In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

26. Transformative Tips for Time Management in Caregiving

• Marika • Season 1 • Episode 26

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What if you could reclaim your time and energy while juggling the demanding responsibilities of caregiving?

In this episode, I delve into the delicate balance between caregiving and personal well-being. I’ll explain why our default approach to getting more done often falls short and leads to burnout. Drawing from my own journey through exhaustion, I’ll highlight the critical importance of setting boundaries and offer practical solutions that can genuinely support caregivers.

If you’ve ever found yourself trapped in a cycle of worry and indecision, I’ll help you identify the sneaky time-wasting habits that drain your energy and productivity. By bringing awareness to these time-draining habits and adopting more effective strategies you can break free and reclaim your focus  .

Finally, I’ll share a list of "time makers" - time management techniques that will help you be more effective while prioritizing self-care and emotional well-being. You’ll learn how to streamline your to-do list, master the art of saying no, and focus on one task at a time to boost your efficiency.

This episode is designed to guide you in protecting your well-being while you manage the demands of caregiving so that you can be more present with your loved ones.

Resources:
Stronger Together - When you are caring for your partner
Join my email list - go to www.coachmarika.com
16. Making Decisions With Confidence - Part 1
17. Making Decisions With Confidence - Part 2

As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.

Marika Humphreys:

caregivers and care partners. Thank you for being here with me and, before we get started, I want to let you know that if you are not on my mailing list and don't want to miss any of the weekly newsletters I put out or any of the announcements of some upcoming events I've got planned all for people caring for their partner, you definitely need to be on my mailing list to not miss those, and the easiest way to get on my mailing list is to go to my website and at the bottom of the page you will have a chance to sign up for free tips on caregiving. So that is the way to make sure you don't miss any of the super exciting stuff I have planned. I made a list of a whole bunch of things that I want to do to support you in your journey of caring for your partner, and some are going to be some Facebook lives. I've got some upcoming webinars planned, maybe even a challenge that I've done once before and was a lot of fun. So lots of things coming up.

Marika Humphreys:

And I also want to let you know that I do have a private Facebook group. It is for people who are caring for their partner. It's a group I've had for a couple of years and we just are at the over 400 member mark. And I created it because when I got on Facebook and started looking for some groups for people caregiving for a partner or cancer support groups, there were a ton. However, so many of them I just found not quite the environment that I was looking for. I wanted a place that was a little more inspirational and uplifting, and what I found was just a little bit not that exact environment. It was a little depressing, to be honest. So I made my own Facebook group, and if you want to have a place where you can share your story and your struggles but also have inspiration and tips and kind of a growth mindset as part of a community with other people that are going through caregiving for a partner as well, then go join the Facebook group that I host. It's called Stronger Together when you Are Caregiving For your Partner, stronger Together when you Are Caregiving For your partner. I'll link it in the show notes too, so free to join. You do have to answer a couple of questions. I do want to keep the community full of people who are caregiving for a partner, because that's what unites all of us, but after that, it's a place where you will have tips I get on there and do some lives and a place of inspiration and strength and growth, as opposed to just a place to talk about how hard it is, which is welcome as well, right, but with a perspective of how can I grow and learn from these challenges. Okay, so enough of the chit chat.

Marika Humphreys:

Today we're going to talk about time and how to make the most of your time and also what are the things that are wasting your time, because I think most of us feel like we don't have enough time. When someone schedules a consultation with me, I have them write a little bit about what they're struggling with as a caregiver or in their caregiving journey, and frequently people say not enough time to myself or feeling overwhelmed with everything on my plate. So those are common challenges for caregivers. Time is one of the things that we all wish we had more of, and when we're caregiving for our partner, there is even more on our plate more tasks, more responsibilities demanding our time and attention. So today we are going to dive in and talk about time, specifically through the lens of being a caregiver or a care partner. So I think the problem that I see and that I had myself is that having more things to do along with our existing responsibilities is what happens when we become a caregiver or a care partner. We just have more stuff right, more things on our to-do lists, more responsibilities that take our mental and emotional energy, and a lot of times that can be a gradual increase. So it's hard to even notice that we've piled on all of these things, because it happens slowly or incrementally and before we know it we're doing a lot of things as a caregiver, and I think most people approach this challenge with the idea that we'll just do more. I'm just going to do more, right, that's the simplest solution. I just need to be more efficient, more productive. I think that's most people's first response. Just add more to the list, fit more in in the day.

