The Create Your Day Podcast

98. Escaping the Busy Badge of Honor

• Jenn Cody • Episode 98

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We've created a culture where being overwhelmed is somehow proof we're important, but this busy badge of honor is killing our businesses and our souls. Confusing activity with achievement leads to spinning our wheels without making meaningful progress.

• Busy work vs. business work: theatrical activities that look like work but don't create results
• The four costs of constant busyness: money, relationships, health, and your dreams
• How to audit your time: track what you're actually doing for three days
• Four categories of activities: important/urgent, important/not urgent, urgent/not important, neither
• Create a "stop doing list" instead of adding more to your to-do list
• Successful entrepreneurs protect their time, focus on outcomes not activities, and don't glorify exhaustion
• Rate your energy levels throughout the day to identify sustainable activities

Your homework is to audit your time and energy for three days. The goal isn't to be less busy—it's to be busy with things that actually matter. Take care of yourself and create your day in the best way possible.


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Speaker 1:

Hi, my friends, welcome back to the Create your Day podcast. I'm your host, Jen Cody, and I'm so happy that you are here with me today. I am on my third cup of coffee and that tells you everything you need to know about how my perfectly planned day has gone. But I realized something this week. There's a lot of talk in the world about busy being an identity, and I think I started finding myself falling into that where being overwhelmed feels like this badge of honor. And it's not just me. This is something that goes on with a lot of people. I was actually talking with a friend just last week. She asked how I was doing and, without even missing a beat, I said oh my God, I'm so busy. I'm like drowning busy. And she nodded, kind of, looking at me, like me, like is this a good thing? Like is drowning an achievement that you want to be celebrating? So I started thinking like when did we decide? Or when did I decide that spinning my wheels was the same thing as moving forward? Because that's what I realized most of us are doing we're spinning, we're busy, yes, we're tired, yes, but are we actually getting somewhere? So this is what I want to talk to you guys about today, the busy badge of honor.

Speaker 1:

I want to tell you about a client of mine. She came to see me last month, totally burned out. She was working seriously something like 60 hours a week. She had a million different projects going on at once and really felt that she was constantly behind on everything. So I asked her what the biggest goal was right now, what's going on that you need to accomplish first, and she just stared at me. She just stared at me for a full 20, 30 seconds and said honestly, jen, I don't know anymore. I'm just trying to keep my head above water and my heart just broke because I know what that feels like and her story is everyone's story right now.

Speaker 1:

We have created this culture where being overwhelmed is somehow proof that we're important, proof that we matter, proof that we're working hard enough to deserve the success that's coming to us. But I'm going to tell you something she was actually making less money than she was making two years ago, when she was working half the hours. All of that busyness, it was not productive, it was just busy. And honestly, I really see that everywhere. Entrepreneurs are out there bragging about pulling all-nighters. They think it makes them look more important, right?

Speaker 1:

Business owners wear this badge, this exhaustion, on them like it's a new Louis bag, and we've really started to confuse activity with achievement, and it's killing our businesses. It is killing our souls. So what's the truth here? The truth is that we are addicted to chaos because the chaos feels important, it feels like we're doing something. That chaos is giving us permission to feel accomplished without us having to actually accomplish something. Did you hear that?

Speaker 1:

Think about the last moment that you felt was chaotic in your business and didn't you feel somehow, when that passed, that you lived through something, that you got through something you felt accomplished without actually accomplishing anything? So you know the hamster wheel analogy, right? I want you to think about that hamster wheel. The hamster is moving really fast, working really hard, getting hamster sweaty and, from the hamster's perspective, they're crushing it. They're in motion, they're burning calories, they feel productive, but they're not going anywhere. And that is most of people in business. You're the hamster. You've built yourself this most elaborate, sophisticated hamster wheel that you've ever seen and you've got these systems, maybe some project management going on, maybe a productivity app, maybe morning routines. You have all of that happening which makes you feel important and accomplished and like you're on top of it, but are you actually going anywhere?

