Have you been there? Are you losing hours or worse yet, slaving away too many hours? Middle of the night, computer-drained, eyes-sore, can’t-see kind of tired?

This week I’m chatting with Neill Williams, my personal business coach, and we’ll chat about the concept of “magic time”. We dive into what your brain is really doing when it seems like you have no time. Plus, she gives incredible tips for how to break through motivation slumps, grow our time sensitive self-awareness, and how time blocking is the biggest gift you can give your brain and your life.

I want to tell you a little story about her and how much she has helped me. 

Neill is a master life and productivity coach from Spokane, Washington. She is way closer than I originally thought and we really should go to lunch one of these days. Neill is just up the road from me, less than nine hours, so once this Corona stuff has gone we have to meet in Kennewick or something. Although I have no idea the restaurants in Kennewick, we’ll just have to go on TripAdvisor or something and find them.

Anyway, a little story about Neill. 

I actually joined a mastermind group and Neill was part of it. Every other week, she gives these coaching calls to us and talk about ‘mind blown’. This woman has her S-H-I-T together, let me tell you. She just knows how to uncover your deepest, darkest issues when it comes to productivity and mindset and life. I was so excited to welcome you today because I just feel like you’re going to just provide so much of a good service for my listeners. I’m excited to talk to you about this stuff. 

Time management. It’s a bear. 

Neill: Yeah. It’s not, but when you know how your brain is interacting within your time, you learn the key to really kind of solving all of your time problems. I really don’t even teach so much about time management because I don’t believe that time management actually works. What really works is personal management and that’s all driven by your brain. 

Julia: Fascinating. You don’t think that work-life balance is actually possible? Is that what you’re telling me?

Neill: No, I think work-life balance is totally possible, but I think in the way that so many people are teaching it out in the world in terms of managing your time, I don’t think that that works for most people.  

Julia: And why not? Why is that? 

Neill: Take two people and if you give each one of them an hour, they’re going to produce at a different level. It’s not because the hour is different for those two people. It’s how that person engages in their time, how they use their brain and how they think about what they’re going to create in that time that they have. It’s really a very personal individualized thing in leveraging your own brain to get the most out of your time. Once you do that, that’s where you create balance because you become so productive in your work time that you automatically get more freedom in your overall time.

Julia: Okay. So let me get this correct, it’s about using your brain wisely, not your time. 

Neill: Yeah, exactly. 

Julia: Fascinating. I can’t wait to get into this more, but before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about your story. You are my business coach and I have fallen in love with what you’ve done for me, of course. But what is your story? I mean, there must have been a connection somewhere. 

Neill: Totally. I was just like you are and just like, probably, so many of your listeners – that typical high-achieving type-A personality. I went into the corporate world and, of course, was going to take that by storm, climb the corporate ladder, and do all the things. 

After I had my son, I realized I was working so many hours and I couldn’t see the benefit from that. I felt like I was failing at work because I wasn’t getting as much done as I thought I should but then, I was also failing as a mom. I felt like overall, I couldn’t win. I was in this cycle and I was really involved in the culture of the firm that I was in, which was telling me every day, to do over time. You have to work more hours, you have to do more. 

I finally decided to really start questioning that and when I did, I decided there had to be a better way. I figured out how to make that happen. Really, what my story was as I went from a 50- 60 hour corporate job, I cut that down to 40 hours per week. I wasn’t willing to work more than that. When I say that, what I want people to hear is, it’s not that I produce less. I didn’t say I’m going to do less. I just figured out how to do that in a constrained amount of time. 

Julia: That’s incredible. And the mom-fail you mentioned, that is so real. We put it on ourselves a lot too, it’s such a self esteem killer. It really makes you insecure about everything and what you do. Should I be pursuing my passions and should I be putting all this time into it? 

Most of my listeners are entrepreneurs. They’ve either been in business for a little bit of time or they’re starting out or they’re advanced for that matter. Even having been in business for 13 or 14 years, I still have mom-guilt. You say to yourself, “I have to balance things. I have to balance my time.” 

