The Question That Frees an Hour a Day, with Neal Schore

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:00)
There's no productivity approach that can negotiate with physics.
How we manage time is really how we manage ourselves. In this episode, a key question to help us shift from ordinary to exceptional. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 795

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

**Dave Stachowiak** (0:27)
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders are born, they're made. In this weekly show, helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. As we reach those inflection points in our careers, one of the real challenges we all have, is how do we manage our time better, and how do we surface the time that we need in order to do the important work of leadership? And how do we think about it, respond to it, handle things tactically, handle our schedules, all of the things that come up, and of course, so much of it comes back to self-management and how we can do even more effective at it. I'm so glad today to welcome a guest who's had so much experience in helping leaders to get better at navigating time through self-management and how we can think about it in some new and practical ways and a key question that'll help us to get there. I'm so pleased to welcome Neal Schore to the podcast. He is the founder and CEO of the 25th Hour Group, an executive coaching and leadership events firm. Previously, he served as founder, president and CEO of Triton Digital, a global technology, data and services leader in the digital audio and podcast industry. He is the author of the 25th Hour, How to Thrive And Gain Ridiculous Amounts of Time by Getting Out of Your Own Way. Neal, what a pleasure to have you here.

**Neal Schore** (1:50)
Thank you so much. It is great to be here, Dave.

**Dave Stachowiak** (1:53)
Neal, this is like a title that's catnip for someone like me, who has achiever in my top strengths finder results. 25th Hour, Finding Extra Time In The Day. I'm all for it.
It's something we all aspire to, isn't it?

**Neal Schore** (2:08)
It really is.
The title has become catchy to so many people. They love it. They get very curious about it. What's so interesting from my vantage is, it's really not about extra time. It's about the time you stop giving away. It's all those extra meetings and the extra time that we just give away and cause ourselves to get distracted by.

**Dave Stachowiak** (2:31)
Well, and in the spirit of that, I grabbed a paragraph that you write early in the book and it just speaks to this and you say, Our conventional thinking about time management is messed up. Experts often equate saving time with working smarter. As they tell us, it's about cutting unnecessary meetings, sending fewer emails, collaborating more strategically. While tactical adjustments such as these help, they only skim the surface and don't get to the core of time management, which is the ability to handle your underlying behavior patterns and emotional needs.
I read that and I was just nodding and thinking, like, how true that is, how often I see that in my own behaviors and other leaders. And I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that core, the core of what really time management is.

**Neal Schore** (3:21)
So this came to me exactly as you just read, because I watch smart, capable people lose hours every week to swirling and commiserations and meetings that didn't need to exist and trying to remain relevant and taking five-minute conversations and turning them into 30-minute conversations, and then complaining that they had no time to work out or they had no time to spend with their families. And it really comes down to you controlling you, you managing you versus trying to manage other people and things that you literally can't control.
And I have seen now for years in my work that when you manage you, the day just gets longer. You find your 25th hour.

**Dave Stachowiak** (4:14)
You said a word a moment ago that comes up repeatedly in your work and the word is swirling. And I'm wondering if you could paint the picture of what that looks like and how that shows up. When you're working with a leader who's swirling, what does that look like?

**Neal Schore** (4:33)
Okay, so the swirl happens to everyone.
No one is immune from it. And we get sucked into the swirl at very early ages and stages of our life. It's that narrative that we start telling ourselves. It's that real or that loop that just overplays and we can't shut it off. It's, I wish I hadn't have said that, or my boss really doesn't like me, or did I land that point in the meeting, or oh, I wish I wouldn't have spoken up, or even sometimes it's, I wish I wore a different shirt, or any of those types of things that happen, and then we just replay it and think about it, and we wake up in the middle of the night and it's still there. And when we come home, we tell our significant other, our roommate or our parents or whoever it is, that this happened, and we just don't give ourselves a break around it happened. So what's the worst thing that can happen? Almost always nothing bad is going to happen, and it's that self-criticism, that overplaying it. That's the swirl.