Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #225| A Simple Tool to Help You Do Less and Ditch the Overwhelm—Without Guilt
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: We're conditioned to believe that we should be able to do it all.
- 0:08Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:15Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:20Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
- 0:25Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:34Michelle Gauthier: Hi, friend.
- 0:35Michelle Gauthier: Thanks for joining today.
- 0:36Michelle Gauthier: Today I want to go back to the basics and talk about how to actually do less because at its core, overwhelm is a volume problem.
- 0:46Michelle Gauthier: Too many things on your to-do list, too many people asking for things from you, too many emails coming into your inbox, etc.
- 0:54Michelle Gauthier: etc.
- 0:54Michelle Gauthier: So I want to give you a very simple, clean, actionable way to just do less, to feel less stressed and overwhelmed.
- 1:04Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you're gonna learn three ways that you can start doing less right now.
- 1:09Michelle Gauthier: You could start some of these today, and you will learn how to bag it, barter it, and better it, which is a tool that I learned from Martha Beck.
- 1:19Michelle Gauthier: I did my life coach training under Martha Beck.
- 1:21Michelle Gauthier: She is brilliant.
- 1:22Michelle Gauthier: If you don't know her, she's written tons of great books.
- 1:24Michelle Gauthier: I highly recommend checking her out.
- 1:26Michelle Gauthier: But she taught me this tool.
- 1:27Michelle Gauthier: It's one of the first life coaching tools I learned way back in 2018.
- 1:31Michelle Gauthier: And I still use it all the time because it is super simple, it makes sense, and it works.
- 1:36Michelle Gauthier: What more can you ask for out of a tool?
- 1:39Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so let's jump into the framework, the three B's, as Martha Beck calls it.
- 1:43Michelle Gauthier: The first is bag it.
- 1:44Michelle Gauthier: When you bag something, you just don't do it anymore.
- 1:48Michelle Gauthier: Some things don't need to be optimized, they just need to be eliminated.
- 1:53Michelle Gauthier: In my corporate job, my job title was Simplification Leader.
- 1:57Michelle Gauthier: And I used to lead these big meetings where we would try to figure out how to do things more simply, how to do them more quickly, or with better customer satisfaction, or how to make more money.
- 2:06Michelle Gauthier: And the very first question we would always ask is, what process step can we just remove?
- 2:12Michelle Gauthier: What is something that we just do not need to do anymore?
- 2:16Michelle Gauthier: So when you ask yourself this question, what can I bag?
- 2:19Michelle Gauthier: Just notice that your brain will probably be like, nothing.
- 2:21Michelle Gauthier: Everything I have to do is really essential.
- 2:24Michelle Gauthier: But really push back and ask yourself, what is something that I can just stop doing?
- 2:29Michelle Gauthier: I will tell you some of the things that I just stopped doing.
- 2:32Michelle Gauthier: One of them is lunches for my kids.
- 2:35Michelle Gauthier: I used to make my kids lunch, send them to school with them.
- 2:37Michelle Gauthier: They would bring them back mostly full.
- 2:39Michelle Gauthier: I would clean out all the stuff that they didn't eat.
- 2:41Michelle Gauthier: It was a huge waste of time on both ends, and they weren't really eating it.
- 2:45Michelle Gauthier: So I just bagged that task.
- 2:47Michelle Gauthier: So now they have the option to either make their own lunch if they want to make their own lunch, or they have money on their accounts to buy lunch at school.
- 2:55Michelle Gauthier: I also set it up so that when their lunch funds run low, it just automatically charges $50 more dollars or whatever it is on my credit card.
- 3:03Michelle Gauthier: I don't look at what they eat.
- 3:04Michelle Gauthier: I don't have anything to do with it.
- 3:06Michelle Gauthier: Their lunches are their own responsibility.
- 3:08Michelle Gauthier: I just completely took it off my list.
- 3:11Michelle Gauthier: I used to try to make my dog go for walks.
- 3:13Michelle Gauthier: My dog, maybe the only dog in the world who doesn't like to go for walks.
- 3:16Michelle Gauthier: Why am I trying to do this?
- 3:17Michelle Gauthier: My dog runs around the backyard.
- 3:19Michelle Gauthier: She doesn't need walks, no more dog walking, done.
- 3:22Michelle Gauthier: Sometimes you can just not do something anymore if you can fully automate it.
- 3:26Michelle Gauthier: I just don't pay my bills anymore because I have them all set up to automatically come out.
- 3:30Michelle Gauthier: That's another example of where you can bag something.
- 3:33Michelle Gauthier: The second option is to barter it.
- 3:35Michelle Gauthier: So to barter is to either pay for something, trade for something, share the load, tell someone I'll babysit your kids if you do my taxes or something like that.
- 3:46Michelle Gauthier: I am a huge fan of outsourcing and I feel like as a single business-owning mom, it is worth every penny that I spend in order to have someone else take care of the things that I do not enjoy doing but want done.
- 3:59Michelle Gauthier: I'm gonna tell you two things that might feel uncomfortable about the idea of paying for something or trading services with someone.
- 4:06Michelle Gauthier: Number one, you might feel like you don't need to ask for help or you shouldn't have to ask for help because everybody else is doing it on their own.
- 4:13Michelle Gauthier: First of all, everybody else is not doing it on their own.
- 4:16Michelle Gauthier: Wait till you hear the list of all the things that I outsource.
- 4:18Michelle Gauthier: And second of all, we're conditioned to believe that we should be able to do it all.
- 4:23Michelle Gauthier: And that is complete BS.
- 4:25Michelle Gauthier: We cannot do it all.
- 4:26Michelle Gauthier: Nobody can do it all.
- 4:28Michelle Gauthier: What also might come up for you is, well, if I have somebody else clean my home, it won't be as clean as when I do it.
