Latest / Breaking the Timeline by Shana Francis / The Productivity Trap Nobody Talks About In Your First Job

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The Productivity Trap Nobody Talks About In Your First Job · Breaking the Timeline by Shana Francis

• Shana: We are the most scheduled, most optimized, the most productivity-tracked generation of professionals that ever existed. And a lot of us are actually quietly exhausted about it. And after all of these things, are we actually sure that we have achieved anything using these specific structures? In this episode, we're about to get into why. Hello and welcome back to Breaking the Timeline. I'm Shauna, and I'm so glad you were able to join us again for our professional office hours where we really get into the ins and gritty of careers, productivity, development, and really talk about the things that you might not want to talk about in your staff room, especially with your leaders. Now, we're gonna focus on three things today. First, we have the optimization culture and really trying to break down why it might be Doing us more damage than good. Second, we're gonna really look at what needs to come across our desk this week and why potentially lunch breaks, even though this is not a brand new thing, could actually help us become that 1% better as a professional. And finally, just looking a little bit about the struggles and the wins of studying whilst you are working for. time and how you can potentially get started in regards to that. So let's open the doors to our professional office hours today. Alright, so I want to start off with talking a little bit about the trade-off that we have when we're thinking about being the most productive person in the room in alongside of building a full life. Now when I think about full life I'm not just talking about Trying to be the best in everything. I'm actually talking about the people who are trying to do multiple things at a specific time. You might be somebody who is running a business. Okay, so you might be a founder, you might be somebody trying to do something on the side to multiply your income. You might be someone who also has a full time or potential partial time job. So a career. And a lot of the people who's probably listening to this. Are in that professional career industry. And then you've got other things in your life, such as like your hobbies, your interests, maybe your family, friends, all of these little things that come together. So this is what we call that full life. Now, when we are somebody who has a full life, we already know that time is the most precious thing that we can have. And as a working professional, somebody who has a lot of multitracks to them, you know that we don't always have the right time. And the things that we see, especially on the news, on social media, from our productivity gurus, is that we need to be a little bit more productive. Now, when we think about productivity, the things that kind of scream out to us a lot of the time is things such as let's time block. Let's put everything into our calendar. Let's make sure that we're writing our to-do list and everything that we actually need to have in place. And yes, for some people, that really gives a lot of structure. However, when these productivity advances are actually made, are they really taking in consideration that person who is trying to do it all? Or are we just looking at the day-to-day person who potentially might be focusing on One to two things. Now I'm gonna really break that down a little bit so you can understand how this potentially might look like to somebody who is having a lot of multiple tracks. Now, before we get started, I want to kind of bring it back to maybe how we are currently feeling. Some of us might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed, and I know it definitely for me, trying to do all of these stuff like running this business, this podcast. And also advancing in my career, it gets a little bit overwhelming. And I would actually do anything right now to have a magic wand and somebody be like, Shauna, here you go. Everything is all sorted. However, this is not the reality. So myself I've been researching a lot to see what is out there, what can really help me to kind of utilize the time I have better. And then kind of look at maybe where I might need to adapt or change little things. Now, what I actually started off with is looking at using my calendar. And if you follow me for a while and see stuff of that I do, I love a calendar. Now I'm gonna reflect more on say last year's calendar into now, what I'm doing right now. So last year, for example, I would be that girly who had the different calendars. Everything color-coded, I would have a calendar for meetings, calendar for birthdays, calendar for my gym routine, content, and so on. In those calendars, I would then have obviously the events that I needed to do, but even under those events would be bad to-do lists. At the time when I did that, that worked. I didn't really have a lot to do. I was potentially just starting off as a senior lecturer. So it was very new. Had a lot of bit of leeway in regards to how I performed. Even though I was in probation, period, there wasn't a lot of hassle or this feeling that I needed to overachieve in regards to my job. I just needed to kind of do what I needed to do on the job description. So I had that. I had my content, which I was