47 How Chronic Busyness Undermines Your Focus and Follow Through

What happens when your schedule's crammed, your pace is a constant sprint, and your brain never gets a break?

In this episode of Joyfully Unstoppable, Becky explores how chronic busyness impacts your ability to think clearly, focus deeply, and follow through on what matters most. This conversation goes beyond time management and gets into how your brain actually performs under constant demand.

You will hear how decision fatigue, cognitive overload, and scattered attention show up in real leadership moments, and what that means for your results. Becky also shares practical ways to reset your baseline so you can lead with clarity, make stronger decisions, and finish what you start.

If your calendar is exploding and you still feel like the most important work keeps getting pushed aside, this episode will help you approach your day with more intention and effectiveness.

What you’ll learn:

•  How chronic busyness impacts focus, decision-making, and memory 
•  Why high-capacity leaders still experience cognitive overload 
•  What happens to your follow through when your brain stays overstimulated 
•  Simple ways to create more clarity and control in your day 
•  How to structure your work so you can focus on what truly moves the needle 

This episode supports experienced women leaders who want to operate at a high level with more clarity, stronger decision-making, and consistent execution.

🎧 Listen now and start leading with greater focus and follow through.

#podcastforwomen #womenwholead #leadershippodcast #executiveleadership #womeninleadership #productivitytips #focusandproductivity #leadershipdevelopment #busyness #timemanagement #personaleffectiveness #womenleaders 

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Transcript

Becky 0:05

Welcome to Joyfully Unstoppable, the podcast for women who are ready to succeed without the stress. Whether you are leading a team, a classroom, a boardroom, or your own big, beautiful life, I am so glad you found us. I'm your host, Becky Ham, leadership coach, speaker and founder of Women Lead Well. Join me each week for straight talk, practical tips and a dash of encouragement. Hello my friends. I hope that you are having a great day. It is April. I can't believe it. This year is going by so fast. This week we are gonna talk about chronic busyness, about the chaos that comes when you are doing five things simultaneously, and back to back, to back, to back, to back. Always something on the calendar. No downtime, no white space. I see it all the time in the amazing women I coach. You perform at such a high level, you have such high capacity that you can do a whole lot of work more than the average bear, right? At the same time, science tells us the research is clear that when we are constantly on, when we are constantly busy. It impairs our performance. It just does. And because you're so high capacity, you can compensate for it, right? Your best, your, maybe I'll say it this way, your mediocre is still better than a lot of people's best. But it's still less than your best. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about how chronic busyness affects your focus. So your ability to stay laser focused on what matters most, what's gonna move the needle, what is the difference maker in whatever your profession is, whatever your task is at the moment. So how it affects your focus. And how it affects your follow through. How you close, how you complete, how you wrap up, how you check off. Because when we've got too much on our plate, when we are constantly busy, not only does our focus decline, but so does our follow through. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today and the mantra of today's show, um, if we are to think about it, uh, I, I used to work with a special forces officer. He was a phenomenal guy. I loved working with him, and he would tell me, because I am the Energizer Bunny, I am constantly doing the things. Um. With periods of just absolute downtime, I, I'm like on, or I'm off. But when I'm on, I'm, I'm fully on. I'm all after it. And so he would tell me from time to time, you know, remember Becky, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And what he was telling me was not do less, slow down, dim your light, step back, shrink. He wasn't saying that at all. He's special forces. He's the best of the best in the army. What he was saying was. When you slow down, you have less hiccups. When you slow down and are intentional at what you're doing, you perform more smoothly. There's less friction, and it's the lack of friction. It's the smoothness that allows you to hit the result faster than if you are just going, going, going with that, frenetic energy, well, you're gonna, you're gonna hit hiccups, you're gonna hit friction, and that's gonna slow you down. So slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. That's what we're talking about today. And before we get into it, I wanna be clear that each of us has our own baseline. And so you might run naturally at a little bit of a higher speed than somebody else. I said I was the energizer bunny. When I'm on, I am on. When I'm off, I'm off. I will spend a day just lay it on the sofa like the best of them, but I know me, I. And I know what it feels like when I'm on and smooth and therefore fast, and I know what it feels like when I'm on and frenetic and therefore hiccupy. So, you know, you, you know, your natural baseline when you are cramming stuff in above that natural baseline. So don't compare yourself to anyone else, just compare yourself to your natural state. But each of us, we just do hit a point where our busyness degrades our performance and we'll experience something like the following. There is an impact on our focus. And so maybe it's scattered attention that our brain is constantly scanning for the next task instead of focusing deeply. And so that might make it hard to concentrate. We might again,'cause we are smart women. We might be able to put the pieces together and do the quick superficial analysis, but we're not giving ourselves time to do the deeper impact analysis. We're not slowing down to let the larger implications inform or the trend research inform the thinking that we're doing. We still are smart in the moment. But we are not as smart thinking across the long term and depending on how senior you are, as you sit here and listen to this podcast, the more senior you are, the more long term you need to be looking, which means the greater your specific need to slow down. Another impact is we know science backs this, that there is reduced cognitive ability. That part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex gets tired from constant decision making and, and high stakes decision making. Yes. Like big important decision making. Yes. But also dinky little decision making. Like, do I wear the blue shirt or the orange shirt? Do I eat frosted flakes or granola? The stupid inconsequential decisions. Also tires out that decision making part of your brain. And that does two things. One, it lowers your cognitive flexibility. And so as you are looking at an important decision. Uh, you cannot entertain the same level of risk or change the same level of difference from the status quo as you can when your prefrontal cortex is well rested. And they've done ridiculous studies on this. They've studied judges. In court cases, you are far more likely to have your parole granted at the first hearing slot of the day, you are absolutely not getting paroled if you have the last slot of the day. And they have looked at thousands of judges. Thousands of cases, and they have found this to be true. Why? Because the judge's prefrontal cortex gets tired out listening to all of the testimony from the lawyers and potentially the, the inmates themselves. And at the beginning of the day, they're willing to take the risk that maybe this person has rehabilitated and turned their life around. But that last slot before lunch, when their blood sugar has dipped and they've been listening to cases all morning and really that last case of the day before, they're done for the day, their brain is tired. Judges who've been doing this for decades, their brain is tired and they are far less likely to parole because they are not gonna take the risk that that inmate hasn't rehabilitated. There's no difference in the inmate. It is simply the cognitive flexibility of the judge and the decision fatigue that the judge faces. When you are chronically busy, when you pack your schedule full day after day after day, you lose cognitive flexibility. You just do. It's not a matter of will, and it's not a matter of your capacity. High capacity people lose their cognitive flexibility. Just the same. The more senior you are, the more important this is. Okay, next up. Kind of going with cognitive flexibility. We're sticking with the brain, uh, memory issues. When you overload your brain, when you cram too much in there, when you don't do dumps, and I have, um, a mental load reset guide. It's a free download. It'll be linked in the show notes. You can find it on women Lead well.net. What we know is getting stuff out of your brain. So like the processing power of the brain isn't holding it, but it is externalized somewhere that you trust that you have worked into your routine. Um, I use paper and also I use Google, and so it's in my G suite. I use the task managers for things that I dump. And so I've got the two places where I know that my tasks go why? Because if I were to keep it in my brain and rely on my brain to hold the information, all of those little open tabs, I wouldn't be able to remember things as well. And that could be, I wouldn't be able to remember an appointment that I had or a thing that I had to do, but I also wouldn't be able to remember. A meaningful conversation I had with a client that can inform a future product I want to develop or that so and so said something two weeks ago that's gonna inform a decision that I'm gonna make today. It's not just the stuff you have to do, but the associations between the people that you know and the information that you bring in, that you as the leader need to be able to synthesize to then inform better decisions. You're losing that when you've got too much on your plate. So all of that is the impact on focus. What is the impact on follow through? I've talked about decision fatigue, but we can go beyond simply decision fatigue to straight up. Overwhelm When the sheer volume of tasks stay at too high of a level, above your natural threshold, whatever that threshold is for you, that leads to exhaustion. That exhaustion over time wears down. Your energy stores. it's a degradation of your overall capacity. You don't have the energy, you don't have the oomph, you don't have the, like the bank to complete the final crucial steps in projects, particularly because a lot of the things that we do, those final steps. Or one of two things. One, either super tedious because you are just drilling through to make that all of the i's are dotted and the T's are crossed. Or the final steps are related to all of the outstanding challenges and problems that you've had over the course of whatever the project is that you're working on. And that takes a lot of mental energy. And so your ability to, to go that last mile, well to finish strong is degraded. And when we feel overwhelmed, a natural response to that is procrastination. an inability to start, much less finish the tasks that we have in front of us because we just can't take anymore. We're maxed out. When we experience decision fatigue, not only do we shut down any risk in the decisions that we face, we sometimes can just stall and refuse to make the decisions themselves. And sometimes that's okay. You don't wanna rush to a decision, but we also know. That a lot of decisions are time sensitive and those delays, that stalling, that waiting, that not being ready to make the decision, that can have an impact on the options in front of you, and you might end up with less good options because you waited,'cause you stalled,'cause your brain was tired and you couldn't make the right decision in the moment. So that's the impact on focus and follow through. Lowering your overall baseline, degrading your capacity, so all of that together. Chronic busyness ain't cool. It is not good for you. It might be your mo. It might be how you got to where you are, but it is not serving you in your current role. It impairs your focus. It impairs your follow through. It degrades your emotional resilience. It induces cognitive overload, scattered attention, decision fatigue, so. What do you do? Well, you can't think your way outta chronic busyness. This is not a, a let me just fix my mindset and it'll all be okay. No, you have to teach your brain and your body a new baseline. How do you do that? You train your brain and your body to be comfortable with less on the plate. And I can already feel the resistance, blah, but I can't drop anything. Oh, but having everything on the plate is how I stay at high level. This is what it means to, to be in the role I'm in. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Your outcomes, right? Your outcomes are what puts you in the room that you're in, at the desk that you are in. The value you deliver is what puts you in that room and sitting at that desk, not the quantity of stuff on your calendar or your to-do list. So I hear the resistance, and I'm telling you, no ma'am, no ma'am. You've patterned yourself to it. You have gotten used to it. You've habituated yourself to being busy. You are perhaps addicted to the busyness, but the busyness does not serve you. The busyness is holding you back. So what can you do about it? Thing one. Create intentional moments, moments of stillness, of a lack of motion. And that doesn't have to be meditation. And frankly, it doesn't have to be a lack of literal motion. If you wanna go for a walk or go touch grass, rock on, that's a great thing to do. But my point is, you want intentional moments, and it could be 60, 90 seconds to start where you are not being productive. Where you are responsible to no one but yourself. And again, 60, 90 seconds, that is all your nervous system needs to regulate. So if you wanna do the sitting down, going for a walk, touching grass, whatever it is, while you're doing some deep breathing right, you are really signaling to your body very quickly and very clearly that it can regulate. So that is thing one, and I mean, do it and habit stack it. Maybe you do something intentional first thing in the morning to really start your day off on the right foot. Maybe you take a minute over lunch or if you've got any kind of a gap between meetings i'm just trying to think through options that might work for you, but you, it's your life. You figure out what works for you, but small intentional moments inside of your day, and you do them put the alarm on your phone so you don't miss it, and you don't get busy and you don't talk yourself out. It's 60 seconds. Do not talk yourself out of it. That is thing one. Thing two is how we approach things and so. Many of us plan reactively instead of intentionally. And I talked about this a couple of episodes before when we looked at how to prioritize, but we get so caught up in the urgent that we miss the important, it's the Eisenhower Matrix. And so really as you are building your calendar and building your to-do list. Focus on only the work that only you can do, and that work should be the important work. If you've got unimportant work that only you can do, fine, ditch it. That's a ditch That is not a do, but the things on your calendar should be the important work that only you can do, and everything else should be ditched, delegated, or delayed. Be intentional, be ruthless. Commit to that approach to planning and follow through. When your brain sees the structure, it helps it relax because it knows it's the same thing as doing that brain dump, getting it out of your brain onto paper or a digital planner. Your brain says, okay, I trust. I know where it is. I don't have to hold it anymore. The same is true with your planning. I trust the important work is gonna get done because I see where it is on the schedule. I can, I can relax and when it relaxes, the good things happen. That's when the big ideas come. That's when the insights come. It's amazing. Three, I'm gonna alienate some people here. I don't even apologize'cause it's true. Um, you wanna limit your multitasking. You wanna focus on one meaningful task at a time. And let me be clear with this. I don't mean 24 7 y'all. I'm not saying revolutionize your life and only do this all the time. No, well, I would say that with, uh, the four D framework, the ditch delegate delay, do, uh, you should do that all the time. That's not just like a, every once in a while live your life that like that's your new normal going forward. I promise you'll be happy. But there are times when we multitask and there's nothing wrong with that. And we can be effective and do it, and that's fine. Right. But what I am saying is that there are certain tasks and there are certain times when we need to slow down and just do one thing at a time and we will be more effective. Switching between tasks slows us down, creates the friction, is the opposite of smooth. Focus on one meaningful task at a time, particularly when that task is something that really does need your undivided attention. Really requires your focus in the deep thinking. Next up, build some habits that reward calm. You probably have a lot of habits that are built on energy. And this is a calmer energy. And so that would be walking, maybe it's reading, maybe it's gardening, right? With the, with the seasons changing, that's possible. Maybe it's puzzles, whatever, to help the brain associate slowness with safety. Because it is highly likely that at least a small part of why you stay, why any of us stay chronically busy is because we have associated the busyness with success, and that success is associated with safety. And so if we just keep swimming fast enough, we'll stay safe. Again, that works to a point. But the more senior you get, the less true that statement is. And so you want to start to teach your body, teach your nervous system, teach your brain the what has been working for you for decades is not working as well anymore, and that slowing down is actually your key to success and then your safety. The key to this, the key to smooth is fast, is starting small. Don't pull your entire calendar apart. You're not walking away from your life. You're making a small little change, and you're getting used to that small little change, and then you're gonna assess, and then you might make another small little change. All of that is gonna improve your performance. That's the point. All of this is to improve your performance, okay? Next week, I hope you'll join me when I ask. Are you the bottleneck on your team? Sometimes we are, and we don't even know it, so we're gonna get into it. Are you stopping your team from, from them following through and hitting complete on their tasks? Now, if today's episode spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a friend who's had too much on her plate. We need more women leading from alignment, not adrenaline. And please don't forget to like and subscribe. And if you could leave a review, I would really appreciate it. Also, you can always grab one of our resources. There's the 90 Day Leader Development Plan available on our website along with free resources like the weekly reset routine, and the mental load reset, both of which can help you overcome chronic busyness. Remember, joyful, sustainable, and authentic leadership is possible, and you deserve to enjoy every minute of it. Until next time, I'm Becky Ham, and this is joyfully unstoppable.