[00:00] Do you know the difference between being busy and being productive? Most people assume they do, and most people are wrong. That’s why today I’m unraveling the hustle lie with data and statistics and real life stories. And I’m going to share with you specific tactics that you can use. And by the end of this episode, you’re going to see why being busy might be the biggest productivity killer of them all.

[00:21] And you’re going to know what to do about it. Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity. Consistency and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw Jr. And today I’m bringing you a solo episode and we’re talking about the myth of being busy, how to be productive without burning out.

[00:44] And. It might be a little bit of one of those things where you think you have an idea of the difference between being productive and, and being busy, and, and you probably do it at a certain level. And I did some deep dive data work into this and pulled out some statistics and stories and examples that are really going to bring this home for you, help you understand it at a far deeper level.

[01:05] And I’m going to give you practical, tactical things that you can do about this. So you can walk away here being more productive and less busy and less likely to Finding ways to get rid of that feeling of burnout, overwork, that can just really weigh you down in all the areas of your life, right? Whether you’re bringing that home to your marriage, or kids, or relationships, or friends and family, uh, it’s affecting your health, etc.

[01:30] I’ve got solutions for you here today. So, super excited about this episode. I had a client a few years ago. Say that he was dropping from five days a week to four days a week. So imagine that. Imagine working 20 percent fewer hours, but getting more done. It sounds impossible. I actually thought so too. And then he did it and he dropped from five days to four days and they’re not losing a dime of revenue.

[01:54] Actually, everybody in his practice is doing the same thing. He talked to everybody else into doing it and they’re actually, they’re making just as much money. It’s amazing. When I worked at the University of Virginia, I was actually on a committee where we explored how to improve productivity in fundraisers at the University of Virginia.

[02:11] And one of the things that we’ve proposed was Fridays off during the summer. I hope none of my former colleagues are listening. Cause they’re going to be like, why didn’t we do this? Why didn’t you get this pushed through Jim? But we did the research and backed it up with data that showed that, you know, working over a certain number of hours.

[02:29] Actually reduces productivity and increases turnover. So retention goes down, all of that. And then the costs, et cetera, of all that. And didn’t get picked up, but I think it really resonated with people in, in the fundraising world. There’s a lot of working nights and weekend. There’s a lot of travel. And so, uh, it was really relevant in that world and it’s relevant for all of us now, especially with smartphones and working remotely and being online.

[02:54] On all of the time, we can really be busy all of the time. And Tim Ferriss has this quote, and maybe it’s his quote. Maybe it’s somebody else. I don’t know where he got it, but he said, being busy is a form of laziness. Have you ever heard that? Like being busy is a form of laziness. I’m like, what do you mean?

[03:12] That’s like BS. You know, I called BS on it the first time I heard it. And then it’s like one of those things where it sinks in. You kind of, you hear it again. It kind of haunts you in the back of your brain. You’re like, that’s bull crap. And then finally it hits you. You’re like, wait a second. Busy ness. It is a form of laziness.

[03:27] It is, is a form of showing up and instead of doing the strategic high level thinking work, you just show up, put a shovel in your hand and you go to work. That’s great, right? We all like the guy or girl who shows up and works hard on your team, but they dig in their hole in the right spot. Are you digging your hole?

[03:48] So that’s what we’re talking about today. I’m going to go deep onto this. And if you like this topic, let’s talk about it. Like you and I let’s engage on this. I created a free community where you and I and other listeners can jump in there. Other athletic minded men can jump in there and talk about this.

[04:05] What’s working for you. What are the things that are holding you back? What are the things that are working for you so that we can learn from you, you can learn from others, and we can talk about practical, tactical things that we can all do. To get better and to be less busy and more productive. And there’s also in there is a seven, a course called seven days to clarity, how to define clear goals and achieve them faster.

