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Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the United States of America by Rodale Inc. 2017
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph 2017
Copyright © Pedram Shojai, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Mention of specific companies, organizations or authorities in this book does not imply endorsement by the author or publisher, nor does mention of specific companies, organizations or authorities imply that they endorse this book, its author or the publisher.
Internet addresses and telephone numbers given in this book were accurate at the time it went to press.
ISBN: 978-0-718-18919-8
To my wonderful family—Elmira, Sol, and Sophia.
My greatest desire is to stop time and be with you.
Any references to ‘writing in this book’ refer to the original printed version. Readers should write on a separate piece of paper in these instances.
INTRODUCTION
DAY 1: Assembling Your Life Garden
DAY 2: Time for Gratitude
DAY 3: Nature
DAY 4: E-Mail Time
DAY 5: When to Lie Low
DAY 6: Anxious Time
DAY 7: Making Time in Your Schedule for You
DAY 8: Workouts
DAY 9: Digesting Thoughts
DAY 10: Time at Your Desk
DAY 11: Dream Time
DAY 12: When Less Is More
DAY 13: Chunk Time
DAY 14: Digesting Emotions
DAY 15: Mealtime
DAY 16: Time Earthquakes
DAY 17: Doing Nothing
DAY 18: Deceleration Time
DAY 19: Cutting People Who Suck Your Time
DAY 20: Big Life Events
DAY 21: Family Time
DAY 22: Time to Digest
DAY 23: Podcasts and Audiobooks
DAY 24: Communication
DAY 25: Dealing with To-Do Lists
DAY 26: When to Go All Out
DAY 27: Eternal Time
DAY 28: Time to Catch Your Breath
DAY 29: Deathbed Wisdom
DAY 30: Gardening
DAY 31: Framework before Work
DAY 32: Listening to Noise
DAY 33: Time on the Ground
DAY 34: Smiling
DAY 35: Drinking from Infinity
DAY 36: Cutting Existing Commitments
DAY 37: Workplace Shuffle
DAY 38: Daydreaming
DAY 39: Time Audit
DAY 40: Time and Money
DAY 41: Prayer
DAY 42: People Have Different Time Stamps
DAY 43: Purchase Decisions
DAY 44: Chair Time
DAY 45: Enjoy This Place
DAY 46: Pulling Weeds in Your Life Garden
DAY 47: Music
DAY 48: Quality Time with Your Family
DAY 49: Time and Technology
DAY 50: Setting Rituals
DAY 51: Stopping Time to Make Love
DAY 52: Phone Time
DAY 53: Relax the Back of Your Neck
DAY 54: Social Media Day Off
DAY 55: Five Breaths for You
DAY 56: Progressive Relaxation
DAY 57: Seasons
DAY 58: Reactive Decisions
DAY 59: Sweating
DAY 60: Time in the Sun
DAY 61: Teatime
DAY 62: Time by a Fire
DAY 63: Time and Light
DAY 64: Regular Breaks Daily
DAY 65: Shower Time
DAY 66: The Rings of a Tree
DAY 67: Building a Legacy
DAY 68: Time in Bed
DAY 69: How Many Heartbeats Do I Have Left?
DAY 70: Bath Time
DAY 71: Cardio Time
DAY 72: Time in the Dark
DAY 73: Enlisting Help
DAY 74: Time on a Lake
DAY 75: Bird-Watching
DAY 76: Car Time
DAY 77: Time and Weight Gain
DAY 78: Time with a Tree
DAY 79: Your Bucket List
DAY 80: Time to Heal Your Body
DAY 81: Vow of Silence
DAY 82: Trading Time
DAY 83: Time under the Moon
DAY 84: Learning Animal Tracks
DAY 85: Times with Low Sleep
DAY 86: Time to Read
DAY 87: Snack Time
DAY 88: Time for Your Neighbors
DAY 89: Utter Relaxation
DAY 90: Turning the Light of Awareness Inward
DAY 91: Stretching Out Trapped Time
DAY 92: Traumatic Events
DAY 93: You’ll Be Pushing Up Flowers
DAY 94: Time Lost
DAY 95: Creative Time
DAY 96: Time with the Stars
DAY 97: Eye Contact and Face Time
DAY 98: Boredom
DAY 99: Waiting
DAY 100: Time ROI
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
This is a book about the crazy life we live in which time is always scarce.