Speaker 1:

So I realized this in my own business, maybe one or two years ago yeah, probably about two years ago. I was working more hours than ever, busier than I had ever been, but somehow was making less progress than when I first started. I had this moment, so join me in picturing this. Right now I'm standing in my kitchen it's like nine o'clock at night. I'm still in my pajamas from that morning and I thought what the hell am I doing? I pulled up my calendar and started to really look to see if I could identify what I had accomplished, not what I had been busy with, but what had I actually moved forward. And I have to tell you something the list was really short. The list of what I was working on was really long, but none of it was actually coming to fruition.

Speaker 1:

Most of my time was what I spent on like these theatrical activities that look like work but they're not actually creating results. So when you think about those activities, those theatrical activities, let's talk about that, because I'm willing to bet that you're performing a little bit in your own show. These activities include things like endless research. Research is great, but if you're not going to apply the research, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? You know we spend weeks and weeks researching the perfect email platform, instead of just picking one and actually sending the emails. Or maybe your theatrical activity is perfectionism. Are you creating detailed strategies, and maybe that even includes things like mood boards or competitive analysis for products that you have not even begun to validate in the market yet?

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about social media. How many hours are you spending crafting the perfect post, whether that's going on Instagram, linkedin, your Facebook group? How much time are you spending thinking that you're being productive, but what you're actually avoiding is work that would make you productive? What about networking? Networking is productive, right. Network is moving the needle. But if you're networking for the sake of networking, just to say you're doing it, you're going to all of these virtual coffee dates and mixers, but there's no real intention behind it. What are you hoping to leave these networking sessions with? Is there any intention behind that activity? Administrative work, organizing your files, updating your website copy for the 15th time or 50th time, if you're me, creating new folder systems, anything that feels productive but does not actually serve clients or generate revenue?

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to tell you that night in the kitchen at nine o'clock, when I'm in my stupid sweatpants from the morning at this moment in my business, I was the queen of these activities. My Google Drive was so organized oh my goodness, chef's kiss. My project management system. I had Trello. I had Notion Everything. My brand colors were exactly what I wanted them to be across every platform. But let me tell you, if I pull the curtain back a little bit and show you my bank account or the actual growth of my business, there was not so much going on.

Speaker 1:

So this is what I call the story we tell ourselves. So this is what I call the story we tell ourselves. This is what we say to ourselves when we're stuck in the busy trap. I just need to get through this busy period air quotes and then I'll focus on what really matters. But if you notice that busy period never goes away. We keep creating more busy work. We're trying to fill that space and we think that we are amazing. We think that we are on top of it because we're so busy. How many things are we saying no to when we should be saying yes to them? Because we're saying yes to things that just keep us active. It's like the person who says they're going to start eating healthy after the holidays, but then it is after the holidays, but then they have a vacation coming up and then it's after this stressful work time, then it's somebody's birthday and I just have one more weekend to get through before I can pay attention to my eating habits.

Speaker 1:

We use busyness as a socially acceptable way to avoid work, to avoid the scary work, to avoid the work that matters but doesn't guarantee our results, and that's why it's scary. We want to focus on things that give us a bam instant gratification. Updating my website copy feels great. I hit publish and all of my work is in front of me to admire and all of my work is in front of me to admire. These things keep us busy. But what is that actually doing when it comes to the service I'm trying to provide? Nothing is actually happening when I'm just updating my website copy, because what's really scary terrifying sometimes is having the time to think about what we really want, having the space to consider am I building something meaningful or am I just building something? Do you have the bandwidth to ask yourself some hard questions like is this working? And if the answer is no. Can you pivot? Do you have the strength and the clarity to make that pivot? What would you do if you were not afraid of these thoughts? Being busy is what protects us from these questions.