[04:26] It’s a seven day video course with worksheets and everything to walk you through this quickly and easily. It’s a really, really powerful course. Just go to jimharshawjr.com/free. And it’ll take you right to the page. You just punch your email in and you join the community is simple as that. So I look forward to talking to you more about this topic in there.

[04:45] And we’re going to talk about all the podcast episode topics every week. We’re going to have a conversation on this. So I look forward to engaging with you there. So the other day I was driving to an event with some friends of mine. It’s. It’s a, this goes the 9 11, so on September 11th, there was the 9 11 stair climb at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.

[05:03] C., and it was 24 laps up the Lincoln Memorial with a 30 pound ruck on, and it was an awesome event, but, uh, the night before we were driving up and, uh, And my buddy, Teja, is his name. So if you’re listening, Teja, this is a great conversation we had about this. But he said, uh, he’s asking about my clients and my coaching and you want to have amazing career success.

[05:26] Gosh, you have to figure out, do I really want to go all in and work those crazy hours? And I always push back on this concept because think about it this way. Think about any billionaire. Think about Any billionaire, hundred millionaire, maybe, or the Elon Musks of the world. I guess there’s maybe one Elon Musk, but if you think about that person, if they were to take off two hours a day, they worked two hours less per day, they are not going to now only earn like 100, 000 a year or 50, 000 a year, right?

[05:57] They’re, they’re still going to be billionaires or maybe they’ll earn like, uh, a hundred million less that year. And they’ll still be a multi hundred millionaire, right? You can find success if you’re working on the right things. And doing the right things, you can find incredible career success and also have balance with your family and also be healthy and fit.

[06:18] This is just a misconception that’s out there. And once you, once you really think about this, and right now, this might not be landing well with you. Maybe you’re thinking, yeah, Jim, that sounds nice, but that’s a little bit of BS. I want you to keep thinking about that. I want you to listen to this episode.

[06:32] I want you to. Let this, uh, marinate in your mind over the next week or a few weeks and you’re going to start to see how there are times when you’re being busy and not actually getting the best work done. Let me give you an example. I get, by the way, I get caught up. I’m looking in the mirror as I preach all of this to you.

[06:51] You know, I’m the guy who can get caught up in like formatting the spreadsheet. It’s like, okay, you know what? That box with the lines around it. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think that that is bold enough. I mean, let me figure out what the right thickness of that bold line is around that freaking cell or those cells that I merged together and you know what?

[07:12] The text is centered. I wonder if it should be like flush left. Let me check both of them. Like, you know, you and I both have a hundred different examples of that. Now, I don’t think. Most billionaires do that, and this is not the kind of work that really moves the needle in your world or in your life. And that’s what we’re talking about.

[07:35] It’s like being busy versus being productive. And there are plenty of other examples of being busy. Some emails, not all emails, but open up your email inbox right now and tell me you can’t find at least at least 10 percent of those unread emails. are not necessary. I hired a company about six months ago and I have two inbox managers right now.

[08:01] Two different individuals who go into my inbox every day and they clear it out, they move things around, they start draft, they don’t actually do any replies to hardly any emails ever. They’ll draft a reply and I’ll go in and edit it Just going through the process of optimizing my inbox, it forced me to unsubscribe from things, stop getting notifications for things that I thought that I needed.

[08:22] I thought that I needed these, and you think you need them too. And I, there’s tons of emails that I don’t get every day now, that I thought I needed, that were not, Helpful. Sure. I’m not saying they were absolutely a waste of time, but there are other emails and other activities I can do with that time that are even more valuable that can move the needle in my life in whether that’s making more money or spending more time with my kids or working out more, it doesn’t matter whatever I do at that time, I can choose to do something different that is more highly valuable with that time.

[08:54] I can be less busy, more productive, right? So some emails, some meetings. What are those meetings that are on your schedule? You’re like, you know, I have this, I attend this. I don’t have to attend this. Or maybe you set the meeting or maybe you don’t set the meeting. Can you get yourself out of that meeting?

