You're Probably Not Busy. You're Running Out of Capacity

🎙 You're Probably Not Busy. You're Running Out of Capacity.

"Busy" has become one of the most accepted excuses in modern life.

We say it when we miss workouts. When we stop meal prepping. When we abandon our routines. When we don't call people back. When we put our goals on hold.

But after studying high performers since I was a kid, coaching for more than fifteen years, and watching thousands of clients navigate careers, families, businesses, and health, I've come to a different conclusion.

Most people aren't actually too busy.

They're exceeding their current capacity.

In this episode, I break down the difference between having a full life and having an overloaded internal operating system.

The people who consistently build great bodies, great businesses, and great relationships aren't given more hours in the day. They've simply developed the skills, systems, and emotional capacity to carry more without collapsing.

We explore why busyness is often a symptom rather than the root problem. Poor boundaries. Weak systems. Decision fatigue. Emotional overload. Constant distraction. Saying yes to everything. None of those create more time, but they dramatically reduce your ability to use the time you already have.

The solution isn't finding another productivity hack.

It's becoming the kind of person who can carry more responsibility without losing themselves in the process.

Capacity can be trained.

Just like strength.

Just like endurance.

Just like resilience.

What We Cover

• Why most people don't actually have a time problem
• The difference between being busy and exceeding your capacity
• How high performers build the ability to carry more responsibility
• The hidden costs of poor boundaries and constant distraction
• Why better systems reduce overwhelm more than better motivation
• How to expand your capacity instead of constantly reorganizing your schedule

Key Takeaways

• Busyness is often a capacity problem, not a time problem
• Your systems determine how much life you can sustainably carry
• Great achievers build capacity long before they build results
• Productivity is a skill, not a personality trait
• The goal isn't to do more. It's to become someone who can handle more without breaking

