Busy Isn't Productive! How to Stop Spinning Your Wheels and Start Getting Results.

Ever had one of those days where you worked nonstop, answered all the things, handled everybody’s emergencies, and still ended the day thinking, What in the world did I actually get done? Yeah. Same.

In this episode of Breakthrough with Mallory and Julie, we’re calling out one of the biggest productivity traps out there: confusing being busy with being effective. Because let’s be honest—running around like your hair is on fire does not automatically mean you’re making progress.

Julie and Mallory dig into the difference between intentional action and reactive chaos, why so many people feel like everyone else is “taking their time,” and how to take your power back by choosing where your time actually goes. They tackle everything from setting priorities and communicating with your boss to using practical productivity tools like time blocking, the Pomodoro Technique, batching tasks, accountability, and the Eisenhower Matrix.

This episode is a real-talk reminder that busy does not equal results. If you’re tired of ending your day frustrated, frazzled, and a little bit cranky, this conversation will help you stop putting out everyone else’s fires and start focusing on the work that actually moves the needle.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why being busy all day can still leave you feeling unproductive
• The difference between reactive work and intentional action
• How poor boundaries and weak communication steal your focus
• Why “time management” is really self-management
• How to identify your highest-value tasks
• Practical tools to boost productivity and reduce overwhelm
• How to stop spinning your wheels and start getting real results

If you’re craving better time management, productivity, prioritization, intentional living, and less overwhelm, this episode is for you.

Stay connected with Mallory Herring and Julie Burch at breakthroughwmj.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Have you ever had that day where you feel like you worked like a dog all day long, 90 miles an hour, never got up, never took a break, and yet you didn't get a lick of anything done. You didn't get to cross one thing off your list. You're busy but not productive. Time to make a change.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hey everybody, this is Mallory Heron, wife, mom, CEO, speaker, author, and now podcaster. Hey everyone.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

My name is Julie Birch. I'm a speaker, author, and now a podcaster. Pretty exciting stuff. Some of my favorite things, my sweet husband, my adorable adopted kitten, Merle Haggard, and a little bit of Chardonnay every day. It's good for the soul, right? And I, like Mallory, am fighting that war on self-abdication. I believe that we give our power away way too often, and it is time to take it back. And I'm here to help teach you how to do that. And maybe, just maybe, lovingly kick in the mindset and uh get you moving in the right direction. Hopefully that'll get you to take action on what you hear. So, welcome to Breakthrough with Mallory and Julie.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

We are so glad that you are joining us. Thank you so much for listening. Today we've got a really cool topic. Today we're going to talk about how being busy isn't necessarily being productive. Why intentional action actually moves the needle and unintentional action just makes you really busy.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

And frustrated. Yeah. Absolutely. And for me, bitchy. That too. I think when we feel like we haven't done anything, we get frustrated. That's not a good thing. I think this is about prioritizing. That's for me, it's all about prioritizing. You know, we in the old days we called it time management. We still do, but we focus it a little bit different today. We talk more about priorities and uh productivity. It's a kind of a different spin, but it's a lot of the same concepts. And it truly is about where do you choose to spend your time? And it that's the intentional that's going to move the needle. Because every one of us can be busy. But here's a news flash for you. If you learn one thing in this episode, take this to take this with you. Busy does not equal results. Busy does not equal results. How many people have you worked with or known in your lifetime? Like, oh, and they're always the most dramatic. I'm just so busy. I'm just so busy, busy, busy. I'm just so busy. But they're not really accomplishing anything. So our objective is how do we re-direct ourselves so that we're focusing on priorities and on intentional action that's actually going to move the needle forward?

SPEAKER_00 2:49

You know, I think that there have been very limited circumstances where being busy was uh also actually being productive for me. Um partially if one of my kids wants me to take them to the store or something and uh mom's busy.

unknown 3:06

I'm not.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

You just didn't want to go to the store?

