Creating more time with Melissa Ambrosini and Nick Broadhurst

0:02 A listener production. Melissa Ambrosini is a best selling author and host of the top rated podcast, The Melissa Ambrosini Show. She's been named as self help Guru by Elle magazine and she's on a mission to inspire women to create the most exciting and meaningful life possible. So we have that in common. Her husband, Nick Broadhurst, is a singer, songwriter, film producer, former member of the ARIA Award winning band Sneaky Sound System. Together they are entrepreneurs, they're building a house, they're creating, they're parenting and active toddler. So how do they do it all?

0:43 Melissa and Nick have teamed up and co authored their latest book, Time Magic, which is a radical new way to rethink your approach to time and change your life. Here's my conversation with Melissa and Nick. Melissa and Nick, thank you so much for joining me today on the Crappy a Happy Show. I love the title, Thank you. It does get a lot of positive feedback. That title alone has won some guests over. I've randomly emailed somebody and said. Will you come on my podcast? And this with a name like crap or Happy? How could I say no? You guys are well known in the wellness space in Australia and internationally. So I'm really curious that you have now written a new book all about managing I'm going to say managing I know it's called time magic, we'll talk about that, but managing time.

1:32 So I'm really curious to know. How do you see the association between how we use our time and our health and well being. It's a good question, and really, you know, health and wellbeing is everything, right, time is also everything. Yeah, they're so so importantly they work hand in hand together. It's one of the reasons why in this book we spoke a lot about health as well in relation to time. So we do cover a lot of health stuff in the book, but also longevity as well, because we wanted people to realize that, you know, there are options these days for technology. Not talking about stem cells and you know, cryo chambers or anything. I'm talking about using technology to liberate your time on a day to day basis, but also using the advancements and the simple things we can do every day to live a longer, happier life. So for me, I just I think they're actually completely tied together.

2:26 What is time without health? True? So time for us is something which we've had to learn to get better and better over the years. I'm not going to say master it, because you know, it's a constant, ongoing process. But we did manage to create a life for ourselves which became normal for us, but we were very clear that it wasn't normal for a lot of people. We'll get a lot of questions from friends and family, How on earth do you do it all? How do you run your businesses, do your music go on to or have investments build? How be a far, a father or a husband? Blah blah blah blah. It came up so often, and as we shared this information, we realized, oh, there's really something powerful here, and that was really the birth of time Magic, was wanting to share what we're learned and accumulated together over the years.

3:16 I mean, it's one of people's biggest struggles, isn't it, Never feeling like there is enough time, but at the same time feeling like we are. I mean, we just lose so much time to not being as productive as we can be. What do you see is the biggest mistakes people are making or the biggest challenges that they're facing when it comes to this like how do I make more time? Like? How do I get more out of my day? How do I fit it all in? It's not so much about losing yes, it is, I guess about losing time. It's about unconsciously wasting time, which a majority of people are doing, unconscious wasting our life.

4:04 We only get one The average person lives to seventy nine years. For us, that is way below what we're aiming for. We're going for one hundred and twenty, and anyone who reads Time Magic can learn how to go for one hundred and twenty as well, And we actually teach you in the book. If you follow our time Magic tricks Time Magic principles, you can reclaim up to sixteen years of your life, which we can talk more about. But I think a lot of people and we have been there too, unconsciously waste time. The reason they're doing that. Is because firstly, they haven't taken the time to get really clear on what are their core values, what is actually important to you, How do you want to live your life? What is your dream life? What does that look like for you? So firstly we're not even stopping to ask those questions, and we have to ask them regularly because of the different seasons we're in in our life.

5:10 Like you ask me those questions, now I have a very different answer to before I had a baby. Yeah, you know, everything is shifted for me. So I think the first thing we need to do is really ask ourselves those questions, like what is important to me? Is it spending more time with my family and friends, or is it creating the best online program or the best supplement range or the best app And for some people that is what they're lit up by. There's absolutely no rules here, there's no right or wrong. All we have to do is just ask ourselves these questions and get really honest and clear with what is important for you.

