Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #284| The Real Reason You're Always Running Late — And Why No Amount of Time Management Advice Has Ever Fixed It
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn the real reason why you're always running late and why no amount of time management advice has ever fixed it.
- 0:11Michelle 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.
- 0:38Michelle Gauthier: Hey friend, thanks for joining today.
- 0:40Michelle Gauthier: If you're often running late to, well, everything and your to-do list is never finished, or if you've ever looked at your calendar and realized too late that you're double or maybe even triple booked for the same hour and you have to be in all the places at the same time, stick around.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you're gonna learn why you're always running late and why you feel like you're the only person who can't seem to pull it together.
- 1:03Michelle Gauthier: The real reason you were never going to complete your to-do list, no matter how disciplined you are, and what it actually costs you when you keep trying to white knuckle your way through it instead of fixing the real problem.
- 1:14Michelle Gauthier: Even though last Sunday you planned your week, promising yourself you'd quit being late and staying organized, you still ended up falling behind.
- 1:22Michelle Gauthier: And now you're feeling bad, and that mean voice in your head says that you're just flawed and you can't keep it all together.
- 1:28Michelle Gauthier: But this feels confusing to you because people look at you and they see someone capable and ambitious and successful.
- 1:34Michelle Gauthier: So if you're doing all of that right, why are you still showing up to your first meeting of the day late and flustered for the fifth day in a row?
- 1:42Michelle Gauthier: Let's talk about how this feels when you're in this state.
- 1:45Michelle Gauthier: When my son was little, he had a tutor who would come to his school and pull him out of class to do work with him.
- 1:51Michelle Gauthier: And one day he was homesick.
- 1:53Michelle Gauthier: So I was working from home trying to juggle what felt like 18 conference calls while taking care of a sick child.
- 1:58Michelle Gauthier: And at 11 o'clock a.m.
- 2:00Michelle Gauthier: my phone buzzed with a message from the tutor that said, I'm at school.
- 2:03Michelle Gauthier: Oliver is sick.
- 2:04Michelle Gauthier: Question mark.
- 2:05Michelle Gauthier: My stomach dropped.
- 2:07Michelle Gauthier: I could feel my face burning.
- 2:09Michelle Gauthier: This woman was a mom too.
- 2:11Michelle Gauthier: She had arranged a babysitter, gotten herself out of the house, and even worse, driven through the snow all the way to get to my son's school.
- 2:18Michelle Gauthier: And I just had completely forgotten to tell her that he wasn't at school that day.
- 2:22Michelle Gauthier: Not like almost forgot.
- 2:23Michelle Gauthier: It hadn't even crossed my mind.
- 2:25Michelle Gauthier: And I remember sitting there thinking, what is wrong with me?
- 2:28Michelle Gauthier: This is not who I thought I was.
- 2:31Michelle Gauthier: I was the person who remembered things, the person who could keep all the plates spinning, the person people could rely on, or at least I used to be.
- 2:39Michelle Gauthier: And I had to admit something that I desperately did not want to admit, which is that I could not keep it together anymore.
- 2:46Michelle Gauthier: I couldn't remember everything.
- 2:47Michelle Gauthier: I couldn't get everything done.
- 2:49Michelle Gauthier: I couldn't keep running my life at this pace and pretend that it was fine.
- 2:53Michelle Gauthier: And the hardest part wasn't forgetting to text the tutor.
- 2:56Michelle Gauthier: It was just that what that moment seemed to say about me.
- 3:00Michelle Gauthier: Maybe I'm just not capable of this anymore.
- 3:03Michelle Gauthier: Maybe everyone else can manage their life, and I'm the one who can't.
- 3:06Michelle Gauthier: It sounds like such a small thing, this one forgotten text, but for me, it was totally the straw that broke the camel's back because I suddenly saw how frantically I had been living, constantly racing, remembering, reacting, and catching things just the instant before they fell.
- 3:21Michelle Gauthier: And I really knew I cannot keep going like this.
- 3:24Michelle Gauthier: Not only did I feel bad about myself, but it affected everyone around me.
- 3:28Michelle Gauthier: There's this quote I love by Shauna Niequist that perfectly sums up what happens when you are consistently bringing home the most chaotic, frenetic version of yourself to your family.
- 3:37Michelle Gauthier: She says, "It's easy to be liked by strangers.
