Our lives have been impacted by many innovative technologies, but we often struggle to find the time to incorporate them into our routines. Although it may seem counterintuitive, working around the clock does not necessarily lead to increased productivity. In fact, it can lead to stress and burnout, which can have a negative impact on the health of a business and yourself.

In this episode, Brie Z Operations Founder Brie DeLisi Zoller shares her insights on time management in both the workplace and personal life. She highlights the significance of recognizing tasks that are beneficial to our work and discarding those that are not. Brie also stresses the importance of taking breaks, including spending time outdoors activities and daylight hours.

Tune in to learn from Brie's expertise in time management and how it can improve your productivity and well-being.

 
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Listen to the podcast here:

Maximizing Productivity and Achieving Work-Life Balance with Brie DeLisi Zoller
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve had a lot of disruptive technology come into our lives in recent times and we also have a lot of expectations placed upon ourselves and one of the things that I’ve heard quite frequently is, “I don’t have time for this,” and sometimes that’s a proxy for, “I don’t have energy for this.” My guest today, Brie Zoller of Brie Z Operations, helps people prioritize what’s really meaningful, what you should be doing with your time, and maybe get rid of some of the things that just really aren’t delivering value.

 
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Brie, welcome to the program.

 

Thank you. 

 

So what are you observing with people’s time management skills in the setting of 2020s Western culture?

 

And I could be speaking about this particularly as a woman and working mostly with women is that fill ourselves to the max. If I see a possible free half hour in my schedule and somebody asks for that half hour, I’m going to give it to them. I have several peers and clients who do the same exact thing. We just are an on-demand society. We need to meet with people, we need to meet with them now, we need to give them that conversation, we need to just kind of overload ourselves. And then not only that but just outside of how we’re actually managing our time, on the flip side of that, we then fill our time because we think we have to. So, even if we don’t actually have anything we need to do with that free half hour block, we’re going to find something to do with that half hour, if that means scrolling on our phone or doing extra work instead of just giving that time back to ourselves. 

 

Now, is this playing to this idea of productivity guilt? 

 

Oh. I love — that’s such a great term because of fighting that for myself personally right now. I think absolutely there’s — if you have the time, you should be using it. That’s this whole thing that we’ve built for ourselves if you need to be working this at a minimum 40-hour workweek and that’s if you’re lucky with a lot of folks. There are other folks who got the 60-, 70-hour weeks that are almost glorified, like you are working at this top huge firm and, “How many hours did you work last week?” “Well, I got 60.” “Oh, well, I got 65.” It’s almost glorified that you should be so then when you’re not, there’s this whole mindset of like, “I’m doing something wrong.” And I experienced that when I was starting my business as well. I would talk to fellow small business owners who would be saying like, “Oh, man, I did 50 hours last week, 30 of them were business development hours,” and I’m looking at my own schedule and going like, “Oh, man, I only did 10 hours of business development last week, I must be doing something wrong.” 

 

And that’s something I observed in what I refer to as the 20th century or old school work culture where there seems to be a strong connection with number of hours.