Protect Your Time

Your calendar is not neutral. If you do not set boundaries, somebody else will gladly spend your time for you. I sit down solo to get honest about where I still struggle: going all in, saying yes too fast, and letting work expand until it fills every gap in the day. Boundary setting is not about being cold or selfish. It is about self-leadership, protecting your energy, and making sure your time lines up with your vision and long-term goals.

We dig into decision-making fatigue and why leaders and parents become bottlenecks without realizing it. From texts to emails to “quick questions,” the micro decisions add up fast, and by midday you can feel mentally cooked. I share simple boundary strategies that help: delegate real decision authority, set expectations for when you will respond, and remember that not everything deserves an immediate answer. These habits reduce leadership burnout and keep your team, your family, and your own brain from depending on constant access to you.

Then we tackle hyperconnectivity, the infinite workday, and digital addiction. Constant context switching creates attention residue that quietly wrecks focus and patience. I talk routines, phone discipline, screening calls, and turning down inputs before you turn up caffeine. We also touch achievement pressure, overscheduling, parenting stress, and why sleep deprivation makes every boundary harder to hold.

If you got value from this, subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend who needs stronger boundaries, and leave a review. What is one boundary you are ready to set this week?

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Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Updates

Gary Wise 0:05

Hello everyone, how you doing today? Half a day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, all the above. Once again, it's Gary, Gary Wise, Wise Leadership Solutions, the Word from the Wise podcast. I'm excited to be with y'all today. It's been a minute since I've done something alone. Uh, you know, I came into 2026, not really planning on doing so many uh guests, right? Which has been amazing because uh people just started reaching out. And I really have really appreciated all the different guests that have not only already appeared on the show, but all the guests that are booked going forward. So there's gonna be a lot of interesting people coming onto the show that are gonna be talking leadership, their own leadership journeys, kind of how they got to where they are in their lives. Not all of them are former military or from my military career, but I'm really exploring the opportunities of giving people a chance to share their message, talk about what they think is valuable, and introduce them to the listeners. You know, it's it's an interesting time right now, in the words from the Wise podcast. As I film this, I'm wrapping up spring break. We just crossed the 450 subscribers on the YouTube channel. We just had our biggest episode ever on the audio podcast size side of the house, thanks to my buddy Sean Bromstead. His episode has evidently been resonating with everybody a lot, which is amazing. Hopefully, we get more listeners to the show and just continue to do this thing that brings uh hopefully a lot of joy to people that are listening to the show. I really appreciate the creative outlet for myself, uh, the chance to catch up with old friends, the chance to make new friends. It's just really an awesome opportunity. And it's really cool to get to do all this from headquarters, which is also known as my home, right? Which is also known as this is my essentially my dad's room, my chief's mess, where a lot of my Navy regalia went to uh rest after my career. Uh, you know, it's just very exciting to get to share these stories and these ideas with you all. Uh today, got a very, uh I believe a good topic. Uh today we're talking about boundary setting, how you should take boundary setting serious. Uh, and I'll tell you, I struggle with this as with anything in life. Uh, I struggle with boundaries because I'm a person that tends to go all in all the time. And I have a hard time in keeping things not just in balance, but within different boundaries. And so as we work through this today, we're gonna talk about not just recommendations, but areas that I struggle and ways that I've found that works for me. And hopefully, if this resonates with you, you can let me know ways that work for you, and we can all continue to grow. You know, the point about this is the real question is are you leading yourself or are you letting other people get into your space, right? Are you letting other people determine what your time is gonna look like? Leadership, the most important leadership position, the most important leadership role in this world will be you leading yourself, you protecting your time, you ensuring the people that are around you, the things that you're choosing to do with your time, are beneficial for your vision, for your long-term goals. And if you're going to choose to sacrifice your time or to donate or invest your time, that hopefully it's going to be aligned with your priorities and the things you want to see happen in this world. What I don't want you to do is just to be a passenger in the wake of somebody else's decision making. Uh, that's tough, right? It's especially when you find yourself giving up a lot of your very valuable time for people that don't respect uh your time. Yeah, it's just one of the most frustrating things in the world is when you realize that the people you've been giving so much of yourself to don't even appreciate what you're bringing to the conversation or to the table. I remember when I went through CMC school, uh, one of the things that came out of my Hogan assessment was that I didn't care what position I played on the team. I just wanted to be a team player and I wanted to know that my contribution was valued. But I also wanted my team to be successful. And one of my one of my isms, if you will, was that I often felt like that in order for that success to happen, uh, I might need to be the leader. And but people would maybe misjudge that because they would think that you always think it's about yourself if you if you're a person who's always willing to put your hand in the air and say, hey, I have no problem taking on the role of leadership. Because not everybody can appreciate that a person would be the leader, but not want all of the uh the privileges and the perks that come with the title, right? Like we used to say in the Navy, if you're doing it for the parking spot, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, right? If you're doing it for um the paper cup, right? If you ever watch that Simon Seneck speech about the paper cup and you realize that ultimately the leader is not, typically they don't get the respect or they don't get all of the praise because they're that amazing. Typically, a lot of it comes due to the position that they're holding and the respect for the position that people have. Yes, eventually people will get to know you, they'll get to appreciate you, they'll get to value you, but a lot of times people are giving deference to the position more to than to the person. And for me, one of my biggest things was I never cared about all of the perks or the privileges that came from the position. I just wanted to know that my contributions and my time was valued and appreciated. And I wanted my team to feel successful. And one of my favorite ways to contribute, which was being a team player, but also did not mind taking on the burden of leadership. Right. Uh, understanding that when you enter into the space of being a leader, being a teacher, being a parent, uh the word no may be one of the kindest words you'll ever have in this