The Real Reason Your Meetings Suck | Hayley Watts

Most professionals don’t need more hours in the day—they need better systems.

In this episode of MarketPulse: Pros and Pioneers, we sit down with productivity coach and speaker Hayley Watts, whose work has transformed how teams and individuals overcome overwhelm and make meetings meaningful again. With a background in charity leadership and high-stress work environments, Hayley understands burnout firsthand—and she's here to share how she turned that chaos into clarity.

You’ll learn what’s really causing your stress (spoiler: it’s not your inbox), why most meetings are a waste of time, and how to take control of your calendar with confidence. Hayley breaks down simple mindset shifts and actionable strategies to help you feel more in control of your day. If you're constantly chasing your to-do list but never catching it, this episode is for you.

We also dive into how work cultures can evolve, the unseen costs of poor collaboration, and how asking better questions could unlock better performance across your team.

Watch now, and walk away with real tools to reclaim your time and protect your energy.

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Transcript

Paul: 0:00

Do you feel like there's never enough time in the day? Hayley Watts productivity coach and author of How to Fix Meetings shares on today's episode how business owners can work smarter, not harder. Hayley's a productivity coach, speaker and author who specializes in helping overwhelmed business owners and teams regain control of their time and workload. As the founder of Inspireful and a productivity ninja with Think Productive, Hayley has worked with organizations of all sizes, from small business owners to large corporate teams, helping them improve focus, efficiency, and wellbeing. She's the author of How to Fix Meetings, a book that challenges the way businesses approach time management and productivity. And Hayley passion lies in helping people create habits that make work and life feel easier without adding to the overwhelm. Hayley is, that's one of my favorite bios so far of season two. I love it. Welcome to the show.

Hayley: 0:58

Hi, welcome. Thank you for having me.

Paul: 1:00

No it's genuinely a pleasure. It's genuinely pleasure. Before we dive too deeply into what you do right now, I wonder if we can kind of rewind time a little bit and just come back to the early part of your career where you I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess something before we start talking this, and I, we can find out whether I'm right or not, I'm gonna guess that you were put into high pressure environments and learned to survive the hard And want to teach other people how to survive without having to go through that painful process because it feels very similar to how I do things, but I don't wanna teach people how to do it. Sorry, everyone. So if we think back to the, to this, the beginning of your career, then what was your first job Hayley Kaley.

Hayley: 1:38

Oh, my first, what I think of as my first proper job was working in a student union with students who wanted to volunteer out in the local community. That involved some elements of training. We did training around like presentation skills. Assertiveness, all those kind of transferable type skills. But it got me really interested in volunteering and volunteer management. So my early career was in that kind of space. And when I'm doing management training now, I often say the first people I managed were all volunteers. And if you mess that up, they just leave. And you don't see them again. So I had to get good at it pretty quickly. And then I became this a few jobs in, I became the CEO of a charity that supported other organizations who were involved in volunteers. So I did a lot of management training. But actually that job was quite stressful. It was quite overwhelming, Anybody who's worked in the charity sector will know, there's not enough money. organisation so people paid to be a member of the organisations There's a certain amount of perceived expectations. Like I, I thought the expectations were quite high and wanted to meet and exceed those. But it did mean that doing. Everything. Like in a small organisation I used to describe my job sometimes as I do all the jobs other people don't want to do or that we don't have funding for. So e everything from hr, marketing, fundraising and doing the actual job and delivering the work as well as managing a team of people. And that's how I came across all this productivity stuff, because I was really stressed, I was overwhelmed and I went back to my. I had a conversation with my team of managers and they were managing different projects in the organisation and I said to them like, what would you do if your project was the best example in the country of the project that you're working on? What would be different? What would be happening? And they came up with the most fantastic ideas. Then my next question is why aren't we doing these things? And they were all like, oh, we'll just spend all this time in email and responding to emails. And that's takes up most of my day. So we got think productive to come in and did some email training with us, it genuinely changed my life. I felt so much less stressed and overwhelmed by all the incoming communication, and then I was like, I need to learn more about this productivity and habits stuff because if it's made this much difference just looking at email, what if I could apply some of this logic to all the other aspects of my job? And do you know what? I'll be honest, if somebody would've said, Hayley, you just need to be a bit more organised I would've been really rude to them because I was like, I'm, I've got a list. I'm organized, I'm on it. I've got a timetable, I've got a plan. But the plan never actually happened,

Paul: 4:16

Because it wasn't a realistic plan, right?

