280: Holly Worton ~ How to Let Go of Pessimism & Feel More Optimistic About Everything

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! This is another episode based on a listener request. Last December, I received the following email from a friend/listener, and I’ve been looking forward to doing this episode ever since. This is a very timely issue that I’ve been reflecting on myself ever since the end of last year.

“I have been listening to your podcasts lately. It amuses me that there are some I think – “Yeah I’ve got that bit nailed” – these are usually the ones about having fun and plenty of down time. Then you have the podcasts on things like Success. The day I listened to that I had sent my husband an email at lunchtime telling him that I had had a successful morning …………………… due to achieving 3 goals, including one that I had been working on for weeks In Pokemon Go! And I realised that maybe after the illness, the need to relax and have downtime and fun got so embedded into my belief system that I have difficulties in allowing myself to focus and work hard to achieve something.”

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

How to get back on track after an illness or burnout
How to know when you’re doing enough, or if you could do more
Why it’s important to not compare yourself to others when tracking your own progress
How to get back on track, focus better + get shit done
How to work smarter, not harder – and what’s the difference

Things I Discussed

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello, hello, and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 293. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode.

So I have a few suggested topics from listeners in the pipeline, and this one came into my inbox last December. So, I have decided to talk about that this week, because it has been something that has been on my mind ever since I received the email and I think it is a really interesting concept to explore, because it is something that I really resonate with, and I think I have found it a challenge in the past as well. So, the email from Claire goes as follows:

So, I totally know where she is coming from.

For the last nine years of my life, probably, I have had issues with my thyroid an under active thyroid, so not only did I gain a bunch of weight, but my energy levels went. So, I found that life was really difficult, I was really struggling to get things done, I was really struggling to do the things that I wanted to do, especially the physical things. I was sleeping more, if I pushed myself more physically that meant I needed to sleep even more. I just got used to being really, really, precious about taking care of myself. This coupled with the fact that I became really careful about taking care of myself, after I left my first company, which I ran for ten years with a workaholic business partner and was constantly cycling between burnout and gearing up to burnout. So, when I took my sabbatical after I left that company, I really started to practice self-care, and just be really gentle with myself and be aware of my energy levels and take care of myself, which was something that I hadn’t done for the previous ten years. And, that, coupled with the thyroid issue, which started about that time, just made me really, really, cautious and aware of what I was doing so that I didn’t do too much and burn myself out. I pretty much made a promise to myself after I left my first company that I would never, or try to never, get burned out again and that I would be really, really, cautious with how I treated myself so that I would avoid overachievement and working too hard and getting burnt out, because that is just not fun, and it is really hard to recover from sometimes. So, I got into that mindset of: I am going to take care of myself, I am going to practice self-care, I am going to be really mindful of how I spend my time and monitor what my stress levels are like so that I don’t do too much and get burnt out.

But, then, I started fasting last year, around September time I started intermittent fasting and I not only started losing weight, but my energy levels just went through the roof in the beginning, at the beginning I had a bit too much energy, it was kind of bouncing off the walls and then I eventually mellowed out to a really great level of energy where I feel like a normal human being again. So, I have got energy, my sleep improved, fasting completely changed my life in so many levels. And, I talk about this all the time, so if you have heard me go on and on about fasting in person sorry, I should probably do a podcast episode on this in case people are interested in learning more about fasting but, in the meantime, I have a blogpost that I wrote about my journey to losing weight and getting energy through fasting, you can find that at: http://HollyWorton.com/weight.

So, fasting changed everything for me and got me in the energy levels that I wanted, my sleep improved, everything was just feeling great and the low energy levels were something that I had worked on in the past with many, many, many different practitioners. I have also done a lot of work on it myself, mindset stuff. So, when I got back to that level where I no longer felt restricted by my energy levels, and I felt like I could do most of the things that I wanted to to do, it kind of took my mindset a while to catchup with that, it took my awareness of reality a while to catch up to that. So I started noticing stuff, like I would be hiking up a hill and I would stop, a third of the way up or a quarter of the way up, whatever, depending on how high or how long the hill was and then I would realise: ah I am stopping because I need a rest except, except I don’t need a rest so I should keep going and then I would kind of pick up my pace again and I would start walking. And this happened so many times that I realised I had gotten into the habit of stopping several times while going up a hill, that I was doing it automatically without actually checking in to my energy levels and seeing if I needed a rest or if I could just keep going up to the top of the hill. And, that was a very interesting, kind of discovery for me because I realised that it had just become automatic to take a rest. And, obviously it is fine to rest if you are going up a hill, take a rest whenever you want but the awareness for me was realising that this had become an automatic thing where I stop and rest once or more times going up a hill, without actually realising whether I needed it, and the reality was I didn’t need it anymore.

