If you have a limited amount of time each week to work on your business, what’s the most productive thing to do with your time? And how do you avoid feeling so much pressure to pick the right thing that it shuts you down completely? That’s what I’m talking about in today’s episode.
I work a limited business time each week and so do the majority of my clients. When this is the case, task selection is more important than ever. But it’s got to be done in a way that doesn’t make you freeze or have you jumping frantically from one task to the next. Tune in to hear how my clients and I think about this so we can make the most of the limited time that we have. If you’re a perfectionist and you’re building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project. A podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake, so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionists Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business, you can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.
Custom Intro
So today’s episode is originally, it was an Instagram live, and it’s on a topic that is incredibly important for all perfectionists who are building a business, especially if you have limited work hours, which if you’re listening to this, there’s a very good chance you do have limited work hours, whether it’s by choice or by circumstance or by circumstances that you’ve chosen, you have not got enough time. If that’s you, if you were like, what do I focus on when I have limited business time each week, this episode is going to be incredibly helpful. So I hope you enjoy it.
Sam Laura Brown
I wanted to go live to share something that I know is going to be really helpful.
And you can ask questions anytime throughout this live, I’m happy to answer them. What I wanted to talk about, and I have my notes here to just go through with you because this will be so helpful if you have limited time for your business, whether because you are parenting, maybe you are working a full time job, a part time job, both those things, you have a health condition, you’re looking after parents, there’s so many reasons that we can have limited time for business, or you are someone who works better with more constrained work hours, which is myself as well. I have four little ones as well.
And when I started my business, I was a full time university student studying law and finance. And then I was working full time as an accountant. And then once I went full time in my business, I had my daughter shortly after that, then my twin sons, and then my littlest son, Liam.
So I go to science have limited hours and to have a perfectionist brain that is screaming at you, you need more time for your business. And that would be the solution. So in this live, I just wanted to share with you really is such a pivotal story for me that was so helpful with this.
And then I want to go through with you what to focus on if you do have limited time for growing your business. And there are two different situations that I want to talk about. So hello to everyone who is here live with me and ask questions as we go and be as specific as you want for yourself.
So the story I wanted to start with is really about for myself when I realized that the lie I’ve been telling myself, basically. So as a perfectionist building a business, my brain was constantly comforting me with this story, that if I just had more time to work on my business, then I would be more successful. And that story as painful as it was to keep feeling overwhelmed to keep feeling like I didn’t have enough time.
And then I need to figure out what to do with that time. As painful as that story was, it was really comforting. Because if I had that story, if I was telling myself, if I believed and I deeply believe this, that if I just had more time for my business, I’d be more successful.
It meant that anytime I was struggling, I could kind of just like, calm myself with that. And just like, oh, but I have this as particularly when I was working full time as an accountant. So in a full time nine to five job that was quite demanding.
And I was just like, look at all these people succeeding. And that’s because they can work full time hours on their business. And that’s not me.
So I can’t be successful. So here’s what like, that had to happen for me. God, it was painful for me to actually get that time wasn’t the problem.
And this is such a powerful thing, too. Because if you are feeling like, I just need more time, but I can’t get more time. And I don’t see any time in the future where I could even have more time to just to really start to understand that you don’t even need more time, what you do with your time is so much more important than how much time you have.
It can be such a relief when it comes to if you’re constantly in overwhelm, if you’re constantly overthinking what to work on, because of the pressure to get it right so that you don’t waste the precious time that you have. This is super helpful. So what happened was, I was working full time in my accounting job.
And I really, really, really, really wanted to go full time in my business to be able to work more. As I said, that was to me, like the biggest block in my business was that I just didn’t have enough time to work. So what I did is, and I’ve told this story before.
So if you’ve been around for a while, you might be familiar with it. It’s such a pivotal story. And if you’ve heard it before, you want to hear it again and just really reflect on this.
So what happened? Where do I start this from? So I really had, from when I started my business, I wanted to be able to be full time in my business, regardless of like solving the time issue. And in the end of 2016, I was kind of just like sick of telling myself that will happen one day. And I actually started to really make plans towards that.