Hayley: 4:18

but it wasn't a realistic plan. But I didn't have good habits and techniques, good stratagies To actually execute the plan, spreading myself too thinly, which is classic for me. and I know that sometimes I get back into that space. But now I know how to get out of it because you don't know what you don't know, right? There were a lot of things I didn't know were things that I needed to learn and know about. So yeah, you're right. I was in a very, and a lot, I say a high pressure environment. That pressure mainly came from me. When I'm coaching people now, often I find like the expectations that people have of themselves are this high. And the expectations they have of everybody else are much more reasonable and realistic somewhere down here. So a lot of the coaching that I do is around helping people to realign those things

Paul: 5:04

start

Hayley: 5:04

thinking about what they can do to be more effective.

Paul: 5:08

Why do you think it was and obviously using yourself as an example, if you think back to when you started doing that, why did you feel like it as a CEO of that organization, you felt it was your responsibility to pick up all the loose ends? what is it a personality thing? Is it something inside you or is it just a, an accountability thing that needs doing?

Hayley: 5:26

Good question. And I dunno, because I think everybody thinks they're normal, right? And as I said to my 12-year-old, nobody's normal. There's no such thing. that's just an invented concept. But I think it's partly I wanted to protect my team, right? They have a high workload already. they've got a lot of work to do. I don't wanna be asking them to do stuff that isn't really part of their job. And there was an element of, it's a small organisation so everybody's willing to muck in. they were a great team, they were really good people, but there were some things that we just didn't have. in an ideal world, we would've had a fundraiser who's responsible for fundraising, I really didn't enjoy fundraising particularly filling in all the grant and application forms. Like paperwork is not my thing. I went into that field and the field that I'm in now, to help people and to make a difference in the world. It didn't feel like filling in a form was doing that, but equally to keep somebody employed and in their job and growing the organisation that's what I needed to do. And there were a lot of things like that. I took over an organisation I remember my first day the chair took me out for lunch and she was like, it's great that you are here, but actually we've only got enough money to last another six months and we're really in dire straits and it really needs sorting out. And the team are unhappy and this is dysfunctional and problems. I was like, okay. And I'm thinking, what have I walked into but I stayed there for nine years and the organisation's still going now. something right!

Paul: 6:48

Sometimes we respond best when the right kind of pressure's applied, right? And I think if some things are too easy, we don't see the challenge in them and we want, we naturally, a lot of us want to drive towards leaving a legacy behind. And I guess that's the nice thing about working in that kind of charity and not-for-profit sector, is there's that real feeling of we're achieving something together. And I love purpose-driven businesses and organizations. Talk to me then about being a CEO because that, again, brings its own mental challenges of one, ultimately the bus, the organization's relying on you to lead the way out, but also because you are alone at the top right? It's quite lonely there.

Hayley: 7:27

That's hard. Yeah, that was hard. And I was quite lucky in that I was working in Central London and most London boroughs had an equivalent organization doing similar kind of work. And I created a network among those other CEOs and we had some regular, very informal kind of catchups, and we did some kind of more formal coaching of each other and. Action learning getting that, getting together as a group was amazing. that was my support network really. And I could pick up the phone to any of those people and go, this has happened. What do I do? as well as the kind of more strategic thinking. we deliberately created a space for us to think more strategically and help and support each other with that, which was really important. And that's one of the things that I found really valuable. I. So when I'm doing management training with businesses now, I often encourage them to have that kind of peer learning space as well as just a training day or a series of workshops to give people those skills to be able to help and support each other. When I stop working with that business and to create that. Supportive environment for each other. I think very often our tendencies as helpful human beings, somebody comes to you with a problem and you wanna give them advice and tell'em what to do. But actually as a coach, I firmly believe like people are the experts in their own lives, right? Somebody could come along and say to me, oh, you should do this, and this in your organisation But I know the people, I know the context, I know the background. And no amount of explaining that to somebody else is gonna help move things forward. so those kind of peer learning environments I think are really important and valuable.

