DEV Community: Elizabeth

Red Flags of Overworked Employees - 5 Tips for Managers

Elizabeth — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 23:41:18 +0000

Hot topics like The Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and mass layoffs (especially in tech) have made headlines across the world these past few years. With so many professionals disengaging and resigning, it may seem like no one wants to work anymore -- but these trends are actually pointing out a much bigger problem in today's work culture.

So how are employees really doing? Across industries, 2022 ended with a horrifying 60.2% burnout rate -- highlighting just how overworked and stressed the current workforce is feeling. And we're not talking long weeks, or too many meetings kind of tired either: out of these exhausted pros, 5.3% reported 100% burnout to the point they are ready to quit.

The reality is, overworking employees ends up derailing motivation, reducing productivity, and destroying any semblance of a work-life balance. Should we really be surprised to see employees quiet quitting to set boundaries against the hustle-culture pressure, or feeling cornered into stepping down from their jobs altogether?

In a world where chronic exhaustion is the new norm -- what steps can leaders take to better support their overworked employees' health and break this destructive cycle? In this article, we'll share what exactly causes employee overwhelm, how to spot red flags early, and outline 5 tips to avoid overloading your employees.

When are employees overworked?

An overworked workplace isn't a new issue, but when exactly does this take place? Overworked employees happen when the team is pushed to do more work than they have the capacity and energy to handle.

A busy week every once in a while isn't unusual -- or even unavoidable. But prolonged overload at work can wear at teams, leading to mental exhaustion, or even job burnout if unchecked. And unfortunately, this problem affects the majority of employees.

More often than not, this pressure comes down on employees from the managers and leaders in the organization. Whether that's over-assigning additional duties across the team to make up for a lost employee, expecting longer hours or work on days off, or demanding an unrealistic standard of perfection from your team -- there are many causes that contribute to overworked employees to be conscious of as a manager.

Top 6 causes of overworked employees

Unmanageable workloads: Assigning more tasks than employees can handle.
Unrealistic deadlines: Not giving employees enough time to complete tasks before they're due.
Understaffed: Lacking the team needed to accomplish your goals.
Poor time management: Not effectively aligning your team's availability with priorities.
Lack of boundaries at work: Interrupting employees during their personal time, or pressuring work outside of business hours.
Additional stressors: Dealing with mental health conditions, personal challenges, and attention-deficit disorders on top of a demanding workload.

While the causes of overworking vary across employees, most people are very familiar with the feeling at work. In fact, a staggering 78.7% of professional feel stressed by an unmanageable workload and a lack of time to get everything done. And, overload doesn't just affect individual employees. Overwhelmed teams affects focus, productivity, and work culture -- leaving everyone feeling unmotivated and disconnected, which ultimately is a loss for the company in addition to individual employees.

3 red flags to look for in employees

Have you noticed your team becoming disengaged at work? Or maybe you've found yourself starting to tire, battling a never-ending to-do list, and feeling exhausted after work each day.

Overworked employees can lead to burnout -- a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. Burnout has serious consequences for both the employee and the company, including decreased job satisfaction, increased absenteeism, and turnover.

That's why it's important to be proactive (rather than reactive) in addressing red flags you notice in your team, and also in yourself. Getting ahead of overwhelm can help you avoid severe outcomes, and create a healthier work culture that can actually sustain productivity every week. Let's take a look at the most common warning signs that your team is feeling overworked.

1. Changes in mood or disposition 🚩

Changes in employees' mood should never be overlooked! You know your team, so when someone is acting out of the ordinary by showing increased signs of stress, anxiety, or conflicts with peers -- it's a good idea to check-in.

When employees are constantly working longer hours, juggling too many responsibilities, or feeling unsupported in their job -- they may experience physical and emotional exhaustion. This could be shown through signs of cynicism or a decreased sense of accomplishment. If left unaddressed, your company will likely see decreased morale, a negative work environment, and even higher turnover rates.

2. Decreased quality of work 🚩

Even if someone on the team isn't showing obvious changes to their stress levels, their overwhelm might start to appear in the quality of their work.

When employees are overworked with too much on their plate, they end up rushing through tasks, increasing mistakes, or overlooking important details they previously wouldn't have missed. While surface-level issues or errors, missed deadlines, and compromised workflows are a concern on their own to managers -- changes to employees' work quality can also signal they're feeling overwhelmed trying to manage an unrealistic workload.

3. Reduced productivity 🚩

Similarly to monitoring work quality, another warning sign of overworked employees is an overall decrease in productivity.

When employees feel overworked, they may struggle to effectively prioritize tasks, manage their time, or stay focused on their daily work due to mental block. And beyond reduced output, a drop in productivity can reveal an employee is struggling to handle everything on their plate.

Additionally -- when employees are on the verge of burnout from being chronically overworked -- they might struggle to feel aligned with the company's mission. This disconnect can lead to low morale, affect individual productivity, collaboration with peers, and ultimately push employees to leave their role. They need to have the time and flexibility to do their work in a way that feels valued. This is where additional support may be needed from managers to get them back on track and performing at their best, in a way that is both sustainable and rewarding.

5 steps to avoid overworking employees

Let's take a look at 5 ways you can prevent overworking your team to become a stronger, more supportive manager.

1. Set realistic expectations

There's only so much that can get done in a week! And running your team into the ground trying to always do more is a surefire way to leave everyone feeling overworked.

Setting realistic expectations for all employees establishes clear guidelines, ensures achievable workloads, and helps protect both their productivity and mental well-being. Take time in your one-on-ones and team meetings to communicate goals and get feedback from your team on their capacity. This will keep everyone aligned on direction, deliverables, and timeline -- and your employees can better prioritize their work knowing team goals are actually reachable.

2. Effectively prioritize tasks

When employees feel like everything on their list is super important, things can quickly start to feel overwhelming. Without effective project management, employees are going to struggle with context switching and decision paralysis trying to decide what to work on so they can get everything done. Not everything can be important all at once, which is why you need to help your team prioritize their tasks every week. This also means making sure they actually have enough availability in the week for focus time to get it done too.

Try working with your team in determining which tasks are most important, and which can be delayed, delegated, or dropped using methods like the Eisenhower Matrix. This can help employees focus their time and energy on the most critical tasks first, without working themselves into the ground trying to complete everything at once. To free up more time for employees to actually get their work done, review which meetings on your team's calendar could be an email or weekly status report instead -- or set up a No-Meeting Day so everyone is guaranteed uninterrupted time for work each week.

3. Hire the team you need

When a company has more work than it can fairly balance across the team, employee overload becomes a ticking time bomb. The average pro is already clocking 45.8 hours a week, 2.6% higher than 44.6 average in November 2021. And when teams are overworked and understaffed, expecting everyone to pull more weight is simply not a sustainable solution.

One of the most effective (albeit obvious) strategies to reduce overworking your team is to hire more employees to distribute the workload. Especially as smaller teams see growth -- or your company adapts to the high-turnover rates as 61% of employees are considering resigning in 2023 -- bringing on more manpower is a must for ensuring long-term success for your team.

If you cannot afford to hire more people, then you need to take a look at your priorities and focus on the work that can be reasonably accomplished with the team you have. Over-assigning work beyond employees capacity will only set you back.

4. Check in with your team regularly

Unfortunately, overwhelmed employees might not take the initiative to reach out for help if they're already feeling unsupported and behind in their roles. And psychological doubts like imposter syndrome can make it hard for employees to say 'no' to additional work, even when they don't have the capacity to take it on.

That's why it's important as a manager to regularly connect with your direct reports, and ask the right check-in questions to make sure they're doing well and not overworked. Setting up regular one-on-one meetings (and making sure they're not frequently canceled -- 29.6% are!), will give you the time to sync up, address any blockers, and give employees the resources they need to succeed.

5. Offer tools for better time management

Giving your team the right tools they need to manage their time can empower them to create and stick to a productive weekly work plan. As we all know, time is the most limited and valuable resource we have -- and a smart calendar app like Reclaim.ai is a great way to help everyone on the team better align their tasks with the actual availability. With Reclaim, employees are each able to defend an additional 5.7 hours/week for productive task work, and reduce their meeting load by 2.3 unnecessary meetings every week.

The AI behind Reclaim automatically creates you a perfect daily plan by flexibly scheduling your tasks, recurring routines, meetings, and breaks around your existing calendar events. To stay connected every week, you can set up Smart 1:1 Meetings that automatically schedule one-on-one meetings across your team at the best time for both employees. Plus, teams can integrate their project management apps (including Asana, ClickUp, Jira, Todoist, Linear, even Google Tasks) to block time for deep work tasks on the calendar, and allow you to assign work to their schedules to estimate and plan around their availability.

Teams who align their work with the availability can better plan for capacity and actually have time defended to get their important work done so they're not overwhelmed.

Turn your overworked team into happy & healthy employees 🙌

Overworking employees is a serious issue that can negatively impact both your employees and your company. By understanding what causes employee overload and knowing which red flags to look for -- you can help keep your employees happy, motivated, and productive.

Promoting a healthy and empowering work culture is what fuels performance in the long run! By setting achievable goals, prioritizing the work, and leveraging time planning apps, you can prevent your employees from becoming overworked and ensure they can show up as their best every week.

Scheduling Links - ROI Report Reclaim vs. Competitors

Elizabeth — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 19:01:25 +0000

Scheduling links, or meeting links, have been around for over a decade, entering the productivity scene to optimize how professionals coordinate a time to meet. In order to save people the trouble (and serious waste of time) of exchanging back-and-forth emails to figure out when both people are free, they can simply share their availability through a scheduling link to allow another person to pick the time that works best for them.

Sounds like a foolproof solution -- right?

Unfortunately, scheduling links have come under fire for lots of issues in recent years. For one, 54.6% of people who use meeting links struggle to even offer enough available open time slots for invitees to choose from. On top of that, they're facing issues prioritizing their urgent meetings, offering flexible scheduling options, and navigating sharing etiquette that have caused many people to just do away with them for good. Which means they're back to manually sending time slots over email, often to find none of those times actually work, or the ones you proposed are now booked with something new. Looks like another email is due!

As a smart calendar app, our users were very actively requesting a better scheduling link tool to get around common issues they were having using other meeting link apps. And since our users are already time blocking their priorities in Reclaim through our tasks, habits, meetings, and breaks scheduling features -- we knew there was a major opportunity to optimize the process for both the inviter and invitee.

So we got to work! But before we built the feature, we asked thousands of users through a detailed survey -- how are you using meeting links today, and what issues do you need solved for better scheduling? And months after the product launched, we asked again about their top issues and how they're meeting scheduling has improved with Reclaim Scheduling Links.

In this blog post report, we break down the ROI and performance advantages of Scheduling Links at Reclaim reported by our users. Here's a sneak peak at the ROI results:

524% increase in scheduling links open available time slots
Meetings booked 15.3% sooner
75.2% reduction in ease of use issues
78.8% reduction in issues rescheduling & canceling meetings via links
64.5% reduction in prioritization issues (offer more availability for high priority meetings)
77.4% reduction in flexibility of links issues (prefer 30 mins, but would take 20 mins)

Quick overview on Reclaim's "smart" Scheduling Links

Before we get into the data, let's walk through a quick overview of how Reclaim Scheduling Links work vs. other available meeting tools.

As mentioned above, Reclaim is a smart scheduling app that helps you automatically find the best time for your tasks, habits, 1:1 meetings, and breaks in your calendar -- and sync your availability across multiple calendars to prevent work-life balance interruptions. The AI automatically plans your workweek around your priorities, while still keeping your schedule flexible for changes through smart "free"/"busy" event setting codes. For example, if you created a Habit for 'Lunch' to schedule every weekday between 11-2pm, Reclaim would block time for that lunch event as "free", until your calendar starts to fill up and you run out of opportunities to reschedule, where it would then flip that event to "busy" to lock in that time.

Now to Reclaim Scheduling Links -- since users are already scheduling their recurring Habits, Task work, and 1:1 meetings through Reclaim smart events, we built the same intelligence into our Scheduling Links.

The two major differentiators with Reclaim's Scheduling Links vs. other products on the market are our high-priority and flexible duration meeting controls.You can create high-priority Scheduling Links for your most important meetings which will show available openings over all of your Habits, Tasks, and Smart 1:1 events (even if they're marked as busy) -- to offer your max availability. Additionally, our flexible durations allow you to add up to 3 different meeting durations to a single Scheduling Link so incoming schedulers can choose a shorter time in order to get that meeting booked sooner.

So, say you're a busy product manager who needs to get time with a customer in the next couple of days, but have a jam-packed calendar. Instead of sending them a meeting link that's completely out of availability, you can send them a high-priority link with flexible durations to surface times that you could actually reprioritize for them.

69.2% fewer issues with Reclaim Scheduling Links

Let's start with the top problems people faced when sharing availability and booking meetings through links -- and how those same issues scored after using Reclaim's smart Scheduling Links:

Improvement using Reclaim Scheduling Links vs. other meeting links

Amazingly, almost every major pain point category was reduced by over 60% when users switched from another meeting link tool to Reclaim's Scheduling Links, averaging a 69.1% improvement across the board. Maximizing availability was one of our top goals for the new product, and that scored highest at almost an 80% improvement. Sharing etiquette even improved almost 40%, as people felt more confident sharing a link to their availability knowing that the scheduler would actually have options to choose from -- creating a better experience for the people they're meeting with.

79.5% availability improvement: Offering open time slots over events that can be auto-rescheduled.
39.2% sharing etiquette improvement: Sending links without coming off as rude.
75.2% ease of use improvement: Easier user experience using Reclaim.
78.8% rescheduling/cancellation improvement: For meetings booked via links.
64.5% prioritization improvement: For higher-priority vs. non-urgent meetings.
77.4% link flexibility improvement: Allowing invitees to schedule sooner with a shorter duration.

524% increase in open time slots via Scheduling Links

Sending a booking link with no availability for the next two weeks doesn't exactly give the impression that you really care about getting this meeting scheduled. It's no wonder people argued that meeting booking links could come across as rude!

So, we asked our Scheduling Link users: How much additional availability (open time slots) have you been able to create with Reclaim's smart Scheduling Links?

The result? People were able to offer over 5x as many open time slots sharing Reclaim Scheduling Links vs. other booking links. Rather than sharing a standard 60-minute meeting link when you definitely don't have lots of free hours available in your busy calendar -- Reclaim lets you add up to 3 flexible meeting durations to a single link. So, while an hour might not be available this week, a scheduler could get in tomorrow by compromising with a 45-minute time slot in your schedule. All from the same URL.

Not only does this help create more availability for your meetings -- it also gets ahead of awkward etiquette problems by actually giving the invitee control over how much time they need, and when they can get in on your busy calendar. A win-win!

But what about your most important meetings, that you'd be happy to move things around on your calendar to accommodate? Reclaim high-priority Scheduling Links allows you to offer up your maximum availability by automatically showing Reclaim smart events - like Tasks, Habits, and Smart 1:1s -- as available times to the scheduler. And if they pick the time tomorrow where your lunch Habit was originally scheduled, Reclaim auto-reschedules it to accommodate your new priority meeting -- no manual calendar reshuffling required!