My question is, what are the biggest mistakes you see in your coaching practice with entrepreneurs and when it comes to time, what mistakes are they making?

Neill: That’s such a good question and just to piggyback off of the story that I just said, after I did that in my corporate job I decided I’m going to teach other moms how to do this too, because my full goal is to try and end the suffering of working moms in terms of feeling like they’re never winning no matter what they do and bringing true balance back to their lives so that they can enjoy being a mom. 

Really, being a mom is enjoyable. It’s just that we sabotage ourselves from being able to live in the enjoyment of that experience. We work at the expense of our lives. My whole goal was to figure out how to do this, also, as an entrepreneur. I built my business with the rule that I’m not working more than 25 to 30 hours per week. That’s just not an option. I will figure out how to make it happen within that time. 

Now, I coach other entrepreneurs the very same thing. It’s so easy to take that corporate mindset, if you’ve been in that world, and go into your business and think, “I’m going into the entrepreneur world because I want that lifestyle. I want the freedom and I want to be able to work when I want and how I want.”

When you don’t change your brain fundamentally, the same brain that was in your previous life comes with you into your business and you find yourself just working more hours, working more than you want, and you don’t actually create that lifestyle that you really want.

That’s really what I work with my clients on is creating the lifestyle that they decided to be an entrepreneur to pursue in the first place and how to make that their actual reality. 

Julia: Why do people do that? Bring the corporate brain to the entrepreneurial brain. Is it a safety thing? Is it just the way we’ve been trained and conditioned?

Neill: Yeah, it’s really habitual thinking because in the corporate world – and you see this all the time – we’re socialized this way, that hard work means success and most of us have put into the equation of hard work, lots of hours. If success means hard work, and that means lots of hours, we’re going to go into our businesses through that lens. If we work more, what we believe to be true is we will be more successful. That’s just this hamster wheel that we end up going on. 

Julia: We’re talking about the brain here and revisioning it basically. What’s the first step in doing that? 

Neill: There’s a couple of things. The first thing you want to realize is, what decision have you made in terms of how many hours you’re working? The way that I would offer this to your listeners is, if you haven’t decided intentionally, you’ve also made a decision. If you don’t decide, “I’m working 30 hours per week,” you’re going to work as many hours as you think it takes to create success because you haven’t decided that for yourself. 

Julia: Yes, and then it gets the best of you. 

Neill: Yes and as a human, it’s just your nature to expand activities to fill up your time. If you don’t decide on purpose, “I’m working 30 hours” or, “I’m working 40 hours,” you’re going to use way more hours than what you actually really need to do all of your work and get your work done.

Julia: Interesting. When I first did time blocking, it felt like I was completely contracting everything and that I wasn’t going to have enough time for stuff. I was so concerned. I thought if I only set aside Tuesdays and Thursdays to work with clients, that’s going to limit my income and it was actually the exact opposite, now that I’ve been doing it for awhile.

Why do we feel like time blocking is going to restrict us when it’s actually the opening? Does it just make us more focused and efficient? 

Neill: Yeah. When you think about it, when you set aside a time block, oftentimes the brain is resistant initially, because what you’ve told your brain is, “We’re going to complete this thing in this amount of time,” and that’s a different way of thinking than what you’ve done before. What happens is there’s cognitive dissonance, which is the way your brain was programmed and what you’re trying to move your brain to be programmed to do. The in-between of that feels uncomfortable. 

It’s pretty natural for the brain to resist. You’re going to set aside maybe a two hour block of time to record two podcasts or whatever it is. When you get to the amount of that time on your calendar, your brain thinks, “Oh yeah, I don’t want to do that right now.” What most people do is they give in to that. They’ll go do something else. They’ll go check Instagram or answer an email or a Slack message. 