Paul: 9:21

So I'm curious then, so you went down a path of. Figuring out how to be more productive and efficient for yourself, for your own survival and for your own to reduce your overwhelm, your mental health, all the rest of the things that come with being able to survive. Why did you then decide that you needed to help other people do the same thing? Because a lot of people would not. Not in a selfish sense, but a lot of people would take that, be very happy with it, and then move on and be quite successful doing what they're doing. Why did you decide to pivot and help others?

Hayley: 9:50

I guess my job was about helping others, or at least that's how I, yeah it very much was. That's how I saw it. That's been doing that for nine years and that felt like it's kind of time to move on. also, I had a 2-year-old at the time that I finished in that role, I've been doing that job for quite a long time before I went on maternity leave. The chair of the organisation at the time was like, when you come back, whatever you need in terms of flexibility, you can have what you need. Like we'll make it work which was an amazing and very generous offer. I'm going back 10, 12 years now, so working from home was unusual and I worked from home two days a week before I went on maternity leave.'cause it was my thinking time. I could get more stuff done when I wasn't in the office. and then I was looking for like my next, step in my career type job and I just couldn't get the flexibility that I needed to have a 2-year-old at home, a partner who worked shifts, including like proper night shifts, working overnight, and making the childcare and the costs stack up. It just didn't work. And I applied for a job that was like a couple of pay grades down from the next job that I really wanted. They offered me the job, not with any of the flexibility that I wanted. And I was like, do you know what? it's time to branch out on my own and. Graham, who is the founder at Think Productive, had approached me a year or two before. In fact, I remember meeting him in a coffee shop. I was very heavily pregnant. I was literally waddling to the station going, oh, pleased I don't have to come on the train every day anymore. And he explained how his business worked in terms of, all of our productivity ninjas are self-employed. I was like, I'm not leaving my proper full-time job to come and be self-employed and maybe get some work. Maybe not. Um, and I wish I'd have done it sooner. It was like so much the best thing that I've ever done. And then, fast forward, I've been doing that, what I do now for 10 years. And one of my friends said to me, oh yeah, I'm feeling really stressed. I'm feeling really overwhelmed. I was like, eh, that's what I help people with. and she's yeah, but you do that for businesses in Corporations and charities and statutory sector organisations you don't do that for like self-employed me Working at my kitchen table, I was like, maybe I should. So in the last couple of years I've been doing a lot more of that kind of work. In addition to the stuff with businesses, because I do helping people. I don't like seeing people struggle. And when I was in that position, I didn't know that there was a different way of doing things. I thought I was quite organised and I really wasn't. was probably looking back quite chaotic in how I work and sometimes I get back into that place, but the difference is I've got the skills now to know that I'm doing that. I recognise it and I know what to do to make the changes. And I think that can be the hard thing for a lot of people working on their own. They haven't got anyone to be accountable to.

Paul: 12:40

Yep.

Hayley: 12:41

it's easy to just spend the day getting in emails and social media and responding rather than being proactive. I.

Paul: 12:51

I think that's, do you know what I so many of the, not just solo entrepreneurs, I guess, but entrepreneurs in general anybody who gravitates towards running their own business I find that a lot of'em have neurodiversity of some way, shape, or form, right? Like I am. Quite on, and I talk about it a lot on this show, right? We've had some amazing guests on the show who've gone from prison to running their own$10 million a year business. We've had Guinness World record holders who used to be addicts and all sorts of stuff all through neurodiversity. But I do think that's particularly challenging when you are neurodiverse because certainly for an ADHD angle, like for me, if a client hands me some work to be done and I feel like I have to get it off my desk there. And then, I really hate leaving things overnight. And I've gotten older, I've gotten better at managing that kind of expectation of myself. this doesn't need to be done today. Look at your diary for tomorrow. Tomorrow's gonna be a decent day. And whilst we can't count on that whole diary of staying free, or could a chunk of it in the morning's gonna be free. We don't need to stay up till 11 o'clock tonight, Paul. But what's your advice to business owners who are out there, who are perhaps feeling like things are normal, but noticing the signs of burnout? They don't really want to talk to just anyone about things. How can they self-diagnose when they need to do something about it, I guess is what I'm seeing.

