Welcome to Episode 110 of the Time for Living Podcast!
TRANSCRIPT
show notes
Your phone feels like the one bit of the day that's just yours. So why does your me time keep going to other women's dreams? Because a lot of the time, you're not scrolling to escape. You're scrolling to find the answer.
This episode is for busy, ambitious moms with a dream collecting dust and a saved folder full of routines, planners and "how I found time to..." videos. If you've been gathering answers for months and your dream still hasn't moved, this one will make a lot of sense.
In this episode, you'll discover:
The difference between the tired scroll (rest, and allowed) and the searching scroll (hope that the answer is out there).
Why searching feels so much safer than starting, and why it keeps your dream "almost ready."
Why someone else's routine never sticks: it can't see your whole day, so it promises more than your day can give.
Three questions that turn a search into a step: Which scroll is this? What am I actually looking for? What's my next step, in my week?
What to do with your saved folder so it stops feeling like homework.
Resources:
Ready to take action? Go to timeforliving.co/anchormap. The free Anchor Map shows you where your pockets of time really land, so your next step has a real place to live in your week.
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timeforlivingco/
• Email: hello@timeforliving.co
Final Thought:
The answer was never in the feed. It's your next step, and you can take it this week.
TRANSCRIPT - How to Stop Doomscrolling and Start on Your Dream
INTRODUCTION - The Scroll That Feels Like Me Time
So, at the end of the last episode, I made you a promise. We'd just spent the whole episode getting your calendar to show your real week, with your dream block sitting right there in it, and I said that next time we'd talk about the habit that fills the quiet faster than anything else. The one that's sitting in your hand. So that's today. We're talking about the scroll.
And I want to start with the moment you pick your phone up. Not the hour you lose. Just that moment.
Because for a lot of us, the phone comes out at the exact point the day finally lets go of you for a minute. Everyone's fed. Nobody needs you right this second. And picking it up feels like the one bit of the day that's just yours. Nobody's asking you for anything. It's your five minutes.
And sometimes that's exactly what it is. You're tired, you want to look at something easy, and that's allowed. I'm not here to take that away from you.
But I want you to think about the last time you scrolled in one of those little gaps, and what was actually on the screen. Because if you're anything like the women who listen to this show, it probably wasn't only funny videos.
It was a woman painting at her kitchen table at dawn. Someone explaining how she wrote her first novel in twenty-minute sessions. A planner that looked like it might finally be the one. A woman who started the exact thing you keep meaning to start, telling you how she did it.
So here's what I think is going on. You're not always scrolling to escape. A lot of the time, you're scrolling to find the answer.
And your one bit of me time is going to watching other women live your dream.
What My App Build Showed Me This Week
Before we go further, a quick one from the build. If you're new here, I'm building an app. For me first, because it's not the app, it's the system, and I wanted an app that works for my system and the way my brain works. Maybe one day it'll be for you too. That's my dream.
This week I found a problem. My app isn't showing my whole day. It shows the things I've put into it, but not everything else the day is actually made of. So when I look at it, it looks like I can fit more in than I really can. And then the day happens, the real one, and something gets dropped.
I haven't fixed it yet. I'm in the middle of figuring out how to stop that from happening. But it's taught me something I keep coming back to.
A plan that doesn't show your real day will always promise you more than your day can give. It doesn't matter how good the plan is. If it can't see the whole day, it can't be trusted with the day.
Hold onto that, because it's the reason so much of what you save never sticks.
The Searching Scroll
Let's go back to that gap.
Picture a lunch break. You've got twenty minutes at your desk with a sandwich, and you open your phone, just for a second. The first thing that comes up is a woman with a sketchbook and the sun coming up behind her. You watch it. Then there's one called "how I found time to write when I had two kids under five." You watch that one too. Then a planner, with tabs and stickers and a little section for goals, and you think, maybe that's what I'm missing. Then a five-step weekly reset from someone whose house looks like nobody lives in it.
You save three of them. Maybe four.
And here's the thing. It doesn't feel like wasting time. It feels like the opposite. It feels like you're working on it. Every one of those videos was about the thing you want. You were gathering. You were learning. You were getting ready.
