In today's episode of The Career Confidence Podcast, we are talking about how we all need to stop wearing busy as a badge of honour.

Key Takeaways:

• The prevalence of people thinking it's a good thing to wear busy as a badge of honour.
• Recognising the importance of boundaries for effective time management.
• The importance of saying no to non-essential commitments.
• Understanding individual capacity for work is crucial in determining appropriate levels of busyness.
• Scheduling breaks between tasks can significantly alleviate feelings of stress and enhance productivity.
• Acknowledge that doing less can lead to better quality work and a more fulfilling life.

About Nicola Semple

I help people to build their career confidence and achieve their career goals.

You can book a free no-obligation chat about how I can support you to achieve your career goals: https://nicolasemple.com/chat

You can get my free guide "Back Yourself: Your 7 Step Plan to Build Confidence and Achieve Your Career Goals": https://nicolasemple.com/backyourself

You can buy my book The Career Confidence Toolkit: Take Control of Your Career and Fulfil Your Potential: https://nicolasemple.com/book

Connect with me on Linked In to carry on the conversation: https://linkedin.com/in/iamnicolasemple

A new episode of The Career Confidence Podcast is released every second Friday. Hit the subscribe button and you will be the first to know when a new episode goes live.

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Hello and welcome to the Career Confidence Podcast where we explore how you can build your career with confidence in this ever changing world.

Hi, I'm your host Nicola Semple, a career and confidence coach and author of the Career Confidence Toolkit.

Welcome back to the third and final of our summer sessions.

Our summer sessions are where you get the opportunity to listen to some gold dust from the Career Confidence Content archive and I get a much needed break from recording over the holiday period.

The episode I've chosen for us to revisit today is all about how to stop wearing busy as a badge of honour.

We're approaching the end of summer and we're starting to get some of that September back to school energy.

It's without a doubt my favorite time of year, but I also find it to be an incredibly busy time of year.

Lots of projects and tasks have been put on hold over the summer while people are away and then September hits and there is always so much to do and then for a lot of people there is the additional pressure of hitting milestones before Christmas or meeting year end deadlines.

So the last third of the year is a really busy time, but that doesn't mean that you need to wear busy as a badge of honour.

This felt like a really timely opportunity to share some tips around setting boundaries, learning to say no, and getting very clear in your priorities.

Have a listen for yourself and feel free to drop me an email nicolaikolasemple.com to let me know which of these tips you're going to take on board and implement for yourself.

Today we're going to be talking about busyness and more specifically how to stop wearing busy as a badge of honour.

I will hold my hands up and admit that I am a self confessed recovering busy bee.

There was a point in time where I felt as though I had to do all the things I had to have all the plates spinning.

I had to single handedly keep everything going and if I wasn't busy constantly on top of things, then my life would come crashing down round about me.

I've come to the realization over the past couple of years that life doesn't need to be like that and I'm enjoying a much gentler pace of life where I'm not trying to cram so much in.

As a result, I'm being much more effective with my work.

I'm also building deeper connection with clients and collaborators because I'm taking the time to get to know them and to nurture those relationships rather than cracking on and hammering through the to do list.

What I find interesting is that as a society, we seem to have got ourselves to a point where busy has become a badge of honour.

If you join a zoom call and you're having some chit chat before the meeting starts, people will generally ask, oh, how are you?

And more often than not, the reply will be something along the lines of oh, good, good, but busy.

At which point people nod in agreement and concur that they too are good but busy.

Being busy has become a self fulfilling prophecy because everybody else is busy.

It's just the way that life is.

And if everybody else is busy, then we think we should be busy as well.

We fill up our diaries with meetings, we take on additional responsibilities because everybody else is, so we should do that too.

And we keep ourselves really, really busy.

We take on more, we commit to more.

And I think there's a real mismatch between what we expect from ourselves and what is actually achievable.

Not just what's achievable.

We need to consider the impact that our constant busyness has on the quality of the work that we produce and the decisions that we make.

You've probably seen a quote floating around the Internet about how we all have the same number of hours in the day as Beyonce.

The implication being, look at what Beyonce has been able to achieve.

You've got the same number of hours in the day as Beyonce.

You should be able to achieve that level of success as well.