SPEAKER_00 3:10

So I'm not, yeah, I'm not really being productive. I just didn't want to drive in the store. Um I so I run my own business and I have to be very careful about how I use my time. So I'm precious about the time that I get to spend with my family. I don't get to make more of that, and I'm very aware of it because my kids are nearing graduating from high school, so I don't know how long they're gonna stick around after it. So I'm really aware of that. But also when it comes to my business, I it depending on the service that our client's going with, um, sometimes I'm billing like an hourly rate. When someone's paying that much, I'm I'm really intentional about how I'm spending that time. You'd think it's the other way around, and that I would say, hey, I want to get more money from you, so this is gonna take me so long. I don't do that. No. I want to get it done as efficiently and effectively as possible, move on to the next thing because I want my clients to stay with me, and they do. Um, so if if you had that misconception about billable hours, it's not how that works. Um, but outside of that, I have been guilty sometimes of just being busy. I wear so many different hats with my business. Some hats I'm not super good at, like social media. So I have to really actively think about it and put effort into how I'm spending my time outside of those specific things.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Absolutely. I think that one of the keys to understanding being intentional with our time and making choices about our time, I think way too often we again, and we go back to kind of our theme of self-apducation, is that we think, well, everybody's taking my time. And in reality, you're always choosing where you're going to spend your time. It's really not about time management, it's about self-management. It's how you choose to invest that resource of time. And the intentional component is really about figuring out how to be uh not to be reactive, but to be proactive. Um, I always say that one of the time management, like destructive time management styles I I tease a lot about is being the firefighter time management style. Now, I love me some firefighters. Let me be clear, uh, they are hot. My husband's a retired firefighter, so I have my own at home. So I'm a big fan of firefighters. But as a time management style, not a good thing. Because what does that mean? Well, it means they're constantly putting out fires. And I think that's really what a lot of people do is they get in to work and they're just they spend their whole day putting out fires. You know, this fire, that fire, this is a fire. I'm gonna put that, I've got to take care of this. So everything becomes urgent, everything is now, everything is a fire. And when you spend so much time putting out fires, you're becoming reactive rather than being proactive. And that's really where intentional comes in, is you're proactively looking at what really is going to move the needle for me.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

So, would you say you said something I think it's important to re-emphasize here? People feel like others are taking time from them, but that's not true. You're deciding what you're giving your time to. You're the one in control. That's exactly. And I I think that that's again another example of how we give our power away. That's right. Even the way we think about it and frame it.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

That's exactly. I had a woman one time in one of my sessions who she we were talking about uh writing, you know, task lists and how to stay focused and know what your goals for the day are and all of those things. And she got very frustrated, kind of flustered, and she said, you know, she said, I can write a to-do list all day long. She said, I can do it, but it doesn't matter because as soon as my boss gets there, my boss is gonna tell me to do something else and they're gonna they're gonna take me off task or tell me that's on a priority or whatever. And she said, I have no control over my day. And I was like, Well, no, you have a lot of control over your day. Apparently, you have no control over your communication because you're not communicating your priorities effectively. So it's one thing to have them, but you have to be able to communicate them. So when you use that, well, everybody takes me off course. Everybody needs something for me. The minute I'm working on something, somebody's you know, got their head in my office door saying, Hey, can you help me with this or can you help me with that? It you're choosing to say yes or to say no to that. So you have to make a different choice.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Yeah, you're right. It's communication because you it's within your control to say to the person that's nickel and diming you for your time, I'm working on something else right now, I can get to you, you know, reasonably within X time, right? You give a general estimate. And even when it's your boss, you can still do that. Yes. I've I've heard it done so well, and I'm probably not gonna do this in any kind of eloquent way, but having a boss come and say, Hey, I need you to stop what you're doing, work on this project, or you need to do these three things. And so that person said, Well, yesterday you told me to work on this thing. I can't do both. Tell me which one I should prioritize.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Help me to make sure I'm doing it in the right order. That's that's key communication. I'm and I always kind of tease and say, be nice to the boss, show, be nice to the boss, right? They can't fire you. So it's like, I would be happy to do that. I'm more than happy to take that on. That sounds like a great project. Thanks for thinking of me. Here's what I had on my list. Here's what I had prioritized based on previous conversations. Help me make sure I'm doing the things in the order that you want me to do them in. And if they say, well, it doesn't matter, you just have to get them all done, say, okay, well, which one would you like me to do first? Right? Help me to just tell me which one you want done first. And if you're willing to have that conversation, and I will tell you, this is I would encourage every single person listening to this to lead by example. Right, people are watching what you do. So have those conversations. I tell the when I teach leadership, I tell people all the time when you delegate something to someone, ask them, do they have the time to do this? What are they currently working on? Because when you have that conversation, what you're doing is you're creating an environment where we're open to talking about priorities. And that's mission critical because let's face it, your boss does not always know what you're working on. We like to think they do, like they're all knowing. They should know everything that I have to do, they have no clue. And we have to be willing to have that conversation with them. And I think when when leaders do it, they set, they kind of set the stage for that. They model the behavior they would expect in others. And I think by us being willing to have the conversation, because if we don't think about what's happening, right? They come in and say, I need you to do this, and you're like, fine, right? And we're mad. Now we're gonna do, we're gonna drop what we're doing and we're gonna do whatever they said, but we're mad about it. And now the boss is gonna walk by your office in you know 20 minutes and see you looking all snarly and wonder why, what's her problem? Why is she in such a bad mood? Well, because you're not communicating. So we have to be willing to speak up. I think that's such a huge part of it.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

If you have a situation where you do have a boss that's too involved with what you're doing day to day, that's probably something of another problem. In addition to communication, that could be a little bit of a lack of trust, but it also could just be a not fabulous leader or a different kind of leadership style. You do need to oh, yeah, yeah. Uh was trying to avoid it because it's a dirty word. We don't like them. I I'm not a fan, but it we talk a lot about taking your power back and exercising your free will. You have choice. One could try to argue that if you're having your boss indicate to you which thing you need to do first, you're removing the choice. No. Your choice is still to communicate and get guidance on that. Your choice is whether or not you stay at that job because if you don't like what you're doing, you can go work somewhere else. That's that's all within your control. So I I want to be clear about because we talk about self-abdication so much, that having a deference to your boss and what they want you to prioritize, that's not giving up your power.

