058: How to balance out your Productivity Ecosystem

Mini series part 6.

The tricky part with productivity, or not being productive, is that we often think that we just don’t have enough willpower to do the things, so we think we need to push harder. But usually that's not a solution that's sustainable.

Feeling like you have to push yourself a ton (but you just can’t push yourself enough to get eeeverything done), that’s a sign that your productivity ecosystem is off-balance.

Let’s talk about what that might look like and what you can do to strengthen the parts that could use some work.

Productivity Ecosystem summary

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Show notes

Last week, I told you all about the productivity ecosystem – which consists of the three things that support you being a productive, balanced human business owner. These are wholeness, design, and sisu. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I recommend you hop on over to the previous episode to get the lay of the land. Actually, the past 5 episodes are all part of a productivity mini series so if you’re in a podcast episode marathon mood, you might want to start with episode 027 and work your way to this one.

The tricky part with productivity, or not being productive, is that we often think that we just don’t have enough willpower to do the things, so we think we need to push harder. But actually, that’s probably kind of almost never the solution.

Feeling like you have to push yourself a ton (but you just can’t push yourself enough to get eeeverything done), that’s a sign that your productivity ecosystem is off-balance, so let’s talk about what that might look like and what you can do to strengthen the parts that could use some work.

So let’s talk about what it looks like if your productivity ecosystem is off balance. I know I could probably talk about this for 4 hours straight, so I’m going to try and keep this to less than half an hour. We’ll see!

And again, the ecosystem consists of wholeness, design, and sisu. For each piece, I’m going to talk a bit about what it might look like in practice if that piece of the ecosystem could use some work, and talk about potential things that you could try. I’m trying to give kinda general ideas here, because what works for you is going to be different from what works for someone else.

Let’s talk about wholeness first.

In short, wholeness is about feeling well physically, emotionally and mentally. When you feel well, you do well. Signs that wholeness could use a little work are:

If you’re finding that you often feel tired, you get brain fog, or feel really sluggish. It is natural, normal for energy to fluctuate throughout the day. Most people do well for a few hours, and then their focus and energy starts to decline – this has been shown in a good chunk of research. If you ever have to have surgery, it’s best to pick a morning appointment – just saying.

If you’re feeling lots of aches and kinks in your body throughout the day. I went through a period of time when I felt like I was too tired to even sleep, because when I’d go to sleep I would start to get a headache on the side of my head that was on the pillow, so I’d wake up after two hours to have to switch sides and then after another couple of hours I would have to just get up because both sides of my head hurt too much to rest on a pillow. Turned out that the muscles and soft tissues around my skull, neck and jaw were so jammed up that it was too much to rest my head on anything. So I had t figure out ways to take better care of my body and to spend less time on my computer.

If you’re feeling disconnected in some way, whether that’s yourself, your loved ones, your friends.

If you don’t have energy to do much else other than watch Netflix after you stop working. I mean, you may have seen all the memes online that are like “Whenever someone cancels plans with me I’m secretly super excited because I don’t have to leave the house” → buuut it’s not actually healthy to feel that way all the time. It’s quite probably that it’s a symptom of not having enough time to decompress.

So if you’re experiencing these kinds of things, WHOLENESS might be the piece to start with.

This might mean taking regular breaks throughout your workday, maybe even go outside during them. (Scrolling social media is not what your body and brain count as a break). It might mean taking a look at what you eat, and whether your diet is supporting you or causing sugar crashes. It might be that you need a better wind down routine before bed, so that you can get a restful night’s sleep. It might mean reaching out to some friends or loved ones more often to feel that connection. It might mean incorporating some regular movement into your day.

I’m going to nerd out on something just a little bit: did you know that human brains are built to support a lot of movement, so when we’re sitting still by our computers for several hours, our brain doesn’t have as much to do? We need to move our bodies to keep our brains awake.

Next, let’s talk about design.

Design has to do with the practices, routines and systems that are in place, the way in which you operate in your business. Signs that the DESIGN piece could use a little work are:

If you’re often feeling frazzled or overwhelmed behind the scenes.

You feel like you’re pulled in a million directions, and you rarely have time to work on the big ideas or updates you have in mind for your business.

If you’re not really sure what to work on when you sit down at your desk,  if you always feel like you’re behind, or like your to-do list is just overwhelming and will never get done.

If you find yourself reacting to a lot of stuff, kind of doing tasks as they pop up on your radar, but you really wish you would’ve done the thing you had planned instead.

Maybe you’re worried that it’ll also affect your clients, or maybe people say things like it seems you have your stuff together when in reality you feel like “Oh if only they knew”.

If you go to bed in the evening feeling like you were pretty busy all day but don’t feel like you actually accomplished anything that’ll make a difference.

So if you’re experiencing these kinds of things, DESIGN might be the piece to start with.

Depending on how your business stuff is set up, there are so many potential things to do within the design piece of the ecosystem.