Then, I started realising that with my kickboxing, when I first started, I was going four days a week, I was really into it, but then I realised I was exhausted all the time and I realised that the days that I went to kickboxing class the next morning it was hard for me to get up in the morning and I had to sleep in a little bit to recover. So I eventually dropped down to going to class just two days a week, but not even class two days a week because I started doing one-to-one classes with my trainer, so I was doing one group class and then one private class and that was it. And, I kept progressing through my belts and doing my gradings and being aware that I really should have been going to class more often, especially considering I am at the advanced grades now an I should be putting in more training time, but I just didn’t have the energy. And then, I got the energy, but it was like I didn’t realise that I could now step up my training and do the things that I wanted to do and do more training because I now had the energy. So, this year, I have started going thee days a week, so once to my private class, and then two times to my group class, but I really want to step it up to four days a week, like I did in the beginning, so three group classes, one private class. And I haven’t kind of been able to fit that into my schedule yet, but I have noticed that there are some days where I have got it in my calendar to go and I have been kind of lazy, because it is the evening and I don’t really feel like going. And before when my energy levels were low that was the time of day when I would check in and think: okay, do I have the energy to go or do I not? And oftentimes the answer would be no. Now the answer is pretty much yes. So, whether or not I go to class is dependent on me getting my butt up off my desk chair, closing my computer screen, folding it down, getting up, getting changed, getting my stuff together and going to class. So, I need to reprogram my brain and start taking the actions I need to take to get to class more often, in the same way that I have become aware of the fact that I don’t need to stop going up the hill and that I can just keep going.

So, it is learning how to reprogram my brain, not just by doing mindset work but by becoming aware of my actions and how I feel, and whether or not I can actually get up and do the things that I want to do, that I have been complaining about the last few years that I didn’t have the energy to do, and now I do have the energy. So, I hope this all makes sense. So, in the same way I am rediscovering that I could be, I don’t want to say pushing myself more, but make the effort to do the things that I want to do because I can do them and it won’t drive me to burnout, in the same way that I am experiencing this there may be things that you want to do, or that you could step up the rhythm on, or do more stuff to get more stuff done to achieve more of the goals that you have. So that is what this episode is all about and there are a few other episodes that I want to mention today and call attention to. So, first of all, in Claire’s email, the episode on success that she mentioned was episode 278, that I did with Joanna Hennon, which was called: success, it is more than just money. In that episode we talked about all the different little areas in life that you can celebrate your success in, because oftentimes we focus our success on just the money we are bringing in and not the other things. So, for example, my success with my energy levels and my weight loss and my sleep, due to fasting, is something that I have celebrated, I very consciously celebrated because it has been so massively life changing for me. So, stuff like that big, small, whatever, it is important to celebrate these successes, to base our life’s success on more stuff than just money.

How to know when you are doing enough?

I think that is kind of the root of this issue and what the heck does enough mean? Of course that is going to depend on everyone, whether or not you are doing all the things that you want to do, all the things that you could do.

So how do you figure out whether you are doing enough or if you could do more, because you are feeling better, you have got more energy and you could be doing more than you have been for the last x amount of time because you weren’t feeling well?

So, I think the important thing is to look at: what do you want to be doing? What are your goals? What things would make you happy? What things would you like to achieve?

Now, I did an episode kind of vaguely related to this last year, it was episode 252 and that was also based on a listener request and it was about how to commit to something, follow through, and make it happen. So, that episode may answer some of your questions on the “how to” of this, because I talked about things that I committed to during the year and what specific things that I have done to follow through and I talk about what kinds of things have worked for me, and what kinds of things haven’t worked for me. I talk about how to make a commitment to yourself in business or life, why you need to make sure you really, really, want this thing that you have set as a goal; how to create a plan and get organised, so that you can actually take the actions to achieve the goal. I talk about time blocking which is my kind of magic tool and I am going to talk about that again today, because I will never tire of time blocking and recommending it. I also talk about how to get clear on the things that get in the way of you actually following through and taking the actions. I talk about how to take inspired action so that you can keep your commitment and where to get accountability if you think you need it.