5:53 In this season of your life. Then from there, once you have the answers, then you can create your day, your ideal day, in accordance to those core values. To live and be in alignment with those core values is the best place to stop wasting your time. It's the first place to start. Yeah, for sure. I Actually in your book, there's a pie chart, which you know, takes those seventy nine years and shows you very visually where a lot of those years are going by the way of a graphic of a slice of pie and. I was actually reading it and my teenage.

6:33 Daughter came past, and I said, how many slices of pie do you think you. Are spending on your phone? And you know, I could have asked myself the same question, to be honest, but we all project onto our teenage children. Now, what is it. It's like thirteen years, I think, is what it says. And that's every second of every minute of every day for thirteen complete years. I mean, just that in it self is so confronting, isn't it. Yeah, And if you consider that we spend not even two years of our life. At school, yeah right right, yeah. Back to back, but thirteen on our own. It doesn't make sense.

7:15 Like, and so I think you're right, Like, when we just actually take a conscious step back and look at where in reality is our time going, then from that point we're in a position to start making some different choices. But you have to start with that, Yeah. I think as well. You know, when we both had big health crisis in our life long time ago, two thousand and nine, twenty ten. When you have something like that happened to you all of a sudden, it does reshape who you are and it does shine a spotlight on potentially a new core value. And for us, health became very much. A core value. It always was for me, but it became central in my life because when you lose that vitality in that health, you know, you don't ever want to go back there.

8:02 So that core value gets really firmly created. Time is very similar. If you go through the process in the book with Time Magic and you really look at your life, that could be your little mini crisis to shape or reform your relationship with time to make time a core value. And to be clear, you. Know, time Magic is not I know you said management before you said you know, it's probably not the right word to use, because it's not in the sense that, yes, there is time management in the book, but it's called time Magic because it's about creating space. It's about creating space for the things that you love. Because, as Melissa said, we had seventy nine years on average, and how do we really want to be spending those years? Is it unconsciously doing things or consciously doing the things we love?

8:49 And that's what the book is about, is to create the space to do what you want with your life. And you know, if you do one thing from the book and you get back six months or a year even of your life. That is an extremely good investment of twenty eight dollars, I would say. Yeah, for sure. In fact, you're right. Even the seventy nine years was kind of confronting to me because I'm like you, I have this idea that, of course I'm going to live much longer than that. But again, like, unless you are. Quite intentional about how you're living, then the reality is that that's that's the average, right. Yeah, So we all have to be really realistic about that too. Absolutely, And that's why we put the health Hacks and the Everyday Longevity chapter in the book, because there's no point in extending your life to one hundred and twenty if you are riddled with disease and cancer and can't remember anything like that's not fun for anybody. You know.

9:44 We still want to be running around, we still want to be doing yoga, we want to be healthy and vital, and it's the things that you do today that will make that a reality for you. Yeah, for sure. Just before we got onto this, I spent the better part of five minutes, when I was already running late, looking for my necklace. Now you can't see me if you're listening to this podcast, but my necklace is around my neck, and you know, it's like running around looking for your sunglasses when they're on your head. I think I waste so much time doing things like that, and I think I'm not alone in that. I guess I don't know if there's a question in there. I think it's just about we have to really kind of I know, for me, like just learn to slow down a little bit.

10:35 It's like we by slowing down, we actually create more space in our lives and create more clarity and focus in our actions as opposed to I think what's different about your approach compared to probably other time management approaches is that there are a lot about squeezing more in. Would you say that that's. The difference, that's the distinction instead of trying to fit more into our time, about let's actually do less but do what matters. Yeah. And that said, we do go into detail in the book with a specific productivity system called tickle flick. Yes, So I want to talk about that. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's talk about that.

11:15 So tick off flick. When we started writing this book, I knew that we had to have some way that people could manage their lives with much less overwhelm. And I had studied productivity for years and years and years. I've read thousands and thousands of pages on it and ultimately had my own way of operating, which I think was simplified version of things like getting things done, these sorts of systems. And I said to Melissa, look, we've got to do something in this book that helps people reduce overwhelm manage their life seamlessly. But it has to be done in three pages. So I sort of set myself the task of creating a system based on what I was doing, and that's where Tickleflick came from. And it's very very simple. When you actually employ this system, you really have no excuse. Well, you should really never be overwhelmed ever again.