world. Right. I mean, ultimately, people need to understand uh if they cannot do something or if they should not do something. And if you're the decision maker, sometimes you've got to give them an appropriate known. And when people think the boundaries are just there to prevent them from having an opportunity or just to prevent them from doing what they want to do, I think that's that's short-sighted. They don't always see all sides of the conversation, all sides of the challenge. And sometimes you need to have faith in the people that you're serving with and trust that they may know something that you don't know. Now, if you're gonna give out the no, uh, one of the things I recommend is you try to communicate the why behind that. Now, I'm not a no person, just so you all uh hear that from me. I'm not. I lead with yes. I look forward to saying yes. I love saying yes, we can get something done. Matter of fact, the minute I default to no, I almost struggle with that because I get frustrated about why are we not trying to do something? Is it because it's too hard? Is it because the juice is not worth the squeeze? What is it about this thing that causes us to say no? And if it's a good boundary, if it's a good result because of the consequences or the challenges, then there you go. Uh, but I've seen too many people in my lifetime just default to no. So understanding boundaries are not just about uh scapegoats to not do things. Right? Don't don't use boundaries. I'm gonna use a I'm gonna have a boundary so as to not do things that make me uncomfortable or to not do something that causes me to feel at risk or in jeopardy. No. But healthy boundaries and appreciation for what's going on around you is what we're looking for here. And and knowing that you strategically, you're if you if you do use the no, right? If you use, if you use your veto power to say no, people are gonna respect it, especially when that's not typically your MO, right? We want you to be protective stewards of your life and your legacy. We want you to understand that uh prioritizing uh somebody else's ideas over your own is a very significant sacrifice. And I think we should communicate that to people. Now, if it's in the workplace, ladies and gentlemen, you took the job. You took the position. It's implied by taking that position that during the hours you are clocked in and clocked out, you are going to sacrifice your own personal ideas to get the job done. And the minute that conflict happens where you don't feel like that's a good use of your time, well, it's time to go ahead and quit that position. It's time to go ahead and drop those retirement papers. It's time to let them know you're gonna be leaving, or it's time to communicate, right? Hey, this is not what I thought I signed up for. Here are my problems, here are the areas that I have concerns, and if we can't get this right, then I'm gonna have to probably go work somewhere else because I cannot do this with that conflict. Or you could suck it up, right? You could sacrifice. I remember looking back on my career, being a young petty officer, and one of my biggest frustrations was not being in the leadership position to affect the change that I wanted to take on. And I'll never forget being a first-class petty officer, deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2006, and my chief tells me at the time that he's getting flown back to the states. We're in the Persian Gulf at the time. My chief is getting flown back to the states because he has a medical condition that he has to be removed from the ship. And I am the first, I am the LPO, I'm the leading petty officer of the division. And chief basically says, hey man, you're going to become the chief for the division. Uh, there were other chiefs that wanted the division, but I went to them and said that I thought you could do the job and that you're gonna be okay. That said, there are people that are going to be watching over, and if you don't do what you need to do, you might lose this opportunity. And I never forget he so he le and he leaves like the very next day, that day. Like he didn't tell me till the very end. It came out of nowhere. And I never forget, I assembled the whole division together, and I had been on this ship now for a couple of years. So I had gone from being a second class to a first class, but I had been there for about two and a half years by this point. And I basically told all the sailors that are in my division, I said, hey, look, you know, we all had our opinions, we all had our thoughts. I know a lot about your guys' ideas. Guess what? We're about to do it. We're about to do it. But as long as I can keep you all fully functioning, doing the job, making sure the maintenance is done, making sure the drills are done, making sure the training is done, making sure we're prepared to fight the ship, all the things that we know we got to do. If you guys are able to support me, we're about to have everything we ever wanted to have in this division. And of course, they all did. They did an amazing job for me. And it was at the end of that deployment that I picked up chief petty officer. So just again, looking at opportunities for when you get the chance to take in into a new space, a new leadership position, uh, there's going to be times for you to affect the change you want to affect. That was one of my challenges. But if you are in a space in your career or in your life where you're frustrated and you're not able to do the things you want to do within your timeline, sometimes you've got to work through that. But if the boundaries are going to be what matters as you continue to try to grow and to continue to try to be the best that you can be, as well as being fulfilled. Now, the idea behind today's podcast is I'm gonna I'm gonna break down, you know, a few recommendations as to high points as to areas of concern. And then we're also going to give you some ideas as to ways to help handle those issues as you're going forward. And these are going to again be lessons learned from my career, from people that I've had the opportunity to serve with, as well as from my own personal experience. And I want you to understand that having healthy boundaries is not something that should make you feel guilty, even though it will. Even though it will, you're gonna feel guilty. You know, I am. My students recognized recently that we don't have a field trip scheduled for the month of April. Now, mind you, this school year, at least for my drill team, we've done more competitions this year than any other uh year since I've been at the high school. And I'm also driving the school bus for the track team at the school to help them get opportunities to go compete in more track meets, which also has some of my students on that track team. So when I looked at the month of April and I recognized there was not a field trip for the month of April, but I'm taking my sons to go see a live wrestling event, that was a boundary that I had to put in place. And a piece of me felt guilty because it's like, okay, I love these students. I enjoy taking them to go do fun things. I enjoy the bus rides. I enjoy seeing them go get experiences that maybe they would not have if not with our program. But at some point, I also have to learn to say, maybe I don't need to spend every weekend hanging out with, like my wife calls them my broke best friends, right? Because not every weekend needs to be something that I commit to with the ROTC program. As much as I love it, maybe I need to set some boundaries in that way. And so I did. Did I feel guilty when it was recognized? And then they asked the question, hey, Master Chief, how come we're not doing something? Yeah, I do. I don't want to let people down. On the reverse, sometimes you got to do what you got to do, and