If you want to know how to get answers from your subconscious mind, the short answer is that you have to make time for it. In this hustle-bustle era, “slowing down” seems counterintuitive to solving challenges, but it’s often the road to intuition and breakthroughs. 

Our impulse is to use logical and systematic thinking to get the desired outcome. We rely on active problem-solving to reclaim work life balance, but logic only carries us so far. We want clarity on a particular issue or to reach a decision, so we attack the problem with our rational mind, like sending Hercules to battle the Hydra.

When we’re feeling stuck, we’re not letting the subconscious mind work out our problems. This article will cover how to use your subconscious mind to have better ideas, become more intuitive, and day design a schedule aligned with your goals. 

It’s All About Connections: How to Get Answers from Your Subconscious Mind

Our subconscious mind endlessly strings together information that is useful for us. Instead of directing our logic with an iron fist, we can step aside and give our brain room to tap into new connections.

Breakthrough thoughts happen when least expected—when we’re relaxed and letting our minds roam free. Just like when pro-athletes rest their bodies after intense training, we have to make time to rest our logic. 

Giving our subconscious mind room to make associations is what unlocks insight, breakthroughs, and epiphanies. By designing a schedule with time built in for mental roaming, we’ll be more creative and better at coming up with ideas for our most pressing challenges. 

Do you want to improve your personal producitivty? Take the Day Design free course. 

How to Use Subconscious Mind to Solve Problems

When we’re not performing well in one area, like Work, we tend to double-down and force a solution from our rational mind. Most people have felt that “stuck” feeling when we can’t work out our dilemma. We have to figure this out, we tell ourselves. 

Conversely, when we make time for this subconscious mind, we leave room for the open-ended and get different kinds of questions answered. 

We become open to possibilities that hold the key to our dilemma. 

Related Video: Relationship With Time

If we’re frequently hitting walls in one area, it’s a sign that we need to shift our focus to another category like Health or Relationships. We cannot always reason out the answers to our challenges using logic. Many times, we need to let our brains rest with the unknown. 

We need to learn how to use the subconscious mind to solve problems. We do this by shutting off our active problem-solving and letting our minds roam. Start with a 30 minute timed interval. Journal or read to give the subconscious space to associate new ideas. Does this a few times a week. 

Designing Pragmatic Schedules With 360 Productivity

Our habit is to throw hail marys hoping that it will work out. We want to create predictable results. It’s not luck or faith that produces results—it’s following a process. 

When we become process-driven, we tap into 360 Productivity, bringing us closer to results that matter deeply. In 360 productivity, we pay attention to the whole picture: health, work, relationships, community, and spirituality. We integrate all of our goals, not compartmentalize them.

Related Video: Process-Driven People Get Predictable Results

We also need to build in time for our subconscious mind to do its thing, just like we’d schedule a date, a meeting, or a haircut. Throw time on the books for mental roaming and stick to it.

Applying Timed Intervals to Other Goals

We apply the same timed interval concepts to each area of 360 Productivity. (Download the free chapter on timed intervals from my book, Get Anything Done) 

Did we do the interval for Work this week? Yes or no? Did we do the interval for Relationships? Yes, or no. Did we complete the interval for Health? Yes, or no. Keep going. Spiritual—did we complete the interval? Yes, or no. And Community, yes or no? 

Organizing your goals becomes a matter of completing a chain of intervals instead of knocking down Goliath. It’s as simple as 15 or 30 minutes for each. 

We’re converting productivity into electrical charges that are positive or negative. We have data to improve and can become more scientific about our growth. It’s no longer a big FAILURE or SUCCESS attached to our results. It’s a small action completed for a precise amount of time.

We need to narrow our focus by shining light on what matters. In a few hours, we can hit all of these areas of productivity. We can do more than we think, and it doesn’t have to take as much time as we believe. 

Developing a Frequency Around Your Goals

Now that we’re tapping into 360 Productivity, we can view the results of our experiments for what they are—information. What’s next? What we do with that information is critical to our following actions. 

Select a weekly interval and frequency for the remaining goal channels. Remember, the frequency doesn’t have to be every day. Think of the entire week: once, twice, three times, or daily. The point is carving out time for activities that reinforce our goal channels. 

Related read: How to Unlock Effective Time Management That Makes You Happy

If we look at our actions, we think that being productive means paying attention to the most urgent areas like Work. We don’t make as much time for goal channels we know are necessary but are not urgent. We say we’ll make time after we handle this situation or project. 

Let’s take Spiritual as an example. It can cover many areas: mediation, journaling, reading, which are activities that allow the subconscious mind to mull over the events of the day. When we go back to the area that may be causing us significant challenges, we will have insight that we didn’t have before. 

Schedule Subconscious Problem Solving

We feel fantastic about decisions, and we congratulate ourselves for making the right call. But what led us there? Was it one decision that we made—we pulled the trigger and were off—or was it a chain of events influenced by associations? 

Our goal channels are interconnected—when we are productive in one area, it influences the others. We think that our decisions are a matter of choice, but our subconscious mind draws associations to create new answers or solutions to our problems. Letting our subconscious mind roam creates space for intuition.

Build time in your schedule for activities that activate your subconscious. The solution to that big problem at work could be one morning walk or journaling sessions away. Explore the unknown and let your subconscious work through connecting new ideas.

Do you find it difficult to live your purpose? How often do you stop to ask what’s driving your daily actions? What about your plans for the future?