12:09 Well stressed, that's a big call. That's a big call. It is, let's hear about it. Well overwhelmed. What is overwhelmed? Overwhelming happens when you are, well, there's too much going on up here in your head, right, You're trying to track too many things mentally, and you don't know what to action. That's really overwhelmed. For you. And it's funny because it actually happened to me yesterday. I sat down at the dinner table and I was like, baby, I'm really overwhelmed, and I said, tonight, I'm going to do something that I don't do very often. I'm going to go after dinner and while you go to bed, I'm actually going to tidy up my entire tick orf flick and get it back into shape. And today I've just been like cruising all day because I know exactly what I have to do, and it only got to that place because I wasn't following my own rules with tick or flick, right. So it's incredibly powerful. And that's example of if you have a certain amount of time, like Melissa has limited time to work, that's how you can really laser focus and get done what matters in order of priority without any overwhelmed. So it definitely is about creating space. But we also show you if you have certain number of hours in the day and you want to be super productive, we show you how to do that as well, So it covers really everything.

13:22 I'm really glad that you mentioned that that even though you designed the system and you said you'll never get overwhelmed. Did you still got overwhelmed? And I think it's really important to be realistic about that. This is not aiming for perfection because people, you know, people like, oh, I'll never be able to stick to that. I've tried like loads of different to do lists and like Asana and Monday and click, like there's alls of these different tools and apps you can use, which I just find overly complicated. Then I just get more stress because I'm paying for a tool that I'm not really effectively using. So I would love for you to share your simple tick or flick system because I will one hundred obviously I've read about it in the book, but I will one hundred percent be implementing that.

14:04 There's really two apps to think about, and one is cool Things, which is for Apple only, so if you're on a PC or Android, then you'll have to use another one, which we love, which is called to doist. And I'm actually currently changing. I talk about in the book that I use things. I'm currently changing to do list. Oh really purely because I want to bring the entire all of our organizations, all our companies into the one system. Because we currently use a sauna and I'm wanting to simplify even more and really and teach the team tick or flick, so it's all in one system, all together, all doing the same process. No excuse for us as a team to get overwhelmed, because we know what we're doing, we know the order of priority. So ticker flick is really quite simple. We start out with basically capturing everything that's in your head or on the back of a piece of paper or wherever you've got it written down, capturing it all into what's called an inbox, so you're just getting it all out, just vomit liter just get it all out.

15:03 We also call it the brain dump. Yeah, well actually call the daily dump. And from there you get to process that and put it into either a tick or a flick action. So when you tick something, it's something which will take you one or two minutes to do, so you tick it and you get it done and you never look at it again. If it's a flick, it's probably because it's going to take you longer or there's more than one step involved, and you flick that into a project, and those projects have orders of priority, and whenever you're doing a project, you don't write something like plan wedding, Like, that's fifty steps there, right, So you break that down. When you have something you need to do, you take a new project, you write down every single, tiny little thing you can possibly think of that has to happen.

15:47 You put it in an order of priority, and off you go, and then you can just very calmly go about your way of executing on that project without having to think about the project. It sounds simple, and it's very similar to something like getting things done. It's it's a simplified version of other productivity systems and you just have to ask yourself the question do I ticket or do I flick it? And that's it. It's very very simple. And I apply this to my email as well. So when I do my email time, I either tick the email straight away yep, got the email or whatever I respond, or I will flick it, which means forward it to someone in my team who will deal with it. Or I will boomerang it to come back when I need to address it, or I will archive it if.

16:33 I don't need to see it. So that's how I can get to inbox zero every single day very quickly. I also don't want to spend my life in my inbox, So I kind of teach people how to communicate with me, and it's definitely not in email. I don't want to be writing long emails. I think it is the biggest waste of time. So send me a voice message, a little quick voice message on voxer or something like that. I would much rather do that. And there's a lot less pressure than having like the perfectly curated email with the best punctuation, like I just want to say yep, got it, Like I don't want to say hi, how are you? Like, you know, all of the no, it doesn't true time, you know, just.