- 3:39Michelle Gauthier: It's very hard to be loved and connected to the people in your home when you're always bringing them home your most exhausted self and resenting the fact that the scraps that you're giving them aren't cutting it".
- 3:51Michelle Gauthier: When I was in this state where I was trying to do 78 hours of things in a 24-hour day, I was always in frantic energy, always trying to make things happen.
- 4:00Michelle Gauthier: And everyone around me felt the effects of it.
- 4:02Michelle Gauthier: One day I was so overwhelmed with a constant barrage of emails that I was multitasking and answering them while I was on another call, and I didn't even realize I'd made an error and sent the wrong file until she replied, Hey, I think this might be the wrong file.
- 4:15Michelle Gauthier: My stomach dropped, and I had to get on another call with her, explain what happened, resend it, and hope she still trusted me to get it right.
- 4:22Michelle Gauthier: But she probably did trust me a little less after that.
- 4:25Michelle Gauthier: I know I would have.
- 4:27Michelle Gauthier: It was very common for me after a hectic day of working until the last possible minute that I would shut my laptop, switch into dinner and homework frenzy.
- 4:35Michelle Gauthier: And as I was getting dinner on the table, checking my husband's location to see why he was still at work and thought, why is he still not home?
- 4:42Michelle Gauthier: I need help.
- 4:43Michelle Gauthier: I can't do this alone.
- 4:44Michelle Gauthier: And by the time he walked in, I was not happy to see him.
- 4:46Michelle Gauthier: I was irritated that he wasn't there earlier.
- 4:49Michelle Gauthier: And I know in those moments he stopped being my partner.
- 4:52Michelle Gauthier: He became one more person that I was tracking and managing and waiting on and just frantically trying to get them to do what I wanted.
- 5:00Michelle Gauthier: Then there was bedtime.
- 5:02Michelle Gauthier: My kids were eight and five at the time, and I had helped my son study for a spelling test while also checking my work email and then rushed them both through bedtime routine because I still had work waiting for me once they were asleep.
- 5:13Michelle Gauthier: And the more I rushed them, the slower they got, which is like a kid trip.
- 5:17Michelle Gauthier: That's what they do.
- 5:18Michelle Gauthier: But that made me more annoyed, which meant more nights that I ended up like a frustrated mom instead of a peaceful good night.
- 5:26Michelle Gauthier: I can totally picture myself half listening to my daughter telling me something, but already thinking about the inboxes waiting for me in my office.
- 5:33Michelle Gauthier: Years don't come back.
- 5:34Michelle Gauthier: And some nights I knew that even while I was rushing through them.
- 5:38Michelle Gauthier: Even if there was time for a moment of peace, I'd fill it.
- 5:41Michelle Gauthier: I'd sit down on my couch after an exhausting day and shop online so that I was still busy.
- 5:46Michelle Gauthier: My formal living room became my returns room because I was shopping online constantly, just trying to make myself feel better, which didn't work by the way.
- 5:54Michelle Gauthier: All it did was add things to my to-do list.
- 5:56Michelle Gauthier: My life contained zero white space and also zero peace.
- 6:01Michelle Gauthier: If you're nodding along with this and really understand what I'm saying here, you might have a thought in your head that's something like, I just suck at time management or something is wrong with me.
- 6:11Michelle Gauthier: Other people can do this, but I just can't.
- 6:13Michelle Gauthier: Your brain tells you that's why you can't get it all done.
- 6:15Michelle Gauthier: That's why you're always late.
- 6:16Michelle Gauthier: But let's look at the facts.
- 6:18Michelle Gauthier: Let's just say your to-do list for today has 17 items on it.
- 6:22Michelle Gauthier: And those 17 items add up to about 30 hours of work.
- 6:25Michelle Gauthier: There is no way to time manage that into one working day.
- 6:29Michelle Gauthier: There is no way to make it to soccer practice pickup at five when you also have a meeting that ends at five.
- 6:35Michelle Gauthier: You're not actually bad at time management, nor are you a flawed human.
- 6:39Michelle Gauthier: You're just asking a day for more hours than it has to give, day after day, and no amount of time management skills will fix that.
- 6:47Michelle Gauthier: Maybe you've tried to fix it.
- 6:49Michelle Gauthier: Maybe you've tried getting a new planner or time blocking or waking up earlier, but it just didn't work or it didn't stick.
- 6:56Michelle Gauthier: So you decided that meant something about you.
