Episode 210: Overwhelmed? Plan Your Week to Reclaim Your Time with Megan Sumrell
We are so overworked, overscheduled and overwhelmed — you have to know how to manage your time. But that itself can be overwhelming, isn’t it?
Today’s guest is Megan Sumrell, Founder of The Pink Bee, where she took her 20-plus year career in systems and processes and applied it to all things time management, organization and productivity. Listen for the one thing you can do to turn the overwhelm around, a deeper understanding about why women are feeling so overwhelmed and why it's important to plan your week ahead.
Journey to time management and weekly planning
Megan’s journey to developing her weekly planning and time management system was personal. She’d been working in the corporate IT space for more than 20 years when she added motherhood into the mix. She remembers some pivotal moments to realizing her overstructured life wasn’t sustainable – getting a phone from the preschool to pick up her child, but she had an important meeting in 10 minutes; and realizing she had no answer to provide when a stranger in the park asked her what she did for fun.
They were little moments leading up to a much larger shift.
“The irony of it all was this is what I did for a living,” says Megan. “I would go into organizations and say, we got to scrap the way you are planning that building and delivering your software to get it done in more efficient ways, better, faster, cheaper.”
The system she developed is based on years of training, education, and brain science that formed a framework for others to bring their own inputs from their life, meaning the reality of their lives.
Why traditional productivity planning doesn't work anymore
So many of the traditional time management and productivity systems work great in a 9 to 5 corporate setting where you leave your life. You walk into your work environment, you get to put that focus on for 8 or 9 uninterrupted hours where you're not, you know, handling anything else but work.
And then you leave. Those systems work great there. But the reality is today, the world has changed so much that unless you are still in that system, which is very hard to find, they're not working.
Technology has blurred the separation of work and home life. Many people are working a hybrid system or remotely. Traditional time management systems don't take these new realities into account or acknowledge the interruptions that might come along from working at home.
Another aspect that leads specifically to women being overwhelmed is that women are taking on more responsibilities without removing any of the old ones. There are expectations that we put on ourselves such as carrying a lot of the heavy lifting around the house.
Move away from daily lists
In the face of overwhelm and constant access, Megan says it’s time to move away from lists to overcome overwhelm. She suggests moving to a weekly planning model instead of seeing how many items you can cross off a list every day before you go to bed.
“The real shift in why this works is we have got to be realistic and understand what kind of time do we honestly have to work with, and we never really capture that when we're doing this daily task list mode,” says Megan.
Another way of thinking about this is, let’s say you’re given a list of 25 things to buy at the grocery store and you’re handed an envelope with the money to pay for it. You fill your cart with the items on the list and it’s $110 worth of groceries. You open the envelope and there’s a $50 bill.
Now you’re going to have to make choices about what to put back. Reframe the scenario. What if instead, you were given $50 and told what you’re trying to accomplish – let’s say feed a family of four for four days? What would the walk through the grocery store look like now?
When we wake up and just do that brain dump, we just mad dash, trying and check it all off all day. That's scenario one in the grocery store. Never are we asking, how long do each one of these take? How much time do I really have? Which one of these actually five days from now is going to get me where I need to go instead of feeling like a fire drill in the moment.
Instead, learn to embrace this very simple but incredibly powerful way of laying out a draft plan for the upcoming week where we are looking at the realities of what you’re already committed to. What are all the things competing for my time? Then you can create efficiencies.
“It takes us out of the state of being really reactive and being incredibly proactive,” says Megan. “It shifts us out of the passenger seat of our calendar and puts us back in the driver's seat again.”
How to manage interruptions and emergencies
Megan likes to call this planning for uncertainty. She suggests that you conduct a time audit during a regular week of life. How much time did you spend doing things that you had no idea were coming? How much of your average day or week was consumed by tasks that came at you that you didn't know were coming but truly had to be addressed?
When we track this over a week or two, we can typically start to see a pattern emerge or at least get a ballpark of the time spent on interruptions. Megan says for her, at this stage of her life, she averages about 5 to 6 hours a week, noting it can change by season.
She makes sure to set aside blank space in her calendar to cover those hours in case something comes up so she can shift rather than stay up late or work all weekend to complete a task.
“And then what happens is maybe you have one of those magical rainbow unicorn weeks where very little comes in,” says Megan. “I am going to do whatever I want. Maybe I'll binge an episode of a show that I missed and I'm going to do it guilt free and stress free because I'm not worried about playing catch up or what's to come because I've got space for all that in my calendar.”
One thing to do for the overscheduled and overcommitted
Megan says aside from weekly planning, the quickest win that you can give yourself today is to program your mobile devices so that they only talk to you when you've deemed it important enough to interrupt you.
You can set your phone up so that you can have everything silent except for the things you've said, no matter what. Ring. And then you communicate that to your loved ones so they know how to reach you in an emergency and when you’ll be checking your device.
Megan has set times in the day where she sits down, pulls out her devices and checks what messages have come in. She’ll respond to them all at once, and walk away for another 3 or 4 hours without worrying that she’s going to miss what's important.
She says it is life changing when you can truly disconnect from your device and not be worried about missing something that you've decided is important enough to interrupt you. You can get your boundaries back.
Free gifts for listeners
Download The Pink Bee app on your chosen app store, and visit The Work Life Harmony for free weekly planning training.
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