[09:08] Can you get yourself out of that meeting? Sometimes. Can you shorten that meeting from an hour to 45 minutes from 45 from 30 minutes to 15 minutes by setting an agenda at the very beginning of the meeting? You know, stopping the small talk, jumping right into it, getting things done and then getting out and then making sure everybody has action items leaving the meeting.

[09:27] Like, can you optimize the meeting? Can you reduce the number of meetings? And we all have examples of these things in our lives, right? That are stealing our time and we’re less productive because of them. And you need to replace those with the high leverage activities, the high value tasks. For example, you’ve heard me talk about the productive pause.

[09:47] This is the single tactic that is the most. Common response when I’ve asked over the years in the podcast, what’s the single habit that you most credit for your success? It’s never doing the thing. For the Olympic gold medalist, it’s never the training. For the New York Times bestselling author, it’s never some kind of writing habit.

[10:06] It’s always some version of stepping back, working with the coach, doing journaling, planning your day in advance, you know, going to an annual retreat. That will help you have clarity of action and peace of mind. And the definition of a productive pause is this, it’s a short period of focused reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind, clarity of action, peace of mind, that is the high value work so that when you engage in, into your inbox, into that spreadsheet, whatever it is.

[10:38] You’re working on the highest value work. Strategic work. Other high leverage, high value activities. Productive pause. Strategic work. Meetings with decision makers. Building key relationships. Those are high value tasks and you can help yourself sort through these by using productivity tools like the Eisenhower matrix.

[11:00] Some people call this the urgent important matrix popularized by Stephen Covey. I think he got it from, from Eisenhower, president Eisenhower used this, at least the legend anyway, but president Eisenhower would use this. Urgent, important matrix. There’s, there’s, you know, if you picture urgent and important across the top on this matrix and then on the side, important and unimportant.

[11:22] So there are four quadrants in the urgent important matrix. Think of this. I just have a four boxes, four squares in this matrix, uh, across the top. You have urgent and not urgent. Then you have important. And not important. So in the top left, you would have urgent and important. That’s the phone is ringing or critical report.

[11:40] You have to have turned in TPS reports, right? By the end of the day, you got to get turned in and then you have the next quadrant below it. This is the urgent, not important, urgent stuff. And it’s not important. It’s like that tweet that you have to respond to, right? Urgent. It’s not really that important.

[11:59] And then you have the not urgent, not important, absolute waste of time stuff. Usually, you know, social media is a great example of that, but the quadrant where most people spend the least time in is the not urgent, but important. Not urgent, but important. That is the stuff that is easy to procrastinate on, kick down the road and work on later because I’ll get to it some other time because I got some other kind of urgent stuff like that tweet I have to respond to or some important falsely important emails, the emails that I think are important, but they’re not really important that I have to get back to.

[12:36] Well, when you get yourself to spend time in that not urgent, important quadrant. You get to the strategic work, the high level work. All right. Um, another way to think about this is the Pareto’s principle, 80, 20. You know what that is. You’ve heard of that before. 20 percent of your work results in 80 percent of the results.

[12:55] When I was in the fundraising world, 20 percent of our donors resulted in 80 percent of our. And sometimes it’s even more than that. Like sometimes you have a situation where it’s like 5 percent of your inputs result in 95 percent of your outputs, right? That’s where billionaires, people who get a lot of things done, that’s where they’re spending their time.

[13:19] There’s frameworks to think about this, right? So what I’m going to give you now are some strategies for how to be productive without burning out. Okay. So we do this two different ways. Number one, tactically, I’m going to give you some tactics and number two, strategically, like a system for living your life so that you can be productive and not just busy, but productive, getting the right things done and not crushing yourself, burning out.

[13:46] And before I give you these two sort of tactical strategic things you can do, I want to give you a little bit of data here, all right, some, some information. So I’m going to have links to all this in the action plan, and there’s three different studies or some research that I want to share with you.