We think because the brain offers us up that thought that we have to act on it. This is part of being aware of your own mind and your own thinking. Just because your brain offers you that thought you have to question yourself and ask, “Is it really what I want to do in the long term?” Your in-the-moment brain is always going to offer you up a solution that feels better or is easier or is more efficient. But, you think about in the long term, is that what you really want? And you decide for the long term versus what feels good in the moment.

Julia: It’s just like that book Atomic Habits. Have you read that one? 

Neill: Yes. It’s a good read.

Julia: Oh, it’s such a good read – about instant gratification and how we do things that are bad for us that give us instant gratification, but it’s so easy to do them in the moment. But stuff that takes long term growth and long term satisfaction are small habits that cumulatively add up to give them you results. I read that book and it just was such a mind blowing thing. This sounds exactly like that. 

Neill: Yeah. One of the skills that I teach all my clients is to take action in spite of negative emotion. Because, especially as entrepreneurs, we’re under this impression for some reason, that we only should be working when we’re inspired and when we’re motivated.

Julia: Oh yes. 

Neill: And I do that, but then you’re really wasting about 50% of your time, because what’s true as a human is about half the time, you’re going to feel that way and half the time you’re not. When you learn to follow through on your plan, even when you don’t feel like it, you’re leveraging so much more of your time. You’re leveraging that 50% that maybe before you just used to distract or procrastinate or to do something that was really not beneficial to you or your business in the long run. 

Julia: What are some tips and tricks that you would offer to not only learn to be more self aware, but also get through that. When you’re unmotivated and your brain is offering up a negative thought, how do you power through? I get in motivation slumps and sometimes it takes me like a month to get out of it. I always come out of it, but it would be nice to have some tips and techniques that work in the moment. 

Neill: Yeah, there are a couple of things you can try here. One thing is a little tool where you can tell your brain, “We’re just gonna do this for five minutes.” Often, the hardest part of getting going on something is the start. Your brain will tell you, “We can do this for five minutes. We can do anything for five minutes.” It feels easier. The brain is more accepting to ease. That’s what it wants. It wants comfort and it wants safety. We’re just going to do this for five minutes and then we can set it aside. 

What you’ll notice is, once you get through the hump of the first five minutes, you’re in it. You think you’ve already done five minutes, you might as well keep going. It’s kind of like a backdoor trick to get there.

Julia: It’s like going to the gym. Once you get there you’re fine, but it’s getting out of bed and getting there that’s the hard part. 

Neill: Yeah, it’s the same thing. You tell yourself, for the gym example, all I have to do is put on my shoes and get in the car. Well, if I’m going to put on my shoes and get in the car, then I’m just going to go to the gym. I might as well just follow through on the whole thing. Overcoming that initial step, that first little bit is the hardest part. If you can trick yourself, mind hack yourself, into getting through the first few minutes, typically you’re okay with continuing on. That’s one thing you can try.

Then the other thing you can do is when your brain offers you up, “I just don’t feel like doing this right now,” or, “I don’t want to do this right now,” you can ask yourself, “But does the future me want this?” Think about the “you” an hour from now or the “you” two hours from now when that thing is done. How does that feel? Think about giving your future self the gifts of having done it. 

Julia: Oh, interesting. That is a mind trick. You are a Jedi mind trick girl. That makes total sense because there is such an incredible feeling when you’re done. You’re like, “Oh yes.” You finished the day, you closed the door to your studio, and you’re like, “Yeah, baby! I got stuff done today.” It’s the same feeling. It’s like crossing stuff off your list. Such a good feeling. 

So, what you’re saying is basically, “Hey, I’m not motivated right now, but man, my two hour future self will feel so good if this is done. And I want to give that gift to her.”

Neill: Totally. And this is overcoming what you talked about earlier, the instant gratification brain. Thinking in the long term versus in the moment. It doesn’t feel great to do this thing right now, I get it, but I’m willing to do that because I know that having done it, the accomplishment of it, is going to feel so good.

