24 mins: Less overwhelm, more intention: get your time back

What you'll learn:

Most of us are SO stuck in the busyness trap that we think overwhelm is a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be.

Nicola Taylor is the co-founder of Tax Traders and Taxi (which have a combined revenue of $65 million). She leads around 50 people, has 3 teenagers, manages a chronic illness and never calls herself ‘busy’. That’s on purpose – when people ask if she’s flat out, she has a whole strategy behind her answer.

💡 What are you telling yourself? As a Powrsuiter said in the live chat, some of us hold ‘a gold medal in the busy Olympics’. If your story is ‘I never have enough time’, every email and interruption becomes proof, and you miss the spare 15 minutes when it turns up. Nicola swaps ‘I’m drowning’ for something specific she can act on, like ‘two deadlines overlap, and I’ve got a birthday party to organise’.

💡 Let your calendar do the heavy lifting: Start with what matters to you, like Nicola’s coffee with her mum every second Tuesday, which nobody is allowed to book over. Then lock in the things that keep catching you out. Every January she books her hair appointments for the whole year, so grey roots never ambush her before a big preso again.

💡 Delete, delegate or simplify: Look at the bottom third of your list (the stuff you keep carrying forward and feeling guilty about) and ask what would happen if you didn’t do it, whether it needs to be you, and whether a simpler version would do. Nicola ran a care package for her son through those questions and concluded he’s not really a care package guy anyway.

There’s more – including the $49 sock fix, her phone limits, and the corridor of rooms that helps her be fully present wherever she is (we loved this one).

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