EP 18 Time Billionaires: Reclaiming 90-Second Gaps for Happiness, Focus, and Agency with Rebecca Shaddix | Deep Work Out Loud
Julie Harris Oliver: Welcome to Deep Work Out Loud, the thinking that fuels our life, our work, and our leadership. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. This is a podcast where I sit with another professional coach and we do some work around a single concept, a piece of inspiration, a topic we've seen come up in our coaching, something that, something in that we're really into at the moment. And if we're very lucky when we're talking about it, we might demonstrate what it might look and feel like to work with a coach. But we'll see how this goes. It's all an experiment. And with any luck, you'll leave with something that you can apply and use in your work or your life, or both. And today I am here with Rebecca Shaddix. Although she does not call herself a coach per se, Rebecca is a business leader, writer, and host of the Time Billionaires podcast, where she explores how the smallest moments in our day can have the biggest impact on how life feels. a decade of experience, leading growth, and go-to-market strategy for tech companies, she brings a practical, real world perspective to questions of time, [00:01:00] ambition, and fulfillment. Her work helps high achievers rethink how they spend their time without adding more to their plate. Now, full disclosure, I met Rebecca about a decade ago when I interviewed her for my other 50%, a Herstory of Tech podcast, and she was very impressive at the time. And since then I've watched her career develop and now I follow her on LinkedIn and often learn something from what she is laying down there. So I'm thrilled to be able to talk with you again. Rebecca.
Welcome.
Rebecca Shaddix: Thanks. I'm thrilled to be here. Yeah, your podcast. 2016, I think was the very first podcast I was ever on, so this is fun.
Julie Harris Oliver: , It was very early in the days of me doing this at all.
Rebecca Shaddix: Awesome.
Julie Harris Oliver: , And now you have your own podcast. I love it.
Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah. Who would've thought,
Julie Harris Oliver: I would love to talk about the crux of your work that you're putting out there right now. So why don't you lay it out for us?
Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, so this is a culmination of my unofficial accidental COVID project when I realized that when I used to have a whole bunch of breaks through the day to [00:02:00] get outside in nature, I suddenly went from just waking up, walking to my desk, barely moving, repeat, and obviously that was draining.
So I just started listening to two minutes of an audio book. Between meetings or while my coffee was brewing, or just did pushups against the kitchen counter instead of scrolling my phone. And over time, that meant that I listened to hundreds of audio books a year. So now, a couple hundred six years after this unofficially started, realized that there's just an overlap of all the different sources of research, from neuroscientists to Buddhist monks of what it takes to be happy.
And I realize that there's six categories that all of them talk about, and we can get. All of them in our day, in 92nd to 15 minute gaps. And so I just started collecting some from the research I was doing, from things I was experimenting with until it became this big stack on my desk, and then that is becoming the start of a manuscript, and then that became the start of the podcast.
It's just sharing things that you can do. [00:03:00] In the 92nd to 15 minute gaps between the structured parts of your day, that research shows will make us happier and feel more grounded and more fulfilled instead of just frantically contact shifting from one zoom meeting, scrolling emails you don't have time to respond to, and going back, which feels to our brain like three times more work.
And that's just really what, it's just reclaiming these small gaps.
Julie Harris Oliver: That sounds incredible to me. 'cause when you say you have 90 seconds to do something, I'm like, no, you don't.
Rebecca Shaddix: Mm-hmm.
Julie Harris Oliver: Nothing can be done in 90 seconds, even two minutes a book at a time. I'm like, Hmm. Are you really getting the book? Say more about what this has done for you.
Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, so I, I think that's really where we throw this time away. The reason the podcast and the book are called Time Billionaires is that a billion seconds is 31 years. So if you have lived 31 years, or expect to live 31 more years, you are a time billionaire. But we throw away these 90 seconds at a time, these 120 seconds at a time because it doesn't feel like we're actually giving anything up.
But we. Wouldn't spend money like that, right? If you had [00:04:00] $5, you didn't know what to spend it on, you would do it for something that you didn't know made you unhappy. But we know scrolling makes us unhappy, and it really is all it takes. Actually, if you lay on the floor in what we call Shavasana and yoga, a corpse pose, literally lay on the floor, look up the ceiling.
For 60 seconds, it actually will reset your creativity. And even if it does nothing for you, even if you're not listening to a page of an audiobook at a time, five deep breaths outside, 10 pushups, this can all add up to a hundred pushups a day, an entire book in a week, depending on how you spend it, even if you're not doing any of that.