[14:01] Number one is a study out of Stanford that found that productivity per hour declines sharply after 50 hours of work per week. Right. And then after 55 hours, they say, at least in this study, they found that there’s like, there’s really no point in working anymore and then 70 hours or more leads to almost zero difference in output compared to working 50 or 55 hours, right?

[14:27] So that’s from Stanford. Another one is a Gallup study where they said, employ, they found that employees who work more than 50 hours a week are at a higher risk of burnout, which is now affecting their performance and their overall wellbeing. Right. And burnout can lead to a 63 percent increase in the likelihood of somebody taking a sick day and can reduce productivity by up to half, half.

[14:52] Reduce your productivity by 50%. And here’s the last one. Harvard Business Review. Uh, there’s an article that shows just how overworked executives are more likely to make poor decision, right? Fatigue, decision fatigue, it impacts your cognitive functions, your ability to probs, uh, solve problems and, and make good decisions, let alone be creative.

[15:14] Right? This is real stuff. And it’s happening for you as well. So how do you combat this? Like, what do you do about this? Well, here’s a few things, right? So I’m going to focus first tactically, then sort of like higher level strategically for your life. So number one is to prioritize and focus at the beginning of your day.

[15:33] Use the Eisenhower matrix or Pareto’s principle. You can use the Pomodoro technique to maintain focus and stay focused. This is essentially a sort of very generalized here, but. 25 minutes on of no checking email, no checking your text messages, no paying, paying attention to any bells, whistles, beeps, or buzzes on your phone, your computer, and just laser focused on work, getting the right work done.

[15:58] Right. And then after that, you take a five minute break and then re engage in 25 minutes. So 25 minute sort of work segments. Um, that’s the Pomodoro technique, and we’ll have a link to that in the Pomodoro technique and a timer that you can use. The one that I use, I will put that in the action plan.

[16:13] Alright, the second thing here out of four is to set boundaries and learn how to say no. Like, say no. What are the non essential things, tasks, commitments that you have on your calendar or that you traditionally say yes to because you want to be a good team player? Or you want to help out, you know, that’s great, right?

[16:32] What is the cost? You have to evaluate what is the cost. And if you’re not evaluating what is the cost, then you’re just blindly saying yes to things. And that’s going to lead to being busy, maybe not with the right things. So set boundaries, learn to say no, and not just put things on your calendar. Just because, right?

[16:54] That’s number two. Number three is embracing delegation. How can you delegate? Delegate to others, empower others. You might say, Oh, well, this is my task. I don’t want to delegate it to somebody. No, no, no. You are empowering them to take on more responsibility so that they can grow and grow their career at the end of the year when they have their annual review, if they’re taking on more responsibility, like that’s what they want.

[17:17] They want to grow in their career. They want to take on responsibility. They want to be trusted. So embrace delegation. And then the last one is to incorporate rest and recovery into your days. Right? I took a power nap two days ago. This is actually, uh, after that 9 11 stair climb that I did, I woke up 340 in the morning, so I was crushed.

[17:38] And then we got home about noon that day after a breakfast event and everything. By the time we drove home from DC, I was crushed. And I took a 15 minute power nap and I was so locked in the rest of the day. I felt like I had a full eight hours of sleep the night before when I got like five. And, and so this power, it was a 15 minute nap and I fell asleep pretty quickly.

[17:59] And if you’re tired in the middle of the day, you can fall asleep pretty quickly. You fall asleep and you come right back out of it super quickly. If you’re like in that 15 to 20 minute range, I find for me 25 minutes or more, I just go too deep into a sleep and I have a harder time coming out of it.

[18:12] Okay. Rest and recovery. Or sometimes this is just getting out and walking around the block. I just did that actually before this podcast. Recording, hit and record here. I wanted to go out of my office, walk around, get some fresh air, get some sunlight before I hit record so that I could, you know, be the best version of myself.

