EP 33: The Dis-Ease of Busy-ness - Managing an Overloaded Schedule

Our mission is to give you tools and strategies that will help you move from being stressed to feeling your best.

Busy-ness is not a badge of honor, even though society thinks that busy equals successful. Check out this episode for helpful tips and tools for creating a schedule that is manageable.

Co-hosts Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are certified HeartMath® Trainers, and certified stress educators, who are skilled at helping people discover the power of living form the heart.  To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in Canada, click here. To take the Stress and Wellbeing Assessment in the US, click here. 

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Barb Fletcher, Deb Timmerman

Deb Timmerman  00:00

You're listening to the Less Stress in Life podcast. Your hosts, Deb Timmerman and Barb Fletcher are on a mission to help individuals and organizations manage stress and change. Together, they bring you real conversations, inspirational stories, and strategies to help move you from being stressed to feeling your best.

Barb Fletcher  00:23

Hello, everyone. I'm Barb Fletcher Welcome to our series of 52 weeks of practical tools for less stress in life. This is episode 33.

Deb Timmerman  00:34

I'm Deb Timmerman. Our goal is to give you tools and strategies that help you move from being stressed to feeling your best. And today we're going to talk about the disease of busyness. In our culture, busyness implies that we have value and social status. Researchers from Columbia Business School have found that people believe that someone has a higher status, and more money, when they're constantly working or busy.  Being busy is become the norm. We got a forced break from that busyness when the pandemic hit, but now as we return to pre pandemic, normal, the pace has increased, and our schedules have picked right back up from where they were before the pandemic and that is an overload. It's a problem.

Barb Fletcher  01:22

It sure is. And I spoke recently with someone who talked about having workloads that previously were Christmas workloads but are now the norm. And so that's a challenge along with all of the other things that might have happened to us out over the last couple of years. What do you think are some of the causes of this extreme busyness that we're feeling?

Deb Timmerman  01:49

When you talk about Christmas loads, are you saying that they were only busy during the holiday time? And now it's become the normal?

Barb Fletcher  01:59

For sure they do. They had a peak workload, you know, a number of businesses gear up for Christmas, and then you're back down. But this happened to be a delivery company, who was delivering parcels, and so when we typically used to go and pick up our goods in the store, we now order many of them online. So, what used to be a Christmas workload level is now January, February, March, April, May, June, all the way through till December.

Deb Timmerman  02:31

Yeah, and I think that speaks back to your question about what some of the causes are. Work demands have changed for everybody, because nearly every employer is understaffed today. I don't know about your province, but in my area, there are need help signs or help wanted signs everywhere and waiting for food or waiting in line at the store, its become the norm. And it's added a lot of extra pressure to pupils already squished schedules.

Barb Fletcher  03:04

The pressure is both on the person delivering the service and, on the person, receiving. I recently would travelled a bit and I know that the customer service that I had come to expect in the past, doesn't exist the same way anymore. And I'm needing to dig deep for more patience when post pandemic because we're still living with it. But at this post period of energy depletion. Don't have patients left again.

Deb Timmerman  03:37

Yeah. And I think that speaks to the next point. And that is that school schedules that we used to have for our children, we pack them off, we sent them to school, that's changed a little bit these days. Parents would get a break in the summer, because they didn't have their kids home all winter. You know, I remember sending my kids off to school in September going, oh my gosh, I'm so glad schools back in order and then the following May I would be so glad School's out, because there is a certain rhythm or schedule that comes with that school day, that changed a little bit for folks, while the kids were off and not going to school. And some of them even would return to school, and then they would be home again, because there was an exposure or something. So that structure of school schedule, we can't plan on so much anymore. It's changed a little.

Barb Fletcher  04:35

Yeah, and I think the expectations on parents and families have changed and with this unpredictability, is really it's all about our ability to be flexible, and as our resilience gets depleted, those changes become more and more difficult for people to accept, and then they begin to show up in behaviors and things that aren't always as comfortable.