SPEAKER_01 10:54

No, not at all. And don't we want to be working in the same direction? Right? I it should be that all of us on a team, our boss, our coworkers, our department, our our entire organization, we should all be rowing in the same direction. We should all be working toward the same goals and objectives. And so that's opening those lines of communication. I want to do what my boss thinks is the biggest priority. It they're not doing it just to annoy me. They're not changing the priority every day, going, watch this, I'm gonna mess with her. There's a reason for that. So I want to be doing the things. I don't want to work, I don't want to work really hard, spend the time, the energy, you know, the sweat and tears of getting this project done only to turn it in and have my boss go, okay, thanks. Yeah, just put it over there on that file, right? I don't really need that. Well, I spent all that time on it. So it should be that we're we want to do that, right? We we're here, we want to be here, we want to work hard, we want to work on the right things. So those conversations, hopefully, that's part of what it's leading us to, is getting us all on the same page.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

If the leader's doing it right, then yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

I so true. I truly believe that everybody wants to do a good job when they go to work. I don't think people are actually, I'm gonna go to work today and I'm gonna be really bad. I've never directly heard that from anyone. It could be questionable with some folks, but I don't think generally that people want to do a bad job when they go to work because we get so much fulfillment from it. Even if you're just doing paperwork, the fact that you are earning your your money and you're doing something that is serving someone else in some way, we have uh identity within it. If you meet somebody at a bar or church, if you don't go to bars, you know, and they ask, like, hey, what do you do? They're not asking you your morning exercise routine. We all understand that question to be, oh, this is the job that I have, this is the kind of work that I do, because that is so much of our identity. And there is a feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment when you've gone through the day and you've been productive, but it doesn't come when the work that you're doing isn't meaningful. And it doesn't have to be like, you know, you don't have to say, but if the work itself was meaningful and not just busy work, you get that feeling of satisfaction. And if you go all day putting out fires or just doing one little thing after another, the busy work that's not intentional, not moving the needle forward, you don't get to leave that day with that feeling of satisfaction. Have you ever noticed that?

