Breaking Through the Barrier of Busy, with Elizabeth Saunders – Episode 102 on The Action Catalyst Podcast

Best-selling author and time management coach Elizabeth Saunders explains why more input doesn’t equal more busy, and shares ways to expertly manage email, use text expanders, define “time investment”, and get clarity from your calendar, plus breaks down techniques like the I.N.O. method, and priority-based decision making.

About Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Grace Saunders is an entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Real Life E, a time management coach, and best-selling author who has been empowering individuals who feel guilty, overwhelmed and frustrated to feel peaceful, confident and accomplished since 2009. She helps people struggling with new levels of responsibility after receiving a promotion or becoming a parent, who aren’t meeting expectations at work, or who need better work-life balance to overcome burnout.

After overcoming her own challenges with work-life balance, Elizabeth began doing time management coaching to help others do the same in 2009. Elizabeth has worked with clients on six continents and improved thousands of people’s lives. Her clients not only increase their productivity but also improve their health, reduce anxiety and stress, and have more time to invest in themselves and their relationships.

Elizabeth was named one of the World’s Top 30 Time Management Professionals by Global Gurus every year since 2018 and is a member of Forbes Coaches Council. McGraw Hill published her first book The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment: How to Achieve More Success with Less Stress. Harvard Business Review published her second book How to Invest Your Time Like Money. And FaithWords published her third book Divine Time Management. Elizabeth regularly writes time management articles for Harvard Business Review and Fast Company and has appeared on CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox.

Prior to founding her own business in 2005, Elizabeth worked for Meredith Corporation, the publisher of magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies Home Journal, VNU Business Media, and Abbott Laboratories. Elizabeth graduated summa cum laude from Drake University.

When she’s not helping people be less stressed, Elizabeth loves swimming, enjoying God’s presence in worship, and cherishing time with her husband and daughters.

Learn more at RealLifeE.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Elizabeth Saunders is a entrepreneur, and she talks about productivity and time management. So Elizabeth, thanks for being here.

Elizabeth Saunders
My pleasure. My pleasure.

Host
I want to talk first about this concept of busyness. It’s like, are people really more busy today than ever before, or does it just kind of feel like that?

Elizabeth Saunders
Absolutely, so number one, it is factual that there’s more input than ever before. So in the past, you would have mail that came once a day, and when the mail came, you could go get it, and that was all you were gonna get for 24 hours, maybe even longer, if it was Saturday and you had to wait until Monday, whereas now we’ve got email, we have text, we have all these social media before there was one phone line in your house, and that was for everyone in that house, so there was just a lot less communication. So is there more input? Yes, do you need to be more busy? No, and the difference is, you can be in a place where you make choices about what you do or don’t do with your time. And the fact that we have technology, whether you’re in sales or an entrepreneur, lots of other things can help you get more done faster, but you have to set the parameters and boundaries on what’s in or what’s out. You don’t get overwhelmed, because if you try to handle all the input coming at you, yeah, you will be crazy busy and running around like chicken with the type get off. And a lot of that comes down to the expectation in regards to whether or not you feel overwhelmed. I have executive clients who, on purpose, won’t answer most email, and they just know that if something really important, their assistant or someone else will follow up with them on it, and they don’t feel overwhelmed by it. And then there’s other people who, if their inbox is in that Bureau all the time, are freaking out. And so of course, it varies depending on your job. I’m not saying no one called me. Elizabeth said, Never answer email. But what I am saying is your expectation of what does or doesn’t need to be done for you to feel good about your life and what you’re doing have a huge impact on whether or not you have that busy or overwhelmed feeling, or whether you’re just in a place of peace, where you’re totally present to the moment and loving what you’re doing.

Host
On the topic of email, do you have any strategies, or, you know, tips, or things that you see for helping people kind of manage email? Because that’s a that’s a big stressor, it seems like.

