054 The Science of Efficiency: Discovering the Best Way to Work for Your Business
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Does this sound familiar? As an entrepreneur, you constantly feel overwhelmed and struggle to find balance in your busy schedule. You've been told to simply work harder and longer hours to achieve success. But let's be honest, that approach has only left you exhausted, stressed, and feeling like you're spinning your wheels without getting the results you desire. It's time to acknowledge the pain of sacrificing your well-being for the sake of busyness and discover a more effective path towards productivity and fulfillment.
In this episode, you will be able to:
Discover the power of setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care to improve your overall work-life balance.
Challenge the idea that busyness equals success and learn how to redefine your relationship with work.
Apply the scientific method to your work habits and optimize your productivity with data-driven strategies.
Evaluate and analyze your work patterns to identify areas for improvement and maximize your efficiency.
Instead of constantly thinking about how busy I am or constantly putting these self imposed deadlines on my work that doesn't have an external deadline, I can just decide that it's okay that I get it done when I get it done. - Regan Bashara
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00:00:00
Hey, everybody. Welcome to money through ease. This is Regan, your host. And this week I want to talk about a concept that I'm calling Busy Shaming, and I don't have any podcast notes for this. I'm gonna go off the cuff and we're gonna talk about it.
00:00:15
I often find myself coming up against this idea that I've got too much going on, I'm too busy. And what I mean by that is that I've got too many tasks on my task list. Now, I'm not one of those people that believes that at some point my to do list is going to be a to done list, as in, I have done everything and there's no more things left to do. I don't believe that I have all sorts of work that is recurring, meaning that it happens again and again. So for bookkeeping, that's obvious.
00:00:52
I do bookkeeping every month. I have to reconcile people's accounts every month. I send them financial statements. Every single month. I run payroll.
00:01:00
That is a recurring thing. So, like, those tasks and then doing my marketing, those are going to always be happening, right? I'm not necessarily talking about that, even though I kind of am, but I'm talking about all the other little tasks that just kind of pop into my head and I'm like, oh, that's right, I need to take care of that thing. Or I want to add this on my to do list, whether it's a one time task or it's going to become yet another recurring task that I need to do when I look at my calendar every week, see what's going on, who I'm meeting with, what kind of work I'm going to be doing, because I plan everything out on my calendar. I look at my calendar and sometimes I'm like, holy crap, I've got so much going on.
00:01:43
There was a week not too long ago that I had, like, four guest podcast recordings scheduled where I was doing interviews with other people for their podcasts. And it was four in a week, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is too many, this is a lot of work and I'm going to be so busy this week. That's what I was thinking. I think I ended up burning myself out pretty quickly by the end of that week in terms of all the work that I was doing that was meeting with people, being interviewed for other people's podcasts. Yeah, I just ended up doing a lot and I didn't actually schedule in time to rest.
00:02:24
Part of me wants to say that, oh, I was very productive that week. Oh, it was a good thing that I was so busy. It was a good thing to have a lot to do, to have a lot of things on the calendar, to have a lot of people to meet with and talk to. A lot of work needed to be done. And so part of me wants to delight in that busyness, right?
00:02:47
Part of me is like, yay, I'm busy. That's a good thing, right? That's good for my business if I'm busy. And then part of me is like I never want that to happen again. I never want to have a week where I have like four podcast recordings in one week.
00:03:03
That's just part of me though. That's not really the truth. I could probably do a podcast interview once a day if I really wanted to. Would I want to sustain that? Probably not, but it's okay if it happens like every once in a while that I just have a lot of interviews in one week.
00:03:19
By the way, I have a page on my website where you can locate all of the other podcasts that I've been a guest on. If you go to my website, All Ease Accounting lLC, and then you click on the top menu and you click on podcast, one of the first things that you see is a link to go look at all of the podcasts that I've been interviewed on as a guest. And I'm updating that list all the time because every week I'm doing podcast interviews with other people in addition to recording, obviously the money through Ease episodes. So if you're interested in listening to my interviews on other podcasts, go check that out on my website. It's under the podcast link at the top in the menu.
00:04:04
Like I'm going to guess that would probably be a good thing for folks to go listen to those episodes and push the numbers so that they see that my episodes that I was on their podcast gets more traffic. So that would be cool anyways. So is that something I'd want to do every week? Probably not. I do value rest and I've actually changed up my schedule a little bit recently.
00:04:32
I just kind of had normal working hours when I started my business like Monday through Friday. Nine to five were my hours that I was going to be working and I decided to change that and tweak it and I have changed it a little bit along the way. But right now I'm trying something new where I'm going to not really work on Mondays at all. I record my podcast episodes on Mondays for the following week's Friday release. Other than that on Mondays I just kind of like do my own personal finances, paying bills and stuff.
00:05:07
Kind of like getting my house in order. So my husband goes to his job on Mondays, obviously, so if we spend the weekend together then he goes back to work on Monday and I get some alone time without having to work. So I'm not taking Mondays completely off, but I am not going to work as much on Mondays. And then I also adjusted my work hours for the rest of the week. I want to have more time in the morning to kind of like wake up and have breakfast and drink my coffee and record some TikToks and all that.