you don't don't be fake about it, right? Just be honest. You know, be honest and say, hey, look, we've done a lot of things. Not every week it needs to be for us. Not every week it needs to be for a school activity. And maybe what you should do is look to figure out other things to do with your weekends by just doing this one thing you're passionate about in this season, right? All things in moderation, all things in balance. Okay, here we go. We're gonna jump to our first topic. Our first topic today is about, you know, uh parental or executive decision making fatigue, right? And I link parental and or executive because I will tell you, parents, you're the executives of your home, right? Mom, dad, older siblings, the people that are responsible for taking care of the younger people within the team of your household, you are the executives. And then for my people that are out there leading organizations that are managers, that are leaders, that have that are CEO type flavor, that have that energy that they're controlling their space and that they they're controlling what they own, uh, you are the executive in that in that space, and there is a decision-making fatigue. And ultimately, there's a bottleneck there because a lot of us drive all decisions through us. Think about from the moment you wake up, how many decisions are you making in a day? Let's think about that. From I mean, from the moment you wake up from what you're gonna eat, from what you're gonna wear, from what you're going to answer to on your cell phone, from how many different social media tabs you're gonna look at in the morning, how many messages are awaiting you when you look to your cell phone, how many emails are gonna come to you during the day? How many different pings of people requesting information from you are going to hit you before nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, whatever it may be. You know, in my household, besides the cell phone, and besides some of the things that I've already laid out, you know, there's my wife, there's my boys. When I get to the school, there's other co-workers, there are the students having the requests and their expectations. There are just a lot of micro decisions that are coming at you day in and day out. And you have to wonder how you're managing all of those. And it's really no wonder why we're mentally exhausted by noon, right? I mean, as a teacher, I will tell you so Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesday, I teach six periods a day. And Thursday and Friday are block days, which are amazing. But Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are six periods a day. And on the days that I'm teaching academics, oh, by fifth period, I'm cooked. Now, what's unique about fifth period is that it's after lunch. So I'll teach four periods in a row, back to back to back to back, same topic, same conversations, same nuance, same new ideas. It's almost repetitive. I mean, it is repetitive, let's be honest. And then I'll have a lunch break, and then I have to get re-going again for the last two classes of the day. And that's hard because typically by lunch, I'm kind of cooked. Right now, how many of you feel like that at your eight-hour workday at any other place or your 12-hour workday, or that has that thought process during your own personal experience where it's just by two o'clock, by one o'clock, you're just tired of being the one that has to make all the decisions. And I'm gonna tell you, you're not gonna be too productive if you're the one that has to make every decision. You know, you have got to figure out a way to delegate. High-performing leaders understand they do not have the capacity to be the only person that can approve something. And the question is going to be why do your people not understand where they have the capability to make a decision? And why do people always want to come and get FaceTime with you? Now, sometimes it's because it's because they like you. Sometimes they really want to feel that validation. Look, in my house, my kids know I can say yes to something, but if my wife says no, it's going to be a complication to their plan, right? So sometimes they might get the yes from me, but then go double check with the mom because they want to, they they don't want to get it taken away from them at the checkout counter, right? Uh or with my school, there's multiple instructors. And so they might come talk with me about something, but then also have to go talk to the other instructor to figure out what his thought process is about it, or him and I will have to talk about it to make sure that we're on the same page for the final decision. All of that takes mental tenacity, all of that takes a little bit of time and it will wear you down your durability throughout the day. So, one of the things that's very important is for delegating down to your people as to what they can make decisions on, what they can't make decisions on, or maybe also to manage their expectations as to when they should expect an answer from you. Not everything deserves an immediate response. That was one of the most powerful lessons I learned as I worked my way up through the food chain of the Navy, whether it was on board the USS George Washington as a senior chief, as a master chief, or even once I got the command master chief program. It was learning that not everything deserves an immediate response. Right? Typically, all it all you have to do is say, hey, I appreciate the ask. Here's my understanding of what you're asking. I will get a response back to you when it's appropriate. Now, does that always uh meet everyone's ideas for what they want to have happen? No. People want to know right now, but sometimes maybe it's a good idea they sit tight as well. Maybe it's a good idea they learn to let it play out a little bit longer or have to go get more information. Because how often do you ask a little bit of questions to get a little more context and they don't know those answers all the time, right? And so understanding that if your job is to not make bad choices, make bad decisions, maybe you should not always be shooting from the hip, right, and making knee-jerk reaction decisions. And so my advice when it comes to if you feel like you're the bottleneck, if you feel like you're giving a million answers to people all day long, maybe you need to train your people, your family, the teammates you have to not always expect immediate responses. And that way you can have a little more time to process things and not feel so exhausted by because every decision you make in this world will have a consequence. And that's part of the stress, right? Uh this report I was reading through has surveyed 20 over 2,500 executives across 10 different countries, and it found that leadership burnout was up to 56% last year, primarily because of the cost of make being a bottleneck for decision making. Now, mind you, that is people that are in leadership positions that they typically ask for. Right? I Love being the decision maker. I talked about that earlier. I said I wanted to be in the position to affect change. I asked for the opportunity to be the one that makes the decision. So don't complain about being the one that gets to make the decision. Better ask yourself how to best train my team to support me so that I can make the best decisions possible while also taking care of myself and having the healthy boundaries that I require, right? Did you know that a lot of people that leave leadership positions or don't want leadership positions, it's because they're afraid of that burnout. Right. And just think about the cost of your organization when somebody quits, when somebody leaves, right? When I retired from the service, 25 years in the United States Navy, I could have arguably been done another 10 