Then the other thing is, you get the reward of feeling relaxed and not having any undone thing floating around in your brain, in your non work hours, which is typically what happens to most people. Which is why we feel out of balance because the work brain comes with us into the non-work hours because we’re focused on all the things we didn’t get done.

Julia: You are preaching my language. Seriously, because I have a bullet journal and I write down everything that I have to do in my bullet journal, but if I don’t get to cross everything off during the day, I notice my stress level is way higher at home with my family, then if I cross everything off my list that day.

Neill: Yep. Because what you’ve done is you’ve created an open loop in your brain and the brain hates open loops. It likes to close them all. That open loop creates stress because, in your brain it’s trying to figure out the solution to it. It wants it closed and once it’s closed, then it can more easily and organically relax and just be present where you are.

Julia: Yes and it’s the same thing when we go on vacation. We cram, cram, cram to try to get everything done before vacation because we intuitively know that you don’t want to leave those open loops while I’m on vacation, for Pete’s sake, because vacation will not be fun. 

Neill: No, and it’s the same reason why I have my clients really question whether they open Slack or they open email or anything in their phone, anything that’s going to create an open loop right before bed. Or after the date is over. You have to realize what’s going to happen with your brain is that it’s going to go work on solving that problem. You have to ask yourself, “Do I want to do that to myself or do I want to give myself space tomorrow? Open this up and bring it to my awareness so that I have the space carved out to actually handle it and close the loop.”

Julia: What I’m hearing is, the brain massively compartmentalizes. If you can compartmentalize your time in your week, you’re actually giving your brain what it wants?

Neill: You’re giving your brain a break. You’re leveraging how it naturally operates. Your brain is the most powerful Google you could ever have. You put something in that search engine and it is going to go to work searching everything to find the answer. It’s just the way it’s programmed, it’s designed to process. 

Julia: Is that perhaps the reason why, if you time block, you are truly time stalking in your brain? And that’s why you get so much more done because your brain is able to chart, classify, and organize everything, keep you on track, and it’s just up to you to stay on that schedule?

Neill: Basically what you’ve told your brain is it’s fine. We have already created the space for this thing. You get to work on this, you get to problem solve on this during these hours or during this one hour. 

Julia: It’s almost like a gift to your head. 

Neill: It totally. It lets your brain relax and I even do this. Everybody that’s listening, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably an ideator. You probably have a million ideas a day. 

Julia: You read my mind. It opens up creativity.

Neill: Yes, and what happens is you have an idea and your brain starts to go down the rabbit hole of how you might do all of this and how you might implement it. For me, this works really well because this happens to me right before I go to bed a lot of times. It happens in the shower too, which is, I don’t know why the shower is full of ideas but it is. 

Julia: You are not alone there.

Neill: I just tell myself, “That’s great. I will put that into my thinking time for tomorrow.” I already have a space set aside for this. I know the idea is going to come. I just don’t know when, and I have now created a space where I’m bringing to work on it. It’s just not right now. This is not the time for that, but I have a spot for it. 

Julia: I want to move on to another thing, because this is super critical in terms of motivation; it’s along the same lines. What happens is we’re good for a while with this whole time blocking thing, I’m doing great. I’m all on it. Then I slip and then I slip again and then I feel sometimes that I’m good for a while, but then I go back into my old habits. How do you conquer that? How do you stay with it? 

Neill: Yeah, I think, again, it’s the same thing as we talked about before. What I would have you do, or anybody who’s experiencing this, when you’re in a nice motivation place, notice that taking action from motivation is much easier than taking action from maybe an uncomfortable place or a worrying place. 

Typically what happens is you have thinking that creates the motivation and those thoughts may be easily accessible while you’re feeling motivated. You might not even be realizing that you’re having the motivating thoughts, and then maybe something changes where your brain is not offering those thoughts up to you as easily. What you have to do is, I call it, “parenting your brain”. Basically you have to redirect your brain, on purpose, and you have to work a little bit harder to create the motivation to call up motivating thoughts on purpose versus your brain offering them up to you. 

