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The Invisible Labor of Running a Business: The Mental Load No One Talks About · Growing a Deeply Rooted Business: Launches, Funnels & Email Marketing with Intention

• 0:00
  Rachel: Life has been lifin' extra hard these days, and if you're like us, maybe you're running a business or chasing a kiddo around, it isn't the only thing that you're doing.
• 0:10
  Rachel: On top of all of this, I run a nonprofit.
• 0:14
  Rachel: I co-host this podcast.
• 0:15
  Rachel: I run my business, and on top of all of that, we all do the normal things that help sustain a normal life, like eating every day, and cleaning your house, and bathing and maintaining a social life.
• 0:28
  Rachel: And I think the thing of when people ask, "How do you do it all?"
• 0:32
  Rachel: The answer is, honestly, we literally don't.
• 0:36
  Rachel: I drop things all the time, every single week, and the reason that that question keeps getting asked, and I think the honest truth, is that nobody really answers it truthfully.
• 0:48
  Rachel: A lot of people are out here comparing your actual Tuesday, your client call Mondays, to somebody else's highlight reel of their 10K launch success or their 10-hour-a-week, you know, 500 lead generator type things.
• 1:04
  Rachel: And you end up getting this comparison trap and wondering, "What the frick is wrong with us?"
• 1:10
  Rachel: And so we wanna start this series because, first of all, nothing is wrong with you.
• 1:15
  Rachel: You're carrying a ginormous portfolio of work, and responsibilities, and things that also don't necessarily exist on your calendar, and they don't necessarily show up on an invoice or an SOP.
• 1:31
  Rachel: is the invisible labor of running a business, doing all of the things that normal people do, and trying to make it all work.
• 1:41
  Rachel: So we're gonna be naming all of this today.
• 1:44
  Rachel: We're breaking it all down and specifically, we're gonna be sharing why a lot of the productivity hacks that are been shared for small business owners and specifically moms aren't necessarily helping.
• 1:56
  Rachel: So this is going to be one of a five-part series, so let's go ahead and get into it
• 2:01
  Jessica: But before we do, welcome back to another episode of Growing a Deeply Rooted Business, the show for women building businesses that support their lives instead of swallowing them.
• 2:10
  Jessica: I am Jess, your systems and sustainable growth operations half, and I'm here with Rachel, who is our marketing mastermind/architect.
• 2:20
  Jessica: And between us, we've got kids, we've got teenagers, we've got ADHD, and we've got a couple neuro-spiciness bits floating around here.
• 2:30
  Jessica: We have not a big team behind the scenes, so when somebody tells us just to theme our days or batch our content to get caught up, that kinda makes us laugh a little.
• 2:38
  Jessica: Before we get into it, it's Monday here.
• 2:40
  Jessica: You're probably listening on Thursday, so you're at the end of the week.
• 2:43
  Jessica: But whenever you're listening, we want you to just let some of that stress go.
• 2:47
  Jessica: So take a deep inhale, exhale, and give yourself permission to stop being the one to carry it all.
• 2:58
  Jessica: Alright Let's get into kind of belief number one, that we tell ourselves when we're trying to handle it all, or we're trying to work towards that business goal of sipping margaritas on the beach while we bring in money.
• 3:08
  Jessica: Just kinda getting through our days.
• 3:09
  Jessica: If you were just more organized, I could handle this.
• 3:13
  Jessica: That is something that we tell ourselves all the time, I'm sure.
• 3:16
  Jessica: And as a Notion person, I always kinda default to maybe if I just kinda get my Notion a little bit organized, I won't be more stressed out, when reality, I'm pretty organized already, and that's not the issue.
• 3:28
  Rachel: Yeah, this is my biggest problem, too, and when Jess was in my business, she noticed a lot of it lingered in my head, and that's both in my personal life as well as in my business.
• 3:40
  Rachel: I'm the type of person that I go, we're out of barbecue sauce.
• 3:44
  Rachel: Okay, I'll remember."
• 3:46
  Rachel: Did I remember?
• 3:48
  Rachel: No, I sure did not remember.
• 3:50
  Rachel: So I think a lot of this comes down to really trying to understand that the problem isn't necessarily discipline.