This simple act of not adding context shifting. So when you go from one meeting to another, that's one context shift. But if you go from one meeting. To scanning seven disparate emails, remembering to mark them unread, half formulating a reply, you don't have time to send. That's actually not just multi, it's exponentially compounding.
So you've contact shifted from what [00:05:00] was one to now what's exponentially more complex to get less done. So it takes your brain now at least three times more effort to do the exact same task, at least. It magnifies because that attention residue can take 25 minutes to overcome, so you never get out of this debt of shifting, shifting, shifting, feeling frantic, forgetting to mark an email unread, forgetting to reply to it, forgetting to finish the send all of this compounds in your brain and leaves these tabs open in ways that even if they don't feel like work, they actually are fatiguing your brain.
In the same way scrolling social media feels to our brain the same as knowledge work. So as you're scrolling Reddit posts, you're reading, scanning, filtering, deciding if it's relevant, deciding if you wanna reply or up vote, that's very similar as reading, scanning slack or teams messages, deciding if you wanna reply, deciding how urgent it is.
All of that fatigues your brain the same way. So when you get to three o'clock and feel fatigued, but don't know where your day went, a lot of it went here. And so [00:06:00] just casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't throw away your energy is huge. Then getting the benefits of more time outside, more time reading.
All of this just compounds, so all of it can be really small. And even if you just take one of your four minute gaps between meetings and do a wall sit or a 92nd plank, or five deep breaths outside, all of that actually can reset you. And even just staring off at the horizon for 30 seconds can reduce the risk of myopia.
A podcast guest of mine told me. So we know that this works. 17 minutes outside is the minimum effective dose to reduce the cardiovascular deaths of being inside chronically reducing carbon dioxide intake. So inside we have higher concentrations of carbon dioxide outside. We have lower, that actually makes us more creative.
It, it lowers our blood pressure, it makes us more creative. So even if you're just outside for 60 seconds, taking five deep breaths. [00:07:00] There are documented benefits to it and it'll feel better too. So the exact same time feels so much better and this kind of all just was a compounding accident. It doesn't have to be intentional.
This really isn't about hustle culture or working harder or doing more or setting goals. It's just about figuring out what you want more of and getting it. And for most Americans, we get less time outdoors than maximum security prisoners do. They spend two hours a day outdoors, 93% of us don't, but there's nothing stopping us from not feeling like prisoners in our office, in our home, et cetera.
So it's just all about, yeah. Reclaiming that, and if you just want a list of them, I can give you five that anyone can do any time. But I also find at the end of each Friday just asking, what went well this week? What didn't, what do I want? More of the, what do I want more of becomes the three micromoment exercises that I just write down on a post-it note and stick on my desk for the [00:08:00] next week.
Because to your point, by the time you realize you have two minutes. You can't decide what to do with those two minutes because then the two minutes are up and that defeats the purpose of less context shifting, less thinking. If you just decide, I'm gonna write a note to a friend, instead of scrolling social media, I'm gonna scroll my own camera reel on my phone, and if I come across a photo that reminds me of someone sending it to them.
Great. That's connection, that's gratitude and all of that is the same motion, so just replacing whatever that scroll is with scrolling, good reads, scrolling your own camera reel instead of scrolling Instagram or Reddit or whatever it is. Just being intentional with where that time goes. That's it.
Julie Harris Oliver: Okay.
You just laid a lot on the table. Question. The 17 minutes outside, are you saying you could get it 60 seconds at a time?
Rebecca Shaddix: Absolutely. Yep. 17 minutes.
Julie Harris Oliver: You don't to set aside a 20 minute break.
Rebecca Shaddix: Nope. Exactly. It can be 60 seconds at a time. Three minutes here, four minutes there. 17 minutes total per day is the minimum effective dose.
More is great, but not necessary. [00:09:00]
Julie Harris Oliver: Okay. I did a podcast with Laura London about forest bathing and um, we're gonna add that to the data. Cool. Of you don't have to do it all at one time. I love it. Other thing that stuck out to me of what you just said was planning ahead. Of what you're gonna do in those reclaim minutes so you're not scrambling 'cause you only have two minutes.
You don't wanna spend a minute and a half figuring out what you're gonna do.
Rebecca Shaddix: Exactly.
Julie Harris Oliver: Could you say a bit more about how you plan ahead to do that?