If you've been telling yourself you're too busy to change, this episode may completely reframe the way you think about time, performance, and personal growth.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the rebuild. I hope you're having an amazing day today. Thank you for being here. Today I want to walk you through something I'm very passionate about. So if I get a little loud, I get a little bit, you know, manic. It's because I'm really passionate about this. I've essentially studied it my whole life. And I want to talk about busyness. And so I kind of titled this busy versus unstructured. Okay. And there's a massive core problem around this because for years, whether it's working with clients one-to-one, whether it's being on the gym floor, doing group training, having a gym, owning supplement stores, talking to people about their health and fitness, doing keynotes and businesses with high-level executives, the one-to-one coaching, the podcasts, the interviews. I hear this term, I'm just so busy so often, and I'm going to be really real with everyone right now. I've studied time management and systems since I was a boy, like a very young boy. And if I was like everyone else in culture today, I would definitely label myself with autism. So imagine like this autistic creature obsessing about something. And if you ever listen to my stuff, when I obsess about something, I know quite a lot about it. Okay. And I'm I'm almost making like a caveat around this because this one is probably going to trigger some folks. And I don't mean to. I'm coming at this with love and grace, but I want the truth pill to be swallowed. Number one, you are not too busy to look after your health. You just don't know what you're doing, and you have very low capacity and you do not know how to structure things. I've gotten to talk to a few in my life, and because we have the gracious thing of the internet, you can find all these things. I'm very interested in founders and the best athletes, and anyone who's achieved just monumental success in one area of their life. Most billionaires are scheduling their time to a seven-minute interval per day. Every seven minutes, there's a new micro meeting, there's a new task. And you know what all of them say? The number one thing that they try to focus on is their health because it's the one thing money can't buy. It's the one thing you can't get back when you lose. And when you have a bunch of problems, guess what? When you lose your health, you only have one. One problem. And so just a lot of the cope things that I might hear is like, I'm too busy to meal prep. Well, you're eating anyway. What do you mean? And if you weren't eating, you wouldn't have too much body fat. So that's nonsense. You're not too busy to meal prep. Maybe you don't know how. Maybe you're not a good cook. Maybe you're not prioritizing it or valuing it. Those are all things that can be true as to why they're not getting done. But just having such low-level excuses of like, I'm just busy. No, you're not. And I'm gonna be honest, most people I coach and or have coached in the past or have consulted with, their level of busyness could be like improved. I could add, if I taught them how to manage things, which is exactly what I try to do inside my coaching container, probably 20, 40 times the load. Like people's capac human beings are the most incredibly adaptive, like creatures. And human beings fascinate me. That's part of why I loved coaching, right? And so I'll ask someone like, oh, are we time blocking? What does that mean? Hmm, do you have any calendar blocks? Are we having weekly planning? Are we allowing small interruptions through our phone all day long? Just dopamine cycling, task switching. How many hours are we spending on our phone as far as you know, screen time? What's the Netflix log time? Listen, if things don't get scheduled and structured, and even me, even as much as I go hard for my clients, I try to run my business, I try to really take uh a very hearty look at responsibility. When I'm gonna schedule my training, when I'm scheduling these very uh podcasts right now, because my clients get a lot of value from this, and it's very important to me to add value to them. I wrote it on the calendar this morning that I was gonna come and do this. There was already four things that came up where I could have said, just ah, I'm too busy. But guess what? That's in there now, and everything else gets layered on top of that. And sometimes, of course, we're adults, we have to flip things, things will take of higher priority, which is why I'm too busy is usually a translation for I'm not valuing this enough. Excuse me. And so when you don't value something, you're not gonna prioritize it. And then I know there's always this knee-jerk reaction of like, no, no, I'm prioritizing it. And I'm like, well, okay, well, how are you doing that? It's like, well, I've hired you as a coach, or I've hired another coach, or I've I've done this thing. And I'm like, okay, that's that's suppositioning the act of spending money into thinking that that's doing the thing. Right. I've worked with tons of people who have paid me uh and over the years, and I'm very lucky that I see a lot less of this than what's in the marketplace. Just someone comes and pays for three months, six months, a year, and changes absolutely nothing. It's it's a lot of people like hiring a coach or starting a program or doing 75 hard because they like going to the lunchroom at work and saying, Oh, I'm doing 75 hard. Oh, yeah. It's like, okay, well, what about after 75? What about what what was happening before that we need a uh a 75 hard days or whatever it is, right? So you can see where I'm going with this. And again, I don't want to be combative on this because I also, and now I want to kind of make a bipolar point. I also don't believe that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. And I also don't believe that a single mom with three kids has the same life as a 20-year-old who's going to university. No shot. And those 20-year-olds will also also all always say that they're way too busy. And I just tell them, listen, you just have no frame or reference of reality because you're not in it yet. This is actually the easiest time in your life. It feels like it's not, but adding kids, adding a career, adding a divorce, adding uh opening businesses, adding losing your parents, like go down the list as we age. And anyone who's you know 35, 40, 50 plus is just shaking their head right now, going, like, yeah, honestly, I thought it was hard then too, as did I. It's not. You get more competent, you get more seasoned, you you get more calm with dealing with problems usually, but life doesn't get quote unquote easier. And it usually comes in seasons. You guys have heard me talk about seasons a lot, but that doesn't mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is where people need to learn to reduce the scope, right? So I've gone through a crazy couple years and I'm just coming out the other side of it, specifically 2025. 2025, I was doing my best to get in three really good sessions a week uh in the gym. Let's use an as an example. Well, to me, and to many people, that's all that they ever need, probably. But to me, because I've been used to training four or five days a week for 15 years, that felt like failing. And it would have been really easy for me to go, well, I'm just stressed out, I'm depressed, I'm exiting these businesses, I have this ex-wife problem, yada yada yada. I could have told myself that story and just kind of stopped going. But I went, no, what can we reduce the scope to? What can I actually do? What could I do? What should I do? And then most importantly, what would I do? It's like, okay, well, I think I could do that. And I reduced the scope for a while. And guess what? Now the seasons are changing, and it's like I'm back in the gym feeling much better, especially these last couple months, and I've worked my way up to four days a week, and this is my first week again hitting five days. Well, if you look at an entire year, imagine what happened or would have happened or wouldn't have happened, I guess, over the year. If I just went, well, I'm busy right now, and uh I guess I don't have time to train. What do you think the difference would be from training most of the year three days a week to zero after that year is aggregated? Huge difference in progress, performance, how I feel about myself. And this is where you teach yourself that you are responsible. This is where you teach yourself that you are reliable, and you teach yourself that you can do hard things and that you can trust yourself. And most people oftentimes don't trust themselves, which is why they just bail so easy on their goals when things get hard. And so I just want to make sure that you feel heard and seen because I get it, you're busy, things are difficult, but I want you to tell yourself instead of just saying I'm too busy, the end, I want you to tell yourself I have lower capacity than what's required to succeed in this busy season, but that can be built. I possess the skills to do so, and there's help for me to learn how. That's the truth. And so it's not so much that I'm too busy is completely false. It's just such a bad story, it's lacking so much context. And so if you're if you're in a spot, you know, one of my clients where you find yourself telling yourself this all the time, I want you to remember something you've heard me say a lot. The words you describe an experience with become the experience. The words you use to describe an experience will become that experience first internally, and then you'll create that manifested outwardly 100%, 10 out of 10 times, every time. And so when you change the language you use with yourself, and I'm this crazy coach that I tell people, like, no, you have to say stuff out loud to yourself. If you have a nonsense thought, like, oh, I'm just too busy, or this has never worked for me, or I don't have time, or you know, any kind of like what I would call low-level cope excuse. As soon as you either identify yourself, whether that's you know through development or you're working with a coach or a mentor or a parent or anyone tells you something that makes sense, you hear it and you're like, Yeah, I know. You have to tell yourself out loud like a little kid. It's super embarrassing. I do this all the time. I sit on the edge of my bed and I'm like, Dylan, no, this is not this, it's this. Do you accept that? And I literally talk to myself out loud. And then I have to go, yes, Dylan, I accept it. And then I repeat it to myself. And guess what? The next time you have that stupid thought, there'll be this circuit. You've implanted a circuit. I call these inhibitory circuits. And that inhibitory circuit will pop up and remind you that you're just talking nonsense. And maybe you're just tired, maybe you're having a bad day, but it's not time to throw in the towel. Okay. And if you're not a client of mine and you want to work on this with some one on one help, just reach out. I'd love to help. Super good to see you. And remember, you're not too busy.