We’re all struggling to find time in our lives, but somehow there’s less of it to go around each year. We’re too tired to think, too wired to focus, and less efficient than we want to be. We feel guilty about not getting enough time with our loved ones.
Our perception of the scarcity of time is coupled with the epidemic of stress in the modern world: Stress makes us feel like the walls are closing in on us, which certainly doesn’t help us feel better about time. We live in a culture that has lost the script and is absolutely frantic about the loss of time.
This concern about time is warranted. Time is the currency of life. We have a certain amount of heartbeats with which to savor life and really taste it. Our time with our families, loved ones, pets, and hobbies is precious, and we cherish it. We also trade our time for money. This money buys us shelter, food, vacations, and college for our kids. We can also squander our money, and it’s as though we never had that time at all.
We develop health issues when we’re less conscious of time. We then wish we had some time back to make things right. Time is all we have, and it’s our most valuable gift in life. When we run out, well, the game is over. We can look back, but we can’t get it back.
When we don’t have a positive connection with the flow of time, we lack purpose. We wander around, aimlessly squandering the time we have, only to regret it later. We get so lost in time that we can’t even stop to look at the future and think through the impact of decisions today.
We see this not only on a personal level but also on a societal one: Our biggest political and environmental issues all stem from our personal relationship with time, which is in distress. We can’t slow down. We can’t stop consuming and polluting.
We all know that we feel starved for time, but what are we actually doing about it? Precious little.
This book is designed to change that and bring us back to a healthier connection with time. By adjusting our relationship with time and finding our center, we can take ownership of our commitments and reprioritize where our valuable time is spent and with whom. In a world where everything is available to us in an endless stream of information and opportunity, the onus is on us to control the gates and take ownership of our time. Our energy, our money, and our time are linked in ways we often don’t think about. This book teaches us how in a simple, easy-to-follow, and proven methodology. I’ve helped thousands of people find more time and peace by becoming Urban Monks.
My goal is to guide you toward what I call time prosperity, which means having the time to accomplish what you desire in life without feeling compressed, stressed, overburdened, or hurried. Time prosperity brings us peace, better decisions, better health, more family time, and a realignment of our priorities in a way that helps us bring fulfillment and purpose back. If you can control your relationship with time and achieve time prosperity, you’ll bring down your stress, have more energy, gain more fulfillment, and actually get more done.
So how do we achieve time prosperity? We learn to stop time. In this book, I will walk you through ancient spiritual practices and practical life skills that help us stop time by tapping into our innate wisdom, taking control of our calendars, and developing solid boundaries around time commitment. Think of this as the practice of mindful time management.
At the heart of this book, I walk you through a practice called a 100-Day Gong. Based on an ancient Chinese practice, a gong is a designated amount of time that you allot to perform a specific task every day. You pick a particular practice (or set of practices) and designate them as your gong and diligently practice them every day, without fail, for the time period. This not only builds resolve but also forces us to wake up and pay attention to our day-to-day routines. We know that our everyday microhabits lead to the lives we have now. Making small, simple yet significant changes along a longer period of time is the way forward. Change a little here and there and eventually life takes off in wonderful ways. A gong is a powerful way of not only building focus and determination but also ensuring that you train regularly. A gong is a dedicated act of self-love that snaps you out of your daily trance and brings the light of awareness to your consciousness. The more we practice, the more we wake up and the better off we are.