Rebecca Shaddix: Absolutely. I'll say a bit more about how I plan ahead to do it currently, but also give an entry level. Just pick one of these to start with. So now six years into this journey.
I have six categories of micro moments that came out of all this research. Those are reflection and mindset, and gratitude and mindfulness are part of that thinking and learning connection with other people. Movement, physical movement, nature and sensory awareness play and creativity. [00:10:00] So. I have a whole running Google Doc that I'm putting in a book and share in my podcast episodes of if you want some of those, what are things you can do for each of those categories?
So in my Friday reflection, asking those three questions, if what do I want more of is playing creativity for the next week. I'll pick one or two activities for my playing creativity running list, put them on my desk and we're done. This week it was drawing overlapping triangles. Just overlapping for me.
I like, I saw these triangles, all of them on a single sheet of paper. They don't have to all be the same type of triangle, but a research shows that actually is enough to shift you out of a lot of the logical analytical work and to feel more creative. Hold on.
Julie Harris Oliver: Slow down. Slow down.
Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah.
Julie Harris Oliver: What
Rebecca Shaddix: all you have to do is something different.
Then the default scrolling mode you're in. So if your day-to-day is a lot of analytical writing, you just need to break that up with [00:11:00] something that fuels a different part of your body. And it isn't complicated. Draw. So draw. So drawing
Julie Harris Oliver: triangles,
Rebecca Shaddix: overlapping triangles on a single sheet of paper as many as you want.
Setting a timer for three minutes is clinically proven to increase. Focus and creativity. That's it.
Julie Harris Oliver: That seems doable.
Rebecca Shaddix: It's so doable. You don't have to be an artist. You can make them squares or circles if you want. They can be isosceles and obtuse and equilateral triangles. They don't have to overlap. I like them to all be the same, but this is what I mean.
It is a lot smaller than you think, but the difference between where you are right now and where you'll be happy is a lot smaller than most people think. You don't need a total lifestyle change, a total schedule change. You have the time, and if you. Work 50 hours a week and you sleep eight hours a night.
Well then, what is that? 50 plus 56. So 106. So you have 1 68 [00:12:00] minus 106. The 168 hours in a week. That would give me 62 open hours a week. But it feels like we don't have time to do the things that we want, right? Yeah. Yeah. 'cause it's in these tiny fragments between things. So if you have 62 open hours a week, if you're working 50 hours a week, you can get little doses of more connection with people you care about in a single thinking of you text that you scroll when you find a photo from them.
It doesn't have to be grand. And so I'd recommend for people getting started to just take. These five exercises and just do with them what you will lay down on the floor in Shavasana, look up at the ceiling, and just feel yourself breathing. You can cactus your arms if you want. You could put one hand on your heart, one hand on your belly.
You can keep your arms by your side. Do whatever. Ideally, not fists, but do whatever feels right to [00:13:00] you. That's enough to get started. Do a 32nd plank. That's enough to get started. Think of one thing. You can see that's green. That's it. All of this can just bring you to being more present and more intentional, and it doesn't have to be grand.
It's not tied to any goals, et cetera. It's just enough to rebalance what feels like this kind of default hustle that a lot of us feel like we're already on.
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah. So you end up exhausted at the end of the day. So are you not feeling like that anymore? At the end of the day,
Rebecca Shaddix: I am feeling significantly less exhausted.
Resentful of where my time goes. I have a seven and a half month old, so sometimes best laid plans are, but no, I really am. I'm not overwhelmingly, I feel like I can do everything I want in a day for the most part, not necessarily. I would love to do a 90 minute yoga class and a 30 minute journaling session, end of 60 [00:14:00] minute walk.
I can't do that, but I can write down 10 things I remember from the day before. I can do five minutes. Of a guided meditation, I can take a three minute lap around my driveway. Yeah. So I feel like I can get everything that I want in some dose out of a day because I think about the floor of what I'll accept.
Not the ultimate goal of,
Julie Harris Oliver: yeah.
Rebecca Shaddix: Utopia. And I think that's the misconception about balance that I really fell into and felt like there was something wrong with me and my time planning that I really thought balance had to be. The maximum every day that I had to find time for both career and personal life.
And every day had to be a balance. But every day doesn't, there can just be a little bit more waiting on more personal attention this week, more work attention that week, less cooking this week, more cooking next week. It just really is about being intentional with what I want more out of that week, and that's where the Friday reflection [00:15:00] comes from, because it just focuses on.
