Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

The focus on on using time well each day makes you feel like something to survive when you realise what you were doing.

When did you realise you were actually doing this to yourself?

So allowing you to use your time well.

And I think that I could productively write down my time well, but then that made me think, well, is that the best way to do it without having these pockets of inspiration, without having these moments of joy and novelty and these free time in your diary to actually explore that?

Yeah.

I mean, I think one useful thing that I find here, maybe what we're talking about is the distinction between like living in a planned way and living in a spontaneous way.

And that sense that a lot of us have that neither one is quite enough on its own because planning Scotch is the life from things.

But pure spontaneity, like you're worried that you might forget all the things that matter.

And that's what I thought for a long time.

Like, OK, I've got to find time for both of these.

And then you start doing weird things like time boxing space for serendipity into your schedule or some rate.

It's completely insane when you think about it in detail, but it.

Is, but we've both done that, yes.

Right, exactly.

Laughing because I'm.

Like.

We've both seen.

That this is the time of day, the 90 minute period when I'm going to be completely spontaneous.

This is something I find useful and you may not, but might just be how my mind works in a sense.

You're always acting spontaneously whether you like it or not, right?

So even if what you decide to do with a spontaneous moment is implement your very strict time boxing schedule, you are in that very moment making that decision, whether you do it consciously or unconsciously.

Unless you're literally like in jail or you know, someone's physically manhandling you put that aside.

You're always in the moment deciding what to do.

It's just that quite often, if you're a certain kind of, you know, anal person, you're, you're what you're doing is what you're deciding to do in that moment is carry out your strict plan that you made yesterday.

So I found this a very sort of liberating realization.

Again, it's one of these things not where you change how you live, but where you see more clearly how you're already living.

I'm always deciding moment to moment what to focus on, where to go, whether to keep a commitment I've made, whether to show up to a podcast recording, or just, I don't know, just fail completely to do so, right?

It's all technically within my power and all I need to do is sort of be aware of that and be aware that there are consequences of doing 1 and not the other and etcetera.

I think that makes it a lot easier to know when to stick with a plan and when to diverge from a plan.

If you see that what you're actually doing is the same thing in every moment, you're you're choosing how to use that moment.

And then I think it's very much easier to sort of say, well, OK, my plan for my day is to put a few hours into this project and try to get to this outcome with it, and then to do that and then do that.

And then something else arises and oh, OK, now I'm just making a decision in this moment about whether that's something to change course for.

You see what I'm saying?

I don't know if I'm expressing it properly, but like actually every moment is, is a choice.

Even You're not actually governed by the plan you made yesterday.

You're choosing to implement the plan you made yesterday.

And so the freedom that we fear losing when we stick to strict plans is actually always there.

The serendipity and spontaneity that we're a little bit scared of because it feels so out of control is just in fact the basic state of our whole lives.

So we're already in that kind of scary situation and all we all we ever need to do is try to make the wisest decision about what to do in the very next moment.

I don't know if you find that convincing or not.

You'll have to tell.

Me, well, sometimes I feel like I can just go through and add more and more on and be more unconscious.

I feel like the busier I get, the more unconscious I am.

That's the way I feel.

And actually when I give myself that time, but the pressure to have that time, it's also quite hard.

I mean, for instance, as as I am someone who loves to be busy, so I fill myself with more busyness.

Is that me moving away from feeling?

Yes, probably.

Is that why I'm connected to self compassion?

Yes, probably because I have to have it as an efficient tool to allow myself to have time off.

But it's interesting you talk about when we free up time in our diary or in our lives, we just fill it with more stuff.

And so we live in this weird moment where actually we tried.

I think about this now with AI, people are implementing more into their daily lives because of AI is allowing them to free themselves up.

They're becoming more efficient.

So we're put out putting more.

I think about this, the show started off the show with just me maybe one other guest five years ago and us just having this conversation back and forth and every weekend, OK, maybe I should record another show.

Now we're doing 3 shows a week, we're putting out more content than ever.

We've, you know, gone to YouTube.

We're we're making it bigger and better than trying to do more than ever before.

But we've also utilised our systems better.

So we've obviously bought in more AI tools, less people become more efficient, but my time is actually smaller.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think the real like I, yes, I am not here to question your content strategy, right?

But but what I but what I think is really important to connect to and I recognise equivalent things from my own different, different domains and stuff.

But like, I think the important question is always like, why are you doing it right?

And, and if tools and technologies, AI or otherwise, enable us to do more of the spend more time like expressing our passions and enjoyment of the world in action, that's fantastic and really good.

If you think.

And because you're human on some level, you probably do.

There's no shame in it at all.

That like this expansion process is like, it's a trajectory that would eventually get to a point where you'll be like, OK, now this is the correct size of things and this is the correct scale.

And we're on all the platforms that count.

And now we've arrived.

You know, I think that's the bit that one always has to be a little bit skeptical of just because obviously that is never going to be the case.

And like, you know, feels like every week I, I encounter news of a social media platform that I like literally haven't heard of its existence.

So clearly I cannot be expected to already be all over that with my thoughts and content, you know, So there's a pointer.

Again, it's this idea that like what you're ultimately, I think what we have to say we're doing when we try to sort of get on top of everything and conquer these mountains of opportunities or of demands, whatever they are in each different person's life is say like, you're not going to get your arms around at all.

You're going to have to stop at a certain point.

You're going to have to let certain people down in some contexts or turn down certain opportunities, you know, not be on certain platforms, right?

This is just a given.

It's baked into the world.

And then it's just a matter of of making those decisions as well as you're able.

It's the same with writing a book, right?

You could do it.

You could keep tweaking it for years until it was even better than you.

You know, you could just that isn't that is an absolutely unfinishable project.

It's finished when you develop the sort of agency and authority to say that's where I'm going to stop.

And, you know, that's the only thing we can do.

I think the the problem is, yeah, when we're sort of chasing this notion that at some point the world is going to tell us that we've done enough and, and, and, and reached the sort of the the correct place to be able to finally relax.

Thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode.

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