124. Your Inbox Is Attacking Your Nervous System

What if your "flexible" communication style is actually keeping you in a constant state of stress?

I used to pride myself on being accessible. No unnecessary meetings. Just Slack me. Stay agile. But what I thought was efficiency was actually chaos—and it was wrecking my nervous system without me realizing it.

In this episode, I'm sharing the week that finally broke me: eleven interruptions in 45 minutes, a chest that wouldn't stop tightening, and the realization that I couldn't keep running my business this way. I walk you through exactly how I rebuilt my communication from the ground up—creating a rhythm that saved time AND calmed my entire body.

This isn't just about productivity. It's about understanding that your nervous system is experiencing every ping, every "quick question," every context switch. And designing communication that gives it permission to stand down.

In this episode, I cover:

• Why "just Slack me" turned out to be more exhausting than scheduled meetings ever were
• The two communication extremes I see all the time—and why both wreck your nervous system
• How constant availability was keeping me in a chronic stress state without me realizing it
• The exact weekly meeting structure I use now (60 minutes, replaces everything else)
• Why predictability creates safety for your brain and body
• The three types of conversations every business needs and where each one should live
• How to spot your current communication patterns and notice their physical toll
• What surprised me most: my team actually became more autonomous when I stopped being always available

This episode is for you if:

• You feel like you're constantly "on" and can never fully focus
• Your Slack or inbox feels like an assault on your nervous system
• You've tried to minimize meetings but ended up with more interruptions instead
• You tense up every time you hear a notification
• You want to be available to your team without being available constantly
• You're exhausted in a way that goes beyond just "busy"

Thanks for listening! 

