80. How to Become a Time Alchemist & Transform From Time Prisoner to Time Transcender

00:05 Dr. Ann Tsung Are you struggling to advance your career and sacrificing time with your loved ones because of endless to-dos, low energy, and just not enough time in the day? If so, then this podcast is for you. I am your host Dr. Ann Tsung, an ER critical care and space doctor, a peak performance coach, a real estate investor, and a mother of a toddler. I am here to guide you on mastering your mind and give you the essential skills to achieve peak performance. Welcome to Productivity MD, where you can learn to master your time and achieve the five freedoms in life.

00:51 Welcome to Productivity MD, and I’m your show host, Dr. Ann Tsung, Today, we’re changing up the setting a little bit. Behind me is the Saturn V rocket in NASA. And so, in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about a super important framework: the five stages to time freedom. This is a framework that I have created, and I wanted to share with the audience to diagnose yourself where you are in terms of time freedom. Because so many of us are actually experiencing fake time freedom, and I’ll explain to you what that is. So, when you would listen to this, I want you to think about where you are. Some of us are physicians who work in other environments. You can be in all five stages in one day. You can be mostly in a few stages on clinical days or working days and a few stages on non-working days. So I want you guys to think about those two different types of situations and the percentage you are spending in each stage. It will make more sense as I go through the stages with you.

01:52 The first stage is called the time prisoner. That is the stage where you say, “I don’t have time.” You are waking up. You are immediately looking at social media, looking at your phone, and then you go down the rabbit hole for an hour, two hours before anything is ever done in the morning. If you are a morning person, that matches a morning quarter of time. And so you’re essentially always in sympathetic, always in fight or flight, always putting out fires, reacting to people’s demands via text, email, or whatever messages before you actually serve your own goals and what truly aligns with your energy and your values. That is the time prisoner. And I will say, for example, a lot of times, when I am working in the ER, I am actually a time prisoner. When the ambulance is building up right next to me, all of the psych patients coming, angry, yelling, I’m a time prisoner, and I’m just reacting to the patients coming.

02:49 Number two, the second stage, is what’s called a time manager. We often hear that. How do we manage time? So you start looking at calendars. You start looking at to-do list. You are busy. You’re productive. But at the end of the day, you say to yourself, “I did a lot of things, but I’m so exhausted. I’m so tired. I wish I could be more productive.” That is when you’re doing everything on your own, instead of using leverage. Some of us may have cleaners, et cetera. But I’m talking about having automations, eliminations, delegations of things. Everything that doesn’t serve your purpose and your mission, that’s delegated out. And because it’s not, that’s why, a lot of times, we’re so exhausted as a time manager—because it is all on us. Now, we’ll say, when I was in residency or in fellowship, I thought I was grown up. I was using calendars. I was planning. I was using checklist. I wasn’t really aligning my peak chronotype zone to my deep work or doing things that move a needle. I wasn’t doing that. And I did not hire a virtual assistant at that time until later on when I was a fellow. Or you could be a time manager when you are in a scheduled work day, or a scheduled ER shift, or in the hospital, et cetera, in the ICU, or as an internal medicine doc, or any work that’s like 8 to 5 or 7 to 7, et cetera. Any shift work, you’re a time manager because somebody else is dictating your time. You don’t really have control, so you’re just managing whatever you can within that container.

04:20 Now, the third stage is what’s called a time creator. Now, the time creator, this is very important that you start using leverage. So you say to yourself, “I can make the time.” Whatever opportunity comes—if you think that’s good, or might be good, or you’re not sure—you say, “How can I make this happen?” You’ll shuffle things around. You’ll delegate more things. You’ll assign more tasks to the people who are helping you so that you can check it out. So there is always this pressure to optimize. There’s always a pressure to make it faster, better, make more money, be more productive. “I worked all day, but I could do more. Why couldn’t I have done more?”

04:56 And so that is the key difference between a time creator and a time liberator. This is a stage where what I call fake time freedom. You may be an entrepreneur. You may be a CEO and founder, a physician who has really exited clinical medicine — that’s a traditional clinical medicine. You’re doing telemedicine, or perhaps you’re doing PRN work. So yes, you technically have true control of your time, right? This is what most people think what time freedom is. You can have the freedom to spend the time with whoever you want, and you have control of the work schedule. At the same time, though, if you’re in the time creator stage, you’re actually still stressed. Because you have said yes to so many things, you have a lot of open loops, right? Each yes you say, there’s probably 20 more open loops or steps after that you are going to need to do, and it’s not close. So all of these open loops, unclosed open loops, that is what causes the stress. That is what still makes you feel like you’re in fight or flight, like you’re always behind, right? That is not true time freedom to me. That is not true time freedom to me. The reason why I know this is because I technically had true time freedom during my sabbatical with NASA. I could travel with my kids. So I have true time freedom. I can dictate when I want to work in the ER. But yet, with that additional free time, I was saying yes to too many opportunities, too many social media opportunities, collaboration opportunities, working opportunities. So I was still very stressed and I was like, “What is this? This is not time freedom. I should feel at peace. I should be in harmony. I should feel calm.”

