First podcast episode
===
[00:00:00] Let me tell you, it was not my intention to have my first podcast episode be designed or recorded this way. I had a very linear, very orderly plan, but you know what needs must, and right now, a lot of people out there need this information. So here we are. Welcome to my brand new podcast. I'm Kimberly and I'm a time management coach who specializes in helping high achievers further build their capacity for productivity.
[00:00:26] And for a little while now, I've been having a really hard time getting things done and being productive. So over the last month and the last few weeks in particular. I've been having a really hard time focusing on work, on creating things, on putting thoughts to paper, so to say, and in being positive in promoting my new business, and I was having this ongoing experience of.
[00:00:51] Not being able to function. That was the thought that I was having. And in many ways, I obviously was functioning. I was, I was eating, I was showering, I was showing up for all the performative requirements of me in the outside world. Um, meetings and going to the gym classes. But at home I was doom scrolling, like dooms scrolling, doom scrolling.
[00:01:12] I was obsessing over the news. I was constantly anxious about friends and family. And I wasn't sleeping well when I was eating, but not, not like I should. For reference, if you are not listening to this close to the published date. It is currently February, 2026, early February, and I live a few hundred miles east of Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where ice officials have been for a little while now.
[00:01:37] So I was doing all these things that were on my calendar, but if it wasn't an appointment, if there wasn't somebody else there, if it wasn't something I was doing with a group. Other than that, I was just, I would be at home and I was just like, blah. And I finally started talking more about it to other people.
[00:01:55] And around the time of the larger organized protests that were taking place, I was having conversations [00:02:00] with a surprising number of people in my various micro communities who either went to the protests. Or they had family that lived in Minneapolis or they were in some way specifically involved or affected.
[00:02:13] And that helped part, partly the sense of community about how bad it really was, how really dystopian some terrible stories and that it, it was not just some normal maize that I was having about something. So I thought, okay, a few more days, a week, whatever. Over the weekend, I had this thought to myself that.
[00:02:35] Is this a sign? Is this like, is this a sign that I am not maybe actually cut out for this? Is this a sign that I'm not made to do this? I'm a time management coach that cannot manage my time right now, which isn't a truly accurate way of putting it. But I can't focus. I help people focus. I help people get things done, even when other things are going on in their lives, and even when they are already really busy.
[00:02:57] So what does this mean that I'm now going through this? I even ended up bringing it up on a business networking call, which I had not really intended to, but it ended up being very helpful because I found out that people in other countries, on the other side of the world actually were being affected by this situation in the us in very real, in some frankly some very frightening ways.
[00:03:18] And some of the advice that I got was to give myself grace, give it some time, and my thought was like, I've given it some time, right? It's been a few days. It's not happening to me. So why am I so challenged by this? And of course, in retrospect, like I gave it a few days. Sounds absurd. It sounds ridiculous.
[00:03:39] And it did take a few more days, even more so than that. But I ended up realizing this is just, come on Kimberly. Like from an outsider's perspective, like it's been a few days, really a day when you were living. A day can feel like a long time, but. In retrospect, a day, a couple days, not a long period of time.
[00:03:58] And I had this thought like, [00:04:00] I should have processed this by now. And I did realize that in a way I was kind of being my own worst client. You know how they say medical professionals, for example, make the worst patients. And it is, I have to say, in my experience, it's, it's pretty true. I'm a retired EMT and my treatment option of choice for myself any day of the week is, I will walk it off.
[00:04:21] Just, just keep, keep going. Walk it off. But what if instead of trying to just walk it off constantly for this particular situation, what if I looked at everything I was experiencing and I treated myself like I am my own most challenging patient, my own most challenging client? Because really that's what I am to myself, right?
[00:04:44] Like I'm the one who knows all the hacks, but I'm also the one who knows all the excuses and all the workarounds. So I said, okay, Kimberly, for the next day, for the next few days. We are just gonna coach the shit out of ourself. I am going to be my own best client. I'm going to double down on doing what I would actually tell someone else to do, not what I think I should be able to manage because I'm somehow above acting normal during, let's face it, the absolute, weirdest fucking timeline.
[00:05:15] So far in, in my lifespan to date as a coach, I have lots of resources that are in development and. They're in development because my business is still very new and I just haven't gotten that far yet. But they are for people in all levels, people who are brand new. I especially want young people to have access to these skill sets.