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Absolutely. And it's frustrating. We throw our hands up at the end of the day and it's like, well, that was a wasted day. And and that affects everything. It impacts how we interact with our family, interact how with people at the grocery store, whatever it is. I mean, it's it it it impacts us deeply. So I think it you're right when we say we want to do meaningful work. What are what are we what mission are we working toward? What's the goal? What's the objective? And I think that does matter.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Absolutely. And meaningful work is gonna look different for everybody. My version of meaningful work is less administrative tasks, unless those administrative tasks allow us to provide better service. And oftentimes they they can and do. I am I I have recently in recent years been able to make this transition. Um, I it's really within owning my own business and and running that that I've started to be able to be intentional about my time during the workday. So I have to wear a bunch of different hats. I have to learn a lot of stuff that doesn't come naturally to me, and also provide the client service. So when I quit my job, and for anyone that's been self-employed, you'll you'll get this. I was working from home. I had$500 and an IKEA table in a closet, and that was my new workspace. And I didn't have clients at first. I had to go figure out how to get them. But it's it can be really tempting and really easy if you're working remotely, and especially if you're your own boss, to be like, I could go do that laundry. You know, no one's waiting on me for something right now, so I I could just go do this other thing. I'll make some cookies, I'll iron some clothes, whatever it is. And I realized, okay, no, I have to either remove the temptation, and I'm not gonna do that because I don't have anywhere else to work, or figure a way around it. And so becoming really intentional with my time was part of that. And that was okay, I have to be disciplined with what I'm doing, and it needs to be work that helps me meet my goals. So I started using have either the Pomodoro technique, which if you're not familiar, it's basically where you take a task, whatever it is that you're gonna do, and you assign a chunk of time to it. And once that task is done, the time runs out, you take a break, and then and the breaks shorter than the time you just spent working. Don't do it the other way around. Right. But and then you go, you do the next thing that you have set this allotted amount of time. And there was a uh book, like a journal that I got on Amazon, and I can't remember the name of the individual. I'll send it and you can maybe put it in the show notes. It's called the Mastery Journal, and it's where you say, okay, for today, I'm gonna have four different chunks of time. This is how much time I'm giving, this is the thing I'm working on within each of those chunks, and then you rate yourself about how disciplined were you at staying on task and how your productive productivity. And then you can track it over time. And it got me into a habit of really prioritizing what's needs to be done today. Right. And being disciplined on, yeah, there's temptations over here to go make a sandwich, but I I'm staying on task.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Right. That really one of the things, and I've always called that batching, that that same technique where you're you're blocking, essentially blocking time. And really what that one of the things that that helps so many people with is actually what we call transition minutes. And transition minutes are the in-between time from when we transition between tasks. So for example, if you're in your office and you're working, working, working, you're focused, focus, focused, and someone pops their head in your office and says, Hey, do you have a second? I have a quick question. And we maybe we make our annoyed face so they can't see it, like, and then we're like, oh sure, of course, what's your question? And they say, Here's my question. Say, okay, well, here's your answer. Oh, sure, no problem. Okay, then. Okay, but bye, then, but bye, okay, but-bye. And you turn back to your computer, what's the first thing you say to yourself? Where was I? What was I doing? And you have to reread, rethink, redo, re-evaluate. And psychologists tell us it actually takes your brain a full eight to 11 minutes to fully transition between dissimilar tasks. So think about how many times during the day you're switching between tasks. So, what you're talking about, Mallory, is so important because it's when you give yourself concentrated work time, what you're doing is reducing those transition minutes and you're getting more accomplished in a shorter amount of time because we're focusing on it. So that's a very powerful technique is getting ourselves in the habit of putting those things together in chunks and calendaring them. Because that also, that when it's in our calendar, there's something about it being in a calendar that feels more real. It's official. It is like when you just say, I'm just gonna get to that today, it's different than saying, Oh, in my calendar at one o'clock, I have an appointment with Project X. And and committing to that, I also think that helps the communication because when people come in and say, Hey, you know, I was wondering if you could help me with this. Oh, you know what? I actually am scheduled with this until 11. But if you come back at 11, I can help you then. And it actually was something about when you say it's scheduled, it's not well, I was really wanting to do, I was kind of hoping maybe I could work on this, and I was really trying to get this done. That's all wishy-washy language, but when I say I have something I'm scheduled with this until 11, then it sounds more firm. And I think you get better results with it. People take it more seriously, and you'll take yourself more seriously too.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Oh, absolutely. And I think too, there's another technique that you can use, depending on what kind of work you're trying to get done. But if you Okay, so after the pandemic, everybody got familiar with like video conferencing and meetings of that sort, right? So you could say, I have schedule, because if you if you if you schedule something and then you know that you're not gonna stick to it because it's like, well, there's not another person involved in that, I could just move it. And then you're again not doing the intentional work that you need to that moves the needle forward and gets results. If if you have a habit of doing that, have a friend that you can make and send like a Teams link or a Zoom invite, and you can just both do your own individual things. You're not working together, but now you're holding yourself accountable to someone else. It's a lot harder to say, Oh, that doesn't matter. I don't have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

I love it. I love it. I like didn't know you were doing that. I uh you said earlier too that use a timer. And I actually think that is so powerful. I tell people all the time, if you want to be better about your time, get yourself a minute timer. Tell yourself you're gonna work on this for 25 minutes, whatever it is, set the timer. When the timer goes off, you can stop. I also like the timer for if you're the kind of person that gets interrupted a lot, this is a great technique because people just a lot of times when they interrupt you, they will say, Hey, so I have a question. Do you have a second? Do you have just a second? They never, never mean just a second. Do you have a minute? They never mean a minute. So I like to use the response. Actually, I have 10 minutes. Uh I I can do it, I can talk to you for 10 minutes. Can we do it in 10 minutes or do we need to schedule another time? And then I set my own timer for 10 minutes and set it right there in front of them. And they talk for 10 minutes, and when that timer goes off, it's like, oh, my time is up. Do we can we wrap it up quickly, or do we need to schedule a time to continue the conversation? And you'd be amazed how many people will wrap it up at that moment. So it's for me, it's kind of a way to get people to get to the point and and and I hold them accountable to the amount of time they say that they that they need. Nobody ever means what they say.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

No, that's important too, because a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people, they love the sound of their own voice and not not us. We're not podcasting because we love to hear our own voice, I promise you. But you'll have people that take forever to get to the point, and I'm guilty of it sometimes too, but you know when that one person shows up at your door or they're calling your phone, that feeling of what do I have going on for the next half hour? So if you set an expectation up front of hey, I'm so thrilled to talk to you. I only have 10 minutes right now, or we can schedule something, then they'll wrap it up. And it also works the other way too. So I don't there's some study that I don't know, science has proved it in some way. I I don't remember from what.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

