Oh crap. I have to take care of this.

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

How Time Dictates Perceived Value

This podcast episode is about 10 minutes long. If it was about 30 minutes long, would you find it to be more valuable or less valuable? And do you ask me then? Well, Mark, it depends what’s inside of it. It depends what the content is. Okay, what if it was an hour and a half? Well, you again, you’d probably say, well, what about the content? Uh, what’s the intent? But you would have your upper limit based on what you would think the value was of what it contained, right?

We do tend to assess value based on time and we do tend to set time based on value. Everything is about that. Your 30-cond elevator speech, uh, giving a talk of a certain length, introductions, if you go to a networking event and they say, “Well, give us your 30-cond or your 1 minute introduction.” And so forth, even your video calls are of a certain length, you have in your brain preset amounts of time that you think have a certain value based on certain activities.

So, knowing that, you may not be surprised by what I’m about to tell you. And what I’m going to tell you is that timing gives something more value.

The Connection Between Time and Energy

And what do I mean by that? I mean, if you say you’re going to, and again, I like to use housework because it’s universal. If you decide you’re going to clean up your kitchen, you have already decided how much time you think it’s going to take, how much time you’re willing to donate to it, right? If you look at your kitchen and go, “Oh my god, this is going to take 2 hours. How did this get destroyed? And and why am I so backlogged on what I need to do in it?” You’re going to say, “I don’t want to do that. Maybe I can do a shortcut. Maybe I can only do a piece of that that will take a certain amount of time.

Which is interesting because as I say, life is made of three things. Time, energy, and resources. And in that case, you’re not even really choosing the amount of energy involved. You’re choosing time. But time and energy are connected. Because the longer you do a thing, the more energy you use. So by assessing the time, you’re kind of assessing the energy. But in this case, you’re focusing more on the time involved because you don’t feel like you’re necessarily going to run out of energy. You feel like, look, I don’t want to do this for that long. I have other things I want to do. And obviously, we do that also in our jobs and our focuses in our life that say, “Hey, I’m going to do this. This, this takes a certain amount of time.” And we juggle time and there’s calendaring things. And that’s an entirely different episode.

So timing obviously plays a part. But what do I mean when I say timing gives it value?

How Constrained Time Increases Your Effort

What I mean is this. If you say you’re going to do a certain kind of cleanup or a chore or what have you and you tell yourself that you only are allowed to do it for 5 minutes, you will find almost invariably that you put a lot more effort into doing it because you’re up against the timing. And now you have tangibly measured the task. You’re not telling yourself you’re going to clean a kitchen. You’re telling yourself you’re going to give yourself 5 minutes of effort.

And what do we know about the way humans handle effort? We do things iteratively. And you can listen to the episode live your life iteratively. Oh my god, that’s a hard word to say. And basically that just means you grow on top of something. you you do something and then you you base it on top of that and you you keep building these layers on top of that until it gets really really good and better and better and better. So, you know, if you give yourself 5 minutes to do a certain thing and it’s the fifth time you’ve given yourself 5 minutes to do a certain thing, you’re going to do a lot more in that fifth time you do it for 5 minutes.

But let’s get back to the whole give yourself a certain amount of minutes. What you will find is that you focus so much on the time that you don’t focus on how overwhelming something is. You don’t focus on how actually long it takes or rather in actual English, how long it takes in actuality.

The Mundane Task Challenge

To understand what I’m talking about, I strongly suggest you play this little game with yourself. the next time you have to do something, a chore, whatever, something that’s mundane in your life, something that’s repeatable, something that is never going to get finished. And that lends us to something else I talked about, which is UPS, upkeep, productivity, and self-care. The upkeep part never is finished. You You don’t wash your hands for the last time. You don’t empty the dishwasher once. You It’s a continuing effort. So it gets to be a bit mundane.

So pick one of those. You pick one of those and then you say, “Okay, I only have x amount of time to do this.” You’ll find that you will focus pretty hard on what you’re doing. And it depends, again, as I said in the very beginning of this, it depends on how much time you give yourself.

If you give yourself too little time, you’ll find yourself rushing and you won’t complete it. But you’ll try really hard. If you give yourself too much time, you’ll just you’ll just do it and the timing really won’t play a part. So you could guess that it takes you 2 minutes to empty the dishwasher. You could take x amount of time to do x thing. But how do you make it a game every single time and really prove thepoint?

The “Add a Minute” Productivity Game

Well, what if you do it in 1 minute increments? So here’s the game.

You set a timer for 1 minute and then you go to do something. You say, “I’m just going to spend one minute on doing something.” And the rule is you have two choices. You either extend the timer before it runs out or when it runs out, you have to stop.

That means if you’re right in the middle of something and you’re just really close to the satisfaction, the dopamine hit of completing the task, you can’t. Okay. When you’re between those two bookends, you tend towards the adding time.

I know it sounds crazy, but it’s a very fascinating way to get something done.

So, what you will find yourself doing is adding a minute or 2 minutes to the timer. Now, if you add too much time, you have to keep working on that until the timer runs out.

So, there’s a there’s a negative and a positive to either one of the bookends, and you’re trying to find the happy middle space of getting that done. You want to get as close as possible to the actual amount of time it takes.

Mark, Mark, why would I waste my time and energy doing this? Well, first of all, it’s kind of fun. Well, it is for someone like me. And maybe you’re not someone like me, but you may also be someone who has a really mundane task to do. And by doing this, you figure things out. You will actually accelerate your problem-solving skills because you will be up against the clock.

And it is really a bizarre rule that you’re forced to continue working on the project or task or chore as long as the timer is running. You can’t say aha I did it because then there would be no fun.

How to Execute the Game with Voice Assistants

So my way of doing this very easily is to involve my resident robots. I simply say Alexa set a timer for 1 minute or 2 minutes right and then I go and I focus on my task and but in my head I have to keep the timing going. I can’t look at a clock or anything like that. And when I when I think it’s about to run out I just say add one minute to the timer. It’s that easy. you just use your voice and then you keep going and and then she’ll immediately say, “Hey, you have now you have 2 minutes and 3 seconds or you have 35 seconds.”

So, the game is to get as close to it running out of time as possible and complete the task as quickly as possible and not leave too much time at the end because you have to keep working on the task.

And you say, “Well, if you just do it for emptying the dishwasher, right?” Well, then you run out of things to do. So you want to do it for a task that really is really long, like something that has other versions of it. So instead of something that’s a one-off like emptying the dishwasher, you can do it for clean up this room or or what have you. Because obviously, as you know, as a someone who has a living space, there’s a lot to clean up. There’s the sweeping and mopping and there’s rearranging things, putting things away, countertops, all that stuff.

Tricking Yourself Into Getting Stuff Done

So if you choose something like...