How to Make Additional Time Out of Thin Air.

Hi, it's Sean and you're listening to the three-month vacation.

Here's a question. How do you build a bicycle lane on busy city streets?

If you were to ask someone at the local council how to build that bicycle lane,

the answer is usually quite complicated.

There will be talks of consultations, resource concerns, engineering reports and budgets.

Eventually, after years of planning and several million dollars,

a narrow strip of space may be carved out on an already crowded road.

Yet sometimes the solution might be very simple or rather at least simpler.

Many busy streets already contain unused space.

Not unused in the strict sense, but space that is occupied by parked cars along the side of the road.

If that parking were reduced or removed, the space could then accommodate a bicycle lane without significantly changing the structure of the road itself.

Cars understandably need access to the roadway, but roadside parking is often a matter of policy rather than necessity.

People like me park their cars on the side of the road because we can.

Not because it is our space, so we have paid for it.

So in effect, if you were to take out all the cars that are sitting on the side of the road, you're reallocating space.

That space already exists. The bicycle lane is there, but the cars are sitting there all day long, baking the sun.

So the space exists. It's not like you have to make new space.

And the same thing applies to time. It exists.

We feel we have to find new time, have eight days a week, and that's not true.

We already have that time, and we have to reallocate it in some way.

And that's what this podcast is about. It's about the three things that you have to do to reallocate time.

Now, two of these things, you already know it because I probably covered it before, but just as a reminder, let's do them anyway.

So the three steps that I take are one stacking activities, two eliminating unnecessary time leaks.

And the third one is avoiding the sluggish keyboard.

And this last thing is the most crucial of all. Why? Because we're using keyboards all day long and we're going very slow with it.

But let's start at the top. Let's go to method one, which is stacking activities.

Most people I know believe in the future. People often talk as though the future is a real place.

They say things like, I will write a book in the future. I will start a magazine someday. I will work on the God in later.

But the future never truly arrives. By the time it gets here, it has already become the present.

Everything we do must be done now. And that creates a huge dilemma.

How do we change now? How do we act now when we already feel like we have no time?

The first method that I use and you're probably aware of is called stacking activities.

Stacking literally means doing two things at the same time.

In other words, bearing activities together, which means that you could be listening to podcasts or audiobooks while walking or doing routine tasks.

Almost every day, Renuka and I will go for a walk. And at some specific point during the walk, I break away and I switch on my audio.

It's not like I'm stuck in my own world for the entire journey to the beach and back.

Instead, I use a trigger point about one third of the way back. And that gives me about 10 minutes of listening first thing in the morning.

Then as I'm making breakfast, which takes another 15 or 20 minutes, I get another batch of time.

And so it is during most of the day, whether I'm standing in a line at the supermarket or just waiting at the dentist.

And this allows me to do two things at once, one which is really boring, like sitting down, waiting for something, and the second which enlightens me.

However, there are limits to stacking. At one point, I overdid it. I wore earbuds constantly until my ears became so sore I had to stop using them for five or six months.

Renuka also pointed out that I seem to be permanently plugged in.

Experiences like this force us to rebalance and develop a slightly different strategy.

Sometimes walking should be about walking, listening to the roar of traffic, the birds in the distance, and everything else.

At other times, you might just want to listen to some music or nothing at all.

However, at least some of the time you need to stack activities. Doing two things at once has helped generate a huge volume of information.

This is the information that I can use my business, as well as when writing articles, creating podcasts like this, and all of the reports and websites and everything else.

This method of stacking is irreplaceable. You have to do it at some level just because of the volume of information.

You're not going to get enough time to sit down at the end of the day and casually read a book or to just sit down and have several hours to do something.

So stacking becomes crucial, and it also gives you a lot more exercise than you'd expect.

But the second thing is more crucial because we already have time leaks, and this takes us to the second part, which is how to eliminate those time leaks.

When I was very young, I was exposed to the prospect of war between India and Pakistan. I used the phrase prospect of war because where I lived in Bombay, which is now called Mumbai, there was no real action.

The Pakistani Air Force did enter Indian airspace, but they never reached Bombay.

Nonetheless, people were terrified. If they believed that planes were flying overhead, they would run health of shelter down the lanes, insisting that people turn off their lights so that we couldn't be located.

Fear was the main constant issue, despite being located far away from the front line.

Does that fear feature in my current mental makeup? I think that fear or uncertainty is everybody's problem, which is why the news becomes so dominant, especially during trouble times.