• 3:59
  Rachel: It's literally trying to build a system that actually supports you.
• 4:05
  Rachel: And, I have tried all of the other systems of ADHD, AD, da, da, da, da, da, and from a marketing side, too, I tell people, the templates that you buy for your email list wont work for your business
• 4:17
  Rachel: because it's missing your spiciness, your neurodivergent little things that say, "This only works if you understand that because I do this."
• 4:28
  Rachel: And so I think this is the most important part, is that finding something that really connects with your vibe, you know?
• 4:35
  Jessica: Yeah, and I think giving yourself permission to play around.
• 4:38
  Jessica: I mean, especially as an ADHD person, I think for me, I need freshness, I need newness for motivation.
• 4:44
  Jessica: So the way that I plan every week is not the same every week, but I have my notion project management system that will eventually catch it all the way that it gets there.
• 4:55
  Jessica: And I think that a lot of the overwhelm that entrepreneurs face is that mental overwhelm of just trying to store everything in your head.
• 5:02
  Jessica: So just doing a big old, brain dump of okay, here's everything that needs to get done, and then looking at my calendar and being like, "Okay, I've got a meeting here, so this needs to get done before that."
• 5:12
  Jessica: And starting to prioritize things so that I can get it on a list and at least start checking things off, whether that's in Notion, which is my tool of choice, or on a paper planner.
• 5:22
  Jessica: Sometimes I do both.
• 5:23
  Rachel: Yeah, I have a amazing podcast that I listen to where it's literally just called, A Mind Sweep, and the link will be in the description.
• 5:31
  Rachel: It's minutes of this guy just narrating, and you're just making a list.
• 5:36
  Rachel: And so the system that I've used to help me get out of these self-sabotage moments where I refuse to write something down and I say, "Oh, trust me, I'll remember," and I literally don't, is that will sit down
• 5:48
  Rachel: every Monday, and I will play this 15-minute podcast, and I will just brain dump everything into a Slack to myself or into a channel or whatever I can see.
• 5:58
  Rachel: Afterwards, he tells you, "Okay, now go clean this up, put it to the assigned projects, assign it a due date," kind of thing.
• 6:04
  Rachel: And I have a scheduled AI assistant that then takes everything that I just did and loads it into my Notion so that after I've done that brain dump, the exhausting part to me is sitting there and creating a
• 6:16
  Rachel: new task and putting it there.
• 6:18
  Rachel: So I've simplified it in the sense that it's removed a lot of the parts where I'll go, "Oh, I'll do that later," or, I'll look at Slack."
• 6:26
  Rachel: Those elements where for sure gonna fail myself, I've created that kind of gap to bridge that.
• 6:32
  Rachel: So that's something that's definitely, helped me remove a lot of that mental load of just being like, I'll do it.
• 6:38
  Rachel: And.
• 6:39
  Rachel: My own sabotage of saying, "I'll remember it."
• 6:41
  Jessica: I do a similar thing After I drop off Stella at school, on the way home, I've got about a 30-minute commute.
• 6:46
  Jessica: So on the way home, my brain starts going with everything.
• 6:49
  Jessica: Instead of just letting it rummage around in there and induce more anxiety, I just turn on my voice recorder and start to record everything that I can.
• 6:57
  Jessica: And then I can drop it into a chat or AI or ever I'm using at that point and disseminate it into it.
• 7:02
  Jessica: I also love this for client meetings, having AI sweep your meeting notes so that you can kinda grab all of those tasks.
• 7:09
  Jessica: 'Cause I think the biggest thing is me missing items.
• 7:11
  Jessica: So even if I am putting tasks in after a meeting, I still have my AI go through and sweep the transcript to make sure that I didn't miss anything, so that I'm not feeling like I'm constantly having to
• 7:20
  Jessica: remember things or forgetting things and then being behind.
• 7:24
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 7:25
  Rachel: So it brings us to myth number two, which is saying, you know, it's really not that much work.
• 7:29
  Rachel: It's just little stuff.
• 7:31
  Rachel: It's just putting barbecue sauce on the grocery list.
