Doing It All Starts With Doing Less: The Power of Trading Time

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:00]:

Every time you say yes, you are saying no to something else. So this is about encouraging you to make sure that you are saying no to the things that you don't care about that you're not uniquely qualified to do, and yes to the things that give you life and build you towards your life. Advance.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:15]:

I'm a small town kid, born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. Seventeen years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy and ever since, my husband JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you too. I'm Tiffany Sauder and this is Scared Confident.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:00:57]:

Welcome back to Scared Confident, the podcast where we tackle the big, beautiful things of life, where we are working to put together all the things to build a life of. And today we are unpacking together. I don't know if it's a myth, but you know how we hear this thing about how professional moms like working moms trying to do it all? Do you have it all? Do you want it all? Can you do it all? I want to talk about helping you see your time differently so that when we say yes to something new for ourselves or in our family or at work professionally, that we have a little bit of a formula to call back on and to say, okay, how do I figure out if I have time for this or not? How do I figure out if this is a heck yes or in a minute maybe, or absolutely not? Because our time, whether we want to admit it or not, is finite. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't get more effective at things, about how do we take things, that this is like a silly thing. But, like, my days are usually totally bell to bell. There is no such thing as like 10 to 15 minutes of extra time between things. It's not really how I roll. I just push things to the max.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:02:13]:

I like to feel busy and so I design my days to feel like that. And so one of the systems that I have is I get gas on Sunday. So that is like really silly. Like, why would you have to get gas on Sunday? But I have found that is a day that is pretty restful for me. I usually do have a little bit of margin and if I am going from meeting A to meeting B, there is no way that I have 10 extra minutes to stop and get gas. Because it's just not how I plan my calendar. So that is an example of how do I take something that takes my time and put it at a place in my calendar where I know I'm going to have the time so that it doesn't take time out of more high value, like minutes on like a Wednesday at 10am So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's an example of what I mean by you can certainly get more effective with your time so that you aren't constantly reacting. Because when we are proactive and then when we plan dinner, so then we get home and we have already know what we're going to eat for dinner, We've already prepped our veggies and I can go ahead and get dinner on the table in 22 minutes.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:17]:

That is using my time effectively, being proactive instead of being like, oh my word, I still don't have groceries. I have to stop on my way home to go get groceries. That takes 20 minutes. Then I have to get home and I have to unload them and I have to chop my veggies and I gotta prep my protein and it takes an hour and a half to get dinner on the table. So we can get more effective, certainly at the way that we use our time. And one way of doing that is to start to figure out systems of how do we be proactive so that we can group tasks together. Like, peeling 30 carrots doesn't take that much more time than peeling 13 carrots. If you're in a carrot peeling moment, go ahead and do them all so that everybody's got carrots for the rest of the week and people can just sort of pick them up.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:59]:

Because you're already in that task versus getting it out, getting the stuff out, washing the dishes, putting them away. Like, there's a lot of motion involved in that little thing. It's like such a silly example. But it's these little things that wreck our time as moms, where we feel like, oh my word, I literally have no time or space to do anything because all I'm doing is reacting. So that is like strategy number one is how do you start to group tasks that are like, another thing that I will do is if I am making dinner, sometimes I will make a second dinner at the same time. I just did this a couple days ago. I was making dinner on Friday night, which usually we go out, but Jer had been on the road and so we were all just Craving some homemade food, I was making dinner for Friday night. I knew the weekend was going to be busy, and while I had all my stuff out, I went ahead and made a pot of soup for the weekend.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:04:51]:

I had already cut one onion for dinner. I just cut another one for the soup. I already had my cutting board out. I could just cut a few more veggies and throw it in. Instead of making six chicken breasts or four chicken breasts, I made six or seven so that I had three extras to throw in the soup. Like, I was helping out my future self by putting maybe 20% more effort into my current task, which was making dinner on Friday, putting a little more effort into Friday. So that Saturday and Sunday there were some things that were super easy. Think about how can you put tasks in places in your calendar? Like I was saying, with the getting gas, where there's just less pressure in your.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:05:30]:

It's proactive and you're in control. How do you group tasks that are like the same so that you are not spending so much motion? I'm using this cooking example, but that was where I started. I was like, oh, my word, how many times do I have to wash the cutting board? If I cut all the veggies I need for the week and I prep all the protein, if I do all of that more in batches, it saves so much administrative, like tasking and getting things out and unloading the dishwasher and all that craziness. And it's just so much more streamlined. So that's another way to think about your time and how do you get better at doing it all and making it all happen. The other thing I want to talk about is how do you think about an exchange of your time? So an exchange of your time. And so this is like the most acute example for me. I think I just use this in a newsletter, but I'll share it here on the podcast as well.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:06:20]:

So my daughter, our second daughter, plays travel volleyball. It's for six months out of the year that this needs to happen. She has two practices during the week that are 2 hours and 15 minutes long, and it's about another hour drive from our house there and back. So let's just call those two hour, those two practices during the week. It's about eight hours during the week of driving her there, waiting for her at practice, waiting for her to, like, cool down, say goodbye to her team, get in the car and come back home. It's like eight, eight hours a week. Over the course of six months, there's 52 weeks in a year, let's call it 50. For easier math, if you take eight hours a week times 25 weeks, that's 200 hours.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:07:04]:

