How to Tame the Busy Beast

Discernment and Self-Responsibility for Solo-Professionals and Freelancers

Unless you are aware of what motivates and drives you – whether it’s fear of failing, guilt about your freedom to work as you want, or a tendency towards overachieving or distractibility – you may very well find yourself working much more than you need to and struggling to build a business and live the life you really want for yourself.

A Quick Case Study

Take the example of one of my earlier clients, an independent mortgage loan officer. She wanted to stop working all the time - and not feel guilty about it. In order to achieve this, she had to address a long-standing pattern of behavior. She needed to dismantle the work-horse habits that she’d worked years to form, and the drivers behind it.

• She worked in a profession that values ‘the hustle.’

• It was difficult for her to say ‘no’ when she’d reached capacity.

• She was in the habit of answering incoming calls no matter what she was doing.

By this time, we’d done a lot of the pre-work. Intellectually, she understood the value of time blocking, where you stay focused on the task at hand instead of going from one thing to the next and back again.

“But how?” She wondered.

In her mind, the phone was ‘always ringing.’ She wondered how she could possibility time block her activities and set boundaries around them, without appearing to be unresponsive.

So we took a look. We evaluated the incoming call patterns to discern when receiving and making calls was the senior priority. Yes, it turned out there was an identifiable pattern.

With that one discernment, she was willing to experiment.

When calls came in outside those busier phone hours, she started a new practice: she let those calls go to voice mail until she was able to be fully present. She blocked out Monday mornings from 9:00—12:00, 9:00-10:00 on the other weekdays, 30-minutes midday, and 1 hour from 4:00-5:00 on each of her work days, to return and make calls.

To make this work she had to train her clients on what to expect. Then she had to keep her own boundaries! That’s actually the harder part. Your (good) clients understand that in order to do good work for them, you need to be able to focus. (In the mortgage industry, accuracy is critical!)

When your customers learn that you’ll return their calls in fairly short order, they will trust you.

It’s not about rigidity either. It’s about flow. None of this is ever 100%.