After a life of wrestling with time, I finally found easy productivity.

My life these past few weeks has run so smoothly, I can hardly recognise it.

It’s a shock to look back at. The house is clean every morning and night. Budget accounted for. Tasks aren’t building up unbearably. I sleep well and regularly. Publish daily. And still have time to write this!

The other day Marissa said ‘You’re a different person!’

Here’s what I achieved stress free in one week.

Remember, this is coming from someone who’s been serially riding burn-out for three years.

I wrote and published a mini essay each day. Caught up with friends and family on multiple days. Took on another layer of tasks at work which in the past would have meant blowing out my emotional budget, big time. Caught up with a good friend before she went overseas. Had three dates with my amazing partner! Kept the damn house clean every single day!

All while working full time.

It’s taken years of struggle. So much struggle.

My relationship with time has been a massive sore point in my life, as far as I can remember.

I’d oscillate between feeling overwhelmed or flat. Have huge bursts of productivity where I’d be driven and determined, followed by long periods (even years) where all I wanted to do was escape reality.

I always knew I had so much potential, to the point where I felt haunted by it!

When I was young I was the most likely to succeed at basically anything I set my mind to.

And this felt like a curse! I couldn’t achieve anything because I needed to do better right from the start. I didn’t feel confident in basically anything outside of video games and eventually doing drugs. I had this spectre following me, judging and criticisng.

Always this damn feeling of guilt.

I’ve tried so. Many. Things.

You name it, I’ve tried to fix my time management with it.

Get Shit Done method. Tiago Forte’s PARA system. I even built an enormous Life Operating System in Notion based on August Bradley’s incredible YouTube series (which I use for content creation, on a side note, I’m writing in it now). Bullet Journaling. I made a quest book once (like, you know, the kind you get in video games).

And there’s loads of things I wanted to try but never got around to!

I remember being struck by the force of one specific idea while in Morocco as an 18 year old (over a decade ago).

I’d been smoking stupid amounts of hash and it occurred to me I needed to create a system of goals that was engaging and fun. So I designed this whole system of tarot cards. I figured I’d design each card as the reward for finishing a big project. For example if I achieved 1,000 push ups in a row, that would become a card.

The idea was really striking and engaging!

And it stayed that way.

I never pulled the trigger.

I came back from Morocco and just fell into the same old habits of smoking weed and accepting peer pressure. It took me a long journey of self discovery and letting go of a heap of toxic relationships (to people both in my present and in my memory). And, lots of work. Oh boy, so much work.

I actually found the blog I designed and never ended up writing a single thing in.

It’s called A Tale Of Perseverance.

Good name, right?

Maybe I’ll use it someday.

My mentor identified a massive blind spot.

Skip forward to a year ago.

I was on a stroll through the park when my mentor stopped me in my tracks.

She repeated back everything I’d said, but in her words.

‘You’re telling me you’re not burning out. Yet… let me see, you… work full time. Have a rotating roster with some morning shifts and some night shifts. The roster changes often. You also do the newsletter which has tonnes of stressful deadlines. You’re building a secondary income. You’re writing for the blog, which you’re not sure if your workplace will get upset about. And your partner is going through really difficult trauma healing work… Meanwhile… you can’t sleep. See a problem here?’

‘Yeah’, I thought, ‘I don’t manage my time well enough!’

I didn’t speak it out loud though because… It dawned on me: this is the thinking that gets me here in the first place.

You know that saying about fish not realising they’re in the water until they’re out of the water?

This was my out-of-water moment.

Flapping in the wind like a fish on land.

She surprised me even further.

‘All that you’ve got going on.. you’re capable of that. You’ve told me yourself, you go hard and push yourself to the limit. You ride the breaking point well enough to keep functioning – for now. But the underlying tone I’m catching is that you really don’t value your own sleep.’

It hit like a slap to the face.

It’s embarrassing how blind I was to sleep.

I talk about self care… a lot.