years in the Navy. The Navy had to replace me with somebody else because I chose to go do something else for my career because I was effectively burnt out. Right? Burnt out. Now, on the reverse side, right? I see the same thing happen in the teaching community. I speak with teachers that have or that will choose to, instead of doing a 20-year career as a teacher, they will cross a certain year line where they become vested with the organization. They secure their ability to get a pension in the future. And then they choose to transition into something else because they are possibly burnt out from doing something. Which, hey, you know what? There's nothing wrong with just saying I would like to do something else with my time. It doesn't have to be because you're burnt out, right? It's okay to say I am excited that I have the privilege to do something new for the next chapter of my life. And there does not have to always be a negative connotation as to why you're choosing to leave. You know, when I look back on my career in the service and I was talking with a buddy of mine about this just the other day, who's about to retire, you know, I say, be super optimistic for life after the retirement because it's freaking fun no longer having to deal with a lot of the stuff you deal with when you're on active duty. It's sour a little bit because you're going to be letting some things go, closing out a chapter, maybe not have gotten gotten things across the finish line. You wanted to get across the finish line. But on the reverse, man, it's super exciting because it's just new beginnings, fresh ideas. I mean, I took my family to the lake this last weekend. There was no leave papers involved. There was no phone calls while we were at the lake. It was amazing, right? I was just off. And so there are some things that you can look at. And when you're when you're feeling burnt out, maybe reframing that a little bit and trying to figure out what it is that has you so exhausted. And if you're gonna give yourself the chance to do something else, maybe not try to launch pad from a space of negativity and try to find a way to make it be an exciting level up, right? By just being a ship because I'm exhausted all the time. But the burnout thing is real, right? I mean, people unfortunately feeling frustrated. I mean, 56% in that group feel frustrated. Uh make sure that you're not suffocating the vision of your people and or yourself by waiting until only you have the answer to something. That's another thing, right? If you're the decision maker, great. Maybe delegate down for people to go get the information that you need so they can bring you back the own answers, then you can better make the choices. And the decision is not just resting on you saying yes or no, but it also relies upon other people to contribute into that conversation. One of the things I remember from my time at staff duty was we would have meetings just for decision making to happen. Like literally, they would put together briefs and say, all right, sir, we're gonna make decisions on these things. Here's all the information that you need, and here is the schedule of events, and you're gonna get briefed on all of it. And what we're gonna do at this moment in time is you're gonna say yes or no. But it was planned into the day. That could work, right? That could work. At the end of the day, just make sure you give your brain enough time to recover as you're making all the decisions throughout the day. The more choices you make, the more, the more shots you miss, right? Uh can't be afraid to be a shooter if you're a leader, but just be cautious. Okay, the next the next topic for today. So, first topic, we talked about making decisions and and unfortunately exhausting yourself and being a bottleneck from being the only one that can say yes or no. The next one is gonna be about hyperconnectivity and the infinite workday. Right? The infinite workday means it never stops, right? The workday never freaking stops. And I don't know about you guys, but that is my favorite way to look at my workday. I am I'm busy from essentially the moment I get out of bed until the moment I'm going to bed. A piece of that is because I'm super excited about what I'm doing. I'm super passionate about it. Maybe it's also because, you know, for me, I have the job I do with the school, I have the podcast, I have the leadership development that I do with civilians or with adults that are separate from those other two things. Um, but it's just when you're a person who is driven and you're passionate and you're excited about the things that you're doing. I mean, for me, it's my hobby, right? My hot my hobby has always been work. Not saying that's healthy. It's not. I already actually know it's not, right? I know it's not, but it's also just how I'm wired, you know. And I tell people, you know, this is me uh on medication. Imagine if this, if I didn't have those, those, that assistance, right? It's just this is who I've been trained to be over years and years and years. And I find it's my most fulfilled state, right? If I'm not happily grinding away at stuff, if I'm not excited about the things that I'm doing in my life, I'm probably going to be frustrated. Now, like I just said, I came back from a trip where I was at the lake where I disconnected from everything and just took a few days to be with my family. That was amazing, right? But I had to learn throughout my life how to put myself in those spaces so that I could come back recharge to make this next video, right? Or to have this next conversation with somebody. Today I talked to probably six different people with leadership topics that had questions, not just about what I'm doing, but their own personal careers. That was very, very recharging. And I'm excited because break is almost over and I got to go back to school on Monday and be back with the kids and get back to teaching again. So lots of exciting things. But you have to be aware of unfortunately hyperconnectivity and the infinite work day and how are you managing your time to best preserve yourself, especially if you're struggling. And I've been there, right? Where you feel like you're a slave to the cell phone, where you feel like you're a slave to the email inbox, you know, you're constantly getting pegged with emails from morning till night, and you don't feel like you have the ability to not respond. Uh again, I would I would go back to the first one, the first comment that I had with the first topic, which is not everything deserves an immediate response to include emails, right? To include emails, right? Not everything deserves an immediate response. I used to, I use my inbox a lot to manage my workday. And I will let emails sit in my inbox or messages sit in my message queue, not because I don't know the answer, because I do, but because I want to train the people to condition them to not expect a response from me all the time. Matter of fact, if you want a response from me quickly, call me. Call me. Call me. But even then, how many of you out there like me screen your calls? I do. I do. I have no problem sending somebody to voicemail. They can leave me a message and I get to choose when I get back to them because my time is valuable and I have a lot going on, and I want to be able to pick and choose when I make that phone call, when I have that communication. I want to ensure that my time is figured out. When I was on the ship, you know, that was one of the biggest challenges having an open door policy, which I did. I loved having an open door policy. And it was my, if I ever closed my door, it was probably because I was having an important conversation with somebody that I did not want to be disturbed. Right. Otherwise, I kept my door open all the time. And I would get interrupted