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Transcript

Overcommunication Versus Undercommunication

The Case For A Communication Rhythm

The Launch Week That Nearly Broke

Building The Weekly Meeting System

Focus Returns And The Team Grows

Cortisol, Stress, And Constant Pings

Three Conversation Types To Schedule

The No-Meetings Myth Explained

Audit Your Communication And Your Body

Rules For Meetings That Work

One Small Change To Start

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Create Your Day podcast. I'm your host, Jen Cody. Today I want to ask you what your thoughts are on meetings. Just in general, like what comes to mind when I ask you, hey, what do you think about meetings? Because for me, I've come a long way with meetings. I used to hate them, like viscerally hate them. I really always saw meetings as this could have been an email, this is a productivity killer, it's like a time vampire, right? It's what keeps me from being able to actually do the work that I want to do. And I felt that way for a really long time. So what I did was minimize them as much as possible. You would often hear me saying, like, just text me, email me, send me a Slack. I wanted to keep things efficient. And I thought that handling everything in quick messages and impromptu conversations was the way to do that. I really felt like I was being smart. I was kind of keeping things lean, right? I was having a lot of agility, able to move at a moment's notice. But what actually happened was that I was getting interrupted all the time, like all the time, all day long. People sending me Slack messages, asking me questions, someone tapping you on the shoulder. Do you have a minute? Like this is what my day was spent like. And I was spending more time communicating than if I would have just scheduled the meeting that I was trying to avoid the whole time. So what I realized here, and I really didn't expect this, was that what I was doing was not just inefficient. It was actually having like an effect on my cortisol levels. Like my nervous system was totally out of whack. Every single time I would get that ping, you know, whatever the sound is that you have set for your um someone messaging you, how do you feel when that goes on right now? Because for me, every single time I heard that noise, it was like woof, spike in my cortisol levels. Every single quick question, whatever I was doing in that time, I would get pulled away from. And it takes a long time, once you've been pulled away from something, to get back into it. So every single time I saw a notification or heard a notification, my body would like brace, you know, bracing for impact. What is going to happen now? What's the next thing that's going to come across my lap that I need to fix? So I feel like I almost spent all of my time in this constant state of alert, not like high alert, but just always kind of waiting to see what's going to happen next. When's the other shoe gonna drop? And I could never actually focus or fully relax because you're always kind of half waiting. I was always waiting for the next interruption. And it's not lost on me, the irony here, that I actually created this entire situation because I was trying to avoid over-communicating and avoid meetings. So by trying trying to stay flexible, trying to stay available, I really shot myself in the foot. So today I am going to share with you how I fixed this. And not only am I going to tell you what it did for my productivity, but what it did for my peace of mind, because you know one doesn't matter without the other. We really need to have both in order to have a balanced business. So I learned a lot during this process, and I especially have learned a lot working with my clients about how most businesses are communicating. And it seems like there are two extremes. Neither one of them work, by the way. They're both broken. But there are two extremes that I've witnessed. And the first one is overcommunication, right? You're having meetings for everything, like constant check-ins, constant reviews, constant times where people are like, we need to get this in sync. We need to have a status update. Your calendar starts looking like Tetris, and you're not winning the game. You are totally losing this Tetris game. You spend so much time talking about work that you don't ever have time to actually do the work. So when you're in this over-communicating pattern, your nervous system never gets a break because you're always on, right? You always have to be ready to go, ready to deliver on whatever the next question's going to be. The second side of the spectrum, we're all the way on the other side now. The other extreme is under communication. And this is kind of where I was, you know. And again, I was still thinking I was always on, but trying to keep minimal meetings, everything to me could have been an email. I just wanted maximum flexibility, to be honest. So as long as everything was happening through email, phone calls, quick phone calls, and Slack, I felt that that sounded efficient. And maybe it does sound efficient in theory, but in practice, if you're constantly interrupted and nothing is coordinated, you just end up having the same conversation a hundred times because nobody knows what anybody else is doing. Both of these extremes, they're going to wreck your nervous system in different ways, but they're really going to have an effect on your overall productivity and your overall well-being. So what we want to do is really figure out why that is and how do we fix it. So when you're in over-communication, it keeps you in performance mode constantly, which is exhausting. A lot of us already feel like we're in performance mode with ourselves constantly. But when you're always presenting, you're always responding, you're always engaged, there's no recovery time there. And how are you ever supposed to get quality work done, right? Undercommunication keeps you, so you might not be on all the time in performance mode, but you are in like vigilance mode. You need to be prepared constantly. You're always watching, always waiting, always bracing for the next time somebody's reaching out to you. So there's also no time for true focus. So neither one of these extremes works, and most of us are bouncing back and forth between them, really looking for that sweet spot, which is there, but we have to find it. So the answer is not more communication or less communication. It's actually the right communication and the right communication at the right rhythm. So when I talk about a communication rhythm, I want you to think about having predictable, recurring moments of connection, and those moments serve specific purposes. So think for a moment. Take your hand, put it on your heart, right? Think about your heartbeat. Your heart is not beating constantly at maximum intensity because that would kill you. So it doesn't do that. It also doesn't beat randomly because that would also kill you. It beats at a rhythm. It's regular, it's predictable, it's sustainable. I want you to think about your business communication working the same exact way. And I didn't really understand this until I experienced it firsthand. But rhythm doesn't just create the efficiency, it creates safety. And honestly, at the end of the day, isn't