Meetings booked 15.3% sooner via Scheduling Links

We all know meetings are often time-sensitive events -- you wouldn't want to schedule time with a partner next week when they're coordinating a campaign going live this Friday. So if you have a jam-packed schedule, you need smarter automation to find time that could be available.

On average, meetings were booked 9.6 days out through competitor Scheduling Links before Reclaim. The goal of Reclaim's Scheduling Links was simple: to let users book the right meetings sooner. By offering more availability and flexibility with our new Scheduling Links tool vs. existing tools on the market -- users report scheduling their meetings 1.5 days sooner with Reclaim, or 8.2 days out, on average. A big difference in today's fast-paced workspace.

This improvement includes both urgent high-priority and normal Scheduling Links, which would be much sooner with the 524% increase in availability only considering the meetings sent through high-priority links. But many people don't want to book right away! We've all experienced sharing a meeting link and asking the person to grab time with us next week, to see moments later that they booked an event for that afternoon. For the non-urgent meetings you want to prioritize at a later date -- you can customize your Scheduling Links to only present openings after a certain date, or the start of the next bookable day or week -- giving you better control over when your meeting can be scheduled.

Almost 3x less manual event clearing

If you're a heavy scheduling link user, you'll definitely know this pain. There's nothing worse than sharing a link with zero availability for days, if not weeks, out on your calendar. And it doesn't leave the best impression when you send that meeting link to an important contact to get something booked asap.

So what are people doing to make room for new meetings on their scheduling links? Manually clearing events from their calendar to create availability -- not exactly efficient for a productivity tool that's supposed to save you time.

When we first surveyed over 800 professionals, only 18.8% of people using competitors meeting links reported NEVER having to do this. Today with Reclaim, that number is up 52.3% -- meaning almost 3x as many people no longer have to clear availability on their calendars for new meetings with Reclaim's Scheduling Links.

That means 81.2% of people were manually clearing events from their calendars before sending a booking link prior to using Reclaim, and only 47.7% now ever have to do it with Reclaim's smarter Scheduling Links.

Additionally, 15.8% of people who were manually clearing events from their calendar 70% or more of the time before sending a meeting link with a competitor - and that number is down to 3.7% using Reclaim - a 76.5% improvement! That's a whole lot of recovered time for more high-value productive work.

89.4% prefer Reclaim vs. competitor meeting link apps

87.9% of Scheduling Link users switched to Reclaim from a different meeting link tool (like Calendly, Motion, or Clockwise). So what do those users think of Reclaim as an alternative solution? A whopping 8*9.4% of people prefer Reclaim's smart Scheduling Links to the meeting link tool they were previously using*.

While meeting links apps have been on the market for years, three major unaddressed issues around prioritization (60.5%), flexibility (57.8%), and availability (54.6%) drove them to try something new. That's why so many schedulers are urgently switching to Reclaim -- they're able to get the right meetings booked sooner, offer flexible options for their schedulers, and maximize available time slots on their links.

And only 12.2% of Reclaim Scheduling Link users are first-time meeting link users! Since Reclaim offers a free Scheduling Link in our free plan, and users are already automating their daily planning through Reclaim, it's become another natural feature to automate the headache of scheduling.

Better experience for both meeting organizers & schedulers

Reclaim Scheduling Links were designed around the top issues meeting link users faced with existing tools on the market. By making these a priority, we were able to improve the top 6 pain points by 69.1% on average across the board -- resulting in a massive influx of users switching entirely from their previous scheduling automation tool.

Plus, Reclaim isn't just a Scheduling Link tool. Users automatically plan out their entire workweeks across their team, finding the best time for their tasks, recurring routines, one-on-one meetings, and breaks to maintain a productive and work-life friendly schedule that prevents burnout across the organization.

You can create a free Scheduling Link at Reclaim to explore how easy it is to get the right meetings booked sooner, and automatically plan out the perfect workweek with smart time blocking for your tasks, habits, one-on-one meetings, and breaks.

Set up your free Scheduling Link →

Me, a Micromanager? 5 Ways To Better Lead Your Team

Elizabeth — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 17:09:51 +0000

Managing a team takes a lot of work. And being a great leader is a learning process that every manager has to go through to discover how to inspire their team. The good news is, you've found yourself reading this article because you want to improve how you lead your team -- so you're on the right track!

Micromanagement is a common challenge that managers run into at some point in their career. In fact, a whopping 79% of employees report feeling micromanaged at work.

The biggest problem is managers don't realize they're micromanaging, and are actually doing so with good intentions, but are baffled when it leads to low morale, reduced productivity, and even resentful employees. Fortunately, there are simple ways to avoid micromanaging at work.

Whether you've independently realized your micromanagement tendencies, or received some constructive feedback from your direct reports -- this blog post will help you understand what micromanagement looks like, its negative effects, and 5 best practices to become a better leader for your team.

What is micromanagement?

Most of us know being called a "micromanager" isn't a compliment -- but what exactly is micromanagement? A micromanager is a superior that's excessively involved or controlling over their employees. In contrast, the management style on the opposite end of the spectrum is called macromanagement, which is a totally hands off approach to leadership. Like with many things, experts suggest the best approach between micromanagement vs. macromanagement is somewhere in the middle.

So why do some managers micromanage? A micromanagement style often stems from a personal standard of perfectionism on the manager's part. Unfortunately, micromanagement often has a negative effect because this kind of helicopter supervision can make employees feel insecure and not trusted to do their jobs. There are many examples of how micromanagement can look like in the workplace.

Common micromanagement examples

Asking to be CC'd on every email employees send.
Excessively monitoring employees on day-to-day tasks.
Demanding constant status updates, even before deadlines.
Overly-criticizing employees' work or performance.
Always unsatisfied with employee deliverables.
Not allowing employees to independently manage their time.
Struggling to delegate tasks because they can do it better themselves.

This corporate management style has built a bad rap over the years, and for several reasons.

Micromanagement not only fosters a poor relationship with the team, who can end up feeling undervalued and mistrusted -- it also puts a lot of pressure on the manager themselves, who might take on more than they can handle because they feel they're the only person who can successfully complete the task.

5 negative micromanagement effects on employees:

Compromised productivity due to lack of independence and trust in their position.
Reduced job satisfaction caused by feeling undervalued by management.
Imposter syndrome when employees feel they aren't good enough at their job.
Feelings of resentment due to excessive supervision and/or criticism.
Quiet quitting as employees stop trying to meet unrealistic expectations.

5 negative micromanagement effects on (micro)managers:

Time scarcity from taking on too much work and lack of time for their own tasks.
Falling short of goals because they're busy with work that could be delegated.
Increased stress from closely supervising many employees and their responsibilities.
Unrealistic expectations for themselves and their team, leading to disappointment.
Poor team relationships and morale that cause friction in the workplace.

Improving your management style can boost both your own, and your team's, productivity. Let's take a look at 5 best practices to avoid the consequences of micromanagement for everyone on the team.

5 ways to stop micromanaging

1. Learn to trust your team

The first step in avoiding being a micromanager is learning to trust your team. This can be difficult when you're a perfectionist, are stuck in one way of doing things, or struggle to delegate because you're worried your employees won't successfully complete a task.

As a manager, you have experience and skills that qualify you to lead the team. But your employees are also there because they have their own unique set of skills that the company needs. And while you may think life would be easier if you could manage clones of yourself, you'd be greatly depriving your organization from the different perspectives and experiences that others can offer to find new and better ways to grow and evolve the business.

So while you can't expect your employees to perform their job exactly as you would -- this doesn't mean they're not capable of successfully accomplishing tasks in their own (and maybe better) way. So instead of fearing a new approach, give your team the opportunity to experiment and find new solutions for their tasks. By loosening the reins a little, your team actually has an opportunity to take ownership and demonstrate what they can do.

2. Be realistic about your own capacity

Today's work culture has long pushed the idea that perfectionism and 'busyness' are a virtue. Unfortunately, workplace stress and burnout statistics are revealing a darker side to that narrative -- especially for managers.

71.4% of managers report feeling stressed because they don't have enough time for everything on their plate, and 61.7% of managers feel completely burnt out (a 2.7% higher rate than individual contributors). The reality is, being busy is not the same thing as being productive. Managers spend only 3.6 hours/day on their own task work, even though they're working extra time at 47.1 hour weeks on average.

Focus your energy on the tasks that only you can do, and practice deprioritizing and delegating the tasks that can be accomplished by others. That way, you can streamline your time management to get more from your week, without running yourself into the ground trying to do it all. And take advantage of productivity apps designed to optimize a busy manager's workflow -- like task management platforms to lay out your project plans, smart calendar tools that boost your time efficiency, and apps that increase focus by reducing distractions.

3. Set clear team expectations

Many micromanagers end up becoming taskmasters vs. facilitators. Set your team up for success by sharing clear goals and expectations around projects so they have the understanding they need to accomplish their tasks. This helps build camaraderie and motivation among your team as you all work towards a shared goal.

Consider implementing a morning standup to go over individual tasks and responsibilities, check in on progress, and realign efforts with priorities if necessary. This can help the team stay on the same page (without feeling like you're breathing down their necks), and clear up the time you spent checking in the rest of the day for your own tasks.

This will also allow you to identify the moments when your employees actually do need a little more support so you can help them when they need it, and give them the space they need to work when they don't.

4. Schedule regular one-on-one time

Simply having an open line of communication with your team is so critical to morale, your manager-employee relationship, and overall productivity. And this doesn't mean dropping in every time you want an update -- it's important to schedule regular one-on-one meetings with each of your direct reports to connect, review, and work through the blockers that are weighing them down.

This is also the time and place to give positive and constructive feedback from your side, and ask effective check-in questions around their work. But one-on-one meetings always need to be a two-way street. Ask your employees what you can be doing to better support them in their role, what ideas they have for an upcoming project, or what resources they're lacking that's holding them back.

Unfortunately, managers have some of the busiest calendars, and one-on-one meetings unfortunately take the hit when time gets tight -- 42.2% of one-on-ones are rescheduled and 29.6% are canceled every week. Using an intelligent meeting scheduler like Reclaim.ai Smart 1:1s allows you to automatically find the best time for these meetings every week, and auto-reschedule if a conflict comes up so your employees always stay a priority on your calendar.

Remember, each employee is unique and often thrives under a different management style, so while one person may need a couple check-ins a week, another may be more productive working independently and only need to connect one-on-one a few times a month.

5. Be the mentor they need to grow

Establishing a collaborative and experienced team takes time! And while you've built the team you have based on the skills and experiences they bring to the table, employees aren't going to fall into a natural rhythm overnight -- this is where the best managers are able to help their team develop a productive workflow that compliments their own style and strengths.

As a manager, you play a lot of different roles, but your number one objective is for your team to succeed. And to do this, they need to understand the history, expectations, and objectives of the projects you put on their plate. But this doesn't mean they need you to outline every step they should take to get it done. Your team are the ones who are digging into the task, and require the flexibility to develop the solution to the project. Your job is to communicate the bigger picture, and be the mentor that sets the guidelines they need so they can find their own success.

And a lot of this boils down to communication. While you may think over-communicating is what got you into the micromanagement problem, your timing is probably just off. Over-communicate early in a project so they understand the scope of the task, but have the breathing room to see it through. Jumping into an employee's work halfway with criticisms is only going to increase stress and anxiety. Instead, let them come to you with questions so you can offer the support and mentorship they need to accomplish their goals.

It's also important to identify learning opportunities for your team. Try to facilitate training for new skills, offer room for new responsibilities and growth opportunities, or try exercises like stretch goals to provide new challenges and boost camaraderie. By allowing your team the freedom to be innovative, you can help them become more productive and successful in the long run. Which is a win for everyone!

Less micromanaging for more success 🙌

It's understandable why most employees don't appreciate being micromanaged. But beyond just causing friction in the workplace, this management style can ultimately jeopardize your own day-to-day productivity and trajectory in the long run.

By identifying the causes of micro-managerial tendencies, fostering open and positive communication, and learning to trust your team with the bigger picture -- you can help lead everyone to success, and create a more positive work environment at the same time.

Have you thought of yourself as a micromanager? Any strategies you'd add to the list? Get in on the conversation by tweeting us @reclaimai! 👋

New Year, New Me: Why Resolutions Fail + 4 Tips to Succeed in 2023

Elizabeth — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 01:18:03 +0000

Welcome to 2023! The start of a new year is a perfect opportunity to set goals, plan for personal and professional growth, and challenge yourself to try something new (or give up something old). But while it's easy to make big resolutions, how you set your goals is the true key to life-changing results and long-term success.

The reality is, of the 41% of US adults that set New Year's resolutions every year, a whopping 91% don't follow through on their goals! And if you've ever come up with your own list of well-intentioned resolutions for January, there's a good chance you can probably relate.

Setting effective resolutions and actually sticking with them can be a challenge -- but there are ways you can maximize your chance of accomplishing these changes. In this article, we'll explore the most popular New Year's resolutions, the common reasons why they fail, and offer 4 easy tips to successfully stick to your 2023 goals.

The problem with New Year's resolutions

Everyone's talking about them this time of year, but what exactly are resolutions? New Year's resolutions are personal and/or professional goals that you aim to achieve in the year ahead. Unfortunately, a study by fitness app Stava found that most people actually throw in the towel on their New Year's resolutions by January 19th -- somberly coining the date 'quitters day'.

Goals for the new year can include virtually anything, but statistics reveal consistently popular resolutions with adults every year.

10 most common New Year's resolutions

Exercise more/lose weight.
Get organized and be more productive.
Learn a new skill or hobby.
Live life to the fullest.
Save more money/spend less money.
Get more sleep.
Reduce stress.
Spend more time with family and friends.
Travel more.
Read more.

Any of these sound familiar? It's likely a few have popped up in your own new year planning. But while they all sound great on paper, why do only 9% of people manage to stick to their big goals for the year beyond the first month? There are a few major pitfalls to New Year's resolutions that make them more likely to fall apart.

3 top reasons New Year's resolutions don't work

You're not setting SMART goals: Setting goals that are too vague, broad, or downright unrealistic can set you up for failure before you even begin.
You haven't prepared an action plan: Goals require continuous commitment to be achieved. Without a clear plan, your daily efforts won't be aligned with your goals.
You don't have clear motivation: Achieving resolutions is hard enough, but basically impossible when you don't have a solid 'why' to fuel sustainable motivation to pursue your goals long-term.

We've all heard the expression -- 'A goal without a plan is just a wish'. So how exactly do you go about turning your New Year's resolutions into actually achievable goals? Whether you're trying to start 2023 with some healthy habits, or setting a new goal for yourself at any other time of the year -- here are 4 steps to help you see your goals through January and beyond!