all the time. Now I work in a classroom where my office is in the classroom. So trust me, I don't get any time to just focus on something in particular because there's always a million distractions and everybody's thing is their most important priority. Right. But I appreciate that when somebody wants an immediate answer, they will come out of their way to come find you or to try to set up a call or to set up a communication. But if people are going to leverage texting and email, then not all of them deserve an immediate response back. Make sure you manage that. You know, Microsoft says uh they did, they Microsoft came out with an analysis from 2025 to talk about the number of emails people get every day. And they said they said that the average worker gets almost 117 emails a day. Now, I cannot speak about that. Uh that's not my reality as a teacher now, right? On the ship, especially on the aircraft carrier. Oh man, I got so many emails. Plus a ton of reply to alls. Like, I did is anybody else out there? If you see a reply to all, you just delete it immediately. I do. If it's a reply to all, I just delete it because, in my opinion, that's just extra energy that I don't need to read through. That's not for me in particular. It's just a message to a bunch of people. And I feel like if they wanted me to know something, it would be directly to me. Um that's and that's when I worked in organizations that had unfortunately a lot of bad email etiquette, uh, which has happened in my career. Now it's a lot better because there's a lot less emails. But some of you out there are probably getting an exorbitant amount of emails. I have four different email accounts: personal, professional, work, and then my ROTC work emails. I got two work emails, my own personal professional email, and then my own personal email. And all day long, they're all getting different kinds of email traffic. Some that is advertisements, some that are phishing, some that are looking for information, some that are legitimate and require timely responses, some that don't, some that have action required, all the above. And so just understanding how much is on your plate every day is a big deal. Then you get into messenger, messaging, all the different communication apps that you may have that people are using to communicate with you, whether it's group chats, personal chats. Do you see how you can constantly be busy? It's a big deal. And you have to learn how to put your phone down. Like for me at my school, it's amazing because we don't use cell phones during the day. So I can focus on teaching. You know what kills me though when I'm teaching is when people call me. And whenever I need to call another teacher during class, I get frustrated because they're probably doing what I'm doing, which is teaching. And when you're teaching and you have to stop teaching because somebody's calling you because a student wants to know about the color purple or whatever it may be, you're just like, dude, I do not want to talk about this right now. I'm teaching. It would be the same thing on the ship. I'd be working with sailors on something, working on my job, and I'd get a phone call from some random person asking some random question that would completely disorient what I'm working on. God, it was even worse when I had the radios on the aircraft carrier, and it was just, you know, the XO's walking through your space right now, and your space is all jacked up, and they're yelling at you over the radio, which literally used to happen on board my aircraft carrier. I remember one time on board the USS George Washington, the command master chief uh was on the radio over the duty net, telling everybody he was looking for Senior Chief Wise, because he was in my pump room and it was a complete goat rope. It was just not good. And he did not like how it looked. I needed to get down there right away. I think by the time I got down there, he was gone. And it wasn't even that bad, man. I got down there and it was not that big of a deal. I think he was messing with me more than anything. But that used to happen on that ship. You know, they would go on the duty net and publicly embarrass people about calling them out on their spaces, and your whole chain of command was going there. So your department, your department LCPO, your primarily reporting department. All these people you worked with were all stopping what they were doing to go down to this space to see what the freaking high-powered problem was, and whatever they were doing was no longer that important. That happens every day for people. And so learning how to best compartmentalize yourself when you're trying to focus on priorities matters. Right? Trying to lay out boundaries when you're focusing on important things, when you're working through the day, when you're hanging out with your family or you're working on something important will protect yourself from getting distracted as you're moving throughout your life. But this busyness and hyperconnectivity, it's a challenge, right? And you know, attention residue is a thing. What that means is it's essentially the neurological state where part of your cognitive load is only able to change uh mind frames so fast. So if I'm intently focusing on making this podcast, and then my wife calls me and she needs me to go do something else, there's a piece of me that's going to take some time to fully shift focus. And if you're shift focused, then shift focus, then shift focus, then shift focus, at some point you're going to be degraded. That's called uh that's the residue piece, right? And you have to you have to learn to recognize that and take care of yourself because the older we get, the little slower that it becomes, which is why so many of us like coffee or caffeine, right? Because we feel like it ramps up our productivity, we feel like it accelerates us enough to keep up with the day. What if instead of drinking more caffeine, you know, Red Bulls, monsters, Coke, whatever your flavor is. For me, it's black coffee, right? What if instead of ramping up the caffeine, we turn down the volume of all these different things, tried to breathe, and lower the amount of inputs that we have consistently. At least before you try to go to bed at night. Try that one out. That might change your that might change your life. Uh, one of the things that I found that worked for me is having a strong morning routine, right? So not waking up and just immediately working, right? Uh so I don't check emails right away. I might leverage some social media for entertainment, right? I might, I'm not gonna lie to you. I I I've got some social media that's dialed in with some areas that I like to focus my attention. So maybe there. I like to get up and make sure that our routine is done so we get the kids ready for school. My wife and I get our room ready for the day, get ready for work. I mean, I'm typically I don't I no longer do the whole get get up at 4 30 in the morning and PTD like I did when I was in the military. I let that go when I'm retired. Uh but now I'm happy to get out of bed at six o'clock in the morning. But by 7:30, I'm in the office, right? So I've got essentially an hour to take care of everything at the house. Typically, commute is gonna be about 15 to 25 minutes, which it's not a crazy commute, but it's stoplights, right? And then by 7:30, I'm in the office and school starts at 8:30, and the students will start arriving as early as 7:45. So as early as 7:45, I will have people into my day, depending upon what day of the week it is and what we have going on. But then I have uh from the moment I walk in the door, I have a routine to make sure that my classroom is ready for the day, to set up all the stuff that I need to be teaching and just and away it goes. I enjoy having that routine, so