Marika Humphreys:

We try to plan better, we try to get more organized, and it seems like a simple, obvious solution, and I do think that can work for a while. I think we can discover that we can be incredibly productive when we need to be, but there is usually a limit and what will happen is you'll get exhausted. That's when burnout happens, right? That's when overwhelm and exhaustion hit. So it is when we haven't recognized how much we're trying to do and we just keep trying to push, push, push through it all. I think there's definitely value in planning and being more organized to try to be more efficient, but it's a strategy that only goes so far. At some point you're going to have a limit right. You're going to have a limit with both your time and your energy.

Marika Humphreys:

I will share my story, my experience of really encountering burnout. My approach to time management during periods when my husband just wasn't able to do the things that he normally did in our home was to simply just add them to my list. I took the same approach that most people do. I just tried to do more, and I also felt like I should. A lot of that was my own expectation of myself. I'll just get more done. This is just what we need to do.

Marika Humphreys:

It worked until I got just so exhausted that I started to feel a little angry, a little resentful. I felt very stuck. I felt very powerless because I had all this stuff right and not enough time and not enough energy. But I also felt like I didn't have any other options. Everything felt important, everything needed to get done. So some of it was the actual tasks and some of it was my thinking about it. I recognize that now, but I didn't at the time.

Marika Humphreys:

So I want to talk about it because I think we do tend to think it's all important, it all needs to get done, and have learned and really seen that that isn't true. We do need to take a different approach. So that is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast episode, because, I mean, everybody struggles with time in regular life and in caregiving. I think it just is another challenge that can make it even more difficult, because the problem with simply trying to do more is that there is a cost to it and the cost is usually exhaustion and burnout. And people can push through that a lot of times or just become incredibly strong and push through the overwhelm and the exhaustion, but they will reach a breaking point in which they simply run out of fuel.

Marika Humphreys:

Maybe some of you are there. Maybe, if some of you are close to being there, maybe you're still pushing through, but you're close to hitting that breaking point and what I have seen is that by that point it's common to have bitterness and anger and resentments come up around our situation and having to do so much and that feeling of resentment about having all these extra responsibilities rust on our shoulders as the caregiver or the care partner, then you start feeling stuck. We don't feel like there's any options. We can't see any other choice but to try to just be more efficient or just have less to do, which seems impossible. So when we get in that mindset, it's just our whole focus becomes on how much we have to do and how little time there is to do it, and so the cost is not just physical fatigue, but it's also mental and emotional fatigue. That is where burnout really comes in. Burnout is a function of being mentally and emotionally fatigued, not just physically fatigued right, that's just fatigue. But when we call it burnout, it's because our mind and our emotions are also worn out.

Marika Humphreys:

So I want to step back for a minute and think about just time in the abstract. Why is time so valuable to us? I mean, many people would say it is the most valuable thing that we have, because it's limited. When I ask myself the question of why is time so valuable to me, the answer I come up with usually is because of what I can do with it. I think probably most of us want to be able to use our time in the way that we want. It's how we spend our time that makes it valuable. However, we aren't often super deliberate about how we spend our time to spend the time that we actually do have, and so today's episode we're going to talk about what are the things that are time wasters that you may not realize are taking your time, your precious time and what are the things that are time makers or time maximizers the things that you can do or the ways that you can think that actually make use of your time the most efficiently and the most effectively. So I want to call your attention because some of these things are not what you'd expect, and, again, it's just about bringing consciousness to something that maybe you have gone a little unconscious on, and if you're feeling burnout, then it's a good indicator. That is a time to think about how you're spending your time and what can you reevaluate, what can you rethink. So I'm going to go through a list of both a list of time wasters that I'll call them, and then a list of time makers or time maximizers, and my intent here is just to trigger your brain and have you look for the things that maybe are showing up in your own life and what you could do differently, just to call attention to it, right? Because once we start noticing, ooh, that's something that I do and it really never thought about it from the perspective of wasting time, but once you see that you won't be able to unsee it as easily and then you can make some changes from there. So we always have to start with awareness.