Hayley: 14:19

Oh, great question. I like that you're asking me questions. I've not been asked before. I think it's that when you're finding it hard to switch off, When you are in a place where you're like, it's constantly on your mind and it's worrying you, I. you don't wanna get to the point where you're having sleepless nights about it, if that's where you're at, that's like definitely a point, but an inability to switch off and say, it's the end of the day, and then it's still on your mind and you're spending your time with your family and your friends maybe checking your email or it's just you're thinking, oh, I didn't do that thing I was supposed to do today. That feeling of there's just too much. I would just wanna pause everybody else. I can catch up. But the world doesn't work like that, right? We can't pause everybody else so that we can catch up. And sometimes, the first thing people need to do is just take a break. Whether that's go for a walk or just take 10 minutes away from your desk and breathe. A lot of us don't do that enough, Stuck at our desk. So I think when you are feeling that sense of there's just too much, I'm never gonna get on track. I can't focus, I can't concentrate. I was speaking to a client a few weeks ago and she was like, oh, I spent the whole week like just procrastinating and I've got this really important deadline. There's this thing here I need to do and I'm not doing it. Why am I not doing it? and it's that, that's your. Your resistance to that task. And then there'll come a point where the deadline arrives and then you work on it and you nail it and it's to the exclusion of all else. And that's when you are in the zone, right? You can focus, you can concentrate'cause you know you have to do it. But actually you could have done a little bit, little and often a few weeks before and that deadline focuses the mind, it creates, you said earlier it's the good, the right amount of pressure. But

Paul: 15:59

if you work Urgency.

Hayley: 16:00

like that all the time, it's just exhausting and it's gonna need to feeling burnt out.

Paul: 16:05

Yeah, I think. I learned a lot of my productivity management skills in retail, right? Because there's, there is no two You either sink or swim and I, I try and carry a lot of those lessons with me into what I do now. And I always used to have part of my day to your point, I escape from the retail environment for a while. Where I could not, it wasn't always possible every day, but, I remember the last store that I worked at was in Richmond, in North Yorkshire, and there was a beautiful park right beside the store and there was a weatherspoons at the bottom of the street, not gonna lie. So my paperwork used to get done in the weatherspoons

Hayley: 17:15

yeah.

Paul: 17:16

enjoy a meal whilst I was doing work. Which frustrated the hell outta my employees'cause they couldn't do the same thing. But also I was bearing the brunt of the force of everything from above and shielding them at the same time I earned it. Like it was a very tough, demanding job, but I think a lot of us have learned coping mechanisms as we've gone through life and I think. To your point, we start to feel like our coping mechanisms are enough and everybody goes through this and

Hayley: 17:42

Yes.

Paul: 17:42

i dont need to change. I just need to work that little bit harder. Or I'll get a break today or something will go my way this week or the other. The other one I really gets me frustrated is I need to get my jobs list done. Jobs list, never ever done. You are, you're kidding yourself.

Hayley: 18:00

when you gonna give up

Paul: 18:01

Where? Where I have a jobs list for DIY in the house that we're working through, and I'm like, might get that done, but I guarantee the moment I empty it, there'll be something else added on the bottom. My wife's trying to fill it up as fast as I can. Edit it. I can cross stuff off. She got wrong the other day for crossing something off that was mine. I was like, no, I did that. Why did you cross that off? That was my dopamine hit.

Hayley: 18:21

Yeah. When I do talks to big groups I'll ask people to put their hands up. so who's got a, who, a to-do list and most of the room will put their hands up. your hands up if you've put something on the list that you've done already.'cause it feels nice to tick it off. And people look around and realise that people are still keeping their hands up and that's a really good indicator that. You, you're feeling like you're not progressing'cause you wanna tick stuff off. So your brain, you get that dopamine hit and you're like, I'm making progress. you're right on your list. Make tea. Yes, I've made tea. Great. I can tick that off. And it feels good.

Paul: 18:53

Yeah.

Hayley: 18:54

some people talk about eating the frog first thing. Some people like doing that, doing the most unpleasant task first. And quite a few ADHDers that I've worked with ah that doesn't work for me. I'm the same. I like to see that I've physically done something. for me, like emptying the dishwasher before I hopped onto our call this morning, I was like, I've achieved something. I can see the difference. So I could have ticked something off my list and there will be some mornings where I choose to do that. But for me, just seeing a physical difference makes me feel like I'm making progress. It gives me that little dopamine here and I'm like, I'm on it, a dishwasher, resented. We're all good. crack on. So different people work differently and it's a case of finding what kind of motivates you and gets you started.