00:05:37
So I'm actually not going to get started with my work for my business, or like my clients work until about 10:00 a.m. Every morning. And then I extended my work day to about six. So I don't need to cut it off at five and stop working. Now there will be days that I don't feel like working till six, and that's perfectly fine too, but that's kind of what my schedule is going to look like from here on out.
00:06:01
All of this to say as a business owner, when you are deciding when and how and where you're going to work and what you're going to do, you get to just make those choices, right? You get to decide for yourself how you want to work and when. And that can really depend on maybe your clients needs or the type of work that you do. But I want you to consider that it should be based first on how you work best. Like what time of day do you feel more energized, what time of day do you prefer doing different types of work?
00:06:34
If you like meeting with clients first thing in the morning, set it up so that clients can schedule time with you first thing in the morning. If you can't stand the thought of talking to another human being until 11:00 a.m., don't accept meetings earlier than that. It is okay to have those boundaries for yourself. I want us to all explore what we mean. If we find ourselves saying, oh my gosh, I'm just so busy right now, what does that actually mean and how does it make you feel?
00:07:06
So for me, whenever I say, oh my gosh, I'm so busy this week, usually behind that is I just have a lot of things that I need to get done. And it's not even things that actually truly need to get done. There are things that need to get done as far as payroll and sales tax and the bookkeeping that I do each month. Some things are on pretty hard deadlines that are externally set, which means that I don't set the deadline. And then there is a lot of work that I do, even for my clients, that I get to say when I'm going to have it done by, and therefore I'm in control of that and I can change it if I want to.
00:07:42
But a lot of what I do is based on my own deadlines. And so if I'm telling myself I'm just so busy and I have a lot of things to do by a certain date, I'm imposing that busyness on myself. How is that making me feel? Most of the time, whenever I think about how busy I am, I feel anxious. And it doesn't usually lead to me actually doing work.
00:08:08
It leads to other things to kind of soothe that anxiety. And so work doesn't get done so instead of constantly thinking about how busy I am or constantly kind of putting these self imposed deadlines on my work that doesn't have an external deadline, instead of doing all that, I can just decide that it's okay that I get it done when I get it done. And I can just decide when I want to get it done. Instead of telling myself I have so much to do and not sitting down and scheduling the time to do it, I can move a deadline if I need to, depending on what it is. Usually it is the case that I have control over when it needs to be done by quote, unquote.
00:08:54
And to me, that is the beauty of entrepreneurship. And also it's a double edged sword, right? We don't have anybody else really dictating to us when something needs to be done. Now, for my services, I do have clients that are like, oh, I need to have this by this date. Can you help me with that?
00:09:14
And then it's up to me to say yes or no, and I can totally turn it down. I can say I don't think I'll have the capacity to have it done in the time frame that you need. And it's good for me to communicate when that is the case versus taking on something that I don't think I'm going to be able to get done for them and putting myself in a position where I'm going to be stressed out and overworked to get something done to make somebody else happy, I'm not doing that anymore. Yeah, I just want to think about what it means for me to be busy. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
00:09:49
Does it actually have to be such a binary good or bad judgment? And what can I say instead? Like, what should I say about the nature of my work besides whether or not I feel busy or I feel stressed or anxious about what kind of work needs to be done? You might think that being busy is good. If I'm busy, that means I've got a lot of clients to take care of, which means that I'm making a lot of money.
00:10:20
Or maybe you're like, I'm extremely busy with all of the administrative tasks that my business requires me to do, like marketing, like bookkeeping, like just the general operations of running a business, maybe managing employees. None of that is paid work, right? Nobody's paying you directly to do that work. That's just part of operating a business is doing those tasks. There's just not really a way you can get around it.
00:10:52
It has to be done. So it's either done by you or you hire it out or outsource it, but it's going to be done. So that's not work that you get paid to do. And maybe you're thinking, well, I'm super busy and I don't have time to actually bring in new clients or bring in new customers or new business. I don't have time to actually work on the client work that I do get paid for.
00:11:18
And so busyness might be a problem for you. Busyness might mean that you delay how often you get paid or whether you get paid on time. That's not really the case for me. Whenever I think about how busy I am, it's not usually associated with money. I don't connect busyness with like I'm making a lot of money or I'm too busy to do the work that's actually making me money.
00:11:44
I don't have that association. I associate busyness with my own levels of energy and my own ability to do work without overextending myself and also have time built in for rest and for personal stuff and just doing things that are not working. Yeah, I just don't have that connection to a monetary value with busyness that other people might have, as I've explained. But to me, whenever I say, oh, my gosh, I'm super busy, to me, that means that if I have a tank, that is my energy capacity. And it starts off the beginning of the week at full capacity by the end of a busy week for me.
00:12:30
I may not have had time to take to refill my energy tank, and therefore I have lower energy levels. And I'm thinking I'm going to have to buy back that energy by taking time off from work or not doing something fun or not going somewhere and staying home so that I can rest in order to fill that energy back up. So to me, it's not a monetary association but an energetic association. And I see myself as having to put so much energy towards the busyness and then not having enough energy for myself. So I don't want to operate that way.
