Time is a Tricky Bitch

summary

In this episode of the Catapult Effect podcast, host Katie Wrigley discusses the complexities of time management and the importance of being present. She shares personal stories about her family, particularly her mother's health challenges, which have shaped her understanding of time and priorities. 

Katie emphasizes the need to calm the nervous system to effectively manage time and prioritize tasks. She introduces practical strategies for prioritizing wellness and breaking down overwhelming tasks into manageable steps. The episode concludes with a reminder to maximize the present moment and forgive oneself for past time mismanagement.

takeaways

• Time can feel abundant until it suddenly isn't.
• Running from problems only brings them with you.
• Meditation helps calm the nervous system.
• Identifying true priorities can reduce overwhelm.
• Cognomovement can aid in time management.
• Breaking tasks into smaller steps is effective.
• Forgiveness is essential for past time mismanagement.
• Maximizing the present moment is vital.

Resources

• Website
• Book your mini session
• Learn more about Cognomovement
• Try Cognomovement for yourself!
• Book a call with Katie

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:00.664)
Welcome back to another episode of the Catapult Effect podcast. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. And as always, I thank you sincerely for joining me. There are so many things that you can listen to out on the internet, and I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to what I'm sharing with you. And it also tells me that you're someone that wants to change your life for the better and allow yourself to have more peace and ease and more joy in your life. And I commend you for making that decision. So today,

We're going to talk about how time is a tricky bitch. We think we have all the time in the world until we don't. And then at the same time, if your nervous system is running hot, you feel like you have to do everything right now. This tends to overloading our schedules and leading to burnout sooner than later. So stay tuned. We're going to dive into those pieces and how you can better manage your time.

and look at time that's coming right up.

Thank you again for joining me today. So last week, I got to enjoy some time with my mom at our beach house. And we've been fortunate enough to have this house in the family for over 100 years. And we have done a lot to be able to preserve it. And getting that time with her was really, really precious to me. Four years ago, she had had a cognitive decline and she's openly talked about this with many people. And recently,

we've noticed that she's declined a little bit.

Katie Wrigley (01:36.564)
As sad as that is, and it's very sad and something that I'm continuing to work through, it's also really opened my eyes to what's important about being in the presence. And this is what I wanted to share with you.

We think that we have all the time in the world and I still find myself doing that. We think that we have time to fix our health, to improve our health and that may be true. But what tends to happen is if we don't have any red flags or we don't know how to listen to the early signs from our body that it's whispering and saying, hey, you, I need some help here. When we don't learn to do that,

suddenly we run out of time to take care of our health and we get some scary diagnosis like cancer or some sort of pain condition or some autoimmune condition. And now I point those out and I want you to understand I'm not saying that anything that's happening to you is your fault. But what I do know is that when things are lying in the nervous system and the body and we aren't dealing with them,

they lead to disease. There is so much science we have around that. One of my favorite books to help understand about how trauma specifically affects the body is Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. I think it's probably the number one book around trauma and helping you understand how the body is truly keeping the score.

but we think that we have time. And in my case, I ran for myself for more than 20 years. I was so unhappy. And what's funny though, is that my life looked really good on the outside, especially in the last few years, right before I was disabled. But when I say running for myself, I have moved to eight different states.

Katie Wrigley (03:40.737)
One of them was the one I grew up in, of course. But I've lived in eight different states, and I kept thinking that every time I moved, things would get better. And they didn't. Because the thing is, until you deal with what's under the surface and what's plaguing you, you're just bringing those problems with you. But the sad part about running from myself is that I ran from my family too.

And then when I made the decision to move to Maine to be closer to my parents, which was during the pandemic in 2020, I thought that I was going to have several years to enjoy their good health before they needed any extra help. But that's not what happened. What happened was my mom was bit by a tick within a couple months of me moving there and got a severe case of anaplasmosis. It's a mouthful to say, isn't it?

And she was able to come back from that pretty well. But then the following April, May timeline, she started to lose weight pretty quickly. And she notably lost some cognitive abilities. It turned out that she was having a thyroid storm. And her thyroid literally blew up, and pieces of it and a bunch of crap went into her brain, something that they call toxic encephalopathy.