Paul: 19:39

And I think that's the key. That's definitely the key is what works for you.'cause what works for me probably won't work for you. It might work for some people. It won't work for everyone. And we've all got our own unique weird things that we do. And I own weird. I love being weird. I told my son long before I realised I was ADHD I was like I'm weird. I'm good with it. I'm just not normal. I don't wanna be normal. And neither should anyone else if I don't think we're all weird in our own ways. So you wrote the book, how to Fix Meetings Then I'm curious, how do we fix meetings? Because I'd love to fix them.

Hayley: 20:11

And I think this is, yeah I'm really intrigued by meetings and meetings culture, because I've been to some brilliant meetings like that CEO role that I had involved a lot of interagency work and working with other people. And a lot of my meetings were with the local authority, and some of those meetings were. Not fun, not a good use of people's time, didn't really feel like they achieved all that much. some of those meetings were amazing and changed the world. And I was really interested in, what makes these things different? So again, think productive, delivered some training for me and my team around meetings. And it's different to email, right? You sort your inbox out, you've got the skills, you've made some progress, and you just, it's some daily habits to. Keep and maintain that, but it's relatively easy once you've you, once you've identified what you need to do. But with meetings, you have to do something different each time because each meeting is different. And if it's not different, you've got a problem. The one-to-one clients that I work with, people who are self-employed, they generally say they want more meetings,'cause a meeting means a conversation with a client or a prospective client. But for people working in organisations they tend to say, I'm back to back. I've got so many meetings. When am I gonna do the work? And a lot of people are telling me, actually I'm doing the work in the evenings and the weekends. Again. that's not sustainable, that's not gonna work. We fix it by firstly, having less meetings. If you are in one of those organisations and you're feeling like I'm overloaded, I've got meetings all day, every day, we, which of the meetings that are really helpful and help move your goals forward? And very often when I go into an organisation it turns out that a lot of their meetings are updates. We're just updating each other on what we're doing, and the managers will often say, but isn't it nice for people to connect and meet, although it's online or in person? I'm like, oh yeah, but you can do that in other ways. You could go out for lunch. You can sit and have a coffee together on Zoom or Teams if you're having a meeting and you are mandating that people need to be there it's just for everybody to go around the room and give an update. There are other ways. that we can do that, that are gonna be more effective. And do you know what? People don't really digest stuff in a meeting and come up with problems,

Paul: 22:22

solutions

Hayley: 22:23

to problems.

Paul: 22:24

Yeah.

Hayley: 22:25

if somebody shares their update and says, and this is what I'm stuck on before the meeting, then people can have to think about how they can help them get unstuck and use the meeting to solve problems, to move things forward, rather than to just share information. And a lot of people will say, oh, it's a meeting. It could have been an email. It's about getting that balance. We want to collaborate with each other. We want to be able to build relationships with individuals and as teams. And I had a client a few weeks ago who said, my boss has said I've got to go to these meetings, but these meetings represent 25% of my week I don't find them useful. It's okay, that's tricky. And the reason her manager was mandating that she was there is I want the team to feel connected. But for her, it had the opposite effect because she was sat in the meeting, feeling wasn't a good use of time and it wasn't valuable. So then she ends up, it's an online meeting, so she ends up doing something else, and if everybody's got their cameras turned off or they're doing something else, there's a question around do we really need to be there? Is that meeting serving its purpose? And one of the things I came across in when I was writing the book was stats on you. If you. Ask everybody after a meeting how useful it was. The person who's convened the meeting or the person chairing the meeting, they will always think it's really useful other people less how do we change things to make it that everybody felt that was a good use of their time? And if it's not, let's cancel it. meeting shorter. Let's not have them, let's have them less often. And if we're missing that collaboration, let's replace that with some more meaningful collaboration where people are helping each other out. They're moving stuff forward, rather than just sitting in a room updating people on what it is that they've done.