4 tips for success with New Year's resolutions in 2023

1. Visualize your end goal

If you've written out New Year's resolutions in the past, you might recall saying something along the lines of, 'new year, new me!'. But what exactly does the 'new you' look like? The first step is getting crystal clear on exactly what you want out of 2023 -- focusing not only on how you're going to start the year, but more importantly on how you want to end the year.

A great way to do this is by writing up a vision statement for where you'd like to be by the end of 2023. It might sound a little woo-y, but visualization can be an effective way to establish an end goal in your mind and help fuel motivation to actually accomplish that outcome through day-to-day commitments.

Be specific, writing about your personal and/or professional end-goals in the present tense, as if you have already achieved them. So instead of a vague resolution to 'be more healthy', write out what a healthier version you does every day -- for example, 'I go for a morning run every day, and start my day with a nutritious smoothie'.

Here are a couple prompts to help you get started with your 2023 visualization:

What has "2023 you" achieved by December? (For example: saved and purchased a new car, received a promotion at work, successfully completed a marathon, etc.)
What does your daily goal look like from beginning to end? Write out a detailed itinerary from when you wake up to when you go to bed.

2. Set smaller, SMARTer goals

Many people get swept away in grand goals with the excitement of a fresh start in the new year, but unfortunately, this can be exactly what trips up your long-term success. Once you have a clear idea of your ideal 2023, it's time to create SMART goals for the new year that will help you realize it.

If you aren't familiar, SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. Setting these parameters helps you create more realistic and actionable resolutions that you can actually follow through on. If you have really big goals for 2023, work backwards on a goal-ladder to make tinier New Year's resolutions that will serve as stepping stone achievements. And instead of writing a laundry list of resolutions, try to focus on a few important objectives that will support you in creating your best year. Now it's time to turn them into SMART goals.

For example, if your goal is to 'reduce stress' in 2023, a SMARTer version could be:

Specific: I will reduce stress by starting a 30-minute healthy morning routine with meditation.
Measurable: I will complete my morning routine every workday, and track my new habit weekly.
Achievable: I previously spent the first 30 minutes of my day scrolling through social media, but am replacing this negative habit with a morning routine and meditation.
Realistic: 30-minutes is less than 3% of my day. I will reprioritize this time to my important goal of reducing stress.
Time-bound: At the end of every month, I will review how often I made time for my morning routine. It will take time to start a new habit and this gives me an opportunity to review any blockers and make adjustments to my plan.

3. Schedule time for your resolutions

Finding spare hours for goals can be especially hard for busy professionals. When your schedule books up and the week gets hectic, new habits can quickly get pushed to the backburner - and even fall off the map entirely.

Defending actual time for your goals is the only way to make them happen -- so make sure they are true priorities. You can set yourself up for success by automating this process with an app like Reclaim.ai, which makes blocking time in your calendar for your routines super easy. The Habits feature allows you to create new habits and set details like how long you need and when you want to complete it. Reclaim then automatically finds the best time to schedule it in your busy weeks, around your preferences and other commitments, so you have a daily action plan that supports your success. Scheduling personal priorities on your calendar also prevents that time getting booked over by a last minute work meeting for example, so you can better protect your work-life balance.

Whether your goal is to make time to read, take a daily walk, create more focus time to work on important tasks every day, or start the day with positive affirmations -- actually putting it on your calendar ensures you always have the time set aside for your resolutions.

4. Review your progress regularly

While you might have the energy and dedication for your 2023 goals in the first week of January -- most big goals are achieved over a long period of time, not overnight (unfortunately).

Regularly tracking your habits is an effective way to identify what's working for you, and what isn't. Time blocking not only improves success by giving you a concrete action plan to achieve your goals, but also offers great retrospective insight on exactly where your time is going every day. Try setting aside time at the end of the week, or each month, to complete a time audit against your resolutions. How many times did you actually go to the gym, or make time for productive deep work on important tasks? If you missed a habit, what took priority instead?

You can do this manually, or take advantage of automations that make calendar audits easier. Reclaim users get an automatic weekly report at the end of the week with awesome stats on how much time you spent in meetings, working across tasks, and how many habit goals you completed. This is a great way to stay motivated and celebrate your wins, and also allows you to make any adjustments to your plan for the following week.

New year, new you - with smarter resolutions 🎆

Doing a 180° on your 2022 routines might not be realistic, but you do have 365 days this year to make some awesome sustainable progress towards your big goals! And by automating the process, you can hack your New Year's resolutions by taking the work out of the planning and instead focusing on the follow-through.

Remember, change takes time. Be patient with yourself through the progress, and don't get discouraged if you've fallen off a little by mid-January. By starting small, and creating an actionable plan around SMART New Year's resolutions -- you can set yourself up for a successful year around your priorities. Consistency is key and a little success is always better than giving up. Here's to a great year in 2023!

4 Meeting Scheduling Automations You Need for Google Calendar in 2023

Elizabeth — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 20:49:19 +0000

Whether you're working at the office, fully remote, or in a hybrid work model -- your calendar is likely (generously) peppered with meetings. Between one-on-one meetings, team meetings, and client or customer meetings, just the average professional sits through 25.6 meetings every week. The busiest professionals, with 15 or more meetings a week, attend an average of 39.3 meetings -- a 37.9% increase since February 2020.

Unfortunately, juggling a jam-packed meeting calendar isn't just a simple inconvenience for today's employees. The average burnout rate across industries sat at a shocking 60.2% rate as of October 2022 -- in big part because employees report not having enough time for focused work on their tasks around everything else in their calendar.

With over half the standard workweek dedicated to collaboration, busy professionals are looking to optimize their meeting scheduling so they can spend less time writing back-and-forth emails, avoid meeting conflicts that derail their weekly plans, and unblock more hours for their actual task work.

In this blog post, we're going to look at the top issues with scheduling tools, and share 4 effective automations to help you book appointments faster through a smarter meeting scheduler for Google Calendar in 2023.

What is a meeting scheduler?

If you feel like all you do is sit in meetings these days, you wouldn't be entirely wrong. Meetings have increased a shocking 69.7% across the board since February 2020! Top that with heavier task loads, more responsibilities compounded by waves of The Great Resignation, and now mass layoffs -- it's no surprise that 78.7% of professionals are regularly stressed because they don't have enough time to get it all done every week.

In an effort to create more productive hours in the week, teams are looking for ways to automate routine processes that eat up precious minutes. And what better place to start than by streamlining the meeting scheduling process that already takes up so much valuable time every week?

If you're unfamiliar, you might be wondering, what exactly is a meeting scheduler? A meeting scheduler app helps people instantly find time to meet around the availability on your calendar. In combination with your calendar app, like Google Calendar, the right meeting scheduling software can plan around your existing calendar events and make booking appointments easier and faster than ever -- even across two, or more, busy calendars. All without the inefficient (often downright frustrating) back-and-forth communication traditionally involved in the process.

There are many productivity-boosting benefits to optimizing your meeting management with a scheduling app for Google Calendar.

7 top benefits of a meeting scheduling app:

Cut down back-and-forth communication finding a time to meet.
Instantly schedule meetings directly in your calendar.
Avoid double-booking by sharing your true availability.
Empower meeting organizers with custom scheduling preferences.
Improve experience for invitees with quick and easy scheduling.
Better plan capacity around other scheduled commitments.
Improve productivity by managing when you're available to meet.
Automatically add breaks to avoid back-to-back meetings.

The most popular type of meeting scheduler is a shareable 'meeting links' that allow people to book time directly on your calendar through a custom URL. Other advanced features of meeting scheduling links can include automatic rescheduling, task management capabilities, multiple calendar sync, automatic reminders, video-conferencing links, and automated email follow-ups after a meeting.

In fact, the average professional already uses scheduling links 7.1 times a week, and over 96.4% of scheduling link users leverage them at least once a week to book meetings. But while there are dozens of availability calendars and scheduling link apps on the market that promise less hassle for Google Calendar users, even the most popular options come with complications.

Common issues with meeting scheduler apps

In order to learn more about what people really want from a meeting scheduler, Reclaim.ai surveyed over 800 busy professionals on both how they're using scheduling links and what they'd like to improve -- unearthing these major issues in the stats below.

4 solutions for better meeting scheduling

Unfortunately, meeting scheduling isn't as simple as just booking a time in the first opening on your calendar. The best meeting scheduler should consider your individual priorities and offer real flexibility for yourself and your invitees

This is where Reclaim Scheduling Links come in. Specifically developed around user pain points -- this free Scheduling Link tool for Google Calendar helps busy people schedule meetings faster by creating more availability around your existing schedule and priorities. Let's take a look at how Reclaim's meeting scheduler is changing the game for Google Calendar users.

1. Share high-priority meeting links

Ever send (or receive) a scheduling link hoping to book a meeting this week, only to find there actually aren't any openings this entire month? The reality is, 32.7% of scheduling links do not show enough availability and result in major meeting delays, which leads to 33.7% of people manually deleting events to create more availability for their scheduling links.

When it comes to your most important meetings, you're probably willing to adjust your schedule to accommodate - for example, moving your lunch break back an hour to make time for a high-value customer meeting. Unfortunately, no other scheduling link app knows that. So once again you're kicking off another email chain to find time to connect, while manually rearranging Google Calendar to make the space you need.

With Reclaim Scheduling Links, you can share* high-priority links* that offer up more free time for the important meetings that need to be scheduled sooner. High-priority links work by showing the other smart events on your calendar as free and available time to schedulers (like Tasks, Habits, Smart 1:1s, and Decompression Time). And when the high-priority meeting schedules over something else, Reclaim automatically moves that event to the next best time in Google Calendar so you can stay on track with your priorities. No manual maneuvering required!

2. Offer flexible meeting durations

When it comes to good meeting scheduling etiquette, offering flexibility to invitees shows that you value their time and are making them a priority in your schedule. But this can be difficult when choosing whether to offer a 15-minute, 30-minute, or 45-minute scheduling link. Making assumptions about how much time someone needs with you, or sharing a link without enough openings certainly doesn't make the best impression.

No one wants to make an invitee feel like they need to 'get in line' to meet with you, or that your busy calendar is more important than their*s. But Reclaim's flexible meeting links* support up to three different duration options to open more opportunities to connect. This shifts more power to your invitee, allowing them to choose how much time they actually need and whether they're willing to flex on time to schedule sooner -- for example, selecting a 30-minute slot this week vs. a 45-minute slot next week.

3. Find the best time across multiple calendars

Scheduling meetings across two busy calendars is hard enough. What happens when you're trying to connect for a team meeting, or co-organize meetings with another person? A meeting scheduler that facilitates finding the best time across multiple schedules can unblock the serious time-sink of manually coordinating calendars, and avoid the sacrifice one attendee usually makes to accommodate the group. Reclaim facilitates collaborative meeting workflows in a couple ways.

You can create Link Groups to share custom scheduling pages with a specific selection of meeting links to book the right meetings faster - for example, a page with meeting links for just your engineering team, or just your sales team.

For the meetings involving multiple attendees, Team Links allow you to instantly get a meeting on the calendar for your whole team so you can always find the best time for everyone to connect. Just add your team members, and let Reclaim automatically find the best opening across everyone's availability, meeting preferences, time zones, and work hours -- so you can focus on planning a productive meeting vs. just getting it on the books. Team Links can be added to your main booking page or in specific Link Groups.

4. Schedule meetings around your priorities & preferences

The biggest thing that sets Reclaim Scheduling Links apart from other meeting schedulers is that it doesn't just look for open time on your calendar, but actually understands your priorities to align your meetings with your goals. By optimizing your meeting scheduling without compromising your other commitments, Reclaim allows you to build the perfect daily plan around the things that matter most.

And all this magic happens through smart events. Instead of jamming up your Google Calendar with fixed time slots, you're able to transform your schedule into smart events that can dynamically change around your priorities. So instead of manually scheduling time blocks every week, you can integrate your project management app to book task work, create smart recurring events for shiftable events like lunch, automatically schedule buffer time after meetings, sync and defend time across multiple calendars, even automate your 1:1 meetings to find the best time for both attendees.

Because Reclaim is already finding the best time for your Tasks, Habits, 1:1 meetings, and Breaks in your calendar -- it's uniquely positioned to now manage your meeting scheduling around these other commitments, like your own personal assistant.

How to set up Reclaim Scheduling Links for Google Calendar

Here's a closer look at how to create and customize your new Scheduling Link for Google Calendar:

Sign up and connect Google Calendar to Reclaim.
Get started with Scheduling Links in the Reclaim app to set up your booking page.
Create a new Scheduling Link, or start with one of the three premade templates.
Customize your individual Scheduling Link titles, URLs, and descriptions for invitees.
Set preferences for attendees, duration options, scheduling hours, time range, priority level, video-conferencing links or meeting location, icons, and visibility.
Set up a Link Group for a booking page with a collection of specific meeting links.
Copy and share your unique Scheduling Link URLs to automatically get meetings booked right to Google Calendar!
PRO TIP: Install the free add-on for Google Calendar and Gmail to easily manage, share, and create your meeting links via email.

Now invitees can choose both the type of meeting and select a time right from your Scheduling Page. But what many people love most is that 'preferred times' are highlighted with a green dot, gently encouraging invitees to book a time that aligns with your daily plan. For maximum control, you can also share a specific meeting Scheduling Link URL for your invitees to book through.

It's also super easy to reschedule or cancel meetings right in Google Calendar so if something comes up, you can find another time without a single email exchange. Scheduling Links also work with non-Reclaim users, but will not show overlapping availability across calendars on Scheduling Links booking pages. You can learn more about the feature in our overview help doc here.

Smarter Scheduling Links for smarter meetings 🤝

With the average professional managing over 25 meetings every week -- optimizing the booking process with scheduling links is a great way to unblock the back-and-forth expense of finding a time to connect.

Reclaim Scheduling Links deliver even more capability to the market with better prioritization and maximum flexibility for both meeting organizers and invitees. Get started booking smarter meetings in Google Calendar around your ever-changing schedule to see the difference for yourself. Now available to everyone in public beta -- we can't wait to hear what you think of the feature. Ready to try it out? Create a Scheduling Link here.

Questions? Feedback? Tweet us @reclaimai to get in on the conversation. We love hearing from you! 👋

Always Tired After Work? Types of Fatigue & 5 Tips for More Energy

Elizabeth — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 19:30:19 +0000

You've made it through another marathon day at work. You get home, or log off from your home-office, and make a beeline for the sofa that's been calling your name all afternoon. Just for a minute though! There's still that evening workout class you signed up for, a healthy dinner to cook, tidying up to do, and maybe some quality reading to get in.

An hour later, you're still on the couch half-watching whatever came on. The workout class started 10 minutes ago, the ingredients for your healthy dinner sit neglected in the fridge, chores might as well be Mount Everest, and even opening a book feels like an impossible proposition. How is it possible that you feel even more tired since you got off work? Your day isn't over, you've got big plans, and things to do! Maybe tomorrow (although that's what you said yesterday).

Sound familiar?