I'm not very science-y.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

I I read somewhere, probably on the internet, and we're not supposed to believe everything there, but I believed it. It was science y and I've seen it in action. You will take up the amount of time you allot for something. So say there's a task that you need to get done, it's really important, and you're you say, Well, I I'll give myself four hours to do it on this day. It will take you the entire four hours. If you then instead say this exact same task, I'm gonna give it one hour, you'll give Get it done in one hour. Of course, that's not universally applicable to everything. But it's true a lot. Yes, by and large, you I don't know why something with your brain.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

They say the task expands to fit the time allotted. So the task will take as little or as much time as you allot for it.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

It's for me, it's very much like my handbags, okay? So I like to carry big ones. And then I just put a bunch of crap in there that I'm usually not even using. And after a while, a couple weeks, I'm like, oh, my shoulder kind of hurts. I'm gonna get a smaller bag. I will fill that one up too. And then I'm like, I need a bigger bag. I'm filling up the amount of space that I have no matter what. Right. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

Stuff expands, that your that your clothes expand to fill the closet. It's universally true. I believe that. Absolutely. So I think if what we're saying is if we agree that being reactive is a problem, then how do we become more intentional? So some of the things we've talked about, I think really move us in that direction. I think it's about learning to take the tasks that are valuable, like high value tasks, and we take those things seriously, right? We've all heard the expression time is money, time is money. Um, why do we say that? Well, because we see money as valuable, right? I mean, most of us do. I mean, I don't know, if you're walking down the street and a$20 bill fell out of your pocket, you know, most of you would not look at it and say, oh, geez, 20 bucks.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Crypto is a little questionable.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Is that even money? I'm not sure. I don't care. Most of us would overreact though, right? You'd be stepping on it. Back off jack. That's my 20. Uh, and if you don't do that, then I want to walk behind you because clearly I'm gonna make some cash. But it's because it's valuable. We see it as valuable, and we don't always recognize that time is a resource just like money is a resource. That's why time is money, it's a resource. Here's the difference money is an infinite resource. You can always make more money. It doesn't always feel that way. But it's absolutely true. You can always make more money. Time is not the same, it is finite. I don't care how good of a negotiator you are, you cannot negotiate for 26 hours in a day. So it we're limited. So if we only get that much, then it makes sense that we want to spend it on the things that give us the best return on investment. That's what we would do with money too. So it's learning to identify the tasks that you are responsible for that are the high value tasks.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

I think about that as a business owner a lot. What do I want my team to be working on and spending their time? Because I'm paying for that time. I'm also paying for my own time. And I have been guilty of it previously of just I love I love a checklist. And I love the feeling of checking the thing off the checklist to the point where I will if if I did something but it wasn't on my checklist, I will add it to the checklist when I'm done and then check it off. I yes. It's a little it's a little much. It should have been on there. What do you know? I did three things before I even started my day putting that on the list. Um it's the feeling of satisfaction, but I I have had too many days where I I checked a lot of stuff off, but none of it was like the big thing I really needed to get to. None of it was the thing that was gonna necessarily like give me the best return. And realistically, I put way too much crap on a daily checklist. I have to reframe it as more, what can I realistically get done? What do I need to do this week?

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Right. That's a very common thing. And and that's actually mentally difficult. And it's it's actually horrible for our prioritization. Because if you put 20 things on your list and you get, you work really hard all day long, but you only get 10 of them done, at the end of the day, when you're driving home from work and you're thinking about your list, are you thinking about the 10 you did or the 10 you didn't do? Well, most of us are thinking about the 10 we didn't do, and then we beat ourselves, oh, I didn't get everything, and I didn't get everything done. Now I'm behind, I'm feeling stressed, and it becomes it becomes deflating. It's it's very bad for our kind of psyche that all we think about are things we didn't do, when in reality, there's no way you were gonna do all those things anyway. It's yeah, it's not realistic. And it wakes me up. Right. It will. It you literally cannot sleep when you feel like you've got all that. Part of the problem though is that it is also how we ineffectively prioritize. Because if you put 20 things on your list, instead of looking at your list and saying, which one of these items on my list is the next most important thing, which one of these has the highest value, the highest return on investment, we look at it and we say, which one can I do the quickest? This will just take me 10 minutes, I can knock it down to 10 minutes and I won't have to worry about it. And we want to scratch more things off the list, and it actually leads to procrastination because we're putting off the things that we need to do because it's well, it's gonna have to be done anyway. I'm eventually gonna have to do it, might as well do it now. And that is not good prioritizing.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