06:42 So that is the true difference between the time creator and the next stage—the fourth stage—is what I call the time liberator. It’s called the time liberator because, whenever an opportunity comes, you’re no longer saying if you have the time, you can free up the time, or I can make the time. It’s not even about the time anymore, right? It’s about, “Will this multiply or drain my energy?” That is the true question you ask. Will this multiply or drain my energy? And if it drains your energy, then it’s a no. Actually, when you are a time liberator, you’re basically at the level of Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. At that time, everything is a no. At that level, everything is a no unless it’s a hell yes. And if you’re like in between, then that means that you just need to find out more information before you say yes or no. The toughest thing about that is that becoming a time liberator is that a lot of us don’t have our life vision set. A lot of us don’t have our massive transformative purpose set. An MTP is what I call it—MTP.

07:50 MTP is where it’s something that you’re always striving to achieve, but you will never check off. For example, for me, I want to be playful, compassionate, be courageous, be zen with me and myself, and also in relationships with my spouse and also with my kids. That is something I am always in pursuit of and that will never check off. Another MTP I have is to help others achieve true time freedom, so they can have more timeless moments to create more beautiful memories. So depending on what your MTP is and what your life vision is at the end of your life, that is really going to help you say yes or no to the things that come to you. Then you can technically have a time liberator schedule or a calendar, which is what happened to me. I had a time liberator schedule. My calendar is always blocked out for kids. It’s always blocked off for date dates. On the weekend, there’s no work. The morning is blocked off for flow blocks. But my mindset did not catch up. My nervous system had not caught up yet. My nervous system was still a time creator. I was still having a little low-level cortisol. I still felt stress. That’s not true time freedom.

09:02 And so, the fifth stage—there’s a fifth stage—at the pinnacle, that’s what I call the time transcender. As a time transcender, you say that all there is is this moment now. That time doesn’t exist. Einstein says that there’s no past, future. It’s really all an illusion, right? It’s really based on the person who’s observing that moment in time. It’s just really that present moment. The reason why that’s important is also because it’s for high performance. It’s practical at the same time, and it is spiritual. So it’s practical because when you are in flow state, when you’re present, you’re in slow state, you have maximal focus, creativity, and energy. That’s when you can 5x your productivity whatever you are working on. So you can finish whatever you’re doing in one or two hours instead of four or five hours in the afternoon. And so that is the elite performance part.

10:05 Now, the fulfillment side is truly when you are on your deathbed. When you are on your deathbed, all you remember are the beautiful memories that were timeless. When your kids took their first step, when you’re hanging out with the kids, when you’re traveling, when you’re having date nights with your husband, with your wife, or laughing, gossiping with your girlfriends, being out—a lot of those beautiful moments are actually timeless. It is when you are starting to manage clock time, when you start looking at the next place you have to be, the next meeting you have to be, the next Zoom, the next scheduled appointment, that’s when you start getting stressed. But the times where you have a full day of doing nothing and going with the flow, that’s truly the time where you are probably mostly in parasympathetic because there’s no urgency to be anywhere. I want everybody to have more of those times where they’re living in flow, to have more white space to think, to visualize your life, to plan your life, or to just meander at a park, to have one-on-one dates with your daughter, with your son for five, six hours, or for the whole day without worrying about time. That’s, I think, truly what life is about. We work all the way from a time prisoner, all the way up to a time transcender so we can have more of those timeless moments, to create more of those beautiful memories. Because that’s what we’ll remember. We’re not going to care how many Zoom meetings we were on, how much we worked, right?

11:40 And so I want you guys right now to think that, on my working days versus non-working days, where am I mostly? I will say, on my non-working days, I am 75% mostly in time transcender and time liberator. But on my working days, say, in the ER, I’m mostly a time manager and sometimes a time prisoner. Well, sometimes when there’s downtime in the ER, I will become a time creator. The first 30 minutes or one hour, I will be doing something that moves the needle of my goals. Either I will be sending an email that has to do with my medical licenses or, say, taking a jurisprudence exam, et cetera. So I am doing things that actually move the needle of my goals. So you can do that as well. You can be a time creator in the container of a time manager. And so once you figure out where you are, the percentage you are, in what stage, then you now know what you need to do the next step in order to ascend to the next stage as much as possible.

