Episode 260 transcript:
I know that running a business is busy and hectic and tests everything that you never knew that you even had. But I’ve got four signs for you today that you are overwhelming yourself, and I can help you to get out of it. Welcome to this week’s episode.
My name is Emma Mills, and I help business owners to get out of their own way and leverage their time so that they are focusing on what they love or spending time with who they love. And, part of this is seeing the wood for the trees. And a lot of it is being overwhelmed as a business owner because there’s just so many things like, you are the face of the business.
Everything comes to you a lot of the time. But I know that we can also be our own worst enemies. And I’ve got four sure signs that you are not helping yourself and today’s episode. Just want to bring them to your attention and, understand that there is light at the end of the tunnel if we just think about a few key things day to day. Number one, if your day to day involves being on a laptop most of the time, and you operate with all of the tabs open in safari, in chrome, in Mozilla, Firefox, whatever you use. If all of your tabs are open along the top, this is symptom number one, that you are overwhelming yourself because one, honestly, the thing that you think you’re going to need at the very beginning of the tab selection, you never actually use again. One of the biggest things for mental fatigue is like your brain has so much to cope with. And looking at screens, the light from screens, the hecticness of screens, keeping it as simple as possible and having everything shut down and just working on what you’re working on.
If you’re looking at your laptop now while you are watching this or listening to it, and you have all the tabs open, please, while you might think, oh, but Emma, it’s fine. Our, brains were not meant to and still haven’t got used to the volume of things we ask it to look at, plus the blue light on screen. So please just keep it, just shut everything down now. Give your laptop a restart. It’ll thank you for it. Just keep it to the thing that you are working on now and just get everything else closed down. Number two, opening your emails is never a specific thing that you just go to do because your emails are open all of the time and you are glancing at them and replying and archiving just as part of the day, like replying to emails quickly, is just who you are now. And for me, that is sign number two, that you are overwhelming yourself.
Your emails are not designed to be, well, I guess they are designed to be open all the time. But this is not how you operate in all of the best parts of yourself and what you should be doing. Your email becomes a list of what other people think is important. And so by having it open all the time, you do yourself a disservice by, not giving the things that are really important the focus that they need. And honestly, for me, this is possibly the worst. If you’ve got your inbox open all of the time, if you see the little notification that something’s come in, if you hear the chime that an inbox has come in, an email’s come in, and then you’re flicking to it and looking at it like there is no concentration, there is no focus on the deep, and meaningful stuff. And so for me, checking your emails, it should be a specific occurrence that happens maybe mid morning, mid afternoon, maybe just before you clock off for the day.
It shouldn’t be something that you’re just like swimming in and out of all day, because it’s just distraction. And you’ll get sucked into other people’s agendas and you’ll get sucked into busyness that makes you feel like you’re doing good work. And that’s not what running the business is about. Number three, you are the world record holder. In response of replying to messages, whether it’s like slack messages, teams messages, it’s another thing that you have open, ready for the notification, ready to read it, see it, react to it, put an emoji on it, like get involved in it again. Internal messages, external, it shouldn’t be a thing that you would like drifting in and out of. Give yourself the grace of closing off notifications for the next hour, giving yourself a dedicated hour to do some really good work. And then coming to the messages, the replies you need to get to in one batch.
It will help you feel mentally much less fatigued, and it will help you do much better work. I’m not saying don’t reply. If something is really urgent, somebody will always find you or find their way to you. But mainly all the things you’re replying to, like they can wait an hour, 50 minutes. It doesn’t need to be a right now. And so you give your best self to the hour that’s coming up. And then you batch this replying to stuff and you give your brain the rest that it needs. Like multitasking is the biggest myth ever. It really is. And so having this flow of all these things happening at once, it’s not how we do good stuff. So please don’t be the world record holder in replying to internal teams messages, slack messages, whatsapps, whatever that might be, just do what you’re doing and batch replies later on. And number four, if someone says the, world famous sentence in business, I just wanted to pick your brains and you’re all over it, this is another sign for me that you can engineer your own overwhelm. So I like to help people.
This is what my pa is based on. We help business owners get out of their own way and leverage their time. But you also have to, just like they tell you to in an airplane, you put on your own. Ah, life vest, safety vest, whatever it’s, can’t remember what it’s called. You put that on first to save yourself because then you can be of most use to the other people around you if you just let your time be taken by other people that want to ask you something or a piece of you, or the emails coming in or the messages, like there is nothing left of you to give or to direct in the right way or to lead your team or to do your best work. And so when someone asks to pick your brains, I mean, I understand that might vary depending on who is asking you and how quickly you do it. But one, I’m open for people picking my brains. sometimes not all the time. Otherwise we just spend our time doing that.
But one, I let my pa schedule the time in and also it just gives an element of it lets them understand, your calendar isn’t just wide open to other people’s requests that they’re like, no problem, let us find a time to get that scheduled in. That works. I never, unless it’s a client that’s got an urgent situation. Aside from that, I would never go, okay, yeah, no problem. Right now or tomorrow or when suits you best. It is getting scheduled in, in my open slots for calls and meetings, which is generally a Tuesday and a Thursday afternoon. I need to protect my time to one make sure I hit the goals I want to achieve, which impacts my life, my family’s life, the people around me, and impacts my team’s life. That is most important. And so if I just let my diary become a free for all or my attention is just a free for all distraction, the overwhelming shoes, you feel like you’re not getting any further forward. And so these four things today for me are real symptoms and ones that are easily closed down, but there are symptoms of the way you treat your time, of the way you guard it, like it’s possible to do really good work and, to get to things in logical order, not just let the outside world drive you. And so today is my tv.
I hope it just prompts some of those. Like you might think, oh, do you know what? I do have all my tabs open. I’m just going to work on one thing really well rather than flitting between lots of things and not actually moving it forward, you might think, do you know what I do? Just reply to a message as soon as it comes in. Turn your notifications off for 90 minutes, do the work, then go back and reply I to everybody in good time. I hope today’s episode helps you to get your head out of the dirt and into the cloud and I will see you next week. Bye.
