Your Time Starts ... Now with Kate Christie | #Perspectives with Sharon Pearson
All of us have those moments where, in our heads, we are the busiest person alive and also the only person in the world who can do all the stuff on our to-do lists.
Making rolls for the kids' school lunchboxes while signing an excursion form. Organising the plumber to fix the dishwasher. Buying a new dishwasher when the plumber says yours is dead. Reaching out to a new client between grabbing groceries. Taking your mum to the doctor before picking up the kids—did you remember to book their dental hygienist checkup?—and dropping them to basketball and dance classes.
In her early thirties, Melbourne lawyer Kate Christie was that woman. “My first two children were 17 months apart and it was the pressure of having twins without any of the glory. I was pregnant as well," Kate told me on new #Perspectives podcast 'Your Time Starts ... Now'.
“There was a period of my life when I did not leave the house because their sleeping patterns were completely different. I was a lunatic.”
Kate's story is very empowering, and I loved our conversation about how she changed the trajectory of her life so she could experience it the way she wanted to, and why she loathes people saying they're 'busy' ("what they're really saying is they're unproductive.")
We talked relationships with ourselves and others, the framework which will find and harness 30 hours of lost time a month, imposter syndrome, outsourcing and the dynamics of how to insource within the family, which if done well and with grace pretty much redefines families.
I was staggered when Kate worked out the financial cost of spending an hour a day on Facebook—if your time is worth $50 an hour, you're spending $18,250 of your time a year just on one social platform—and cheered when she called on us to reject “silly stuff” we do by habit, including checking phones within ten minutes of waking up.
“You’re living a completely reactive life because your messages, emails, everything on your phone is someone else’s to do list. It’s not yours," Kate says.
"That’s people saying, ‘I want, I need, can you’ and you just lost control of the agenda within ten minutes of waking up.”
We started with where Kate learned her craft, which was with her own family. I won't throw her ex-husband under the bus too much, but he took what she calls "a traditional approach", earning "great money" as a barrister while she did the parenting, “plus I wanted to work as well so I was juggling that.”
There were only two days her then-husband stayed home from work when the kids were sick, and Kate soon found herself floundering, stuck on the shifting sands of wanting to have it all and do it all.
"I was always the one who made it work," says Kate. “To be 100 per cent honest I wanted to be the one. It would be easy for me to say ‘my bloody ex husband never helped out’ but that’s not quite true. I was the