Sometimes, an afternoon of doing absolutely nothing is exactly what you need. But what happens when you're too tired to do anything after work, all the time? In this blog post, we're going to take a look at the most common types of fatigue and their causes, and offer 5 tips to overcome and prevent exhaustion so you can do more of the things you want to do.

Why am I so tired after work?

Many professionals are familiar with the feeling of exhaustion, especially after a hard day's work. But what exactly does it mean to be 'tired'? Being tired means you are limited by a lack of energy and need of rest and recovery to recharge. But when you are consistently feeling tiredness or weakness, you are dealing with fatigue. Fatigue can be a physical or mental tiredness - or a combination of both - and presents in a wide range of symptoms.

Common symptoms of exhaustion:

Aching or sore muscles
Daytime drowsiness
Trouble focusing or learning
Gastrointestinal issues
Headaches and nausea
Irritability or moodiness
Delayed response times
Vision complications like blurriness
Compromised immunity
Executive dysfunction
Lack of motivation and inspiration
Feelings of apathy or depression

But here's the catch! The word 'tired' has become an umbrella term to describe a variety of physical and mental states. The reality is, there are many different 'types' of fatigue that might afflict busy professionals. So instead of asking yourself, "why do I feel so tired?" -- the first question should really be "what kind of tired am I feeling?".

Chronic fatigue can be broken down into more specific categories based on your symptoms and experiences. This can help you more accurately pinpoint and address the root issues causing your feelings of exhaustion.

5 types of fatigue & their causes

Ok, so it's not as simple as just 'being tired'. But how do you figure out what type of exhaustion you're dealing with? Common types of fatigue are divided into two categories: physical and mental. Let's take a look at 5 common types of fatigue to better identify why you're feeling tired after work.

Physical exhaustion - body tiredness & aches, depleted energy

Physical exhaustion is the kind of tired you might feel after an intense workout or strenuous physical labor. You might be physically overrun at your job, or pushing yourself too hard exercising on top of work. Excessive physical exertion can leave you with sore or injured muscles, and drained of the energy you need for tasks and activities at the end of the day.

If you are experiencing physical exhaustion but aren't actively overworking your body, this kind of fatigue can also be a consequence of lifestyle choices. Poor diet, even mild dehydration, and alcohol or drug use can contribute to you feeling physically exhausted every day. Underlying medical issues like allergies or intolerances, anemia, chronic disorders, and other conditions can also cause fatigue and are worth getting looked at by a medical professional.

Lack of sleep - drowsiness, trouble focusing, irritability

Sleep is an unsurprising cause of fatigue. Still, it's underestimated by many professionals. In fact, 1 in 3 people don't get the recommended amount of sleep every night!

Tiredness caused by a lack of sleep - or low quality sleep - can leave you drained of physical energy to complete your daily activities. It can also result in mental symptoms like feeling groggy, emotional, and unfocused. In the long-term, a chronic lack of sleep increases risk for a wide range of serious health consequences including hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, heart attack, and stroke.

Mental exhaustion - lack of motivation, fatigued despite sleep

Mental exhaustion is caused by a chronic state of stress and exhaustion due to intense mental activity over a prolonged period of time.

This can look like an increased cognitive load at work with extra responsibilities, or an overwhelming high-pressure project on your plate. It can also be caused by decreased resources you need to function at your best -- like not getting enough sleep or personal time to decompress and recharge. Your brain becomes overworked from running at its max for too long and starts to shut down, leaving you feeling exhausted and drained at the end of the day (even when you get enough sleep).

Emotional exhaustion - feelings of detachment, demotivation

Similar to mental exhaustion, emotional exhaustion happens when you are stretched too thin by draining emotional experiences.

This kind of fatigue can be caused by persistent stressors like imposter syndrome at work if you're constantly worried that you're going to get fired, or dealing with difficult feelings like grief from the loss of a loved one or the end of a relationship. These emotional experiences are incredibly tolling and can manifest as fatigue in your everyday life, especially on top of already exhausting workdays. Mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or ADHD can also perpetuate emotional exhaustion, as you eventually wear yourself out trying to grit through challenging symptoms that might require additional treatment.

Burnout - no energy, feelings of cynicism & hopelessness

Burnout is an end stage of exhaustion caused by prolonged conditions of any of the above states of fatigue. And unfortunately, it's not an uncommon syndrome in today's work culture. The average burnout rate across industries was at 60.2% as of October 2022, with over half the workforce reporting being burnt out.

Job burnout is the result of chronic stress and overwhelm at work, leaving you feeling completely exhausted and unmotivated no matter how much you try to sleep. Without improvement, workplace burnout can push professionals to withdraw in their positions by quiet quitting, or entirely leave their jobs as seen in movements like The Great Resignation.

Even outside of work, constant mental exhaustion can lead to burnout in your personal life where your brain simply can't take on the unrelenting pressure of emotional stressors. This can leave you with feelings of emptiness, demotivation, and cynicism and apathy towards things you used to care about. In worst case scenarios, burnout can even trigger depressive episodes in some people.

5 tips to beat exhaustion & boost energy levels

When it comes to addressing fatigue in your life, identifying what may be causing the issue is the first step. Now, let's take a look at 5 tips to help handle these types of fatigue so you can beat afternoon exhaustion and create more energy in your everyday life.

1. Prioritize your physical health

Investing in your physical health is key to preventing exhaustion and fueling your energy levels. Building a lifestyle around healthy habits like regularly eating nutritious meals, moving your body, and staying hydrated is all a part of improving and sustaining your energy levels.

Create a better work-life balance by actually scheduling time for these routines in your calendar every day. Too busy to plan out every minute? We get it. Smart apps like Reclaim.ai take the manual work out of time blocking by automatically finding the best time in your busy week for all the important habits you want to defend time for. No more putting personal priorities like eating a healthy lunch or taking a 10-minute walk on the backburner because you didn't have time for a break!

Taking care of your health also includes prioritizing routines, like getting in with your doctor for a regular physical check-up to identify any other medical issues that might be contributing to your fatigue. Try syncing your personal and work calendars to avoid getting double-booked over a personal appointment that your team didn't know about.

2. Get enough quality sleep

This might seem like a no-brainer, but sleep is something we tend to sacrifice even when we know how important it is. Experts suggest the average adult needs 7-9 hours of sleep per night, and making exceptions (even if it's 'just for tonight) actually adds up in sleep debt that needs to be caught up on eventually.

You simply can't perform at your best at work - or in your personal life - without adequate rest. And not all sleep is created equal either. Good sleep hygiene boosts the quality of your rest so you can improve your focus, mood, and energy during the day. Try to put away electronics an hour before bedtime, ditch the alcoholic nightcap, and establish a regular sleep schedule to get top quality shut-eye that'll boost your energy levels for tomorrow!

3. Set boundaries around your time

Today's professionals are overrun with more meetings than ever and overwhelming workloads to boot. A whopping 78.7% of people experience stress due to increasing tasks and lack of time in the week to get it all done. In fact, the top reported contributing cause for job burnout is a lack of time for focused work. As a result, many employees find themselves sacrificing personal hours trying to keep up -- overrunning and exhausting themselves week after week.

If this sounds like you, try countering the cycle by actually blocking deep work for tasks in your calendar, so you have the time defended from another unproductive meeting. And if you find yourself sitting through a lot of meetings that could have been an email, or always taking on projects you don't have the time or energy for -- learn to set better boundaries by effectively prioritizing your tasks and strategically saying "no" to requests outside your bandwidth. That way you can focus your time on the things that are most important, instead of exhausting yourself trying to do it all.

Setting healthy boundaries around your availability - during work and personal hours - is key to protecting yourself from mental exhaustion and burnout. It's easy to forget that time and energy are limited resources. Maximizing your work hours with a productive weekly work plan and better time efficiency helps you stay on top of your true priorities, while also protecting valuable off-hours for all the personal commitments you want to have energy for.

4. Take care of your mind

Exhaustion wears heavy on both your body, and your mind. And while taking care of your physical health is crucial to maintaining your overall well-being, taking steps to care for your mental health is just as important when addressing everyday fatigue.

Incorporating more mindfulness in your life has been studied to reduce stress and even prevent burnout in the long-term. Don't know where to start? Try adding confidence-boosting positive affirmations in your daily morning routine, take up journalling to work through stressors, or set aside a few minutes during the busy day for a short meditation to ground yourself amidst the chaos.

If you've been struggling with feelings of exhaustion despite your best efforts, and consistently find yourself too tired after work to do anything -- it's a good idea to consult a medical professional to see if there's an underlying condition that might be contributing to your fatigue. Talk therapy is also a great option to learn effective stress-management skills so you can achieve more of your goals. You aren't alone, and chronic exhaustion isn't something to dismiss or be ashamed of!

5. Make time to rest and recover

At the end of the day, time to rest isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. You can't run on fumes forever -- if you don't take the time to recharge, your body will do so for you when it's finally pushed too far.

Many professionals struggle to fully unplug from the stress of the job at the end of the day, work extra hours on the weekend to catch up, and even feel anxious about taking advantage of their time off. It's not surprising then that 57% of people feel like their mental health wasn't a good enough reason to take time off.

If resting feels like a challenge, it's ok to start small. Try dedicating even just an hour in your evenings after work to unwind with a relaxing bath, restorative yoga, or some reading. You can also consider making your weekends decidedly work-free (that means no checking emails!). From there you can build your way up to actually requesting time off for a well-deserved vacation or even just a day off to intentionally lay on the couch and do absolutely nothing, so you can get ahead of exhaustion and come back with more energy to hit those goals.

Sustainable changes for more energy every day🔋

It's normal for life and work to be exhausting sometimes! And there isn't a way around avoiding that altogether. But in a work culture that pressures employees to give 100%, 100% of the time, establishing ways to protect your own time and well-being is key to successfully navigating those stressful seasons.

By setting healthy boundaries around your availability, committing to physically and mentally healthy habits, and defending time for quality rest and recovery - ideally before you reach burnout - you can beat the toxic cycle of exhaustion and feel more energized every day so you can actually do the things you want to do!

How do you handle fatigue? Any tips we missed that have helped you successfully navigate exhaustion? Tweet us @reclaimai to share your thoughts with the community! 👋

9 Reasons to Switch to a Digital Daily Planner Today

Elizabeth — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 19:57:32 +0000

If you've ever seen a beautifully curated paper planner on social media, you might have been tempted to start using one yourself to get on top of your endless to-do list and overwhelming weekly commitments. The hashtag #planneraddict has a whopping 157.3 million views on TikTok, and features countless stunning planners, bullet journal to-dos, and hand-colored time blocked calendars in the most aesthetically pleasing handwriting out there. But is it really the most productive way to plan your valuable time?

The reality is that today's professionals are absolutely slammed at work. The average employee is sitting through an average of 25.6 meetings a week and with heavier workloads on top of that, individual contributors are managing to complete only 53.5% of planned tasks every week on average. It's not surprising that this increasingly demanding work environment has been fueling job burnout rates and contributing to movements like quiet quitting and The Great Resignation -- piling even more pressure on teams across industries.

Paper planners are an age-old method of managing your days and keeping track of appointments and priorities. But in recent years, digital planners have established themselves in the space with advanced features specifically designed to help the busiest professionals of today make the most of their limited hours every week.

While planners are powerful tools to help manage your time every day, the question is -- do paper or digital daily planners offer more benefits to maximize your productivity in the long run? In this blog post we're going to take a look at the overall benefits of using a daily planner, and break down 9 top reasons to consider switching to a digital planner to better organize your time and hit more goals in your professional and personal life.

What are paper vs. digital planners?

Whether you've been using a paper daily planner up until now, or are currently weighing the choice between that and a digital calendar app to help you stay on top of all the things you need to do -- it's important to understand the difference between the two options. Let's first go over definitions of a paper vs. a digital daily planner.

A paper daily planner is a printed tool in which you can manually write down your appointments and to-dos for the day and/or week, typically designed with dated entries and in a yearly calendar format. These planners are published in countless styles and sizes, and can include additional space for things like lists, goals, habits, and events.

A digital daily planner is a downloadable app or online platform that allows you to virtually schedule all your tasks and commitments in a calendar for the days, weeks, and months ahead. Digital daily planners are typically accessible across devices, offer a variety of automated features, and can be virtually shared with others.

Benefits of using a daily planner

You might be surprised to learn that up to 82% of people actually don't have a time management system in place at all. And when you don't have a clear plan of where your time is going, it's easy to get distracted by non-important urgencies or scatter your efforts across a bunch of to-dos. In fact, individual contributors average 1.96 hours of unproductive task work every day -- almost 25% of their entire workweek!

So how does using a daily planner help counter this productivity pitfall? Between juggling a heavy meeting load and massive to-do lists, taking the time to develop a daily action plan ensures your focus is always dedicated where it matters most. The strategy is simple -- you map out your to-dos and meetings for the day ahead in your planner, and then follow the plan to meet deadlines, be where you need to be, and keep any responsibilities from slipping through the cracks. Spending just 10-12 minutes planning your day can save you up to 2 hours of time you would have otherwise wasted thanks to a lack of planning, and spares you the mental exhaustion of being spread to thin trying to remember and do everything at once.

Planners are a tried and true time management tool and offer many benefits to those who adopt them.

5 Top benefits of using a daily planner:

Boost productivity: Planning your daily goals in advance boosts productivity by aligning your efforts to your priorities and ensuring nothing important is forgotten.
Reduce decision paralysis: Writing out an action plan for the day ahead limits decision paralysis in trying to choose what to work on next.
Improve focus: A clear daily plan helps facilitate single tasking to complete one objective at a time, with less time wasted context switching during the day.
Reduce stress: Creating a realistic daily plan reduces time anxiety by keeping you on track with deadlines and making consistent progress towards your goals.
Prioritize wellbeing: Scheduling time for healthy habits, regular routines, and personal commitments helps you defend time for your own priorities and goals.

So while both paper and digital daily planners ultimately have the same goal of helping users organize all the things on their plate so they can get the most from their weeks -- what are the benefits of choosing a digital daily planner over a paper planner? Let's take a look at 9 ways digital planner apps outperform paper calendars.

9 Reasons to switch to a digital daily planner

1. Save time by optimizing your planning

Say that between planning, filling everything out, and managing any changes to your schedule, you spend about 30-minutes manually writing out your calendar on paper every day. While it might not seem like a lot, that actually adds up to 2.5 hours come Friday. And when you're managing a massive task load and a demanding meeting schedule -- those few hours can be the difference between hitting your goals and not meeting your deadlines for the week.

Optimizing your planning process by switching to a digital calendar app can effortlessly boost productivity during the week by automatically creating a schedule around all your priorities. That way, you can stay on top of your busy calendar and win back time during the week for more focus time on your high-value tasks.

2. Automatically time block all your priorities

Time blocking your calendar has been shown to boost productivity up to 80%. And while some people do time block on paper, digitizing the process is ultimately much more efficient with benefits like having editable time blocks and notifications to keep you updated on what's coming next.