As the current war in the Middle East rams up, I find myself bouncing incessantly between different websites.

I'll go to one, two, three international websites, as well as local news sites to see how all of this drama was affecting us in New Zealand.

But even spending 10 minutes per site quickly turned to 40 or 60 minutes every single day.

The uncertainty alone creates an impulse that impulse to check the news constantly.

I decided to use the impulse to my advantage. Whenever I felt the impulse to check on a developing situation, I would do something else instead.

I redirected that impulse to my benefit. Instead of news, I started listening to a Spanish podcast about Maradona, and I finished that podcast.

And it had sat incomplete for several months, but now I had the impulse.

And I just redirected that to do something else like my magazine or some other project, or just take a walk.

But this talk about how the world has become a really dangerous place. It's all around us. Everybody's talking about it, which led me further back to those websites to read everything again.

I decided that rather than battling the impulse, I would just redirect it towards something special.

Now, I'm not saying that you should avoid the news entirely. Some awareness of world events is necessary.

However, channeling that impulse reduced the amount of time I was spending there. Those time leaks were starting to erode a bit by bit.

So I could spend time painting, going to the cafe, or doing something without feeling like I was running out of time every single day.

All of us have a sort of time leak. The time leak is never dramatic. It doesn't take an hour or two in the day.

It doesn't seem like a big hole in the ground. Instead, it's a very small problem, like a tap that never fully closes.

A few minutes here and there, and suddenly we have consistently lost a lot of time, and we have this problem every single day.

For some people, the leak is the news. For others, it might be social media. And each visit, it feels harmless because it only lasts a few minutes.

But if you look for that time leak, you can close that tab, and you can do so in a very short period.

Time leaks are different for everyone, but they share one common feature. They hide in plain sight.

The moment you identify them, you will find there is a surprising amount of time that can quite easily be reclaimed on a daily basis.

We've covered two points so far. The first is stacking activities. The second is the time leaks that we all encounter.

But this takes us to our third point, avoiding the sluggish keyboard. And I can tell you, this is one thing that we can all do, no matter who we are and where we live.

My father is 90 years old, and he wants to write about his life. So guess what tool he's using? Yes, he's using a keyboard, and he's doing so on his phone.

It's kind of ironic that he's reduced to slowing down so much, because at one point, he ran a secret table college.

At that college, he taught shorthand and typing, and his speed ranged between 60 to 100 words per minute.

And now, he's reduced to roughly 20 to 30 words a minute.

Most of us spend our time at keyboards operating at only one-fifth of our potential.

With dictation software, you can easily reach between 90 to 115 words per minute. And that means that you are going 500% faster than everybody else.

And you're not wasting enormous time fiddling around with your keyboard.

Even if you're using the keyboard at your desk, you're going to be much slower than the speed of dictation.

And when you use the phone, of course, your speed is going to drop dramatically.

We use keyboards for messaging, email, and dozens of apps that waste an enormous amount of time. And it's for no good reason.

I'll give you a practical example. During the courses that I conduct, I provide extensive feedback to clients.

It can be as long as a paragraph and sometimes longer.

I will tell them what I liked, what needs improvement, and where they can make those fixes.

Now, take an average client, and you say, it's five minutes per client, and you have 20 clients.

So the math's simple. That's well over two hours of typing.

What we overlook when we say typing is the fatigue factor.

When I first start out, I can think clearly, and I type faster, because I'm not so tired.

But as I continue that journey, I start to get tired.

Two hours of typing, for any reason, will weigh you down considerably. It weighs me down.

So no matter who we deal with, they get two versions of us, the fresh version and the tired version.

And that is because we spend so much time on these mini keyboards on our phone, and then on the mega keyboards on our computers.

And we're typing slower than ever before.

As you get more tired, you slow down even more.

Then I started using dictation software.

But the dictation software was terrible for years, for decades.

And today it has changed. It has changed because of AI. You may not like AI, but it has brought certain advantages that haven't existed before.

So now I can deliver the same amount of work, but with far more detail and precise feedback.

I can finish in half an hour what used to take me two hours.

And best of all, clients receive better responses. They receive more detail.

The biggest objection I hear is that people can't dictate accurately without making mistakes.

Because we just talk, we ramble, which means you have to go back and then tidy it up.

And of course, that means that you might as well not have tried it in the first place.

But the software that I'm talking about lets you speak in the way that you would when you were at a cafe.