Paul: 24:08

As both an introvert and an ADHDer I can see all let's have a meeting. Let's have a meeting to discuss what we're gonna have in the meeting next week. I always, what we're gonna do, or the best one was in retail when you'd have a conference call, right? Conference call is Wednesday at 11:00 AM. just before dinner when my rush hour's on and I need to change staff over and I need, you want me to? Everybody? Why do I, can you not? I've got an area manager who visits my store twice a week. Why can I not have that from him when he arrives or her when they arrive in store? Why? And you, but if you said anything on the meeting you could hear, you could feel people like shopping. Take a breath. Ooh, we said something. We are here to listen. Not to, like it, it was just in a public announcement. just send it in an email then. Come on guys.

Hayley: 25:01

yeah and I don't like writing. I, I. I I've written a book, but I don't enjoy writing. I would much rather stand in front of a few hundred people in a room and talk and have people ask questions and make it a bit more interactive than writing that email. I'd rather be on a call, but actually that's not valuable. So what I could do is just do a little recording that's okay, this is my five minute update. I don't need to write anything. I could put it in an infographic on Canva if I wanted to get people to maybe engage with it a bit more. And I can say, this is the video. It's gonna take you five minutes to watch it. You can watch it in your own time. You don't need to watch it. You could just listen to it. So now someone can do that while they're washing up or just say, ah, okay, I'm tidying up my desk. Let me listen to that message from Hayley while I'm doing that. I'm not generally advocate of multitasking, but that feels like a bit of an exception. we don't always have to write everything. People receive so many emails. They're probably not on top of them. They probably haven't read them all. They probably just skim through things like put the headline at the top. I think you really want people to know. And then the information and the detail further down for those. And how you wanna deliver the message, rather than just go, let's get everyone together. And then I can tell them,

Paul: 26:15

Yeah.

Hayley: 26:16

that me and Georgia's less prepared. You haven't gotta do as much planning and prep. Whereas if someone's had they get the information a few days before, they're gonna think of much better quality questions to actually ask. When they do see you, they're gonna think, how does that update that Paul just shared? How does that affect my job? How does that affect what I'm doing day to day? And the quality of the questions, particularly from the introverts, is gonna be much better. think the world of work is often designed for people who are highly extroverted and a lot of people are not highly extroverted, so we need to think of better ways that are gonna work for everyone rather than just catering to the loudest.

Paul: 26:55

Yeah I think you've made a really good point there as well around how we all consume. Information and we wrongly assume that face-to-face is a great way to relay information. As, as a great example, we'll do a shopping list every week. And I know it's coming tonight. My, we do shopping on a Friday morning. My wife is gonna do a thing she does every week. Sam, if you're editing this, I'm sorry, but this is true. We've talked about it many times.'cause she does do the editing for the podcast. And she will read out that list. As I'm stood in the fridge, I'm looking in the fridge for something to eat and she'll go, right here's what's on the list. Is there anything that we need? And she'll reel this list off. And honestly, it goes in one ear and out the other.'cause I haven't heard a thing on that list. I don't, I can't process a list like that. I just can't do it. And every week I go over and I take the list out of her hands and I read the list and I go,

Hayley: 27:42

okay. Yeah.

Paul: 27:44

So let's now have a look in the fridge. And I can compare the list with what's in the fridge as well, right? Like I can go, all Yeah. She has got that on the list. Yeah, she has.'cause I could pro, I've got a terrible memory, like short term memory's terrible, ADHD out the window. So that for me is important. But if I listen to a podcast, for example, ironically, although I work in video I consume audio much better than I do written or by video. I like reading, but when I read, I like to read fiction. don't very often get that time anymore with two kids. I like to read fiction where I don't have to remember anything. It's all emotions. It's storyline. That's great. If it's something I need to remember in the ear unless it's something I need to remember there, and then, in which case I need to read it, it just has to happen. So I think it's really important for business owners, for executive leaders, for corporations to consider that. Yeah, your team don't all absorb the information the same way. I think that's super critical. If you wanna have effective meetings, especially

Hayley: 28:45

they don't absorb it in the same way, but also not the same speed.

Paul: 28:48

yeah.

Hayley: 28:48

Like I, I used to be a school governor and when figures were being presented in the meeting, it, I was like, if I can sit and look at the figures before the meeting, I'm gonna have questions about those numbers. That was my job in that role was to ask questions

Paul: 29:01

Well, that's why they didn't give you them, or she'll have questions. Oh.