Want to save even more time? By taking advantage of productivity apps like Reclaim.ai, you can actually completely automate the time blocking process for your tasks, habits, recurring one-on-one meetings, and even regular breaks and travel time -- so you always have the perfect daily plan, around your ever-changing schedule. And with custom color coding for event types and even emoji features, you don't even need to sacrifice the fun of personalization when switching to a digital planner.

3. Efficiently plan around future goals

While a paper planner can work for planning for the day or week ahead, they don't efficiently accommodate bigger picture planning. When you're planning around future goals and big projects, using a digital calendar can help provide a more comprehensive overview than a paper planner.

A digital daily planner allows you to easily view your schedule by day, week, month, or even year, so you can better prioritize tasks according to what's important to your current and long-term goals. By being able to create a productive weekly work plan in your digital planner around things like future deadlines, dependent tasks, and your always-changing availability with new meetings and appointments -- you can stay on top of all the things you need to do today, and keep course for where you want to be tomorrow.

4. Be flexible to changes (no eraser needed!)

Adaptability to changes is one of the biggest benefits of using a digital planner. Especially if you've put in the effort to time block all your priorities for the day, pulling out the eraser to reorganize your week around a change in plans can become a major time and energy sink.

By using a digital planner you can quickly move around your week when an inevitable change like a meeting conflict or personal commitment comes up. And instead of having to pull out an eraser - or even rewrite your carefully planned week altogether - you can simply drag-and-drop time blocks to accommodate. To save even more hassle playing calendar tetris, smart planner apps like Reclaim automatically reprioritize your schedule for you when something important crops up, no elbow grease required.

5. Better communicate your availability

Ever write out your perfect day in your planner, only to have a spontaneous work meeting throw a wrench in your productive plan? Another major benefit of a digital planner is that it facilitates more transparency around your availability. Your team, clients, and even family or friends don't typically have access to your paper planner to see when you're free to meet or collaborate. This can make for a frustrating experience for everyone involved.

Switching to a digital planner allows you to effortlessly share your plans to make scheduling time with others easier, because they can at a glance see when you're free and when you're busy (with things like deep work on important tasks, for example). There are plenty of availability calendars on the market that make switching to a digital planner easy, and open the door to other time-saving features like scheduling links to book meetings without the back-and-forth. You can even sync your personal and work calendars with custom privacy settings via Reclaim, so your perfectly planned day doesn't get double-booked over again.

6. Integrate with other apps you're already using

If you're new to the world of digital planners you might be wondering -- what even are integrations? Integrations connect separate apps to sync information from one system to another. This is especially beneficial when you're already using apps like a team calendar or task management platforms at work. Most of these apps offer native integrations to help optimize your workflow even further.

For example, instead of having to manually write out your to-dos from your assigned tasks in a project management platform -- you can automatically sync time for tasks before the due date right to Google Calendar with Reclaim's native integrations to popular work tools like Asana, ClickUp, Todoist, and more. Or, try integrating your calendar with Slack to update your status to what you're doing in real time so you can reduce interruptions during the day.

7. Automatic tracking & auditing

Tracking your hours in a paper planner is challenging because even the best-laid plans end up changing over the course of a busy day, and might not get updated for accurate tracking. With a digital planner and automated time blocking, you can quickly look back at the weeks and months to see exactly where your hours were dedicated across meetings, task work, habits, personal commitments, and anything else you had going on.

Whether you're a freelancer or contractor that needs to track hours across projects, or even if you're just committed to improving your time efficiency at work, regularly auditing your calendar can offer awesome insight to where your time is spent (and misallocated). This can help you better plan your capacity in the future and effectively deprioritize commitments that might be pulling you away from important goals.

8. Plan larger workloads

Some of the busiest professionals are juggling an average of 39.3 meetings a week on top of their demanding task lists. Unfortunately, there's only so much you can fit in a daily entry slot of a paper planner, or even on a whole page. This doesn't serve well for those who are looking to plan out heavy workloads every week.

Digital planners offer much greater capacity than paper planners because they aren't limited to a physical area to record your monstrous to-do list and meeting schedule. That means you never have to worry about running out of space when scheduling your daily plan. Digital planners automatically present even impressive amounts of information clearly so you're always on top of your daily plan. No more trying to decipher what that scribbled important margin note was supposed to remind you of...

9. Never lose your planner again

One of the biggest disadvantages of a paper planner is that it needs to be physically on you for it to be easily accessible. And beyond the inconvenience of having to carry it around with you everywhere -- forgetting, misplacing, or damaging the only copy of your daily planner also becomes a risk.

A digital daily planner is accessible from anywhere, at any time, across your devices, so you're always on top of your schedule and can make necessary changes as they arise. And because it's virtual, you never have to wing the day without a plan because you left your daily planner laying at a coffee shop.

Going digital for better productivity 🤖

Using a daily planner is an easy and effective way to plan your time and stay on top of all your to-dos, meetings, and routines every week. And while paper planners are a great start to better time management, busy professionals need tools that can keep up with their demanding schedules.

Optimizing your daily planning by choosing a digital planner that works for you, helps you create the perfect plan around your priorities every day and frees up valuable time better dedicated to high-value tasks so you can hit more of your goals. And if you love the creative aspect of a paper planner, there's still room to enjoy a pen-on-paper experience! Consider starting a beautiful journal to practice more mindfulness, or write out morning affirmations for a more positive mindset to boost productivity.

What are your thoughts on paper vs. digital planners? Have you made the switch to digital, why or why not? Tweet us @reclaimai to get in on the conversation! 👋

40 Positive Morning Affirmations for More Success (Science-Backed)

Elizabeth — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 21:11:55 +0000

When you think of positive affirmations you might imagine standing in front of a mirror, quite seriously looking your reflection in the eye, and awkwardly chanting an inspiring statement you saw on social media. Maybe you've even tried this exact approach before!

It might sound a little silly, but self-affirmations aren't all woo-woo. Scientific research supports that implementing self-affirmations can deliver psychological benefits by countering habitual negative thinking, and even improve productivity and motivation across areas of your life.

The reality is, today's work culture has left 78.7% of professionals feeling stressed at work. With employees and students across the board averaging an alarming 60.2% burnout rate as of October 2022 -- promoting routines that support individual wellbeing is key to reducing immediate consequences like mental exhaustion and other long-term health risks of chronic stress like heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, depression, digestive issues, and asthma.

While positive affirmations aren't a quick fix for all of life's obstacles, or a solution for the root issues that leave workers chronically overworked -- starting your mornings with a moment of mindfulness can help create a more positive and resilient mindset as you navigate everyday stressors in pursuit of your goals.

If you've found yourself reading this article wanting to give morning affirmations a(nother) shot -- you're in the right place! In this post, we're going to break down how to get started with morning affirmations, scientific tips for max success, and offer 40 effective examples to inspire your own morning affirmations.

What are affirmations?

There's been lots of talk about the power of affirmations, from self-love gurus on social media to major success stories like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But what exactly are they? Let's break down an affirmation definition. Affirmations are positive statements that can help you overcome negative thinking, reduce stress, boost confidence, and set the tone for your day. Some examples of positive affirmations could be: 'I am worthy of success', 'I can do hard things', or 'today will be a good day'.

Practicing mindfulness by being more present and aware of your thoughts and feelings has many benefits including reducing stress, enhancing performance, and allowing you to be less reactive and overwhelmed on busy days. Self-affirmations are a great addition to a mindful morning routine, helping you to take back control of your thoughts and redirect them in a positive direction that is aligned with your daily goals.

And there are some pretty powerful (scientifically backed!) benefits to trying them out.

8 Scientific benefits of self-affirmations:

Reduce stress (Sherman et al., 2009; Critcher & Dunning, 2015)
Counter anxiety and rumination (Koole et al., 1999; Wiesenfeld et al., 2001)
Improve productivity under stress *(Creswell et al., 2013)*
Promote physical activity (Cooke et al., 2014)
Inspire healthier eating (Epton & Harris, 2008)
Set intention to change for the better (Harris et al., 2007)
Perceive 'threatening' interventions with less resistance (Logel & Cohen, 2012)
Improve academic achievement (Layous et al., 2017)

Do positive affirmations work?

Before you take the time to get started you might be wondering, do positive morning affirmations actually work?

The good news is, research on the effects of self-affirmations has found that they can be very effective in creating a more positive mindset and improving self-image. For one, focusing on the positive and practicing daily gratitude can make you a happier person (bonus: happier people have been found to be 12% more productive!). Research has even found that positive thinkers live longer and healthier lives, have more energy, enjoy more successful careers, make better decisions, are less stressed, and have healthier relationships.

New understanding of neuroplasticity has revealed that negative thought patterns in the brain can actually be rerouted over time with positive thinking. Interestingly, your brain doesn't always effectively differentiate between a real-life experience and a thought experience. By taking advantage of this, consistently practicing positive thoughts can be used to shift how you feel about yourself so you can be more confident, productive, or resilient vs. negative thoughts which can perpetuate negative feelings like anxiety or self-doubt, and in extreme cases even spiral to trigger responses like panic attacks.

So, dedicating a few minutes in your morning to being mindful with something like an affirmation practice can ultimately support you in replacing negative messages in your mind with a positive narrative in the long run.

Here's the catch. A different study discovered that affirmation techniques only work for people that already have high levels of self-esteem, and not on those who don't. This is because affirmations are mostly addressed to your conscious mind, but not your subconscious mind. It makes sense then that repeating a self-affirmation you really don't believe probably isn't going to deliver a magical transformation, no matter how often you say it.

How to start doing morning affirmations

Ok, so now you know what an affirmation is, and how they work -- how do you go about actually implementing positive affirmations to your routine? Here's an easy 6-step guide to get started.

1. Reflect on what you want to improve

Write a list of things in your life that you would like to improve on, or areas that you currently feel negatively about. Do you want to work on self-love? Being more patient? Banish lingering imposter syndrome at work? Eating healthier? Breaking a bad habit?

Reflect on a few things that matter most to you, so you can develop affirmations that resonate deeply with your goals and values.

2. Create positive affirmations

After you have a list of the things you want to focus on, write a positive affirmation to counter each negative belief. Try to keep them short and to the point.

Self-affirmations are often formulated as 'I' statements (ex. 'I am', 'I can', 'I believe', 'I have') but can also be general intentions or goals or your day or a specific event (ex. 'today will bring', 'this meeting will be').

For example, you might worry that you aren't performing well in your role at work. Your countering positive affirmation could be something like: 'I have unique skills and experience that bring irreplaceable value to my team' to generate feelings of confidence.

3. Plan your routine

Next, you need to decide how you want to actually follow through on your affirmation practice. You can repeat them out loud to your reflection in the mirror (as if you were encouraging a friend or loved one) but it's ok if that's not something you're comfortable with. You can instead write them down in a journal or on a sticky note to have at your desk, or add them as a silent mantra to your daily meditations or even during your commute to work.

You can do your affirmations in the morning to start the day off, but you can also fit it in the evening before bed to release pent up stress from the day. You can repeat the same daily affirmation as a constant reminder, choose a few that resonate with you, or create a new one every morning that speaks to what you have going on that day based on your weekly work plan.

You get the idea -- your affirmation routine can be whatever you want it to be! Don't be afraid to try different approaches to see what works best for you (because that's all that really matters).

4. Do your morning affirmations

Ok, time for action! However you've decided to do your affirmations -- try starting by grounding yourself with a few deep, mindful breaths to direct your intention. Repeat your chosen affirmation(s) out loud, in your mind, or by writing it down, and try to stay focused on the message for the duration of the exercise.

This might feel uncomfortable or awkward when you first start out, or you might notice your thoughts bouncing around a lot. This is completely normal! Like meditation, a new mindfulness technique can push you out of your comfort zone and be quite challenging in the beginning.

You can begin with just 30-seconds of affirmations every morning, and work your way up to longer sessions. Some experts recommend a goal of 5-15 minutes up to 3 times a day -- but studies have found that even just 3-minutes of self-affirmations a day can reduce stress and improve productivity on stressful tasks.

5. Make it a habit

The most important thing with affirmations - like with all healthy habits - is that you are consistent. You're rewiring your thinking, and that can take some time!

You can try habit-stacking self-affirmations with another established habit in your routine to make it stick easier. For example, try saying them in the mirror after brushing your teeth, or take a few minutes to write them down at the end of a journaling session. You can also optimize the process with a productivity app like Reclaim.ai, which automatically schedules time for recurring Habits - like morning affirmations - around your other commitments, so you have time defended for mindfulness even on your busiest days.

6. Reflect on progress

Consider checking in with yourself after a month of doing morning affirmations to reflect on your progress.

You might find the very experience of speaking positive words to yourself in the mirror feels easier and more natural. Maybe you're noticing your productivity improving at work, or are having fewer negative thoughts about your self-image and capabilities. Or one day, perhaps you realize that your affirmation actually does feel true when you say it. Take the time to celebrate small victories to fuel your motivation and finetune your approach for your next affirmation.

While there is no right or wrong way to try to incorporate positive affirmations into your morning routine, here are some tips to help you get the most out of the technique right from the start.

Top 6 tips for effective morning affirmations:

Formulate your affirmation in present or future tense to create the feeling of already having achieved it to strengthen those connections in your brain.
Avoid negative words or a 'lack-mindset' (ex. 'I need the promotion because I'm not making enough money' vs. 'I deserve the promotion because I work hard and bring great value to the team').
Root affirmations in core values to create a strong foundation of why this affirmation is important to you and your goals.
Believe the possibility of what you are affirming and don't be afraid to go smaller or redirect if the affirmation doesn't feel genuine.
Practice positive affirmations consistently and stay patient to see meaningful and lasting changes in your thinking patterns and beliefs.
Be realistic. Self-affirmations can be a helpful part of your toolkit but they are not a cure for clinical conditions like chronic anxiety or depression, nor can they change other people's behavior towards you. Don't be afraid to reach out for help if you're struggling with your mental health.

40 Morning affirmations examples

Whether you're trying to build up your confidence, maximize your productivity, hit more goals, or create better relationships at work -- affirmations can help you create a positive mindset to assist your efforts. Let's take a look at 40 effective morning affirmation examples to inspire your own affirmations.

Positive affirmations for the day:

Every day is full of potential and I am open to new opportunities.
I am exactly where I am meant to be, and heading in the right direction.
Today I am grateful for ___.
Today, I choose to celebrate all the progress I have made to get here.
I am capable of creating the life I dream of.

Positive affirmations for productivity:

I enjoy being productive because it brings me joy.
I am efficient with my time and capable of achieving my goals for today.
I tackle challenging tasks that come my way with ease.
I deserve to defend time for deep work on my important priorities.
Taking small steps every day is helping me achieve big goals.

Positive affirmations for anxiety:

My anxious thoughts do not define me or my worth.
I am doing my best and that is enough.
I control how I respond to stressful situations and triggers.
My emotions have purpose and value, even when they are unpleasant.
I am strong and capable of getting through anxious thoughts.

Positive affirmations for self love:

I am inherently worthy of my own love and respect.
I treat myself kindly and with compassion.
I have many positive qualities including ___.
I do not need to prove myself worthy of love.
I choose to accept myself the way that I am today.