[00:05:34] People who want specific answers, specific results, specific hacks for specific areas of their life. But my high level one-on-one coaching packages are very specific and they are highly tailored to a certain person and personality. My target audience is people who are already high achievers. They're already doing a lot, they're already getting a lot of things done.
[00:05:52] They're already working on big important projects. Uh, they're already very into time management and organization and productivity and [00:06:00] self-improvement. So they're people who already have. Knowledge and skills and are working on themselves in this realm. And the difference is that while I, yes, am working with people who are very focused on doing things bigger, faster, stronger, it is always on the foundation of you pay yourself first.
[00:06:17] Most people go into, uh, time management training or productivity hacks with this idea. Like they have an isolated area of their life that they want to improve, and they learn how to make that part better. But it's very rarely holistic and it can be very lopsided. And it used to be, it was, it was always lopsided towards the side of like, hustle culture, hardcore hustle, cult culture.
[00:06:40] Why aren't you doing more? Why aren't you doing it faster? Why aren't you optimizing it to death? Did you know if you just took a another job? For three hours every single night, you could do this other additional thing, like, why don't just work yourself to death? So we, and we all know what that looks like.
[00:06:52] We like we've, we've seen that and now recently it feels like it has swung back in the other direction. And I feel like COVID has now been long enough ago that we are dealing with these side effects of making all these concessions and giving all of this grace. We went through the tough times where things were really weird and hard and there was a steep learning curve.
[00:07:12] To implement new symptom systems that we needed just to function, just to get through the day, through work, through school. But now there's this forever mentality of not doing something because. The barriers are so great and that doesn't serve us anymore. There's this attitude that I've seen in talking to some people about that hustling has swung in the opposite direction almost too far, I would say.
[00:07:37] And some of it gets quite too permissive and it's too much in the realm of if you just don't feel like doing it work, end something else instead, or take a break or don't plan your day so full. Or, um, you know, I hate time lacking so you shouldn't do it. Or, this is why these things don't work for these people with your brain, or whatever it is.
[00:07:53] It's just, it's so all over the place and I feel like a lot of it was designed as an antidote to hustle. And I'm [00:08:00] not opposed to that in theory, but I feel like it also misses the mark in a lot of really important ways. That is not by any means, my most perfect way of explaining my thoughts about that.
[00:08:10] That is a whole other future podcast. I think that is, um, I think a lot of that was designed for. The marketing of it and forgetting people's attention, but a lot of it just isn't working. It's still, it still quite isn't hitting the mark. So what, how is what I'm doing then not toxic hustle culture? How is what I am doing then?
[00:08:33] Not Kimberly. Things have been rough, but push through it. Many reasons. There are many reasons why it's not the primary one, and the one that I've been missing out on so poorly while I was kind of spiraling is that everything that I work on with clients is built on the foundational prerequisite that you pay yourself first, rest and self-care come first.
[00:08:55] And they are not a reward. They're not scheduled in the margins. They are the priority. They are the first thing. It's not that you did something really well, now you get to rest. It is no, you rest. So you have the energy and the attention to work on the hard things, to do the hard things. And then it's often the hardest thing to do is to pay yourself first.
[00:09:17] Think about if you have ever known someone who was diagnosed with a serious illness, or for example, if they had a heart attack. People will flip their lives completely upside down to prioritize their health after something. Devastating happens, or if you see people with young children and everything stops for the bedtime routine, you do not have to have a heart attack to make your health a priority.
[00:09:44] You do not need the excuse of caring for someone else to make sleep a priority. You can just simply decide that that comes first. And in all of the. Nonsense. That is what I had stopped doing. [00:10:00] I was doom scrolling on my phone. I was not eating well. I wasn't sleeping well. I wasn't stretching, I wasn't hydrating.
[00:10:07] I was just so consumed that I stopped doing those very basic things that I make sure are the priority for my clients. So I'm attempting to live this normal, high energy, happy life on top of this absolute shit foundation, which is partially why it just wasn't working. Rest is not an afterthought. I mean, it kind of is in our culture, which is some crazy bullshit if you think about it, because it is literally a requirement to not die.