just starting out with. So I used to have an old podcast before which was specifically looking at physical education, which is actually my niche if you knew that. But I wasn't kind of doing a production, which I kind of do now. It was quite easy humor form content, just to maybe like lighten it up a little bit. And then the other things on the side I obviously had is like my gym stuff, which I carried on with. So at the time Those things made sense because I was maybe juggling, say, three things at a time, two main priorities, and then one that I kind of had on the side that just made me who I am. I would have in those events and each day everything to the T of what I needed to do every single day. And I had this mapped out using Google Calendar of my choice, and this was synced towards all of my different devices. This really kept me on task. And I had that satisfaction when I ticked off an event or ticked off a task underneath that, and I felt like the most productive girly ever. Now, looking into what's happening today, I've actually added a lot more to my schedule than that. I'm now running a newsletter. Okay, so the newsletter is a t an attachment of this podcast itself, but maybe more of the behind the scenes, more the feelings, the uncut. realities of what I'm currently facing that goes on there. I'm also trying to build a coaching business. And the coaching business specifically is for early career professionals who maybe want to upscale in their industry or reach into a leadership position. I'm also well just finished actually, but I was also studying on the side. I was completing a master's in leadership and education. So I had those three original things that I had And then I'm now attaching another three to it. These are six things I needed to juggle. So can you imagine what my calendar was looking like? Now, just from the aesthetic view and just looking at it straight away, it was overwhelming. It wasn't something that I felt that I could accomplish. It wasn't something that I felt was motivating and really wanted me to continue and stand out. And it wasn't something that I actually wanted to tackle. So when I used to like pick up my phone, for example, and see my calendar for the day, most times I would just turn that over. And again and again and again, those things that I maybe didn't achieve or the things that I didn't really want to focus on. did not actually happen. Now you can probably imagine the mental damage that started to have on my well-being. And you're probably having the same thing. The issue with to do list is this. We're probably putting a lot of things on there. Instead of focusing on just say one thing for the day or one thing for a specific time period, we are putting in maybe five to different things and breaking it down. And the project manager in me would absolutely love that. But I need to remember that one, I am a trained project manager, but my project management isn't my role and it's not my job. It's just something like a task. That I have to do alongside my main role to make sure it is effective. So having to do lists like that that was so rigid for every single day was not working. So I had to kind of change up. So this is now like what I'm doing right now. Instead, on my calendar, I have five or six non-negotiable things that I like to do throughout the week. It sometimes has timestamps on there, sometimes it doesn't. But the one thing I really love about like Google Calendar itself is that it's easy drag and drop shift of anything. So if I have other priorities in the day, especially when it comes to like meetings in my career that I cannot change. I can kind of move those things. And those six negotiable things are things that move me forward. And I'm gonna kind of share that a little bit today in regards to what that looks like. So when I start off my day, it's all about mindset and movement. Mindset and movement are important things to me because these are the things that really lead me to start off my day in a great way. Mindset is getting sure of what I want. What do I need? What do I want to achieve? What are the challenges that I'm facing and how can I potentially accomplish them? I'm not looking at a broad term, I'm looking at actual days. Now, if you're a female, you probably will understand this more. But each day when we wake up, it feels like a different day. You might be on top of the world on Monday and feeling so refreshed from the weekend. And by Wednesday, you just want everything to end. You don't want to get out of bed. You don't want to do anything. And that's the whole point of this mindset reshift. Because I need to acknowledge how I'm really feeling at that specific time because it's going to have a knock and effect of what I do later. So I do a quick check-in. How am I feeling? How does my body feel? Am I really feeling like I can accomplish specific things today? Now, if the answer is yes, then great. I will have maybe a jot of things that I would like to accomplish today. If the answer is no, then everything goes out the window because my mental health, my well being means more than actually ticking things off my task. And then we look at what can actually be achieved. Maybe there might be one thing on my list today that might be okay, I would like to complete 30 minutes of MUVA, for example. The 30 minutes of movement might have been a heavy strength session. Instead of forcing myself to do that