What things to commit to

So, those are kinds of the “how tos” of committing to something, following through and making it happen but how do you know what things to commit to?

I became very aware when I did that episode, 252, that all of the things that I was using as examples were personal life stuff, so I remember I talked about my kickboxing stuff, I talked about my Walk1000Miles Challenge, I talked about my books I had written, I talked about doing my Workcation Weekends, I talked about doing a Coach-to-5k program to get in shape for my kickboxing gradings. I talked about my Druid Bardic training grade course and I realised that all that stuff, except for my books, was very much kind of personal goals and not business and I hadn’t included any business or money goals or anything like that. And, later, I realised that that was because all that stuff was more important to me than achieving my business goals and that was kind of one of the things that probably led to me letting go of my business. Now, if you are in my Patreon, you probably know that I am still doing occasional mindset work, because I love that work, I love helping people, but I am no longer really longer focussed on that as a business I am choosing more on my writing and my books and specifically working on my tree book which will be coming out in April.

So, I think the important thing is to first of all identifying your priorities, what do you want to do, what do you want to achieve, and make sure that you really, really, want it, and then it is a priority for you, because it not a priority for you, if it is not something that you really, really, want to do, you just think it is something that you should do, it is going to make it a lot harder to achieve it. So think about the goals that you have for your life; whether it is business goals, professional goals, work goals; personal goals; fitness goals; mindset goals; inner work goals; personal development goals; spiritual goals, I don’t know, all that kind of stuff. Think about all the stuff that you want to achieve, in all those areas of your life, and think about what are the most important ones. And then, think about what is one more thing you can do, maybe pick the three top goals, in any area of your life, it could be three personal goals, it could be one goal from each category, whatever, pick three that are the absolute most important ones for you.

And actually, sit down and write them out and prioritise them. I find that it is really useful to write this stuff out and help get my priorities clear by seeing this stuff and then assigning numbers to prioritise. So pick the top three and then for each of those top three, pick one thing that you could do, one action that you could take, to get closer to achieving your goal with each of those three goals. Add it to your calendar, time block it, so you have got the time in your calendar to do it and do it. And then see how that goes, was it really hard to fit those three things into your calendar? If so, dial it back and maybe pick one of those things to do each week for three weeks. Or, if you have got a really crazy schedule, I don’t know one of those things per month. Figure out how you can add a little bit more and that will help you see if you are doing enough or all the things that you can do, to achieve your goals. If that is too much, if that is overwhelming, pick one goal, and one thing you could do to achieve that goal, add it to your calendar, do it, and then add a second thing. Add another thing you could do to achieve that goal and keep doing until you achieve that goal and see how that works. See if you can kind of step up the rhythm a little more, get more stuff done, get stuff done faster, focus more on your goals and see how that works for you in terms of doing more, taking more actions, to achieve your goals. So, I think that is one thing that can help you understand if you are doing enough, or if you could do more.

So, the next topic I wanted to talk about was how to do know if you could do more, but that was kind of the flip side of how to know if you are doing enough, because this is really a balance, you don’t want to push and push and push yourself, and hustle, hustle, hustle and end up burning out and not being able to do anything, because now you have got to focus on self-care and get yourself back on track. So, do a little bit more, see how it goes and really become aware of how this works for you. Is it too much? Dial it back and do a little bit less, but play around with it and try to find what’s your limit, how much can you handle? And how much more, I am aware that sounds, I am aware of my language as I say this: [it is not] how much more can you handle, add more and more and more into your schedule! It is like how much can you take and still feel like you are in balance? We are trying to do this kind of gently while still getting things done. You know I don’t like hustle, you know if you have ever listened to this podcast before you know I don’t like push, push, push, that doesn’t work for me. So, assuming it doesn’t work for you, push yourself a little bit, do one little thing, take one little bit more of action and see how that works and then just pace yourself and see whether you need to step up your pace, slow down your pace, and the only way to do this is really by experimenting and by being aware of how you feel as you do this experimenting. So, make a list of some of the things that you have accomplished in recent years that make you really, really, happy and proud of yourself and have added joy to your life. And think about: what are some other things that you want to accomplish? Write all this stuff down so you don’t lose it, write it down in a journal, write it down on your computer, in Evernote, or something, somewhere where you won’t lose it and pick one thing and play around with it.