What is going well that I wanna keep? What isn't going well that I may wanna look into and what do I want more of that next week? And the what I want more of those are the micro moments. So I make sure I get more of whatever I want in the following week in 92nd intervals.
Julie Harris Oliver: It feels like a relief. Yeah, because they're like, well, I can't work out because I don't have two hours to go to the gym.
Exercising takes so much time to go to Pilates. It's an hour that kind of takes that excuse away.
Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah. And it is. So, I don't know. The last time I went to a gym, because it's an hour class, you gotta drive and park. So it's two hours and get ready and it's kind of two hour commitment.
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah.
Rebecca Shaddix: That is just impossible for a lot of people.
But you absolutely can do a hundred pushups every day in 10 pushups at a time. You can do 30 minutes worth of planks, three minutes at a time. That's totally possible. And you can also do it when you would've otherwise been scrolling, which is making you less happy. [00:16:00] You can do the pushups, waiting for your coffee to brew.
You can do the wall sit, waiting for a meeting to start. It's not like we're looking for more time. We're just reclaiming the time That used to go nowhere. Yeah.
Julie Harris Oliver: That's fascinating. I will tell you actually, when I started. Paying attention to what you were doing with this time. Billionaire Business and Confession.
I am one of those late diagnosed, middle-aged, menopausal, A DHD women, which seems like such a stereotype. At least that's my entire feed, is just women talking about that. So common. So common. And I will tell you before. Being on Vyvanse, I wouldn't be able to use time. That felt too short. And part of it is, one of the symptoms is you have an appointment at 10 o'clock, you can't do anything before 10 o'clock.
Even though so many hours from when I woke up until 10 o'clock, I'd be like, well, there's nothing I can do. 'cause I have a 10 o'clock appointment. And so then my initial thought of 10 minutes, really I could do something that's starting to feel now like. [00:17:00] Oh, I can actually get something done in that time, which I didn't feel that before at all.
What if people are in that spot where that just feels insurmountable? If there's not a big chunk of time
Rebecca Shaddix: starting small the floor? I think that the compounding benefits and confidence of all of these things are more likely to make you happy than whatever this default is. You can look on your phone to see how long did you actually spend.
On Reddit, texting, et cetera. Something that doesn't make you happy. But really if you say that one of your three goals for today is to do 10 pushups, you could do one pushup at a time. You really could, as you're putting your shoes on, as you're getting out the door. So that floor is really just the compounding confide.
That you are the type of person who can set a goal and meet it. And for a lot of people with a DHD, having more constraints on time is actually very helpful. So saying before 10 o'clock, I need to get out the door to my appointment, do 10 pushups [00:18:00] or journal 10 things I can remember from the day before.
Or write a card to a friend. So if your to-do list is so small, just one of those things, it feels good. It feels like a win, and it's compounding. And I think the problem with anything that's not neurotypical is that we often feel like there's some kind of systemic. Failure on our part. Why can't I blank?
But that question is always asked, like, in the self condemnation way, why can't I be more organized?
Julie Harris Oliver: What's wrong with
Rebecca Shaddix: me? But what you actually answer, right? What's wrong with, but what if you actually answered that right? What's wrong with me? What? What's wrong with my day? Oh. I feel frantic, I feel like I'm masking.
If you actually answered that question, why can't I get more done? Well then that's your answer. Like, why can't I get more done? Oh, because I'm so focused on not being late because I'm so insecure about being late and the consequences that it becomes all consuming. Okay, well then I can accept that and I can do something with that.
But if we [00:19:00] just ask those questions like, why can't I in this way? That's just accusatory of ourselves. That's not productive. But just actually answering that question. What do you want me to do to your spouse when you get frustrated about something? Really? What do you want me to do? What would be better than this?
And so a lot of this is just accepting where we are and it's so small to get started.
Julie Harris Oliver: So when you said the floor is to do one thing, I heard, do the thing that's laying on the floor. Because Really
Rebecca Shaddix: Sure.
Julie Harris Oliver: I can't lay on the floor for a minute.
Rebecca Shaddix: Exactly. That could be the one I meant metaphorically, like we tend to talk about our ceiling.
