Stop Fighting the Clock! Change Your Mindset Instead
How often do you glance at the clock and feel a surge of adrenaline in your gut, certain you won’t get everything done in time?
Is an important deadline just around the corner and you’re nowhere near finishing?
Maybe you’re dreading something, but you just realized it’s now or never. You gotta do it.
If any of these anxiety-inducing experiences sound familiar, you’re not alone. As AI innovations promise ever greater productivity and, simultaneously, burned-out workers leaving jobs seeking relief from Grind Culture, we’re all feeling the pressure to keep up the hustle. It seems there’s no way out.
An Alternative to “Time Scarcity”
Thankfully, a new book has arrived just in time.
It’s About Time: 21 Days to Reclaim Your Time, Energy and Self offers hope. Leadership coach and trainer Cody Williams invites overwhelmed professionals to examine unhealthy beliefs about time—such as we must beat the clock to win. He describes a much more sustainable mindset and provides a step-by-step path to shift our very relationship with time.
Former pastor and police officer, Williams compassionately encourages readers to pause and reflect on hidden beliefs:
“[W]hen you stop seeing time as an enemy and start treating it as a relationship to nurture, everything changes,” he says. “You shift from scarcity to presence. You create space for what truly matters. You move from living in reaction to living with intention—finding meaning in your days instead of just racing through them.”
Start Changing Your Relationship to Time
In the chapter on “The Invisible Script”, Williams talks about the insidiousness of our quiet self-talk about how much we need to get done every day—at work, at home, in the world.
Fueled by these unconscious scripts, we try to manage our scarce time resources. Even with smartphone apps and time management hacks, the clock always wins. If we base our self-worth on our productivity, we’ll always come up short. And we’ll likely burn out and be forced to stop.
Williams hopes we will take stock before that happens and offers practical ways to transform.
I felt profound resonance in the following lines:
· “You don’t have enough time to live your life with peace and purpose.” (invisible script)
· “What’s it mean to win when you keep losing yourself?” (reflection question)
· “You don’t need to earn rest.” (alternative mindset)
The book provides powerful exercises to reflect deeply on our internal time scarcity scripts and step back to look at what we value most.
Later chapters provide a practical and loving guide to help anyone who struggles with time to take an honest look inside and develop actionable strategies to flip the script and begin living with more presence,, meaning and joy.
If you’d like support on your journey to boost a greater sense of spaciousness and joy in your life, please book a discovery call and learn how Legs on Dreams Coaching can help.