Deb Timmerman  05:08

So, I'm also starting to see many people out and about, and they're posting a lot of social gatherings on social media and that is great. But some folks that I'm working with are saying my schedule is too much. I feel obligated to go to the social events, because I haven't seen these people or connected with these people in a long time, but they're realizing that it's too much in a week or a month for them to navigate all the other changes, plus do all these external activities. I had a week like that last week, I'm really good at creating my schedule so that it works for me, and I do a lot of future planning so that I'm not overloaded, but last week was one of those weeks where I was gone every night of the week. Two of those were family things i golf with my husband on Mondays, which I really enjoy. And on Wednesday, we took our grandkids to the local arcade and amusement place as a summer treat before they go back to school. The other three nights, I had work events, and by Friday, I was whooped. Even though I did a great job of managing that, I still was tired, because it was like 100 degrees here last week, super-hot. So that was a factor that I didn't plan on, and it made those external events harder because they were outside. So, a lot of my energy that I would have been able to preserve, got kicked to the curb, because I don't do well when it's that hot, and it was super humid. So, it was exhausting.

Barb Fletcher  06:43

It's all those variables. And I think, for some of us, a lot of outside activities are very draining to us. We need that alone time. We need that space, that separation to recharge and although for the last couple of years, we would have thought that we should be well charged. As we move into this new world. I'm not sure we're as resilient. We haven't gathered as much resiliency as we would like over the last couple of years to be able to jump back into things.

Deb Timmerman  07:14

I think that there were other things taking our energy during that time, the fear of getting sick, navigating family issues, maybe homeschooling all of those things, that were an extra burden that took the place of those external events that we would do, or social things. But we didn't really have a chance to get our batteries back up and recharge.

Barb Fletcher  07:38

And that's one of the important things that I like to share with people is just because we're home, and maybe we're separated and we're relaxing, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're recharging our battery. It may have stopped the drain. But if we want to really recharge, we've got to be purposeful for it.

Deb Timmerman  07:59

Amen to that. What tips do you have for managing schedules? What do you do to manage your scheduling chaos?

Barb Fletcher  08:09

Well, I use a calendar. I would say that I've been buffeted around a bit because I haven't necessarily been as good at it. When I have a time when there's a lot of opportunity to meet and connect with people, I've been allowing them just to book some time in my calendar. Sometimes it gets booked the night before and I get up the next morning, and what I thought was going to be my day turns out to be something quite different. And so I need to be more purposeful about booking blocks and creating space to do that recharge after because I find myself sometimes at the end of the week, not having anything left as I roll into the weekend. I used to try and keep Friday sacred and somehow that's been a lost cause because we either have a holiday on a Monday or something goes sideways, and I allow things to creep in. But it's really for me it is that awareness and being purposeful. How about you?

Deb Timmerman  09:16

I am really good at blocking out my schedule. I have to be. I live 45 minutes from the bigger town that we're in, so I have to block in travel time to and from if I'm going there. So I do that. And also, if I hand out a Calendly link for someone, I go in and check when can I see that person where it's not going to be an issue for me in terms of being over scheduled? I also will go in and put those blocks in like I just time block out certain parts of my schedule, where if I know I have some office work to do. I put that in there. So, like someone reached out yesterday, I'm not meeting them until next Thursday. So, I don't necessarily put that in my calendar, unless I have big gaps, which that doesn't happen so much anymore, now that we're open. I have a combination of people that I see online and some folks that I see in person, and I do the traveling for them, so that it's not more stressful for them to get to me. That's been a huge help and prevention strategy from the overscheduling piece.

Barb Fletcher  10:29

And we know that some of that discipline means that when we're able to show up for somebody who's experiencing stress, we're bringing our best self to them. And it's not that, you know, we've got distractions and other things going on. So that's, you know, that's part of our need to be really focused on this.