Speaker 1:

If we're always rushing to the next thing, we don't have to pause, we don't have to evaluate, it doesn't matter if we're in the right direction. We just know we're doing something and there's a cost to that. Spinning our wheels, this hamster wheel, constant spinning. There is a real cost to that and I really want you to hear this, because the first thing it's costing you, it's money, nevermind the time that's being wasted. When you're scattered across 17 different priorities, you are not allowing yourself to go deep enough on any of them to create real results. That surface level effort. Guess what it creates? Surface level results. The next thing it's costing you Relationships Relationships with clients, relationships with your family. When you're always frazzled and overwhelmed, are you giving 100% of yourself to anyone? You're not showing up fully for anybody at all, whether that's your team, your family, your clients, your dog, like you're not showing up fully in any part of your life. That is exhausting.

Speaker 1:

Third and actually this probably should be first on the list it's costing your health because chronic stress stress of always being behind, always having too much to do, always feeling like you're failing, not sustainable your body is keeping score. Even when your mind is trying to push through, your body knows what's going on. You know I'm going to go off on a tangent for a second, as I do, and you guys know this. When I was in labor with my son, the epidural was so strong that I literally could not even lift my legs. I was completely numb, in zero pain. I was vomiting over and over and over again and the nurse told me at one point she was like you know, your body is still reacting to the stress and the pain, even though you can't feel it. So, no matter how much you try to numb, what's going on around you, your body is keeping score. Remember that, your body is keeping score. Remember that.

Speaker 1:

And fourth, this is the big one it is costing you your dreams. Every single day that you spend spinning your wheels is another day that you are not building towards the vision that actually excites you. I had a client tell me one time I'm so busy keeping my business running that I never have time to actually grow the business. That hit me because it is exactly where I was at the time too. And if we are not growing, we are standing still. A business that is just running is on a hamster wheel. We need to be growing and in order to grow, ironically, you need to stop sometimes.

Speaker 1:

I'm telling you right now you have permission to stop. You have permission to say no to half the things on your to-do list. Permission to say no and close some of those tabs, literally and metaphorically. Look at your computer right now. What is on there? How many tabs do you have open? How many of them are you leaving open because you're afraid that they're going to trigger something that you need to be doing, so you want to leave it there to see it right. I know, I see you, I do the same thing, but we have to step back and give ourselves permission, have to step back and give ourselves permission.

Speaker 1:

We need permission sometimes to allow us to disappoint some people, because we will disappoint people who have gotten used to us responding immediately and being endlessly available. Those people might be a little disappointed when we put some boundaries up, but I'm telling you right now doing less it will help you achieve more, and I know that that sounds simple. It sounds like I'm you know distilling it down to a, you know a Hallmark card Do less, accomplish more. It is simple, but we have been conditioned to believe that our success requires suffering, that if it's not hard, that means we're not trying enough. But what if that is just another lie that we've been telling ourselves? What if the people out there who seem to have it all figured out, they're not working more hours than you, they're just spending their time on the right things?

Speaker 1:

So I want to share with you the one question that can change how you approach your business and your life. I want you to ask yourself the next time you're doing something not right now, because what you're doing right now is listening to this podcast, and that's important but next time you're doing something to work on your business like a physical activity, ask yourself is this the most important thing I could be doing right now? Not, is this important? Because everything feels important when you're overwhelmed. The question is whether it is the most important. When I started asking myself this question before I said yes to anything, before I would say like open up a new rabbit hole to go down or agree to a call Before I started reorganizing my email folders, everything changed? If I asked myself this question Because most of the time the answer was no I was defaulting to doing something that was busy work, doing something that made me feel productive over the actual work.

Speaker 1:

So think of it this way there's busy work and there is business work. You want to choose progress, not just motion. You want to choose being productive over feeling productive, and that's a difficult choice to make sometimes. So I'm going to help you decide and really put some things in place that are going to get you on the right side of business work right. So cancel the busy work, let's focus on the business work, and that requires us getting practical about some things.