Now go and have a look at your saved folder. Not right now if you're driving. But later today, open it up and have a scroll through. If it's like most of ours, it goes back months. Maybe years. Routines, recipes, workouts, quotes, how-tos, the "I wish someone had told me this sooner" ones.
How many of them have you actually used?
If you’re anything like me not many, if any.
So there are really two kinds of scroll. There's the escape scroll, which is rest. You're tired, you're switching off, and that's fine. And there's the searching scroll, which is hope. You're looking for the piece you think is missing. The routine that will make it all fit. The way she did it, so you can do it too.
And the searching scroll comes from a good place. You're not lazy about your dream. You're the opposite. You care about it enough to keep looking for the right way to do it. You believe there's an answer out there, and that if you just find it, the rest will fall into place.
And there's something else about searching that makes it so easy to keep doing. Searching can't fail.
When you're watching someone else's routine, nothing is being asked of you yet. You can't get it wrong. You can't sit down to paint and find out you're rusty. You can't write a page and decide it's not very good. As long as you're still looking for the right way, the dream stays perfect, because it hasn't met your real life yet.
Starting is different. Starting means a messy first go, in a week that's already full, with skills that might be a bit out of practice. So of course the search feels safer. It keeps the dream at that lovely, shiny distance where nothing can go wrong with it.
But nothing can go right with it there either.
The problem is where you're looking.
Watching Someone Else Live Your Dream
Here's what's really happening to your dream while you search.
You're watching other women live it, ten seconds at a time. The painting, the writing, the running, the little business, the course, the trip. You're getting the feeling of being close to it, without ever touching it.
And because there's always one more video, one more method, one more person who did it slightly differently, your dream stays almost ready. There's always something to learn first. Always a better way you haven't found yet. Always a routine that might finally make it fit. The searching starts to feel like progress, when really it's become a very polite way of waiting.
Every saved post is a tiny promise to your dream. I'll come back to this. I'll try this. This is the one. And when those promises pile up and don't get kept, that's where the guilt comes from. That low, heavy feeling when you open the folder and see how much is in there.
Now think back to what my app taught me this week. A plan that doesn't show your real day will always overpromise.
That's exactly what every one of those saved routines is. It was built for her day. Her mornings. Her kids, or no kids. Her energy, her job, her partner, her season. When you try to lift it into your life, it can't see your whole day. So it promises more than your day can give, and something gets dropped. And usually, what gets dropped is the dream.
So if you've tried a lot of these things and none of them have stuck, please hear this. That's not proof you can't follow through. You were handed a map of someone else's week and asked to find your way around yours with it. Of course you got lost. Anyone would.
It's a bit like having a guitar in the corner of the living room and forty guitar tutorials saved on your phone. You know what each one says. You could tell a friend which one is best for beginners. But the guitar is still in the corner. And the forty-first tutorial isn't what's missing. Picking up the guitar is.
That's the line I'd love you to take from today. The answer isn't in the feed. It's in your next step.
Three Questions That Turn a Search Into a Step
So what do you actually do with that? Because I'm not going to tell you to delete your apps or put your phone in a drawer. You need your phone, and some of what you save is useful. This is about catching the searching scroll and turning it into something that moves your dream.
There are three questions. They take about two minutes the first time, and less every time after that.
The first question is: which scroll is this?
When you notice your thumb going for the phone, or when you look up and realise you've been in there a while, just ask it. Is this the tired scroll or the searching scroll? If you're tired and you want to switch off, enjoy it. Really. No guilt. That's rest, and you're allowed rest.
But if you notice you're looking for something, if it's routines and how-tos and other people's versions of your dream, pause there. That's the searching scroll, and it's carrying a question.
So the second question is: what am I actually looking for?
Write it down. One line. In a note on your phone, on the back of an envelope, wherever. And make it the real question, in plain words. "How do I find time to paint?" "How do I start the course I keep talking about?" "How do I get back into running?" "How do I write when I'm this tired?"
Something shifts when you write it down. Before, it was a fog. A general feeling of wanting something and not knowing how. Now it's a question. And a question can be answered.
Which brings us to the third question: what's my next step, in my week?
Not her week. Yours. And this is where you stop searching and start answering, using the one piece of information no video has, which is your actual life.
So look at the week you've really got. The one your calendar shows, if you did last episode's step. Find one real gap. And then decide one small step toward your dream that fits inside it. Small enough to start in ten minutes. Specific enough that you'd know when it's done.