• 7:33
  Rachel: It's just things like that.
• 7:35
  Rachel: But I wanna reframe this in the sense that, action itself might take you a handful of minutes to do, but me telling myself, "Hey, remember this" is an active effort for the span of Friday to Sunday when I'm
• 7:52
  Rachel: trying to compile what next week's menus are.
• 7:55
  Rachel: And so this goes all into the same thing as business, where you're saying like, "Oh, I just need to send that client follow-up.
• 8:03
  Rachel: I'll just do it on whatever day it is."
• 8:05
  Rachel: It's taking up this space in your brain, which is why this doesn't necessarily help when you truly are, a solo team or a solopreneur or a small team business owner is because that invisible labor doesn't stop when the
• 8:18
  Rachel: laptop closes.
• 8:20
  Rachel: The actual task may get logged into wherever it goes, but remembering it and holding onto it so you don't forget is where can self-sabotage a lot more.
• 8:30
  Rachel: So I think the thing that works here is you're putting it into its allocated bucket, when you have that thought of saying, my task is instead of doing the remembering, I'm going to just put it where it needs
• 8:43
  Rachel: to go the first time.
• 8:44
  Rachel: And it's something I'm telling my son now, where I'm like, don't walk away from it.
• 8:48
  Rachel: Put it back.
• 8:49
  Rachel: Put it where it goes."
• 8:50
  Rachel: I have to have that remember for myself, too, so that it's not, getting trapped in here for five days.
• 8:57
  Jessica: Yes.
• 8:57
  Jessica: Yeah, I mean, I feel after a brain dump, it's like, "Ah, I don't have to remember all of this stuff anymore."
• 9:04
  Jessica: It feels so much lighter.
• 9:05
  Jessica: And then I'm like, why don't I do this to myself?
• 9:07
  Jessica: Why wouldn't I just do this more often?
• 9:09
  Jessica: Why can't I just do an artist way page every day if I know how good that it makes me feel to brain dump everything?
• 9:15
  Jessica: I totally, I totally get it.
• 9:17
  Jessica: And you know what?
• 9:18
  Jessica: You gotta try to just figure out what works for you.
• 9:20
  Jessica: I saw a girl, I'm like, that's so smart.
• 9:22
  Jessica: She has her Apple Watch, and it's connected to her reminders list, so she can just "Remind me of the barbecue sauce, Siri," and then it's on her list.
• 9:29
  Jessica: I'm like, this is amazing.
• 9:30
  Jessica: One thing that I love is we have an Alexa.
• 9:31
  Jessica: I kinda don't like her 'cause she knows way too much about me now.
• 9:34
  Jessica: But we have an Alexa in our kitchen, and I've trained my entire family that when they use something that they want to get replenished at the grocery store, that they have to tell Alexa to put it on the
• 9:44
  Jessica: shopping list because I will pull up my Alexa shopping list when I'm there and buy it.
• 9:48
  Jessica: But if not, they do not get to buy it.
• 9:51
  Jessica: She was unplugged, I don't know why, but she was not activated and I really missed her, so she's back in action now 'cause I need all the help from the robots that I can get.
• 9:58
  Rachel: No, I totally hear that.
• 10:00
  Rachel: I totally hear that.
• 10:00
  Rachel: Okay, what's myth number three?
• 10:02
  Jessica: So myth number three is, I just need a better system, the right app will fix this.
• 10:07
  Jessica: And I think that's the same thing as another template or another AI bot.
• 10:12
  Jessica: Implementing anything new into your business is going to take time.
• 10:18
  Jessica: That this is a trap that I fall into a lot is that I'll be overwhelmed because I have so much stuff to do, but instead of doing the stuff, I try to get a new system to make the
• 10:28
  Jessica: stuff less overwhelming.
• 10:29
  Jessica: And then I'm like, "Oh, I just spent eight hours doing this thing, and now I'm behind on everything else."
• 10:36
  Jessica: This is why I think time tracking is so important so that you are really cognizant of where your time is going to know, okay, this is a not right now task.
• 10:45
  Jessica: Or you'll scroll TikTok and you'll see somebody built their chief operations officer.