Elizabeth Saunders
Definitely, definitely. So a few things, number one, if you have the ability to have an assistant help you just clear things out and do standard responses. Do that, that’s a huge benefit to you, particularly if you’re in sales or in other sorts of positions where you have a lot of scheduling coordination that needs to happen, that can literally cut hours and hours from your week of having someone else just take care of that in advance, follow up on whatever you need to know about phone numbers or location or that sort of thing, so you don’t need to deal with that. And you can also set up filters so that those emails get sent to the right person if they don’t go through your inbox, or even with all the meeting confirmation, so they get filtered into particular folders so that they’re not cluttering up your inbox. Another thing that I really, really love and use every day are something called Text expanders, and what that means is I have software downloaded on my computer, very inexpensive, and you have short abbreviations that then pop up to give you standard responses. So standard email replies. I send standard even sentences or paragraphs of text I tend to need. I have in little, short abbreviations that are maybe three to five letters long, did that standard reply, and then I just send the email. So it’s way easier than copying and pasting something. I think it’s even easier than having draft email, because I simply put it into wherever I am on my computer, whether it’s in my email program or in a Word document or on a web page, and those snippets of text expand or whatever I need. The one I use is called type it for me, and that works on Mac. There’s a few other tools that work on Mac, and then also some on PC. If you just Google Text Expander, you’ll you’ll get some good options there, and you just set up little little clippings or little abbreviations. And I do everything from, like I said whole email, to have an abbreviation for my name or for my mobile phone number or for my address, or anything that I might have to type again I have down from basically a two letter or three letter abbreviation. Shit I don’t have to type it. That is really helpful. Then also, in regards to just the time investment side of it, I find that people setting aside dedicated time to answer email is much more effective than just randomly trying to squeeze it in. Because what happens when you quote, unquote, squeeze it in is that you end up reading but not responding to a lot of emails, and the email that are truly most important a lot of the time, they maybe require a nuanced approach. You never end up doing because it takes more than five minutes. So you just let them linger in your inbox and feel guilty, filthier about it every day, whereas, if you set aside maybe 30 minutes two or three times a day, or if you prefer to do it all at once, an hour, hour and a half, then you can process through when you read something, immediately respond and get those emails that are truly important done, instead of never responding to them.

Host
That term, what does that mean, like when you talk about time investment?

Elizabeth Saunders
Definitely. So I think time management, traditional time management, is dead. What I see is the next evolution is what I call time investment, and that is about deciding what’s important and what’s not saying no as much as possible, and then really focusing in on what matters, what are those high value activities? So that is, first of all, just cutting out a whole bunch of things and just saying I’m not doing this, and I’m not going to feel guilty that I’m not doing it, because that’s the fastest way to get something done. Then from there, I have what I call an ino technique. And what that stands for is investment neutral and optimized. So there are certain perks of your life or time that I see as investment activity. So basically they pay returns on that time. It’s not about like ABC priority, like what needs to get done today versus tomorrow, that first thing. It’s about looking at what’s the ROI on that time invested so professionally an investment activity may be setting up a system that will mean you never need to do something in or it could be moving ahead a huge contract that is going to help you need this quarters quota, or maybe half a year’s quota, those things where, if you put in a few extra hours, or even a few extra days, this exponential return on that investment, neutral is where there’s a one to one ratio. So maybe this could be like having a meeting with your staff, or talking to your assistant, or something like that. You need to put time into it. We don’t want to just cut it, but spending a lot more time in that staff meeting is not going to probably lead to 500% return on that time. So you want to get them done, but you don’t want to spend any more time than is necessary doing them and then optimize activities. Are things that you want to accomplish as quickly as possible. So like I was saying with the text expanders, answering a repetitive email is not something where there’s any value in that taking any more of my time that it needs to take. So if I have a little snippet of text that pops up, that’s what I should use, coordinating, scheduling things that can be something that can be delegated to an assistant, or if you’re doing it yourself, you can use tools like Calendly that make it easy for people to book a time with you, or time trade, or other tools like that, and it syncs with my Google Calendar, so then I can send people to a link, and then they can select a time that works for them, have the appointment set up, and it will automatically go to my Google calendar. And as I mentioned it to my Google Calendar, Calendly will update so that it will show me an ID on the times when I’m no longer available. So it’s basically a very simple way for people to make appointments with me, and they’d have total control over my busy time, my free times, and I’ll set up a lot of parameters. So with Calendly, I can designate whether or not it’s a 30 minute meeting, a 60 minute meeting. I can say how many meetings I want in today, if I want buffer after meetings or before all those sorts of things, it let me tell it what is appropriate, and then it gives people the freedom to set up the appointments they want within those parameters.