Marika Humphreys:

I think a lot of us the reason we do, we have ways of wasting our time is in part because we operate so frequently out of habit and in default mode, or what I call default mode. It's really just habitual ways of thinking and being. So much of the things we do day to day, the ways we go about our day, everything in our life is habitual, and there's nothing wrong with that per se. It's just that you have to shake things up. Just because we do something habitually doesn't mean it's effective or useful. It just means we've just done it over and over again, and a lot of times that's how we create our unuseful habits is just by repeating them over and over again. So to shake things up, you have to bring awareness to it first and the ways of thinking a lot of times can be habitual, but also create a lot of wasted time and are super ineffective. So here's the list. Let's get started on the list of time wasters.

Marika Humphreys:

All of these things that I'm going to talk about here are actions that use our time, that distract us, that use up our energy, that keep us unable to focus, and in those ways they waste time. And the first one is a big one for caregivers, and it's worry. Worry is a very useless emotion really, yet many of us do it a lot when we're caregiving, but it's just a mental exercise in negativity. We fuel this worry by thoughts of what, ifs and maybe and oh my gosh, this might happen, right. So worry is kind of like a mental hamster wheel that we get on and it just spends endlessly. We keep going and in this hamster wheel of worry, but we never actually get anywhere. And that's why it's a time waster, because worry doesn't actually solve problems. We focus on possibility, things that might happen, possible scenarios, but we don't actually create a solution for it. We don't solve any problems. We get stuck in focusing on the problem as opposed to the solution, and that's why it steals our peace of mind, right, it drains our energy and it distracts us all without actually producing anything. So that is one of the ways. Those are the ways that worry wastes time. So if you're a big worrier, just take note. It's something that is going to cost you time in those ways.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, another time waster is indecision. I think this is a big one for caregivers as well, because we are making a lot of decisions In addition to the decisions we make in our regular life. We are making decisions with our partner or making care decisions, sometimes for our partner. There's a lot of additional decisions that we have to make when we're a caregiver or a care partner. An indecision not making decisions, getting stuck in analysis or thinking things over is a kind of sneaky thief of time. And I say sneaky because sometimes it feels necessary, feels valid. But when we put off a decision, when we stay in confusion or this was probably where I default to is spending time in endless research we don't progress, we don't move forward, and the more we delay, less information we actually gain, so we don't move ourselves closer to making a decision right.

Marika Humphreys:

The current model in a lot of technology and like startups, tech startups is about iteration, and part of the reason for that is because it's super efficient, time-wise. Apple doesn't try to get out a perfect product the very first time. They put out a product and then they iterate on it, right? They fix problems, they improve some things, they maybe add another thing and then they put out another version. That has really become the standard in tech companies and any apps, but it's a great model to think about, and the reason why that works in technology is because it's super time efficient, right? Instead of trying to have this perfect solution, which would take endless, endless time to get there, just put out a best version and then you make it better and then put out another version.

Marika Humphreys:

So I'm not suggesting that you do that necessarily in your personal life or with care decisions, but I really think it's a helpful way to think about a lot of things we can do Make a decision, learn from that decision as we move forward, and then you make a new decision. You can't always do that necessarily in every single thing, but it is a way to think about indecision. Trying to get something perfect will keep you stuck, it will waste your time and it takes your energy as well, being in confusion or waiting to figure out what is the perfect solution or the right decision here is going to take time and energy. I did do a whole podcast on making decisions, so I'll link that in the show notes. But if this is an area where you feel like you are guilty of and you hadn't thought about it from the perspective of stealing your time, check out that episode, cause that's a really good one as well to think. I give you a new way to think about decision-making. It has really changed my life. I will say this is an area where I used to be very much a person who got stuck in analysis and trying to find the perfect solution and maximize every decision, and it took forever. I really struggled making decisions and now I have learned to make very quick decisions, good decisions, but I make decisions and I don't second guess myself and I just move forward, and sometimes I have to make another decision and I don't second guess myself and I just move forward, and sometimes I have to make another decision. Sometimes things don't turn out, so making decisions, getting stuck in indecision, will waste your time.