So 200 hours is how many hours of capacity it will take away from me or Junior, somebody in our house to take her to this practice. This is just the practices during the week. Okay, 200 hours to take her for six months. She also has a practice every Sunday. It's the same location for the same duration. So that's another four hours. So that's only one day. So that's four hours for 25 weeks, which is another hundred hours.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:07:34]:

So we have 300 hours of time that it costs our family to say yes to that decision. For her to be able to go join this volleyball club that is like 35 minutes away from our house. 300 hours. That is insane. That is insane. That's like eight weeks of time. Okay? So the first thing that you do when you're going to say yes to is take a measurement of the size of time it's actually going to require for you to say yes to that. Because we say yes to all kinds of things without actually considering how many minutes is this going to take.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:08:15]:

For me, if you get asked to, like, join a board, sit down and actually look at how long is it going to take me to drive to these meetings? What time of day is it? Does that display something else that I'm doing? Of course it does. It always displaces something else. How long are the board meetings? Are there social events that I'm going to need to go to? Are there fundraisers I'm going to need to attend? Are there key constituents I'm going to need to meet with and. And then add 20% because we almost always underestimate it. In the example of my daughter, I'm not even going to add 20% because there will be other things that we have to do. Contribute to goodie bags and I don't know, there's just going to be stuff. So we have 300 hours of energy into this. Yes.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:08:54]:

Into this decision for our family before we've gone to a single game. And there are 14 tournaments over the course of 14 weekends across six months. That same six months. I'm not even going to do the math on that because it's going to make me cry. But you understand what I'm saying, The size of this. Yes. For our family of four kids and two careers, all the things we have going on is massive. It is very healthy to know and understand that that decision is massive.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:09:21]:

Because then you can start to say, how am I going to make this a yes work in the context of everything else going on in our life? Because I either have to displace something that is currently taking 300 hours of my time over the course of those six months, or I have to figure out how I displace that 300 hours in a different way. So that was what led us to the choice to ask our nanny to help us by taking our daughter to practice during the week. So that took 200 of those 300 hours. I was able to say, we don't have to do these. My husband came to me and he said, I want you to know that my goal is to drive her to practice zero times during the week. He was not trying to be a butthole about that. He was blessing me with clarity. So then I knew, I know the game, no problem.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:09]:

If I can't do it for 300 hours over the course of six months, then I've got to find another way to get this to happen. And then the question I have to ask myself is that 200 hours that I now get back, do I think I can make the amount of money that I'm paying my nanny? I need to go make that happen. Do I think I can make that back? Of course I can. Plus my younger kids don't have to be in the car and they don't have to be away from home for 200 hours. Plus I still have time to work out in the evening if I want to. Plus I can still make good food. So when she comes home from practice, there's something good to eat. We aren't going through the drive through for all of us twice a week.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:42]:

Like it's crazy because we have to leave at 4:30 and don't really get back until about 8:30pm and so you're always gone over dinner and it's too far away to come back to our house. You don't really need to understand the complexity of this though. I'm taking you through the mud on it. But what I want you to hear is the specificity which I thought through. What does a yes mean to this choice for our family? And when we start to say we're going to do it all, one of the things we have to do is make sure we have rightly sized what the yes means. And I think we do that better on the financial side than we do on the time side. We think about our dollars being finite, but we don't think about our time being finite. And so we Accidentally displace all kinds of things like sleep and hobbies and time with friends and date nights with our husbands and time to work out and just time to go smell the fresh air.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:11:34]:

Because all of this margin starts to seep out of our life. More than margin, all of this things that we actually care about tend to seep out because we're saying yes to this stuff and we haven't really quantified how much time it's going to take to do it. So then once you've done that and quantified, you've got to decide are you going to do it? Are you going to delegate it? Are you going to share it? If you're going to do it, then you've got to figure out what are you not going to do to find those hours. And the stuff I was going to have to say no to, like working out and cooking and being able to have an another hour in my workday and some things that that was going to be important for other things I had said yes to, I could not pay that 200 hour price and keep my commitments everywhere else. So then I had to figure out if I was going to delegate or if I was going to share it. And when my husband said again, not as a way to be a jerk, but just to say, I, I want you to know I do not see my schedule being able to support me. Being able to leave work early and take her over there and all the things required that clarity was a blessing because then I knew sharing it wasn't possible. And so the third option was to delegate it and to figure out how do I do that in a way that not only works for me, works for my daughter, but also works for the person who's making it happen.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:12:42]:

Which thank you Lexi, God bless you. So that is how you start to actually be able to do it all. Because we were able to say a resounding absolutely yes to our daughter without saying absolutely no to other areas of our life. And so you can have the. And my daughter can go play at this club that she's so excited about and it's an awesome opportunity for her and she's growing so much. And I can keep my professional commitments and the hours that I need available to be able to make that happen. And I can make sure that my younger daughters have peaceful evenings of some play, free play and hula hooping and healthy food on the table. And my husband can have the hours that he needs for his job.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:13:26]:

And like we can create this life of ant, but it is not about a perpetual state of yes. Is it about getting maniacally comfortable with the fact that your time is finite and every time you say yes, you are saying no to something else. So this is about encouraging you to make sure that you are saying no to the things that you don't care about that you're not uniquely qualified to do. And yes to the things that give you life and build you towards your life at and thanks for listening. If you've loved this episode, please share it with somebody you love. And I hope that this season finds you stepping into your life of and in a way that you're living and loving it. Thanks for listening.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:14:06]:

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling Fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I will.