Comparison Game

Now, I think one thing that is really important here is not to compare yourself to other people, which is something which I have really struggled with in life, so last year I also did an episode on comparison, it was episode 239, and it was about how to quit the comparison game for good. And, that episode is something that I personally need to go back and listen to again, and do the mindset work so that I can let go of the comparison game for good, because one of the things I talked about in that episode was a three-step process to help you quit the comparison game for good. I talked about how to understand what your particular brand or flavour of comparison game does, and how it works, talked about things you can journal on to get clarity on what your comparison game looks like, how to get a higher perspective on your comparison game and the people that you might be putting on a pedestal. I talk about why you don’t have all the other information on what someone else’s game really looks like and how to take both inner and outer action to quit the comparison game for good.

So, again, I think this comparison game stuff and I know that I was kind of bold when I titled that episode on how to quit the comparison game for good, because, like I said, I haven’t achieved that yet, I thought I had, hadn’t. So I think with the comparison game it is a lot like other mindset stuff where, it is like that spiral staircase, which I keep talking about, I keep going up to new levels and kind of hitting a new ceiling and then taking action and then going up to another level and hitting that ceiling. And, by taking that action, that combination of mindset work, plus practical action, you keep going up that staircase, hitting new ceilings, being confronted with that block again and then taking more action to get through that block and get up to the next level. So, the way I see it: quitting the comparison game for good is simply doing the work, getting up to the new level; doing the work, getting up to the next level.

With the comparison game, I clearly have some work on that to get up to the next level, because I recently had an experience where I was ridiculously aware of me comparing myself to other people. So. I recently did this Combo ceremony, which is a frog medicine ceremony and I will link to that in the show notes, and if you are interested in Combo, I can send you the details of the person that I did this ceremony with. Combo is kind of shamanic, spiritual, healing ceremony, using the secretions of this South American frog. It is perfectly legal and is available all over the world except for Brazil, which is the only country where it is illegal, which is interestingly the country where the frog comes from. So, anyway, doing this frog ceremony with this lovely group of people most of whom I knew, it was just a lovely, supportive environment of people, who were really into healing and like I said I knew a lot of these people. So, Combo is one of those spirit medicines where you go though a purging process, so when you go to a Combo ceremony and you settle in, you are going to see that you have been given a big bucket and the bucket is for you to be sick in, you might want to forward this podcast a couple of minutes if you have any issues hearing about sickness, vomiting that kind of thing.

So anyway you are given the Combo and then you immediately start purging, so most people vomit, so you are vomiting in the bucket, you are doing your thing, you spend about 20-30 minutes vomiting and the idea is to vomit all the water that you have recently consumed, because you have to drink about 2 litres of water before you start this. So, vomit, vomit, vomit, until you have emptied your stomach and bile comes up. So, I am not massively fond of being sick, I find it really difficult to vomit, but for some reason this went really easily, not easily in the sense that I felt fantastic because I felt like crap, the whole time I was going through the purging I was thinking: why did I do this? Why did I sign up for this? I am never doing it again, but I was doing my thing and then I finished. Then I kind of went into my rest period and then later on at the end of the day we all kind of grabbed our buckets and went out to the gardens of the grounds of the place that we were doing this ceremony to give our sick back to the earth and thank the spirits of the land for supporting us in this and (grossness warning ahead), it was impossible to not see other people’s buckets and their stuff in it and I realised I hadn’t produced as much sick as some other people and some other people had more bile than I did. And I was thinking: oh my god I didn’t produce as much as other people I should have asked for a third dot so I could keep vomiting, and oh my God these people puked more I have. Do you hear what I am saying!? I was saying that I wasn’t good enough because I hadn’t been as sick as some other people. This reminds me of that blog post that I did a couple of years ago about how much my celery wasn’t good enough, I will link to that in the show notes because that is another ridiculous story about me thinking I was not good enough because my celery wasn’t organic or something. So, listen to how ridiculous I am (!) my vomit was not good enough because others had more bile! First of all gross, I am sorry I am sharing this story with you and I am sorry if that is TMI, but I wanted to share it with you because it is such a ridiculous example of how we can compare ourselves to others and try to reinforce this shitty, limiting belief that some of us have that we are not good enough. So, be aware always that you are comparing yourself to yourself and to your own standards of what you want to achieve, and that you are not comparing yourself to anyone else.