Hayley: 29:05

Yeah. And that's literally the role of a school governor is to question stuff and to make decisions. And you can't make good decisions unless you've answered the information. And for me, processing the numbers takes a lot longer. I like stories, if someone gives me a story and says, this is how it's playing out, that's helpful. My brain digests that really quickly, so I. For me, like you, I love reading fiction. I get through fiction at a rate of knots, but if I'm reading something that's nonfiction and I need to remember it, I literally do a little mind map and I note down the things and that means I'm interacting with the content in a different way. So giving people, if you're giving people information. We need to think about how we're doing that in a way that they can absorb it. I did some dyslexia awareness training couple of years ago. Percentof the population are dyslexic. That's huge. I hadn't realised how prevalent that was. and even if you don't know that somebody is dyslexic, let's just assume that if you've got a team of 10 people, somebody probably is somebody else. Probably is and doesn't really know it. So just, recognising that. People work in different ways and let's give them the option to work in a way that works for them rather than that one size fits all kind of model.

Paul: 30:22

I think. It's ins. Instead of blaming them for not being able to follow your instructions or information, make sure that they're able to understand it in their own way so that they can give you a hundred percent results. And once you've done that with a team, I think you've gotta go through that experience of dealing with that properly to see the outcomes so that you can really get behind why you should be doing it in the first place, sadly.

Hayley: 30:45

Yeah,

Paul: 30:46

a lot of people just go through life blaming their employees or their coworkers for just being, not, for being stupid. Why are you so stupid and not being well?'cause you're not giving them the information they need and the way they need it. It's very simple.

Hayley: 30:59

some personality styles will. Not take any action unless they've understood the reasons they need that opportunity to ask questions. So one of the things I train on is Gretchen Rubin's, four Tendencies. I'm a licensee for her habit, her model around habits, and what inspires people to take action. for some people it's having the opportunity to ask questions'cause they're not gonna do anything until they are fully on board and understand the reasons why. when I'm, yeah. I live with one of those people. There are a lot of questions and when I'm doing that session with a team and I start talking about this personality type of being a questioner, and it's only a very small aspect of personality, so I say personality type, but that's not technically correct. I guess when I talk about people being a questioner and having like lots of questions about something, but when they've understood the answers that will, you know. Get'em into a place of taking action. People look around the room and they look at the questions. They go, that's you. And then somebody will be like, yeah, I know that's me.

Paul: 32:02

We on it.

Hayley: 32:02

And try and ask more questions. I'm a coach. I like asking questions. I've found. People asking me questions is much more helpful than people telling me what to do.'cause I can think it through for myself. But I'm not a questioner. It's not my natural default setting. Somebody who is a questioner will keep going with the questions and have a lot more whereas I'm like, if somebody tells me to do something, yeah, I'll do that. I'm Much more of a people pleaser, which is not necessarily a positive thing at the time. So yeah, that giving people that opportunity to. something a bit deeper and a bit further sometimes means that for a lot of people, that means they're more likely to do it. They're more likely to respond and take action. Whereas if they haven't really fully understood you might think, I've explained, but like they're gonna have more questions. You haven't explained everything.

Paul: 32:49

Yeah, they're gonna find the one thing that you didn't explain and that's gonna really annoy them. So it's interesting what you said there. So I'm a, I'm a questioner unless I get it and if I get it, I become a people pleaser.

Hayley: 33:00

Yeah.

Paul: 33:01

I'm either really on board and I'll get it done better than anybody else will ever get it done. Or I will drag my heels until you answer all my questions and I will not do it even at the threat of losing my job. It's as simple as that. I used to, I, I joke, but for 15 years I pretty much had my name on the naughty seat at the top of the stairs in our head office, right? Paul's gonna be back there in six months time because he just can't do what he's asked. Because you can't tell me why I should be doing it. I'm not gonna do it without, like I refuse. I am a rebel.

Hayley: 33:31

A good thing, right? You need questioners in your team because they will stop you going off in com, completely the wrong direction.'cause they'll ask really good and relevant questions. And I know some people in our team will say, oh, it's really frustrating when that person, we wanna end the meeting and they've still got more questions. And it's everybody else can go, don't need the answers to these questions. having a question in your team really helps you to focus on. whats important, what's gonna move the dial because those people are seeing things in a slightly different way if we all saw things through this in the same way, we wouldn't be see seeing the full picture.