strength session, I might decide to opt for something a little bit slower, such as walking, maybe Pilates, maybe do some mobility work. Then I still achieve something. It might not be exactly what I wanted, but something is done because I know movement is going to be really key for me. Now, the one thing I made sure that I implement now, and something that potentially I didn't have so much before, is not to worry if something is not done and then moving it to the next day. Now, the issue that we have when we are moving things to the next day is that that accumulates over time. So just say it's Monday and you had maybe three things that you needed to do. Say you only completed one. Those other two things are now going to move to Tuesday. I then had three other things on that day already. So now I have five. But I know my day is very busy, so I can only still accomplish three things. So those two things carry on. And they carry on and they carry on. That is when we come into the issue. We will get to Sunday and we've got about 15 things on our list, and we know we cannot achieve it. That is going to cause us so much stress. And as a professional, this is the last thing we want on our plate. So instead of just planning out the entire week, what I actually do now on a Sunday is plan out just one day. That Monday, I want to know what do I want to achieve across the entire week, and then I put something on the Monday. This allows me now to the other days to have nothing there. If I don't accomplish what I wanted to do on a Monday, I then will shift it to the Tuesday. But I'm more likely I'm going to be able to do it on the Tuesday because nothing else is scheduled then. Now this might seem like, ⁓ my gosh, Shauna, this is not organized at all, is not productive. But honestly, you are gonna feel a lot better when you've achieved baby jazz that one theme that goes over. Now, you're probably thinking, okay, you might have suggested four things for the week. You get free done on Monday, go on Tuesday. Now I have nothing rest for the week. You can do that Sunday thing again and really look into what are other things I can maybe do. I have a little bit of wiggle room now. I can do what I need to and do that. Have those things done. Or what you could do is just have that personal time for you. And this is something else that I make sure that I have. For myself in the week. What are the personal things that you are implementing into your routine which allows you to be you? This can literally be anything. This could be something that makes you happy. So for me, for example, just doing a little bit of pampering, a little bit of gaming. Like I love gaming right now. This is something that people don't know about me, but I love my Nintendo Switch. I love to play cozy games. Something I don't really talk about a lot on social media. But if you have me like on personal accounts or you see what I do, like just walk around. I literally walk around with this. I absolutely love my Nintendo Switch. I've got actually two. And at the moment, obviously, I'm playing games like Tomodachi World. I've got the new Pokemon on there. It is great. And it's time for me to obviously shut off. And really just do stuff that I really enjoy. And this is the thing that you need to kind of do. Now, the one thing I want to kind of finish this segment off in this area is that you we need to start realizing that typical productivity 5 a.m. routine be that person who has all these pretty calendars is not always going to be achievable for people who have multiple pathways, multiple interests. We need to kind of look at our own selves and create something that works for us. Now, what I've shared today is something that works for me. And yes, just taking trial and error for me to get to you. I was once that girly who had all these colour corrected things on there, everything to-do list, everything timestamped, and nothing changed on that. But I've just made it a little bit more adaptable. I don't do all days in the week now. I just do one day. I have them kind of segmented in a way that I want to and I shift it throughout the week. And it gives me time. It gives me breathing space. It gives me something that I know I can achieve. And having achievement across the week is what's gonna really motivate you to keep going as an early career professional or somebody who's trying to get up the ladder. All right, so I think this is actually the perfect time that we go into our second segment. And really looking at now, what are the things that need to come across our industry and table this week, which is really gonna support us in our career? Okay, so what I really want to talk about today, and this specifically is really in line in what we were just speaking about, actually. And it's more about what we really need to Understand when it comes to protecting our time. All right. So that's the main thing I want to kind of bring from this specifically. So this article obviously came out on like five days ago, so predominantly last week, for what we do, but I think it's an important topic, kind of links to what we've been talking about already in terms of productivity. Now, this is about specifically use this lighting, our lunch break to the most. To actually increase our productivity, which I found a very interesting article to read. Now, obviously, when it comes to lunch breaks, we are in an industry and I'm talking about early