As we started to dive down this road, as she was trying to come back and had to spend six weeks between hospitals and rehab before that whole stint was over, very stressful for her, she refers to it as her time in prison, very stressful for my dad and my sister and I, all of us worrying and wanting her to come back. And in that time though, we noticed that she wasn't coming back the way that we thought she could come back.

And so a future MRI showed that not only did she have the toxic encephalopathy, but she had also had several TIAs, which are mini strokes. All of these combined, her poor brain took so many hits. And at this point now we're looking at further brain decline.

Katie Wrigley (05:51.501)
And now she's doing cognitive movement multiple times a week and it's done tremendous things to help slow that decline. But my point in bringing that up is there I was thinking I had that time and then time was gone. The mom that I grew up with, she's gone. I still have a mom. I still love her. But the one that I grew up with, she doesn't exist anymore. Her brain has changed too much.

She's still her at the core. She's still forced to be reckoned with. She still has a fantastic sense of humor and you can get her cracking up really easily. But the pieces that, other pieces that made me identify with her as my mom, those things have changed. And that's okay. We're gonna get to what we can do to be present if we find that we have run out of time.

because beating ourselves up for what we didn't do, it's not gonna get you anywhere. Trust me, I've tried that route. I don't recommend it. Now the other tricky thing about time is when your nervous system is running hot, it starts to tell you that you need to do all of these things at the same time. And what this does is it leads to burnout. It leads to spinning your wheels with a whole lot of extra activities that may or may not be moving the needle.

And it doesn't allow you the space to be able to do any one thing really well. It stretches you too thin, but your nervous system keeps telling you, you have to keep going, you have to keep going, you have to keep going. You need to have this coach, you need to have that coach, you need to do this for your wellness, you need to do that for your wellness. You need to do this, you need to do that, you need to have a social life, you need to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah. The list is endless. We want to start to dial back those messages.

and start to get real with ourselves. So how can we start to utilize time to our best advantage? I'm so glad you asked. So the first thing is to start to get into a practice to be still.

Katie Wrigley (08:04.694)
and some of you listening may have a resistance to meditation, but taking that time for yourself, again, so much science, so many successful people credit their regular meditation, daily meditations, to their success. In that stillness, you're helping to tell the nervous system that you can be still without any screen time, without any noise.

without any anything in the silence and you're okay. You're also strengthening the prefrontal cortex, which is our executive reasoning center in the brain, by doing so. This allows you to be able to pause in these stressful moments and think and respond rather than react.

You can also do meditative music if you aren't ready to go into the silence yet. I encourage you to do a guided meditation or one that has music, something that helps your brain start to get into that nice, relaxed state. For those of you who are spiritual, allows those downloads to come in, that peaceful time to just be. One of the ways that I was able to allow more time for meditation was to tell myself that being

is doing and that by taking that quiet time, I'm actually doing a lot for myself. And I encourage you to take on a similar mindset.

Once we start to calm down and get that nervous system to slow down, then we can start to see what are our priorities? What are the things that we really need to do now? And what are some things that can wait? And I want you to take a list. Grab a pen and paper right now if you can. If you're driving, just go back to this later and do it when you can. But I want you to make a list of all the things that are on your to-do list right now.

Katie Wrigley (10:08.682)
Every single one. Every single thing that you're juggling. Things with your kids, things with your pets, things with yourself, your partner, whatever it is how you have going on. I want you to write it all down right now. Things you do for yourself, everything. And then I want you to start to number them.

and look at what is your number one priority.

What is your second priority? What is your third priority? These are the things that have no room for procrastination. These are the things that need to be done immediately. When you start to stack your days and focus on your priorities, you're going to actually find that you're going to start doing things a little bit differently. Because now you know what your priorities are.

and you know why you want to move towards them. So the second piece, let's actually dive into that a little deeper. Why are these your priorities? What are important about these things? If it's something to do with your kids, it's pretty obvious. You obviously want to make sure that you're being the best parent that you can possibly be. And I commend you for that decision. And I thank you for being such a present parent with your child.

See why these priorities are important to you. Really connect to that. Really, really deeply. Because that why is gonna help drive you through that procrastination.

Katie Wrigley (11:46.809)
So if you've been following me for any length of time, I want to give you an example from my life, but if you've been following me for any length of time, you know that this business and growing it has been one of my priorities. And it's been working to keep that as a priority. But if I sit down and I put pen to paper, helping my parents is priority number one. Helping my dad with the extra caregiving my mom needs, priority number one. They matter more than any work that I can do.