I launched something for sale for the very first time after three years of having my business. I actually had something for sale after being in business for three years, which is an online program that I created. And I launched that.
I made about $3,000 from doing that. And that definitely wasn’t enough to pay the bills and to pay, you know, groceries, a gym and all the different things that I was paying for at the time. And so I still wanted to go full time.
So I went through a process of changing my brain. I wrote down an affirmation. I did other mindset work to just really see the possibilities that were available to me.
And to cut that bit short, what ended up happening was I realized that I could, to be able to get more time, I could leave my accounting job and get a job again as a receptionist at a hospital that I previously worked at, just a hospital reception job, leave my degrees behind, my law and finance degrees behind, and do that so that I could just work in the afternoons and not need to spend all the day, like getting on the 7am train to commute into the city, then working my full work day, and then coming home and just being, I was just so exhausted by the end of the day that I couldn’t get anything done. And that was my time to hang out with Steve and just like all of that kind of stuff. So I just was finding like, I need to figure this out.
So what happened was, when I went to that part-time job, I was working from 3pm, or I think it was 3:30pm until 7:30pm, like I was working a four-hour shift in the evening. So I had all day. I finally had more time.
Amazing. This is what I got. Amazing, amazing, amazing.
I finally have all the time I want. Because for me, like a three o’clock onwards, that’s my least productive time of day. So to be able to work a part-time job that is in my most productive hours, my most unproductive hours of the day was just like amazing.
So I could have my morning routine, I could be working, and then I literally have to leave here at like 3pm. So I could get in a full work day on my business and be essentially full time in the business without financial pressure on the business. Amazing.
So what happened when I did that? Well, I spent the next five months, the next five months, procrasti-working. Doing busy work, for me specifically, that was around Pinterest. And I was creating Pinterest graphics.
And that was taking up a lot of my time working on my strategy. And I wasn’t making more money. And I wasn’t making progress.
I wasn’t creating momentum. And week after week after week, it would get more and more frustrating because I was working so damn hard. I was spending a lot of time on my business.
But I wasn’t actually moving the business forward. And that’s what I wanted to do. That’s why I wanted the time.
And it was very painful to, and this is why it took so long for me to realize, it was very painful to eventually be like, oh, lack of time was not the problem. Lack of time was not the problem. Because once I had more time, and you might have experienced this, if you know, if this is true for you, this is what will have happened, is once you have more time, you waste it.
You don’t really know what to do with it. So if you’re constantly in this, I don’t have enough time loop, and you’re just like, if only I could be having full time hours in my business, or if only I could just have a full workday uninterrupted. And then you get that.
And then you waste it. Either you spend all of that time trying to figure out what to do with that time, so you don’t waste it. And then you don’t have to get anything done.
Or if you just end up doing busy work, whether that is fiddling with graphics, or it takes you hours and hours to create a piece of content, like a caption or an Instagram story you want to do, and you record it like 15 times, and then you don’t end up publishing it, because you recorded it so many times, it now like, it just has lost complete sense. And you’re just like, I just can’t even share that. If you find yourself in these spirals, when you do have the time, even if it’s just like a little pocket, I just love two hours of uninterrupted time to just focus on this one thing.
And then you get that, and you’re like, and I didn’t actually do the thing that I wanted to do. Then time is not, lack of time is not the problem. And there is a solution.
And I want to talk about that, because that’s what I figured out. And what has allowed me to now have a successful business where I’m working full time, I have my four little ones that I spend lots of time with my husband, my dog, friends, other hobbies, and things like that. And so I, I really had to figure that.
And especially because I wanted to grow our family and have kids, which meant pregnancies, giving birth, postpartum, all of that. Did that mean I was still, even though once I was like technically full time in my business, like making a full time income, I’ve always been doing that on part time hours. And I think regardless of anything, I just actually work best that way when I’m in like my natural rhythms and flows of having very concentrated time to focus, and then lots of time to just be and do and read and whatever is my ideal that I’m working towards, regardless of any circumstance.