I think that if you s make time specifically for the little things, so like half an hour, all those little things that just need to be done, but they're not as high impact. I can get those knocked out really quickly and then move on to things that are more impactful, have better results, the results that you need, then you can still get that done. It's not that you can you should still do the little things. They do have to get done at some point, but that's not where your primary focus should be. Have you ever heard of the Eisenhower matrix? Yes. So I'm a big fan, and uh, it's something that I teach when I'm speaking about time management. So for for those that might not know, the Eisenhower matrix is a square with four different quadrants, and it it's where you slot your activities based on is it urgent and is it important? So I imagine the square. And in the first quadrant, those are the things that are going to be like high urgency, high importance. So the really meaningful stuff that has to get done, but it's also it needs to happen really quickly. Quadrant two is your things that are high important, high importance, but they are low urgency. That's where we want to spend most of our time. Quadrant three, you're going to have low importance and high urgency. And then four, you're gonna have low importance, low emergency. And those are things like sending emails, sorting through your jug mail, stuff like that. We by and large primarily spend our time in quadrants one and three. But what we need to do is be proactive and spend as much time in five as in quadrant two as we can preventing things from becoming a quadrant one task. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Help me explain that well. Covey called, you did. That sounded good. Covey calls it the planning, prevention, and relationship building activities of your job. Those are the things that are quadrant two, and those are the things you're investing in. The example I always share is that that would be for as a leader, for example, it's your coaching, your training, and your developing of your team. Is it urgent? No, it's not urgent, but is it important? Absolutely. And it's when you spend the time, you invest that time in that quadrant two, in the coaching, the training, and the developing, then you're preventing, you're teaching them how to do things so that now they don't screw it up and now you've got a quadrant one because now it's urgent and you have to fix it. When we invest the time in two, it comes back to us. And that's really kind of what what we're looking at is we want to spend more time in two. I would say the quadrant three stuff, those are, and people spend a lot of time in that, but those are generally everyone else's issues, right? That's those other people's issues. There's a difference between good interruptions and bad interruptions. Yes. Right? I had a woman one time, one of my favorite moments. I was in Denver, I'll never forget it. And I was doing a full-day training on productivity and prioritizing and time management. And I had a woman in the very back row, and she never spoke to me all day long, never said a word, didn't raise a hand, didn't ask questions. She looked like she was taking notes. So I mean, I guess she was listening. I mean, she could have been writing a letter. I don't know. But she looked like she was interested. We get toward the end of the day, and all of a sudden her hand shoots up because I mentioned interruptions. So she's like, So I called on her and she went off. It was hilarious. That is my issue. If my phone would stop ringing, I could get some work done. But my phone never stops ringing and I can never get any work done. And the whole room was kind of like, Oh, I feel your pain, right? Like, I get you. And I told her, I said, I understand, I get that a lot. I said, Tell me what you do. With a completely straight face, she looked at me and said, I am the receptionist. And I'm like, Oh my gosh. That's a pretty important job, duty. If it's part of your job description, it's not so much an interruption to your work. It is your work, right? And that to me is kind of understanding good interruptions versus I mean, and bless her heart. As soon as, because when she said that, everybody laughed at her. And I think she kind of realized what shit said. But I think it's really helpful because I think it helps us to understand is this a quadrant one or is this a quadrant three, right? We go back to the firefighter. So and because I'll tell you one of the big questions I ask people is whose fire are you putting out? Whose fire? Is that your fire to put out? Is that a quadrant one? Or are is are you putting out everybody else's fires? Are they dumping fires on you and you are just not good at communicating, or you're just always the fire person? And we're doing those things that are everybody else's issue. Now, if it's part of your job description to put out the fire, then that should be considered a high value task, and we have to navigate that. But understanding what are truly your quadrant one and two, and what are the things that are the three and four, and how can we make sure that we're we're we're putting those in the right place, we're giving them the right value. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Absolutely. I you need to spend your time doing the most high value work that you're gonna get the biggest return on, because that's the point of why you're doing this in the first place. And not not just at work, wherever you're spending your time. If it's at home, if it's at TJ Maxx, wherever it is.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Which for me looks like I'm going in, I'm selecting the item I want to buy, and then I'm checking out and leaving. My husband and I, we can't shop together because he's the opposite. He's like, we have to go down every single aisle, look at all the things.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

I gotta look at the aisles.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

I yeah, I gotta smell the candles. Well I gotta smell the lotions. That's that's he that's enjoyable to him. So if he's spending quality time with me or with the kids, that's high value to him. I'm like, no, I have other shit to do. This is not my high value items. Um, but that's our own problem to work out. I have to be very careful about okay, what do I need to work on? What supports what needs to be worked on, what am I actually spending most of my time on, and really think through realistically. Here's what I need to do today, here's what I need to do this week, here are things that I also want to do if I do end up having some time. And any of the other little stuff it stays on a different list entirely, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:05

