26 ~ How to Have More Time and Energy (Tool Box Edition)

Join us for another tool box edition, mini-episode, as we share a tool called Energy Accounting, a time, activity and energy tracking tool.
 
This tool helps you track daily activities, time and energy. There are a few ways to do energy accounting. You can use our trusty spreadsheet,  voice notes or in-the-moment lists, just to name a few.   Our official Desire as Medicine Energy Accounting spreadsheet is linked below for you to try out.

Energy Accounting Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u3J8k8US3o5m0cL5o7Qjb9uMzZThYnfV-BTPivtPSUw/edit?usp=sharing

This simple practice has revealed to us how long something actually takes to complete and how deceptive 'relaxing' Netflix binges can be. Our discussion is peppered with actionable tips, all designed to help you reclaim your time and reconnect with your innermost desires. 

We'd love to hear from you. Engaging with or fellow listeners via our social media links is our favorite thing to do.

Let's continue to journey together, letting desire illuminate our paths.

Join us at our next live event, Desire Discovery Hour, on Thursday, March 14 at 7:00-8:00pm eastern.  It's free. Link to register https://events.humanitix.com/desire-discovery-hour

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to Desire as Medicine. We are two very different women living a life led by Desire inviting you into our world.

Speaker 2: 0:16

I'm Brenda. I'm a devoted practitioner to being my fully expressed true self in my daily life. Motherhood, relationships and my business Desire has taken me on quite a ride and every day I practice listening to and following the voice within.

Speaker 1: 0:32

I'm a middle school teacher turned coach and guide of the feminine, and I'm Catherine, devoted to living my life as the truest and hopefully the highest version of me. I don't have children. I've never been married. I've spent equal parts of my life in corporate as in some down and low shady spaces. I was the epitome of tired and wired and my path led me to explore Desire. I'm a coach, guide, energy worker and a forever student, Even after decades of inner work.

Speaker 2: 1:00

We are humble beginners on the mat, still exploring, always curious. We believe that listening to and following the nudge of Desire is a deep spiritual practice that helps us grow.

Speaker 1: 1:12

On the Desire as Medicine podcast. We talk to each other, we interview people we know and love about the practice of Desire, bringing in a very important piece that is often overlooked being responsible for our desire.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Welcome to the Desire as Medicine podcast. This is Brenda. I am here with my amazing co-host, Catherine. Hey Catherine, hey Brenda, Happy to be here once again. Today we are bringing you a new episode in our series called the Toolbox Edition. Toolbox Editions are many episodes with tools and practices to play with Desire. Have you ever wondered where your time went? All of a sudden, it's the end of the day or the week and you're thinking about all the things you did not get to. What would it be like if you were able to spend your time on things that truly mattered to you? So today we're offering you a tool that will help you track exactly how you are spending your time and energy, so that you can build self-trust and make informed choices.

Speaker 1: 2:14

That's so good, brenda. I'm so excited to bring this into the conversation today. A tool that will help us build self-trust and make informed choices is just the best. Today's practice is called energy accounting. By definition, energy accounting is a tool to chart how you are spending your time and energy over the course of a select amount of time. So it could be a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Brenda, and I definitely suggest that you just do an audit for a few days so that you can adjust appropriately and, if you have to make any changes, it could be smooth and swift to keep yourself on track, to follow your desires. And just to add a note here, brenda and I did not create this practice.

Speaker 1: 2:58

This isn't an air quotes new practice. We have been introduced to it in both corporate and woo-woo settings. You can put it on a spreadsheet, if you want, like a Google Excel sheet. You would put the time on one column and the actual activity in the next column and then after that, how you felt after the activity. You could make it more complicated if you want. So it would be the time, how you're feeling the activity and then how you feel after, but that is something that I would like our listeners to kind of play with and see what feels good to you, because you're basically gathering information for yourself, for you to see how your day is going, how you feel before and after activities, so you can track how long something took you, in addition to how you felt before and how you felt after.

Speaker 1: 3:51

You can do it in increments, like you can track in 15-minute increments, 30-minute increments, or you can track as you go. That's how I do it. I will sit down and say, okay, it's nine o'clock, I'm going to do some admin and then afterwards maybe I feel tired or I want an app. Or then, at 10 o'clock, maybe I'm going to go have breakfast and then after breakfast, maybe I feel full and satiated, just to give some examples. It doesn't have to be spreadsheet style, it doesn't have to be as you go. You can do it in a notebook, do it in your mind, do it in voice notes and your mind and voice notes. That can be a little tricky, but all possible. Again, this is less about the perfection of doing it. It's just giving it a shot and giving it a try, seeing how this practice can really help you build trust with yourself as you make these informed choices and get to follow through on them.

Speaker 2: 4:42

I love all of that. Yeah, I think the idea is to really keep it simple. I personally like a spreadsheet. I love the way you do it, where you just write down what you're doing as you do it. That wouldn't work for me, but what works for me is a spreadsheet. So you really have to figure out what works for you, but the idea is not to over complicate it. Keep it simple. Actually, we're going to be including a potential spreadsheet for you to use to account for your time in the show notes. It's a Google Doc that you can try out.

