Find The Time

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries. Snozzberries? This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions People That Confined the Time by Allen Branch. For this article, let's define a successful person as a person that is well known within their industry, does interesting work, has a following of industry peers, and an income that supports them well enough that they're not stressed out about money.

We follow these successful people on Twitter, read their blogs, buy their ebooks, and listen to their talks at industry events. We put them on a high pedestal. We tell ourselves they've risen to this place of excellence due to many factors which we, unfortunately, do not have. They have tons of extra time because they have fewer responsibilities. They're smarter than us.

They're in a metropolitan city. These are simply not true. Popular, interesting people in the tech industry seem to have extra time to travel to industry events, the time to learn new things or contribute to open source, time to write blogs, screencasts, ebooks, and even Twitter. You're probably like me, kids and a spouse, a house that needs the grass cut, and plenty of other family obligations. We normals think, oh, those people must not have the same obligations that I do.

Newsflash. I'm sorry to say, these people are busy just like you. Finding the time is a skill in itself. It's a game of seeing the hundreds of things you need to get done and being able to place tasks in the order of things you need to get done now and things that'll help you in the long term. It's asking yourself these questions.

Is this task something I can push off for now? Use procrastination to push back on unimportant things. Is this the best time to do something creative? Steve and I have a standing rule that you write in the moment of inspiration. You do not wait to write.

The same might be said for an illustrator that wants to try a new technique or illustrate something to showcase his work. What have I done lately to market my skills, my products, or my services? This is super tough. Usually, when you're at your busiest, you need to pop your head up and release something that we'd consider marketing. Finding the time can even mean borrowing time from sleep, TV, and hobbies to instead spend it on more effective things.

Successful people have only mastered one skill you do not currently have. They're able to find the time to build value for their careers. As you become better and better at finding the time, you'll notice people saying, when did you have time for this? And you'll smile. The guy that wrote this article is named Alan Branch, and he and a buddy cofounded a company called Less Accounting.

And he's one of my absolute favorite people to follow on Twitter. 1, because he's just hysterical, but 2, because he's always talking about something that he's done or something that he's built. So he runs less accounting. He builds these awesome lamps in his garage out of, like, old industrial parts. He builds go karts from scratch with his son, and he built this awesome office shed in his backyard.

It would be impressive enough to just do all of these things that Alan is doing. But in addition to that, he writes up guides to a lot of this stuff and puts them up on his other site called thunder guides dotco, adventures for fathers and sons. So this post is particularly relevant coming from him, coming from a guy who started and runs this business, and does all this other ridiculous awesome stuff in his, quote, spare time. So he's got a leg to stand on when he's talking about finding the time, because somehow he finds the time to do all of this stuff. This is something that I've been noodling on for a while.

How do successful people find the time? How do people that put out a large body of work find the time to do it? And as I've been taking on my own side projects, I've started to realize that, yes, it is a skill. It is a skill to be able to find the time. Once I started looking, I was finding time in a lot of places.

One of those places that I've found time is after dinner. I've noticed that after dinner turns into time to go to bed faster than I thought possible. And most of the reason for that is because after dinner, we're watching TV, and we just keep watching TV. And so one episode turns into 4 episodes, and suddenly it's 2 hours, and, well, now it's time for bed. And this time watching TV is not good quality time with my wife, and we're not really doing anything productive.

So it's the worst of both worlds. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna decide, do we wanna watch TV? And if so, how long do we wanna watch TV for? And then we turn it off. Because right now, the problem is we just and Netflix is very helpful and just keeps showing us episode after episode after episode.

We're gonna start getting intentional about where our time goes after dinner, so that's one place. And another place that I'm finding the time is in the morning. My wife does not wanna hang out with me at 6 in the morning. I know that for a fact, and so I'm taking away from some of my sleep time to get up and work on some of my projects. And it really works because these projects give me energy.

They increase my personal energy way more than watching TV does at night. And at least for now, getting up at 6 instead of 7 and working towards my dreams gives me a lot of energy, and so I don't mind losing an hour of sleep because the things I'm working on are important to me. So that's what you got away in your head is, what am I gonna give up, and do I care enough to actually give something up? If you don't care enough to get up an hour earlier and hustle on whatever it is you're doing, maybe maybe you shouldn't be trying to do that. Maybe you don't really care about that thing very much, which is totally fine.

You just gotta be aware of that. And I can vouch for what Alan's saying. Once you start trying to find the time, you get better at it. It's a skill. You'll pick it up.

You'll learn it. After a couple of months of doing the work, a couple of months of just showing up every day, you'll be amazed at how much stuff you've actually created, and you'll be super encouraged and motivated to find even more time and to create more stuff. So then when people do ask you, how'd you find the time for this? A real and legitimate answer is practice. I practiced finding time, and it turns out I got good at it, and I found a lot of it.

The Music Makers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode, Move Your Feet. I found an old pair of shoes, got on the treadmill, and just started running. You can subscribe in iTunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at aaron@musicmakers.fm.