Host
You know, on the topic of calendars, what’s your current stance on using to do lists? Schedules and calendars? You think like they’re still useful tools, or are those things that have been left behind?

Elizabeth Saunders
I think that calendars in particular are still extremely useful, and why that is they give you clarity. I think one of the biggest reasons people don’t invest their time well, or even do. Don’t eliminate things like we were talking about, is because they don’t have clarity on what’s truly significant or important, and so then they just fall into a reactive mode as they sit at their computer, look at the emails that come in, look at who comes by their desk, go to their meetings, and they haven’t even stopped think about what might be important. So what I find is that when you have your calendar laid out and you reserve time in advance for those top priority, most significant activities, we then force everything else to fit around them, and that’s particularly important with individual to have a lot of meetings and time to get booked. Can Get Booked back to back. They have to reserve time in their calendar in advance to just say this will be time I move forward on priority projects, or else they will never get done. And I really think that’s where weekly and daily planning come into play, which is something I absolutely advocate and weekly planning in particular, is an opportunity to make strategic decisions about what you will or won’t do on a weekly basis. They review the prior week, see what needs to be wrapped up or moved forward or taken off, and then they look over the coming week, and that’s a great time, if they haven’t done so already, to decline meetings, to postpone things, to take things off their schedule and really clarify based on the current reality, what are my top priorities, and how do I make those happen? So the calendar should not be like a mindless thing that you just you just follow. But I think it can be a good place to give people a realistic sense of their capacity, because often what happens is, like I said, people don’t have any time reserved for those key investment activities. So they don’t get to simply completely over commit. They say, Oh sure, I’ll work on that project or be on that presentation, or this or that without ever stopping and looking to see on their calendar if they have the time to pay for whatever commitments that they’re they’re making.

Host
What about to do lists?

Elizabeth Saunders
Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s so interesting you ask that question. Because I’ve, actually, I’ve been evolving in that regard, and I think part of that was based on the sort of work I did. So before being in this whole area of time management time investment, I was in the world of magazine journalism, and so a lot of my work was project based, and I had a lot of different deadlines that needed to get done. And it was actually quite helpful to have things like my project list and to do list and all of that, and I still do have like to do places where I write down potential items. But what I’m finding more and more is that if something is truly important to me, it should just go right on my calendar, either as an event where I’m going to get the item to happen, or as a like, a task or all events at the top of the day, when it it’s I’m sensitive and needs to get done. Otherwise it probably not that important. And either, like, shouldn’t be on a two day do list at all, or should be on some sort of, like, someday maybe list. So I’ve been evolving in that area more and more towards it’s important, just schedule it now. And if it’s not that important, maybe you shouldn’t even write it down or hold yourself accountable too. What has sound worked best is to do something I call priorities based decision making. And what that is is a filter that helps you determine. It can help you determine from an overall life view or from a narrow view, like just within your professional life, what needs to be attended to and what doesn’t. So for example, my priorities based filter would look like, you know, God and my faith at the top, then my family, then my friend, then my business, then wellness and leisure activities. So as I’m making decisions about what’s going to be on my schedule, I want to make sure that I have the top things there first. So like I have time to go to church or I have time to connect with my family or my friends, and then from there, I can decide on things that I’m going to do for my business or leisure, that sort of thing. And so it’s about making sure that the higher level items are attended to first, before I do the lower level items. Then, if I’m drilling into a specific area, like, for instance, with my business, I have a sense of, okay, what are the top business development activities that I need to be working on, and then what are some of the lower level priorities? So it’s like, yeah, Business Development at the top, and at least for me, and then serving my current clients. And. Then, you know, I might have some business upgrade or business that I want to work on, and then there’s everything else after that. And so I make sure that my top order items are put in first, and then if I don’t have time for the things at the bottom, it’s okay.

Host
Awesome. Well, Elizabeth, where can people go to learn more about you. Where do you want to direct people?

Elizabeth Saunders
Well, the best place to go is to real life, e.com, and I’ll spell that for you. So R, E, A, L, L, I, F, E, and then another E at an elizabeth.com.

Host
Very cool. Well, it’s been awesome to have you here, and thank you for coming on the show, and we wish you all the very best.

Elizabeth Saunders
Awesome. My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.