vor 3 Tagen

The Hard Work Myth (And What Actually Moves the Needle)

Have you ever looked back at a whole year and thought, wait, what did I actually do? In this episode, I sit down with fellow podcaster, entrepreneur and advocate for sustainable ambition Genevieve Pool for an honest, unscripted conversation about work life integration, and the belief so many of us quietly carry: that if you're not succeeding, you just need to work harder. Let's be real, I used to believe that too. Genevieve and I both talk about the moments that broke that belief open for us, sudden loss, burnout, and the realisation that hard work doesn't always create the right output. We get into why protecting your energy matters more than doing more of everything, how reducing work stress starts with noticing where you've stopped making room for yourself, and why rest, play, and even a planned monthly mental health day are part of sustainable energy in work, not a distraction from it. Genevieve shares how she built quarterly, monthly and even weekly rituals into her business after realising she'd been "earning" rest instead of just taking it, and I share how quarterly planning and being intentional about the season I'm in has replaced the old, exhausting way I used to set goals. This conversation also touches on something I don't often say out loud on the podcast: redefining success isn't about chasing the biggest goals, it's about self compassion, presence with the people you love, and remembering that none of us know how much time we actually have. If you're a mom entrepreneur juggling productivity, business and everything in between, and you've been waiting for permission to stop proving yourself, this one's for you. 🔗 Connect with Genevieve Pool ✨ Ready to Take Action? 🕰️ If you want a clearer read on where your capacity actually sits right now, take the Capacity Snapshot. It's quick, it's honest, and it'll show you where you're working with yourself, and where you're working against yourself: www.annerajoo.com/snapshot 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more grounded, compassionate conversations on productivity, energy and boundaries. 💛 Enjoying the podcast? Leaving a quick review helps other heart-led women find the show. It means the world to me. Thank you for being here. 🙏 How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad Open the Apple Podcasts app.Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot.Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page.Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews.Tap Write a Review.Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review.Tap Send.Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

vor 4 Tagen

Capacity Over Hustle: A New Way to Price Your Work

Do you ever feel like your calendar is full, but your bank balance doesn't show it? In this episode, I sit down with Linda Hunt, a profitability and pricing expert who helps business owners set work boundaries that actually protect your energy, instead of draining it. We talk about why pricing pressure is almost never really about the numbers — it's a symptom that your business isn't set up to support you. Linda shares her Perfect Pricing Formula, a simple way to work out your true professional capacity, so you stop pricing from fear and start pricing from your real value. We dig into the three places profitability pressure shows up (the sales conversation, scope creep inside the work, and your business structure), and why understanding this is one of the most actionable insights you can apply this week. If you're someone who over-delivers, undercharges, or hears that little voice asking “who am I to charge this much,” this conversation is for you. Linda and I get honest about our own money stories, the courage it takes to hold your rate without your voice shaking, and why leadership capacity starts with strong, kind boundaries, not hustle. This is entrepreneurship and productivity at its most practical: learning to run a business that pays you fairly for the value you bring, without burning yourself out to prove you're worth it. It's some of the best productivity tips women entrepreneurs juggling pricing, capacity and confidence will hear this year. 🔗 Connect with Linda Hunt (if you're listening to this in August/September, make sure to grab a seat to Linda's profitability masterclass.) Grab a free chapter of Linda's book, The Money Conversation, at moneyconversation.net. ✨ Ready to Take Action? 🕰️ Curious what your own capacity actually looks like right now? Take my Capacity Snapshot to see where your time and energy are really going: https://tally.so/r/zx49NR 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more grounded, practical conversations on entrepreneurship and productivity. 💛 Enjoying the podcast? Leaving a quick review helps other heart-led business owners find the show. It means the world to me. Thank you for being here. 🙏 How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad Open the Apple Podcasts app.Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot.Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page.Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews.Tap Write a Review.Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review.Tap Send.Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