I don't have to really think about it too much. And what is not very much involved in all of that is going to be all these extra emails and outside entities. My focus for the morning is getting to work and prepare for the day for teaching the kids and for the school. I typically don't even get to all of my work emails or all my other things that I do until after that day is done when I'm at home and decompressing from all of that and give myself some free time to focus on my hobbies, right? And so I think having a good schedule, having a plan that works for you, and not getting distracted from that during your routine days. Now, some days are not routine, right? Well, we were on spring break, amazing. No school, right? Or if you're on leave, or if you took some holiday or whatever it is, you've now got some time. And you'll find, I don't know about you guys, but I find that my routine gets disrupted, my eating regimen gets disrupted, my my physical training regimen gets disrupted. Uh and you kind of get thrown off. So I always look forward to getting back on routine again because there's just comfortability there. A lot of kids thrive in routine. A lot of people, humans, thrive in routine. Because again, I don't mind chaos. I was a firefighter for most of my career. I'm good in a casualty situation, but not every day needs to be freaking chaotic, right? Some days can just be regular. Some days can just be regular. And when I was on the ship as a D seaman, if you ask anybody that I ever trained, I would tell them, uh I we will accelerate until we determine whether or not anyone's at risk of being harmed. But once we determine that no one is dying, we will then slow it all the way down and methodically work our way forward because I want to ensure that we're doing everything the right way. Right. Now, if somebody's at risk of unfortunately being unsafe, then we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna go get them, we're gonna go save them, right? We're gonna go save them, we're gonna do what we got to do. But once we determine that no one is at risk or no one's in that space, then we're gonna slow it down, we're gonna set boundaries, and we're gonna methodically work our way into the casualty. And that's the way I live my life to this day. You know, so protect your day, have a good routine, look at your routine, make sure it's working for you, and just ensure that it's aligned with your priorities every day. All right, next up, ladies and gentlemen, we are all addicted to our digital devices. You know, it's it's a it is a thing, right? I love my phone, I love my computer, I love my television. I I use all these things, which it's amazing that we have them all. I'm not even gonna lie to y'all, because my generation, you know, I'm 48 years old right now, born in 1977. My generation went from having three channels on our television when I was a child or a young person. I mean, I didn't have cable television until I joined the military, right? So growing up at houses, I didn't have cable TV in my house as a young person. You know, we didn't have a the first VCR my family ever had was the one that I bought as a teenager. All the videos that I had in my house were all the videos that I recorded with recordable VHS tapes because we didn't buy VHS tapes in my house, right? We just that was not where our money went. We didn't have that kind of extra money to do those things. So my generation went from that level of technology to where we're at today. It's been pretty impressive. And yeah, they they make your life very comfortable. They they add a lot of value to your life, but it also can become an addiction. You know, you're looking for that dopamine hit of hoping people resonate with the video you post or the thing that you like, or sharing a story that you and your family went and did something, or sharing uh a piece of information, or you you like to feel like you belong when you see a lot of people enjoying the same things, right? It makes you feel connected, even though you don't even know the people you're talking to, or the people. That you're liking the post with, right? And unfortunately, when it comes to the young people, they really do get wrapped up into this. And this is, it's not just the young people, adults too, right? Uh I've seen people, I've had people come for me. You know, not too long ago, I had a cousin come after me on social media. A cousin, first cousin, like family. Like I'm 48. He's like 53, 53 years old. And bro is attacking me on Facebook like we're a couple of freaking teenagers. I my wife tells me, she says, hey, your cousin's attacking you on Facebook right now. You should probably check that out. And sure enough, like we're like full adults, 53. Bro is about to be retired, and he's attacking me, just cursing at me, telling me my dad who's passed away wouldn't be proud of me. Just just saying mean things. For what? Bro, you ain't even talked to me since my dad died. Like, what are you mad about, dude? Get old, like calm down. Calm down. It's not that serious. But people get so emotionally wrapped up in their facades of the world, and then they start going after people and attacking them when they when they don't feel like the other people agree with them. I mean, and and God forbid, if we were in real life, would we have had to fight like we were teenagers because you're angry about a person's political opinion or a person's civil opinion or public opinion? Like, really? Is that what we're doing? Like, that's incredible to me. I will tell you, as an adult, as a man, for me, I just don't think there's anything that's gonna get me that upset to the point where I'm going to go off and start yelling at people in the world in general, let alone via social media, which is not real, bro. It's just a a microcosm of what people choose to share with other people. But it's happening every day. And the reality was him yelling at me on that social media post was more about him than it was about me. Right? It's his unfortunate feelings about his personal life and his personal challenges that for whatever reason I am triggering him. But it really is not about me. It's about his layout and God bless him. I, you know, I wish him nothing but the best. But the first thing I had to do was disconnect, right? Disconnect, put a boundary, lay down a freaking abil inability for him to do those kinds of things because there's a lot of people that I care about that are connected to my social media that do not need to see his temper tantrum in front of the world. That's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for him, I'm a barrist for our family. But unfortunately, not everybody is able to manage their addiction to digital devices, right? And his addiction played out in him having a freaking episode. Sucks. Maybe you should take a break from doing social media. Maybe you should take a break from certain kinds of content or whatever it is. If you cannot control yourself emotionally, it's unhealthy. And this is not just in this situation, this is throughout the world, right? Unfortunately, young people, old people, people will feel frustrated if they don't feel like people are appreciating their time, their content, their posts. And it's a it's a concern. It's a concern. Uh, I know for my kids, they don't do social media personal profiles yet. They become adults, they can figure it out. But I don't have them doing it as kids. Uh, I do let them watch YouTube. I do, but there's controls on that. They don't get Facebook and they don't get Instagram, they don't get all these other things uh because I think that there's there's development that needs to happen. And of course, I don't want them to get so wrapped around the axon communicating with people on these on these apps that it becomes