• 10:49
  Jessica: And you're going this tangent to build this but you didn't do any of your work.
• 10:52
  Jessica: It's important just to be mindful if you are that type of person, and we both are that type of person, because of our ADHD and because we're trying to find these solutions, it's like, okay, do I have time
• 11:02
  Jessica: to invest in this now?
• 11:03
  Jessica: Same thing with buying courses or stuff like that.
• 11:05
  Jessica: If you don't have time to implement, it's not worth doing it at all.
• 11:08
  Jessica: So it's not usually the system.
• 11:11
  Jessica: I just had this conversation with a new HR person, she doesn't think Notion's working, so let's move to ClickUp.
• 11:16
  Jessica: That's not gonna fix it.
• 11:17
  Jessica: It's the habits, the routines that you've built around that piece of software and not the software itself.
• 11:24
  Rachel: Totally.
• 11:24
  Rachel: And I think, the main thing that people do is they throw it out before they make it their own.
• 11:31
  Rachel: Jess has worked very hard to turn me into a Notion girly over here, cause before I was like, "I don't need this.
• 11:38
  Rachel: I don't need that.
• 11:39
  Rachel: I can be in ClickUp.
• 11:40
  Rachel: I can be in Trello.
• 11:41
  Rachel: I can do in all the things."
• 11:42
  Rachel: When you actually design something to work the way you work, not the way that that person on TikTok works or the planner that you bought is gonna, you know, process it out for you, really making sure that you
• 11:57
  Rachel: build it to give it time to make it your own, I think is super important, especially when you are saying, "Hey, I'm a no systems type person."
• 12:07
  Rachel: Okay, well, you just haven't quite found your system yet, because everybody needs a system, or else you're just gonna keep failing the life happens test constantly.
• 12:16
  Rachel: Well, I tell myself this every week when I ignore my tasks for three days, and then I jump back in.
• 12:21
  Rachel: I go, "Okay, I need to make these changes.
• 12:23
  Rachel: I need to do this kind of thing," which is a beautiful thing once you've finally found it, because I truly was that person who was like, "You know, this isn't gonna work."
• 12:30
  Rachel: And then now has beat it into my head that it, it
• 12:33
  Jessica: Yeah.
• 12:34
  Jessica: I mean, you gotta use it in your way, too.
• 12:36
  Jessica: I think people think they fail systems if they don't use it every day.
• 12:39
  Jessica: But I'm a Notion complete nerd, and there will be days, they're probably not my most productive days, that I don't open my Notion at all and I'm working off of my head, or I jump straight into Slack and
• 12:48
  Jessica: move from this reactive mode.
• 12:50
  Jessica: So it is a little bit about getting some sort of discipline to start your day, but you just kinda have to figure out what your work boot-up routine is.
• 13:00
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 13:00
  Rachel: So then that brings us to myth number four, which is I will deal with this when I hire someone or when things slow down.
• 13:07
  Rachel: And I think the problem with this is that, one, nothing's gonna ever slow down.
• 13:13
  Rachel: Jess and I were literally just talking about how the heck is it September?
• 13:17
  Rachel: How did this just happen?
• 13:19
  Rachel: Where did summer go?
• 13:21
  Rachel: And the second part of that is that you don't want to bring somebody in and deal with this stuff after you've hired someone.
• 13:30
  Rachel: You want to deal with it now.
• 13:32
  Rachel: You want you to be the use case for a successful employee in your business versus hoping that when you hire somebody that you'll put the pieces together and figure it out.
• 13:46
  Rachel: This is something that I have had to overcome significantly, and now that we have a really successful VA working in both of our businesses and in the podcast, it's mindblowing how it's so easy to just fall into the
• 14:01
  Rachel: trap of like, "Oh, I'll just do it myself, it's a five-minute task."
• 14:04
  Rachel: But freeing up certain things that exist in my head and freeing up time on my calendar to live this life first business that I want to live is so validating that I don't live in these two spaces of
• 14:17
  Rachel: I'll just deal with it myself," and, "Oh, I'll put it off when things slow down," 'cause that's never gonna happen.
• 14:23
  Jessica: Yeah, for sure.