20. Aug.

Stop Being the Employee In Your Own Business

“I don’t have enough time” is the sentence I hear more than almost anything else — and in this episode, Kate Kurdziej who helps service-based business owners with their capacity planning and helps me get to what’s actually underneath it. Because most of the time, it isn’t about entrepreneurship and productivity in the abstract. It’s about capacity — knowing exactly how much of yourself you actually have to give your business, and building effective CEO habits around that number instead of ignoring it. Kate walks us through the framework she uses with her own clients: splitting your time into chargeable work and everything else, and why sixty percent chargeable is the sweet spot for most solo service providers. We talk about what happens when that number creeps past eighty percent (hello, laptop open at 9pm), why “busy” so often gets mistaken for “productive,” and how to stay organized without white-knuckling your way through every week. This conversation is also, gently, about work boundaries — about noticing when your business has started borrowing time from your evenings, your weekends, the moments you swore you’d protect. Kate shares her own story of being “successful on paper” while working flat out from breakfast to bedtime, and how capacity planning was the thing that finally showed her a different way to run things. If you’ve ever opened your laptop and felt behind before you’ve even started, this episode gives you actionable insights you can use today: how to find your real hundred percent, how to read your own numbers, and what to do next once you know where you actually stand. 🔗 Connect with Kate Kurdziej ✨ Want to know what’s actually squeezing your capacity right now? I put together a short Capacity Snapshot to help you find the one condition placing the most pressure on you today — not a generic quiz, just clarity on what to fix first. 🎯 Take the Capacity Snapshot: annerajoo.com/snapshot 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more grounded, practical conversations on building a business that actually fits your life. How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad Open the Apple Podcasts app.Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot.Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page.Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews.Tap Write a Review.Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review.Tap Send.Thanks for listening! PS: Kate mentions Toggl, which is a time tracking tool I have used for years as well. It's free and it works really well to track your time, clients, projects etc. What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

13. Aug.

What If You've Been Solving the Wrong Productivity Problem?

You cleared your inbox by 10am. Calls done, content posted, invoices sent. By 6pm, everything on your list had a line through it. And yet at 9pm, you're still sitting there wondering why your business doesn't feel any further ahead. Let's be real: that's not a time management problem. You didn't run out of time today — you ran out of the thing time was supposed to create, which is space to think. In this solo episode, I'm sharing what I've been researching over the last few months while writing a through paper called The Attention Recession, and why I think most advice on how to reduce work stress gets it backwards. We keep trying to fix ourselves when what actually needs redesigning is the way work happens. We talk about the three false assumptions baked into most productivity advice, the Busy Loop™ (the pattern where overload makes you tighten your grip instead of slow down), and work debt: the coordination, decision, and recovery debt that quietly compounds, like interest, until you're running on empty. If you've been chasing every trick to protect your energy and still feel behind, this conversation on entrepreneurship and productivity will help you understand why. I share two actionable insights you can use this week: how to stop remaking the same decision over and over, and how to protect one piece of recovery on purpose, before your week fills in around it. This episode is really about professional capacity and personal energy management, and about creating productive systems that hold you instead of ones you're constantly fighting. Because burnout recovery doesn't start with doing more. It starts with designing differently. ✨ Want to go deeper? Everything I unpacked today — the Busy Loop, work debt, the full research — is in the paper, The Attention Recession. annerajoo.com/attention-recession 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more productivity conversations rooted in alignment, not hustle. Let's design work that actually works for you. 🚀 How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad Open the Apple Podcasts app.Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot.Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page.Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews.Tap Write a Review.Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review.Tap Send.Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

6. Aug.

You're Not Doing Too Much. You're Compassion Fatigued.

Have you ever come home so depleted that you had nothing left for the people you love most? In this episode, I talk with Dr. Julie Merriman, a researcher, professor, and nervous system regulation expert, about compassion fatigue: the very real, very physical cost of caring for others — and why learning to protect your energy and reduce work stress isn't selfish, it's survival. Julie has been researching compassion fatigue since the early 2000s. She explains why the term was coined to describe what nurses experience when they give and give and give, why your brain doesn't actually register a difference between your own pain and the pain you're absorbing from someone else, and why so many caring, high-achieving women end up carrying the dual burden of holding everyone else's stress on top of their own. We talk about the early warning signs — dreading your calendar, feeling too depleted to really connect with your own kids, the guilt that shows up the moment you try to take care of yourself — and why the answer isn't to care less. It's to get curious instead of ashamed. Julie also connects compassion fatigue to perimenopause and menopause, and makes a genuinely freeing case for why midlife is one of the most powerful times to restructure your life — not a crisis to survive. We get into somatic work, the vagus nerve, and two simple things you can do today to come back into your body when you're running on empty. 🔗 Connect with Dr. Julie Merriman + Somatic Signature Quiz: www.juliemerrimanphd.com/quiz ✨ Ready to Take Action? Want to know what your current work style is actually costing you? Take my free CEO Time Quiz and find out where your energy is really going. 👉 annerajoo.com/quiz 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more conversations on peaceful, sustainable productivity. 💛 Enjoying the show? A quick review helps more women find their way here. Thank you for listening. How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad 1. Open the Apple Podcasts app. 2. Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot. 3. Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page. 4. Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews. 5. Tap Write a Review. 6. Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review. 7. Tap Send. Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

