind of a good week this week. Some really interesting conversations. My day is spent with, boy, just great conversations.

I'm so lucky. I'm so blessed to be able to do that. I started the gym in the morning, and sometimes I complain because nobody's getting a workout, but we're having great conversations, and we get our workouts in. We work hard as well.

But sometimes some of the stuff that comes out of the gym, on the treadmill, back in the sauna, whatever, is just fantastic. And then I get to come home here. I work out of my house. I've worked out of my house now 26 years straight.

Maybe longer than that, actually. 26 years doing this business. And I get great conversations with you all day long. Is your life like that? Have you figured out how to make it the way you want it to be?

I am doing what they call the freedom lifestyle. I know it's been overhyped for such a long time. I'm one of the guys who overhyped it starting about 20 years ago, but I...

I just know this. Anything is possible. You can do anything. And if you decide to have the flexibility and the freedom to be able to go to coffee shops in the middle of the day and have meetings with cool people, you can do that.

It might take you a while to get there, but you'll get there. But you've got to first things take control of your calendar and your schedule. We talk about this all the time. This will never go out of style.

I'm always blown away by how many people have no control over their calendar and even once they get it, how... how it still kind of controls them. So it's just time and time is one of the most important parts of our life. We have to pay attention.

So first things first, if you have not downloaded my perfect week planner, go get it. Perfectweekplanner.com or at motivation2move.com. You can find it there.

It's free. It's a single page PDF. It doesn't look great. I did it four years ago these days. It needs to be redone, but it's still very solid. The video was done four years ago and it still works.

It's just a really basic concept. So I'm on a call this morning with a client who downloaded my planner. And I'll tell you this, very often I get with these people who are my, kind of my avatar, if you will. There's a certain level of people that I talk to and talk to all the time.

They already know what they're doing. They've done really well. Many have successful businesses. I mean, they're the kind of people you look at, you say, man, this guy's professional, got his act together, right?

And oftentimes they'll come to me and they'll take my little silly little planner here. And I say that because it is just one page PDF with a good theory behind it.

And they'll start using it. And before you know it, I get on the phone with them and have a Zoom call and they'll hold up in front of me. They'll show me my perfect week planner that they're actually using.

That's a cool thing. They just print out the PDF and they use their pencil. They just draw on it. So he had this planner and he's got this busy stuff going on in his life.

And the concept is very simple. Every Thursday we make our plan for next week and we hold space. This is the number one thing. This is not time blocking, by the way.

I know you guys are going to go that. This is holding space. This is looking at the calendar and saying of all the days and all the hours on my calendar, which are mine.

Which are mine. Which do I have 100% control over? And the goal is, yes, let me be obscene here. The goal is for you to have nothing on your calendar and 100% control over everything.

That is the goal. It is obscene because it's impossible. But you can do it more often than you think. That's the goal. So would you like that? Would you like to get up and look at your calendar and see nothing else?

And knowing that you had all that time for yourself to do whatever you wanted to do. Now, this week, I think I have actually 12 appointments on my calendar. That's a lot. I don't like 12.

Eight or nine, I'm like, I'm done, right? So this week, it got a little bit out of hand. It happens, okay? So the first thing, if you step in and you say, man, I'm going to hold space for myself.

Can you grab that line and just run with me on that for a second? This is a mountain that I'll defend. I don't say I'll die on it, but I'll defend it.

If you don't hold space for yourself, somebody else is going to grab it for themselves. Bottom line. That's how it's going to work. So I'm just saying, up front, decide when you're going to hold your own space.

Does that mean a day off? Maybe in the beginning. Does it mean Sunday morning? Does it mean a couple of hours during the day? Whatever it is to you. In my case, I hold Mondays completely to myself.

There is nobody ever on my calendar on a Monday or a Friday. I hold between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. for anybody else that wants to get a hold of me. Before 9 a.m. or after 2 p.m., there's nobody that ever gets on my calendar.

And I like to see white spaces between whatever anybody has put on my calendar. So I don't like too much back to back, although I will do that on a Wednesday when I have a coaching day. I'll go back to back all day long, just get it done, right?

I'm controlling my space. So I'm talking to a client this morning and he's talking about the things that have popped up this past week. And my first thought is, hmm, this is kind of interesting. He needs to kind of hold more space.