As much as my brain still wants to tell me like, if I just have full time work hours, which I could have if I wanted them, but I don’t want them. But my brain keeps offering that because it feels so comforting to our perfectionist brain that is so scared of finding out that all of those inadequate thoughts we think are actually true. And therefore it feels risky to try anything fully.
It feels risky to actually do the things you need to do. It’s so comforting. It is so comforting to be like, I just have a time problem.
I just don’t have enough time. And this is why one of the things that we really support our PGSDers with inside perfectionist getting shit done. Our clients, what we support them with is time management and mind management as a perfectionist entrepreneur.
It’s so important. If you know what to do, I’ll talk about this in a second. If you know what to do and you’re just not doing it, I will talk to this in a second.
And then if you don’t know what to do with your time, and you’re just like, I don’t even know what the needle weavers are, I don’t even know what to focus on, then I will talk about what to do in that situation as well. Because it’s so, so powerful to just be able to shift from, I don’t have enough time. And then that constant, like, I don’t have enough time loop that just creates so much overwhelm into, actually, I have the time that I need.
And what matters most is how I use that time. And, and, and, and, and, and this is so important. This is so important.
If you’re a perfectionist, and you hear, like, it doesn’t matter how much time I have, what matters is what I do with my time. Our perfectionism handbrake comes on, like, okay, so now I must figure out the exact perfect thing to do with that time, because I don’t want to waste that time. I don’t want to create momentum in the wrong direction, like, okay, pressure is on, which then creates all of this, like, procrasti-planning, and like spending days and weeks and months of procrasti-learning, and like, okay, now I need to figure out the perfect strategy.
Like, we don’t want that. We don’t want that. And our PGSD is like, one of the biggest needle movers, like high level is taking action, getting shit done doing that without burning out.
But just being like doing things instead of thinking about things, and just creating ideas, and then they don’t get actioned. So I want to talk about the two situations. I’ve got some notes here.
So first of all, as I said, this is all about what to do if you have limited work time. And we want to not have any pressure on that. We want to use our time.
Well, we don’t want to do that by adding pressure, because your perfectionist brain will freeze up or like go into like hustle, hustle, hustle, work, work, work. So what we want to do is understand if you know what to do, if you know what your needle movers are. So needle movers, we talk about these in perfectionist getting shit done, it’s part of power planning is knowing your needle mover is very, very, very important.
Your needle movers are the projects and tasks that when completed will move your business forward. So a lot of our PGSDers are in the early stages of their business and just working to get their business off the ground. And like, they are dreaming about having a full time income being full time in their business, even if that’s like me, like a full time in my business, full time income on part time hours, but they want to have their business be their main thing.
And that is what they’re working towards while balancing, whether it’s part time job, full time job, parenting, looking after parents, health condition, like all these different life circumstances. So you want to know what your needle movers are. And inside PGSD, like part of the power planning process, and then we have extra resources plus the coaching course to get coached on, but the needle mover matrix and just lots of support around needle movers, because it’s so essential that you know what to do with that time.
And it’s not this long laundry list, our perfectionist brains like, okay, I know my needle movers, it’s these top 15 things. No, it’s not going to be that. So first of all, if you know what to do, I just want to talk about like, if you know your needle movers, but you’re not doing them, I want to talk about what’s going on and what the solution is.
So this took me a long time to figure out. And now I’ve worked with over 1000 perfectionist entrepreneurs, and like, I am just so pleased to be able to share with you what to do. Oh, God, it took me so long to figure out and to be able to solve for this myself.
So I just love being able to give you a shortcut. So if you know what to do, but you’re not doing your needle movers, then what is going on to cause that is that you are working against your perfectionist brain. So a lot of people talk about perfectionism as this big problem, you’ve got to overcome perfectionism.
Perfectionism is killing your business. Like if you search business and perfectionism, you will see everyone who’s talking about it talks about it just at this very, like kind of superficial level of like, you know, perfectionism, either perfectionism is why you’re successful. And it’s like about perfecting the little details.