Positive affirmations for work:

I bring unique skills and experiences to the table.
My unique skills and contributions are valued by my team.
My manager recognizes my hard work and passion for the job.
I am worthy of recognition and praise for my hard work.
My contributions support the success of the whole team.

Positive affirmations for success:

I am surrounded by people who inspire me and want me to succeed.
I deserve the space to grow and learn to become my best self.
Every day I am getting closer to reaching my goals.
I take risks because the rewards are greater than my fears.
I stand tall in the face of challenges on the path to my goals.

Positive affirmations for health:

I deserve to treat my body with love and care today.
Investing in my health is one of the best investments I can make.
I can say 'no' to choices and habits that do not make me feel my best.
I am grateful for my unique body and everything it does for me.
I choose to love my body today as I work towards my health goals.

Positive affirmations for students:

I love learning and that makes me a successful student.
I embrace this chapter of my life as I prepare for my future.
I can transform my nervous feelings into motivation for growth.
I value my education and all the opportunities it opens for me.
I am focused and determined which sets me up for success.

Affirming your success ✨

Affirmations aren't a magical solution to all your problems, but even science argues that the power of positive thinking shouldn't be underestimated. With benefits across your professional career, personal life, and relationships -- committing to a habit of self-affirmation to start your day can help transform the way you feel about yourself and the world around you to set you up for long-term joy and success.

And with a more positive outlook, who knows who you'll inspire! In the words of Arnie himself, "Positive thinking can be contagious. Being surrounded by winners helps you develop into a winner". So here's our affirmation for you: you are a winner and you inspire others with your unique perspective and ideas. Now go hype yourself up with morning affirmations to start every day on a positive note. You deserve it.

Have you ever tried morning affirmations? Any tips we might have missed that beginners need to know? Tweet us @reclaimai to share your thoughts and experiences! 👋

Meeting Scheduling Trends Report: 130+ Scheduling Links Stats

Elizabeth — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:36:33 +0000

Scheduling links have quickly become the go-to way to coordinate meeting times across the calendars of busy professionals. Instead of the endless back-and-forth email exchange to find mutual free time, professionals are able to shoot over a quick link to share their availability and allow their invitee to grab whatever time works best with their own schedule. And while this major scheduling optimization has streamlined millions of professionals calendars worldwide, we have uncovered serious availability, coordination, and scheduling etiquette issues that increase by the complexity of the schedulers calendar.

This scheduling trends report surveying over 800 busy professionals reveals how they are using scheduling links across different role types, for internal and external meetings, and analyzes the top issues they face when orchestrating their meetings via scheduling links.

We found that the average professional uses scheduling links 7.1 times a week, and over 96.4% of scheduling link users leverage them at least once a week. And while scheduling link users lean so heavily on the tool for setting up their meetings, the biggest issue they face is prioritization. Over 60% of users want to be able to prioritize certain meetings over others, and offer more availability to get those high-priority meetings scheduled sooner over low-priority meetings that can be set up a week or two out.

In a world where the average professional attends over 25 meetings/week, it's clear we face an addiction to meetings in the workforce. And while we're slowing working to reduce the number of meetings on our schedules each week, meetings are not disappearing anytime soon, so it's important busy professionals set them up in a flexible and optimized fashion so their workweeks aren't completely tied up as priorities change across the slew of calendars that overlap with our own every week.

Report overview

How often scheduling links are used for meetings

Scheduling links for external vs. internal meetings

How often scheduling links are used for meetings

Scheduling links have become an essential tool for meeting coordination, and heavily leveraged as the number of meetings on the calendar continues to increase putting more and more strain on busy schedulers. Let's take a look at how often scheduling links are used for meetings every week.

The average professional uses scheduling links 7.1 times/week
96.4% of scheduling links users use them on a weekly basis
44.7% of professionals use scheduling links over 5x/week
18.5% of professionals use scheduling links over 10x/week
5.2% of professionals use scheduling links over 20x/week

So if professionals average 25.6 meetings per week, that means that 27.9% of all weekly meetings are set up via scheduling links. That's a major percentage of meetings, considering how many recurring meetings are scheduled without coordination on the calendar.

And almost half of professionals use their scheduling links over 5 times a week, with power users leveraging their links over 20 times a week to manage their meeting-intense calendars. And with an average meeting length of 50.6 minutes, that means these super users are coordinating almost 17 hours of new meetings via scheduling links each week.

Scheduling link use by managers vs. execs vs. ICs

So who leverages scheduling links the most across busy organizations? In this next analysis, we break down scheduling link use by managers vs. executives vs. individual contributors (ICs).

Executives use scheduling links 8.1 times/week on average
Managers use scheduling links 6.7 times/week on average
ICs use scheduling links 7.0 times/week on average

Unsurprisingly, executives, who tend to spend the largest portion of their workweek in meetings, average the highest use of scheduling links at 8.1 times per week. This is likely attributed to the wide variety of meetings that are typically attended by executives as they coordinate meetings across all aspects of the organization.

While it may surprise you to find that ICs average higher scheduling link use than managers at 7.0 times per week vs. 6.7, this is probably because a large portion of manager meetings are recurring with their direct reports, and likely not scheduled via scheduling links.

Scheduling link use by team department

Now that we've analyzed scheduling link use by role type, let's take a look at how they're leveraged across different teams and departments within an organization.

Finance/accounting professionals use scheduling links 9.7 times/week on average
Sales professionals use scheduling links 9.1 times/week on average
CEOs/owners/founders use scheduling links 9.0 times/week on average
Marketing professionals use scheduling links 7.9 times/week on average
Operations/HR professionals use scheduling links 7.3 times/week on average
Product professionals use scheduling links 6.3 times/week on average
Freelance/consulting professionals use scheduling links 6.2 times/week on average
Software/engineering professionals use scheduling links 5.3 times/week on average
Students use scheduling links 4.2 times/week on average
All others use scheduling links 7.1 times/week on average

As we can see, there is a wide variety of average across different departments and teams with the highest use by finance and accounting professionals at almost 10 times each week. It's no shock that sales professionals and CEOs, owners, and founders also ranked high at an average of over 9 times per week as they use scheduling links to set up meetings to expand business opportunities for their organization.

Scheduling links for external vs. internal meetings

Since scheduling links are primarily used to set up one-time meetings with people who may not be able to see your availability inside of their workplace, many people assume that they're only used to coordinate meeting times across external meetings with people who are not in the same company. However, we found that scheduling links are actually starting to make a big dent in setting up meeting times across internal meetings with coworkers too.

74.3% of scheduling links are used for external meetings
25.7% of scheduling links are used for internal meetings
33.6% of people use scheduling links for external meetings only
1.9% of people use scheduling links for internal meetings only

This report discovered that over a quarter of all scheduling link use is actually for coordinating internal meetings across coworkers in the same company. This finding highlights the need for meeting optimization, even at an internal level, as meetings have increased 69.7% since the start of the pandemic.

However, 33.6% of scheduling link users only leverage their links for external meetings, the most common meeting type set up through scheduling links, with less than 2% exclusively using scheduling links for internal meetings only.

Internal & external scheduling link use by managers vs. execs vs. ICs

So which role type leverages scheduling links more for internal vs. external meetings? Let's take a look at the breakdown across managers vs. executives vs. individual contributors.

80% of executive scheduling link usage is for external meetings
72.0% of manager scheduling link usage is for external meetings
70.0% of IC scheduling link use is for external meetings

It turns out that executives leverage scheduling links the most for external meetings, with an over 5% higher average than all role types combined. But, both managers and individual contributors are more than 2% under the average external scheduling link use, resulting in almost 30% of their scheduling link use for internal meetings only.

Internal & external scheduling link use by team department

After seeing the wide range of external vs. internal scheduling use by role type, let's take a look at the breakdown across different teams and departments.

81.8% of CEO/owner/founders scheduling link usage is for external meetings
81.7% of finance/accounting scheduling link usage is for* external meetings*
81.5% of freelance/consulting scheduling link usage is for external meetings
76.2% of sales scheduling link usage is for external meetings
73.2% of operations/HR scheduling link usage is for* external meetings*
71.8% of product scheduling link usage is for external meetings
71.5% of student scheduling link usage is for external meetings
71.0% of marketing scheduling link usage is for* external meetings*
69.7% of software/engineering scheduling link usage is for external meetings
72.8% of all other scheduling link usage is for* external meetings*

All role types averaged over 70% of all scheduling link use for external meetings vs. internal meetings, excluding only software and engineering teams, indicating that across the board, external meetings still dominate usage for this critical meeting coordination tool. External meeting booking via scheduling links is even more prominent for professionals in finance/accounting, freelance/consulting, and CEO/owners/founders who all averaged over 80% of use for external meetings vs. internal meetings.

Almost a third of all meetings set up through scheduling links do not show enough availability, forcing an invitee to have to schedule too far out causing potential delays in business opportunities and progress for the organization. And this availability issue is faced by almost 80% of all scheduling link users, ranging from 55.7% who report lack of availability 30% or more of the time, and 3.8% who report lack of availability over 90% of the time.

Creating availability for scheduling links

So how are busy professionals combating this lack of availability issue with their scheduling links? They are creating more availability by manually clearing out events from their calendars so schedulers have more openings to book time. Let's take a look at how professionals are creating this availability.

Professionals clear events from their calendars 33.6% of the time to create more availability for scheduling links
Only 20.2% of scheduling link users never have to create more availability in their calendars
55.3% of pros have to create more availability 30% of more of the time in their scheduling links
35.3% of pros have to create more availability 50% of more of the time in their scheduling links
16.3% of pros have to create more availability 70% of more of the time in their scheduling links
4.0% of pros have to create more availability 90% of more of the time in their scheduling links

Over a third of all scheduling link users are taking the time to manually clear events from their calendar every week just to create more availability for their scheduling links. In fact, just 20% of scheduling link users don't have this problem at all. This is a major time-consuming issue that hasn't been properly addressed -- up until the recent launch of Reclaim.ai's new Scheduling Link feature, which allows you to create high-priority links for the meetings you need to get on the calendar.

At Reclaim.ai, we're focused on helping busy teams tame their complex, and ever-changing schedules by helping them optimize their calendars around their true priorities, and gathered this research to better understand the biggest issues people face in coordinating the incoming meetings on their calendars. To learn more about the complexities of managing a chaotic schedule in the modern workplace, check out our other recent trends reports:

Burnout Trends Report: 200+ Employee Stress Stats by Department

Elizabeth — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:30:11 +0000

Workplace burnout, or job burnout, is chronic work-related stress that leaves employees feeling emotionally and physically exhausted. As the global workforce evolved into a hybrid work model over the past two and a half years, employees have been asked to take on larger workloads, attend more meetings, and work longer hours to meet the demands of their organization - and the cost has been great to both employees and employers.

As one of the biggest challenges organizations face today, workplace burnout has been a major driver to the Great Resignation wave, or the Big Quit, where thousands of employees still today are voluntarily resigning from their positions to seek a break from the crushing weight of workplace stress, and seek employment that fosters a healthier work-life balance to improve their personal wellbeing.

While this economic trend is still very relevant, many employees are handling workplace stress in a new trending phenomenon known as quiet quitting. As a bit of a misnomer, these workers are not actually quitting their jobs as part of the Great Resignation. Instead, 'quiet quitters' are unsubscribing from the hustle culture mentality of constantly overextending themselves at work in response to the long-term exhaustion from larger task loads, compromised work-life balance, and a lack of positive company culture.

The average workweek has actually increased by 2.6% to 45.8 hours, up from 44.6 hours in November 2021, and still 78.7% of employees report feeling stressed due to increasing tasks with not enough time to get it all done every week. So, while workers who are quiet quitting are staying at their companies and completing their essential duties, they're no longer going above and beyond in their roles -- especially when their extra efforts are unrecognized and have left them feeling burnt out.

This workplace burnout trends report surveying over 700 busy professionals reveals how many hours the average person works a week across role type and team department, what their current burnout level is, and what are the top issues currently contributing to burnout and quiet quitting, and what employees want from their organizations to reduce burnout and improve job satisfaction.

Report overview

Average workweek length statistics

Average burnout statistics

Top issues that contribute to burnout

What do employees want to alleviate their burnout?

Burnout stats across roles:

Looking for more productivity trends? Check out our Scheduling Trends Report, Meeting Trends Report, or Task Management Trends Report.

Average workweek length statistics

While we're all accustomed to working the 40-hour workweek to pay the bills, it turns out we're putting in way more hours than that every week. Employees are reporting record-high hours worked each week. Let's take a look at the results:

The average workweek is 45.8 hours for ALL employees, 2.6% higher than 44.6 average in November 2021
The average workweek for full-time employees is 47.6 hours (35+ hours/week)
69.3% of professionals work +40 hours/week
29.3% of professionals work +50 hours/week
9.4% of professionals work +60 hours/week
2.7% of professionals work +70 hours/week

Assuming that the average professional works roughly 48 weeks a year, excluding 4 week for PTO and sick leave, they are averaging an additional 276.3 hours of work each year, and that's including part-time workers in the average. That's an extra 6.9 workweeks! So employees are actually working way more than the standard 52-week year by almost 3 weeks.

Average workweek length for managers vs. execs vs. ICs

So who is working the most hours across the organization? We break down the results across executives, managers, and individual contributors to see how many hours employees report working each week.

Executives average 51.2 hour workweeks (48.3 hours including part-time workers)
Managers average 47.1 hour workweeks (46.1 hours including part-time workers)
ICs average 46.6 hour workweeks (44.7 hours including part-time workers)

Executives reported by far the highest number of hours worked each week, with over 4 more hours than managers and individual contributors who resulted much closer to our average for full-time workers. This equates to over 170 additional hours executives work above the average employee, or 536 additional hours each year over the standard 40-hour workweek. Managers also reported an additional 30 minutes of work a week above individual contributors, or the equivalent to a little more than half of an additional workweek a year.

Average workweek length by team/department

Now that we've looked at the average workweek length by role type, let's take a look at how the average workweek breaks down across team departments.

Sales professionals average 47.1 hour workweeks (45.9 hours including part-time workers)
Software/engineering professionals average 46.3 hour workweeks (44.8 hours including part-time workers)
Product professionals average 45.3 hour workweeks (43.7 hours including part-time workers)
Marketers average 46.3 hour workweeks (46.0 hours including part-time workers)
Operations/HR professionals average 48.7 hour workweeks (46.9 hours including part-time workers)
Finance/accounting professionals average 48.4 hour workweeks (47.1 hours including part-time workers)
CEOs/owners/founders average 51.9 hour workweeks (48.3 hours including part-time workers)
Freelance/consultants average 50.4 hour workweeks
Students average 49.7 hour workweeks (44.4 hours including part-time workers)

Similar to our analysis by role type, we found that CEOs, owners, and founders worked the most hours each week, averaging almost 52 hours, closely followed by freelancers and consultants who also average over 50 hours a week. Four team departments reported below our average full-time workweek of 47.6 hours, which was sales teams, software and engineering teams, product teams, and marketing teams.

