Ep 142: The 3 Sneakiest Time-Wasters That Keep You Overworking
Episode Summary
Are you constantly working but still feel like you're getting nowhere fast?
Even the most driven women entrepreneurs fall into patterns that look like productivity but unnecessarily drain your time. If you’ve ever wondered why you’re so busy, this episode will open your eyes.
In this episode, you will:
Discover the hidden habits that are keeping you stuck in overwork, and how to break free for good.
Learn to reclaim hours of your time without sacrificing results.
Uncover the sneaky productivity killer that could be costing you hours every week without you even realizing it.
Listen now to reclaim hours of your week and unlock the mindset shifts that let you work less while achieving more.
Episodes Mentioned:
Ep 137: How to Easily Destress Without Changing Anything in Your Business
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This podcast dives into the challenges of leadership, decision making, and delegation, helping women business owners and mompreneurs overcome overwhelm, decision fatigue, and the guilt of working less. Learn to build powerful habits, embrace smarter working, and master time management by streamlining tasks, implementing business systems, and even prioritising self-care. We explore efficiency, productivity, and automation to create passive income, reduce overworking, and finally take time off—without the fear or shame. Say goodbye to imposter syndrome and people pleasing while running a small business: It's time to shift your mindset, reclaim your work-life balance, and thrive!
Full Episode Transcript:
Jenna Harrison: [00:00:00] If you feel like you're working harder than ever with no end in sight anytime soon. This episode reveals the three biggest time sucks that make your hours vanish, and how to reclaim your time while achieving better results. Welcome to the show that helps women entrepreneurs run profitable, meaningful businesses in just three days a week without stress, guilt, or sacrificing growth.
I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, sharing practical strategies, mindset, hacks, and even some woo, to help you work smarter, lead boldly and find true balance. Let's dive in. Welcome. Welcome to the three day Work Week. If you've ever felt like no matter how much you work, there's always more like you're running on a treadmill that just won't slow down.
You are in the right place today. I wanna let you in on a little secret. Most of the time you're spending in your business isn't actually moving the needle, and that's not your fault. [00:01:00] You've been conditioned to believe that hard work equals success. But what if that's not the full story? In today's episode, we are gonna talk about the three biggest time wasters that keep entrepreneurs overworking.
You will discover the hidden habits that are keeping you stuck in overwork, and how to break free for good. Learn to reclaim hours of your time without sacrificing results. And uncover the sneaky productivity killer that could be costing you hours every week without you even realizing it. But before we get into that, here's something interesting that you must know.
The people who struggle the most with these time-wasters, they're often the most ambitious, the most driven, the most capable entrepreneurs. Does it sound familiar? It did for me. If it does for you, I am so excited for you to kick these time wasters to the side [00:02:00] and start improving your business outcomes because of it.
Let's dive in. Our first time waster is context switching. It's like the invisible time drain. Context switching is what happens when you constantly shift between tasks, answering emails, checking in with a team member, bouncing to social media, and then trying to get back to writing that sales page. Or maybe you have a client call and then 45 minutes of work time, but then another client call.
But that time between isn't enough to really do much. Each time you switch, your brain takes time to recalibrate. And studies show that this can reduce productivity by up to 40%. And here's the kicker. When you are switching contexts all day, your brain is working overtime, but you don't actually feel like you've accomplished much.
Have you ever had one of those days where you were busy all day, but [00:03:00] somehow nothing got done? That's context-switching at play. You would see completely different outcomes if you batched your client calls, set boundaries and timetables for checking emails and social media, and actually gave yourself some focus time to work on your business rather than in it.
But one thing that keeps us from doing that though is that a lot of people think they need to be responsive to be a good leader or to be successful. But if they don't check in or respond to every request, or every opportunity or every issue, things will fall apart. But actually, what makes you a strong leader is protecting your time so you can make those high-level decisions that move the business forward.
Hard work isn't the secret to success. Working on the right things is. A study from the University of California Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain full [00:04:00] focus after a distraction. Think about that. That means every time you glance at your email or check a notification, you're losing almost half an hour of deep work.
No wonder it feels like nothing gets done. And if you're telling yourself, oh, no, no, no, no, I get back into it just fine. Just think about what it would've been like if you had continued with the deep work. You don't even know because you switch context. What great insight would've come to you? And as we all know, one great insight can bring in loads of cash, change the direction of our business, or just all of a sudden make everything feel happy and peaceful.