that what we're all really looking for all the time, every day in our lives and our business? We just want to feel safe. We want to feel like we're in a place where we can exhale. And when you have a rhythm, everyone knows, everyone around you knows when the communication is going to happen. They know when you're going to update them. So they know when they can ask questions. They know when decisions are going to be made. So they're not interrupting you every five minutes because they know that there's a designated time on the calendar for them to speak to you about this. Your nervous system can stop bracing for impact and that constant interruption because you know that things are going to be handled in it's in a structured way. So you're able to relax and to focus work, right? That's what we want to do. Have the time to exhale, focus on what we're focused on. And we can do that because we trust that the important stuff is going to get addressed. It's just going to get addressed at the right time. That trust, that predictability is profoundly calming. Not just mentally, physically calming. So I'm going to let you into a little story about how I kind of came to this place in my business. I'm going to tell you about a week that really, it really broke me. It almost broke me. Let's say that. I don't want to say it actually broke me. But I was in the middle of a huge launch. So I had a lot of moving parts, a lot of people on my team working super hard. And my messages were relentless. Every few minutes there was another question, another decision that needed me. It was always a quick thing. So it never felt to the other person like they were bothering me because it was a quick thing. It would take two seconds. But every quick thing was pulling me out of whatever I was trying to focus on in the moment. And I was sitting at my desk and I was just trying to write the copy for an email sequence. That's it. Just trying to write the copy. In the span of about 45 minutes, I would say, I was interrupted 11 times. I counted them. It was 11 times in 45 minutes. And every single time I had trouble refocusing. And none of those interruptions were unreasonable. I really need to stress that. The people who were interrupting me needed to interrupt me because I was not providing them with an opportunity to have those conversations. They were all legitimate questions. They were from people who needed answers in order to do the jobs that they were supposed to be doing. So they weren't being needy, they weren't disrespectful of my time. They were literally just working and doing their job. But I was coming apart at the seams. I, by the end of that 45 minutes, I was ready to just throw my hands up in the air. I felt like my chest was tight. I couldn't finish what I was working on. So now I felt like I had wasted that 45 minutes because I didn't actually get to finalize what I was doing. And by the time I woke up the next morning, I was dreading what the day was bringing. And I started to think about how often this happens and realized this is not going to cut it. It's not sustainable, and I can't run my business this way. And it's not just because the business isn't going to survive, it's because I won't. I just can't do it. Something has got to give. How many of you out there have had those moments of something's got to give? We have them all the time. So I tried something that felt radical, uncomfortable. Didn't it wasn't part of my way of doing things? And I created a communication rhythm. It was something that I had seen from Ryan Dice. He has a company called Scalable. And this is one of the processes that they introduced me. So I looked at all of the random and scattered communication that was happening around my days. And I thought to myself, what would I do? What would my day look like if all of this had a place to live? What if instead of handling everything in real time, we handled it handled it at like intervals? Now I have done time management. Some of you have taken my time management course from many years ago. So I have done this for myself, right? I know what it feels like in my nervous system when all of the things on my to-do list have a place on my calendar. They have a place to live. I know how freeing that is. I don't think I ever thought to put into practice what if everything that involved my company, even with other people, lived on my calendar somewhere. And those conversations had a home. So this is what I did. I set up one weekly meeting that was for the whole team. It wasn't long. It would maybe take an hour. Um, and we would do this once a week. And same time, same structure, no exceptions. It was just a weekly touch point. And we structured it in a way that it wasn't like boring bullet points. You know, I find a lot of joy in my work, and I want the people who work with me to find joy as well. So it doesn't sound fun to me to sit and go through a bunch of bullet points. So we did structure it where, you know, for the first 15 minutes, we would talk about what had gone well from last week, what didn't go well, what we needed to change, that kind of thing, kind of audit the prior week. Then we would talk about the priorities we had for the coming week. And my rule is, you know, you're not going to choose 10 things to focus on for this week, but what are the three to five things that need to happen? And who's going to do them, right? Everybody takes responsibility. Then we would talk about are there any issues around any of this? Anything that really needs group discussion, anything that needs a decision made right now. So this is not status updates, it's problem solving. Let's look at what we've discussed and figure out like what are the questions that need answering right now. And then before we would end, we would just kind of talk about what each person needed to know. What did anybody have to add, like that they really wanted to make sure it was communicated before the next time we met? And that was it. It was one meeting a week. So that worked really, really well. And then instead of people sending me questions throughout the day, we decided to keep a running list. So unless something was really urgent and we defined what that looked like. So, you know, like you can define for your business what is truly urgent look like. Truly urgent, message me. But if it's not, it goes on the list and then we talk about it on Monday when we're together. So it it made it so easy. And then we also decided to have a daily check-in that was minutes. It was optional, it was not something that you had to participate in. But 10 minutes a day, if someone had something that couldn't wait until the that Monday, they couldn't talk about it then. And then I also decided to implement something called office hours, which was blocks of time during the week when I was available to just collaborate with people that needed to collaborate with me. Outside of those windows, I was able to be in focus mode. But everyone on my team knew that if they needed me, these were times. They would, these were designated blocks of time so they could just jump in and chat with me about different things. I really was nervous about implementing these changes because I thought it was going to slow things down. And I thought that my team would feel like I was not