And there’s so many misunderstandings around perfectionism, because that’s not actually what it is. But there’s that kind of approach. Or when it comes to the other side of things, it’s like perfectionism is killing your business.
Don’t be a perfectionist is basically the advice. And that’s why I have this business. Because once I figured out I’m a perfectionist, and then I went out to get help with that.
And the advice was don’t be a perfectionist. What am I meant to do with that? How do I just stop being a perfectionist when my brain is screaming at me, that if I can’t do it perfectly, it’s better not to do it at all. And that’s a scream.
I figured that, like what will people say? Because like all the fear of judgment that comes with it, the all or nothing thinking, all of those things. So you are working against yourself. If you know what your needle movers are, and you aren’t getting them done, maybe you start on them, but you don’t actually complete them.
Maybe you have a hard time starting on them. There’s so many perfectionist reasons for that. And you might be neurodivergent as well.
But there are perfectionist reasons. If you resonate with what I’m talking about, there are perfectionist reasons. It’s vulnerable to start something.
It’s vulnerable to work on something. It’s vulnerable to complete something when you’re a perfectionist. Because any of those actions puts at risk you finding out that it’s not going to be as good as it is in your brain when it’s actually put out into reality.
So working against yourself and working against your perfectionist brain looks like, first of all, having a really vague goal. Like you’re not really sure exactly like what you’re working towards. It’s really hard to create meaningful momentum in your business if you just have a super vague, like I want to have a full-time income one day kind of goal.
Too vague, not really able to ground in that and create traction with that. Maybe you don’t have any goal really. Or you’ve got a lot of goals.
I see this a lot. Like you’ve got all the goals. You’re forcing yourself.
You’re constantly trying to ask yourself like how do I push through? How do I be more motivated? How do I find more willpower? You are guilting yourself and shaming yourself. So if you are resting, you’re telling yourself I should be working in my business right now. Like I’m too far behind to not be working on my business right now.
So any rest you’re getting, it’s not actually restorative. And so you don’t really get the benefit of it because of the shame, because of the guilt of I’m behind. I should be further along.
If I’m so smart, why is my business not getting anywhere? You are being really strict with yourself. Like just trying to like maybe you’ve done like time blocking. And I love planning from a calendar.
Power planning does that. But if you’re time blocking and just like putting this schedule that if you can’t stay connected with your calendar for more than a couple of days because it’s so overwhelming, you just fall behind so fast. And you’re just being really strict with yourself.
That is working against yourself. Maybe you have no plans at all. You’re like I hope I have a productive week this week.
And off you go to working. And like trying to, this is another sign as well, like just trying to squeeze business time in around everything else. And just constantly like okay I’ll try and squeeze that in after I get home from work tomorrow.
I’ll try and wake up early tomorrow and squeeze that in before I have the kids wake up. And like just all this like squeezing energy, squeezing in is really working against yourself. So what you want to do if this is you is you want to work with yourself.
You want to work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. So instead of trying to not be a perfectionist and maybe with that you write on a post-it note like you know done. What’s the saying? Done is better than perfect.
And you put that on a post-it note like that is not, that is not the solution. That is not the solution. I heard so many people do that.
They write a little reminder of like you know enjoy the journey. Like your perfectionist brain is not going to resonate with that. It’s not going to meaningfully impact how you operate as a business owner.
Particularly if you have other stuff going on in your life and you’re wanting to build up your business at the same time as maintaining if not thriving in other areas of your life. Your perfectionist brain that little post-it note it’s not going to be helpful for more than like five minutes or like five minutes once a week. So what you want to do is you want to work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it.
That is the answer if you know what your needle movers are but you’re not actually doing them. So if you know okay for me it’s consistent content creation inside perfection is getting shit done. We have a whole creative cocoon program in there on how to create content in a way that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it.
But if that is a needle mover for you but you’re not doing that it’s because you’re working against your perfectionist brain instead of with it. We want to work with ourselves instead of against ourselves. We want to work with our perfectionist brain that has a tendency for fear of judgment.
It has a tendency for all or nothing thinking. It has a tendency towards burnout and working from a place of inadequacy. That’s really what calls causes the burnout.