17:15 Yep, got it? All good, speak to you later, you know what I mean. So you can apply to go flick to your email as well. Yeah, I was really interested in the email kind of section of the book as well, because I think a lot of as struggle with email overwhelmed. I use Gmail like you guys do, and you recommend in the book, but there were some things in there that I wasn't even aware that I could do so, for example, and I think this is really helpful stuff to share with people. Apparently in Gmail you can send and at the same time like archive it as soon as it's sent. Whereas I have got a thousand emails which I have responded to or I haven't or whatever, but they're all in the same inbox, and then I don't know what to.

17:59 Do with them. And I've I've created a thousand folders to store different email like to move them into. And somebody said to me, I don't think what Gmail you need folders because I think that Gmail is It's got a good enough search function that you can. Find anything you need. Just archive it. Hallelujah like that. Yeah, that in itself is life changing. One hundred percent. I get to email zero every day through this system because for me, like having a thousand emails whole, that would just like blow my mind with overwhelm. And I don't want to delete everything because I often need to search back to something from could be ages ago. So send an archive. Gond an archive gone out of the inbox, s hea later.

18:40 You can also snooze it so it comes back to you. Yes, So even if you send an archive, you can snooze it to come back if they haven't responded in like a week or so or something, so you can go, oh, trigger your memory to go, oh, they still haven't responded, Maybe they didn't get it, maybe it went to their spam or something like that, so you can follow up. Yeah, that just to add to that, send an archive really should only be used when that's the final action for that email thread. So what if it's not the final action, then what else where. Does it go? Well, you want to make sure because the thing is you don't want to be thinking in a week, oh, what happened to such and such they didn't reply. You have to think it's taking up brain power. Right, the send an archive is okay, this communication is finished, send an archive. This one's not. I actually need to know if there's a reply. I want to know if there's a reply to this. So that's where you send, and then you go snooze and you return it tomorrow or depends how urgent it is.

19:37 A week, a month. You can do send later as well. You can send it, write something and send it in a month if you want to have a birthday or something like that. So there's a lot of things you can do, but every single email needs to have a final action, whether that is archiving. It or snoozing it. Yeah, and really it's really not that complicated, but it makes a huge difference. I said, can you talk about You said, there's the snooze, But I was also really interested. This is something I did not know about about the boomerang function. So that's a separate app right, that you can bring in. Can you explain that. Yeah, it's just an extension. So yeah, you can get that in your email as well, which is really great.

20:18 So like, for. Example, tickets to a concert, you don't need that sitting in your inbox, but you do need it the day of the concert, so I will boomerang that to come back to me the day of the concert that morning on at six pm. Yeah, at the time of the concert. Yes, So it's right at the top of your inbox at the time of the concert when you're going to be walking in the door when you need the ticket, right at the top of your. Email, so you can boomerang it back. I use this so often, so often I use boomerang. I love it. Yeah, for things like that, tickets, flights, all of those sorts of things. It's just awesome.

20:58 Then it's not sitting in your box causing overwhelmed. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you EPs drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. That's cool. Speaking of email, Nick, you decided you're off email altogether. I'm retiring from email now. This is a dream come true for most people. Can you please explain how how in this modern world you are able to extricate yourself completely from email?

21:45 Well, Cas, you would have seen today there was an email thread between el. Yes. So at the moment, I'm back in the inbox because we're building our home and there's a lot invoices and design function design decisions to be made, and it's just a lot easier for me to be in there and making their decisions. So the way I run it at the moment, I have my assistant Laura, who basically runs the inbox, and if it's for. Her, she labels it Laura. If it's not, she just leaves it so I know it's for me. Whereas before she would handle everything and she would slack me if there was a question, and if there was a contract to read. She'd say, Look, I've left a contract in the inbox for you. It's quite lengthy. You might just want to go in there and read it. So to fully retire, I think is near and possible. Unless I don't know, maybe the President of the United States or something. They probably don't do emails.

22:32 Maybe they do. I don't know, maybe they do. I'm not I reckon. They probably still answer some. But I think reading if you can get your emails down to two or three responses a day, to me, that's effectively retiring from email. As I said, I'm a bit more in it at the moment because of our house build. But if you go to timemagic dot me and you put in your name, an email, and your order number of where you purchase the book, we'll send you a couple of things. One is over two hours of audio of how successful people start their day, and we have some of the top scientists, doctors, sports people, thought leaders, spiritual leaders around the world sharing their morning routines. It's really freaking cool. And the second thing is we give you the time Magic toolkit, and in that toolkit is the actual job posting that I used to hire Laura oh wow.