30. Juli

What Building a $10M Business Taught Her About Emotional Intelligence

What happens when the hustle that built your business is the same hustle that breaks it? In this episode, I sit down with entrepreneur, mother, and children's book creator Juls Bindi to talk about work boundaries, entrepreneurship and productivity, and why learning to protect your energy might be the only sustainable way to build anything that lasts. Juls grew a business to over ten million dollars in under three years. Then her marriage ended, and the business collapsed with it. What she found on the other side wasn't a better system or a smarter schedule. It was emotional intelligence. We talk about the family patterns she grew up watching — a mother who drove four hours a day just to give her children consistency, a father whose hustle never quite landed — and how those patterns almost became her blueprint too. We talk about what it actually looks like to reduce work stress when your nervous system has learned that everything is an emergency. And we talk about the dual burden so many of us carry: being fully present for our kids while still running a business that depends on us. Jules shares how she's raising her daughter with a completely different relationship to feelings, boundaries, and her own body, through the series of children's books she's written. And she gets honest about running multiple businesses with ADHD, and why the right team, not more hustle, is what actually makes that sustainable. This conversation is for you if you've ever built something out of exhaustion instead of alignment, and you're ready to try it the other way. 🔗 Connect with Juls Bindi at eqkidbooks.com ✨ Ready to Take Action? Want to know what your current work style is actually costing you? Take my free CEO Time Quiz and find out where your energy is really going. 👉 annerajoo.com/quiz 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more conversations on peaceful, sustainable productivity. 💛 Enjoying the show? A quick review helps more women find their way here. Thank you for listening. How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad 1. Open the Apple Podcasts app. 2. Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot. 3. Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page. 4. Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews. 5. Tap Write a Review. 6. Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review. 7. Tap Send. Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

23. Juli

Your Best Day Starts the Night Before: Sleep, Energy & Productivity

What if the secret to protecting your energy, boosting focus, and finally reducing work stress wasn't another productivity hack, but a better night's sleep? In this episode, I sit down with sleep physician and Telemedora founder Dr. Subaila Zia to talk about why sleep is the most overlooked lever for sustainable energy in work, and why so many working moms are running on empty without realising sleep is the missing piece. Dr. Subaila explains why we spend up to a third of our lives sleeping, and why that's a good thing: sleep clears toxins from the brain, sharpens memory and creativity, stabilises mood, repairs the body overnight, and even helps regulate weight and heart health. She walks through the most common reasons sleep falls apart, from sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome to nutritional deficiencies, poor sleep hygiene, and "orthosomnia," the very modern anxiety of chasing a perfect sleep score on a tracker. For working women tips that actually fit real life, Dr. Subaila shares practical, low-cost strategies: a consistent sleep and wake time, a wind-down routine of at least 30 minutes, a dedicated "worry time" set hours before bed so your to-do list doesn't follow you into the sheets, and the ideal bedroom temperature for deeper rest. We also get into the very real experience of interrupted nights and why "sleep divorce" is becoming more common. If you've been powering through exhaustion and calling it normal, this conversation is your permission slip to make sleep a priority again. 🔗 Connect with Dr. Subaila Zia, the founder of Telemedora - Virtual Sleep Clinic Ready to take action? 📄 Want to protect your focus even further? Working hard has stopped working? We're operating inside a system that quietly accumulates debt, in coordination, decisions, and recovery, until it collapses into burnout. I’ve written a structural playbook: The Attention Recession Paper - Why Working Harder Stopped Working. Grab it here. 📩 Subscribe to The Productivity Sweet Spot for more conversations rooted in sustainable productivity, team wellbeing, and entrepreneurship. 💛 Enjoying the podcast? A quick review helps more women find the show — and it truly means the world to me. Thank you for being here. How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad: Open the Apple Podcasts app.Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot.Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page.Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews.Tap Write a Review.Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review.Tap Send.Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