Average burnout statistics

Long workweeks can be painful, but are they a strong indicator of burnout? We asked over 700 busy professionals how burnt out they feel from 0%, I'm in it for the long haul, to 100%, I'm completely burnt out and on the verge of quitting.

Employees averaged a 60.2% burnout rate
Burnout has decreased by 2.7% since last year
Only 2.7% of people reported a* 0% burnout level*
5.3% of people reported a 100% burnout level

Despite well over half the workforce reporting burnout as of October 2022, burnout has actually decreased by almost 3% in the last year. However, only 2.7% of people feel zero impact of burnout in their current role, and almost twice this amount feel 100% burnt out and ready to quit their job.

Average burnout levels for managers vs. execs vs. ICs

Let's take a look at current burnout levels for executives, managers, and individual contributors in October of 2022 vs. October of 2021.

Surprisingly, executives, managers, and individual contributors ranked very similar burnout levels in October of 2021, each averaging over a 60% burnout rate. This number decreased most dramatically for executives who now average only 55.8% burnout levels in October 2022, down a full 10% in one year. Individual contributors also saw over a 3% reduction in burnout, and only managers' burnout levels have increased this year, rising a full 2% now in October 2022.

Average burnout levels by team department

Which teams are the most burnt out in Q4 2022 vs. Q4 2021? Let's take a look at burnout levels across departments.

Based on these surveyed results, it appears that finance and accounting teams face the highest burnout rates by far at 73.1%, even after an 11.7% reduction in burnout since October 2021. This is also over 5% higher than the second highest burnout group of students who reported a burnout rate of 67.4% in October 2022, a full 15% higher than this time last year. Marketing, software and engineering, and CEOs, owners and founders all reported the lowest burnout rates at roughly 55% in October 2022, where all reported burnout rates in the low 60% in October of 2021.

Top issues that contribute to burnout

Now that we understand the current burnout level across organizations, let's take a look at which factors are most contributing to burnout in October 2022.

63.4% report lack of time for focused work
59.9% report notification & distraction fatigue
52.2% report lack of work-life balance/not enough time off
48.2% report too many meetings
39.4% report workdays running too long
23.2% report poor working conditions/company culture
22.1% report inadequate pay
21.1% report lack of room for career advancement
16.1% report poor company performance

So what's causing the most burnout across busy professionals? It turns out that 63.4% of people are burnt out because they just don't have enough time to get their actual work done. This is 3.5% higher than the second highest burnout contributor of notification and distraction fatigue at 59.9%, which is probably contributing to the lack of time for focused work, alongside too many meetings which came in at 48.2%.

While you might assume things like inadequate pay or lack of room for career advancement would be at the top of the list, they actually ranked at the bottom with just over 20% reporting this as a contributing factor to burnout. The least reported factor was poor company performance at just 16.1%.

Top burnout issues for managers vs. execs vs. ICs

Which role types are most affected by these burnout factors? Let's take a look at how these issues contribute to burnout across executives, managers, and individual contributors.

The highest burnout factors again across all categories is the same as the highest for all employees -- lack of time for focused work. While both executives and managers reported much higher at over 70%, individual contributors still reported high against other factors at 58.9%. Individual contributors also reported 58.9% for lack of work-life balance or not enough time off at over a 10% higher level than executives and managers for this factor. However, individual contributors only reported 41.5% for too many meetings contributing to their burnout, compared to 54.5% for executives and 56.2% for managers.

What do employees want to alleviate their burnout?

Now that we understand what's contributing to burnout, let's take a look at which factors have or would likely alleviate burnout levels for busy professionals.

69.4% More time for focused work
54.4% Better work-life balance / more time off
53.4% Fewer notifications and distractions
42.8% Shorter workdays
42.4% Fewer meetings
29.8% Higher pay
24.5% Better working conditions / company culture
19.6% More room for career advancement
16.6% Better company performance

Still number one on our list is the opportunity to provide employees with more time for focused work on their actual tasks, reported by nearly 70% as a factor that would alleviate their burnout. While better work-life balance, notification fatigue, and shorter workdays remained high, fewer meetings actually dropped by almost 6% for what would alleviate burnout vs. what is contributing to it. Higher pay also rose by over 7% when comparing what alleviates burnout vs. contributing to it, indicating that current salaries aren't causing workplace stress, but a higher salary would surely ease the pain.

Alleviating burnout stats for managers vs. execs vs. ICs

Do executives vs. managers vs. individual contributors want different things when it comes to alleviating burnout? Let's take a look.

Executives ranked by far the lowest for some of the obvious improvements that would alleviate burnout, such as room for career advancement, better working conditions, and higher pay as these are likely less felt by leaders at the top of the organization, but did rank better company performance highest among the three role types as the performance of the organization has a much greater weight on their contribution to the company. While managers typically sat in the middle of these results, they did rank the highest out of role types for more time for focused work by over 3/4ths of all managers, over ½ wanting fewer meetings, and fewer distractions at 55.7% believing this would alleviate their burnout at work. Individual contributors did rank highest by role type for higher pay, work-life balance, and shorter workdays.

Let's see how these burnout issues break down across teams and departments.

Burnout stats for sales professionals

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting salespeople.

33.3% of salespeople are burnt out from long workdays (40.0% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
55.6% of salespeople are* burnt out from lack of work-life balance or time off* (64.4% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
60.0% of salespeople are burnt out from too many meetings (46.7% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
62.2% of salespeople are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (66.7% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
57.8% of salespeople are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (53.3% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
22.2% of salespeople are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (28.9% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
22.2% of salespeople are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (20.0% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
17.8% of salespeople are burnt out from inadequate pay (33.3% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
11.1% of salespeople are burnt out from poor company performance (15.6% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

What do salespeople want to stay happy and reduce burnout at work? Not necessarily the same things that are causing their burnout in the first place. While only 17.8% of salespeople are burnt out from inadequate pay, almost twice as many report that higher pay would alleviate their burnout. Salespeople are also feeling the weight of their heavy meeting load, as 60.0% report meetings are contributing to their burnout compared to the overall average of just 48.2%. Salespeople also reported 5.0% lower than average on burnout from poor company performance, which is surprising as sales-roles are so performance-driven, but this may just indicate that poor performance is not an issue they face here in October 2022.

Burnout stats for software & engineering professionals

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting software and engineering teams.

36.8% of software/engineers are burnt out from long workdays (38.7% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
52.3% of software/engineers are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (50.3% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
53.5% of software/engineers are burnt out from too many meetings (49.0% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
67.7% of software/engineers are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (68.4% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
60.0% of software/engineers are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (57.4% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
20.6% of software/engineers are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (16.8% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
20.6% of software/engineers are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (24.5% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
26.5% of software/engineers are burnt out from inadequate pay (30.3% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
18.1% of software/engineers are burnt out from poor company performance (15.5% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

Software and engineering professionals average 1.3 hour shorter workweeks than the average professional, and as a result, are 6% less affected by long workdays with an average of 36.8% vs. 42.8% for all professionals. They are, however, much more affected by meetings at over 10% higher burnout rate from too many meetings vs. the average professional, and software and engineering professionals are also reporting 6.6% higher contribution to burnout from notification fatigue than the overall average.

Burnout stats for product professionals

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting product teams.

44.2% of product professionals are burnt out from long workdays (51.9% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
50.0% of product professionals are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (51.9% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
61.2% of product professionals are burnt out from too many meetings (57.7% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
69.2% of product professionals are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (71.2% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
59.6% of product professionals are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (55.8% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
23.1% of product professionals are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (19.2% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
36.5% of product professionals are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (38.5% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
23.1% of product professionals are burnt out from inadequate pay (32.7% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
23.1% of product professionals are burnt out from poor company performance (19.2% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

While the average full-time product professional works 2.3 hours less than the average person, 44.2% of them feel that long workdays are contributing to their burnout, and over 50% believe shorter workdays would alleviate this stress. Only 23.1% of product professionals feel that inadequate pay is contributing to their burnout, while almost 10% more believe more money would or has alleviated their burnout level. Product teams are also more impacted by poor company performance than the average professional, reporting a 7.0% higher burnout rate from this issue.

Burnout stats for marketing professionals

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting marketing teams.

25.5% of marketers are burnt out from long workdays (36.2% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
36.2% of marketers are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (38.3% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
57.4% of marketers are burnt out from too many meetings (48.9% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
74.5% of marketers are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (76.6% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
66.0% of marketers are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (53.2% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
17.0% of marketers are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (12.8% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
17.0% of marketers are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (17.0% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
17.0% of marketers are burnt out from inadequate pay (25.5% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
17.0% of marketers are burnt out from poor company performance (19.1% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

Marketers reported over a 10% difference in long workdays contributing to their burnout at 25.5%, compared to 36.2% who feel shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout. Marketing teams also reported way below average for burnout from lack of work-life balance at only 36.2%, compared to 52.2% average across all professionals. They were the second highest team to rank lack of time for focused work as a major burnout contributor at 74.5%, affecting almost three quarters of all marketing professionals.

Burnout stats for operations & HR professionals

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting operations and HR teams.

41.9% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from long workdays (40.3% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
50.0% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (51.6% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
53.2% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from too many meetings (41.9% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
71.0% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (75.8% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
58.1% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (41.9% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
29.0% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (29.0% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
11.3% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (12.9% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
25.8% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from inadequate pay (43.5% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
12.9% of operations & HR professionals are burnt out from poor company performance (14.5% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

Operations and HR professionals, who actually average 1.1 hour longer workweeks than the average professional, report a 1.5% higher average burnout contributing from longer workdays, but 1.6% say that shorter workdays would not alleviate burnout. They also ranked 5.0% higher for too many meetings vs. the average professional, and 7.6% higher for lack of time for focused work as they are likely burdened with the additional workload of managing and retaining talent in these tumultuous times.

Burnout stats for finance & accounting professionals

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting finance and accounting teams.

25.0% of finance professionals are burnt out from long workdays (25.0% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
58.3% of finance professionals are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (58.3% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
8.3% of finance professionals are burnt out from too many meetings (41.7% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
83.3% of finance professionals are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (66.7% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
50.0% of finance professionals are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (50.0% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
8.3% of finance professionals are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (8.3% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
8.3% of finance professionals are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (33.3% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
25.0% of finance professionals are burnt out from inadequate pay (33.3% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
8.3% of finance professionals are burnt out from poor company performance (8.3% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

Finance and accounting teams were the department to most closely rank the factors that are contributing to their burnout levels with the ones that would alleviate burnout, scoring exactly the same across long workdays, work-life balance, notification fatigue, career advancement, and company performance.

The lowest ranked burnout level contributed from long workdays, only 25.0% of finance and accounting professionals reported being affected by this issue. And it's not the long workdays that are stressing finance professionals, it's not having enough time to get through their actual work, with the highest ranked issue across all professionals at 83.3% affected by lack of time for focused work.

Burnout stats for CEOs, owners & founders

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting CEOs, owners, and founders.

35.6% of CEOs are burnt out from long workdays (39.0% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
47.5% of CEOs are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (57.6% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
45.8% of CEOs are burnt out from too many meetings (39.0% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
64.4% of CEOs are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (72.9% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
57.6% of CEOs are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (57.6% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
1.7% of CEOs are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (0% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
8.5% of CEOs are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (3.4% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
11.9% of CEOs are burnt out from inadequate pay (13.6% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
27.1% of CEOs are burnt out from poor company performance (25.4% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

CEOs ranked by far the highest full-time hours worked every week at a 51.9 hour average compared to 47.6 for all other full time workers, but only 35.6% feel that these long workdays are contributing to their burnout level. They also ranked below average for all other categories, except lack of time for focused work at 1% above average, and poor company performance where they ranked 11% above the average employee.

Burnout stats for freelancers & consultants

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting freelancers and consultants.

42.9% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from long workdays (57.1% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
64.3% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (78.6% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
28.6% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from too many meetings (14.3% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
57.1% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (64.3% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
64.3% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (64.3% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
21.4% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (14.3% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
0% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (7.1% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
14.3% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from inadequate pay (42.9% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
7.1% of freelancers/consultants are burnt out from poor company performance (7.1% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

Full-time freelancers and consultants work a lot of hours, over 50 a week, yet only 42.9% feel this is contributing to their current burnout level. However, 57.1% say fewer hours would alleviate their burnout, over 14% higher than the 42.8% average for all workers. But these long hours are having their impact, over 64.3% of freelancers are burnt out over lack of work-life balance and not enough time off compared to the 52.2% average. Freelance work does come with its advantages though -- 0% of freelancers are burnt out over poor working conditions as they have the flexibility to set their own hours and work environment compared to those employed by organizations who set the conditions.

Burnout stats for students

Let's take a look at the top burnout issues affecting students.

53.1% of students are burnt out from long workdays (53.1% say shorter workdays would alleviate their burnout).
56.3% of students are burnt out from lack of work-life balance or not having enough time off (62.5% say more work-life balance would alleviate their burnout).
12.5% of students are burnt out from too many meetings (9.4% say fewer meetings would alleviate their burnout).
40.6% of students are burnt out from lack of time for focused work (68.8% say more time for focused work would alleviate their burnout).
43.8% of students are burnt out from notification and distraction fatigue (43.8% say fewer notifications would alleviate their burnout).
18.8% of students are burnt out from lack of room for career advancement (21.9% say more career advancement opportunities would alleviate their burnout).
31.3% of students are burnt out from poor working conditions or company culture (31.3% say better working conditions would alleviate their burnout).
25.0% of students are burnt out from inadequate pay (25.0% say higher pay would alleviate their burnout).
12.5% of students are burnt out from poor company performance (18.8% say better company performance would alleviate their burnout).

Students are another group that ranked well above average for full-time hours worked each week, averaging over 2 hours more than the average worker, and that stress is affecting the majority of students with 53.1% saying this contributes to their current burnout. Students are less burdened with some of the common issues affecting many professionals, with only 12.5% reporting too many meetings are contributing to burnout, and 40.6% who feel they lack the time they need for focused work, over 20% lower than the average across all workers. However, students ranked poor working conditions almost 8% higher than the average professional, as many students may be working more entry-level jobs with fewer benefits to ease the daily stress of the workplace.\
At Reclaim.ai, we're focused on helping busy teams tame their complex, and ever-changing schedules by helping them optimize their calendars around their true priorities, and gathered this research to better understand the biggest issues affecting teams work-life balance and burnout levels in todays workplace. To learn more about the complexities of managing a chaotic schedule in a busy organization, check out our other recent trends reports:

Scheduling Links Dos & Don’ts: 10 Tips for Better Etiquette

Elizabeth — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 18:31:53 +0000

It's pretty mind blowing that the number of remote employees in the U.S. workforce has increased 400% in the past two years, with 16% of American companies now running entirely dispersed. One thing most of these employees have in common? Whether fully remote or working in hybrid models -- they've probably had a lot of virtual meetings on their calendar since then.