- 6:58Michelle Gauthier: But honestly, it was never gonna work, not because you did it wrong, because none of these tools were ever built to solve the actual problem.
- 7:05Michelle Gauthier: A planner organizes the time that you already know about.
- 7:08Michelle Gauthier: Time blocking tells you when to do things.
- 7:10Michelle Gauthier: Waking up an hour earlier just gives you one more hour to fill with the same overloaded list, but none of them ever told you the truth about how much time your life actually requires.
- 7:20Michelle Gauthier: So no matter how well you used any of those tools, you were always going to run out of hours because the tool was never designed to catch that in the first place.
- 7:28Michelle Gauthier: If you keep going at this pace, if nothing changes, it's not just one bad week.
- 7:33Michelle Gauthier: It becomes every week.
- 7:34Michelle Gauthier: You keep sending that rushed email and your clients keep trusting you a little bit less, you keep coming home irritated instead of warm.
- 7:42Michelle Gauthier: Your husband keeps learning that walking in the dorm means walking into a problem to manage.
- 7:46Michelle Gauthier: You keep rushing bedtime for one more email, and your kids are getting the distracted, half-listening version of you.
- 7:53Michelle Gauthier: Kids notice that.
- 7:54Michelle Gauthier: They notice that distraction, and none of that fixes itself.
- 7:57Michelle Gauthier: It just keeps compounding, literally, one rushed week at a time until just a busy season turns into just your life.
- 8:05Michelle Gauthier: It's how you manage your marriage and your work and your kids' childhood.
- 8:08Michelle Gauthier: If this is you, I totally understand how you feel.
- 8:11Michelle Gauthier: I have absolutely been there.
- 8:13Michelle Gauthier: My overwhelm to calm method shows you the real math of your week.
- 8:17Michelle Gauthier: So you stop blaming yourself for a schedule that was never possible to accomplish in the first place.
- 8:22Michelle Gauthier: It teaches you to decide the small stuff once instead of redeciding it every single day so that mental energy is finally available for the people standing in front of you.
- 8:31Michelle Gauthier: So the years with your kids and your marriage and your family get your best you, not just the leftovers.
- 8:38Michelle Gauthier: The good news is I stopped living like that.
- 8:40Michelle Gauthier: I stopped living in that frantic pace that made me feel really bad about myself.
- 8:45Michelle Gauthier: And I just dropped my son off at college and I was so sad to miss him, but I thought I didn't miss his childhood.
- 8:52Michelle Gauthier: Came close.
- 8:53Michelle Gauthier: I maybe could have, but I didn't.
- 8:55Michelle Gauthier: And you can do the same.
- 8:57Michelle Gauthier: When you work with me for one-on-one coaching and you learn the overwhelm to call method, you'll walk in on Monday morning, five minutes early, in a cute outfit with a little spring in your step.
- 9:07Michelle Gauthier: You'll know your schedule because you've planned your week.
- 9:09Michelle Gauthier: There are no double bookings.
- 9:11Michelle Gauthier: You have white space for when things pop up.
- 9:13Michelle Gauthier: Your to-do list has top three things to focus on for the week.
- 9:17Michelle Gauthier: When someone asks you to step in and run their meeting, you pause, ponder, do I really want to do that?
- 9:22Michelle Gauthier: And say no with zero guilt and a hundred percent confidence.
- 9:26Michelle Gauthier: I just want to reiterate, you are not bad at time management.
- 9:29Michelle Gauthier: There is nothing wrong with you.
- 9:30Michelle Gauthier: You are not flawed.
- 9:31Michelle Gauthier: You just haven't developed the habits and skills to be successful and ambitious and also calm at the same time.
- 9:38Michelle Gauthier: That's exactly what we do together in coaching.
- 9:40Michelle Gauthier: We look at your real calendar, your real to-do list, all of the things you need to manage, and we do the math and clean out your calendar.
- 9:47Michelle Gauthier: We create a life that is not hectic, but instead productive and calm.
- 9:51Michelle Gauthier: If you're ready to stop living in frantic, exhausting energy, book your consultation with me.
- 9:57Michelle Gauthier: The link is in the show notes, but I will tell you if you want to just grab your phone right now.
- 10:02Michelle Gauthier: It is MichelleGauthier.com /bookme.
- 10:06Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 10:14Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.com.
- 10:20Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.