Julia: How do you do that? 

Neill: I have my clients do this, create a list. I call this like your ‘toolkit’ for your brain. Create a list of thoughts that make you feel motivated. Create a list of thoughts that make you feel excited. Create a list of thoughts that make you feel in service or full of purpose or fulfillment so that you can go back to those and you can engage one of those on purpose. If your brain is telling you that we don’t really want to do this right now, you can create motivation on purpose anytime you want, by thinking in a way that creates motivation for you. 

Julia: And just a quick plug, you have an amazing podcast episode on this exact topic. 

Neill: Yes, I do. 

Julia: Neill has an amazing podcast, and remind me what’s it called again?

Neill: Unbusy Your Life is the title of the podcast. 

Julia: Unbusy Your Life! Yes, and I binged listened to all of Neill’s podcast episodes and she has a great one on motivation because it’s a really interesting concept that you can call up motivation anytime you want, because most people don’t think that way. People think, “I’m enlightened from the world, the universe bestows it upon me, the stars align and now all of a sudden I’m motivated.” No, you can actually create it through your thoughts. 

And we talk all about this a lot, you and me privately, your thoughts lead to feelings, which leads to action and simply by changing your thoughts, that will change your action. I know you’re talking about it right now, but can you elaborate that a little bit more when it comes to motivation?

Neill: Yeah, I think the key here is that when you’re feeling motivated, you may not have realized this before, but you have thinking in your brain that’s making you feel that way and you maybe didn’t have to work really hard to create it. Your brain offered it up to you. That’s usually what people think. I just felt motivated and I don’t know why. It was just because your brain offered you up some nice, easy, motivating thoughts that maybe you weren’t conscious of.

Julia: An example for me, is usually, “I had a really good shoot today,” or, “The baby I worked with was so good” or, “I’ve really got this composition and color thing down.” I’ll have these kinds of self-affirming thoughts that are, in turn, self-motivating. Or I’ll have a really good sale. Usually it’s an external factor. 

Neill: So there’ll be an external thing that happens, but your brain has an interpretation of that external thing that made you feel the motivation. 

Julia: Gotcha. 

Neill: That’s usually the missing piece. People don’t realize that, so they attribute the motivation to the thing outside of them not realizing it was their brain’s interpretation of the thing that created the motivation or not.

Julia: You can call this up simply by changing thoughts.

Neill: Yes, and so that’s what most people don’t realize is that this is a skill. You can literally engage motivation anytime you want, by thinking on purpose, motivating thoughts. This requires more energy. This isn’t the situation where your brain just offered you up this beautiful thing. If you feel motivated and you weren’t even aware of it, this is you parenting your brain on purpose to feel motivated because you are choosing a thought that makes you feel motivated.

Julia: Yes, and of course this relates to time blocking and time stalking because motivation, they go hand in hand. We often let go of our good time habits when we’re feeling unmotivated or distracted by Facebook or other things that have this way of creeping in and just grabbing a hold of your insides and yanking them out and going, “We’re not doing this anymore.” All of a sudden, the next thing you know, it’s four hours down the rabbit hole of online shopping somewhere.

You’re telling me, that’s the point where I need to parent my brain, come back to my time. And then at the same time, use the tips to get through motivation, giving that gift to my future self, doing things for only five minutes or so to kind of reset myself and reparent. Do I have that right?

Neill: I think there’s two pieces to this. I would always offer to create a list, again, of thoughts that make you feel motivated or excited or inspired or focused because those emotions are really great fuel for action. Those are the ones that are going to have you get into that flow state where you’re knocking things down. It just feels easy and it feels great right now. You won’t necessarily always be able to access those so the second piece of this is what you were just talking about, which is the skill of acting in spite of negative emotion. 