Not "work on my painting." That's a wish. "Sketch the view out of the back window" is a step. Not "start the course." "Write down the three things I'd want someone to learn in the first lesson" is a step. Not "get fit." "A ten-minute walk around the block at lunch on Thursday" is a step.
And once you've got it, give it a home. If you put a dream block into your calendar after the last episode, this is what goes in it. If you didn't, put the step in as its own little block, on the day and at the time you picked, so it shows up as taken. A step with a place to live is so much more likely to happen than a step that's just floating around in your head.
That's it. Three questions. Which scroll is this? What am I actually looking for? What's my next step, in my week?
And there's one more thing I'd love you to do, once, so you don't have to keep deciding. Go into your saved folder and find the one post that actually fits your life right now. Just one. The one that made you think, oh, I could do that this week. Keep it. Use it this week. And let yourself off the hook for the rest. You don't have to delete them if that feels like too much. But you can stop treating them like homework you haven't done.
Same Question, Different Answer
Let me show you what that looks like.
Same woman, same lunch break, same twenty minutes at her desk. She opens her phone and there's the sketchbook at sunrise again. And this time she notices. Oh. This is the searching one.
So she stops, and she writes one line in her notes. "How do I make time to paint again?"
And then, instead of answering it with someone else's morning, she answers it with her own week. She looks at it. Mornings are full and she's not a five a.m. person, so the sunrise thing was never going to work. But Wednesday after work, she's home and the laundry is running for twenty minutes anyway. So that's the gap.
And the step is tiny. Sketch the view out of the back window. Pencil, the old sketchbook from the cupboard, twenty minutes, while the machine runs.
Wednesday comes. She does it. It's not beautiful. The fence is wonky and the tree looks a bit like broccoli. But there's a drawing on the page that wasn't there on Tuesday, and she's the one who drew it.
Same question as before. One time she searched for the answer. This time she answered it.
And look at what changed. Nothing about her week got bigger. She didn't find a new routine. She didn't buy the planner. She just stopped asking the feed and asked herself. Her dream went from something she watches to something she does, even if it's one wonky drawing at a time.
And the Wednesday after that is easier. The sketchbook's already out. She knows the laundry gives her twenty minutes. She's not starting from nothing, and she's not waiting for a better plan, because she's got one that already fits. Two wonky drawings. Then three. That's how a dream stops collecting dust. Not in one big push, but one small step that fits the week you've actually got, and then the next one.
And the funny thing is, the next time she goes looking, she's got a real question to bring to it. "How do I shade a tree so it doesn't look like broccoli?" That's a search that helps, because it starts from her own step, not someone else's whole life.
Your One Step This Week
So here's your one step for this week.
Open your saved folder and count how many of those posts you've actually used. Don't judge the number. Just notice it. Then write down your one question, the real one, in plain words. Then write your one next step and the gap in your week where it's going to happen. And when that gap comes, take the step instead of going looking.
You'll know you've done it when there's one real thing, a sketch, a page, a walk, a first lesson written down, that exists this week because you answered your own question.
And here's the decision it takes off you. The next time you feel that pull to go searching, you don't have to go looking. You already know your next step.
If you write down your step and then realise you've got no idea where it could actually live in your week, this is exactly what the Anchor Map walks you through. It's free, you name the dream you want more room for, it shows you where your pockets of time really land, and it has you plant one 15-minute anchor in your actual day. About five minutes, at timeforliving.co/anchormap.
And I want you to hear this before we finish. All that searching was never a sign that something's wrong with you. It's proof of how much your dream matters to you. You kept looking because you care. You can stop looking now.
The answer isn't in the feed. It's your next step.
Your phone isn't going anywhere, and neither is the tired scroll at the end of a long day. That part of your life can stay exactly as it is. What changes is that your me time stops going to other women's dreams and starts going to yours. A drawing on a Wednesday. A page on a Sunday. Something real that you made, in a week you actually lived, that's yours to point to. That's what all this room was for.
Next week, we're talking about the plans you keep trying to follow and then blaming yourself when they don't fit. Because I don't think anything's wrong with you. I think you might be running a plan built for a season you're not in, and we're going to find the one that fits the season you're actually living.