Speaker 1:

What I want you to do might be a little uncomfortable and it will also be revealing. We're going to do something to audit your time. For the next three days. I want you to track what you're doing, not how you think you're spending your time or how you're planning to spend it, but what are you actually doing? Set a timer to go off on your watch well, if you have an Apple watch or on your phone, wherever you have alarms set, set an alarm to go off every hour on the hour. You can make it silent if you have alarms set. Set an alarm to go off every hour on the hour. You can make it silent if you're in meetings, it's okay, but set that alarm for every hour during your work hours, when it goes off.

Speaker 1:

I want you to write down what you just did for the past hour. Don't judge it, don't try to change it. Just observe, be curious about your patterns, notice where you find them. Maybe you'll discover that you're spending a few hours a day checking email, or that you're losing an hour every day to social media before you even start working. That's an easy thing to do, so don't beat yourself up over it. This is about recognizing what's going on. This is not about shaming yourself. That's not the goal. Our goal here is to get clear on where the time actually goes, so that conscious choices can be made about where we want it to go.

Speaker 1:

So, once you've done this, take everything that you discover and you're going to put it into some categories. Look at each hour of your day and how you spent it. Now, during these business hours, there's going to be things you do that aren't businessy right, like maybe at two o'clock you went to your son's basketball game or something like that. That's totally fine. Just write down all the things that you've done. Then they're going to go into four categories.

Speaker 1:

The first one, important and urgent. These are your priorities. The first one, important and urgent, these are your priorities. This is work that has a deadline, the activities that directly generate revenue or directly serve your customers. So if you're on a coaching call that's if I'm on a coaching call I should say that's important and urgent. That is me delivering service to my clients. So that's important and urgent. Then there's important but not urgent. So this is where that behind the scenes magic that you do. This is where that lives. This is your planning, your strategy, relationship building, skill development, creative work.

Speaker 1:

We don't ever really get to this quadrant because we're so busy with everything else. But this is important stuff. Hence the label important, not urgent. Then there's urgent but not important. These are things that are stealing our time, other people's emergencies. They somehow become our priorities. Who? No one knows how that wizardry works yet, but it happens every day. Meetings that could have been emails, busy work that feels important but doesn't move anything forward. Urgent but not important, and then neither urgent nor important. These are the time wasters, social media scrolling, organizing your kitchen cabinets that are organized 400 times over, research that never leads to action. Those types of things.

Speaker 1:

Most business owners that I work with they're living in three and four Most successful, I'm sorry. Most overwhelmed people that I work with. They're living in three and four Most successful, I'm sorry. Most overwhelmed people that I work with they're living in three and four. The successful people that I work with. They are spending almost all of their time in one and two and we all have these activities that we're doing every day and we all have control over them. It's recognizing how much time we're giving to the things that don't matter that has to happen first so that we can make the changes that we need to make.

Speaker 1:

So I want you to stop creating to-do lists, because we all have them, and what I want you to create is a stop doing list. This is going to be uncomfortable and that's how you know it's working. So look at the results of the exercise that you did and identify three things that you're going to stop doing. Not do less of Things that you're going to stop doing entirely. Maybe it's a networking group that has never led to anything. Maybe it's checking email first thing in the morning, because it sets you up to answer other people's problems before your own. Maybe it's spending an hour each day making graphics for social media posts that get two likes. We don't need to be wasting our time doing that. So here's the thing about the stop doing list. This is going to create space for the things that do matter.

Speaker 1:

You cannot add more important work to a schedule that is already bursting at the seams. We need to remove the unimportant work first and then add what matters. And yes, people are going to notice. People are going to be disappointed. That's okay. Their disappointment is not your emergency. Your dreams are your responsibility.

