Welcome to Episode #254 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast.

My word for the rest of this year is power, and scattered is what power looks like when it’s spread across forty tabs and a to-do list looks like a small child’s art project. Scribbles everywhere, arrows pointing to other arrows, half the items already circled and underlined in panic.

You are not scattered because you’re bad at your job. You are not scattered because you’re bad at life. You’re scattered because your brain has been screaming at you and nobody’s been listening.

Maybe it’s the Teams and Slack notifications every thirty seconds. The messages from home, or from your kids. The mental load of holding your kid’s soccer practice, your boss’s last-minute request, and the side hustle you swore you’d launch someday. Or maybe it’s just the sheer volume of things asking for your attention at once.

I’ve been there. A few years ago I was running a business, working a full-time corporate career, traveling once or twice a month, and volunteering as a Girls on the Run coach. One day I sat down to work and realized I had 17 browser tabs open, three half-finished emails, and no idea where to start.

What I figured out, after landing back in that spot again and again, is that scattered isn’t only a productivity problem. It’s an early burnout signal.

So today I want to give you the three habits underneath it. These are the ones I work through with my clients.

Habit #1: The “just one more” trap

You know this one. I’ll just take this one extra call. I’ll squeeze in a workout. I’ll answer these five emails real quick.

And then your day is derailed, you’re late to the thing you promised yourself you’d be on time for, and you’re sitting in that particular embarrassment of having done it again.

Every time you add something to your plate without taking something off, you fragment your attention. Your brain isn’t built for that. It’s built for depth, for the kind of focus that actually changes an outcome.

I worked with a client, let’s call her Sarah, who was a director at a large organization. Brilliant, and completely exhausted. She’d stay up until 2 or 3 or even 4 in the morning trying to catch up, then wake up already behind.

When we dug into her schedule, the pattern was that Sarah was adding without subtracting. Yes to every meeting, every hang-out, every favor, every quick chat. No wonder she was overwhelmed.

So here’s the fix. Subtract before you add.

Before you say yes to anything new, ask what you’re saying no to by saying yes. If the answer is your sanity, or your top priority, then the answer is no.

Habit #2: The multitasking lie

You’ve probably heard that women are better at multitasking. That one is a myth.

There’s a statistic that gets passed around about how many IQ points multitasking costs you. I’m not going to quote it, because the study behind it is shakier than the way it gets repeated. What’s actually well established is simpler and more useful. Every time you switch tasks, your brain pays a cost to reload, and that cost is real, in both time and accuracy.

And if you’re already running on four hours of sleep because you stayed up to catch up, you’re paying that reload cost on an empty tank. The exhaustion and the task-switching compound each other, and together they’re doing more damage than the actual work on your plate.

I used to hate rebooting my computer at night. It meant stopping. It felt easier to leave everything open in front of me than to turn anything off.

There’s a fallacy in that, which is the idea that we’re interrupting the flow of the work. At some point you have to stop. You just don’t get to choose when or how if you never decide it for yourself. And that decision, knowing when something is enough, is what over-achievers struggle with most. We overwork and overthink until we’ve run out of time and the deadline is the thing that stops us.

I’ll never forget trying to multitask my way through a meeting with my manager at McKinsey. I was writing emails during the meeting, and he asked me to stop and listen. “Can you write that email afterwards?”

I thought I was being efficient. I’d have the email done by the time we finished. He saw someone who wasn’t paying attention.

What got me was that I’d watched other people do exactly that, which is why I thought I should be doing it too. Just because everyone around you is doing something doesn’t make it the right thing for you to do.

The long-term gains of better focus, better ideas and less reactivity are worth more than the short-term hit of one more thing done and the little dopamine of a checked box.

Your brain isn’t wired for multitasking. It’s wired for flow.

So here’s what I use. Call it Pomodoro Plus.

You’ve probably heard of the Pomodoro Technique: 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of break. The plus is what happens first. Before each 25-minute sprint, do a five-minute brain dump. Write down everything swirling around in there. Tasks, worries, ideas, all of it. Then close the notebook and let it go, literally and symbolically.

One more thing: set the timer, and when it goes off, actually stop. The break is not the optional part. It’s how your brain recharges.

Habit #3: The open door

The third one is saying yes to every request, meeting and favor because you should, or because you’re afraid of what you’ll miss.

Every time you say yes to something that isn’t aligned with your priorities, you’re saying no to something that is. Over time that becomes resentment, burnout, and a scattered mess of a life.

Let me tell you about another client. Let’s call her Priya. Priya was a rising star at her organization and drowning in favors. Coworkers asking her to quickly review their work. Her boss piling on last-minute requests. She felt like she was always on call, even on vacation, even at home after her work was done. She was exhausted.

We used a High-Impact Career filter to sort out what would actually matter in six months, and which activities lined up with her real priorities. She got back hours every week, and she got back headspace during the time she was supposed to be off.

Where can this take you?

Those are the three: the just-one-more trap, the multitasking lie, and the open door. All three habits are breakable. 

I also want to say something about the limits of this. Every productivity tactic in the world falls apart if you don’t have a goal underneath it, something genuinely worth your time.

If you’re in a career transition right now, it’s hard to know where to put your best energy. That’s why most people stall out. They have one conversation with a friend or a colleague about making a change, and then they don’t make it.

Working with a coach is where the change actually happens. You figure out why you work the way you do, and where your best energy belongs, so you’re building a career you love and a life you love at the same time. Relationships with your kids and your partner that you’re proud of. A mind-body connection where you’re treating yourself with care instead of getting through.

Week after week we take one obstacle at a time. Productivity, networking, overwhelm, your resume, planning, health goals. So you can make the moves you already know will lead somewhere healthier and happier than you’d have guessed. 

Because when you don’t feel like you’re spending your time on the things that matter most, that’s the reason you don’t feel successful. It isn’t the volume of your output.

Coaching gets you more wealth, more health and more happiness because someone is challenging you to make smart, bold moves that raise your odds while keeping you recognizably yourself, and teaching you more about where you actually find joy and peace along the way.

If you’re ready to release the stress and anxiety of your work life while still having both a family and a career, let’s talk. Go to www.mayempson.com/contact right now, fill out the quick form, and book a complimentary strategy call with me. We’ll build your plan to reduce your mental load and find greater career fulfillment together.

Spiritual Achiever coaching is my year-long transformational coaching experience for professionals who want clarity and capacity while being coached at the highest level.

You can learn more or start a conversation at www.mayempson.com/contact.

Start Here: Free Training

👉 Watch the free training:
STAND OUT AND LEAD – How to use spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom.

Apply for Coaching

Ready to live a life that feels as good as it looks?

📞 Apply now at www.mayempson.com/contact
Risk-free: If you don’t start seeing results in your first month, you’ll get your money back.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.