Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #295| Why Being Busy Is BLOCKING Your Productivity & Keeping You Stuck In Overwhelm
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn why being busy is actually blocking you from being productive and keeping you stuck in overwhelm.
- 0:12Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:19Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:24Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences.
- 0:29Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:39Michelle Gauthier: Are you busy all day, but at the end of the day you feel like you didn't actually get anything done?
- 0:44Michelle Gauthier: Let's talk about why.
- 0:45Michelle Gauthier: I want you to picture this conversation because maybe you've had this conversation.
- 0:48Michelle Gauthier: Maybe even this week, somebody's like, hey, how are you?
- 0:51Michelle Gauthier: And you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so busy.
- 0:53Michelle Gauthier: And she says, Me too.
- 0:55Michelle Gauthier: It's nuts.
- 0:55Michelle Gauthier: I don't know how we're doing this.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: I know.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: We really need to slow down.
- 0:59Michelle Gauthier: And then everybody just kind of nods and goes back to their lives and does the exact same thing over and over next week and the week after that, and the week after that.
- 1:06Michelle Gauthier: I call this the busy Olympics.
- 1:09Michelle Gauthier: It's like a game where we're all competing, but nobody remembers signing up and the prize is exhaustion or having a to-do list that never ends or feeling behind nothing good.
- 1:19Michelle Gauthier: The prize is nothing good.
- 1:20Michelle Gauthier: I wrote about this back in 2020, and I feel like not much has changed.
- 1:24Michelle Gauthier: And it turns out there's been some good research behind it.
- 1:28Michelle Gauthier: And researchers from Columbia and Harvard and Georgetown found that in the US, we see busy, overworked people as higher status.
- 1:36Michelle Gauthier: Busy has become a status symbol.
- 1:39Michelle Gauthier: Saying, I'm so busy, I don't even know what to do isn't just a complaint.
- 1:43Michelle Gauthier: It's kind of a humble brag as well.
- 1:45Michelle Gauthier: But here's the part I actually love and find so interesting.
- 1:48Michelle Gauthier: When the researchers asked the same questions in Italy, it was the opposite.
- 1:52Michelle Gauthier: Italians saw the person with more leisure time as higher status.
- 1:57Michelle Gauthier: So somebody who was taking a long lunch, enjoying their evening, having time for themselves.
- 2:01Michelle Gauthier: That is more what success looked like there.
- 2:04Michelle Gauthier: Now, if you're listening to this in Italy, I want to hear, is that really true?
- 2:07Michelle Gauthier: Would you say that that is true of your culture?
- 2:10Michelle Gauthier: This isn't just how people are, this crazy busy.
- 2:14Michelle Gauthier: I can say for sure in the US and probably all of North America, my Canadian people, you tell me if it's true for you too, I assume so.
- 2:20Michelle Gauthier: It's something that we've learned and something that if we've learned, we can unlearn.
- 2:25Michelle Gauthier: So when you listen today, you'll learn the real difference between being busy and being productive, why your brain keeps choosing busy even when you know better.
- 2:34Michelle Gauthier: And I'll tell you how one of my clients stopped spinning her wheels and was able to turn from busy to productive.
- 2:42Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so let's start off thinking about what the actual difference is between being busy and being productive.
- 2:48Michelle Gauthier: If you're doing lots of activity, a flurry of activity, but no clear priority, I would call that busy.
- 2:54Michelle Gauthier: And if you have a clear priority and you're taking focused action, I would call that productive.
- 3:00Michelle Gauthier: When you're busy, busy, busy all day, you end the day feeling tired and behind.
- 3:04Michelle Gauthier: And when you're productive all day, you might also end the day feeling tired, but you're feeling satisfied.
- 3:09Michelle Gauthier: Let's just look at an example.
- 3:11Michelle Gauthier: My current number one priority in my house is getting my basement storage room cleaned out.
- 3:15Michelle Gauthier: This is somehow the way that I've decided to deal with the fact that my son went to college.
- 3:19Michelle Gauthier: And I have been very strategic.
- 3:21Michelle Gauthier: I hired someone to help me, and I have also been working on it myself an hour or two at a time for probably the month now.
- 3:28Michelle Gauthier: And last Sunday I knew I was in the final push to just get us over the hump to get the thing done.
- 3:34Michelle Gauthier: But I also take about an hour and a half to two hours to plan my week on Sundays.
- 3:39Michelle Gauthier: So I decided to put some serious focus on those two priorities, and that's how I wanted to spend my Sunday.
- 3:44Michelle Gauthier: So I planned my week, which includes my work schedule, meals, ordering groceries.
- 3:50Michelle Gauthier: I arranged rides for my daughter when I wasn't available.
- 3:53Michelle Gauthier: I invited my parents over to dinner.
- 3:55Michelle Gauthier: And then I went and worked in the basement for several hours.
- 3:58Michelle Gauthier: I took one million trips up and down the stairs, went to Goodwill to drop off a bunch of things, listed stuff on Facebook Marketplace, and at the end of the day, I was tired but in the most satisfied way.
- 4:08Michelle Gauthier: Think of how much frantic busyness I avoided by being productive on Sunday.
- 4:13Michelle Gauthier: If I hadn't spent my time that way on Sunday and I just flitted around and done random projects around the house or whatever, I would have had to figure out dinner every night, including going shopping.