I talk about it online. In my stories on social media. I talk about it at work. I teach crisis supporters how important it is. I talk about it with friends, constantly pushing back on their attitudes of putting their own wellbeing last.

And yet… here I was doing the exact thing I warn about.

You ever find how easy it can be to give others what you need most?

The worst part was that Marissa had been trying to get my attention about this for months.

Somehow I never understood my partners warnings.

She’d say it in all kinds of different ways.

Gently, jokingly, seriously. She’d challenge me, or grill me. She’d say over and over again about how I really have to get more sleep and that just because I didn’t value sleep didn’t mean I was immune to needing it!

The message finally landed… Once I’d burnt out. Again.

I remember the turning point where I started truly valuing my sleep.

I’d just made a big deadline for work. It was Christmas period which had been a whirlwind of weird work hours, putting out figurative fires and heading to family events. It was hectic and I was absolutely exhausted.

And I looked at my calendar and realised I’d booked myself a few days of recovery.

I could have cried with happiness.

That was the first time I really understood the value of planning not just the work, not just the hard part, but the soft part too. The rest, the down time, the play.

Now it goes into the calendar very quickly!

But, we’ll get to that point.

Fast-forward from this point in the story another five or six months.

I got the message but hadn’t really learned.

I was burning out again!

That’s the thing with personal development. It’s never been linear for me! But it’s easy to read people’s stories of growth and feel like a failure in comparison because stories are so often linear. They don’t include the boring parts. The very average, very mediocre bits of little ups and little downs.

That stuff doesn’t usually float to the top because who wants to read that?

I do!

In fact as a teenager I always loved getting my hands on stuff that super high achievers did differently to everybody else.

Autodidacts held a hypnotising appeal to me.

High school did not treat me well.

At the end of middle school I got my heart broken. My best friend ghosted me, which was quite an amazing feat considering we were still in class together. She literally stopped talking to my face and never explained or apologised.

As you can guess, I hated school.

Enter autodidacts.

As an angsty 14 year old I discovered this word and went ham learning about people who’d achieved great things without formal education. They had teachers, tutors, libraries, but they weren’t learning in the way an institution told them to learn.

This resonated with my damn soul.

People like Benjamin Franklin and so many others became my role models.

Why hadn’t I heard about this from my teachers? Or elsewhere!

Probably for a lot of reasons lol. But I was so excited to see these super high achievers, movers and shakers, who carved their own path. They took the road less travelled and were able to not only make it work, but even become influential.

So many people had made this alternative learning style work!

I looked up to these autodidacts and daydreamed my way through high school.

As a teenager I couldn’t help but think, why not me?

I could create my own system of education. Learn how to keep myself on task. Build practical skills people will pay me for. Keep challenging myself. Let life be my university.

I fantasised about it for many, many hours.

One of these role models, Buckminster Fuller, showed me the power of mastering time.

I knew the name but learning about his life blew my mind.

The dude was prolific! He got shit done. I remember being struck by the way he handled his time in particular. It was crazy. He wrote out everything he did.

Literally everything.

The guy kept a journal of his entire life!

There’s boxes and boxes of his journals in library of congress.

It’s the most documented life in human history. Most people would hear that and think ‘where the hell did he have the TIME to do that!’ but I somehow understood.

Writing so much out didn’t TAKE time, it GAVE it!

I was too afraid to live my fantasies.

I had dreamed about autodidactic living. Now I dreamed about time.

The years wore on and on and I kept dreaming about it.

I watched as people became less and less excited by my ramblings about what I would do ‘some day’. I caught sight of my poor self worth in their eyes as they’d roll up into their skulls waiting for me to pass the joint. I fell into fear based decisions.

Fast forward again through a metric tonne of trauma healing work.

The fantasy of living with purpose was still there under the surface.

Many years plus loads of personal development and growth later and I still had that dream of mastering time.

I’d taken the advice I mentioned earlier from my mentor, and really put that into practice valuing my sleep. I had a stable work flow, was producing content consistently and regularly because I’d put in tonnes of effort to really develop habits and self care. Reading and listening to positive information, taking time to basically heal a life of bad habits.