Marika Humphreys:

Another one is arguing with reality. Even though we want life to be fair and just, it isn't and things happen that we don't like right. But when we spend time arguing with reality or wanting things to be different than they are, it costs us time and really energy when we are thinking things like this shouldn't be happening. This isn't fair, shouldn't have happened that way. It's a distraction. It keeps us not in the present right. It keeps us focused on the part of life that we have no control over. It's, for example, complaining about traffic doesn't make the cars move any faster, it just wastes time and energy. But yeah, we complain about traffic. It's the same thing. It's arguing with wanting things to be different, arguing with reality.

Marika Humphreys:

One of the ways that this showed up for me I would say this showed up for me during my husband's cancer journey and I mean even still I catch myself doing this a little times is wanting my situation to be different than it was. There was a period of time I remember thinking I just don't want to keep doing this, and at the time it was really frustration with the medical system, seeing my husband really in pain and struggling with the treatments and the fatigue of all of that. But I kept saying it over and over I just don't want to keep doing this. I was just exhausted and it kept me feeling sorry for myself, and whenever we're stuck in self-pity, it's a huge time waster. Essentially, though, I was arguing with reality. I was wanting my situation to be different than it was, and I'm not saying that those thoughts aren't going to come up. They are because you're human. We all are. We all don't like it when things aren't the way we'd like and things are bad when we are struggling. Nobody likes that, but the quicker you can catch yourself wanting things to be different and feeling very frustrated, and if you notice that you get stuck in that place, it will waste your time because it's going to distract you and keep you in a self-pity cycle. So you got to be onto yourself and move forward out of that line of thinking as quick as you can.

Marika Humphreys:

Another time waster is not feeling our emotions. Avoiding them, not knowing how to allow our emotions or trying to avoid them actually takes more time than it does to feel them, because when we avoid our emotions, they don't go away. Instead, they lurk and they fester in the background, and this often will lead to more anxiety and feeling. Unsettled and unaddressed. Emotions keep us distracted. They will wake you up at night so you're not getting sleep deeply and solid sleep. They take our time by wearing us down emotionally and physically. So, while we might think we don't have time to feel, we actually don't have time not to feel. You have to allow your emotions, and there's a way to do this that isn't just about wallowing in an emotion. You can learn to allow an emotion without it, without getting stuck in it, and I think that's why we tend to try to avoid our emotions, because we don't know how to do that. So that was something I had to learn and that's something I teach my clients to do. But it's super powerful, because avoiding emotions doesn't work either. That will just wear you out and then rob you of precious time.

Marika Humphreys:

Another time waster and this will be no surprise to anybody is all of our distractions Playing with our phone, unplanned TV watching that maybe goes on way longer than you intended. Tv watching that maybe goes on way longer than you intended, eating out of boredom or nerves over drinking. Or sometimes I've heard someone say they procrastinate. I love that. I am not a huge procrast cleaner, but maybe some of you are right Doing easy tasks to avoid doing harder tasks, and for some people they turn to cleaning because they're trying to avoid doing something else that they really should be doing or plan to be doing. So that is another time waster, right. These are all just distractions that take up our time, and often we distract ourselves when we don't either know how or don't want to sit with our emotions. That is still, for me, something I struggle with, and all humans do. Emotions can be hard, so distractions are a way to avoid emotions.

Marika Humphreys:

For me, a big distraction, if there's emotions that I don't want to feel, is food, and when I'm feeling overwhelmed. I have noticed this countless times. Middle of the day, if I'm just feeling overwhelmed, the first thing I think is, ooh, what's in the pantry? It's a total, total distraction. My mind just wants to eat something because it feels like at least it somehow feels important, even if I'm not hungry. But it's really just a way to avoid doing what I need to do. So overwhelm comes from feeling like you have too much to do and not enough time, and yet when I need to do so, overwhelm comes from feeling like you have too much to do and not enough time, and yet when I want to eat. Well, guess what that does? It takes time, but it distracts me from that feeling I'm having.

Marika Humphreys:

So another reason distractors are time wasters also is because, while we might think that five hours of TV watching is like a way to relax check to see if you actually feel rejuvenated afterward Usually we don't feel rejuvenated from our distractions, right, they distract us, they don't rejuvenate us. So there is a difference and you really want to be clear Are you doing this to distract yourself or are you doing this to actually rejuvenate? And TV watching, I think, is a great one, and probably phone scrolling In some cases it can feel a little bit rejuvenating. But I think that's a very, very tricky one because a lot of times it's mostly distraction and we don't have any more energy afterward, right? Whereas I know myself, if I go for a walk, that is one of the easiest and most effective ways to get some energy back in my day Literally like a five or 10 minute walk, and I will feel so much better. But if I spent five or 10 minutes scrolling on my phone, I'm not going to feel any better. So distractions don't rejuvenate us. That is the biggest difference. If you have some of them that feel like they're self-care, you have to check how you feel afterwards, if you're rejuvenated or if you feel a little bit rested, then it's self-care. If you don't feel any better, even more distracted, then it's not, it's a distraction.