And my work matters. I get to really help people change lives on a deep, deep level that is so meaningful to me. But my parents have done more for me than anybody else in the world. And they deserve to be a priority of my life. And so I make them that.

Every week on Wednesdays, I go over there, I help assist in one of the Cognitive Movement sessions. She works with another practitioner because it's much more effective. Because I am way too attached to the outcome and that practitioner is not. She loves my mom. She's very attached to my mom. But she has a neutrality that I'm not able to master as my mother's daughter. But every Wednesday, I leave my house around 2.15, 2.30 or so and I head over there to help work with them in the session.

And then I help my dad because he's got some numbness in his legs and he's been told there's a hundred reasons why you may have numbness but none of them are coming from your spine. So we're getting feeling back in his legs, also doing cognitive movement. Slowly but surely, but we're getting there. And we enjoy a dinner together and we enjoy some laughs and Tangie goes with us and she's partially their dog too. And we really enjoy our time together.

And then I prioritize them again on the weekend. And I spend another half a day or so there. We hang out, we have another meal together. Helps take one thing off my dad's to-do list and gives me time with them. And if I could spend more time with them, I could, I would. And I'm actually working on some ways that I may be able to do that. And then my next priority.

Katie Wrigley (13:50.153)
is my pets and my wellness and they're kind of hand-in-hand to me. They're equal priorities. It's so important to me that I'm making sure that I'm taking care of my pets, giving them the love they need, I'm giving them the nourishment they need and in Tanji's case, I'm giving her the training that she needs. And my wellness is a huge priority as part of that too because if I don't have that wellness,

I have anything else. So actually, as I'm saying this, my wellness is actually a higher priority than my parents because if I'm not well, I can't take care of my parents. So let me just flip those around. And I give you permission to flip around numbers on your list as you're looking at your priorities. So my wellness is number one, parents number two, pets number three. Huh, see? Easy to change those priorities, but I still have them in the right order. In the way that I prioritize myself, every morning I get up.

I take Tangy out and then feed my cats, feed my dog, warm up my matcha chai latte that I absolutely love, and I do a few dishes to clean out my kitchen because for some reason my brain will not let me focus on work if my kitchen isn't clean while that's heating up. And then I go sit down and I do my miracle warning. I also have a huge glass of water within the first 30 minutes of waking to help rehydrate and wake up the cells.

and I spend that first hour in the morning doing my miracle morning. And this gives me the foundation for success for the day. It helps me with exercise, helps me with scribing, visualization, meditation, like we talked about. All of those things are included in what Hal Elrod calls his sabers. Absolutely love this app. I've been doing it for 592 days. It's 10 secondively in a row.

very proud of that accomplishment. But that is how I prioritize my wellness for myself. And I'm feeding my cats and my dog at the same time. And then I'll check in with my parents at least once a day, usually sometimes a day goes by, but I usually check in with them once a day just to make sure everything's going okay and that they don't need any extra help. And then I sit down and I get to work.

Katie Wrigley (16:05.034)
And I even prioritize what happens in the business. So the morning hours are where you're most likely to be creative and to be in flow. And so I reserve those hours to focus on the business and the tasks and the programs and the offers that I want to create. And then around late morning, midday, my calendar opens up and I can start doing client sessions. By prioritizing the day, this allows me to be much more effective. Now another way

that you can help start to figure out what your priorities are and to start to sequence things in time is doing Cognitive Movement. Now I'm not trying to sell you on sessions, but I do want to continue to speak about the power of it because we're going into the nervous system, we're helping to supercharge the brain, and we're helping to unwind and cool down that hot nervous system.

I'll give you an example of this. So as summer began, I thought, my gosh, I have all these things that I need to do. I want to be out and I want to be paddling out on my board. I also have a bunch of yard work I need to do. I need to mulch my yard. I need to do this. I need to do that. All of these things I needed, needed, needed to do. And they felt like they all needed to happen at the same time. Then I also had my trip to Norway that was coming up.