Just a quick aside, you can also use this information about the 20 minutes to really motivate yourself with a task that you don't feel like doing, because now you know you won't be fully engaged, most likely [00:05:00] until about 20 or so minutes in. So I recommend telling yourself, I'll just work on this for 20 minutes.
That's all. And then chances are, once that time has elapsed, you'll actually be engrossed or in such a good flow that you won't wanna stop. Just try it out. But back to context switching. Let me tell you, once you have experienced the benefits that come from batching or reducing this context, switching, you can't unsee it ever again.
Over the last week, I have been contact switching so much because. Our new house has some issues in it that are keeping us from actually moving in. Little things like no hot water. And so since I'm the Spanish speaker in the family, I've been working out of that house as workers and installation. People come in and out and they've been giving me updates and asking questions.
So I'm very aware now of what it's costing me, but it wasn't always that way. [00:06:00] I used to be in my inbox and messages all day thinking that that was productive. But when I stepped back, I realized I was treating the requests from others like my to-do list instead of focusing on the things that actually would grow my business.
Once I implemented structured work blocks and batch production, I was able to cut back my work hours and increase my revenue. That shift alone was a game-changer for me. And let's take the example of Bill Gates. He's known for his intense focus and the ability to work really deeply on problems. In his early Microsoft days, he realized that constantly being interrupted and multitasking was really slowing him down.
So to combat this, he started implementing think tweaks where he would isolate himself in a cabin for a full week with no distractions, just books, notes, and time to think. These weeks led to some of Microsoft's [00:07:00] biggest innovations. One of those was the company's pivot to the Internet in 1995. Isn't that crazy?
Things we take for granted now, used to be visionary, but apparently Gates read a paper predicting the massive impact of the internet, and then he immediately wrote a now famous memo called the Internet Tidal Wave, which completely shifted Microsoft's Strategy. It led to the creation of Internet Explorer and Microsoft's pivot towards all of their web-based technology, and those are moves that really help the company stay competitive in that evolving digital space.
This is a perfect example of how eliminating context-switching and creating focused time for deep work can lead to game-changing results. So imagine how your business might change if you had hours of focused high-level work every day, or a [00:08:00] day per week, or a week per month. What could you create? How much smoother would everything run?
You'd be showing up, more present, more strategic, and feeling in control instead of constantly reacting. You'd probably be a lot kinder to yourself and everyone around you too. That is what's possible when you break the cycle of context switching. But let's talk about the second time waster. And this is really the mental time waster.
It's ruminating. This is one of the sneakiest ways that we waste time without even realizing it. It's when you get stuck overthinking decisions, replaying past conversations, or second-guessing yourself. You're technically not working, but your brain is still burning energy like you are. And usually, my clients have no idea how much time they're spending in this [00:09:00] category until we do some sort of time audit.
Or until they're able to see kind of a before and after where they look in the past and realize, oh my gosh, in the old days this would've been something that took me a week to get over and now I just processed it and moved on and I'm fully engaged in my work again. Now you might think that thinking through every possibility makes you a better business owner.
Maybe you avoid pitfalls. You avoid burning bridges. The truth is successful entrepreneurs make decisions quickly and with confidence because they trust themselves to course correct if needed. So often the things that my clients are most worried about are actually their zones of genius. I'm like, you of all people should be the least worried about messing up in that way.
You've already done the learning around that. You've put in the hours, you're good [00:10:00] overthinking, just keeps you stuck. So the difference between stuck entrepreneurs and thriving ones, it's just the ability to move fast, trust themselves, and stop overthinking. One of my clients had really spent years overthinking.
She had plateaued in her business and she kept just going around and around doing the same things. For every new initiative that occurred to her, she would talk herself out of it, or she'd compile so many good ones that she just couldn't choose which ones she should really focus on. Once we worked together, she realized that that had cost her years of higher sales.
We implemented a simple filter to help her prioritize and constrain. Within a couple of months, she implemented a new launch that blew past even her highest goal for her business, just because she [00:11:00] stopped hesitating. I mean, Oprah Winfrey has spoken openly about how she used to overthink and second guess herself, particularly in the early days of her career.
But once she embraced the philosophy of trusting her intuition and making decisions quickly. She saw an exponential rise in her success. She often says doubt means don't. Meaning. If she starts ruminating over a decision, she recognizes it as a sign to step back, trust herself, and move forward decisively.