I'm afraid I call bullshit on this one.

We are not all Beyonce.

We don't all have the support and the infrastructure that she's got in place.

The majority of us are just normal human beings doing the best we can with what we've got.

And I think we set ourselves some truly high expectations of what we should be doing in the time that we've got available to us.

Often those expectations aren't achievable and we are expecting way too much of ourselves.

So the first thing I want to encourage you to do if you are feeling busy all the time, is to take a step back and recognize why it's important that things change.

All of the work that I do is to help professional women gain confidence and clarity so they can create an incredible career they excel in and still have time to have a life outside of work.

In order to create that incredible career, sometimes you need to decide to do less rather than more.

And certainly if you want to have time to have a life outside of work, you definitely need to decide to do less rather than more.

I don't want you to Have a lifestyle that leaves you completely frazzled, where you commit to too many things and take on too much, where you have got more responsibility than one person really should have.

So the first step is just acknowledging and recognizing that you don't want to keep going with the busyness and that you want to make a change.

The next thing I always encourage people to do is to get super clear on where it is that they do want to spend their time.

In the early episodes of the Career Confidence Podcast, we talked about creating your own definition of career success and setting goals that you actually want to stick to.

I'll put a link to these episodes in the show notes so that you can go back and have a listen again.

When you've got that clarity, you can then take ownership of the things that you have chosen to focus on and embrace the fact that you've chosen to spend time on your priorities.

It's also important that you understand and accept the level of busyness that is right for you.

We've all got a different capacity as to what we can actually take on within one day.

What I can do within a day is not what you can do within a day, and it's not what your team members can do within a day.

Within the scope of a day, we each have different capacity levels.

Getting to know yourself and understanding what is the right level of busyness for you can be a game changer.

Some people thrive on having a jam packed day.

They need the pressure and the adrenaline to help them perform at their best.

Other people need to take things at a slower pace, get to know what's right for you and when you know what's right for you and people say, oh, I'm so busy, you'll be less tempted to join in and feel that you too need to be so busy or that you're not doing enough because you're comparing yourself to what other people have chosen to take on or at least allowed themselves to take on.

A very practical tip that can make a huge difference to how busy you feel is is scheduling your time to get things done and creating breaks and spaces in your diary.

Some people call it white space.

It's essentially creating little blocks of time that you can block out within your diary that just give you a breathing space.

If you've got lots of meetings, it's as simple as making sure you leave yourself 5 to 10 minutes between meetings so that you're not going straight from one to another, which is much more likely to leave you feeling busy, stressed and overwhelmed.

Give yourself five minutes to Sit in the car before you go in to meet a client or before you join a zoom call.

That can be enough just to give you that opportunity to collect your thoughts, get ready for your next conversation.

You'll be better prepared and therefore likely to have a better quality of conversation and contribution.

Scheduling these short breaks can go a long way to help reduce that feeling of constant busyness.

Now, if you're going to get serious about cutting back on your levels of busyness, then you need to learn to say no.

We find it difficult to say no for a whole variety of reasons, and I'm going to record an episode specifically on this topic because I know it's something that people struggle with.

But first of all, you do need to learn to say no to the things that you don't want to do.

If you don't want to do it and it's not adding value, then you can't let it take up time in your life.

But I also want to encourage you to learn to say no to the things that you do want to do so that you have space and time for the things that matter.

And that's hard.

There may be many, many, many things that you do want to do, but you can't do them all.

You need to be super intentional about the things that matter to you.

Learn to say no to some of those things that you do want to do, because what that will do is free up your time to focus on the things that are super important to you.

By accepting you can't do everything even if you want to, you can reduce that feeling of obligation, that feeling of needing to do all the things.

And when you're able to do that, you can then reduce that feeling of busyness and of overwhelm.

If you feel like you've been wearing busy as a badge of honour and would like some support streamlining your life so that you're focusing on the things that really matter to you.

Then send an email to nicolaikolasimple.com and we can arrange a time for a no obligation chat.

Sometimes talking things through with an objective person can make a massive difference.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you've enjoyed the episode, do make sure you subscribe and share with anybody that you know that would benefit from taking a breather and slowing down.

Thanks again for listening and I'll talk to you again next week.

Bye for now.