Speaker 1:

But I still want to go a little bit deeper, just for a minute, because I think there's something underneath all this busyness that we don't really talk about so much. Sometimes we stay busy because we are afraid of what we are going to discover in those quiet moments. So what if you slowed down and you realized that you've been building the wrong thing? What if you created space to think and discovered that you're not actually passionate about what you're doing? What if you stopped moving long enough to feel how unhappy you really are? Those are some scary thoughts, and it's easier to stay busy than it is to face them, but you know what's scarier Spending years of your life building something that doesn't matter to you, because you were too afraid to pause and consider what does?

Speaker 1:

I once worked with someone who realized that, when she finally stopped spinning, she had been building something that she really didn't want. And actually I had a client a separate client that had such a great analogy for that. She was like you need to stop once in a while while you're climbing the ladder and make sure your ladder is leaning on the right building Props to you, janae. I love that analogy. So this client she realized she was building a business that she didn't want. She had gotten so caught up in what she thought she was supposed to do that she never asked herself what she really wanted to do. The good news, though, is that once she figured that out, everything got easier, and it didn't get easy. It got easier Because, when you're working on something that really matters to you, you don't have to force the motivation, you don't have to trick yourself into caring. The energy is already there, so it gets easier.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to share with you now what I know that successful entrepreneurs do not do. They do not glorify exhaustion. They don't brag about how little sleep they got or how many hours they've worked. They talk about their results. They talk about their impact. They talk about the problems they solved. They talk about the people they helped. Successful entrepreneurs are protective of their time and intentional with their energy. They say no to good opportunities so they can say yes to great opportunities. They focus on outcomes and not on activities. Here's what's surprising. Often they're working less hours than the struggling entrepreneurs who are always so busy. Because when you're clear on what matters and you focus all of your energy there, you get more done in less time. Efficiency becomes your sidekick. You don't have to worry about when things are going to get done, because you know they are going to get done.

Speaker 1:

So, besides just tracking and auditing your time, I also want you to pay attention to your energy For those same three days that you're putting things in those buckets for important and urgent, important but not urgent all of those buckets those same three days. I want you to rate your energy level after each hour, so when you're putting in. During the last hour, I did X, y and Z. Where was your energy level? Scale of one to 10, 10 being the highest You're going to start to notice patterns. Certain activities are draining, even when they should be energizing, and other things fill you up, even when they're challenging. So this information, it is like gold, because it tells you not just where your time goes, but which activities are going to be sustainable on a long-term basis. If you're spending most of your time on activities that rate like four or below, you're going to be exhausted all the time. So this is not about working harder. It's about working on things that energize you instead of depleting you.

Speaker 1:

So, before we wrap up, I want you to just take one last little bit of permission from me. This is your official permission slip to stop wearing busyness as a badge of honor. You have permission to work fewer hours and accomplish more. You have permission to work fewer hours and accomplish more. You have permission to say no without explaining yourself. Prioritize your peace above other people's urgency. That's a really big one. Build a business that energizes you instead of exhausts you, and I want you to care more about your results than you do about being busy. You don't need to earn the right to have boundaries. You don't need to prove that you're working hard enough by being overwhelmed. You don't need anyone's approval to choose progress over motion.

Speaker 1:

So we're going to talk more about this in the weeks to come. We're actually going to speak next time about some um, expensive procrastination. So stick around for that, and, but for now, I want you to just sit with this question what would you be doing with your time if you were not trying to look busy? And I want you to really think about it, because that might be the most important question you ask yourself. Your homework is those action steps we talked about.

Speaker 1:

Audit your time and audit your energy. Don't try to do it perfectly. Just start and see what you discover. And remember this the goal is not to be less busy. The goal is to be busy with things that actually matter. There is a difference, and your future self is counting on you to figure out what that difference looks like for you. So until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other, use this information to stop spinning and create your day in the best way possible. There is something out there right now just waiting for you to build it, and you have to be focused on the right things in order to make that happen. Have a great one, everyone. See you next week.