Deb Timmerman  10:53

So, I learned something really great from Lisa Larter. So, both of us had been involved in her accelerate programs before, and she's a master at scheduled blocking. So, I adopted some of the strategies from her. And I usually work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, outside. Friday morning, I reserve, I work for half a day, on Fridays. Friday, I reserve basically for catch up and things that I didn't get done - communications, and Monday's my planning day, I block out time in the morning, you and I meet every Monday at 10 to talk about what we're going to do on the podcast. So those things are scheduled and blacked out. And I usually see my online clients on Mondays so that I'm not in that scheduling snafu where I have to travel and I have to hurry up and get back here for the next session, I just find that that works out really well for me. And I also have a summer and a winter schedule. So, my husband plays cards in the winter on Tuesday nights, and he golf on Tuesday nights. So that's the night that I work late. And in my Calendly, I have it set up that that's my late night. So, I try to look at some of our natural family habits and plan my schedule around that and I've been doing this now for four or five years, and I haven't always been that good. I think what you have to do is pick one thing and start and then see how that works and then keep evolving that schedule, but don't stay stuck and do nothing.

Barb Fletcher  12:26

So, we have control over our schedules. Now there are people who are employed by others, and maybe are going out to work or maybe they're in a combination of work from home and now they're being requested to come back to work. So, what do people do if their boss uses the clock to manage them?

Deb Timmerman  12:56

Well, I think that you have to recognize that stuff flows downhill. Typically, that's about your boss's need to control and not about you and sometimes we take that very personally, and we feel like our boss doesn't trust our work or whatever. That's not always true. You have to really change the way you look at that situation and regulate yourself so that you don't get caught up in that, "Oh, my gosh!" And then when you're in a space that you can have a good conversation with your boss, you have to ask what that's all about.

Barb Fletcher  13:32

Yeah. And it's really about finding out what is the outcome that they're looking for? I remember, early on in my career, I had a successful woman who was influencing promotions with within the employment opportunity where I was, and one of the things she used to do, what she used to take note of who came early because we had to sign in and who signed out late, because for her the measure of someone's commitment was how many hours that they had on site.  I think that whole notion has been turned upside down now, because we know people working from home who might have worked eight to four or eight to 430. Now maybe sit in their chair at 730. And maybe at 815, they put a load of laundry and they're back in their chair, two or three minutes later. And so, the workday doesn't look quite the same, yet. The production line might even be greater than it might have been before this change.

Deb Timmerman  14:45

I worked with a couple of folks who had bosses like that, and they used a task list. So, the boss would let them know what their goals were for the day or week, what needed to happen. and they would make task lists, and when they finished those things, they would just go in and check those off. And that was a method by which they could communicate and so that served that purpose. So, I think there are lots of tools that you can use, if you can figure out what is the outcome that they really want you to have, so that you can have that reporting or that accountability with their oversight, but not feel like you're burdened and bogged down with their every move checking on you.

Barb Fletcher  15:33

So I guess we've talked a little bit about what stress looks like us being self-employed, and then when the same for an employer, it doesn't matter. You know, if you're listening into this podcast, whether you're self-employed or employed by somebody else, we have a call to action for you for next week. What we really like you to do is pay attention to how much you're packing into your day and your week. And it's not necessarily just work, it may be family activities, it could be extracurricular activities, and how are you feeling about that? Are you feeling like your schedule might be a little overloaded? Are you taking enough time to recharge your batteries so that you have enough energy to get everything done, and want to remind people that we're in control, we get to decide to a large degree, you know, if we're working for somebody else, we're working eight hours a day, there's still 16 left that we're scheduling in somehow. So, take back your control, figure out whether or not the things that you're doing how you're spending your time are actually adding energy to you, or depleting you.

Deb Timmerman  16:50

I would only add to that, make sure that you're using your partner and communicating schedules well between each other and see what you can delegate and negotiate between the two of you to take off your plate. So, I no longer do the Costco runs because my husband goes into the city several times a week to do work and we've managed to work out a system where I make a list, and when he goes, he will pick those things up. Crazy as those sounds, for us that saves us about two and a half hours of not having to make that extra trip. So sometimes those little, tiny things that we can buddy with each other when we're in that location are big, huge savers for us. So, look at what else you can do.

Barb Fletcher  17:35

And those things that are creating stress are kind of running in the background. So, when we can turn those off, we're going to feel instant relief. So, until next time, have a great week.

Deb Timmerman  17:52

Less stress and like is possible. If you're new to this kind of thinking and would like to explore what's possible for you. We'd love to connect. You can reach us through our website at less stress in life.com. That's less stress in life.com