And that's a great idea because research from the University of Michigan found that excessive rumination increases stress and anxiety, making decision-making even harder. Your brain is literally draining energy on thoughts that aren't moving you forward. Learning to break that cycle is key to freeing up mental bandwidth and actually enjoying your life If you haven't already, I recommend you listen to my podcast, episode [00:12:00] number 1 37.
We're gonna link to that for your convenience, and it's called How to De-Stress without Changing Anything in Your Business. Because picture what it would be like to move through your days, feeling calm and in complete confidence to make decisions quickly. Take action without holding back, and trust that you've got this.
No more losing time and energy to self-doubt. Imagine if things didn't feel like such a big deal to you. No more losing sleep because you're lying awake, replaying the day's conversations. That's the kind of clarity and freedom that's waiting for you when you stop overthinking. You ready for our third time oyster?
It is being too in the weeds instead of, which is usually about perfectionism, I'll say, which often shows up as perfectionism, spending hours tweaking a social media post or redoing a memo 10 times or [00:13:00] micromanaging your team because no one does it quite like you do. Studies from Stanford show that perfectionists often experience lower productivity because their fear of making mistakes leads to procrastination and to overworking.
Letting go of perfectionism actually makes you more effective, but we stick with it because most entrepreneurs think their attention to detail is a strength. I mean, after all, it helped you get through school and helped you prove yourself as a good worker, right? And so now it would really mess with our sense of self to churn out something that's substandard.
But the real power move, it's knowing we are good enough is actually good enough. I. Moving on, because perfectionism isn't usually really about high standards. It's about fear. Fear of being judged, fear of failure, fear of letting go, [00:14:00] fear of giving up control. For me, this showed up big time when I was creating my first website.
One year y'all, one year tweaking, rethinking, rewriting. No, that's not exactly what my business is about. Nope, that's not exactly how I wanna say it. I wanted it to be perfect before I told the world that I was in business, especially before I told my old college friends that I was in business. But perfectionism cost me a year of business when I could have been out there doing things that would give me the specific types of clarity that I desperately needed.
Now I've pivoted my business several times and each time I spent a couple of hours rewriting the webpage and that's it. Hit publish. Done. So basically I've made multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars on web pages that were draft versions of [00:15:00] what I currently have. It's time for you to create some really lucrative drafts.
I think Jeff Bezos's story is one that we can all learn from. He built Amazon with a mindset of good enough to launch, then iterated early on, he realized that trying to make everything perfect was going to slow their growth. So instead of obsessing over every detail, he encouraged this 70% rule, which is if you have at least 70% of the information needed, make the decision and move forward.
So you'll notice failures built into this model because it's impossible to make the quote-unquote correct moves a hundred percent of the time with only 70% of the information. That's the uncomfortable truth that people at Amazon have to learn to tolerate both of themselves and with the people that work for them and of their bosses too, right?
Tolerate their [00:16:00] mistakes. But this willingness to let go of perfectionism allowed Amazon to scale quickly and dominate e-commerce. So what if you trusted yourself to move fast, to create, to launch, and let things be imperfect and still wildly successful without guild that you're doing something wrong for that, or that you don't really deserve it because of that?
Imagine the freedom of believing that your 80% is still 100% effective. You don't have to overwork for success. You can let go of perfectionism and watch your business grow. How much more relaxed would that make you feel? What would you do with all of your extra time? That is the life. Those are the kinds of champagne problems that you create when you step out of the weeds and into your full potential.
So to recap, if you want to [00:17:00] stop overworking and start making your time actually work for you, I. Start paying attention to where you are. Contact switching, jumping between tasks and losing hours of productivity or ruminating, getting stuck in your head instead of taking action or getting lost in the details and the busy work.
Spending too much time perfecting or obsessing instead of progressing. Recognizing these patterns is the first step. But if you want real transformation, if you wanna shift from knowing this to actually living it, that is where I can help inside my programs. I work with entrepreneurs not only to create better workflows and priorities, but to rewire the habits and beliefs that created overwork in the first place so they can scale their businesses without scaling their work hours.
If you found this episode helpful, hit subscribe and share it with a friend who needs to hear it. [00:18:00] Let's redefine success together because most of our world stays stuck in the habits that keep them overworking, but by training your brain to think in uncommon ways, you gain an edge that unlocks a whole new level of impact and possibility.
Thanks for being here. Let's talk again on Tuesday.
Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the clarity-first strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit the uncommon way.com. See you next time.