23:21 So you can. Copy it, tweak it, you can post it in something like upwork dot com and I call it I think it was an email ninja, and you can find your own email and then you can come in and handle it for you, because honestly, there's so many things we do not need to be doing ourselves. For example, there is this incredibly long, outstanding email thread with this royalty collection agency in America for music. Right Royalty Collections for Music is so complicated and ridiculous. It's crazy and so archaic, but you have to do it. But do I want to do forty emails back and forth to try and get my bank account updated in America?

24:06 No? I don't. So that goes to Laura and she she loves this stuff. She's totally happy to do it. So and this kind of comes back to that bigger question that we were talking about at the start, is like what is important to you, Like what do you love to do? And the things that you don't love to do, stop doing them or outsource them or delegate them in your business and in your personal life, and then do more of the things that you do love that do bring you joy. That whole crowding out, you know, crowding out of all the things that you don't want to do in your life. Like that's literally if there's something that I don't want to do, I'm like, no, I don't want to do it. I'm at that stage in my lifehere, I'm just like, no, I don't want to do that. I mean to ask Nick to do it, or like you know, pay someone to do it or outsource it. And I know that is a luxury. And you know, you can always do swaps as well with friends and families. Like if there's something that you don't want to do and there's someone in your life that loves to do that, swap with them. You do something for them that maybe they don't love to do, like cooking.

25:12 You could bake for them whilst you know they do your tax return or whatever it is. Do some swaps, get creative outsourced. Life is so precious and so sacred. Do more of the things that bring you joy and less of the things that don't. Yeah, I think that the both of you have talked about being kind of really caught up in that hustle culture in the past. Melissa, you talk about having an identity kind of wrapped up in your productivity. I think a lot of people will say, well, I don't have the luxury I have to do it myself. I don't have the luxury of doing the things that I love, Like wouldn't that be nice? But I guess what do you say to those people? Because I sometimes wonder is it really that you don't have the choice, or is it that you don't don't necessarily realize as many of us don't. There we're actually we've been conditioned into this kind of rest is Rest is not an option. Relaxation is lazy, It's a waste of my time. You know.

26:12 There's a lot of kind of unlearning deprogramming that has to go on around that I would love for you to talk about that. So much unlearning, so much reprogramming. And I catch myself to this day still subscribing to some narratives that my true higher self don't believe in. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa is up there? Like why why am I getting sucked into that narrative? So the first thing is ask yourself. Is that what you truly believe? Like do you truly believe that. You have to do it all and only you can do it and you can't afford it or whatever it is, do you truly believe those societal narratives? And if the answer is no, then what do you truly believe? Like?

27:04 What is true for you? I think that's the first place to start. I think a lot of it comes back to inner mean girl and worthiness, Like what's your in a mean girl telling you I can't afford this, or you don't deserve that, or you possibly can't ask for help for X, Y and z. So that worthiness, you know, really just going ah, there's my mean girl telling me that I'm not worthy. You know, everything is a story we tell ourselves. Sometimes they're really helpful, supportive stories like broccoli and green smoothies are great for you, eat them, drink them. And then a majority of the stories we tell ourselves are not supportive, are not helpful, but they're on repeat in our mind over and over again. But when we actually stop, slow down, take a breath, and tune inward, the answer is always there.

28:06 The answer is. Always within, Like what really resonates with me? What feels good for me? I think we live in a time where comparison itis is so rife you know, you just look at your phone and instantly comparing to all of these other people's lives that aren't the true reflection of someone's life. It's not the whole picture, it's not the totality of someone's life. Therefore it's not a fair comparison. But yet we still do it, and it causes so much stress. But when we actually, like when I slow down and when I am just in the moment with my daughter, I am at the most piece, the most inner piece, When I am sitting on the floor with her fully present, I am so peaceful, and I'm like, I have made it.