connected to their personal happiness, right? Because it's not always real. And remember that our brains are not fully developed until we're around the age of 25. On the reverse, you know, shout out to my cousin who's older than me. As we get older, we start losing our minds a little bit, right? Because it's almost the reverse of adolescence, right? Even for guys, you go through a type of a menopause phase, even they call it like andro something, but you start to lose the ability to control yourself a little bit. And you have to be aware of that. And, or the other thing is this, and this is just a reality. You start to look at your life and you're valuing where you're at, in contrast to all these other perceived perceptions in the world, other people, and you're comparing, and maybe you're unhappy with where things are landing and lining up for you, and you're very pissed off at your reality, and you don't want to take responsibility for it or accountability for it, so you get mad at other people and you lash out. It's it's just it comes, it's humanity. And my advice would be that if your addiction to a social media or to a digital device is having is giving you negative reactions, take a break. Negative responses, take a break, set digital boundaries. Uh my advice is just give yourself space. You know, again, for my kids' cell phones, you know what's funny is I got some hate in the world because I talked about how I kept checking my kids' phones. And people were like, people from Europe in particular were commenting on my uh posts or on my videos saying, How dare you do that? And how dare you do that? That's an invasion of privacy. Well, guess what? I'm their dad, you're not. Okay. I'm the one that pays the bill, you don't. Right? And I think it's a blessing to have people that love you so much that they will invade into your privacy a little bit to ensure you're not gonna get off track. Right? Um, and for those Europeans that were making the post, you know, I'm an American, so kumba, y'all. We're not, we're not worried about y'all. Love you, mean it. Love you, mean it. Looking forward to going to travel Europe someday. But ultimately, our parenting styles are different, right? And you have to understand that these websites, these apps are there to exploit the dopamine, right? I recently saw that young lady who took Maida to court because she said that their app was designed to get her to be addicted, to then have her then unfortunately live a life of an addicted personality. Um, for me, that's almost like a person who gets into drugs suing the drug dealer. Right? Like at some point, you've got to take responsibility for yourself, you know? And I don't know that it's always gonna be the drug dealer's fault that you could not manage yourself. But it's gonna be interesting how it all plays out because people always want to blame somebody else except for themselves. Take the blame, right? Now, the National Center for Health Statistics, which I take statistics always with a grain of salt because anybody can make numbers say almost anything. But they said that 19.2% of US adolescents, so United States adolescents aged 12 to 19 screened positive for depression in 2025. 19%. So 20% screened positive for depression. Um, you know, I get that. I can be depressed any given Sunday, too, right? People always find reason to be upset, be purple, have upset moments. The reality is, are you going through a mental health challenge or are you just is it a perceived mental health moment? I don't know. Um, it sounds like a lot, 20%. I think also carrying all the weight of all these relationships via a social media device is complicated. When I was on the ship, we go underway, we tell the sailors and the Marines that they could no longer use their cell phones. And we would literally watch them go through withdrawals. We would watch them go through withdrawals because you're always used to pulling out your cell phone and looking at your phone. After a week or two of being at sea, though, there would be some liberation there. There would be a recognition and that they're going to be okay not checking their socials every five minutes, not checking their messages every five minutes. And there would become a freedom to being more focused on the day-to-day operations. So that was that was always a pleasant reminder that it's going to be okay. And again, I think everybody as an adult, everybody as a person needs to take care of themselves when it comes to managing their digital addictions, right? And and addiction to anything in this world is going to be a challenge. I struggle with that as a person, struggle with alcohol addictions, uh, struggle with work addictions. And so we all have to learn how to manage ourselves. I think one of the things for leaders, adults, parents, is modeling the best that we can for our kids and showing them how to not always have the cell phone in our hands, not always have the need to be watching a YouTube video or a short or Instagram or whatever it is, especially when it comes to family time, especially when it comes to specific decision-making time. Uh just demonstrating their accrued behaviors that you expect them to uphold, because unfortunately, it's not always about what we say. It's typically going to be about what we do. That and your actions will always speak louder than your words. And if you don't want, I'm sorry, you just you gotta recognize that. And and uh say as I do, uh or do as I say, not as I do doesn't always work. Right? So just think about that. All right, next topic uh for today is going to be um how do you manage the the need to have to achieve everything? Right? How do you manage the need to have to achieve everything? Are you burning out your kids? Are you burning out yourself by trying to do everything possible to get the best resume available to you or to your kids? Uh 57% of high school kids are reporting burnout because you're trying to meet other people's expectations as they're coming through high school. Now, that's a statistic that I pulled off the internet. Do I believe that's true? No. As a person who lives in a school surrounded by kids, honestly, I think that most of them could be doing more. But are there kids that are doing everything? Yes. Are there kids that I wish could just be um a kid and not be trying to be a pseudo-college student or a pseudo-professional in 10th grade, 11th grade? Sure. Are there parents out there that are, you know, tiger momming it up, right? You ever heard of the tiger mom that have their kids doing X amount of hours of homework every day, X amount of, you know, sports every day, X amount of uh things, and there's just a regimented schedule, and there's just no time to play, or there's no time for social events. And look, I'll I'll see the kids do it to themselves too. In ROTC, my program, Mondays and Thursdays, there's marksmanship after school, Tuesdays there's orienteering after school, Wednesdays and Fridays, there's drill after school. I'll see kids sign themselves up for every one of those events because they want to stay after school every day because they love being busy and out of the house and being with their friends. It's not only uh socialization for them, but it's also entertainment. But these kids will also hit the wall and get burnt out because homework might suffer, or grades might suffer, or parents start to get tired of them always being gone. And there has got to be a balance there. And so I would just recommend that as you live your life as a leader, as a parent, as a as a young person, is this is what I tell my students. Maybe you don't need to be on three teams, four teams. Maybe you only be on one or two teams. For my kids, it's one sport at a time. Right? One sport at a time. That's just one. I remember when my sons were doing