We all have similar goals—we want to be more productive and have time for the things that we deem essential. We’d like to peacefully balance work and life, but how often do we feel like we are in control of what truly matters? We intend to do so many things, if only we had more time.

In this article, we’ll address common issues that can hold you back from living your purpose. By the end, you’ll have a fresh perspective on discovery and decision, which will bring insight into how to live your purpose.

Here’s the points we’ll cover if you want to skip ahead:

• The Reason Why We Lack Purpose
• We Are Powerful When We Decide
• We Decide How to Live Our Purpose
• Why We Become Indecisive About Living Our Purpose
• We Need to Become Day Designers

Why It’s Hard to Live Your Purpose

The way we approach our day—creating to-do lists and working as much as we can before our brains are exhausted—doesn’t bring us closer to understanding who we are.

Reality check: an unclear identity makes it impossible to nail down a purpose worthy of devotion.

Most of us think that we know ourselves, but as Peter Drucker said in Managing Oneself, we are often wrong.

Instead of sorting the things that weigh on our hearts, we run down the conveyor belt without stopping to ask why we’re there in the first place.

The Reason Why We Lack Purpose

Our responsibilities are more complicated than ever before. Running a business, developing relationships, raising children, improving our health, paying rent—the list of things we need to accomplish is overwhelming.

What about happiness? Fulfillment? Questions that once seemed fundamental to our future have turned borderline absurd.

It’s easier to keep going than taking time away from our busy lives. Grinding it out seems the only way to succeed. But stopping to figure out our purpose? Does anyone have time for that anymore?

The combination of a global market and 24/7 machine keeps us moving but not going anywhere in particular. We’re distracted by flash and have forgotten how to go inward to decide what we want.

Going inward is our opportunity to take back control of our day, week, and ultimate direction.

We Are Powerful When We Decide

With Day Design, our goal is to define the purpose of each moment. We design each day intentionally, making use of our most potent tool—TIME.

Achieving our goals comes from our ability to make effective decisions and use our time to take meaningful actions. Instead of waiting for the Universe to align with our wishes, we can align ourselves to it.

Wherever you are right now and whatever you may be doing, can you answer this question: what is the purpose of this moment? If you’re not sure how to answer, don’t worry.

Day Design will show you how to get better at knowing the purpose of each moment. You’ll have a better understanding of what you want and how to get it.

Spoiler alert: You’ll never be able to live your purpose if you’re always trying to discover it. Your purpose isn’t a matter of discovery, it’s a matter of decision.

We Decide How to Live Our Purpose (But We Often Let Others) 

In certain ways, we’re more productive than ever. We’re successful at our business, or maybe have a great relationship, but how does the picture look as a whole? Is our productivity balanced?

As Day Designers, our goal is to balance all areas of our lives that bring us fulfillment.

The five areas of 360 Productivity are:

• Relationships
• Health
• Spiritual
• Work
• Community

Many questions run through the river of our thoughts when we start something new. Is it the right time, can we handle this, do we have the right skills? 

Instead of waiting for a breakthrough discovery, we can decide what we want and go after it. It’s up to each one of us to decide what kind of life we want and work towards it through actions.

It’s not luck or financial status that creates purpose—it’s purely a decision that we have the power to make.

We are at a crossroads—instead of making a deal with the devil for fame or fortune, we are making a deal with ourselves. It’s us and us alone who decide the meaning of our lives.

A strong purpose will act as the glue to hold all 360 areas together.

As a Day Designer, we are at this wild junction between fact and fiction, ideas and reality—it’s our job to create what we imagine. We can be Leonardo Da Vinci in our own way.

The purpose we decide will evolve and adapt as we generate more actions. We’re experimenters of ideas, not observers. We’re scientists that generate actions across each 360 area. This is how we get closer to fulfillment.

Why We Become Indecisive About Living Our Purpose

Indecision is what stands between us and what we want. It’s not a lack of skill or ability that keeps us from reaching our goals. If we don’t yet have the skills we need, we can learn anything we choose. 

When we act, we get feedback from reality that helps us refine our next action—we replace indecision with open-minded experimentation. 

This is what we strive for as Day Designers. 

We know that it’s actions that will take us closer to what we want. We delay because we are not sure where to begin. We get stuck thinking about our goals, doubting if what we’re doing is correct.

Our goals to get in shape, start a business, or find a partner are too far away from where we are right now—we’re not ready, we don’t have enough information, or it’s not the right time are a few things that we say to ourselves. 

Instead of taking action, we turn “figuring it out” into an excuse for being indecisive. We get lost in the mechanics of our goals—the new diet, proper exercise shoes, workout schedule, marketing plan, or timing for a difficult conversation. 

We’re procrastinating because we are afraid.

The problem is that years have gone by, and we still have the same goals. We’ve grown exhausted thinking about what we want instead of testing. Our goals are dusty and distorted, crammed on a shelf. 

It’s time to bring them out to the light of reality.

We Need to Become Day Designers

There’s a reason why the wisdom of the Greeks to “know thyself” has survived for thousands of years—it’s the foundation you need to live your purpose.

Living your purpose takes effort just like anything else. No matter who we ask, even if they’re the wisest person on earth (like the Oracle of Delphi), no one can tell you what your purpose is.

The Day Design Course is a free video series that walks you through how to be productive in the important areas of your life. My hope is that it will help you decide your path, instead of waiting to discover it.