29:06 This is it. I've made it. Yeah, I'm done, this is it. But then I'll look at. My phone and I'll get stressed out and caught up and start comparing, and. Then we need to take a breath again. And this is why, you know we talk about in the book meditation practices are so important because those practices are what anchors us back into our true self. And this is why we need to do it daily so that we can keep checking back in, get present again, come back to the present moment, always keep coming back to that moment. That's why we are such huge fans of meditation same.

29:48 I mean mindfulness and meditation is probably foundational to literally everything that I teach everybody, and people get sick of me banging on about it, but you obviously share a similar view. Like you, it all starts with that being present, recognizing what's happening as it's happening. Otherwise we're just we're just swept away by all of the noise in our own head and all of this reactive, reacting, emotionally, reacting, you know, doing unconsciously, just doing things whether they need to be done or not. So one hundred percent concur and even as I say that I haven't been doing my daily meditation lately, and I think that's really important too, Like we all go off track, like you're talking about your overwhelm nick and your emails.

30:35 You know, we all go off track. And it's not about how far off. Track you go. It's about how quickly you can recognize that has happened and come back. And just try as an experiment, asking yourself for the next couple of days or the next week, when do I feel most at peace? When do I feel most at peace? What am I doing? Is it in the bath? Not on your phone. Is it in nature? Is it surfing? Is it meditating? For me? It's yeah, it's sitting on the floor with my daughter. It was this morning walking through our guard and holding hands, just chatting with her. Like I literally was like, Yes, this is what life is all about. So asking yourself where do you feel most at peace? Do more of those things every day?

31:28 Yeah? Perfect. I just want to pick up on one thing before we kind of wrap this up. But when you talked about Nick outsourcing the inbox, I know immediately people and I know you said it's a luxury Melissa, but I know immediately people are going, oh, well, wouldn't it if I can body pay somebody to manage my inbox? I just want to make the point that many years ago, you guys would have read the same book. Many years ago, I read Tim Ferris's Four Hour work Week, and in that book he talked about this wild idea of hiring like a VA in a virtual assistant in the Philippines or India or somewhere, and he was basically seeing how much this person could could take on for him to reduce his amount of commitment to doing certain things and getting sending flowers to somebody in another country and making bookings for him dinner reservations, and at the time, I thought.

32:21 That's ridiculous, as if I'm. Going to be hiring it. And fast forward a few years and one of the first things I did in my business was put an ad on a website in the Philippines for somebody to help me with basic admin tasks that would have been I don't know. I think it's maybe four or five years ago. She's still with me to this day. I started paying her I think ten dollars Australian an hour, which was a lot of money for her, and probably even more than I really needed to I know people pay less than that, but you know, it seemed comfortable to me, and she takes so much off my plate. I'm a small business and you know, I do a lot of stuff on my own, but she just picks up so much stuff and she's more than happy to do it. It supplements her other income. She has another job.

33:07 And I just. Encourage people to be a little more open minded about things like that. About there are various ways you can outsource that are not incredibly expensive. It's not like you need to hire a full time executive assistant. So I just wanted to share that, and I guess you've probably got thoughts on that as well. Yeah, well, I think what's important about it is, you know, what can you do with the time that you're saving. Can you make more than the ten dollars per hour? Exactly? One hundred percent? You can? One hundred percent And he calls it geo. Tim Ferres calls it geo arbouitrage where you are basically leveraging the skills and talents with someone in another part of the world, but on a much cheaper rate because you're earning a different currency, and that's global business for you these days.

33:50 And there's nothing wrong with that because you. Know you're doing a great service to that person in their life and giving them stable income. Because I can tell you we've worked with a lot of Philippine employees and what they want is stability. The crave stability. They want to know that they're taken care of and that they can take care of their family. So for ten dollars an hour, can you go and do something else that makes you more than ten dollars an hour? Of course you can if you live in a Western country. That is absolutely the reality so it's about opportunity cost of not doing it. In my opinion, Yeah, I think that's a really good point to make as well, to flip how we think about that that you know what, that frees me up to do with my time. Becoming a parent, for me and for most people, is probably the biggest, single, biggest blow to our time freedom and autonomy. Suddenly your time is not your own anymore. You guys became parents a couple of years ago. I'm curious to know how you have adjusted to that, or how you have used these systems and ideas to maintain that kind of spaciousness in your life since having a baby.