So you can speak at any speed. And it will recognize your accent.

The software has no problem inserting all the punctuation, all the grammar, and it does one more thing.

There is a tool called the transform tool.

So when we speak, we often pause, we start out, we circle around.

And the sentences are garbled at times. They aren't quite complete.

Sometimes we use the word in instead of at. We're grammatically wrong.

We tend to make these speeches in casual conversation.

And on paper, it looks terrible. On a screen, it looks horrible.

The transform tool fixes these errors with a single shortcut.

One keyboard shortcut and you're done. It takes you words. It tighties them up without changing the meaning.

At times, it makes them slightly superior. And that's what a lot of AI does these days.

But it's now reducing your editing time and your typing time.

To get back to my father, I did ask him whether he would like me to help him with his software.

He could write his life stories. He would even have a hands-on editor while he was doing so.

Because the system does that editing. It tweaks things a bit.

And I was quite sad when he said that he had to think about it.

And I wasn't just sad for him, but for everybody else who is listening to this podcast.

Because for a small fee, you can save an enormous amount of time every day,

instead of pounding away other keyboard.

Now that the technology exists and works far better and faster than anything you've used before,

the problem is that we will continue to use the keyboard.

It's something we started using years ago and we go, okay, we'll think about it.

Will you do it? Will you change over? That's the question.

And that's because all of us without exception spend enormous time filling around with some keyboard or the other.

You want to save that time.

This brings us to the summary.

We started out with just stacking up activities.

You might enjoy your walk. You might not want to listen to a podcast or a book.

And that's fine.

Maybe things like the news really interest you and you're not willing to give that up.

Maybe social media or Netflix is what is important to you.

However, nobody will go to their grave saying, I wish I had spent more time with my keyboard.

So if you would like to know what software it is, I can send you a link and you get a month free to try it out.

Well, it's free, right? Try it out and see what works for you.

Send me an email to Sean at Psycho Tactics and I'll send you the link.

Finally, I want to say two things.

The first is in order for you to make these changes, you have to have time in the first place.

In order to stack activities, listen to podcasts, you have to subscribe to something, have it on your phone when you go for your walk.

The software which replaces the keyboard, you need to download it, you need to figure it out.

It doesn't take very long but you need time in advance and that saves you a lot of time in the future.

The second thing is that all of this productivity is not meant to be more productive.

It's not meant to create even more work.

Instead, what you need is time for hobbies, time to sit at the cafe and do nothing and this will not happen.

Because when we save time in one space, we start doing some other work because the work is endless.

So you've got a benchmark that factor of I'm going to the cafe between 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock and I'm going to sit there and not going to do any work or planning or any such thing.

And this is the core element of time, the concept that has existed for hundreds of years.

You heard that poem which says, what is this life, so full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.

And now you have the time to stand and stare.

We talked about the road, it already exists, the bicycle lane, it exists.

You don't have to go up tearing everything, it's ready for you to use.

You just have to change your mindset and you'll find yourself zooming along while also having more time.

More time to waste.

And that brings us to the end of this podcast.

Let's find out what's happening in psychotactics land.

For all of April, we're going on a one month vacation, one out of three, and we're going to be in Greece.

So if you're in Athens, come see us at the meetup, if not, well, another time.

But this second announcement is very crucial.

Most of us struggle when it comes to telling stories.

We might have one travel story or two travel stories that just happen to be good.

But what if you needed to create hundreds or thousands of stories and you need stories for everything.

You needed for writing, for speaking, for presentations.

The best speakers, writers in the world consistently use stories.

And if you can't tell a good story, you can't build a new and interesting analogy, then you get stuck.

Because you don't know how to build it.

And that's where the storytelling course is all about go to psychotactics.com slash workshops slash storytelling.

And on April 11th, you get the chance to sign up to the course.

You have to be on the waiting list. So go today and sign up for the waiting list.

You'll get some goodies. And then on the day itself, April 11th, you'll get a notification telling you whether you can sign up for the course.

Yeah, that's how it works.

The course itself starts in June, but you'll read all the details on the page.

It's a really good course.

It's one of the courses that I would totally recommend in today's day and age, especially with all of this AI around and everything being so same in terms of how the writing is being done.

The stories, that's what makes you different from everybody else.

So yeah, that's what I've said.

That brings us to the end of this podcast.

I'll say bye for now. Bye-bye.

Thank you.