Paul: 34:07

Yep

Hayley: 34:07

So

Paul: 34:08

Yep.

Hayley: 34:08

questions on our team are really valuable. They'll be missing you on that naughty step.

Paul: 34:12

They are indeed. They are indeed. Took my naughty step with me, I think. So as we draw this episode to a close, a couple of questions that I'd like to ask your opinion on Hayley. in terms of almost, it doesn't matter whether you're a small business owner or a large business owner, but what's one common mistake that you see people making in how they approach their workload and productivity and what can they do to resolve that? What's your biggest bug bear?

Hayley: 34:38

I think very often when I ask people what their priorities are, they'll give me a long list. Like I've got like these 10 things, my priority. And I'm like, if you've got 10 priorities, you haven't got any priorities. Like what is the, what are the three things that you're gonna focus on this week? So I run a Monday morning a call for people who are maybe feeling a bit stuck and overwhelmed, and we do a bit of. Planning for the week. It's a 45 minute call. I ask them different questions each week. Some of the questions are the same, some of them are different. But one of the regular questions each week is like, what are your top three priorities? I actually get people to write'em down and I go on my whiteboard next to my desk so I can see them every day when I sit down and work on those priorities before anything else. But in doing that, I also will ask people, okay, you've got your top three priorities. What are you not gonna do this week? So that you are just making a really conscious choice. Okay, isn't getting my, gonna get my energy and attention this week, and that allows me to focus on these things over here. Maybe once every 4, 5, 6 weeks, I might challenge people and say, is there something that's just been on that list every week? week you've said you're not gonna do

Paul: 35:44

Yep.

Hayley: 35:44

week, maybe that's because it's not important and it's not impactful. We can get rid of that. We can let that go. That on a good ideas list of things to come back to in the future when we've got more resources, when we've sorted out our other priorities and we're maybe looking for some new ones. It's something to delegate, if it's editing your podcast, then may maybe they need to work with somebody else to do that. so really thinking about what are the patterns and the trends you're seeing in that. And are you moving the dial on your priorities? Like very often, somebody. Might put on their to-do list marketing, like that's my priority for the week, but that's massive. you

Paul: 36:23

Yeah.

Hayley: 36:23

people working on that and then still probably go, oh, we could do a 21st person. What's the next action is what you should be putting on your list.

Paul: 36:31

Yeah.

Hayley: 36:32

top tips would be to have like your overall top three priorities for the week be clear on what your next action is in relation to each of those. if I'm watching you do something, what am I seeing you do? Is that sending an email to someone, is that looking at your website and rereading the text on the homepage and making a few tweaks, what does that actually involve doing? What's that next step? And that makes you, it's so much easier when your brain comes to look at your list to go, that's really specific. I know what to do with that. Let me crack on with it. And then you tick things off more often, which feels good, makes you wanna do more stuff.

Paul: 37:09

I can feel procrastination rearing its head at the moment at the thought of rereading my homepage website. Text. Yeah, that's,

Hayley: 37:16

need to do that. That's

Paul: 37:17

I need somebody else to do that for me at some point. We'll, getting there, we're getting there. Hill, it's been fabulous to chat this morning. I think we could have probably gone for another couple of hours easily. I know everyone at home will have found that incredibly useful. Not just in, in the advice that you've given at the end, but like that, that grounding of where you came from how you got where you are and why I think is incredibly powerful for people who are. I see I meet so many people who are stuck in their job and they can see elements of what they want to do with their life, but they're just not quite courageous enough at that moment to take that leap. And it's lovely to meet somebody who's gone. Do you know what? I was really good at doing this for so long, but actually what I enjoy doing was this. And that's what I do now. And you can see the passion in you. It's lovely.

Hayley: 37:59

I love it.

Paul: 37:59

So congratulations on, on, on being who you are, I guess. And thank you for being amazing guest here. It's been a, it's been a genuine pleasure

Hayley: 38:08

Oh yeah. Pleasure to be on the show. Thanks very much.

Paul: 38:11

and thank you everyone who's watching along at home or listening along, if you're listening on the audio site. Please do remember, give us a subscribe and if you feel brave enough, just a few words or a star rate in review on whatever audio directory you're listening on, Spotify or Apple or wherever you are, that'd be massively appreciated, and I will see you next week on Marketpulse Pros and Pioneers.