35:00 Melissa is going to answer this question, but I'm just going to say that one of the reasons I got into productivity is I actually have a seventeen year old son, and I was a single dad for a long time and I was doing everything, yeah, and I needed I was running real estate business at the time, and I had to figure out how to get more done, And. That's why I got into productivity. But Melissa's got a different Well, I'll let you tell a story. Yeah, so this is not Nick's first rodeo with kids, and so yeah, he had Leo half the time. So as a single dad, like he said, he had to work it out. He had to work out how to be super productive and still make money. So interesting story.

35:44 We wrote Time Magic four years ago. Oh and I was having a meditation, doing a meditation and I got this intuitive download and the intuitive download said not right now, this book is not right now. We'd signed book. Deal with one of the big biggest publishing houses, HarperCollins, and I got this download that said not right now. You need to go and write Comparisonitis. Oh wow. So we called our. Agent and I said, not time, I need to go write Comparisonitis and get this out into the world. So I went and wrote Comparisonitis, birthed that and a baby in the same week. They came out in the same week. Wow, two years ago.

36:27 And then about a year ago, our publisher called us and said, what have you guys done with Time Magic? Did you end up repurposing that content, turning it into an online program? What did you do with it? And we said it's still sitting there, about eighty thousand words. It's still sitting there. And she said, the time is now for this book post COVID. During COVID, personal development and any sort of self help book sales went down because everyone was buying fiction because they wanted to escape. So it's really interesting that post COVID everyone was out into the world again. They're wanting to be the best version of themselves, you know, self help sales and all of these personal development books, time management, time magic books were doing really well, and She's like, now's the time, and so we said, okay, we're going to go and rewrite most of it, which is what we did.

37:25 We kind of. Rewrote the whole thing well because I had to write this book. And I realized that this all happened because if it had come out four years ago, I would not have written this book through the lens of being a mother. And like you said, time completely shifts when you become a mother, your relationship to time, everything shifts when you become a mother. So I feel like the universe was like pull the brakes and just hold because you need to become a mother to then write through that lens. So we rewrote most of the book, we change the title, and then it came out this year and it's yeah, people are hungry for this information. People want to live their best life. People want to make the most of this precious time here on earth, of this one life that we have been gifted. And this book teaches you exactly how to do that. It gives you, it's very practical. It it gives you so many practical things, but it also gets you to really think about what's important to you with your career, with your family, your relationships, your health. Like it goes through everything, and the feedback that we've had is mind blowing. It's changed people's life, completely change their life. And yeah, I feel like I had to become a mum to write it.

38:49 Yeah, that's such a cool story. And also I just want to pick up on that, like doing a meditation, just having that intuitive sense that it's not the right time. I'm always encouraging people pay at tention, like pay attention to those little messages. So many people would say, oh no, but I've got a deal. I can't possibly put this on hold, Like we have to pay attention because it's our intuition is never, never wrong, And you're right. The book is it's very holistic in its approach. It's not just about time, it is about finances, health, how you spend your time, and it is imminently practical. I think we all want a hack or a tip or an app, and I was just like devouring them.

39:29 I'm like, I've already googled up what does it cost to get things? I've already I'm already looking. Into like the whole boomerang email system. So if anybody is looking for that, you will get that, but you'll also get. So much more. So thank you guys for coming on the show, and congratulations on the book and on everything else. Thank you so much for having us. It's been so much fun. We could chat for hours, I know. Thank you so much for having us. Time Magic is available now in all bookstores or if you want to grab those resources. Nick and Melissa mentioned timemagic dot me. Of course, you can follow them both on Instagram. I will put a link to Melissa's website.

40:13 Do check out Nick's music. It is really really something else. If you enjoyed this episode, please do share it with your friends, give us a follow on whatever is your favorite podcasting platform, maybe even. A five star rating and review. It really does help to get us in the ears of more listeners. Come and check me out. Cast done Underscore XO at Instagram, Hello atkas done. If you'd like to email and say. Hi, I can't wait to catch you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy Listener