Because it takes at least 90 days for a particular good habit to burn into your nervous system, I have found the 100-Day Gong to be the most appropriate length to practice. You can think of it as a 100-day ritual that helps instill new habits. We all need rituals to snap us out of the trance of modern living and into a deeper personal interface where true change can happen. Instead of asking an already busy person who’s on the verge of breaking to add one more thing to her chaotic life, we’re going to take something you’re doing already and provide a swap that will help you liberate more time and energy each day. We’re going to check in, relax a bit, and slightly alter a current habit by offering up a better way. We do this each day and slowly build better routines.
Some practices will stick, and others will not. That’s fine. The key is to slowly and gently unlock more time and therefore more energy and enthusiasm in your life through the practice. You’ll keep some of the efficiencies or maybe come back to some later in life, but taking a 100-day walk through your life will fundamentally transform your relationship with time, energy, money, people, and life itself.
With short chapters, each day offers a quick lesson and action plan. That’s it. Some of the lessons focus on specific activities that you probably wish you had time to do. Some focus on general ways to find more time for however you want to use it. Some may be easy for you, and others may rattle your core. Over 100 days, life will be different. You will be different, and your relationship with time (and therefore life) will be fundamentally transformed for the better.
The ideal way to use this book is to run through it from start to finish over the next 100 days (yes, that means start now!) and simply do each day’s practice. As you roll forward, you’ll find that certain things have come along on the ride with you. You may have huge realizations one day and fundamentally change the way you do a certain thing. Other days, you may go through a practice and not connect with it deeply. That’s cool. Roll forward day by day and see what habits you pick up along the way. Write your notes all over this book. Journal in it and circle things. This work is your process. It’s your innate wisdom that’s being tapped as we go. Document it.
Once you’ve finished your first 100 days, I recommend using this book randomly each day. Let’s call it gong roulette. Carry the book around with you and randomly open to any chapter and make that your day’s gong. You’ll have seen that practice at least once in your first pass, and now you’ll have a chance to revisit it. You’re never going to be the same person when you come back to a chapter, so you’ll learn much about your journey as a human on this planet as you go.
Now go live your life and practice it. Let’s get to work. We’ve got 100 days together, starting today!
Today we look at life through the filter of a natural metaphor. Imagine your life is a garden. You have limited water and need to leave space for each plant to flourish. Some may be bigger and more important to you than others. Some you may not even like but are obliged to keep there.
Think about what’s important to you. What would make it into your Life Garden? Family? Career? Health? Relationships? Music? What’s important in your life?
List these items and then imagine how much energy needs to go into the sustained growth of each. Think of your energy as the water you need to nourish and grow each plant. It comes in the currency of time, effort, willpower, and attention. If you were to adequately nourish each plant, what would it take?
Some may require far more time and energy than others. Make an allowance for that. New cars cost money. If you want one, you’ll have to either make more (which means more water in the career area) or take away some funds from your family or elsewhere. Take a cold, hard look at what you say you value and then reconcile that against how much water (time, energy, attention, money, focus) you have to keep that plant happy and healthy. Can you manage to keep certain plants alive while directing the flow of your water to certain others for the time being?
Get realistic about how many plants you need to water and cultivate. You have room for five to ten plants and that’s it. Guard against any new ones that may be introduced into your garden, and pull up the ones that are sucking valuable resources away from your most important plants. Consider these weeds. It takes focus and dedication, but this is critically important. By saying yes to something new, you’re effectively saying no to your existing plants. You’ll find yourself watering newcomer weeds and diverting away from the plants you’ve deemed important in your life. Does this sound familiar?
This practice will help you grow more mindful. It’s important to set a Life Garden and then use it as a filter to see if new plants can root. Does something fall within the domain of an existing plant? If so, how much water will it pull from the others? Can you afford the shift? Is it a completely new plant? Where will you draw the water from to make room for it? Is that the best use of your resources? Be honest.
Qigong means energy work (qi = energy and gong = work). It is the cultivation of one’s personal energy through a yogic practice. The actual term “gong” is used to describe our practice here.