It might mean getting some software or creating some automations or templates around things you have to do repeatedly. It might mean putting boundaries in place, or planning out a regular weekly schedule. It might mean documenting workflows for things you do often, so that you don’t have to remember every single step in the process PLUS it’ll make it easier to outsource that task in the future. Design can even have to do with how you’ve put together your services, for example if you don’t like having frequent calls with people, can you restructure your services to have less calls? Could you instead do voice notes?

And this reminds me – sometimes the things we can do for design are more around how we do things vs what software or systems we have in place.

I don’t know if you can relate, but sometimes when I’ve got a call scheduled for later in the day, it’s like my brain throws up it’s hands in the air and says “Well because I have that call at 2pm, there’s no way I have enough time to work on anything meaningful” – even when it’s just 8am at that point. That usually tells me that I could’ve planned my days a bit better. I could either plan to do tasks that don’t require a lot of focus and brain power into the time leading up to a call, or tasks that I’m super excited about so that I don’t feel resistance to working on stuff. Or making sure that I don’t sprinkle out calls across every day of the week, so that I’m not feeling that “Gah I have time for nothing!” feeling on several days a week.

So we’ve made it to the sisu part of the ecosystem.

Sisu has to do with your grit, determination, and resilience. But let’s not confuse it with pushing and forcing willpower, it’s more about feeling an internal motivation to do the thing. Signs that the SISU piece could use a little work are:

If you do have energy, you do have systems in place and feel like things on the outside look like they should be good, but you find yourself not following through on plans. And you’ve noticed that trying to push it isn’t really helping.

You notice that you don’t have as much patience anymore, you’re not happy to experiment anymore, or can’t find the energy to tweak things even if you feel like there’s gotta be a better way to do a thing.

Maybe you’re feeling a lack of motivation and drive, and you have these debates with yourself about why you should do the thing and why you actually should start watching Schitts Creek from the beginning for the 4th time.

Maybe you’re not where you’d like to be yet with your revenue yet, but you’re finding that making more money isn’t really enough of a driver for you anymore. Maybe you catch yourself wondering if what you do actually has meaning.

So if you’re experiencing these kinds of things, SISU might be the piece to start with.

I think sisu can be a bit trickier to solve for than the other two, because it can feel a lot less tangible to start.

Maybe you could journal a bit around what you enjoy, what feels exciting to you, what motivates you to do the thing you do.

When you look back at some moments that have felt really great in the past couple of months, what made those moments feel great, what made you feel good about yourself in those moments?

Something that can also chip away at your sisu is doing marketing or other things in your business in a way that you don’t enjoy or that doesn’t fit you – you identifying those things could be helpful so that you can change them.

If things pop up for you as you journal, you could then think about how you could incorporate more of that into your life.

Maybe there’s a change you could do in how you approach your work, or maybe there’s something new you could incorporate into your daily routines outside of work.

When I wasn’t getting family photography clients consistently, I didn’t want to just sit around for them to come to me. I wanted to be creating photographs, and I enjoy photographing people the most. I actually am terrible at taking pictures of landscapes or inanimate objects. So I did portfolio sessions for free, I’d take my camera with me everywhere so that I could keep being creative, keep testing ideas, and keep testing new equipment without having to wait to get clients.

Or when it comes to this coaching business, I would go nuts if I only got to share my thoughts and ideas with 1:1 clients – I don’t think we’d get very far on their strategy if I was telling them all the things I’d like to talk about. So that’s why I have this podcast, it’s a way for me to do something that I really love *and* at the same time it benefits people who listen.

Final thoughts

The solutions for each part of the ecosystem may vary quite a lot from person to person, but I hope that this gave you some insight into what you might be able to change.

Now that we’ve gone through each part in the ecosystem, I want to point out that because it IS an ecosystem, this isn’t quite as black-and-white as it might sound right now.

When something’s lacking in one of the areas, it also affects the others. But the good news is that when we improve one of them, it also affects the others.

And I should also point out, that even if one of the pieces is suuuper well taken care of, it doesn’t compensate for the others. Each piece has to be at like a good basic level for life and business to feel doable and good and sustainable. Like having just amazing sisu isn’t enough, you need to take care of yourself and operate your business in a way that’s supportive of you. Or like having all the systems in the world in place doesn’t make up for not taking good care of yourself. I hope that this all makes sense – it’s all so very much connected.

And of course, I’d be happy to support you to figure out which shifts might be most beneficial to you. So if you have trouble following through with tasks that feel important to you, or you work later than you’d like to to get them done, together we can figure out ways to get those things done with less effort.

You’re probably just a few simple shifts away from being more productive and we can team up through my 1:1 intensive to figure that out. My intensive also comes with a support period so that you can ask questions and get gentle accountability when you’re implementing the ideas we’ve decided on. You can find out more at jennahellberg.com/services or send me an email or a DM if you’ve got questions.