Speaker 2: 5:14

I personally like to do 30 minute increments and I just write down what I'm doing as I do it, and it's amazing at the end of the week or at the end of the day to see what I actually spent my time on. And what I love about this tool is that it brings you into reality. It brings you into the reality of how you're actually spending your time versus how you think you spend it. Sometimes tasks take way longer than we actually think, so it's great to say, oh, I just wanted to send that email, but it actually took you an hour because you had to get the link and you lost your password or whatever happens when we try to do a task, so we can get real with how long things actually take and how we're spending our time.

Speaker 2: 5:58

And recently, when I was doing this practice, I noticed that I had this idea that I was spending so much time watching Netflix. And when I tracked it, I looked at it and I realized, oh, I'm actually not spending that much time watching Netflix at all. I felt really good about the amount of time that I was watching and I really love the shows that I was doing and it's also great to see is. Does the activity you're doing, does it give you energy, is it fulfilling or is it draining? I think that's a really important part of this practice, because we might think it's fun to just numb out and scroll on social media, but if you do that for too long, I find that it could really be very draining and then I don't feel good about it, versus, if I do that for 15 minutes, because I want to see what's happening on social media. That is fulfilling and fun for me. Anything you want to add to that, catherine?

Speaker 1: 7:02

Yes, I've been there. When I track my time at you, at least say to yourself oh wow, I'm spending so much time there. I have the opposite problem. I have like daily, weekly amnesia. I don't think it's a dementia or Alzheimer's, but if I'm in hindsight and I have not written it down and I'm doing energy accounting for the day, I tend to be like what the heck did I do this week? What did I do today? And my mind will so easily be willing to tell me you're such a loser, you're just not doing anything with your life because I have. There's a part of me that just wants perfection. There's a part of me that just wants to always do, and so, as I'm going, that same part will eliminate all the things I've accomplished. So the energy accounting really helps me to be kinder to myself. I get to look back at my day and say, oh, I actually did X, y or Z today, or I did X, y or Z this week. It makes so much sense why I feel A, b or C, especially if I have overextended in some way. Usually.

Speaker 1: 8:07

This practice is really helpful for me, one of the things that I see right when I think about time and energy. It's like how easy it could feel. I mean, I've heard my clients like, oh my God, my life is just so hard, I just don't have enough time, I just don't have enough money. We can get into this place of scarcity where we feel as if we are under resourced in this arena. But the undeniable truth is that we all have the same 24 hours, whether we are Oprah or Warren Buffett or you know whoever. Clint Eastwood, I don't know, even alive For some reason. I thought about him, but anybody okay, I'll use George Clooney, I'm sure he's still alive, that hot man.

Speaker 1: 8:56

All these people, we all have the same 24 hours, right? What makes us different? Yes, we may not all have the same circumstances, yes, we may not have the exact same means, but we definitely have the same allotted time of 24 hours. But when we're in survival, or we are in comparison, or when we're in time scarcity, money scarcity, or I, you know, I'm not as good as everybody else, or everybody has it better than me, my life is hard, et cetera. We kind of get muddied in our own mind.

Speaker 1: 9:25

And this is a great practice to really get real with ourselves, have an accurate view of how we spend our time. It helps us level out the playing field. This is one of those things Like we may not all have the same means or the same circumstances, but if we have the same 24 hours and we don't like how where our life is going and our life is actual, like the product of our lives is the result of, or the consequences of, our choices, then how do we then impact our choices more? It's by looking at how we're actually choosing right. We get a chance here to not hate the players. We don't even have to hate the game. We get to learn how to play the game and this tool will definitely give you an edge in playing that game. It helps inform you about how your time actually is.

Speaker 1: 10:18

And warning, there is a caveat Parkinson's Law. If you give yourself two hours, three hours, four hours to complete something, that's how long it's going to take. So in this practice, don't give yourself like open-ended time, right? Parkinson's Law says that the work will expand to fill the time allotted for some completion. We don't want to do that. We want to potentially do it either. Brenda said 30-minute increments, hour increments, but where we're tracking ourselves. We want to track how long something is taking. We want to be generous with time, but we don't want to overgive ourselves time because we'll just spend the day doing something that could have been done with less time. Ultimately, we want to get to the place where we get to build self-trust, build self-trust so that we can make informed choices. That's all I'll add, brenda.

Speaker 2: 11:11

Beautiful. That was wonderful. I love that. It feels so empowering. The way you talk about that. I think that's what I love about this practice is that it's so empowering and we get to make really good choices, like you said, build self-trust With that.

Speaker 2: 11:27

We want to tell you to try the practice. It's not about doing it perfectly. What I recommend with the practice is just not trying to change anything about how you spend your time and energy. Track it for real, like what are you actually doing, and then at the end of the week you can make some adjustments if you would like. And with that we have an invitation for you. We would like to invite you to our next online event called Desire Discovery Hour. We are hosting these on the second Thursday of every month and the next one is on March 14th at 7 pm. It is free and we would love for you to join us. The link to register is in the show notes. We would love to see you. Thank you so much for joining us today for the Toolbox Edition and we look forward to hearing from you how this practice works for you. Thank you for joining us on the Desire is Medicine podcast.

Speaker 1: 12:27

Desire invites us to be honest, loving and deeply intimate with ourselves and others. You can find our handles in the show notes. We'd love to hear from you.