I don't think that's a bad thing at all. I actually think of it, I call it Julie's AD20 rule. Uh, we've all heard of the AD20 rule, right? Prado principle and um Italian scientists in the 1500s, basically, 80% of the land he discovered was owned by 20% of the people. And then you can extrapolate that out. And he found that that 80-20 reigns true in a lot of areas, and even today it really does. It's probable that all of our listeners, it's entirely probable that you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time, right? At work, 20% of your people cause 80% of the problems, right? So we see that 80-20. Here's the problem in how it relates to our own productivity is that we tend to spend 80% of our day, our time, our energy, our output, our creativity, 80% of our day, and we only generate 20% of our value. When I heard that, I thought that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. What that horrible, how horrible is that? That means that we're spending 80% of our day doing the little stuff, right? Putting out those other little fires, reacting to the urgent demands of others. And we're only spending 20% of our day where we're really digging in and we're doing those high value, high importance type of product projects, tasks, and assignments. So for me, when I say do lose 80-20 rule, I try to get people to flip that. So I want you to spend 80% of your day in high value, high dollar, important, good return on investment, projects, tasks, and assignments. 20% like you said, you have to do the little stuff. You gotta do the little stuff. But you can't spend your whole day doing it. If you spend your whole day doing it, you'll never get to the good stuff. And that's what we want to avoid.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

So a question: how do you determine what is that high impact, high value stuff, and what's not?

SPEAKER_01 34:50

That is such a good question. And I don't think that there's one answer for everyone. Um, for me, what I look at is the highest value ones are first of all foundational, meaning it is at the heart of what I do. So for my job, it's the writing, it's the it's my presentations, right? It's it's gearing up and getting that presentation just right. So that's a would be a high dollar kind of task for me, right? So anything that's foundational to your job description, and I really do, I tell people, look, what's your job description say? What are you responsible for? And those kinds of big things tend to be the high dollar. Anything that's directly related to dealing with a customer or client. Um, so if a client calls me, that is a high dollar or high value task for me. So directly interacting with your clients or customers is generally high dollar. Uh anything that goes to the planning, prevention, relationship building, those quadrant two activities are generally going to be your high dollar. Anything that impacts your visibility, your um the promotability within your organization, the more people that the more people that see it, generally the bigger uh that it becomes. Uh the other thing, so all of those kind of big picture things, I always tell people the way that you have to identify it for yourself is you want to try to take like that 30,000-foot view, right? So looking down on where you're investing your time. One of the challenges, I think, for people is that we don't know where our time goes anyway. So if you really want to get better, if you really wanted to try to practice Julie's 8020 rule, for example, you have to know where your time is going now. If you don't know where your time is going now, how do you know it's wrong? Yeah, you need to collect some data. You you need you do. Now that means basically that implies some sort of a time log, which totally freaks people out. But I always tell people it's not a lifetime commitment. It's just it's a it's a diagnostic tool. So if you were to give yourself just one week where you literally tracked where you spent every minute of your day. Every minute. That means when you took that phone call, when you jumped on social media for five minutes, when you got interrupted by this person asking you a question, it track it all for a week. Just give yourself one week. If you can do it for a week, remember it's a diagnostic tool. And then you get to look back at that and you get to start identifying out of those things that I'm spending my time on, what's high dollar and what's low dollar. So you start to play with it a little bit. I I promise that everybody thinks, and this this will be true on this episode. It's true every time I teach it in a front as a speaker, that when you first hear it, you think everything you do is high dollar. Everything we do is high dollar. That's what we all think. If it wasn't high dollar, I wouldn't do it. But in reality, that's not true at all. So it's really trying to be more judicious. Put on a, you know, your logic, analytic analytical kind of viewpoint and look at it that way. Like let's keep your emotions out of it, right? I know we fall in love with the things that we do, but we have to look at it differently. And really just get real about it. Is this, what kind of investment, return on investment am I getting from this task? Ask yourself the question if I didn't do it, would anybody even notice? Would anybody notice? And then another big thing for high dollar is when this is done, where does it go from here? Who sees it? What's it being used for? How is it being used? And when we, again, 30,000 foot view, put it into the big picture, we can start to see the value. So doing that, giving yourself that diagnostic tool and kind of starting to identify what's really high dollar and what's really low dollar, then the objective is with the low dollar stuff, you have to either delegate it, delete it, meaning don't do it. If nobody notices, why are you still doing it? Right? We do outgrow things. Uh, or we have to, if you can't delete it or you can't delegate it, you gotta learn to do it in less time. So that task normally takes you 20 minutes. How can you do it in 17?