martial arts and like football. That was a big lift because martial arts was three times a week, and then football was three, four times a week. We had to let something go. Right. Uh now it's one sport at a time, right? Unless you really think you're gonna become a collegiate athlete or a professional athlete. I think one sport at a time is pretty good, and grades have got to be above a certain level, or sports are gonna get knocked down because sports are a plus. They are not the definition of, right? The number one most important thing for my children is grades, right? Um, I think the other thing when it comes to leaders managing themselves in their own time is don't sign yourself up for too many extracurricular activities, right? You don't you don't need to do, you don't need to coach your kids' soccer team, plus be on the company bowling team, plus be a leader in the church. Like there's all these different things that you're signing yourself up for. And oh, by the way, you're a professional working 50 to 60 hours a week, like crazy time. You know, here's another statistic I got. Mothers report a burnout rate of 60% compared to 42% for fathers. And this is again, this is a statistic, statistic, and I didn't really like it because for me it was why not just people? Right? When I got into the when I got into my research and I was redoing doing this research, it brought me this statistic and this about mothers. And for me, I said, well, let's reframe it as just people, right? But it came back and said, no, this is recognized moms, even if these moms are working full time, they still handle 71% of the domestic mental load. And that's true. Like my wife and I both work, right? We both work. We're both very busy taking care of our lives, doing our own professional things. But there is a lot more domestic things that carries room in her mind than it does in mine. Meanwhile, I'm a lot more worried about finances, future investment opportunities, business, all these different things that for her are not the priority. Right? I would nine times out of ten, you look at the list of domestic things, that's probably gonna be a lot more on her periphery than it is on mine. We did an orientarian competition last week, and there was this gentleman helping us. He was a volunteer who is newly retired. And I asked him, I said, Hey man, you know, how does it feel to be retired now? He says, I can't hide. My wife knows where I'm at all the time. He says, before I could go to work and I'd have free time to kind of do what I wanted to do at work, and I had he'd have the drive and the come home, whatever it is. But he was there volunteering because his wife felt like he needed to volunteer. And he basically just told me, he said, Hey man, I just can't hide. I can't seem to get out of this thing. And that's a comp for him, that was stressful when he missed going to work. I thought that was interesting. That was an interesting data point. But how many moms are out there stressed, burnt out because of carrying that domestic mindset? And then, oh, by the way, our professionals. I mean, on the reverse, you got a lot of dads that are out there stressed about work. And I mean, it's just there's more than enough to go around. Right. But I thought that was an interesting data point that even in 2026, and you have to pay attention to it and to give yourself the chance to have these conversations to help mitigate the load and to help share the stress, you know, and try to communicate whether we're talking about school events, budgeting, you know, economic cost for your family, what's the future hold, child care concerns, parental burnout, right, is supposedly costing the U.S. economy $172 billion annually in lost earnings and productivity. Now, I don't know if that's as much as the Learing Center in Minneapolis or wherever, right? The Somalian folks that are juicing us for everything that we got here in America. But the reality is there's a lot of money being left on the table because people are just kind of not living to their full potential because they're possibly burnt out or they're they're struggling managing all the things on their mind, right? And so think about that as you come day to day. Uh, the next one I brought up was sleep deprivation, right? 90% of parents uh report losing sleep due to caregiving challenges. And four out of five says their sleep's gonna suffer when their kids don't sleep well. Well, duh, right? Well, duh. Um getting sleep matters. And if you're not getting sleep as a human being, you're going to struggle day for day. And if you're struggling sleeping because you're stressed, or because your kids are not doing good, or because just whatever it is, you take that as a very big concern. You know, I'm one of these guys that I got the whole sleep apnea machine. I wear the whole thing. And my wife was the first one that recognized that I possibly had that challenge. She was just like, bro, I can't sleep at night because you're snoring so damn loud. Maybe you should get that checked out. And that was like 2010. I mean, I've had a sleep app machine since 2011, right? When I was in Yokusuka, Japan is when I first got diagnosed with sleep apnea. And I will tell you, it was a game changer, right? Because the minute I started using that sleep app machine to sleep, oh my God, if it was a it, I would start to fall such a deep sleep, it would scare me. It would scare me because I I would not be used to that level of deep sleep. Um, so figuring out your sleep and making sure you're getting the rest you need, all that's gonna matter. Remember, good is better than perfect for most of the time. Uh I need you to verify you're not trying to take on too much for yourself, for your kids, for your family. You know, that's another thing for me and my family. Uh my wife and I will ensure uh that we do not schedule every weekend for either visitors or for things. Sometimes it's just nice to have a day. Right now I'm in here filming this podcast because I enjoy it. It is something I enjoy doing with my time. My wife is outside by the pool reading a book because she gets the chance to relax. That's important. But we also just got back from a trip where we took our kids to the lake house. And while they enjoyed that, we were out of, we were displaced, right? We were all in everybody's space and it was out of regulation. As we're preparing to get back to school and preparing to move on with our next phase of the season, right? We got to get dialed back in. This is a reset day. And we had friends that asked, could they come visit us this weekend? And we said no. We said no because we said selfishly, when we get back from our trip, we're gonna want a couple of days to just chill. And there you go. Right. And it's okay to be uh careful with your time and to tell people no. You just gotta be able to do it. Right? Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and stop right here for this podcast. We'll take on the next one here shortly. I really appreciate everybody listening to the sound of my voice. I really appreciate everybody that's paying attention to what's going on out here. Thank you so much for taking care of yourself. Thank you so much for joining the Words from the Wise podcast. I really hope this brings value to you as we continue to go forward. I want to continue to hopefully bring uh content that helps you out, plus shares information that I find valuable, and hopefully you do so as well. If you would like to reach out and ask me any questions, or if you would like to go ahead and shoot me an email, or if you even want to be on the show, just hit me up and we'll go from there. All right. Uh, thank you very much, everyone, for listening to the sound of my voice. Uh, it's Gary Weiser and I will talk to y'all later. All right. Bye.