supporting them, that things were gonna fall through the cracks because I was trying to put the this structure around something that felt like there was not an opportunity for structure, if that's what happened, if that's what if that makes sense. And then I realized that the opposite is what actually happened. My email, my text messages, um, Marco Polo is something that I use to communicate with my team and my clients. All of that kind of got quieter. And it was not because people were not communicating, it was because they started monitoring like what talk, what do we talk about during this time, what do we talk about during that time? So the constant pings, those noises that were giving my nervous system agita, um, they went away and everything just became a little bit more manageable. And then as a result of that, obviously my focus came back because I was able to work on something for two hours without being interrupted. And I honestly had forgotten what that actually felt like. So my work was being produced in less time and it was better work, honestly, if I'm gonna be super honest, because I wasn't constantly switching the context, right? Like when I get pulled away and come back, I don't know, like my brain, it takes so long for me to get back into that flow state, which is where I do my best work. And what really was great about this was that my team, they got more autonomous. And that surprised me a little bit because when they couldn't get an answer from me, they just solved problems themselves. So I was pleasantly surprised that they would start thinking through options before bringing something to me, and they became more capable and they became better at their jobs because I wasn't always there to answer the question. And that Monday meeting that we had put aside that time for, that really became like the end all be all. That was our sacred time. Everybody came prepared to that meeting. We made decisions in that meeting, problems got solved, and then we were all able to go execute for the rest of the week without constantly having to check in with each other. But I want to circle back to the very beginning when I was talking about our well-being and how that gets affected by all of this, because when you are on high alert or when you are in that state of vigilance, you don't want to stay there. So the best part about this is that your nervous system will settle down. That constant state of alert, the bracing, the vigilance, the low-grade anxiety that's kind of like it's humming under everything, right? It's just like that monotonous hum that underscores everything in your day, it starts to fade away. And then maybe you'll notice that you stop checking your phone every few minutes, you stop tensing up every time you have a notification, and you stop dreading opening the laptop in the morning. So when you know that things are being handled, you know that important stuff is going to surface at the right time and that you don't have to be constantly available for the business to function. So, me finding that out, that knowing, trusting in the system was worth more than any productivity hack I had ever tried. So, I do want to talk a little bit more about the nervous system piece because this is to me, this is one of the most important parts, and I don't want to overlook it. Um, we think about communication systems in terms of efficiency. How are we gonna save time? How are we going to get more done? But our bodies, don't forget, are experiencing all of this also. So every time you're interrupted, your nervous system responds, your attention shifts, your brain releases a little hit of cortisol, and your body prepares for action. And it's totally fine if that happens once in a while, but when it's constant dozens of times a day, you are keeping yourself in a chronic stress state. And the body never gets the signal that it's safe to relax. You're always a little bit like activated, a little bit vigilant, a little bit bracing for impact, and that is exhausting. It's mentally, physically, all of it. It affects your sleep, your digestion, your immune system, your relationships, your capacity for creative thinking. When I implemented this rhythm, I wasn't just saving time, I was giving my nervous system permission to like stand down, just stay calm. Right? It's so important. And the predictability that came along with all of this told me I don't have to watch for threats constantly. Things are handled. You can relax. And that I think kind of made everything else seem possible. It gave me the better focus, better decisions, better patience with my family, honestly, better sleep, better everything. So let's talk about um what is a practical way, a framework for you to think about this. So there only should be maybe three types of conversations that your business needs. The first one is strategic. Where are we going? What are we building? What does the big picture look like? These conversations have to happen, but they don't have to happen that often. Maybe it's monthly, maybe it's quarterly. These are about direction, they're not about execution. So we get caught up in this. We think the strategy is first and foremost and constant. Put it on the back burner. It's about direction. If you have it in advance of these other um conversations, that's what makes all the difference. So let's take the strategic conversations, maybe monthly, maybe quarterly. We put them on the back burner for a second. The next one is operational, which is the doing, right? What are we doing this week? Who is responsible for doing what? What's the status of what we were working on? Where are people stuck? Um, these are the things that have to happen frequently. This was my Monday meeting, weekly is usually when this should be. And these are about coordination. They're about keeping things flowing, keeping things moving, making sure that anything that does get stuck gets addressed and is able to move on. The third kind of conversation is tactical. These are specific. They are the questions that come up in the course of the doing. So these should be minimized because we want to have good documentation. Our SOPs should be clear, our processes should be clear. When all of that exists somewhere, that minimizes tactical conversations. But they are definitely going to still happen. The key is that you want to have a clear channel for them so that they're not interrupting everything else. So before I did this, before I had this rhythm, all three of these conversations were happening randomly and constantly and every freaking day. So there were Would be strategy questions at 9 a.m., tactical questions at 2 p.m., operational stuff happening all day long, and my brain just was exploding, and I was exhausted, constantly switching modes, and never really able to settle into one type of thinking. But now each conversation has a home, right? So the strategy that happens once a month in my company. We'd have a planning session, we do it once a month. Operational is that weekly Monday meeting. And then the tactical stuff comes to those office hours, those blocks of time that I have set aside, or to a daily check-in, or you can document it so that it actually doesn't require a conversation at all. Maybe that is a Slack, maybe that is an email or a text or a Marco