SPEAKER_00 38:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

And we start to make the adjustment. Every minute you save, you invest in quadrant two. Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

And you can absolutely apply this to home as well. Absolutely. So a lot of people, you know, they want to spend more time with their partner, they want to spend more time with their kids. How much time are you actually spending with them? When I get in a really busy season, I don't get to spend as much time as I want with them. However, that's on me. I need to challenge myself to, okay, where am I spending my time? What am I giving my time to that isn't that during my non-work hours? That's right. And from there you have step two. So what do you do after you've made that determination? It's putting into place different practices that will help you redirect those things to where they need to be. So that could be task batching, pomodoro technique, um, actually doing an exercise with the Eisenhower matrix, calendaring things, having someone that will be your accountability buddy, whatever works for you. And it's okay to try something. And if it doesn't work, that's okay. Just try something else. And you'll keep doing that until you find the thing that works. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

Always asking yourself, is this the best use of my time right now? If as you find yourself, whether it's you're procrastinating, you're getting off track, you're not sure if this is what you should be doing, you're feeling overwhelmed or overloaded, what is the best use of my time right now? It doesn't mean you're not gonna do that task. It doesn't mean that task is invaluable. It just means it's not the best use of your time right this minute. And I think that is super important.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Well, I think the best use of your time right at this minute is listening to this podcast. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

Breakthrough with Mallory and Julie and we're hoping we're gonna help you break through some of those time constraints you're dealing with and be more intentional in your time. Do we have a couple things we want to wrap with that are uh specific things like takeaways, things that we've thought of that maybe we can share with our audience?

SPEAKER_00 40:36

Yeah, I think it's just thoughts. Important that to what your point don't think about it as the time people are taking from you. That's self-abdication. Right. Think about it as where you are, what you're giving your time to.

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

And be an active participant in deciding how that's gonna go.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

Have agency over self, right? So you make those choices. I would say don't be a firefighter. In other words, who you stop being reactive, look to be proactive, and whose fires are you putting out? So the firefighter method does not work unless you're really a firefighter and you're probably really hot. But other than that, that is not a good style of time management. So we have to be careful of that. I I would like to share one last my uh this is actually, if anybody's read Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Affective People, one of my favorite Covey quotes. And I think this really does speak to a lot of what we've talked about in this episode, is he says you have to learn to schedule your priorities, not prioritize your schedule. And we started with busy does not equal results, and I think that's really the distinction, right? People that are busy, busy, busy, they go in and they write 25 things on a list and they're like, you know, now how do I put these in or what do I do with this, right? But people that are truly the most effective, the results-oriented people are the people that go in and what they write on their list are these are the most important things that I need to accomplish today. And it's realistic and it's the important tasks, projects, and assignments, and that is where they focus. And that's what we want to be up be able to do and do it a little better. Because remember, busy does not equal results.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

And as you're doing that, you're going to start to feel good about how you are more accurately using your time in an effective means that gets results and it will become its own habit.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

That's right. As we started when we said that that this was about using our time intentionally to uh actually move the needle. And when you start to feel that needle move, you start to see that needle move, it it feels good and it will help build that confidence and the competence that will help you to continue to move forward. So we hope that you get lots of good ideas, that you'll take some of these things, marinated them a little bit, and see if you can come up with some things that will work for you so that you don't feel like you're spinning your wheels, but rather working with intentionality and you're moving the needle in the direction you want to move it.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

Thanks for hanging out with us today. Before you go scurry off to do better time management. That's right. Um, one priority that should be at the top of your list is to subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your podcast, and you know, like it, share it, give us comments and feedback.

SPEAKER_01 43:14

All the things, all the things. We need all the things, and we appreciate you doing it. So subscribe, share, listen, like all of it. Help us out. Thank you all so much for being with us today. Looking forward to seeing you on the next one. Bye. Come back to breakthrough with Mallory and Julie. Bye. This episode is sponsored by Heron HR, the experts in full service payroll and HR built for growing businesses. Heron HR offers a white glove experience and specifically works with small and mid sized businesses. Heron HR is there to take on as much or as little of your HR function as you want and need. If you're ready for a solution that scales with you, if you need full service payroll or you just want a real HR. HR partner, they've got you covered. Give them a call today at 1-800-607-7787 or find them online at heronhr.com.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

This episode is brought to you by Julie Birch Speaks. If you want another boring keynote, keep scrolling. But if you want an experience, meet Julie. Julie isn't just a speaker. She's the moment your audience didn't know they needed. With down home charm, a sharp sense of humor, and zero tolerance for fluff, she delivers real-world techniques that make people laugh, think, and actually do something different when they leave. Through relatable stories, bold truth telling, and solid business strategies, wrapped in brilliant comedic humor, Julie connects in a way that feels like a conversation, not a lecture. Your audience won't be just entertained. They'll be equipped, energized, and ready to level up. Solid business strategies, brilliant comedic humor. Find Julie online at Juliebirch.com or give her a call at 214-679-2717.