16. Juli

Doing More Isn't Productive: Manage Your Time the 80/20 Way

Doing more is not the same as being productive. In this episode, I sit down with Kate Moir — entrepreneur of ten years, mom of two, and host of the Mamas Making Commas podcast — to talk about doing less, being intentional, and how to truly manage your time and protect your energy as a mom entrepreneur. From honest working mom tips to the real tension between entrepreneurship and productivity, and the difference between energy management vs time management, this conversation is one big permission slip to release the pressure of doing it all. Kate takes us back to 2017, to a room full of excited entrepreneurs where she sat in tears because she had nothing left to give. She was working until one or two in the morning, running on empty. So she made a bold decision to step back and do less. The result? She hit her big goal two days ahead of schedule. We unpack her 80/20 flip: 80 percent of your results come from your mindset and energy, and only 20 percent from what you actually do. Yet most of us spend our time exactly the other way around. Kate shares the seven-day time audit she swears by (green highlighter for income-producing activities, red for the time leaks), why “keep the main thing the main thing” lives on a sticky note on her desk, and how gratitude quietly became her most reliable productivity tool. We also go deep into balancing career and motherhood: why your why cannot be your excuse, how Kate involves her daughters in her business (crooked stickers and all), and the family decision-making habit that dissolved resentment at home. If you're building productive habits in fifteen-minute pockets between school pickups, this one is for you. 🔗 Connect with Kate Moir ✨ Ready to take action? 🕰️ Kate swear by it and so do I! Start with a time audit and I have one ready for you. It's a gentle but powerful way to see where your time and energy are actually going. Start your Time Audit here: https://www.annerajoo.com/time-audit/ 📩 Subscribe to the podcast for more productivity conversations rooted in alignment, not hustle. 💛 Enjoying the podcast? Leaving a quick review helps other heart-led entrepreneurs find the show and it means the world to me. Thank you for being here. 🙏 How to leave an Apple Podcasts review on iPhone or iPad: Open the Apple Podcasts app.Tap Search and type The Productivity Sweet Spot.Tap the show (not an episode) to open the show page.Scroll down past 4 or 5 episodes to Ratings and Reviews.Tap Write a Review.Choose a star rating, add a title and a short review.Tap Send.Thanks for listening! What's really stealing your CEO time? Every entrepreneur has a dominant productivity pattern — a way of working that feels normal, even productive. But when you're the CEO, that pattern has a cost. It shows up as full days with no real progress. As never having time to sell, to build, to think. As always being busy but never feeling ahead. You might recognise yourself in one of four patterns: The Overloaded Operator, The Momentum Chaser, The Preparation Loop, or The Capable Bottleneck. Find out which one is your dominant pattern 👉 Take my quiz: https://annerajoo.com/quiz Or book a complimentary productivity assessment with me and start reshaping your approach to productivity and success. Don’t forget to connect with me on Instagram @_annerajoo_ and share your key takeaways from this episode! Your insights mean a lot to me!

The Productivity Sweet Spot: How Women Master Time, Energy & Focus

The Hard Work Myth (And What Actually Moves the Needle)

Capacity Over Hustle: A New Way to Price Your Work

Stop Being the Employee In Your Own Business

What If You've Been Solving the Wrong Productivity Problem?

You're Not Doing Too Much. You're Compassion Fatigued.

What Building a $10M Business Taught Her About Emotional Intelligence

Your Best Day Starts the Night Before: Sleep, Energy & Productivity

Doing More Isn't Productive: Manage Your Time the 80/20 Way

Trailer

Start Here: What Productive Habits Actually Look Like for Women

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Great podcast

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The Productivity Sweet Spot: How Women Master Time, Energy & Focus

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The Hard Work Myth (And What Actually Moves the Needle)

Capacity Over Hustle: A New Way to Price Your Work

Stop Being the Employee In Your Own Business

What If You've Been Solving the Wrong Productivity Problem?

You're Not Doing Too Much. You're Compassion Fatigued.

What Building a $10M Business Taught Her About Emotional Intelligence

Your Best Day Starts the Night Before: Sleep, Energy & Productivity

Doing More Isn't Productive: Manage Your Time the 80/20 Way

Trailer

Bewertungen und Rezensionen

Info

Informationen