[18:27] All right. So I talked about Tactically and strategically. So tactically, those are some things that you can do. Prioritize and focus at the beginning of the day. Set boundaries, learn to say no. Embrace delegation and incorporating rest and recovery. Now, strategically, I want you to zoom out a little bit around on life.

[18:45] And think about this. What are you actually working towards? What is your aim? What are you working towards? Like, what’s the goal here? What’s the vision for your life? This might be at the life level. It might even be a little lower level, like project at work or your career or something like that. Like, what are you working towards?

[19:01] Once you figure that out, once you get clear on that, then you can actually define what are the steps that I need to take to get there? Like, what are the goals that I need to set that align with this larger vision that I’m trying to achieve? Then you got to get around the right people. Like who are the people you need to spend time around who are operating at that level so you can get there too.

[19:23] And then you’ve got to develop the systems and the habits and the routines that are going to support you in getting there, you know, morning routines, evening routines, habits, and. If this sounds familiar, this is the Reveal Your Path framework. This is at a very high level. This is the framework that we use in our coaching.

[19:39] And if you want an acronym to remember this, think P A T H. Path. Okay. Reveal Your Path is the name of our program, but if you want to use this for your own life, think about this. P is for principles. Like, what are the principles, what are the things that are guiding me in my life? That vision, the core values for your life, what are the underlying principles that define you, what you want out of your life, and where you’re going?

[20:02] A is for aim. These are the goals. Like, what are you aiming at? Right? And if you want to avoid being just busy, and you’d rather be productive, and avoid burnout, The aim can’t just be like, I want to make, you know, millions of dollars and crush it at work. Screw my family, screw my health. No, you have to actually have an aim in multiple areas of your life.

[20:24] Relationships, health, wealth. We also have another category called self that we coach our clients to, um, to work on itself is around growth, personal growth, impact, or even just things that are fun for you. All right. So P A T H principles. The third one is Territory. Look at your surroundings. Like who are the people that you’re surrounded by?

[20:48] Who are the people in your territory? Are they the right people? Are they the people that are going to move you towards these, living out these principles and achieving your aims? If so, great. If not, you need to do some thinking around that and adjust that. And then H is for Habits. What are the habits and the routines and the systems that need to be put in place to So that you can actually live this out.

[21:09] Morning routines, evening routines, workout routines, you know, planning routines, productive, what am I doing a productive pause? I do it every single morning. I write down three things I’m grateful for. What do I got to do to make today great? What’s your productive pause? What are the habits, routines, systems you have to put in place so that you can live this out?

[21:28] And so you have some practical, tactical things you can take away right now. I’m going to leave you with this. Kevin Johnson. Kevin Johnson is, uh, he was the CEO of Starbucks. He took over from Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. So he took over in 2017, Kevin Johnson did as the CEO of Starbucks. In 2012, He was the CEO of Juniper Networks and he was diagnosed with skin cancer.

[21:51] And for months, he said he found himself canceling doctor appointments, rescheduling doctor’s appointments because he had business commitments. And here’s a quote from him. Then he said, why am I prioritizing business commitments over a health priority that could be fatal? And so what did he do? He quit his job, quit his job so he could spend more time with his wife, more time with his family and his friends and prioritize his health.

[22:16] How about you? Are you willing to make the commitment to prioritize the important things over just being busy? Now, mind you, he quit his job and then he goes on to become the CEO of Starbucks. He didn’t quit his job and like, okay, there goes my career and everything else that I’ve been working for falls by the wayside.

[22:33] No, he actually got better by doing this. Being busy does not equal success. I want you to take action on this. And here’s the action item. I want you to take, go to jimharshawjr.com/free. It’s a free community. We can talk about this. We can go more in depth. We can exchange ideas on this. So jump on over to jimharshawjr.com/free. Join us in the community. Join other guys like you. We can talk about this stuff, the meaningful stuff. That’s going to move the needle. Take action. Good luck.

Note: This text was automatically generated.