Marika Humphreys:

And speaking of self-care, not taking care of yourself is a time waster. We think we can save time by cutting out our exercise or by getting a quick meal instead of preparing a healthy meal, and in the moment we may get back 30 minutes or an hour, but it will cost us time in the long run. Not taking care of yourself is about it's a long-term gain and a long-term time maximizer, but in the short term, yes, it does take time, but I really want to stress that when we don't, it will cost you time and often it will cost you time in a big way. If you don't take care of yourself over a long period of time, if you neglect your health for a long period of time, that's when illness and injury and sickness comes up. So when you don't take care of yourself, you don't have the energy to sustain and continue to do all the things you need to do.

Marika Humphreys:

When you are not getting good sleep, consistent sleep, you'll be exhausted and not able to focus. That is a big one for me. If I don't sleep well, I am just so inefficient the next day. And the older I get, the more important good quality sleep is to my ability to be effective and efficient in my work life. I also get grumpy. If I don't sleep well, I get very grumpy, and that then has other consequences. I maybe interact with people in a way that I'm not proud of, and then I feel guilty and there's a whole cascade of effects. Right, if you're not getting enough movement in your day, you will feel more drained and lacking of energy. When you're not eating well, you won't feel as good in your body, and when you're not feeling good in your body, it's hard to focus on others because you're just feeling bad. So all of those reasons are why self-care is not a luxury, is a necessity. When you don't do it consistently, when you neglect your care over a period of time, that will cost you time in the long run it really will.

Marika Humphreys:

Another time waster is sticking or getting stuck in overwhelm. It's an emotion that actually robs us of our time. When we spend time thinking about and feeling overwhelmed with all we have to do but not actually doing those things. It wears us out because our mind doesn't actually know the difference between thinking about things and doing them. So the thinking about them is just as tiring as the actually doing them. And I will still say that this is what I struggle with, not so much overwhelm. But you could also say procrastination is the same thing, right, it's thinking about and putting something off because we feel like it's going to be so much work and the amount of energy that that takes is probably more than it would take to actually do the thing right away instead of procrastinating on it. So overwhelm and procrastination are both time wasters. They take our energy without producing any results.

Marika Humphreys:

And in that same line of kind of topics is trying to keep things in your head without writing them down. That is another time waster. When we try to remember things or not forget things, it will be distracting to your mind because our mind is not a good storage device. So when we try to keep our to-do list in our head, what will happen is your brain will go in a loop so that you don't forget those things, and it's very distracting to do that, and that is why you need to write them down. Otherwise you're going to keep your mind distracted with trying to remember important things. So it will be a constant distraction until you get them out of your head and onto paper, which is a time waster, right Distraction. Anytime we're distracted mentally, we are less efficient. In whatever we're doing, we're less efficient and effective, so we're going to waste time. So get tasks out of your head onto paper or in a calendar.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, I just actually made a list this morning of random things that I kept thinking, ooh, I need to do that, and I finally made a list right and got them out of my head, and the last one I want to talk about and there are probably more that aren't even on this list, but the last one I want to talk about I just thought of before I sat down to record this was taking responsibility for things outside of your control is also a time waster. Think for a minute what or who are you trying to control or trying to manage that is not within your control? Are you trying to manage your partner's mood or emotions? Are you trying to control other people's jobs, maybe at work? These are big time wasters. They will draw so much of your energy and your focus without producing anything.