- 4:35Michelle Gauthier: Okay, let's pretend that's true.
- 4:37Michelle Gauthier: Would you rather have your house mostly clean or dirty because you don't have time to do it?
- 4:42Michelle Gauthier: If you're gonna outsource, you have to know that you will probably feel uncomfortable about asking for help and that you may feel uncomfortable about the job that someone else is doing.
- 4:51Michelle Gauthier: Me, I'm not a great cleaner, so the person who cleans my house does a way better job than I would ever do.
- 4:56Michelle Gauthier: But if we think about my mom, for example, who is super clean, I think no one would ever clean her house to her standards, but she has them do it.
- 5:03Michelle Gauthier: And then she just does a little follow-up work.
- 5:05Michelle Gauthier: Okay, here are the places where I, on the regular outsource, I absolutely never ever go to the grocery store.
- 5:11Michelle Gauthier: I have delivery every single week.
- 5:13Michelle Gauthier: I get delivery from Costco.
- 5:15Michelle Gauthier: I get delivery any time that I can get delivery.
- 5:18Michelle Gauthier: The amount of time that saves me, I can't even imagine.
- 5:21Michelle Gauthier: I have a laundry service who comes and picks up on Tuesday and brings it back clean, folded, and ready to put away on Wednesday.
- 5:30Michelle Gauthier: I have someone who does the yard.
- 5:32Michelle Gauthier: I have someone who cleans the windows every season.
- 5:35Michelle Gauthier: I have previously had someone who comes into our house and makes meals for us.
- 5:40Michelle Gauthier: Now I purchase a lot of meals from we have a place here called Fit Flavors.
- 5:45Michelle Gauthier: That's healthy food that you can buy in bulk.
- 5:47Michelle Gauthier: I do that every week for at least some of the meals that we have.
- 5:51Michelle Gauthier: I've done meal subscriptions.
- 5:52Michelle Gauthier: All of those things are outsourcing so that you can have more time back in your life and do less.
- 5:59Michelle Gauthier: And then after you've gone through everything that you need to do and you cross off the ones you're not going to do anymore, and you outsource all the ones that you don't want to do anymore, but still you want or need to be done, the last thing to do is to better it, which is to make the task easier, fun, or faster.
- 6:15Michelle Gauthier: So if it has to stay, if you have to do this task, it doesn't have to be miserable.
- 6:20Michelle Gauthier: A great example of this is pairing chores with podcasts or audiobooks so that they go by more quickly and you're also learning or enjoying something else.
- 6:29Michelle Gauthier: Another example of bettering something is creating an intentional routine instead of making constant decisions about things.
- 6:36Michelle Gauthier: So for example, if you know that every day one of the things that you do is you pick up your house before you go to bed, you could set a routine to that, even set a reminder on your Alexa to say, okay, now is the five minutes where we pick up the house and get your family involved and maybe play a song and make it fun so you can make something better in that way.
- 6:58Michelle Gauthier: A couple of ways that you can better it include making the task smaller.
- 7:02Michelle Gauthier: So make being able to do it more quickly because you make it smaller.
- 7:05Michelle Gauthier: So instead of cleaning the whole house, maybe you clear one surface.
- 7:08Michelle Gauthier: And instead of catching up on email, maybe you reply to three messages.
- 7:12Michelle Gauthier: Just make the task a little bit smaller so that it's not so arduous, and you actually probably will start on it more likely if it's smaller.
- 7:20Michelle Gauthier: Another way to better a task is to remove some of the decisions.
- 7:25Michelle Gauthier: One of the best listener tips I ever got was from a woman who serves the same dinners every week.
- 7:30Michelle Gauthier: Both of her kids like it, her spouse likes it, and she knows exactly what they're gonna have every week.
- 7:34Michelle Gauthier: Imagine how much decision time that takes out of what should I make?
- 7:38Michelle Gauthier: What should the grocery list be?
- 7:40Michelle Gauthier: How do I prepare this?
- 7:41Michelle Gauthier: Do we have all the ingredients?
- 7:42Michelle Gauthier: That is such a great way to make it simple.
- 7:45Michelle Gauthier: I personally eat the same breakfast and lunch every day for a week.
- 7:48Michelle Gauthier: I eat the same breakfast every day forever until I get so sick of it, I can't do it.
- 7:52Michelle Gauthier: And I rotate my lunches by week and I just don't have to think about it beyond that.
- 7:56Michelle Gauthier: You can also have a default outfit.
- 7:58Michelle Gauthier: Like if you know that you need to get dressed to go somewhere, maybe you have three go-to outfits where you're like, should I put on A, B, or C?
- 8:05Michelle Gauthier: Because if you don't have to decide again and again, it saves you a lot of time and it makes the task so much better.
- 8:12Michelle Gauthier: And then the last tip, which is scheduling focused work during your best energy window.
- 8:18Michelle Gauthier: So for me, that's early in the morning.
- 8:20Michelle Gauthier: If I really want to concentrate or need to have a new creative idea, I'm gonna do that in the morning or doing prep tasks when you're already in motion.
- 8:28Michelle Gauthier: For example, if I'm making soup and I'm chopping carrots and I know tomorrow that I'm gonna have tacos, maybe I'll cut up the tomatoes or whatever.
- 8:36Michelle Gauthier: So when you're already in that mode, or do your future self a favor and set it up then.
- 8:40Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so those are three solid ways to do less in order to feel less overwhelmed.
- 8:46Michelle Gauthier: Bag it, barter it, or better it.
- 8:48Michelle Gauthier: Let me know which one you like best.
- 8:50Michelle Gauthier: I challenge you to try to think of one in each one of those groups so that you can be doing less by the end of today.
- 8:56Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 8:58Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 9:04Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
- 9:10Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.