- 4:23Michelle Gauthier: I would have had to scramble last minute for rides for my daughter or try to move my schedule around or move clients to pick her up.
- 4:30Michelle Gauthier: The basement would have stayed a mess and there would have been no progress.
- 4:33Michelle Gauthier: And instead, I was focused and productive and got things done.
- 4:36Michelle Gauthier: And this is obviously a personal example, but work has a busy and productive option too.
- 4:41Michelle Gauthier: The company Asana did a big study of workers and found that people said they spend 58% of their workday on what they call work about work.
- 4:50Michelle Gauthier: So like coordinating, chasing updates, checking in, meetings about meetings, responding to emails.
- 4:56Michelle Gauthier: That's more than half the day spent on being busy around the work instead of doing the work.
- 5:02Michelle Gauthier: So if you've been feeling like you're working so hard and still not getting anywhere, you're probably not imagining it.
- 5:07Michelle Gauthier: You might be busy and not productive.
- 5:10Michelle Gauthier: And those are two different things.
- 5:12Michelle Gauthier: So if you know the difference now between busy and productive, why does our brain keep choosing busy?
- 5:18Michelle Gauthier: There's a study I love called the mere urgency effect.
- 5:21Michelle Gauthier: And researchers found that people consistently choose tasks that feel urgent over tasks that were actually more important and had a bigger payoff.
- 5:29Michelle Gauthier: And here's the funny part that it doesn't even matter if the urgency was real.
- 5:33Michelle Gauthier: It was like a made-up deadline.
- 5:35Michelle Gauthier: Fake urgency was just fine.
- 5:37Michelle Gauthier: This makes me think of like when I was back in college or graduate school, I'd always want to clean my room before studying for a test.
- 5:43Michelle Gauthier: I had no desire to clean my room, but when there was a test, I made up fake urgency and kept myself busy instead of doing the real thing that needed to be done by cleaning my room.
- 5:51Michelle Gauthier: And maybe your version of that is answering every email before you start working on the project, or maybe you have written your to-do list once and then you write it again twice and you write it a third time, or doing just a little more research before you can make a decision, or tidying the kitchen before you make that hard phone call.
- 6:09Michelle Gauthier: If you're feeling more busy than productive, how do you shift?
- 6:12Michelle Gauthier: I'm gonna tell you about a client I was working with recently because she's such a good example of this.
- 6:16Michelle Gauthier: She told me that she spent a lot of time on her to-do list, like a lot of time.
- 6:20Michelle Gauthier: She would write it over and over.
- 6:22Michelle Gauthier: She tried new categories, she tried putting them on her calendar, she tried a new app.
- 6:27Michelle Gauthier: And on the surface, that looks really productive, right?
- 6:29Michelle Gauthier: Because she's planning and organizing.
- 6:31Michelle Gauthier: But when we talked about it, she realized what was really going on that working on the list was a way to avoid actually doing the things on the list.
- 6:39Michelle Gauthier: So she was working on work, but she wasn't actually doing the thing.
- 6:42Michelle Gauthier: And the list felt safe, but she didn't ever actually get into the tasks.
- 6:47Michelle Gauthier: Once she saw that, she looked at the list and decided what she could outsource, which by the way was a whole bunch of things.
- 6:53Michelle Gauthier: Then she picked her top three priorities and focused on those and got straight to them without buffering with busy.
- 7:00Michelle Gauthier: In fact, one of the things that she did is she quit checking her email first thing in the morning and did the important work first.
- 7:05Michelle Gauthier: I just said that like it was one quick sentence, but we worked on that over several sessions and now she is able to feel so much more productive and to work on the things that really need her specific expertise.
- 7:17Michelle Gauthier: So to wrap it up, I feel like here's where we are.
- 7:20Michelle Gauthier: If you're busy from the minute you wake up until the minute you fall asleep, and the thing that really matters still hasn't moved, it's not because you aren't working hard enough.
- 7:29Michelle Gauthier: You're probably working really hard, but you're just spending your best energy on being busy, like managing your inbox or cleaning out that drawer.
- 7:37Michelle Gauthier: And that's what keeps you stuck and overwhelmed because the important thing is still sitting there waiting.
- 7:42Michelle Gauthier: This is exactly what I help my clients do in one-on-one coaching.
- 7:45Michelle Gauthier: We get clear on what is really a priority for you, what can be outsourced or dropped, and what you've been avoiding by staying busy.
- 7:53Michelle Gauthier: Then we build new habits that make productive your default, so it's not something you have to white knuckle every day.
- 7:59Michelle Gauthier: Just like I mentioned about my client, she now does her most important work first before she even opens her email.
- 8:05Michelle Gauthier: Imagine ending your day like I did last Sunday.
- 8:08Michelle Gauthier: Tired, yes, but satisfied.
- 8:11Michelle Gauthier: I had a delicious dinner with my mom and dad.
- 8:14Michelle Gauthier: I still had time to rest in the day.
- 8:16Michelle Gauthier: I moved two big things forward, the week is planned, dinner is figured out, and I wasn't laying in bed on Sunday night running through everything that I didn't get to.
- 8:25Michelle Gauthier: If you're ready to step out of the busy Olympics and start ending your days satisfied, book a free, no pressure consultation with me.
- 8:32Michelle Gauthier: The link is in the show notes and we'll talk about what's keeping you busy and what a productive day could look like for you.
- 8:39Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 8:40Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 8:48Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.com.
- 8:54Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.