Marika Humphreys:

I had a client who had a very responsible job and because of that, she just was used to taking responsibility for things. In addition to her very responsible job where she basically oversaw a whole care facility, she was also a care partner to her husband who had a reoccurrence of cancer and she had an ailing mother who was living with them. And one of the things that I noticed right away when we started coaching together is she just took responsibility for everything the people in her life, parts of her job. She was frustrated with her boss and basically assumed responsibility for the things that the boss wasn't doing and she didn't realize it because she was just so used to being responsible. But I had to point out that she couldn't actually have any control over some of these things that she was feeling responsible for but she had no control over and which is why she was exhausted. She was literally exhausted. So once she started realizing all the things that she felt responsible for and was trying to manage but didn't actually have control over, she recognized that that's completely crazy to do and stopped doing it. I mean, she had to slowly start recognizing all these areas, but once she stopped trying to control and trying to take responsibility for the things that were actually outside of her control tasks the people she got back more time in her life and mostly more energy, and then she had time to exercise, which then made her feel even more productive because she had a little more energy and less stress. So where are you trying to control or manage things that are outside of your control, outside of your realm of responsibility? That's a big time waster, okay, so hopefully that brought to light, maybe, some areas that you hadn't realized you were doing, and, if so, that's always a good starting point.

Marika Humphreys:

Right Is knowing where our challenges are, so that we can just make different choices Always. All of coaching is about making choices powerfully and deliberately. It's never about shaming, it's never about judging ourselves, even though those are human emotions that we can tend to do. It's just not useful, so, but what is useful is making deliberate choices, thinking about things and thinking how you want to be or where you want to improve, or ways that you want to do something a little better, and starting to work on those. So I want to give you now the things that will help you maximize your time A list of time makers actions that make the best use of your time or make your time more efficient and more effective, or make your thinking, help you to think more clear and focused and productively.

Marika Humphreys:

And the first one is the most obvious, and that's planning. Planning is the easiest and yet often overlooked activity that helps us make the most of our time. Taking the time to plan our day, write down our most important tasks, brings order to your mind. It will allow you to make decisions about what's important instead of just kind of going off of whatever feels the most urgent, and it gives you a structure to plan and follow right. So not only frees up time but it saves your energy as well. So planning, even if you feel like maybe you only associate planning your day with work, you can plan your weekends too, and maybe it is planning to have downtime. So you decide where you want to implement planning if you aren't already. But planning is an easy way to be a little more deliberate with your time and in line with that is making decisions and sticking to them. So I already talked about how indecision is a time waster.

Marika Humphreys:

Making decisions is a time maker and sticking to them meaning committing to the decisions we've made instead of second guessing them also is a time maker. Both of those things are very powerful. Every decision we make is an exercise in control and power in our life, because it's through our decisions that we have control in our life. So decisions keep us moving forward and cause us to feel empowered, and when we commit to the decisions we've made, we create clarity about the path that we're moving in. We know where we're headed and what steps we need to take, and that clarity gives us a sense of purpose and direction and it makes it easier to stay motivated and focused. So those are all the reasons why decision-making and commitment to the decisions we've made make time right. And another thing about making decisions, too, is it also builds momentum. One step forward makes it easier to take the next step, and even when a decision doesn't turn out the way we wanted or the way we planned, we still learn, gain experience, gain valuable information in which we can then make a new decision or another decision. So when we decide that we are going to learn from our decisions instead of beating ourselves up, then we keep ourselves moving forward. So making decisions and committing to the decisions is a huge time maximizer.

Marika Humphreys:

And equally, I think this area is one that is probably one of the hardest for us to do, myself included and that's constraining. Limiting what we do or what we focus on. It's something that is really hard to do. Most of us want to do all the things. Everything is important, but when we think everything's important, it actually means nothing is important because we're treating everything equally. Constraining means focusing on just the most important things in our life, and that requires decision-making, requires us to choose and decide what is more important and what can be let go of. Constraint means taking things off your list, pushing them till later or potentially saying I can let this go for now. That is hard to do. I know that's hard to do, but I also think is one of the most powerful things you can do when you're caregiving, because we tend to easily just add more to our list.

Marika Humphreys:

But I want to encourage all of you to do is decide what can you take off your list for now. There may be a different time in your life where you have the chance to resume that activity or to be more diligent about your house cleaning or whatever it is. But think about what you can take off the list. Okay, that is some of the. I think that's one of the most powerful ways to get more time in your life because it's going to give you so much more energy, be willing to let things go. Okay, it's a very powerful time maker and I know it is a hard one.

