You Guard Your Money and Hand Out Your Hours

You guard your money like a soldier, but yet hand out your hours to anyone

who asks Well, hello there, my friend.

It's Jonathan Doyle with you as always for the Daily Podcast.

Today, we are talking about the fact that there are some things in our

life that we guard meticulously.

You don't let somebody-- You don't hand over your bank account

details to random strangers, right?

You don't, because you realize that your financial resource is precious to you,

and it's something that you must protect.

It's a very simple observation, isn't it?

When was the last time you walked up to a random person on the street and

said, "Here is my, my ATM card, here's my credit card, here's my PIN number.

I just want you to have a great day.

God bless you." You've never done that, right?

Because you intuitively understand that your financial resource rec- represents

what you've traded your life for in terms of time and effort and energy.

So money's a scoreboard.

It's one of many, but you understand what I'm saying.

It's precious.

We protect it.

We don't just hand it over to random strangers.

But let's talk about what we do with our time.

And in our modern industrialized attention economy, think how much

time on an average day we are handing over of the most precious resource

we have to complete strangers.

I don't know whether it's getting older or being in this particular phase of life.

You know, forty-five to fifty-five is one of the most challenging,

busiest times of our life.

That's what the research tells us, because you've usually got kids,

you've got work, you've got career, you've got parents who are aging.

It's a really, really busy time.

And in the last few months, I've become acutely aware of this, that the most

precious thing that I possess isn't talent, it's not money, it's not property

or investments or anything like that.

The most precious resource I have is time.

And I genuinely mean that.

I don't want that to sound abstract to you because I genuinely mean it, that

time is the single most precious resource that I have, and yet it can be so easy

for it to be hijacked by other people.

Is this happening to you?

No matter how disciplined you are, social media, TV, Netflix, other

people's agendas, that's a big one.

Other people's agendas can take so much of the single most

precious resource you have.

So this is an episode about getting very, very clear on the preciousness

of this commodity and why you must guard it, if not as much as your

financial resource, but even more so.

So way back in, uh, the… way back in ancient Rome, we've got Seneca

writing this famous essay called On the Shortness of Life, and he makes

one great argument in that treatise.

I love that word, treatise.

He makes one great argument: Life isn't short.

He argues that we make it short by wasting most of it.

What are people wasted on?

Well, he would say on grievances, on other people's agendas, or on

preparation for a life that we might live one day in the future rather than

living the life that we have right now.

So he argues that people who are sometimes really concerned with protecting

their property or their wealth can sometimes be reckless with wasting their

time, that single precious resource.

So we begin as we do often these episodes with the audit.

Let's think about where we're burning this every single day.

See, I use the Brick app on my phone more and more and more.

It literally just shuts off access to any social media, web browsers.

So the only thing that works on my phone is the phone and messages and a couple

other bits and pieces, and that's it.

So you go through into early American history, and you get people even

like Benjamin Franklin, who developed this system of writing down an agenda

for every single day and auditing his agenda every single night to ask

himself if he, if he had used his time effectively, if he'd helped people, if

he'd made a difference in the world.

He was meticulous on this.

So for some reason, whether it was just his particular personality, he

understood the incredible value of time and utterly refused to waste it So it

doesn't mean that we become selfish.

I know some of you might hear this and go, "So what are you saying? We

just look at our own lives and make our own lives the only thing that's

truly important, that matters, and we build an entire system around

nothing but our own personal agendas?"

No, we can be very gracious with our time.

We can serve people and, and lavish time on people, but my

friend, at least do it consciously.

At least say to yourself, "You know what? I'm, uh, I'm busy today, but I'm

gonna go and do this thing because I love this person, I care about them,

I wanna support them, I wanna be a blessing to them," but do it consciously.

I mean, how many hours in a day are we likely… I did an audit, you know,

I, I run screen time on my younger kids' phones, and I'm constantly having

the conversation, "Please explain to me, please explain to me why you

thought it was a good idea that Block Builder was a good use of two hours

of your time?" "Oh, I don't know."

"No, I don't know is not an answer, child.

Try again.

Please explain to your father, the one who pays for this phone, the one

who never wanted you to have it in the first place…" Sorry, I'm doing

a bit of therapy here on myself , but it's like, "Please explain why you

thought two hours of Block Builder was a good use of your time."

So like a lot of things in personal development, the, the jump to this

kind of life is just that, it's a jump.

Most people are never doing this.

Friends, I'll be really honest with you, most people are simply just

running on some kind of vague autopilot.

Just like, "Well, you know, I, I, you know, whatever. I, I just-- This is how

I live and this is my day and I go to work here and I come home, I do this."

But to be really conscious, to be really awake, because the clock is ticking

and it is going to come to an end.

I'm 52 years of age.

I like being 52.

Why?

Because I'm still in great shape.

My energy's high.

I'm loving my life.

I'm getting to travel heaps and serve people.

I'm speaking more and more and I'm coaching more and more and

I'm, I'm in a really happy place.

But one of the reasons that I am super conscious at the moment is

that I start-- You, you, at, at, you, at 52, you understand something you

could not have understood properly at 22, which is the clock's ticking.