career professionals overall who don't like lunch. Okay. And I'm not talking about in terms of eating food, like we definitely do eat, we do nourish ourselves. But I'm speaking on the front of we do not like to take our lunch break in the way that we actually do. Now, it's quite interesting, especially with how they started off this article when they first went, but work is piling up, you've got 150 unread emails and deadlines. I'm telling you now that it's the most relatable sentence that I've read so far. And they are showing us that we are utilizing our lunch break to be time to catch up with work. Now It's quite funny this because the whole purpose of a lunch break, and it actually actually says lunch to eat our food, and secondly, the break, for us to step away and do nothing. And actually, a lot of us are taking less than 33 minutes per day for a main lunch break. Now, a lot of us are actually got about one hour in our designated contract. It's kind of like a difference in regards to industry. So I know obviously in education, this can range between 45 to an hour. For some people who maybe work for themselves, you might allocate a little bit longer for the corporate girlies in there. This potentially might even be 40 to 2 hours, depending on if it's like a company lunch break or so on. But either way, everybody needs to have a designated lunch break and If you're somebody sitting there right now, be like, I don't have a lunch break, I would suggest go speak to your HR manager because that's not right. Everyone should have one. Now, I find very interesting that five days a week we are found to skip one lunch break per week. For me personally, working in the education system, I know that every time I used to have a lunch break, I will sit there to catch on with those 150 emails. To maybe do some marking for a student. I was never doing a break. And I was actually finding myself typing on my computer, eating at the same time, answering a call, and I wasn't taking seriously my break, which I find very ironic speaking out loud because we always talk about recovery in terms of the sports and the PE industry. And I wasn't really embodying it myself. So Yeah, it it just didn't really make any sense. Now, they obviously go a little bit more into detail with this, and they say about the issues that we are facing in terms of having a short break. So they were saying even a 30 to 45 minute break isn't enough to truly switch off, according to Charles Hips, which is a founder CEO recruitment technology company. Now, the argument is that we should actually have 75 minutes away from work. Now, for some of us, it's not going to be possible. But having a longer break is actually gonna have a lot more benefit for us. And within that break, we need to actually spend some time away from our desk. This is gonna allow us to not be intrigued with answering emails or using that time to complete tasks. So I really wanna kind of challenge you to step away and get outside. A lot of us don't do this enough. It is spring now. We're getting into summer. The weather is getting better. So why are we not utilizing this time to get a little bit of fresh air? I understand if it was winter, because we don't want to be outside in the cold. But during this time, let's get that vitamin D that we all deserve because we don't usually get this in this country to really just rejuvenate ourselves and refresh. A little bit of sunlight can do us justice and really just get our minds away. Your mind actually settles better than having your lunch inside. And there's loads of research behind it. And this article really goes into detail about it. And it's just really gonna help us. Optimal performance at work is based on a calm nervous system. 100%. If we are feeling anxious and overwhelmed about certain things, we are never gonna be performing our best. We're not gonna be that what we call as our own productive. person because we have too much on our minds. So things that we could potentially be doing during this lunch break, other than actually eating. Maybe we might take some time to do a bit of meditation to kind of recenter ourselves. potentially might be journaling or doing some creative writing. This is actually something that I've seen. I saw ⁓ somebody post the other day on TikTok about it about global majorities like writing, being creative and there's actually like a challenge happening right now about it. And it really kind of got me excited. I haven't done any creative writing for a very long time. I really like actually doing like fiction stuff and doing poetry, writing diary kind of stuff. Hence the newsletter. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll challenge myself to do this for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, and see how it goes and utilize that during my lunch break. So it's not really kind of taking too much brain power because I have that creative side of me. And again, it's no judgment, it's not really going anywhere. It's just for me just to kind of get my creativity ideas out and do something that I really enjoy. I'm probably gonna do that for the lunch break. So If you're somebody listening to this and actually want to give this a go as well, let me know down in the comments. But yeah, so I do really agree with this statement. And I think we take this for granted a lot, especially in the UK, about our break time. I know more in like places like Sweden, they really take this seriously in terms of lunch break and make it like a big event kind of thing. So it'd be really good to kind of adopt that a little bit and see if this makes a massive impact in our productivity and make us just be a bad professional overall. All right, so we're gonna move over now to our final section of our segment. And this is all about now our education bit. So there's always gonna be one area that we spoke about about what we are kind of be focusing on for the week. what needs to come across our desk and now something a bit about education, learning and development. So I did mention this a little bit earlier when I was talking about like what my candidate system now looks like. And I have just completed my masters. Okay. Finish my master's in leadership and education, which actually took me two years to complete because I was doing it as a part-time student. Now this naturally goes into what I'm about to talk about today. And it's all about learning on the job whilst learning for the job. Now, I'm gonna separate these two because I think they're two separate things and two different things. Now, learning on the job. The whole point is you're learning about something and you're doing it whilst you're working full-time. You're trying to juggle this type of knowledge base and understanding whilst you're doing your full-time role. You Do not have any adjustments made for you during your career. Now, if you've got a really good line manager, they will be very receptive on this because they should be not just focusing on you completing your role, but focusing on you growing. And they should be able to allocate this time or specific strategies to allow you to do this. Now I want to talk about the other side and that's learning for the job. You might be in an industry that you have. Allocated on your contract that you have to do specific things to be able to be successful in that probation year or potential professional development year. For us, it's specifically just doing mandatory training online where we need to kind of tick off to say that we are now completely. client. So this could be like stuff as cybersecurity training, potential data retention or data protection training. These are vital things that we need to do for our role. And yes, they're great. They're training that we can add to our CV, which is going to allow us to develop or maybe get that 1% better. But these are designated things that we have to do for our job. Now the honest difference between the two one, you really want to do it And this is something that you have an interest in. The other one, you have to do it to be able to be successful for your job. Now, both of them are going to be very good, and both of them are going to serve you in different spaces. Now, for me, for my masters, they actually crossed over for both. Okay. So this was something that I really wanted to do because I have a passion in education, a passion in leadership, and trying to support the next generation to move up. That's always been something that I like to do, like to talk about. But it was also in a requirement for my job. Now, when I first got my role, I only had two degrees. I had my bachelor's in sports and excise science, and I also had a postgraduate certificate in education, specifically secondary education, physical education. That allowed me to get into my industry of being a teacher educator in a university. But the policy changed straight after I got the job. Now, everybody coming in needs to have a minimum of a master's. Now, the agency, the issue is that it sits in the intersection of undergrad and masters. It's not an undergrad, but yet again, it's not quite a master's. You do get credits towards it, which you can utilize a little bit later, but it doesn't count as one. It just counts as a postgraduate degree. So I had to basically step up. And get a master's between a specific time frame, which they gave me. I decided to do it earlier than later because I was like, let's just get it done and dusted. Let's get into it. Now, I could have actually done a master's in anything. They didn't actually specify what I needed to do it in, but I really wanted to do it in leadership and education because again, it linked to what I really am interested in. So doing that and really developing over the year has been absolutely a game changer for me. I've really enjoyed it. I've learned a lot along the way. And it has actually closed the gaps a lot in regards to how I facilitate myself as a leader, being a senior leader myself in my subject, but also how I kind of look at other people and understand why certain decisions have been made. Now, the one thing I want to kind of talk about is trying to juggle both. Juggle studying. And juggle being somebody who's trying to grow a career. A lot of the time, especially how these degrees, these qualifications are set out, that they are two different avenues. We've got our studying, we've got our kind of thing that we have to do for our career. But instead, I want you to kind of look at it into a different way. I want us to maybe potentially combine the both. Utilize what we're doing on a day. So I'm gonna use the example of what I actually did just so you get a little bit of clarity in regards to what I'm speaking about. So I have a certain maybe curriculum that I've got to create because I've got to create curriculum for my trainees every single