Honesty

So, the next question is: when you have been through an experience like this: how do get back on track? How do you focus better? How do you get shit done? Good question! I find that again, getting your priorities straight, getting your priorities clear, is the absolute first step, you need to know what is important to you, what you want to focus on, and what do you want to commit to so that you can achieve it? And that requires, as I said earlier, being really, really honest with yourself. These goals, are they goals that are going to make you happy and bring joy to your life or are they goals that you think you should be achieving because someone else is doing the same thing or has already achieved it, so you feel like you have to catch up to them? Don’t try to catch up to other people, do your own thing because that’s what is going to bring joy to your life.

I also find that when I get off, I know I have said this in previous episodes, but gratitude work really helps me to kind of centred. So, when I am feeling crappy, when I am feeling like I am comparing myself to others, when I am feeling like, just things aren’t going well, doing gratitude work can really get me back centred and in a good mind space. So you might also think about doing gratitude work for yourself: Like: I am so happy and grateful that I was able to achieve [whatever goal[, you know my Walk1000miles goal. That can be really, really, useful. So, be sure that you are in gratitude with yourself for the things that you have already achieved, because that can help you get centred and come from a good place to be planning the stuff you are going to be achieving.

So, how to focus better and get stuff done?

Ooh, this is also reminding me of this ancient blog post that I wrote, I think it was back in 2011, and it was basically how to focus and get stuff done, so I will link to that in the show notes, that was actually a two-part blog post that went viral and got so many views, it was so exciting. It is a really, really, old blog post, I will link to those. So, I went to get the link for this blog post to put it in the show notes and the blog post is called: 10 Easy Steps to Improve Time Management and Reduce Stress and this blog post has had 1000s and 1000s of views. And, I wanted to make an aside here to say that I was making notes today on things I wanted to talk about in this episode, about how to get things done and how to focus better and how to work smarter and not harder and realised that a lot of the things that I had written down were very much in alignment with stuff from this blog post. So there are two blog posts and I will to them in the show notes but very quickly let me run through some of these because I have totally…this is a great blogpost {laughing} and I totally work by these guidelines and I am just really happy with this blog post. You know I wrote it in January 2011, and 8 years onward it is fantastic. So, start out with setting goals which we have already talked about and then planning. Plan your strategy, break your big goals down into tasks and if you have got big tasks break them down into smaller tasks, that is the only way that I get shit done, I tend to get overwhelmed sometimes by really big goals and projects and things so the very first thing I do: is what do I need to do? What does this goal entail? When I am writing a book what does that book entail? It is not just write the book, it is writing the book, editing the book, getting someone else to edit the book. It is formatting the book and formatting the eBook, getting a cover design, so much stuff, but it is easy when you have it all broken down into little tasks, so plan, be strategic. Don’t get distracted by bright shiny objects, plan a strategy and take actions. Now, how often you take the actions, or how many of those actions you fit into a day or a week depends on what you can handle but you gotta have the plan so you can stay on track to achieve the goal.

Next, prioritise, as I said earlier you have got to pick the goal or goals that are most important to you and start with those. Next is setting deadlines, especially when you have got a project, like a book, for example.You have got to set deadlines, if I don’t give myself deadlines, I don’t get shit done, I don’t do anything, it drags on. Now, I have got a deadline for my book, I just had a call from my book launch coach, last week, and I realise that I have less time than I thought I had. So, we are launching the book on April 23rd, but she has got to have the files from me by April 2nd, to do her stuff, it means that backtracking from there I have got to get my final draft done, get the file back from the editor, go through the editors comments, do my eBook formatting, get that done, get the typesetting done, I have so much stuff I need to do, before April 2nd. So I have had to get clear on exactly what those things are and then time-block them into my calendar, now time-blocking is the only way I get stuff done. So, I have, if I look at my calendar, I have got certain recurring tasks like waking up, tidying up downstairs, the first half-hour of the day my brain does not function so I kind of wash the dishes, tidy the kitchen, that kind of thing and that is my first hour of the day because that is the time that it takes me to start functioning properly. Then I have got a very extensive morning routine where I do my Druid stuff, reading and journalling and that kind of thing and then 11am, usually, I start my working day. So I have got stuff time-blocked in my calendar for emails, writing, sending out any invoices that I need to send out, working on promoting my podcast episodes so that every time an episode comes out on Monday, I spend some time putting it online, that kind of thing. I have time to record my podcast episode, which is what I am doing right now, Patreon, other stuff.