Life had become good but I was still holding back.

I wasn’t working out, I wasn’t making much time for family, I was still spending hours doomscrolling on social media that I knew wasn’t really serving me.

Now we’re almost caught up to the present day.

I was at a leadership conference recently and this couple was up on stage. I could see myself and my partner in them, maybe ten years time if we keep on our current trajectory.

They live the exact life I want for my partner and I.

They speak belief into people’s hearts, people like me. They live driven by value and impact, helping countless people through so many different avenues of business and charity, they were role models like the autodidacts I looked up to, but still alive!

Meanwhile, I could fully relate to the story she told about her husband.

A dreamer. Ambitious but completely unfocused.

Someone who had started a million projects and finished none. Who got overwhelmed and stressed and flat and burnt out. But what struck me like lightening was when she described how he’d changed.

He went from a burning out maniac to a productivity boss when he changed his relationship with time.

She taught him to respect his calendar.

Watching this couple on stage put a torch to my old dream, I was lit UP!

Buckminster Fuller’s crazy practice of writing every moment down was rattling around in my head since high school.

It haunted me!

Kinda weird thing to dream about don’t you think? Writing out everything you do every few minutes of your entire life? Weird but I knew if I gave it a go I’d have a break through.

Little did I know how much it would cost me…

Buckminster Fuller called his journal a Dymaxian Chronofile.

I never learned what the fancy name meant but to me it meant overcoming my life-long struggle.

What did I have to lose? It would be easy enough, I thought. I’d already done a load of n-of-1 experiments which maybe I’ll write about here some time. I’d tracked a bunch of different things, my habits, my dandruff, my nutrition, loads of things.

I was already watching my sleep with this cool tracking ring I bought.

What did I have to lose?

Just 1 day almost broke me!

By the end of the day I was exhausted.

I felt as depressed as I’d ever felt. It was like I had lost my dearest loved one. I remember laying down that night thinking ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to keep this up for long, I feel like dying’. Needless to say it was very disheartening.

If I couldn’t handle one day what would longer do to me?

I didn’t understand it at the time but I think I see now why this exercise cost me so much...

Awareness of wanting hurts.

Holding a desire creates tension.

When we hold a desire for one second, say for example, to be close to our loved one, we create a second worth of tension. On one hand we ‘want’ (desire) our loved one, on the other hand we’re ‘wanting’ (lacking) our loved one.

This desire and lack equation leads to pain until we can reconcile somehow, either by getting closer to our desire, or by changing what we desire.

This is what makes it so easy to give up on dreams.

It’s often a lot easier to move the goal post closer to where we are, than to move ourselves closer to the goal. But I’d already spent the last few years building up a social media presence, I had plenty of experience struggling to get closer to my goal and having absolutely no reward for it. I wasn’t going to let self sabotage or thoughts of doubt get in my way of mastering time.

I knew I could do it… Still I had no idea how much it would suck.

Awareness of time hurts… It’s exhausting.

Writing out every single thing I did all day caused massive tension.

It tore my heart open to the way I make decisions. I could see immediately the difference between what I wanted and what I had. What I had was a pretty good life. Loads to be grateful for in many ways.

Yet what I wanted…

I wanted to make a bigger impact.

I am haunted by the memories of pain listening to my mother’s screaming from when her mental health dropped so low. I’m haunted by memories of my own pain, knowing it wouldn’t have been so bad if I just knew how to communicate. I still carry the responsibility for so many people I’d hurt because I simply didn’t know better.

I knew what impact I wanted to make, and this constant time awareness brought the ultimate consequences of every mundane decision right up into my face.

I wanted to make my dreams come true so strongly.

I felt so acutely aware of my decisions that I spent the entire day working.

Each minute, each second.

The level of tension built as the day wore on.

Not scrolling on my phone. Not opening a social media app. Not checking emails. Not grabbing a snack. Not watching a Minecraft video. Not watching my favourite YouTube journalists.

It was so painful I wanted to cry.