Over time, with qigong and meditation, you’ll have access to more energy, personal power, and clarity. This’ll help you draw upon more water for existing plants or newcomers. But for now assume your water (energy, time, and focus) is limited to what it currently is. With that, how do you need to allocate this water to make each plant flourish? Let’s get clear on where you want it to go and then assess if that’s what’s happening. If not, let’s make adjustments.
Using the Life Garden metaphor can help you be honest about how much time and energy you have to commit to things. This way you don’t overcommit, and you also simultaneously avoid the stress and regret that come with not getting things done.
When we align our goals with our plans, we plug in our focus and willpower to make it work.
Today we pull over and take some time to be grateful for what we have. Gratitude is good medicine and is always time well spent. It helps relieve stress and build positive energy, and it gives us great perspective on life.
When’s the last time you did this? Are you hardwired to be grateful, or is it something you have to remind yourself about? Practicing gratitude is healthy. It helps paint a worldview of optimism and hope. People who practice it are consistently happier—we’ve seen this in multiple studies.
What tends to happen with people who are depressed and stuck is a phenomenon called stacking. This is when something bad happens to us and we take that isolated event and attach it to a series of other “bad” isolated events and create a pessimistic narrative.
Let’s say you stub your toe and drop your phone. People who stack go to a place where “this always happens to me; I have such bad luck; I remember when I tripped in college and was embarrassed” and on and on. A bill could come in and remind you of all of your financial woes, or something as trivial as your favorite team losing could trigger your personal narrative of how you married the wrong person.
It doesn’t make sense, but it’s what we tend to do. It’s a downward spiral that drags us into a “my life sucks” narrative that doesn’t serve us. It also makes us less fun to be around.
Gratitude is a wonderful antidote for this tendency. Today let’s practice this. Grab a piece of paper or pick up your phone and simply start making a list of all the things you’re grateful for. It could be your kids, your cat, your accomplishments, a tasty lunch you had recently, or the clouds in the sky. Just keep writing.
Spend at least 10 minutes going through this exercise and don’t stop. Even if it sounds stupid, write it down and keep flowing down your list. It may take a second to recall some of these items. That’s fine. The act of recalling them delivers a powerful therapeutic and spiritual value.
Once you’re finished with your list, stop and ask yourself how you feel. How did you feel before you started, and how do you feel after? Any difference? Take note of it.
As you go through your day, keep your list with you. Take a look at it a few more times and do a quick read through. Stop on any item that grabs your attention and let that gratitude fill your heart. Sit with the feeling of gratitude toward whatever the given item is. Bask in its sunshine, and let it fill you.
At the end of today go back and recall how you felt in the morning and how you feel on the other side. Any difference? Chances are, it’ll be subtle but definitely there. If you like what this is doing, keep your list with you tomorrow and add to it. In fact, see about adding things as they come up for you, and make this list a growing scroll of things you’re grateful for. The more you do it, the better it’ll serve you. Over time, this practice will radically transform your life and change your mood toward all things. It takes away the friction and allows us to live in a healthier, timeless space.
Today’s lesson is simple: Step outside and learn from the ultimate teacher. Nature is our guiding light when it comes to cycles and rhythms. She functions under a perfect ebb and flow of counter-balancing principles. Heat and cold balance with light and dark. Growth and decay are fully realized in cycles of the year, as are birth and death. Nature has all the wisdom you need, packed into plain sight.
We’ve simply forgotten to look.
Today’s practice is to step outside and spend some quiet time in nature. Even if a public park or back lawn of an office park is all you can access, I am positive that there is going to be some semblance of the natural world available to you today if you open your eyes and look for it. Go there.
Sit in a comfortable spot and start to breathe deeply to your lower abdomen. Relax into your breathing and sink into the sounds all around you. Feel the wind on your face and maybe take off your shoes and wiggle your toes into the dirt. If you have the luxury to fully immerse, get into some clay or bury your body at the beach. Break down the wall and allow for nature’s majesty to touch you and surround your senses.