Polo. Whenever something comes up, this is really the key point here. Whenever something comes up, I know where it goes. My team knows where it goes. Nobody is guessing, nobody's interrupting, and nobody, the best part, is just sitting waiting in limbo for someone to come save them. So this has truly changed my business. And I know some of you out there agree with me when I say like I viscerally hated meetings. Right now you're thinking to yourself, oh no, I really hate meetings. And my life and my business are better without them. I hear you, I was you. And I just want you to consider that the absence of scheduled meetings does not mean the absence of communication. It just means that the communication has no structure and it's reactive and it's usually at the worst freaking moments. So you're never going to get rid of communication. You can't. It doesn't, no business can survive without communication. So just because you don't like meetings, think about what you're inviting into your business by refusing to do the work around this kind of structure. Every quick question that interrupts your deep work is an unscheduled meeting. Every Slack message that spirals into a 20-minute debate is an unscheduled meeting. And every time someone says, Do you have a minute for a quick conversation? and it turns into 30 minutes because guess what? That's what happens. Tell me the last time someone asked you if you had a minute and it was actually a minute. That 30 minutes is an unscheduled meeting. So I get it. Maybe you're super proud right now that you have no meetings on your calendar. But guess what? I bet your whole day is meetings. They're just disguised as interruptions. So the question is not whether you're going to spend time communicating, because you will. You have to. The question is whether the communication is going to be intentional with boundaries around it, or is it going to be scattered and exhausting and really kind of destructive to your business? One great scheduled meeting can eliminate 20 unscheduled ones. One great scheduled meeting tells your nervous system when to be on for communication and when it can truly be off. So, what kind of rhythm does your company need? Everybody's different, right? So I want you to start by looking at what is happening. Pay attention to all the communication that's going on in your business, every meeting, every message, every quick question, and ask yourself which of those three conversations does that fall into? Is it tactical, operational, strategic? It's going to be one of them. Everything is. Where does it fall? How often are those conversations happening? Are they happening at designated times? Are they random? And how do those interruptions feel in your body? That last question really matters. I want you to start noticing your physical response to communication. That sound of the text or the sight of a new email. What happens in your body? Do you feel neutral? Do you feel a spike of cortisol, dread, resignation, even worse, right? What is your body telling you about whether or not your current communication system is sustainable? Once you see that, you can start to design the rhythm that your company needs. What needs to happen weekly, what needs to happen monthly, what needs to happen daily? Everybody's different. Okay? There's no wrong answer here. I work with companies that have a daily meeting every single day for 10 minutes every morning. There's nothing wrong with that. Their companies need it. So what should be handled on their own? What should everybody be able to handle on their own through documentation with no conversation? And then where does the conversation get scheduled? Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever it looks like for you. And be specific about what's going to make these meetings effective, right? So my weekly meeting is effective because it's always the same. Same time, same day, same place. We don't move it around. We don't skip a week. Consistency. This creates trust. If someone has a conflict, they come to the next one. That's it. We stick to an agenda. Everyone knows what we're going to cover. Everyone knows what order we're covering it in. So I try not to go off on too many tangents. I do still struggle with that a little bit. And I try to keep the like, oh, while we're all here, why don't we talk about we don't want to do that? We stick to what this the script, right? Stick to what's on the agenda. And I do like to start with what went well. Like we want to celebrate our wins. We want to set a good tone. So always talking about, like, okay, we talked about all this stuff last week. What went really well then? That's great. If someone gets stuck, this meeting is where they say it. There's no shame, there's no judgment. The goal here is to identify the stuckness and unblock it. Get rid of the bottleneck. That's what we're there to do. So it doesn't matter. Like if you're stuck with something, you get airtime in this meeting. We're not leaving until we fix it. And we make those decisions. If we need a decision, we make a decision. We don't put it into another conversation. And when we're deciding what's happening next, everyone knows who is responsible for what is happening next. If you're assigned something, you know it. And then we end on time. Every single time we do not let it stretch out into two hours, we don't let it stretch out into an hour and 45 minutes. We want everyone to be efficient and we want to respect everybody's schedule. So this is what works for us. And maybe it feels rigid, but that is what creates space for other things. And that's a really interesting lesson to learn. When everyone knows exactly what they're there for and how the meeting runs, they come prepared. And then you can cover more ground, less time, and you're good to go. So this week, the first thing you're going to do is start looking at your interruptions. All those unscheduled meetings, every time you get pulled out of focused work, make a note and notice how they feel in your body. And then I want you to look at your calendar and your communication patterns from the past two weeks and really audit yourself a little bit. How much time did you spend in unscheduled meetings? And how much time did you spend in scheduled meetings with boundaries? What are the conversations that you're having over and over and over again that can be consolidated? I want you to be really honest here because a lot of people are shocked when they add all this up. And then identify maybe one place where a predictable rhythm could replace some reactive chaos. Just one. Can you implement a weekly team check-in? Can you implement a monthly planning session? Maybe it's a daily thing, whatever it is, but can you choose one and start there to see how it feels? Not just in your calendar, but how does it feel in your body? And remember, the goal is not to eliminate communication. We're going to communicate all the time. The goal is to make the communication intentional. So I hope you found this information helpful. I hope you're able to go out there and use this information to create your day in the best way possible, create the business you deserve. And until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I will see you here next week. Thank you so much for joining me.