Hey everyone, its Erica here. Today I'm going to talk about running time experiments as a way to develop your own sense of how long things take in your life. So, I first got exposed to this when I was chatting with a fellow coach named Kathy, and she asked me, "how long does it take you to go, when you wake up in the morning, from feet on the floor to feet out the door?" And I said, "I have no idea", and I said, "Kathy, do you now?" and she said, "yeah, 75 minutes". I said, "Really?" She said, "Yeah", I was like, "how is that" and she said, "I had to learn it, I had to figure it out. Because it didn't come naturally to me and I was constantly being late to school with my kid. And he's the kind of kid that doesn't do well when he is rushing into school". So, I asked her about her morning routine and I learned from her that, she has it really structured, she does everything in sequence. And she has a sense of how much time each thing takes. And that might sound really rigid and might sound like the opposite of being somebody who likes to be free flowing with time, which I know a lot of people who are creative and have a mind that's really imaginative and have ADHD, sort of have this vision of wanting to be really fluid. But in reality, what I found with a lot of my clients is that having a really set sequence of habits and experimenting enough that you know how long it takes you to do things in your life can be enormously helpful, because it essentially saves your cognitive load. It saves you from having to spend a whole lot of time thinking about "what am I doing next?" or "have I brushed my teeth yet?" "Where do I have the thing?" into just a sequence of habits that allow you to get things done, and move on to the other really important stuff with your brain.So it can help to think about some of the things that you do really often that, if someone asked you, you wouldn't know exactly how long it takes you to do that. Most people have a sense of how long it takes them to get to their work, if they have a commute, but what about how long does it take you to go get your lunch? Or how long does it take you to walk your dog? Or how long does it take you when you have to run out and send something at the post office? If there are things like that in your life, where it would actually be quite helpful to know specifically how much time it takes, have fun with doing time experiments. I mean, you can sort of predict how long you think it takes to walk the dog and then time yourself and see how correct you are.And then where it becomes really useful is when you're planning out your day, when you're trying to plan out a day that is reasonable where you have enough time to do things or when you're having to pick between like what's more important the post office or this other thing. You actually can have a sense of how much time it would take you to do that. And so it gives you the same kind of information that a lot of other people just get naturally because they have a sense of how much time is passing and how frequently it's passing. But you just get it in a different way.So when I mentioned Kathy and her morning, I talked about the sequence of habits that she and her son do in exactly the same order every day. And it's something that we call habit stacking and I think it might be worth trying it out for yourself if you haven't tried something like this, especially in the morning routine. So a lot of my clients will try out a thing where they will think through how they might do things, but really specifically. So, for example, like you hop in the shower, and you're going to shampoo your hair first and wash your body, then you're going to put on the conditioner, then you're going to pop out, then you're going to do this, this, this, this, this and you have it exactly an order and your intention is you just do everything in the same order every day. And even, this is where it seems silly but can be really helpful, and even write it down. So there's this funny thing you know, you can write with Sharpie markers on your mirror, and then you just erase it with rubbing alcohol. But I know other people who just put a big post it up and it has a list in sequence of what they do. And keep looking at it every day, until it's such an ingrained habit you don't have to look at it anymore. Maybe you do. Maybe just keep looking at it forever. And if you don't yet have any of these really specific habit stacks in your life that you want to try one, it's worth thinking about looking at your morning, your getting going routine and then also anytime you're sort of leaving a place, right so anytime that you're leaving your house or anytime that you're leaving your work, what's the routine that you can get into so that you could for example, know that there's a 16 minute sequence of things that you do before you leave work, you fill up your water, you shut off your email, you put the folder away you do this, you do that, so that when it comes time to leave, you can just start doing backwards planning and plan for that and also, you just don't have to do so much like a stressful juggling and trying to remember what you were doing.Because it's those transition moments, when you're getting ready to do something or shifting something, those task switching times can be really exhausting. And it requires a lot of working memory happening at the same time. So if you can build these habits and sequences that make it easier to handle and much less stressful, you may find it's really a major shift in your life. So there's a bit about doing time experiments and creating your own habit stacks and I hoped there might be something in there that sounds useful to you or that you might like to try.