Trees can get to hundreds of years in age, but the pebbles below your feet are millions of years old. Where did they come from? Were they part of some large rock aeons ago? How did they get here?
Now observe the dirt under your feet. Long ago, certain fungal elements evolved to break down rock and create dirt. With the coming of bacteria, Protozoa, nematodes, and multiple other life-forms, the dirt started to become soil. This allowed for certain life-forms to take inorganic materials and make them available to the plant kingdom, which then took off and spread across the planet. Those plants adapted to drink light and create energy from the sun, trapping energy in carbohydrate bonds. This became the fuel for certain animals to eat, and fast-forward several million years, here you are.
The microscopic life under your feet created a long cascade of processes that eventually allowed you to be here as a consumer of sunlight via plants. If you eat animals, you’re capturing the sunlight they ingested via the plants they consumed.
Life: It’s all around you. You’re breathing it in right now as you’re reading this. Millions of bacteria and viruses just entered your lungs and are all over your skin. They help you interact with the natural world all around you. They help defend against invaders. They are part of the ecosystem of your body, which is part of the ecosystem of the planet. This is all going on while you go through your day, millions upon millions of life-forms living their lives, oblivious to your bills or petty dramas.
Sit outside in the symphony of nature and notice the oddity of scale. On the one hand, you’re this universe of life with bugs in you and on your skin, all interacting as an ecosystem. On the other, you’re a tiny speck on a single planet at the edge of a regular galaxy that is light-years from the next.
Up and down it’s all amazing, and you sit in the middle of all of it. You are a focal point where infinity collides into a single point of time and space. How can you make sense of it all? The only way is to open your heart and fall into the wonder that it induces. This way, we don’t take ourselves so seriously. It helps us think about the big questions and puts in perspective where we stand in the grand scheme of things.
You only get a moment of time here as the person you think you are. What are you going to do with it?
E-mail has become an integral part of our lives. It became a powerful way of communicating, which quickly became the new norm for businesses all over the world. E-mail is great. You can attach files, pictures, and videos efficiently. You get people what they need and move on with your life.
So what’s the problem? Volume. We’ve become slaves to the inventions that were created to make life easier. Now we’re drowning in e-mails. Every store, car dealer, app company, and vitamin peddler is sending you e-mails almost daily. Spam has become an enormous issue that we all deal with, and it doesn’t seem to be going away.
Today we deal with this. It doesn’t make sense to look at your e-mail every time your phone or computer chimes. It distracts you from the task at hand and keeps you unfocused. What other people want you to look at isn’t going to get you through your day efficiently. In fact, every time you look away, you lose momentum and clarity in what you were doing.
Let’s set up some chunk time for you to check e-mail. Depending on the volume you deal with, set 30 to 60 minutes for e-mail in the late morning and another block toward the late afternoon. This is your dedicated e-mail time. The key is to get in, handle it, and get out. One way to do this is to run through all the messages in the morning block, handle anything that can be responded to in the first 5 minutes, star the important ones you need to get back to, and delete or mark as spam all the others. You’ll have another block later in the day to get to the longer ones if need be.
On that note, you need a good spam filter so the junk doesn’t even get put in your face. There are a number of good ways to do this, and you’ll have to find one that suits your unique needs. Make a habit of marking items you didn’t elect to receive as spam within your e-mail program. This teaches the software what not to send you and helps you keep your inbox clean. With spam out of your face, look at the key communications that deserve your time and start to back your way out of long e-mail chains that waste it.
The secret to e-mail chunk time is to book it on your calendar, communicate clearly (so you needn’t go back and forth), and clear your plate. This way it doesn’t sit on your mind and pester you; it also doesn’t languish unread or half-answered. The sweeter result of this play is increased focus and concentration on the work you’re doing. If you’re working on a document, stay in it. Spreadsheet? Cool, get your work done there. Driving? Well, what were you thinking checking your phone anyhow?