year. Usually what I would do is kind of look at the year, look at the research which I actually need to embed during that year, anything new. Look at the feedback that I've got from others. Instead of doing that, I potentially might look at one of the modules or one of the teachings which I might have got in my masters and try and embed it within them. So one of the modules that we actually had to do is about coaching and mentoring. Now, in my curriculum originally, I didn't have any element to do with coaching and mentoring. So I decided to have a one-to-one session built into my curriculum for every single trainee each time. During my learning, I needed to child and to devise a coaching framework. So we had a variety of different coaching frameworks, such as like the growth framework. And I needed to practice how that is. Now we used to do it in our lectures with the other people with us and just practicing that kind of dialogue. But it really wasn't the kind of strategy I needed right now because it wasn't realistic. It wasn't really what I was going to bring into my industry. So for me to actually utilize this teaching and to actually write about it, to actually give day-to-day usage of it, I actually implemented it within my work and utilise this growth framework with my trainee teachers and wrote about it. And at the end of that module, I had to write a 5,000 word essay about it. Everything that I did there, I made sure I wrote about it in there. So instead of just having everything separate, I actually looked at my industry and thought about what can I change in my career to adopt what I'm learning and what I do in my career, how can I bring it back to my learning? So there was like this kind of going back arrow continuum between the two. So if you're somebody sitting there right now and was thinking about How would I juggle both learning, career, development? I would really challenge you instead of looking at it as two separate things, just think of it as one. Both of them are going to support each other either side, or vice versa. So you just got to really map out together how can these things kind of interlock towards it. So that kind of goes down to my final reflection, final thing. For us to develop as professionals, we need to do these things. We need to look at what we can do to learning for the job and learning towards it and on the job. So combining everything together. And I really encourage you to look at things that you can potentially do and what can actually fit into your calendar because we don't want to be overwhelming ourselves by saying, Yeah, go do a master's and you don't have any time to actually commit to it. Start off small. Maybe online you might have a one-hour CPD that you've seen that will maybe help you understand the process in your workplace and see where you can kind of fit that in. But before you decide to sign up, look at how can your work support that thing and how can that thing support your work? And that naturally will allow it to embed into your life without it feeling like a completely separate add-on that you actually need to complete. At the end. Alright, so we've come to the end of today's episode. And I really want to kind of leave us with kind of the three segments that we've gone through. First of all, about the gap about being productive. We are multi-tracked individuals. We have so many different things about us which kind of bring in from different angles. And we need to make sure that we are talking about it, utilizing it, and embedding things that work for us. Those traditional models weren't always made for us, and we need to be able to accept that instead of trying to fit within a trend which was never made for us intentionally. I really challenge you to kind of look back at your calendar or your to-do list and make these changes now and stop holding on to that feeling of not feeling accomplished and you are not accomplishing things. Just get rid of it. Okay. If it's not. Serving you, it's not the right thing. The next is actually utilizing these lunch breaks. I really challenge you to get outside, even if it's for 10 minutes during that time period. Just do something different, get away from your desk and just have some fresh air. And the final thing. Looking at something that's gonna move us forward in terms of education. Maybe it might be one-hour podcast that you listen to that's gonna make you a little bit better. It may be a break in the timeline podcast that might serve you some space in developing that. But really trying to map out how does this fit my career instead of looking at it in separate avenues. So hopefully you've enjoyed today's episode and kind of liking the new structure, a little bit more yappy content, I think. And I feel this kind of fits me a little bit more naturally. But I'm really interested to know what would you like to see more in these episodes. Leave these information below or feel free to reach out to me in the DMs or on social media and just let me know because I really want to make sure that these episodes are useful for you. And it's something that you can actually take away from. So I think it's time that we close the office for today. Make sure that you send this episode to somebody who feels they need a little bit of clarity of what productivity might need to look like and a reminder of what a lunch break is. Don't forget to like and subscribe and I hope to see you very soon.