00:13:11
I don't want to constantly give and give and give to my business and work through feeling tired or exhausted and put myself even further at like an energy deficit. I want to be able to schedule the time that I need to rest so that I can show up to my business when I'm scheduled to do work at full energy capacity and then I do the amount of work that I need to do without totally depleting my energy storage. So if you're kind of visualizing the tank analogy, you can kind of see where I'm going. I want to shift away from that. So that's going to be something that I am thinking about as we move into the new year.
00:13:53
And some of this starts with me readjusting my work schedule, which is kind of like what I talked about before, like adjusting my work hours and adjusting how many days a week I actually spend working, which work I do when there's like client work that I have to do that my clients pay me to do. And then there's the administrative work that I have to do to run and operate my business and to grow my business and keep everything paid and online. It might take some time. If you are starting a business, it might take you some time to figure all of that out and it's really a trial and error. Kind of like try something out, keep doing what works, change what doesn't work, but like isolating the variables.
00:14:43
So if you know about the scientific method at all, we want to start out with a hypothesis. We think that this is the case, this is the facts, and then we test it out. But we want to control which variable we're testing one at a time so we can see which variables actually have an impact on the results that we get. So your variables might be what days of the week you work, how many days of the week you work, what work you do on specific days, what work you do at specific times, whether or not that involves you communicating with other people or doing solo work, how many hours in a day do you work? Do you split up your time and give yourself a lot of breaks throughout the day?
00:15:33
How long are those breaks? All of these things can be variables for you figuring out the best way for you to work. And I don't think it's going to be the case that you will figure it out at any point in your business and then it will just never change again and that will always be what works for you. I don't think that's the case at all. I think it's going to be a constantly changing environment to adjust to your needs because as time goes on and we grow, our needs change, our bodies change, our minds change and our businesses change.
00:16:07
Like you're going to work completely differently when you're going solo versus if you have somebody working for you, like a contractor or an employee. All these things are going to change over time. But I think focusing on adjusting one variable at a time is the right way to go about it. It's the right way to figure out what's best for you and your business. If you're somebody that finds that you think or say a lot that you're just so busy and maybe you can't keep up, or maybe you're busy with tasks that aren't actually making you money, sit down and kind of evaluate what's coming up, why you're thinking that, why you're saying those things?
00:16:48
What are the actual factors involved? And analyzing that and evaluating that? And I'm going to be doing the same thing. I'm going to be evaluating why I have these thoughts about being so busy. This kind of like a model of a tank of energy that I am burning through and I would love to share with you kind of what my process is with that.
00:17:14
So I'll be doing that on the podcast. I'll be checking in and kind of letting you know where I'm going with that, like how things are going along, what variables I've been changing and what the results have been when I change them. If you want to work on this together with me, I think a great time to do that together would be on my virtual year end party, Fuck Off 2023. This is going to be a zoom party. It's on December 20 at 01:30 P.m.
00:17:41
Central Standard Time, and the registration fee for that is $69. So if you want to get registered for Fuck Off 2023, go to the link in the Show Notes or go to my website and you'll see it at the very top of my website right now. The registration link for that, by the way, you can totally deduct to the cost of your registration for Fuck Off 2023, so there's no excuse to not pay for it. And if you register for Fuck Off 2023, that will give you access to be a beta tester for Mind the Gap. Mind the Gap is my Entrepreneurial Bookkeeping course that I'm launching next year after tax season is over in 2024.
00:18:24
If you want to beta test that, that means you'll get access starting January 1 so a lot earlier than everybody else will get access. And then you'll also be invited to join in the community aspect of this work, which I am launching the community on February 1. And what else? Oh, that's right. As a beta tester, you get over 60% off the cost of Mind the Gap.
00:18:52
The beta testing offer is only available through December 31. And that's why Fuck Off 2023 is so perfect because not only do you get to claim your registration fees for that as a business expense, but that will allow you to also sign up for beta testing for Mind the Gap, which you get early access to, you get a huge freaking discount. You get access to the community starting February 1. I don't want you to be doing Entrepreneurial Bookkeeping or just running a business alone. And that's why I'm building a community and I want to teach you how to be more organized and how to run your business in line with your values.
00:19:30
That's what Mind the Gap is going to teach you. It's a self paced digital course. We're going to have audio lessons, video lessons, downloadable content where you'll get to kind of plug in and play with your own business numbers. And it's going to teach you my system and framework for doing bookkeeping and running a business. Get registered for Fuck Off 2023 at the link in the Show Notes.
00:19:51
And remember that if you are interested in being a guest on Money through Ease, I am accepting guest applications you can get on my email list and you'll see the links for that for the application. It is an application process because I will be reviewing and if I accept your application, then you'll be able to schedule time and we'll do an interview to be released on the podcast. So if you want to be a guest, check the show notes, get on my email list, make sure you sign up for Fuck Off 2023. This episode is coming out on December 1, so happy December, everybody. 2023 is almost over, and let's tell it to Fuck Off.
00:20:30
Have a great weekend.