The goal is to maintain clarity in your work and handle e-mail at designated times. Rearrange your schedule to chunk your e-mail time, and make this your plan for the day. Try to do it again tomorrow, then the next day. In a few weeks, you’ll see the clutter dissipate and your life get better. Stick with this, and pay close attention to holding the line. Some discipline will pay off here. People may push back. That’s fine. Deliver everything that’s required of you and get your job done. Efficiency is key. Once people learn to sync to your new rhythm, the difference in productivity and sanity will emanate from your vicinity. The key is to get better at what you do by curating your day to serve you and free up your time.
There’s a time to jam and a time to chill. A wise person can know where she stands and adjust her speed accordingly. We all have deadlines and eras in life when time is tight and compressed; if we know how to protect ourselves during these times, they can be filled with energy, excitement, and momentum. But we can’t stay in hyperdrive for long, and if we don’t learn how to turn it off, we can get burned out or burned up. That’s how our economy is set up—the constant grind. If you can work your way off that hamster wheel, you’ll find yourself in a much healthier position in life.
If you’re stuck in such a lifestyle, it is prudent to understand the ebb and flow of these rhythms and adjust your own velocity manually. This means knowing when to slow way down. You still may need to go through certain motions, but this lesson is about learning to identify the moments when you need to be redlining and the moments when you can—and should—intentionally take your foot off the gas.
Today let’s examine the bigger cycles of your busy life. Are you in a “push hard and get there” phase, or are you between deadlines? Are you required to leave it all on the court right now, or can you ease off the gas and replenish your reserves? Only you can determine this.
One thing to take into account is your current energy level. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest energy), how much do you have right now? A score of 1 means you can hardly get out of bed and are totally depleted, and a 6 means you’re doing okay but certainly not feeling great. What’s your honest answer to this?
Now here’s the kicker: If you were to factor your willpower out of the equation, then what would your number be? You see, most of us are forcing energy out to keep up with the demands of our lives. We use our willpower to keep us in overdrive so we can get through, and our bodies, our minds, and our relationships are paying the price. What’s your honest number if you factor out willpower?
Now take that number and think about what you need to do for yourself to bring it up and feel better. When can you slow down? How would you do it?
Today take 30 minutes and simply only do what you feel like doing. This may turn into a nap, since most of us are usually exhausted. That’s fine. It’s a step in the right direction, which honors the spirit of today’s gong. From there, tonight start to think about what else you think would help bring balance to your life.
Can you take a week in the backcountry? Maybe you can factor in a day off now and again to go to the spa and catch your breath. Perhaps you need to learn to meditate and at least slow your roll on your daily burn. Each life is different, and we all need our own medicine to come to balance. What would your medicine be?
Now that you’ve taken an honest look at your energy levels and thought about what you may need to bounce back, look at your calendar and book some downtime for yourself. Make it a date, a trip, a sabbatical, or whatever it needs to be. Book it, and honor it. You’ll need the energy to get through your life with your health and sanity intact.
When can you pull over and take a breather? Book it in your calendar today.
The way the modern world is stacked up, unfortunately, we get a lot of anxious time. This is time spent in anticipation, frustration, aggravation, and, well, you know.
So how can we leverage this time to become our teacher? There’s information packed into our internal state and how it is cooking at these moments, so why not leverage it for growth?
The velocity of time is oftentimes too fast when we’re anxious. The blood flow is going to the hindbrain, which is telling us to fight, flee, or panic. It is being cut off from our internal organs, immunity, digestion, and higher reasoning. Again, sadly, we run a lot of miles in this lane, so let’s take this as an opportunity for greater awareness.
Scan your mind today at random times and ask yourself if you sense anxiety. Make that your mantra for the day. Keep scanning and checking in to see how you feel. When you identify a state that you would label as anxious, the game is on. Now, it could feel like “slightly anxious” or “agitated” and that’s good enough for our exercise today. The key is to grab some sample data from this state to reflect on.
Okay so you’ve identified an anxious state. Now what?
Ask yourself the next series of questions:
And then follow with the next series of questions: