108. Break Free from the Productivity Trap: A New Perspective on Getting It Done

Are you constantly chasing productivity, hoping that the right system or tool will finally help you catch up? If it often feels like there’s never enough time in the day to get everything done, you’re in the right place, because in this episode, I challenge the way you think about productivity.

As interior designers, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that more is always better. Whether it’s working on client projects or moving the ball on our business goals, we believe that if we could just be more efficient, more organized, or more disciplined, we could finally get ahead. But what if this constant pursuit of productivity is actually holding us back? What if productivity isn’t the pinnacle it sells itself to be?

Join me this week to hear some hard truths about productivity that might surprise you. But don't worry, I also share some good news that will help you approach your work in a more intentional and sustainable way. You’ll learn why more isn’t necessarily better, how the productivity trap strings you along, and most importantly, how to break free from it.


My annual goal-setting workshop, Create Your 2025 Roadmap, is coming to you soon! We’re not ready for sign-ups yet, but mark your calendars for January 9th and 16th 2025, and stay tuned for more details! 

If you're interested in working together one-on-one in the fall or winter, now is the time to put your name on the waitlist for private coaching. Click here to secure your spot!


What You’ll Discover from this Episode:

  • Why prioritization and making decisions are the keys to true productivity.

  • How to recognize and avoid the lure of the productivity trap.

  • The surprising truth about getting everything done.

  • How to leverage productivity tools in a supportive way.

  • Why you must define what "enough" means for yourself and your business.

  • The importance of making peace with having more ideas than time.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:


Full Episode Transcript:

Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 108. In this one we’re talking about the lure and the trap of productivity. We’re going to talk about when productivity works for you and when it strings you along. If it always feels like there’s more to do than time available, whether that’s to work on client projects or move the ball forward on your business goals, this episode is for you.

Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.

Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I’m sitting here, it is incredibly sunny. I love it. I feel like I’m being blinded by the light coming in my office, but I just can’t bear to close the shades after the incredibly gray and rainy day we had yesterday. Also I’m hoping I’m going to get this podcast done and dusted before the crew shows up to install our holiday lights. So I’m going to dive right in.

I guess before I do with the topic, I do really want to make sure I express my gratitude and just send a huge thank you to everyone who left a rating and review for the podcast recently, or even just in the past. I just so appreciate it. And right now, I just looked, we’re at 99 ratings. So I would love for you to be the one who tips it over the 100 mark for me. I would be absolutely over the moon and so appreciative.

Today what I want to talk about is the productivity trap. And I’ll explain a little bit about what that is, but I want to do this episode a little differently. I’m going to be sharing something that I wrote for my weekly note that I send out. It’s called Monday Mindset. The way that I think about Monday Mindset is it’s much more than a newsletter. It’s bite-sized practical wisdom that comes straight to your inbox every single Monday morning without fail so that you can start the week off right.

If you’re not on my email list, you need to get on there. I’ve been writing Monday Mindset for about five years now. I think maybe even more, maybe it’s six. I’d have to go back. And it’s something that I repeatedly hear from designers that they look for that email among all the emails, let’s face it, we get during the day. And they look forward to reading Monday Mindset because it’s so valuable and they will even save these emails so that they can refer back to them in the future.

So if you’re not on Monday Mindset, all you have to do to sign up is you go to www.desiid.com/mondaymindset, and you’ll just enter your name and email, and then you’ll start getting these emails. Then you’ll start getting this weekly dose of inspiration, insight, and practical tips.

So back to how this whole idea of the productivity trap for this episode came about. I was drafting my November Monday Mindsets and one of the things that I wanted to write about was the productivity trap. It’s something I’ve been thinking about again. And I’m always thinking about productivity, our relationship with time, how we relate to efficiency, and the amount that we get done in the day and what that means about us, what that means for the business.

And as I was writing this particular Monday Mindset, I thought I really need to share this in an episode. So that’s what I’m going to do. And I’ll probably add on to it a bit because let’s face it, I can’t help myself. There’s actually a newsletter that I love to receive. And the woman who sends out the email, she also releases a weekly podcast with her reading the email. And I was like, oh, that’s so interesting. And so we’re gonna kind of experiment with that, but of course, with my own flavor.

The other thing I just want to be clear about is if you know my work and you’ve been following along, you know I love to help my clients create profitable, streamlined businesses, where they balance work and life and they also feel productive, right? And accomplished when they end their day and when they end their weeks and see how much they can accomplish when you are focused, when you are steady and when you’re consistent in your business.

So what I’m going to share today is in no way a bash on productivity. I think it’s more of a new perspective and some things I want you to think about in terms of your relationship with productivity and how you use the productivity tools that I teach or maybe you find online wherever you go in a different way.

What I’m titling this Monday Mindset is the productivity trap. And the preview text of it is don’t get stuck in the lure. Here’s the start of the email. Getting stuck in the productivity trap looks like overemphasizing doing and dismisses the very important first step, deciding. It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you haven’t taken that first step of clearly prioritizing what’s important within your current capacity. Current capacity being what you decide you have time and space and bandwidth and team support and all those other things in your business.

Prioritization is at its core making decisions. This is why we all avoid or allow ourselves to get stuck in confusion about prioritization. Prioritization is hard because we want to do everything. And so instead of deciding what’s most important and what is needed right now, often we want to skip the decisions that are required to create the container of focus and actually being more productive and moving more projects forward in your design business.

Your brain lies, okay? We cannot believe everything your brain tells you. It tells you that if you could just get more done in a day, then you wouldn’t have to face those tough choices, meaning prioritization. As a side note, even if you’re someone who tells yourself I can’t prioritize, it’s so hard to know what’s important. Everything’s important. That’s simply not true.

That’s another lie that your brain tells you, because at some point you do decide what’s most important. You’re not at the office 24/7, or you’re not at a job site 24/7, or you don’t ever look at your financials and figure out what your taxes are. There’s always limits that we put on ourselves, it’s just where those limits and decisions begin and end.

Okay, so back to the email. What I want you to see is that this lie of, if you could just get more done in a day, then you wouldn’t have to face the tough choices of what to do, when to do and how to do it and how much to do, that is both simultaneously the lure and the trap of productivity culture.

Essentially productivity culture, believing if you could just figure out the right planning system, if you could just be so efficient, if you could just master that Pomodoro method, it’s a lie. It’s a dangling carrot, or we could just call it as it is and it’s hustle culture.

The productivity trap overemphasizes doing and doing just for the sake of doing more, more, more. So often, whether it’s in our business or just as a culture at large, we believe that more is better, but more is not necessarily better. Sometimes less is better. And sometimes just the right amount is best.

I want to share some good news and some bad news for you today about productivity that you can start using and applying to the way that you approach projects and tasks in your interior design business. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of a bad news first kind of gal, so that’s what we’re going to go through first.

The bad news is, all right, here’s the truth, you’re never going to get it all done. That list just keeps growing. We put more things on the list, whether that’s because there’s more things we want to do, accomplish, learn about, or because we’ve got new projects coming into the business to sustain the business and make it that profitable business you want to grow. So you’re never going to get it all done.

The second piece of bad news is you’re always going to have more ideas than time to execute. This one goes at the idea that we do prioritize eventually. Maybe you’re not prioritizing or making those decisions early enough or strong enough, but eventually you do realize that you don’t have time to execute everything and balls get dropped.

So this is an opportunity to get yourself on board with this idea of you will always have more ideas than time to execute. You’ll never be able to do everything you want. I know that sounds kind of like really bad news, but we’ll talk about it.

And the last piece of bad news I want to share, and I’ve alluded to this earlier in the episode, is that no amount of planning or streamlining or being efficient will change any of this news that I just shared. It helps, but there’s a limit to these tools. And that goes back to deciding what’s important, what is needed right now.

Now that I’ve completely bummed you out with all this bad news, now I want to share the good news here. The first one being you get to decide what is enough for you and your business. It’s you, it’s your job as the CEO to define enough. And I want to do an entire episode on defining enough in the future, because that can be hard. That can be a little bit of an internal struggle to overcome.

What is enough? Sometimes it’s math, but sometimes it really is just deciding what is going to be your capacity. What makes sense with your life? What makes sense with your business goals? What makes sense with the type of support you have in and out of work? You have to decide what is enough and we’ll for sure dig into that deeper in a future episode.

The other piece of good news is that you get to decide the pace, the pace at which you move and maybe your team moves is up to you. What I want you to know is ahead or behind is of your own construct. Yes, you technically could have moments where you’re supposed to be at a particular crossroad or milestone in a project and there’s certain work that hasn’t been done yet. But it all starts with those early decisions of what is the timeline going to be?

And then when timelines are getting a little bit off, what are you going to tell yourself about those timelines or what the work is that you have yet to do? Pace isn’t just the actual productivity measure of how much gets done in a day. It’s a mindset and it’s an emotional state that you are in. And you want to be at a steady pace, even if there’s things that need to get done. That’s really something you can cultivate for yourself.