And I wanted to make sure that I was in a good place to really fully enjoy that trip and be able to leave all of my issues in America behind. It would be here when I could come back. And I wanted to be present on that trip. And then I did a Cognitive Movement session with one of my mentees in something that we call the Reconnection Set, which is a special way of utilizing vision and colors to really supercharge the brain. And suddenly...

all those things that I had to do immediately all at once, those got stretched out in time and sequenced. And I could see the logical order of it. And so the logical order to me, the multi-native being is done sooner than later. I was still a little late doing it, but I did it.

Katie Wrigley (18:09.902)
But that all needed to be done and I wanted that to be done so that my yard was just in maintenance mode when I got back from Norway. And so I postponed the paddling, which was pretty easy to do because it was pretty cold here in June. It wasn't yet warm enough to be out there on the water. And so I knew I could wait to start to paddle until close to the time I went to Norway or came back. And that's what I did.

the yards and maintenance mode. I don't have too much I have to do, a few things here and there. But what that did is instead of everything that had to be done at once exhausting myself before I went to Norway, I sequenced the things that mattered. I kept my priorities in order and I was able to do the things that mattered most, get those done and be able to take care of all the other tasks later. Another thing that I want you to look at is some of these projects that you've been procrastinating on.

We all have them. I know you do. I certainly did. Certainly do. In fact, I have had one that has been on my board for years that I'm going to take care of in the cooler months, and I'm holding myself accountable to that, to put everything that's in my storage in my basement into plastic bins so that the humidity doesn't ruin all the things that are in there. I don't know why I haven't done it.

But what I do know is when we have these tasks that are undone, it pulls on the nervous system. It takes energy away. Now I'd had another task too. I'd removed one of my gardens last year and I had all these landscaping bricks that I had no need for anymore. And they just sat piled in my yard. Kind of thought I was ignoring them.

But I actually wasn't. So this week, I put out an ad on Facebook Marketplace. And I said, these are free to whoever wants to come pick them up. Had a whole bunch of responses. And most of the bricks went yesterday. And they're coming back today to get them. I cannot even tell you the extra energy that that has given back because it's not bothering me anymore. It's been alleviated from my nervous system. I'm no longer spending energy thinking about that thing I need to do.

Katie Wrigley (20:16.268)
So in that list of priorities, I also want you to make a sub list and write down what are some of the low-hanging fruit, little things that you've been procrastinating on that are taking energy for you to do and knock those out, especially if it only takes a few minutes, just knock them out, get them done. You'll be so much happier.

That nervous system work is incredibly important to being able to set your priorities, to be able to sequence things in time rather than everything having to happen all at once. And it also allows you to have that presence, that stillness, to be able to sit there and look at these big projects. We all have these big tasks, these big goals, and knock them down into baby steps.

and then prioritize those baby steps. When we look at this big overwhelming project, overwhelm is never going to help any of us get anywhere. So we want to bring that down more into little bite-sized pieces and help move that forward. And the last thing I want to address is also the first thing that I started out with, how we think we have time until we don't. So the thing to do here, again, not beating yourself up.

for what you didn't do. You were doing the best you could at the time with the knowledge and awareness that you had. And spending time regretting and feeling guilty for all the things you missed, it's not going to work. Allow yourself to start to forgive yourself.

Katie Wrigley (21:57.419)
work through the guilt, work through the shame, and then make an effort and really follow through to be present with yourself, with people you love. Take that time. Enjoy them. That's what you can do. You can maximize every current moment. That's the other sneaky thing with time. We are never promised tomorrow.

We've had so many of them that we just assume that they're going to keep going. But one of these days, there won't be a tomorrow for you. There won't be a tomorrow for me. And we have no idea of knowing when those days are coming. So maximizing the moment, being in the present is one of the best ways that you can utilize time. Keeping your priorities in order, really attaching to the why they're priorities.

Allowing yourself to sequence things over time. Taking the time to be still. And understand that being is doing. Forgiving yourself for not handling time better. And for throwing it out. Shit, I threw out most of the time in my 20s and 30s. No ability to be present. Constantly in my device. Constantly running, running, running. I can't get those decades back.

But what I can do is I can stop adding to the list of regrets. And I can be more present now with my friends, with my family, with my pets. And I can fully soak up these moments and be aware in these moments because they're so fleeting and they're so special. And that's something that you can do too. Thank you so much for joining me today. And as always, until next time, please be well.