Like I want to be aspirationally the kind of person who does a 90 minute workout three times a week. That is just not going to happen for a lot of us. It's not gonna happen for me. It's not gonna happen for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. Okay. That's the ceiling of where I'd like to get, but the smallest dose of that could literally be, if you wanna do a 90 minute yoga class, do one chair pose, [00:20:00] do one, Shavasana, any of that is fine and that's all compounding to then break this cycle of just giving away are micro moments.
Julie Harris Oliver: What else should I ask you about this?
Rebecca Shaddix: There's an intentionality and mindfulness behind this. It's a good question. I think that it's possible to do. Anything mindfully or mindlessly, and that's something that I've come to realize with a lot of these micromoment exercises that I've been collecting. A lot of them I knew I knew about.
Four. Four. Four box breathing. Mm-hmm. Four breaths in holds for four out for four, but I just rushed through that. Check, check, check. Okay. Got it. Got it. Or the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 5 things you can see. You, you know that one?
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah. Well it's one thing to know it, right? Oh, I got it. Therefore I don't need to do it 'cause I understand it is very different from, I'm actually gonna stop and do that breathing
Rebecca Shaddix: right or rush through it.
Because that's not the point. It [00:21:00] doesn't have to take much longer to actually say, okay, look at those things you can see. Appreciate them. Just pick a single color and see how many different things you can see, how many shades of green moss, different types of tree leaves, different grasses, different ferns.
All of those can just bring you into that present of appreciating. How amazing things are around you? Um, I have a, a seven and a half month old and I just started doing this, you know, the brown bear, brown bear? What do you see?
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah,
Rebecca Shaddix: we go outside. I just sort of say, Ellie, Ellie, what do you see? I see a red log looking at me.
And then we just go down whatever we see and it's just that simple of what do you see? Just pick red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and see something you can find. And. It just made me appreciate how amazing the things around us are, how in any given moment we really are safe. I think a lot of the anxiety, rumination traps of thinking about the present, ruminating about the past can go away when we [00:22:00] realize why we're doing certain things.
Like focusing on your breath in the Shavasana, for example. I initially thought it was just totally arbitrary that you focus on your breath because it's something to focus on. I thought I could have been focusing on my leg, but by definition, your breath is only ever in the present. It literally can only ever be in the present.
So it's not just a sensory focus, but it's a forcing you to focus on. At present. And if you do that of forcing yourself to focus on your breath, forcing yourself to notice one new thing in your environment that you hadn't noticed. For me, it's the shape of certain rocks in my driveway that is forcing mindfulness in a way that's hard to check.
I think a lot of the mindfulness exercises, you pull yourself outta them to see if you're doing them. Like if your thoughts are clouds floating by or thoughts are leaves on a river floating by seeing am I doing it? Pulls you out of it.
Julie Harris Oliver: Mm-hmm.
Rebecca Shaddix: But you can ask yourself, am I noticing something new? Am I noticing different shape leaves or different colors of [00:23:00] what I thought was the same model car?
Yeah. All of that is forcing you to be mindful and it's okay to just make it that small or one tiny thing that you didn't think to be grateful for before. It could be salt, it could be paper, and then all of those spark. For me, this compounding benefit, when I think about paper, I think about the origins of the paper, where it came from, how many people were involved, the printing press, the fact that I have something to write on that.
For so long, having access to books was just really not attainable to most people and to us it is, all of this is great. Or even just an orange that you're peeling. Just shifting that into like the. Positive gratitude of how many people were involved in making it, how it evolved and was largely domesticated from like, how cool is that, that we can control agriculture?
How cool is it that the atoms in anything you're looking at have always existed since the dawn of the universe and will always exist? 'cause matter can't be created or destroyed? All of it can be so, so small. It could be your [00:24:00] keyboard, it could be a mouse. Like all of these are things that you can really go deep on being grateful for.
And it, it just doesn't have to take very much time at all.
Julie Harris Oliver: I always think about like who was the first person who figured out popcorn? Who was the first person who figured out bread? I'm always fascinated by it. How do they figure out how to make caramel? Oh,
Rebecca Shaddix: sure. Or the fact that indigenous populations knew the medicinal qualities of certain things.
How do they test that or figure that out or, yeah. I think bread's a good one, right? Because if you just take flour and water.
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah,
Rebecca Shaddix: you're not gonna live for very long, but if you bake it, we can live indefinitely. How cool is that?
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah, it's amazing. Um, this seems so, this feels so timely to me because we see so much talk about how people are just at their wits end, and there's so much change and there's so much chaos and there's so much coming at us.
