Maximizing Productivity and Achieving Work-Life Balance with Brie DeLisi Zoller

Our lives have been impacted by many innovative technologies, but we often struggle to find the time to incorporate them into our routines. Although it may seem counterintuitive, working around the clock does not necessarily lead to increased productivity. In fact, it can lead to stress and burnout, which can have a negative impact on the health of a business and yourself. In this episode, Brie Z Operations Founder Brie DeLisi Zoller shares her insights on time management in both the workplace and personal life. She highlights the significance of recognizing tasks that are beneficial to our work and discarding those that are not. Brie also stresses the importance of taking breaks, including spending time outdoors activities and daylight hours. Tune in to learn from Brie's expertise in time management and how it can improve your productivity and well-being. --- Listen to the podcast here: Maximizing Productivity and Achieving Work-Life Balance with Brie DeLisi Zoller Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve had a lot of disruptive technology come into our lives in recent times and we also have a lot of expectations placed upon ourselves and one of the things that I’ve heard quite frequently is, “I don’t have time for this,” and sometimes that’s a proxy for, “I don’t have energy for this.” My guest today, Brie Zoller of Brie Z Operations, helps people prioritize what’s really meaningful, what you should be doing with your time, and maybe get rid of some of the things that just really aren’t delivering value. --- Brie, welcome to the program. Thank you. So what are you observing with people’s time management skills in the setting of 2020s Western culture? And I could be speaking about this particularly as a woman and working mostly with women is that fill ourselves to the max. If I see a possible free half hour in my schedule and somebody asks for that half hour, I’m going to give it to them. I have several peers and clients who do the same exact thing. We just are an on-demand society. We need to meet with people, we need to meet with them now, we need to give them that conversation, we need to just kind of overload ourselves. And then not only that but just outside of how we’re actually managing our time, on the flip side of that, we then fill our time because we think we have to. So, even if we don’t actually have anything we need to do with that free half hour block, we’re going to find something to do with that half hour, if that means scrolling on our phone or doing extra work instead of just giving that time back to ourselves. Now, is this playing to this idea of productivity guilt? Oh. I love — that’s such a great term because of fighting that for myself personally right now. I think absolutely there’s — if you have the time, you should be using it. That’s this whole thing that we’ve built for ourselves if you need to be working this at a minimum 40-hour workweek and that’s if you’re lucky with a lot of folks. There are other folks who got the 60-, 70-hour weeks that are almost glorified, like you are working at this top huge firm and, “How many hours did you work last week?” “Well, I got 60.” “Oh, well, I got 65.” It’s almost glorified that you should be so then when you’re not, there’s this whole mindset of like, “I’m doing something wrong.” And I experienced that when I was starting my business as well. I would talk to fellow small business owners who would be saying like, “Oh, man, I did 50 hours last week, 30 of them were business development hours,” and I’m looking at my own schedule and going like, “Oh, man, I only did 10 hours of business development last week, I must be doing something wrong.” And that’s something I observed in what I refer to as the 20th century or old school work culture where there seems to be a strong connection with number of hours. I know this is going to sound a little crass but that the baby boomer generation to me seemed to pride themselves in, “I work this many long hours.” Do you have any idea where that came from? Where this idea that the value I’m producing or my value in life, my value as a human being is correlated to the number of hours I actually spend on the job. I would say that’s industry. That has come up through industry of when we started exchanging money for the work that we’re doing, the work that we’re producing. Once we started that exchange, that turned into time is literally money and we want and we’re basing value on how much money we have. That’s how it came about, in my opinion. I have no actual factual data behind that. The feminist in me says that’s also a white male supremacist creation as well. My parents are of the baby boomer generation and that’s something that they’ve ingrained in me and me now looking at my — I aim for 25 hours of work a week and I can talk about that a little bit later on but — Sounds awesome. I feel so guilty about that on a regular basis and I feel like I am doing something wrong by only doing that. When you’re doing quote-unquote “nothing,” and I’m putting this in quotes because doing nothing is not often really doing nothing but when you are doing nothing, when you find yourself with that empty half an hour, if it were to happen and you don’t pull your computer out, you don’t scroll, you don’t do anything, what goes on through your head? Is there some sort of mental process where something in your head is telling you like, “Oh, my God, I’m doing nothing. I’m gonna regret this half hour. Two days from now I’m gonna be swamped and this half hour is gonna —” you know, something like that, yeah. It’s almost not even a thought process. Well, and I know it is a thought process, it just happens so fast that I don’t even think of that of, “There is something I could be doing. I could be problem solving with this half hour. I’ve got a load of laundry I could be doing if I’ve got nothing to do for work.” My checklist of things that need to be done is bottomless. I think that’s something that happens particularly when you become a parent is now you’ve got an endless checklist of things that can be done and we’ve placed this pressure on ourselves societally to make sure to get as much of that checklist checked off as possible. I don’t even allow the thought process to happen, it’s just like, “Time, go do something.” Feel like it’s been within the past five years that people have been placing more interest in ideas such as meditation, the mindfulness, putting aside time, is this, in your view, a good way to set aside time or is this also kind of adding something to a task list, like even your brain’s downtime is now suddenly a thing — Yes. Oh, I love that you brought that up because I do meditate. I have a meditation journey myself, which is on and off, like depending on the week. I have a couple different perspectives on it. One of them, I have to thank my therapist for pointing this out to me because it could just be another checklist item. So, making sure that if I put that on my list of things that I want to do on a day, that I’m not beating myself up if I don’t get it done. So that’s one thing to make sure that it’s not a true checklist item and that I’m going to be upset with myself if I don’t do it at the end of the day. That was a healthy perspective change for me. But then I scheduled walks for myself, I schedule lunch for myself, I schedule a meditation time for myself, and I’m using that time intentionally to step away from my technology, so that I’m not focusing too much on the small day-to-day tasks instead of thinking back to what the big picture is, which is to have a fulfilling life. So many people, and probably a lot of your clients too, is so focused on, you know, you mentioned laundry which is what I call a day to day, what I sometimes refer to as a maintenance task. It’s a task you do to keep your life going, it’s not really an advancement task. And it’s easy to kind of drift away. Do you observe that a lot where people are so focused on, “I need to do what I need to do today. Today, I need to make sure I get the groceries. I need to make sure I fill out these expense forms, I need to fill out those things,” and then all of a sudden they realize that their life has kind of drifted in another direction and it wasn’t necessarily what they wanted? Oh, yeah, absolutely, and that’s something that — I used to call it — in my previous life, I was in occupational safety and health working in industry and I spent all of my days “firefighting” and I put firefighting in quotes there. So when I’m firefighting, that means there’s an issue, it needs my attention immediately, I’m going to go and handle that, instead of thinking long term how am I helping my company to meet its goals? How am I creating overall improvement? Those conversations are so important, both internally and with our organization if we’ve got an organization, and I know people who are so wonderful and I get to do this with my clients too of we actually set aside time for strategy sessions and that’s something that I help my clients with is let’s sit down for half a day and work through what are your goals for your company? What are the actions that you’re doing to meet those goals? Build out a whole action plan and then I like to check in with them on a monthly basis, going, “What’s your progress on our action plan for your overall goals?” Because, otherwise, especially if you’re in any form of startup mode or just a high-demand work environment, we generally don’t give ourselves the space to be able to think about what’s the big picture and are my actions aligned with the big picture. And we could have that conversation for the business, we could also have that conversation for our own personal lives. Yeah, your life as a whole....