That is, “I’m feeling overwhelmed today and I really can’t coach my brain out of this. I am just going to feel overwhelmed and I’m going to still take action.” I’m still going to follow through on my plan, even though I don’t feel like it because I know that the two-hour-from-now me is going to feel so much better having this done v.s. not having it done and trying to figure out how I’m going to add it into my schedule some other time.

Julia: How do you know how to block your time? 

Neill: Such a good question. There’s multiple ways to do this. One of the most important blocks of time that I have all of my clients add – and I think we’ve talked about this Julia. There’s different names; I call it ‘magic time’, where you create the majority of your work product. There was this study that came out from Harvard not too long ago where they talked about out of a 40 hour week, how many hours are people actually producing work in? 

Julia: Oh, fascinating.

Neill: And it turns out 10 hours out of the 40. 

Julia: You’re kidding.

Neill: No.

Julia: That’s it?

Neill: That’s it.

Julia: Man, we waste a lot of time!

Neill: Right? Yes! When you think about it, that is truly the amount of time that we’re using to create our work product. I thought about this, and so I have my clients add typically a two hour block, sometimes 60 to 120 minutes into every single day. This is their focus, distraction-free time. I call it ‘magic time’ because I have them put it into their day, if at all possible, during the time of day where their brain is the most energetic. For most people, that’s the morning time. Most people are morning people. 

Most of my clients have this magic time in their morning and that is where you put all of the stuff that requires the most of your brain. We’re talking to entrepreneurs so that’s the creative stuff. Maybe the stuff that is content. It’s maybe new things in your business that you don’t know exactly how to do and you know it’s going to require a little bit more of you to try to create or complete.

Julia: Things that require more brain power. 

Neill: Exactly, you want to get that into your calendar. If you looked at my calendar, you’d see I have that pretty much every single day. It’s a recurring appointment with myself, for the end of time. What I do is, when I do my weekly planning hour I fill in the details of what’s going in there, but I have carved out the space for that so I know for sure, I have time to create the content for my course. 

I have time to create the podcast. I have time to create my weekly emails. Any new video training or whatever it may be. All of that stuff has a space, because I’ve carved out this magic time. That’s one of the most important time blocks that I think we can all have in our calendars.

Julia: Very cool. What I’ve done, because I do both portrait clients and then I have my education business, I designated my ‘magic time’ in the morning and then Tuesdays and Thursdays are for this business where I shoot portraits. Then the other three days of the week are for education and online business. And I’ve blocked it out – maybe a little bit more detail than you have – but my weekly meeting times are put in there and I’ve even scheduled time to be on social media. I blocked out an hour on Friday where now I can be on Instagram and shoot the breeze on Facebook and do what I want. 

I’ve noticed that sometimes I look forward to it and other times I think, “Oh, I don’t really want to do that. I want to get this other thing done.” 

Neill: What do you do? 

Julia: I usually get the other thing done and it’s just a good feeling. It’s fascinating because now that I’m allowed to do it, I don’t really want to do it.

Julia: Neill, you’re so amazing. I want to wrap up with one last question I have and of course, anything else that you might want to add that could help our listeners. Self-awareness comes down to being aware of how you think, aware of how you’re spending your time, aware of you. Sometimes it is so hard to just go, “What am I doing? How am I acting?” A lot of us are in denial. How do you learn to be self-aware? Are there any tips for that? 

Neill: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. I think some people come to self-awareness not wanting to be aware because they’re going to judge themselves. The whole point of this is not to judge yourself, it’s to use yourself and your life and your brain as a science experiment. Be curious. Why did I say that thing? Why did I think that? Why didn’t I follow through on my plan? Simply to learn, not to judge, but just to gain awareness about what’s going on.

If you’re someone who wants to evolve, grow, which I would imagine everyone who’s listening to your podcast is in that camp, this is one of the best ways to do that. But you can’t judge yourself to learn. You have to really come into it as a curious observer of yourself. 