Every, we all know what we're living in right now. We're recording this in April 1st, 2026, and there's such a need for. [00:25:00] Centered, mindful, especially leadership. Half the battle now is holding onto yourself and being present and managing your nervous system. And this feels absolutely so simple as a way to do it.
Like you don't have to go on some big meditation retreat.
Rebecca Shaddix: No, you can do it anywhere. Waiting for a light to turn green, waiting in a school pickup line, waiting in a doctor's office. It doesn't have to be grand. It really doesn't.
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah, it's beautiful.
Rebecca Shaddix: Thanks.
Julie Harris Oliver: Um, I wanted to, I wanted to ask you about something else that I saw on your LinkedIn, and this may not even be relevant to this topic.
That's, and it might be a departure. I think that's fine. It's my podcast. I can do what I want. There was a post I saw that you did where after a meeting you don't necessarily write a bunch of notes, but you write down what was the feeling of that meeting or what was the feeling that you had walking away from it?
Can
Rebecca Shaddix: you talk more about that one single word?
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah,
Rebecca Shaddix: absolutely. It's a single word to [00:26:00] summarize whatever the first word comes to mind is, and I actually first heard about this, I was still living in la so it had to be pre 2020. It was probably 2019 or earlier, and it was the way this giant art dealer heist was brought down was because there was supposedly this really famous art dealer who sold all these artifacts and he sold a.
Fraudulent. Sculpture for whatever reason of that. When he looked at the sculpture, this really famous sculpture that was supposedly hundreds of years old, the very first word that came to his mind was fresh. And it had survived like carbon dating of all, it was displayed in a major institution at the time.
And this one critic looked at this sculpture that had fooled everyone for decades and was considered the original because the very first word that came to his mind was fresh. He couldn't explain it, and it turns out that it was that they had figured out some weird lemon juice thing to make it past the carbon [00:27:00] dating that they knew that the museums would do.
And because there's this intuitive knowing of our brains evolved from the. Space up. A part of our brains that's responsible for words is more recent, but the part of our brain that's responsible for a lot of our micro expressions and our intuitive knowing of what we're seeing is physically disconnected from the parts of our brains that connected to words.
So if you have to explain fresh, for example, he couldn't explain why he thought that this fraudulent sculpture was fraudulent when it was, when everybody else, I think Sotheby's had sold it. It was like it was considered to be legit. And I just thought, if you could do that, why not try this with meetings?
And so I just realized that after coming out of you come out an hour long meeting, you have pages of notes and pages of action items, but often what cuts through the noise is something like incomplete, tense, productive, unfinished, follow up. Not for me. Good. Whatever it is, and not just a single word I have on my note doc is just good.[00:28:00]
Great. Well that meeting was good. Check it off. Moving on.
Julie Harris Oliver: Done.
Rebecca Shaddix: If the single word is incomplete, okay, let's come back to that. And it has helped me with so many things, and I think, not least of all, can't remember if I posted about this or not. Probably not was just the word young that came to me after my first few series of one-on-ones with a direct report I inherited from a team that I came in to lead the team was up and running.
This was. An individual contributor and I was told that he was underperforming, I'd probably need to let him go with the next review cycle. But he'd been at the company for a long time, so he had some legacy knowledge that they hadn't. And after our first one-on-one, the word that came to my mind was just young and I couldn't explain it 'cause he wasn't chronologically young.
We were pretty close in age, but just the word young and it kept coming up for me. And a few weeks in, I. After some more conversations, I learned that he was the very first person in his entire family to leave the state he grew up in to go to college to have a corporate job. So there were a lot of just [00:29:00] implicit rules of a white collar job that had never been explained to him what you should or shouldn't explain to colleagues about your weekend dress attire, like things that you would or wouldn't say that just never had been explained to him, and it was impacting people's perception of his potential.
He was really good at the job like he really was, and he became the single highest performing person in the entire department. And my successor when I left the company, just from cutting through the, there's something here and just digging into why is the word young coming up when I talked to this guy, truly could not explain it.
And I would never, I never would have. And for a lot of these other meetings of like, Hmm, that felt tense. Let's go have a clearing conversation with the other person who led it. Just label. Just that label can take away this like generalized anxiety of the recurring meetings between these two departments.
And for whatever reason, these biweekly meetings, I just feel tense after them. Well, [00:30:00] let's go have a one-on-one conversation with the other head of the depart. Clear that up. So it's not just this lingering dread going into it. It's just that easy. Just that single word tense, young, good, whatever it is, will tell you.