[00:10:36] You can literally die from just not sleeping. And then also, of course, we know people who are sleep deprived, uh, have higher incidences of illnesses and injuries and car accidents and I mean, it's just. You will literally die from things related to not sleeping. And we make it this afterthought and we make it this reward for if you work really hard, then you can take a break.
[00:11:00] But in my program, it's not an afterthought and it's not a reward. It is the priority. It is the a priority thing. It is the thing that comes before all others. You take your rest and your sleep and your self-care seriously. Another thing that I do with my clients is that we work in seasons. Our lives are always evolving, and we learn about time management and goal setting as if our lives will not change from now going forward.
[00:11:26] We organize our house and then we're like, yep, this is it. This is, this is what it'll look like for the rest of my life. As if for some reason you, you don't expect your life will change in a few weeks or months. We are constantly moving through these short, overlapping phases in our lives, lives that I, I refer to them as seasons and sometimes we're thrust into a season against our will.
[00:11:46] And that's basically what had happened to me. Like I didn't sign up for the season of the government pulling some nonsense, but here we are. And I'd been refusing to acknowledge that I'm attempting to operate [00:12:00] business as usual in an environment that is very, not business as usual, but because I am just so deep in the mentality of like, I'm the coach, I set the standard.
[00:12:09] I just kept pushing through and this was a really good reminder that, you know, talking about. Do as they say, not as they do, but also take your own medicine, so to say. So what happened when I said, okay, I'm going to be my own best client. What happened? Well, nothing magical happened. The, the world around me did not magically improve.
[00:12:29] Not enough anyway. I didn't stop caring very deeply about things that were going on. I didn't stop being mad. Been mad for a while now, but I didn't stop being mad about things. I didn't become numb to them. I've not, I didn't stop staying informed. I didn't just turn everything off, but I did sleep better and I slept more, and I went back to my eating plan.
[00:12:53] I drank more water and I reduced my media intake, and I allowed myself to just be mad and grieve that there's some terrible, terrible stuff happening and it took more than four days. Surprise, surprise, to work through my thoughts about these, but my capacity started to return. I started to experience better focus and the tools that I was attempting to put into place, it stopped feeling like something was broken.
[00:13:19] And while I'm still not back up to what I would love to be, my super high capacity, I'm definitely more productive. And even from yesterday. When I was doing a lot of project work two this morning, just one more day, even just one more good night's sleep. I can see how like, yes, things are, things are getting better, things are starting to improve.
[00:13:39] What was missing that I was just absolutely running my, my body and my brain ragged rather than powering up for fighting the good fight, so to say. I realized that not only am I not the wrong person for something like this, that I'm exactly the right person to be doing this. I am very clear on that Now, I was willing to consider, I was willing to [00:14:00] reflect, to challenge my own thoughts about how this is not really just another toxic formula in disguise because this is not the work that I do.
[00:14:09] The, the program that I've designed is not a, Hey, the world around you is bat shit. But you know what? Buckle up and. Publish your stuff and it also is not, Hey, things are hard. It's okay if you don't feel like doing this. Maybe today is just a Netflix day. Okay? Now don't get me wrong, sometimes we need Netflix days, but like big picture, it's a very solid, balanced, balanced, for lack of a better term and scalable mentality that says, yes, this is abnormal.
[00:14:36] So we're going to shift things a bit. We are still going to decide in advance what most needs our attention. We are still going to put that into a short timeframe. We are going to do our deep work focus on that. And then when that is done, we will evaluate what do we have additional capacity for, and we will always make sure that we are doing that on the foundation of we ate, we drank some water, we rested, we slept, we were taking care of.
[00:15:01] And when it really comes down to that is always the system. That is always the system that I promote. You pay yourself first. You take care of your own needs first. You identify your most valuable tasks. You practice your focused time bound work on those things, and then you consider additional capacity, and it's so much more than that.
[00:15:19] But when I put the system to work, it worked even in a time like this. So here's what I offer to you as a coach, as someone who is not immune to the effects of being a human being with a body and a brain. If you are interested in time management and productivity and goal setting and being more organized in healthy ways, I have that.
[00:15:41] I am so excited to be working on getting those released for you. If you're a high achieving individual who wants to explore increasing their capacity using one-to-one coaching, and you are in alignment with that type of growth happening on top of making your self care a priority, I have that too. [00:16:00] And you can learn more about all of these things on my [email protected].