One of the tools that might be really helpful for your listeners to start doing to really become aware of what’s going on in their mind is to do what I call a ‘brain dump’ or a ‘thought download’. I have my clients do this every single day. You take five to 10 minutes and you dump out everything that’s in your brain. You write it all out on a piece of paper so that you can see what your brain has offered up to you.

I will tell you, some days I do this and I can see why I feel like crap. Those are terrible thoughts. Other days, I think, “Man, I feel amazing. I am a total badass,” and I can see why because my thinking is so great. Just to become aware, and then you can see patterns of things that happen for you in your brain that maybe you didn’t even realize were playing out.

I think if you’re going to do this work, you really have to come at it from grace and compassion and curiosity, not from judgment or that you are doing something wrong. 

Julia: I love that concept of curiosity, because so often when we do become self aware, we are really hard on ourselves. I’m notorious for that. I love to self criticize and think, “You did that wrong. What were you thinking? What did you do?” You have imposter syndrome and it loves to rear its ugly head when you start being more self aware, but attacking it from that place of curiosity and like it’s a scientific experiment is a great way to kind of flip the script in your head. You always say thoughts lead to feelings which leads to action which leads to results. 

Neill: Right. When you’re first starting this work, you want to just see what your brain’s offering up to you, how it made you feel, what you did because you felt that way, and then what it created in your life. Then you get to decide, is this thinking helping me? Is it serving me in any way? If it’s not, that’s where you get to engage your human superpower of decision and choice. Do I keep this or do I choose something different? 

Julia: Your super human power. I love it. 

Neill: It is! We’re the only species that really gets to choose consciously and on purpose. So, that is our superpower. 

Julia: It’s such a gift, to be able to choose. Who would have ever thought that whenever someone asks you what you want your super to be, you say, “I want to be able to choose.” I have that and I can do that every day, with myself, with my thoughts, with who I hang out with, all those things. What I eat, how I behave, I have the choice whether to judge something or not. That molds and grows me into the person I want to become, whether that be an entrepreneur or a corporate person or whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s up to us. 

Neill: Absolutely. Even down to the choice of how many hours am I going to work this week? And what am I going to do? 

Julia: And I’m going to work 10 hours, but not do 40. 

Neill: Yeah, exactly! I think sometimes we forget the power of the decision and choosing purposefully and consciously.

Julia: Oh, such good advice, Neill. You’re so amazing. Is there anything else that you’d like to add that you think might provide people a value when it comes to making the most of their time? 

Neill: Yeah, the last thing is to piggyback off of that idea, you can decide how many hours that you work and also decide what you create in those hours. What you’re going to complete, what you’re going to have accomplished at the end of that time block, or the number of hours that you want to work. When you do that, you’re really taking charge of your time in a way that most people never do and that’s what will set you apart. 

Julia: And it grows your confidence too.

Neill: Totally. Yep. 

Julia: You just feel so good when you’ve said to yourself, “I’m going to work this much time,” and when you actually do and you have efficiency and you keep going and you don’t let yourself be distracted and you knock off your list, it is such a good feeling. 

Neill, you have given us so much incredible information and tips and I think you’ve really made people think a little bit differently about time. I cannot thank you enough for joining us today. You’re awesome. 

Neill: Thank you, Julia. I so appreciate you letting me be on here and really share this message with your listeners. I hope that it resonates and helps some other working moms as much as it’s really impacted my own life and that of my clients.

Julia: It will. How can people find you if they want to learn more? 

Neill: They can go to my website, or check out the podcast, Unbusy Your Life. So much of what we talked about today, I explore in that podcast and all kinds of other topics as well. 

Julia: Awesome. Thank you so much, Neill. We appreciate you.

Neill: Thanks Julia. 

Julia: That’s all for today, everyone. Thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me. Let’s #dothework and keep that conversation going. 

If you’d like to chat more join me over on Instagram @juliakelleher and on Facebook @5caratcollective. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. 

Join me next Tuesday for another episode and have an amazing week!