Is there actually more here, or the act just closes it out in my mind. You can have seven action items out of a meeting and just close that out in your brain to go to the next one with one single word.
Julie Harris Oliver: I love that so much. We know so much more intuitively than I think we know that we do or that we listen to.
And honing into that is so incredibly valuable.
Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah. And we convince ourselves otherwise of like, if we, if something doesn't feel logical, we try to talk ourselves out of it.
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah. '
Rebecca Shaddix: cause where's evidence as opposed Exactly. Like why, why not? Don't be blank. Why. Yeah, exactly. Where is your evidence? But.
There's clues there. Any emotion, feeling single word is a clue. So why is this making me anxious? Why is this making me [00:31:00] think blank? Actually answering that doesn't take very long.
Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah, that's great. Thank you for explaining all of that. What would you leave us with going back to time, billionaire? What's one thing you can take away today?
Rebecca Shaddix: Um, I just think it's empowering to realize that we have so much. Power, for lack of a better word, over how we spend our time, but we often waste it in ways we just wouldn't with money. We would not buy an unflattering pair of expensive pants or food that we know makes us sick over and over. But we do that with our time.
We do things that make us sick over and over and buy things that we don't want. I think because as you started, there's not really this clear counterfactual or opportunity cost. We can just feel like this is how it is. But a lot of things that are not good for us are very normalized and very common, and we can break out of that agency over how we spend our time is a fundamental human need.
We all need to feel it. And giving that away is breeding resentment. I had a podcast guest, [00:32:00] Erica Swin, talk about how a lack of intentionality is a rec recipe for resentment, and we can do that. We can feel resentful of our spouse's jobs, et cetera, for this perceived obligation of, well, what was I supposed to do?
You did blank. But if you actually answer that, what was I supposed to do? Oh, I could have done any number of these things. I didn't get a chance to go to yoga yesterday because. Uh, my husband booked a dentist appointment that we didn't communicate well on. There's no reason to be resentful. It's okay.
Well, I can do here at our house while our daughter naps. There's just a lot more power all of us have over how we spend our time. And when you start very small, reclaiming it, feel a lot more confident, it just cascades into how other people see you. And it doesn't take much. It really doesn't. There's no.
Mecca of feeling like we don't have time. Poverty, you're never gonna earn enough or achieve enough out of this. Actually, the research shows otherwise that the more money we make, [00:33:00] the more time poor we tend to feel because your time is quite literally worth more. So there is no place of arriving past this.
You can claim it today in ways that'll be probably easier than wherever you perceive yourself to be. Working harder years from now, and that's all in your control and getting whatever you want out of your day is in your control. Even if it doesn't look totally like your dream aspirational ceiling. If you focus on that floor of, I'm gonna take five deep breaths while I enjoy a warm cup of coffee in the morning, that can take 20 seconds to do and there's nothing stopping you.
Julie Harris Oliver: Well, it reframes the whole thing that you're not then a victim of your time. Mm-hmm. You keep your agency and you don't have to wait until you retire to. Do a lot of the things you wanna do.
Rebecca Shaddix: No. And they probably won't feel the way you think they will then. Yeah. So you can get them now.
Julie Harris Oliver: That's so great.
Rebecca. I think you're brilliant. Keep on keeping on. Where can people find you
Rebecca Shaddix: most active on LinkedIn? LinkedIn, Rebecca Shaddix or timebillionaires.org for podcast updates.
Julie Harris Oliver: Great. Thank you so much
for
Rebecca Shaddix: doing
Julie Harris Oliver: this. Thanks. I can't wait to
Rebecca Shaddix: see you. What we talk about
Julie Harris Oliver: 10 years from now?
Rebecca Shaddix: I can't either. It's a fun little time capsule.
It's awesome.
squadcaster-1d8b_3_04-01-2026_142850: This has been deep work out loud. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. I'd like to thank Rebecca Shaddock for joining the podcast. If any of this resonates with you, please subscribe, leave, review in all the podcast places. Please share this episode with a friend. If you'd like to work with me, you can find me at julieharrisoliver.com and let me leave you with this invitation. What might it look like for you to spend some time thinking about how you spend your time? Take this on as an experiment. What's one way you're going to reclaim some of your time during the day?
Try some things. Report back. Thanks for listening. See you next time.