It's like, oh wow, like the how I'm closer to the end than the

beginning and I love it because I'm like, "Wow, I gotta show up.

I'm not wasting any time.

I refuse to waste it.

I'm going to give myself fully to the moments that I have

left." So I build systems.

I use Brick.

I use, um, you know, very-- I use my planner very carefully every single day.

I'm constantly-- I, I use the bullet journal method, so I'm

planning every single day.

I plan blocks of weeks.

I have months planned.

So I'm just super committed to using this precious gift as carefully as

possible so that I don't squander it.

So can I please ask you to audit your life?

Where are you burning time every single day?

Where are you burning?

And I've gotta get better at this, friends.

I'm the most driven, focused person that I know, and if I struggle with

this, if I'm constantly having to be on guard against time-wasting, then

most people listening to me have probably got some distance to travel.

So look at your life today.

You know, a-and just be clear, like, let me be clear, I'm not saying that

every single millin of your life must be planned to the nth degree

and there's no time for downtime.

Of course, I'm not saying that.

But be intentional about your downtime.

Say, "You know what?

I'm gonna go sit on the couch and read a book, and it's planned.

I'm gonna have two hours just to do nothing but read." Or, "I'm gonna go for

this walk 'cause I just wanna do this, and it's what I wanna do." Or, "I'm gonna

go and catch up with this friend because I care about them." But be deliberate.

But just, I think the real killer, as I said at the start of the episode,

is the attention economy, right?

Is the industrialized attention economy.

I remember listening to an interview recently with one of the guys

that was there at the start of the social media industry, and they had

really clear choices about how they were gonna build these systems.

And the concept of the infinite scroll, of just thumb, thumb, thumb,

infinite scroll, doom scrolling, they built that on purpose.

They built that on purpose because they understood that dopamine

reward systems are what they are.

And so most of us are tending to walk around these days in a

dopamine-depleted state, and what we have-- One of the reasons we have so

many mental health challenges, not the only reason, but one of them, is

'cause our dopamine's been completely hijacked by an industrial-based,

industrial-scale attention economy.

So please, the smartest people in the world have built a system to

trap you, to trap your time, to steal your time, your energy, your focus.

So fight back.

And the first way you fight back is intentionality, awareness, waking up.

I mean, so much of the work that I do is literally that.

The, the DNA that I'm carrying is to wake people up to this one beautiful,

precious life that you've been given.

You must be fully conscious for it.

One of the reasons I talk about addictions, you know, the problem with

addictions is not that anybody's a bad person, it's that addictions lock you,

they, they send you back to sleep.

Addictions often happen because we have difficult emotions that we

don't wanna deal with, so we use addictions to go back to sleep.

And the problem with that is, well, it's, it's tragic, but it's also that

there's this great big life that just gets missed because people are trapped

in these doom cycles of just consumption and consumption and consumption.

So please do not be careless with your time.

Make a decision today.

Go home, wherever you're listening, or grab some paper or notebook and

just write down, what are you about?

What matters to you?

What do you want?

How are you wasting your time?

Audit it.

Be honest.

Don't show anybody, but just write it down.

Just say to yourself, "I burn two hours a day on Instagram." Just say to yourself,

you know, "Well, I waste this much time on this TV program every day," or,

"I'm gaming," or, um, you know, "Just wasting time reading news websites,"

or, "I gossip all the time, and I spend two hours a day gossiping with my work

colleagues and not actually working."

This is uncomfortable stuff, right?

Like, nobody wants to admit it.

Nobody wants to go, "Yeah, it's true. He's right. I'm actually burning two

hours a day on absolute nothingness." And I'm with you, I'm doing it too.

I'm really disciplined.

Like this day today, like I'm recording content, I'm just committed.

I've got processes in place today.

I- I'm disciplined.

And the engine that drives it all for me is not insecurity

or trying to prove myself.

The engine that drives it is if I live in a really conscious, deliberate way,

I get to serve and bless more people.

I get to encourage and help more people.

That's the engine, that's the purpose, to make the best of my gifts and talents and

not squander them on meaningless things.

I'm gonna stop right there, otherwise I'll keep going.

Uh, come and say g'day on Instagram @jdoylespeaks.

I get the irony of me inviting you to Instagram after just talking about it, but

just, just subscribe to a few accounts.

Just subscribe to a couple people and then put some blocks around it and say, "I'm

only gonna look at it for 25 minutes in the morning at this time to this time,

and I only follow accounts that are gonna be encouraging and inspirational to me."

On YouTube, I'm at Jonathan Doyle Speaks, and again, I'm doing 60-second

content every single day to inspire, encourage, and motivate people, okay?

No cat videos, no AI-generated, uh, you know, ducks singing

Pavarotti, none of that.

Just content designed to encourage, inspire, and

motivate you every single day.

Um, website, jonathandoyle.co.

Please subscribe to this podcast.

I wanna keep serving you every single day.

And here's our final thought: You would never let a stranger

take $50 from your pocket.

Yesterday, you let one take three hours.

Which was worth more?