I know he's using my perfect week planner. It sounds to me like he's letting things kind of run over him a little bit. Very organized guy. You can probably listen to this show and he'll hear this.

And he says, no, no, I'm actually holding my space. I have a really good calendar. I have lots of control. I have lots of time to deal with things that pop up.

Let me take a sidebar here and just say that one of the things that I do this for is so I have time to deal with things. Because I don't know if you've ever figured this out yet, but no matter how much you think you have control of your life and your day, the universe has different plans.

Things are going to happen. What's it called? The Eisenhower matrix? The urgent is going to come out of nowhere and you're going to have to deal with it.

I know it's crazy, but Scott, I did your planner and I planned everything. My life is perfect. I've got my life under control. I'll laugh in your face.

It's not me. It's a universe laughing in your face. Just when you think you've got it under control, it's going to fall apart. But here's the thing. When you hold space for yourself and you have nothing scheduled in your entire day and you get a flat tire in your car, guess what?

You've got time to deal with that flat tire, don't you? Let me ask you a question. If you held enough space so you had a flat tire, you could just fix it and not worry about it. Plus you had money in the bank to take care of it.

That's no big deal, is it? What happens if you've packed your calendar to the point that you don't have any breathing room whatsoever? You're late for everything already and then you get a flat tire. And let's compound it.

You don't have any credit card left or any money to go buy a new tire. That makes it even worse. But let's just stop at the time. What happens if you are so scheduled, so running crazy that suddenly, well, I'll tell you what happens.

The smallest thing will derail your life. And that's what happened to my client. A little itty-bitty thing involving his business and his kids. And I said, well, listen, man, this kid problem, I believe, started 18 years ago, didn't it?

And he cracked up. He said, yeah, I guess you're right. I said, you could have predicted. I mean, kids grow up and then they go to college and they get jobs and they get married.

You could have predicted about 18 years ago that you're probably going to have a problem. You couldn't predict it was going to happen today, but you predicted about 18 years ago this problem was going to arrive. He said, yeah.

And you gave yourself space. You actually held space for you to deal with anything that popped up. He said, yeah. Have you figured out that the universe just makes things pop up when you at least expect it?

And because you gave it time for yourself to be able to handle it, that you could handle it in style? And he just laughed. He says, man, I hadn't thought about it like that way.

I know we like to control it. We like to pretend that nothing's going to happen, but stuff's going to happen. People are around us that we care for. And if we care for those people, we're going to get in their muck.

It's going to happen. That was an early lesson I learned in life. Like, man, that's such a cool dude. Man, I really love her. Life is good. What is that?

Where'd that come from? Why'd you make me do that? Why'd that happen? It just happens, man. So if you want to really be happy in your life and you want to kind of sail through life and be joyful, one of the areas that I've had to learn to do, and I learned this very early on, I still practice it every single day if I can.

And that is that, you know, I just expect anything to happen. Yes, I try to mitigate it, try to plan around it, try to make sure it's not going to happen, try to be smart enough. You can get rid of most of that if you plan, right? Almost all of it you can, but sometimes you get a flat tire.

And how are you going to handle it? Well, I'll tell you, if you've got the time to deal with it and you have the finances to deal with whatever happens, it makes life a little easier. So what do we do with this today? What's the lesson here for those of you thinking, okay, I get it, Scott.

What's the lesson? That's pretty simple. You are 100% in control of your time as much as anybody else's. Time does its own thing. It's here 24 hours a day.

That's it. Can't change that. Nobody can. Can't even really manage time. Time doesn't need to manage. It starts at midnight and goes to 24 hours, right?

And you don't have to manage it whatsoever. It's going to do what it's going to do, whether you do anything. And when you die, time is not going to die. It just keeps on going.

It doesn't matter. So the only thing you can do is carve out how you're going to live within that time. And the more you hold space for yourself, I want you to write that down and think about it. Scott said, hold space.

For me. Basically, it gives you time to live your way. Want to work? Want to play? Want to cry? Want to watch a movie? Doesn't matter. Plan to do something like that and suddenly something else pops up?

Doesn't matter. Is it perfect? No. But you've got time to deal with it. If you get that attitude, you can get anything done, because now you know you're paying attention to what's important, mostly, and that's your time.

Got that figured out? Everything changes. All right, let me get out of here. That's enough of the day. I'll see you tomorrow on The Daily Boost.