Marika Humphreys:

The the all, the the mores that we have in our life, the more stuff, the more tasks to do. All of that takes time. So when you can limit that, constrain your list down, take things off your list, it's going to give you time and along with that, the next one I have on my list is the ability to say no, saying no more often or when you want to. For some people it's really hard, and learning to say no may feel like a skill that they need to develop, especially if you're a people pleaser. But when you are caregiving, you cannot do everything and it may mean some people feel disappointed if you have to say no to them, and that is okay. People can be disappointed, but saying no is something we do to protect our time and our energy and it's a really good habit to get into. Before you say yes to anything, decide if you truly have the desire and the time. Otherwise, it should be a no, no, thank you, not right now. Appreciate the invite, but I'm not going to make it. You don't have to give excuses. You can simply say no or no. Thank you, okay, you don't have to feel guilty about that, and I know that's a practice. It is a hard one for a lot of people, so if you want some help on that, come see me. Lot of people. So if you want some help on that, come see me.

Marika Humphreys:

Another time maker is honoring your needs and I wanted to say it that way instead of self-care, because I really like thinking of it that way honoring our needs to take care of ourselves. But that, I think, is a bigger. I think when you think of it as honoring our needs, it's a encompasses more honoring our commitments to ourselves as opposed to constantly adjusting our schedule to meet others' needs. When we honor ourselves and our needs, it will actually save time and it's a skill. I know it can be difficult to do it first. Most of us are very adept at putting other people's needs first. We get very good at that and that feels very comfortable. But it comes at a cost and I think in caregiving you have to get really clear on where your limits are and where you need to constrain. So honoring your own needs means maybe other people have to wait while you take care of something that's important to you, maker, that I want to talk about is focusing.

Marika Humphreys:

This is a hard one. I have struggled with this a lot. Because we have so many distractions these days it's even more difficult to focus, and our phones being probably the biggest one. However, focusing on one thing at a time is the quickest and most efficient way to get things done. Multitasking is not efficient, and yet I think focus takes practice now, because a lot of us have trained our brains to get easily distracted. So focus does take practice, but it is the most efficient way to do something. We are much more effective when we focus on one thing until completion and then move on to a different thing. Trying to do multiple things at once is not efficient, and I think that's obvious when it comes to work. It may not feel as obvious when it comes to home, and it might feel like we can multitask, but I bet if you simply focused on folding the laundry and then doing the next household chore, you're still probably more efficient, and I'm sure somebody has studied that. You can look it up. I don't know the actual facts, but again, when we have all of our energy and focus to accomplishing one thing, that is always the most effective. So it is a time maker.

Marika Humphreys:

And the last one I'll talk about here is learning to allow and process your emotions instead of avoiding them. That actually makes time, because you don't lose time trying to avoid emotions. We often think that we don't have the time to be upset or down. There's too much to do. We don't give ourselves room for our emotions. But when we try to push them off, they just hang about and wait for us and they usually crop back up at the worst times. So if we don't take the time to feel and process our emotions, our emotions will come up when it's not a good time. So the quickest way around any emotion is directly through it. You have to give yourself time to feel. That is an important activity and will save you time in the long run. Okay, it's one of those kind of long-term gain activities. It may take some time in the moment and it will, but it will save you time in the long term.

Marika Humphreys:

So that is my list of time makers. There are, of course, many more that I haven't listed here, but I wanted to get your brain thinking and seeing areas where you maybe need to work on or things that you can adopt or just have awareness around. So much of the time we can make some improvements just by being aware, because time is precious and when we are stressed and worried about all we have to do, we won't be available and present and able to connect with our partner, with our kids, with the people we care about in our lives. We will miss the beauty of the present moment when we're stressed and distracted. So, learning to maximize your time, learning to constrain and make decisions and process emotions those are all ways that you will get back time and energy.

Marika Humphreys:

So I want to leave you on this podcast episode with an offer to take action this week. Just one thing, one area that you can work on that you can either minimize a time waster or improve a time maximizer. Just choose one from the list of things that I talked about, whatever resonated with you, and implement it today. Commit to it. See how much of a difference it can make in your life. Just one thing one area of improvement is all you need often to just get started. Okay, so that's what I'm going to leave you with is a challenge to take some action on this. Pick one area to focus on and make some time. Get some time back in your life. All right, my friends, I will see you next week.