So, what’s important when you time block is to be aware of how long it actually takes you to do a thing. So, for example, I was talking with a friend once about how long it takes to do a podcast and she was saying how she wanted to do a podcast episode, or fit it into her schedule, or get it done or something. And she said: how much time do you block out for your podcast? I said well every time I do a solo episode, I block out two hours in my calendar. She was like: what it is a half-an-hour episode! And I said: yes, but it is not just recording the episode, I spend at least half-an-hour or so making notes and bullet points on what I am going to say, I don’t just show up to the microphone and just blab for half-an-hour or more, I plan what I am going to say because I know that your time is valuable and I don’t want to just blabber about stuff for half-an-hour so I try to keep it to the point. I have personal stories, and personal examples that I want to share, those go in the bullet points, I talk about the stuff that you are going to learn from the episode, that goes in the bullet points. If I know that I am going to reference any other podcast episodes, that are kind of related to this topic, that goes in the bullet points, I plan all this stuff out out, that takes me at least half-an-hour. Then, the episode takes between half-an-hour, to an hour, right now, as I say this, I am at 36 minutes, I have already gone over half-an-hour, plus I have got to do the show notes and the graphics plus send all that stuff to the podcast guy so that he can get it set up. So, it is really about two hours. So, sometimes more, sometimes less, about two hours.

So, you have got to be honest with yourself about how much time you need to time block, a half-an-hour podcast episode is not an hour in my calendar in my life, it is two hours. So, be honest and time-block based on how long it takes you to do stuff. Now when I do an action, take an action to work on a project, and it takes longer than I expected, or shorter than I expected, I would update that in my calendar. So that if that is a recurring task, something that I am going to do again, not every day, or every week, but maybe next month, I could look back and say: ah, how long did that take me to do that thing? Okay, it took me three hours, that was longer that I thought, so I am going to have to time block another three hours to do it again. Now, next time I do it, it might take less or more time, but the important thing is I have an estimate based on how long it took me the last time to do it. So, it is really important to keep things updated in your calendar. So, time-blocking and if you don’t know what time-blocking is, please email me, ask me what that means, what that looks like and I can give you some examples or you can Google it and I am sure Google has lots of stuff on time-blocking. Also Amber De La Garza, who has been a guest on this podcast before, has talked a lot about time-blocking on her blog and her podcast so I will link to something from Amber’s in the show notes, because she is a time-blocking genius.

I also find that the days that I do my morning routine, which is pretty much every day, I am so much more efficient, because I have started out with my mind in the right place. The days that I skip my morning routine because something happens, or I have a call, you know whatever, I am much less efficient, because my mind is not in the right place, I have started out on the wrong foot and the rest of the day is just not as efficient as it might have otherwise been.

Next, focus on just one thing, don’t try to multi-task, try to lump tasks together. So, I have a bit chunk of time every day to work on emails and that’s not just emails it is the tasks related to the emails, but I don’t check emails through the day, I have a big chunk where I do emails and then after that, if an email comes in, it is sitting there until tomorrow. Unless I have extra time at the end of the day I might go back to my emails and check them again but pretty much it is just that once. So that’s really, really, helpful. I find it just crazy to kind of go back and forth and dip in and out of my email inbox throughout the day, that does not work for me and I think it does not work for most people. So, focus on one thing and do it.