It’s unsustainable to work from a place of constantly trying to improve and constantly trying to through your actions show yourself that you actually are good enough. That’s exhausting. The overthinking the procrastination if those things are coming up with you for you that’s that perfectionism then you want to work with your perfectionist brain.
So one of the things that I developed for me to help me because I’m my first client I needed to figure this out for me and then I taught it to my clients and then more clients and then started sharing about it publicly and people like tell me more about that which is power planning and this is a flexible planning method that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it and once I began power planning after so much trial and error of like figuring out things like figuring out what’s most important to work on and how to actually do that when my week’s constantly changing or like I get in my own way and all of that like how can I actually work with myself so there’s flexible structure clear and realistic plans.
I said that—just want to underline this—your plans, when you are planning in a way that works with your perfectionist brain instead of against it, your plans are anchored in a clear goal that you have for your business that’s a little bit stretchy but not crazy. And ideally as well, you have things broken down into projects. This is why in PGSD we teach the Growth Goal, we teach the Momentum Projects that go towards your Growth Goal, and we teach Power Planning, which is your weekly planning system that works with your perfectionist brain. All of this is designed to work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. So you will be doing your Power Planning each week to complete your Momentum Project, which gets you to your Growth Goal. Pretty simple.
And you’ll be getting clean rest, which is when you’re resting without the guilt, without the shame. So when it does come time to work—if you’ve heard me share anything before you know I’m very passionate about this topic—Clean Rest is a productivity tool. If you are resting and that rest is tainted by guilt, then when it comes time to work, what you will find is you scroll. What you will find is that you don’t want to do the hard courageous thing that you plan to do because your brain hasn’t had a rest. So it’s like, “Okay, well we need to rest. We need to just, like, restore ourselves” because even though you might have been not working on your business and doing a million other things or just watching Netflix or just scrolling or whatever, you didn’t actually get your battery recharged. And so it’s very hard to focus because your brain is tired even if you physically rested. We want our brain to be rested. That’s—if you’ve got limited work hours, getting brain rest is super, super, super important.
So that’s what to do: You work with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. And inside Perfectionists Getting Shit Done, this is exactly what we help people do. I created a whole program around it with so much support because this was the thing I had to figure out for myself the hard way, and I don’t want you to have to figure it out the hard way.
The other thing I wanted to talk about and then I shall wrap up—but if you are live with me, as many of you have been coming on, if you have a question, ask it. So if you don’t know your needle movers, I just want to talk to why that is and what the solution is. And also join us in PGSD because 100% we help you—I don’t even like “help you” figure out the needle movers, but we get the information from you about where you’re up to in your business, what kind of business you have. We have all kinds of perfectionist entrepreneurs and we tell you what your needle movers are so you don’t have to be left figuring that out by yourself. And we know perfectionist brains can be like, “I think this is the needle movers or wait, is it this? Or I saw this thing that someone else was doing on Instagram, should I do that?”. Like, so we provide so much support and clarity on that.
You need clarity. If you’re not—if you’re not actually getting that momentum in your business that you need, you need clarity and you need follow-through and that all comes from working with your perfectionist brain instead of against it. So if you don’t know your needle movers, then what can happen—this is, like, typically what’s going on that I see for perfectionist entrepreneurs is there’s so much, because of your limited work time, there’s so much pressure to get it right and to not waste time. So you’re like essentially your perfectionist brain is just super scared to pick something because, “What if I pick the wrong thing?”. And particularly as well—this is the other thing I wrote here—is procrasti-learning and consuming lots of strategic how-to content, is that you might feel like, “Oh my God, there’s a million ways”.
For example, I did a story yesterday about needle movers and I got people to DM me to just share more. And one of the people who replied just said that their needle mover is to find more clients as a copywriter, because there are so many strategies to find clients that they don’t know which strategy to pick and which one’s going to be the best one specifically for them. Because there are so many different strategies out there and they don’t want to waste time because, of course, they want to have a successful business.