12:41 So if you’re a time prisoner and you want to become a time manager, you essentially need to remove all distractions. Leave your phone outside your bedroom. Leave your phone outside your office. Get a business phone if you have to. Download the Freedom app. Only serve yourself first before you serve any other people. Then to ascend from a time manager to a time creator, that is really when you start hiring virtual assistants. You start having learning automations. The virtual assistant can help you with automations, developing systems, processes, and standards and operating procedures. That’s why you can have, like, perhaps you can use a meal prep, or you have somebody meal prep for you. Do you have a cleaner for you? We have a live-in nanny. We actually have a live-in nanny and a house manager who helps us take care of our kids while we’re hyper-focused on working, so that in the four or five hours that we have with our kids daily, we are super focused and present with them. We’re not doing anything else that’s taking our focus and attention from them, that we’re not having any sort of guilt. We’re not having any sort of anxiety, that there’s things looming over us, things left undone like charts or other patients that

could be seen, right? Everything is cut off, shut off at around 4 or 5 PM, so we can spend the time with our kids. On average, for us—if you can leverage this out, hire other people—we spend about, yes, four to five hours daily. On the weekends, no work at all, it is fully with them completely. Just imagine how much of the impact that can have, right? I spend at least one-on-one dates with my son separately and my daughter, at least once a month or once every three weeks or so.

14:22 The next stage, if you’re a time creator and you want to ascend to a time liberator—that is due to saying yes too much, a pressure to optimize so much. You think it’s a great opportunity. You don’t have your life vision. You don’t have your massive transformative purpose set—at that time, you will think about what you would ideally want to do in the future. You can Google, like, how to write a life vision, what is the MTP about. Have that set, so everything that comes to you, you will very easily have a North Star to say yes, to say no to. Just think of that mindset that everything is a no, unless it’s a hell yes.

14:57 I’ve talked to many high-performing physicians, entrepreneurs, founders who are stuck in this fake time freedom stage. Just think that, if you have kids, just think that what you’re doing right now is a model for your kids. Do you want to model that you prioritize yourself first? Or do you want to model for your kids that you’re going to say yes to things, even at the expense of your sleep, at the expense of your energy, even at the expense of your presence with your spouse and your kids? Because they’re learning. They’re absorbing. Whatever you do now and whatever you’re modeling for them now, that is what they approach the world is going to be. And when they have their kids, they might be in a life where they always have this low-level cortisol because they just want to do, do, do. I understand that very well, coming from an immigrant background, where you want to do everything yourself. You want to work as hard as possible. You don’t want to waste money hiring other people. I’ve seen my mom sacrifice a lot even to this point—her health, her energy—because of not wanting to use leverage and always saying yes and doing things herself. So I really want, whoever’s stuck in this time creator stage, to really, really think about what are you saying no to if you say yes to this? What are you modeling for your kids if you say yes to this? Okay?

16:26 Again, we talked a lot about flow habits, flow tactics, in order to be more in the time transcender stage. But more of that will be coming if you can look at the prior episodes on how to get into flow easier. That is the next step in terms of going from a time liberator to a time transcender—having more of a whole day, white space day, when nothing’s scheduled one day a week, so you can think, so you can flow, so you can have self-care. Just go with the wishes of your whim, which we don’t do that anymore. We’re so structured right now—which you want to be on some days of the week. But other days, you want to allow yourself to recover from the structure, from the high performance, from the slow blocks that you’ve been doing, that you’ve been 5x-ing your productivity. You want a day of recovery or a whole weekend of recovery. Sometimes after a whole month, maybe a week of recovery, maybe after a quarter of those days.

17:21 So, again, just to summarize, first stage is time prisoner. I don’t have time. It’s sympathetic all the way to parasympathetic. I don’t have time. Fighting fires. Reactive. Don’t serve yourself. Number two, it is the time manager. You’re very busy. You’re productive. You use a to-do list, a checklist. You’re so tired because everything is yourself. The third stage is a time creator. You use leverage. You hire people. You use automation. You have systems. But you say yes too much, and so you’re stressed. Because every yes you say has multiple open loops. Number four is a time liberator, where you want to live most in the time. Everything is a no, unless it’s a hell yes. Everything you say will bring up your energy, multiply your energy, and doesn’t drain your energy. It aligns with your values. It aligns with your purpose. Number five is a time transcender. All there is is this moment right now.

18:13 Thank you for your presence, for your energy. Everything that we talked about is going to be on the show notes at Productivity MD. And if you are interested to hear a little bit more about what it might be to look like working one-on-one, to be your time freedom advisor, how you can ascend from one stage or a few stages up to the top stage, you can book a call with me also at productivitymd.com. You can see what I can do to help you guys. So thank you again. And just remember, everything you need is already within you now. Thank you.

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