• 14:24
  Jessica: And I think even preparing to hire someone makes you so much better at your business or at your role that you're trying to hand off.
• 14:31
  Jessica: I'm in a role right now where I'm kind of dual strategy and project managing, but I really can't hold it all forever.
• 14:39
  Jessica: At this point, there's not enough systems built around what I want to hand off for someone to step into.
• 14:45
  Jessica: So now as I'm going through this process of building out the system for them, I'm like, "Oh, okay."
• 14:50
  Jessica: This is breaking down.
• 14:51
  Jessica: "Oh, this is how I did...
• 14:52
  Jessica: it and this is how I could be more efficient, and this is how I'm recreating the wheel every time, and I don't have to do that."
• 14:57
  Jessica: Even if you don't plan on hiring, it's still worth creating an SOP for or a process for yourself that you can go back, revisit so that you're not starting from scratch every single time.
• 15:09
  Jessica: Rachel and I, we're gonna do a whole podcast about how we run our podcast on two hours a week.
• 15:13
  Jessica: But I think it's really because we've leaned into don't recreate.
• 15:16
  Jessica: We use the same prompt every single week.
• 15:18
  Jessica: We use the same pillars that we've had since before to pull from.
• 15:22
  Jessica: We have the same process for how we're breaking our content down every single week.
• 15:26
  Jessica: And we really optimize this podcast from end to end in a way that allows us just to flow through the week.
• 15:33
  Jessica: Even in our busiest weeks, we're still able to show up and, do this because we've got processes around it, and we've got it written down, and we're not trying to start fresh.
• 15:43
  Jessica: We just kind of have to show up and check off the boxes, which sounds robotic.
• 15:46
  Jessica: But systems like that free up space for more creativity and other things.
• 15:50
  Rachel: All right, so let's go ahead and wrap this one together, 'cause I think the most important part is understanding the invisible labor is the remembering, the deciding, and the holding until you decide to then do it.
• 16:05
  Rachel: The four beliefs and myths that we want to help shift while we're starting this series is, one, you're not disorganized, you're just carrying a lot of unnamed tasks.
• 16:18
  Rachel: Number two is that it's not that it's just a little task that you can hold, it's unaccounted on your list that needs to go onto your list.
• 16:26
  Rachel: Number three is the tools that you have added have quite literally made it heavier because you have to maintain them, and it's creating a system that you are working against versus a system that's working for you.
• 16:40
  Rachel: And then four is waiting until you can afford help doesn't quite work to organize your system or to figure out all of these things that you're holding onto because you can't really hand off everything that really just exists
• 16:54
  Rachel: in your head.
• 16:55
  Rachel: So Over the next four weeks, we're gonna be breaking this all down by category or by bucket of business.
• 17:03
  Rachel: We're gonna do it for your projects, for your clients.
• 17:05
  Rachel: We're gonna show you how we do this podcast, where most people assume that we have a really large team because we crank out probably like 50 plus pieces of content a week.
• 17:15
  Rachel: We don't.
• 17:16
  Rachel: We have a massive system that has helped us, me and Jess, manage this podcast in between all of our businesses, all of our lives, and all of the things.
• 17:25
  Rachel: So, we're gonna be breaking all of this down for you, so this is just the start of the series.
• 17:30
  Rachel: And so one of the things we wanna leave you with is that none of this is a discipline problem, right?
• 17:36
  Rachel: If discipline were the fix, it would've been fixed years ago when you decided that you wanted to start a business and you're still sticking with it five years later.
• 17:45
  Rachel: We business owners, small business owners, especially small team business owners, are some of the most disciplined people we know because they've stuck with it for so long.
• 17:56
  Rachel: So stick with us through this.
• 17:58
  Rachel: You do not need more time.
• 18:00
  Rachel: You need a system.
• 18:01
  Rachel: You need to stop trying to cookie cutter other people's productivity tasks into your life.
• 18:06
  Rachel: If this named something for you, send it to a friend that you know is also a little neuro spicy and is productivity optimizing, and help unleash this mental load here.
• 18:19
  Rachel: And until next week,
• 18:21
  Jessica: are rooting for you.