I saw the cost of greatness.

To be who I claimed I wanted to be, I’d have to become truly present.

Numbing, avoiding, escaping would all have to go. It’s in the little microscopic decisions that are made every 30 seconds that we build the life we create.

That’s what I saw.

Buckminster Fuller was a man who wrote down everything he did every 15 minutes between the years of 1920 and 1983. Can you imagine that level of awareness? Of presence? Can you imagine what it was like to be with him?

It’s no wonder he changed the direction of the world.

He was an architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, philosopher, critic and futurist.

He left the world far better than he found it because he knew exactly where he was spending his time. He realised that every single moment of every single day mattered. It all counted. None of it was insignificant.

Not a single interaction, not a single receipt, not a single fart was meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

The week was a roller-coaster.

I woke up on day two of my experiment with insanely high energy!

The day flew by in a languid pace. It was like everything was in slow motion. I was basically Neo just directly manipulating reality. I did so much and had plenty of time for more! The house was clean with ease, I posted videos, made content, got work stuff done, spent time with Marissa, it was unbelievable.

And best of all, I didn’t feel depressed!

This high lasted… until I woke up the very next day.

It was a bloody rollercoaster up one day down the next. I could handle it because by this point I’d nailed a lot of self care. Cooking, sleeping, thinking, writing and working, I’d already put a lot of effort into building habits that allow my life to run smoothly without much thought.

Plus so much of my life had become smooth by this point due to the huge amount of effort both my partner and I put into our relationship. Negotiating, listening, understanding, communicating, it all makes life operate so much easier.

And yet, this exercise of writing each action down was damn near killing me.

I knew I couldn’t do it for long.

I switched from pen and paper, to digital.

After the week of this crazy journaling I started allowing the old behaviours back in.

I knew I would be burning out again if I maintained such a rigid, strict attitude so I allowed exactly what decisions I felt like making on one condition. I would track and record every second of it.

If I scrolled, if I dove into YouTube or TikTok or whatever, I would make sure I watched myself doing it.

And that’s what I’ve done ever since.

As a result I can tell you exactly how many hours I’ve spent over the last month, scrolling on social media versus connecting to people consciously through it. I can tell you it’s a number I’m happy with, low enough in the hours count and getting lower.

I’m improving but allowing myself grace to take it easy as well.

I’m being who I want… With ease.

That’s the biggest reward from doing this.

I have precise confidence to counter my limiting beliefs now. I know the voices of doubt and fear are wrong. I have evidence! I can see the where my time is going, so I know exactly what my future holds.

Per week this month I spent at least:

• 8 hours writing
• 6 hours quality time with my partner
• 4 hours cleaning / maintaining the house
• 4 hours building my secondary income
• 8 hours socialising
• 16! hours caring for myself

And of course all the other stuff, sleep, full time job etc. Where do I get the time? I’ve taken it from social media!

Four hours a week doesn’t sound like much, does it.

That kind of thinking is what leads us into trouble in the first place. 4 hours isn’t much but what about in a year from now, when that 4 has been multiplied by 52? What about 5 years from now, when that 4 has been multiplied by 260?

Do you think you could achieve your dreams if you put an extra 1,000 hours into them over the next five years?

I do.

And that’s literally less than 40 minutes a day.

Transformation is not sexy nor exciting.

It happens in tiny decisions made constantly every day.

The little 1 inch adjustment on my chair, to sit up straight while I type. The choice to flick my phone to silent while I share dinner with my partner. Wiping down the backsplash instead of leaving it for tomorrow. Thanking someone for going a little bit extra above and beyond at work. Asking how a friend is doing, really doing.

Transforming my life has been a lot of things, but more than anything.. it’s been mundane.

There’s been pain as I expand my awareness, for sure.

But the mundanity of just choosing to remain focused on what I’m doing instead of letting my mind drift… That’s where transformation lives. It’s the difference between moving one inch closer to the people I love, or one inch farther away.

Over the years, the choices stack up.

What decisions do you want to stack?