So if that—if you relate to that, if you’re like, “I’m very familiar with, like, what I could do, but I don’t actually know for me what the needle mover is”—again, join PGSD. 100% you want to be inside PGSD; we solve with that. And like, that is worth the investment alone to have pinpointed for you exactly what the needle mover is so when you’re in your work time, you are actually doing the business time—you are actually doing the things that grow the business and you’re not constantly being like, “Oh wait, should I do this?”. We want to have you knowing that needle mover and then being able to follow through on it.
So if that is you, where you don’t know what they are, just know that’s very normal for perfectionists to get kind of, like, in that trap of—like, especially if you’re doing a lot of consuming of information and maybe you’re, like, doing all these long chats with ChatGPT being like, “Help me figure out what exactly my niche is,” or “Help me figure out what I should name my business,” or “Help me figure out”—I’m just thinking of I lost the other ones that I see—”help me figure out, um, you know, like, what the perfect thing is that my audience would want”. If you find yourself and you’re just in these, like, ChatGPT chat loops constantly trying to perfect a thing, we just want to have you know exactly what your needle mover is.
So that’s why we help with that, and it’s very normal for perfectionists to get stuck there because of this fear of wasted effort that goes along with perfectionism and the pressure to get it right. And when that pressure comes on, the perfectionism handbrake comes up and we—we want to stop ourselves. Or you might just try a million things and jump from thing to thing to thing. It depends really if you’re a more avoidant perfectionist and you tend to go into that freeze, or if you are more of a busy perfectionist rather than freezing. And it could be a functional freeze and you’re, like, still doing things, but you’re not really doing things. Um, or you’re just, like, doing all the things and that’s your tendency as a perfectionist. We want to have you just be clear on your needle movers.
So the solution to that is when you are Power Planning—again, we support with this inside PGSD. When you are Power Planning, part of it’s embedded into the Power Planning process because it’s so essential is determining what your needle movers are. And so having that tool—and we have the Needle Mover Matrix as well—and inside PGSD we have coaching, weekly coaching that you get lifetime access to. We have Ask a Coach, we have again—like, we can just tell you what your needle movers are if you tell us where you at. So that is all in there.
Because you need to know your needle movers. And I just don’t want you to have what I had which is years literally, I’m crossing my legs, my feet are going numb so I need to uncrossed.
Years, I had years of thinking that if I just had more time, if I was just full-time in my business, then I would be more successful. And then once I had essentially full-time hours, I wasted that time. I spent five months doing that before I was like, hang on a second, I’m not making progress, but I have the time, what’s going on? Oh, it’s actually, I didn’t have a time issue.
I had a, not even a perfectionism issue, I had a working against myself issue. And once I figured out how to work with myself, that perfectionism handbrake came down and I could create momentum. So with that said, that is what I wanted to share.
I’m doing each week, I’m going to do a live on Instagram as part of a Get Out of Your Own Way series. So I wanted to just start with this one because I really wanted to chat about it. That’s the reason.
There’s no, and I want to share that too, because it’s like, what’s the perfect thing? And you might go to chatGPT and like, tell me the perfect thing to do a live on. Like what I did is I went, what do I want to talk about live? And I talked about that. That’s the strategy.
So, and that has worked for me well, I’ve made over $2 million in my business by following that strategy.
So it works very well. So I’m going to be doing a live each week.
And also if you haven’t listened to it before, you’re not familiar. I have a podcast called the Perfectionism Project. So if you enjoyed this, if you found it helpful and you want more, go and listen to my podcast and just pick a recent episode that stands out to you and start with that. So I hope that’s been really helpful and I will talk to you soon. Bye.
Outro
If you enjoy this podcast, I recommend signing up for the waitlist for my program called perfectionist getting shit done, aka pgsd. This is a program designed to help you get out of your own way in your business, you’re going to learn how to release your perfectionism handbrake by setting a growth goal for your business. Planning properly as a perfectionist with power planning and getting regular, guilt free, clean rest, you’ll learn the skills required to get out of your own way and be supported every step of the way to do it. To find out more about the program and join the waitlist today, go to samlaurabrown.coms/pgsd.