Here’s another piece of good news. Not every idea is meant to come to fruition. So you can drop the pressure, the guilt that you have around not doing the things that you put on that list, or maybe it’s in a bunch of notebooks, whatever it is. Not every idea is meant to be. We’re going to have ideas and sparks of inspiration that we’re going to want to act on, but remember, we don’t have time ever to act on every single idea we have.

So I like to tuck it away and put it in a parking lot, I call it. And then I can revisit those ideas from time to time and see, hey, do I actually want to do this still? Does it still feel like a good idea? Maybe I can plan for it in the future. Maybe it’s a not right now.

And if you want to learn more about the parking lot idea, you can do that in the interior designers get it done daily planner. It’s a free download that I have for you that designers just love. If you want to download that, the URL is a little bit different than signing up for Monday Mindset. It’s desicreswell.com/planner.

I think we spend so much time judging ourselves and shaming ourselves for all these ideas that we had, and initially told ourself we were going to act on, when not all of them are even meant to be. And here’s the really good news, this is where productivity starts to serve you. Where tools for efficiency and calendaring and planning out your day so that you can be streamlined really become something supportive versus a cage you have to act within.

So this last piece of good news is that once you decide what’s in and what’s out, and you decide your capacity and make a commitment to honor that capacity, then that’s when the productivity tools really will shine. They become supportive. The key here is making peace with this bad news that I shared. There’s quotation marks around bad news, of course, it’s actually good news.

When you make peace with the fact that you’re never going to get it all done, that not every idea is meant to be executed on, and you stop telling yourself that you just need to get more done at a pace that is not sustainable, everything becomes easier. You stop fighting this productivity trap and being lured into its false promises.

You don’t have to feel like your days are a perpetual state of pushing through. You really get to decide what’s needed and when it’s needed with flexibility and wiggle room.

I really hope that this all just makes your shoulders relax. Even now, I’m thinking about you listening to this, just squeeze your shoulders up into your ears, squeeze it, squeeze it, squeeze it, and then just let them drop. Take a big breath, decide what, when, how, and then leverage productivity strategies. That’s when you can drop the productivity trap, because productivity isn’t the pinnacle it sells itself to be.

Going all the way back to where we started, if you’re not making intentional choices or decisions, that’s when the trap comes to be. Focus not just on how much you can get done, but on what is actually essential to your success. Then trust that whatever you’ve decided right now is meant to be. And what’s meant to be for next time will be there when you’re ready.

And trust that you can always adjust course as needed. We’re all taking best guesses at what’s going to work for us, whether that’s in how you’re planning your day or what activities in your business are going to get you the results you want.

But the one thing I know for sure is that choosing, deciding what those things are that you’re focusing on in the right now moment, that focus is what’s going to help you learn from what you’re doing and get data fast and see consistent progress, whether that is consistent progress towards getting that result that you want or consistent progress in the learning of what you need to do next.

As we wrap up, I want to share a question with you to consider. That question is, what trajectory would your business be on if you could calmly and confidently decide and then do, knowing that you can trust your decisions and your ability to stay the course? Once those decisions have been made, that’s when efficient planning becomes helpful.

And of course, if you find it very challenging to bring your ideas into focus, to let go of what isn’t meant for right now, and then use planning tools to execute on those ideas, those are all areas that I can help you with. As your coach, we’ll work together on both the strategic planning and the mindset needed to take what we’ve been talking about today with this productivity trap and apply them to your business.

If you’re interested in private coaching, make sure you check out the show notes so that you can add your name to the waitlist. And then I also want to offer an opportunity for us to work on making those decisions and prioritizing live together in a format. Sign up isn’t available yet, but I wanted to let you know that I am going to be hosting my annual goal-setting workshop in early January. It’s called Create Your 2025 Roadmap. This is something I’ve been doing for the past few years, and I’d love for you to join me.

We’ll be meeting the mornings of January 9th and January 16th. It’ll be a combination of a business retreat where you’re setting the vision for 2025 and creating an actionable plan with my support. And then a coaching component where you’re going to be able to get your questions answered, get feedback and work through some of these mindset blocks that will come up inevitably when we start this process.

So mark your calendar now for the morning of January 9th and January 16th and then stay tuned for details on how you can sign up.

All right. That’s what I have for you today. Remember if you loved the format of this episode, if you love the content of this episode, make sure you sign up for Monday Mindset. You’ll start getting it the next Monday and you’ll have that bite-sized wisdom and practical advice sent straight to your inbox. To sign up all you have to do is go to desiid.com/mondaymindset, enter your email, and then I’ll be sending you a note the following Monday.

I’ll be back next week on the podcast with a brand new episode as always. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week.

Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.

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107. Designing for Good: Charitable Giving Strategies for Interior Designers with Mark Ostrom