I also find that this time blocking thing really helps me to just focus on one thing, because if I don’t have my day time blocked, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I don’t plan my day properly that day is just totally inefficient, and I don’t get very much done. Time blocking also helps me to stay on track because I can see when my times are for doing specific activities and I can see when my times are for a break and I can get stuff done when I am supposed to. So, plan your days, but also plan your weeks, so at the start of each week, sometimes on a Sunday, usually on a Monday morning, I go through my calendar for the week and I look at what I have got on my plate and I adjust my time blocks if I need to and look at the tasks I have, see if I can reasonably get stuff done, and then I bump the stuff off to a following week if I really don’t have time to do it this week, or if one day everything seems to take longer than I thought, and some tasks can’t get done then I just bump it to a later day, or a later week. So, plan your weeks, really, I can’t stress enough, using an online calendar, to plan your weeks, because you can drag and drop and change the dates on stuff and it is so much more flexible than using a paper calendar, or a printed calendar, or a written calendar. You just drag, drop and adjust as needed. I love Google calendar, I love it so much and I am so grateful for that.

So, when you are going through stuff like emails and tasks you need to prioritise: what’s the most important stuff to get done? So, I use an app called Boomerang, and I think it is called: Boomerang for Gmail, I will link to that in the show notes. And Boomerang I could not live without because when I am looking in my inbox, last week was not a very productive week for me because my cat was unwell, she was at the hospital, I was a nervous wreck, I was not getting stuff done, I was doing the most important stuff, but a lot of stuff went wonky, because I could not concentrate because I was so worried about her, because I am a cat-mum, as one of my friends called me once. So, worried about the cat, not focussing means that when I showed up to my inbox this morning, I had 59 emails. So, I ended up having to prioritise: what are the most important emails? What are the ones that aren’t so important and what I did with the ones that aren’t so important was I boomeranged them out of my email inbox to come back at a later date, whether that was today, tomorrow, whatever, I also knew that I had a meeting planned with my husband because we do some business and work stuff together for 6pm, so I took all the stuff that were related to stuff that I needed to talk to him about in the meeting and I boomeranged those to go out of my inbox and into at 6pm, so when I showed up for the meeting at 6pm I am going to have all the stuff coming back in my inbox. But, in the meantime it is out of my inbox where I don’t have to look at it, Boomerang is so amazing, so again I am linking to that in my show notes. Boomerang just helps me to prioritise, get the stuff out of my email that I don’t need to prioritise, I only see the stuff that I need to prioritise. So, doing that, I ended up working my way through my inbox and I ended up working through all emails except for about ten and stuff comes back into the inbox later and I will deal with that when I have time which might not be until tomorrow.

So, prioritise your emails, prioritise your tasks, maybe choose three most important tasks and most important actions and do those everyday, that is something that I used to do all the time. I was pick three of my most important actions and get those done, so that is something that might work for you. Also, work out when you work best. So my brain does not work well in the morning that’s why I don’t start working until 11am, my brain works really well as the day goes on and my brain works really, really well in the evening, so about 6pm, 7pm, 8pm, unfortunately that’s about the time that I have kickboxing, at 745pm, so the days that I don’t do that I can’t work in the evenings. But, my brain really, really, well on evenings and I just hyper-focus and get stuff done. So, that is kind of unconventional workings times, your brain might work really well between 9-5pm or 8-5pm or whatever, but you need to figure out when you work best and tailor your work day to those hours. I am so much more efficient now that I spend my mornings doing my inner work and my morning routine and I work during the hours of the day when my brain actually functions, and I can get stuff done more efficiently.

Next, figure out how you waste time. So, I sometimes waste time by playing games on my phone, my family got into words with friends which is like a phone scrabble last year and I started using that as a kind of palette cleanser for my brain when I was switching between tasks. So I would finish my block of emails and then I would switch to promoting my podcast episode, I would take about five minutes or so and I would play words with friends to clear my brain and do something differently before I switched to another task. So, that worked really well for a while and it still works well sometimes but there was one week where I was spending too much on it and I was playing too much so I ended up using the function that you have got on an iPhone and I am sure Android does this as well where you can limit your time on certain apps. So I limited my time on Words With Friends to a half-hour a day and that is not one half-an-hour block it is a half-an-hour of total time during the day.

Another thing that I did to make sure that I spend my morning routines doing the stuff that I want to do which is the inner work and not messing around on my phone is I limited my phoned time between the hours of 7pm and 11am. So you can override that so if you need to use some of the apps for any reason during that down time, you can, you can override it, but what I love about that is that it kind of fades out all of your apps that you have chosen to block for that time. So, I am reminded, if I pick up my phone absentmindedly and think: ah I am going to browse Reddit for a while if it is faded that means that this is not my my official Reddit browsing time and I need to put my phone down and do something else. I do this because sometimes in my morning routine, I would start the day off wrong and get the day off wrong from the start and not spend my morning routine doing the things that I want to do in my morning routine. So block the stuff that distracts you, figure out how you waste your time, and find out how to block it or avoid it.

Next, get enough sleep. If you have not rested well then maybe the most efficient use of your time is sleeping in if you can. If you have kids you probably won’t be able to, if you don’t or if you have someone that can take of them, or if your life is set up in a way in which you can be flexible with your mornings get enough sleep, get an extra hour of sleep if you need to. That might be the most efficient thing you can do so you can get stuff done when you finally get on and get out of bed. So, do not undervalue the importance of sleep.

So, next thing I want to talk about is working smarter or working harder because a lot of people tend to say: oh, I need to be working harder and I think what we actually need to be doing is working smarter. So, what is the difference? The difference is all the stuff that I just mentioned the difference is time management and employing time management techniques so that you can work more efficiently on the most important stuff and not just time or focussing on most important stuff.

So, work smarter and try adding a little bit more to your schedule so that you can do a little bit more to achieve your goals.

How to achieve your goals? Go back to that episode 252, how to commit to something, follow something and make it happen, I think it is a great companion to this episode. And again, don’t compare yourself to other people, don’t compare the stuff that you have achieved to what other people have achieved, if this is a problem to you go back and listen to episode 239, how to quit the comparison game for good. If you have done that work and feel like you have hit another ceiling in the comparison game, comparing your sick to other people’s sick, as I did, do the mindset work and take the actions you need to take to clear that and let go of that comparison stuff and move up on the comparison game ladder. If that story was too much information for you I apologise, if you are interested in Combo, again I will link to that in the show notes, if you want information about the guy that I did it with, I will also link to that in the show notes, I know he is doing another date in June with the same group of people that I did it with at the same healing centre and yeah I will let you know once I have that date I don’t yet have it but I will be doing it again so despite the fact that I said never again, I look forward to doing it again it is definitely something that I want to do again in life.

I hope you found this episode interesting and useful, I did not think I had this much to say on this topic, sometimes I surprise myself. I write some bullet points and then I end up having a lot to say.

So, as always, if you have any topics anything you want me to talk about, please drop me a line and let me know, you an email me at: [email protected] or find me on line, I have another topic that somebody gave to me via Facebook. So feel to Facebook me, whatever, I am out online, get in touch, send me the topic because I find that my favourite topics to cover are always the ones that people have sent me in rather than the ones that I have come up with on my own. You guys seem to be really good at coming up with topics for me that I know how to talk about and if I don’t know how to talk about them, or I don’t know how to talk about it on my own I will bring someone in to have the conversation with me. So, again, topics, I like them, send them to me.

Thank you so much for listening if you would like to join me on Patreon, I would love to see you there, so if you head over to: http://HollyWorton.com/Patreon you can join me there, membership starts at $1 a month and you will get exclusive access to content and discounted sessions with me and done-for-you mindset work that I don’t offer anywhere else. So, http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton and you can get access to that stuff.

Finally thank you so much for listening. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I have been doing this episode for almost six years because people are listening, if no one listened I wouldn’t be doing this so thank you for listening.

Next week’s episode should be an episode with Jo Casey, we haven’t yet recorded it so I am hoping that will be in the calendar if not it will be something else, probably another solo episode with me based on one of the fantastic topics that people have sent me in.

So, I mentioned tons of stuff in this episode, so if you visit http://HollyWorton.com/293 you can find the show notes to this episode including all the stuff that I have mentioned, and in a week or two, the transcript will be ready, and you can read that. I know some people find it really useful to read the transcript I am so much more of a reader than a listener which makes it baffling to me that I have been doing the transcript for so long, so if you like transcripts you can get that. Thank you thank you thank you for listening I am signing off now, you have a fantastic week and productive week, have an efficient week and get shit done! Thank you.

293 Holly Worton ~ How to Get Back on Track & Get Sh!t Done After Illness or Burnout