While there was a time when teams struggled to figure out how to use video conferencing platforms like Zoom or Google Meet (hard to remember, we know!) -- meetings have increased almost 70% across the board since 2020, and over 85% of meetings are now organized as remote vs. in-person. And with today's average professional juggling a staggering 25.6 meetings a week on top of heavier task loads, finding availability across two busy schedules is increasingly challenging.

This is where scheduling links and availability calendars have come in as an innovative solution to help optimize the traditionally exhausting back-and-forth of finding a time to meet. But as these tools have grown in popularity they've also introduced unique social challenges, and meeting scheduling etiquette has become a major topic of conversation in the remote work-sphere.

In this post we're going to look at the top issues users run into with scheduling links, and offer 10 tips for best practices when sending meeting links so you can create an efficient and pleasant booking process for everyone involved.

What are meeting scheduling links?

Before we get into etiquette and tips -- what is a scheduling link? A meeting scheduling link is a custom URL that is directly linked to your calendar to show available dates and time slots when others can book a call or meeting with you. Typically, scheduling links are part of an availability calendar to help you efficiently manage all your meetings.

The goal of scheduling links is to streamline the booking process and limit the many 'when are you free?' emails it usually takes to find a time across two busy calendars. Instead, scheduling apps now allow you to simply share your personal meeting link so an invitee can book an open time with you right in your calendar.

Benefits of meeting scheduling links:

Automate the meeting booking process
Reduce double-booked events
Optimize weekly meeting schedule
Set custom meeting hours/days
Limit back-and-forth communications
Cancel or reschedule around conflicts
Embed scheduling URLs on your website

The problem with meeting scheduling apps

It sounds pretty great, right? Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. Calendly, for example, is a meeting scheduling app used by over 10 million users worldwide and has been the center of heated criticism a few times as people have debated whether sending a Calendly link is pretentious (or even makes you a jerk).

And while other meeting scheduling apps have come onto the scene, and continue to come out with new features to improve how users book virtual meetings -- many pros argue that there are still largely unaddressed issues when it comes to prioritization, flexibility, and the social experience of using scheduling links.

10 tips for better meeting scheduling link etiquette

Let's take a look at 10 essential dos and don'ts for getting the most from scheduling links, while making sure everyone walks away with a pleasant experience and a successful meeting on the books.

1. DO manage your availability

When someone opens your scheduling link, you want to make sure that your availability calendar is actually communicating when you're free. This means making it a priority to manage your primary availability calendar by scheduling your other commitments to avoid getting double booked, and making sure you're not sending scheduling links that offer no openings.

‍Pro tip: You can try a productivity app like Reclaim.ai to send better scheduling links by syncing all your calendars, and auto-scheduling task work with integrations to your favorite project management apps.

2. DO set the right tone

Whether you're using scheduling links for clients or your coworkers, be sure to set the right tone when you send out a meeting link. Try to include enough context around your request, and add a personal message when appropriate. A human tone makes an automated experience a little less robot-y feeling.

3. DO personalize your scheduling link

Your scheduling link represents you and your availability to attendees, so try to make it a personable experience. From formatting your URL with a custom slug, to actually changing up the design of your booking landing page -- see what options your scheduling app offers to make your meeting links a little more you.

4. DO keep meeting links an option

Ideally, sending a meeting link is an efficient and easy way for both parties to schedule a time with each other -- but that doesn't mean you should corner someone into using yours. Instead, try framing your scheduling link as a suggestion for the invitee to check your calendar for a time that works, but leave the invitation open for them to schedule another way. For example: ''Hey there, excited to meet! Feel free to use this link to book time with me, or we can coordinate times over email if that's easier for you.'

Pro tip: Set up an introduction for your scheduling link with a text macro in Mac OS for easy autofilled messages that are ready to go!

5. DO ask for their scheduling link

Another approach to make the experience more friendly is to actually ask the other party for their scheduling link. This nixes the 'get in line' feeling some people might get from being sent a meeting link, and still results in the same goal of booking a convenient meeting time for both parties. And if they don't 'do' scheduling links -- you know to use a different method for future meetings!

6. DON'T send cold scheduling links

Receiving a scheduling link out of the blue without having confirmed a meeting in the first place is probably not the greatest start to a productive collaboration. A good tip is to make sure a meeting has been discussed before you send out a meeting link. And if you are going to request a meeting via a scheduling link, try to provide plenty of context in your message to make sure it doesn't come off as a demand for their time.

7. DON'T just make it about you

The very foundation of meeting etiquette (virtual or not!) is a shared respect for everyone's time. Sending a meeting link without context, flexibility, or openings can come off as disrespectful if you assume the invited party should accommodate your availability. Try to remember that although sending a meeting link is just a click to you -- there's another real, busy person on the receiving end.

8. DON'T assume links will always work

Automation technology is awesome for optimizing processes like meeting scheduling, that might otherwise be very time and energy involved. But when you're just getting the hang of a new app, booking your most important meetings, rescheduling key events, or making edits to settings around things like your availability -- it's not a bad idea to double check that everything is working the way it should before you start sending out links.

9. DON'T use scheduling links for everything

Considering the clear gap between people that love and not-so-much love scheduling links -- it's worth considering a different approach if you don't feel 100% confident in how a scheduling link will land with an invitee. When scheduling high-value or high-risk meetings, for example, taking a more traditional approach might be a safer option. You don't have to make meeting links the only way you schedule meetings!

10. DON'T be inflexible to accommodation

It can be a huge challenge to find a time to meet across two (or more!) busy calendars, especially when meeting conflicts inevitably come up. While this is exactly what scheduling links are working to address -- sometimes you'll still need to write a follow-up email or make accommodations to make the meeting happen.

Pro tip: When choosing a scheduling link app, consider features that facilitate automatic cancellation and/or rescheduling from both parties to make this a smoother process!

Making scheduling links more human 🌎

By 2025, an estimated 36.2 million American employees will be working remotely, so it's safe to say that virtual meetings aren't going anywhere anytime soon. As teams work to optimize remote work processes like meeting scheduling to unblock time and maximize productivity -- the reality is that they're also navigating a new frontier of professional relationships at the same time.

Ultimately, we're all figuring out virtual meeting etiquette as we go and as new solutions come out. But by facilitating more flexibility and personalization around meeting links, we can work to create a more human experience for automated scheduling that saves users time without compromising the individuality of calendaring.

Do you use scheduling links for easier meeting booking? Any major tips or grievances we didn't mention? Tweet us @reclaimai to share your thoughts! 👋

The Eisenhower Matrix: Important vs. Urgent Tasks Template

Elizabeth — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 23:32:05 +0000

Have you ever looked back on a super busy week only to realize you've hardly made progress on your long-term goals? Although you've barely come up for air putting out little fires everywhere, got all those last-minute requests done for your boss, and even made it to every meeting on your calendar -- you haven't gotten closer to where you really want to be.

The problem isn't that you're not working hard enough, but rather that you're working too hard on the wrong things. Even when you're diligently chipping away at your to-do list every day -- if you're not effectively prioritizing your most important tasks, you're ultimately undermining your performance in the long run.

Author Stephen R. Covey highlighted this issue in the bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, reflecting, "most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important".

But how are you supposed to know what is urgent and what is important when everything feels really important all the time? In this blog post we're going to break down this 'urgency trap' and share 5 tips on how you can use the Eisenhower Matrix to better align your time with your priorities every week (free template included!).

Avoiding the urgency trap

If you've ever seen a new email in your inbox with a subject line that included words like URGENT, IMMEDIATELY, ASAP, SOS, or NOW (with any amount of caps or exclamation points) -- you probably know the panicky feeling that quickly follows. In fact, you might usually drop whatever you're doing to handle it right away because it's obviously super important.

Or is it?

A 2018 study found that when people are deciding what tasks to work on, they will consistently prioritize urgent tasks over important tasks -- even when the urgent task offers much less of a reward. This psychological phenomenon is called the Mere Urgency Effect and suggests that people will pick tasks with a short completion window because they provide more immediate payoff, instead of prioritizing important tasks with much larger reward that would take longer to complete.

But exactly what is the difference between urgent and important tasks?

Difference between urgent vs. important tasks:

Urgent: Tasks or activities that are time-sensitive and require immediate attention to avoid immediate consequences. Urgent activities typically support others in achieving their goals.
Important: Tasks or activities that support strategic progress towards your personal and/or professional long-term goals. Important tasks might not be time-sensitive or have a deadline.

The thing is, the human brain has a hard time telling the difference between the two (which is why urgent tasks often feel important in the moment). Also known as the urgency trap, urgency effect, or urgency principle -- this tendency actually helps explain why many professionals inherently struggle with time management.

Consider urgency like a set of blinders that keep you nearsighted. They demand immediate attention and block your wider view of more important priorities that offer greater rewards down the line. Though you might be inclined to try and finish urgent tasks first and then work on important tasks 'later' -- this cycle ultimately results in important tasks constantly getting set aside to accommodate the never-ending flow of new, 'urgent' demands.

Shockingly, 78.7% of people say they feel stressed by increasing tasks and lack of time to get it all done every week -- but how much of that task load is truly important work? Professionals who get stuck in the urgency trap are often stressed and mentally exhausted from being overrun by other people's priorities. And since they're constantly occupied with urgent tasks, there is never enough time in the week for meaningful progress on their own priorities. The reality is -- many professionals in this cycle might not even be aware that their 'busyness' isn't actually productive.

But there is good news! The same study also found that the urgency effect can be reversed. When prompted to reflect on the long-term consequences of their decision between an urgent and important task, participants were more likely to choose the important one.

So, with a little mindfulness and effective task prioritization methods it is possible to avoid the urgency trap and align your time and efforts where they matter most. Sounds great, but how do even start? Cue the Eisenhower Priority Matrix.

What is the Eisenhower Matrix?

You might have heard of the prioritization framework before, but what exactly is the Eisenhower Matrix? The Eisenhower Matrix is a decision-making and time management tool to help effectively prioritize tasks according to their urgency and importance.

But to really understand the value of this now popular productivity method used by professionals across the world -- we have to go back to its beginning and brush up on a little U.S. history.

The Eisenhower Matrix was actually created by Dwight D. Eisenhower -- highly awarded Army General, Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in World War II, and - most famously - the 34th President of the United States from 1953 until 1961. Just some of Eisenhower's political legacy from his two presidential terms includes creating the Interstate Highway System, establishing NASA, ending the Korean War, bringing Alaska and Hawaii into the union, and effectively managing a Cold War with the Soviet Union.

It's safe to assume Eisenhower's daily to-do list was pretty demanding for most of his professional career as a leader. And this is precisely what led him to develop a time management tool to help decide where his time and energy were best dedicated every day by identifying which of his tasks were truly important, and which were urgent.

Stephen R. Covey later popularized Eisenhower's urgent-important matrix in the 1989 publication of *The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. *Inspired by Eisenhower, Covey agreed that the key to time management wasn't about trying to do more, but rather deciding where your time is best invested every day. And to help others answer that question for themselves, Covey provided a simple grid to help even non-presidents identify the true priorities in their demanding task lists.

The Prioritization Matrix template (with examples)

Divided into four quadrants, the Eisenhower 'Box' - or Covey's time management matrix - helps identify your priority tasks by effectively sorting them according to importance and urgency. Let's take a look at each of the categories of the decision matrix, with example tasks for each one to help you get started.

Download the Eisenhower Matrix Template here

Quadrant I: Urgent & important

High-value tasks and activities that have set deadlines and immediate consequences if not completed on time. Prioritize completing these tasks above others.

Examples of urgent & important tasks:

Finalizing materials for launch day.
Completing a slide deck for an investor presentation.
Fixing an emergency technical problem.
Resolving a customer conflict.

Quadrant II: Important, but not urgent

High-value tasks that support progress towards long term goals which may, or may not, have a set deadline. Create a plan to complete these tasks, and schedule time to work on them for sustainable and strategic growth towards goals.

Examples of important, but not urgent tasks:

Strategizing your product roadmap.
Taking a new training course.
Revamping your marketing plan.
Regular networking and recruiting.

Quadrant III: Urgent, but not important

Low-value tasks and busywork that needs to be completed on time, but don't require your expertise. Delegate these tasks to someone else, or automate the process where you can with smart tools (like Reclaim.ai to optimize your calendar management!).

Examples of urgent, but not important tasks:

Responding to emails or calls.
Certain mandatory meetings.
Requests from co-workers.
Managing your calendar.

Quadrant IV: Not urgent, nor important

Low-value tasks that interrupt your focus and pull time from your other tasks. Cancel and decline these tasks from your schedule.

Examples of not urgent, nor important tasks:

Unproductive meetings.
Inconsequential or trivial to-dos.
Social media and cyberloafing.
Distractions and interruptions.

5 prioritization tips using the Eisenhower Principle

1. Set goals & make a plan

The first step in better prioritization is to actually establish where you're headed. Take time to come up with professional and/or personal end goals that you are passionate about, and review these periodically to ensure you're still on the same page.

Once you've established your big goals, you can work backwards on a goal-ladder to identify stepping-stone (or rung!) goals that will help you in achieving them. Try creating weekly plans around these smaller SMART goals to reduce day-to-day decision paralysis and stay motivated even when the finish line is still out of sight.

2. Take time to prioritize your tasks

Remember how participants were able to reverse the Mere Urgency Effect? Be sure to reflect on your choices before immediately responding to urgencies that might not serve progress towards your end-goals.

Take advantage of the Eisenhower Matrix (you can download the free priority matrix template here) to regularly sort through your own master list of to-dos as they come in. That way, you can build out productive daily goals around your long-term priorities and take care of your current important urgencies without getting stretched too thin in every direction.

3. Learn to deprioritize

You only have so much time in a week. That's why it's important to remember that effective prioritization also means effective *de*prioritization (hello, quadrant IV).

Practice strategically saying 'no' to non-priorities and other people's urgencies when you don't have the time or bandwidth. By taking back control of your availability, you can reduce time anxiety and be more confident that your efforts are being focused where they matter most -- even if the greater reward is further down the line.

4. Defend time for important work

Unfortunately, urgencies and distractions don't disappear once you start prioritizing your goals. While learning to decline non-priorities is a key element in getting the most from your week, there are other ways you can protect your time and energy better as well.

Time blocking your to-dos in your calendar boosts productivity up to 80% by facilitating single tasking and reducing context switching. But another awesome benefit is that it actually allows you to effectively communicate to others when you're busy with priorities, and when you're available for collaboration. That way you always have real time defended for productive deep work and important personal routines, while at the same time managing interruptions and reducing requests that pull you from those priorities.

5. Audit your progress

Once you're putting in the effort to invest your time more productively -- making it a habit to audit your calendar at regular intervals can offer valuable insight on where you can fine-tune your prioritization in your next planning session.

Look back at your schedule every week (or even monthly) to identify how much time you spent across focused work, productive vs. unproductive meetings, busywork and urgencies, or on personal habits. You can then evaluate where you're being effectively time efficient on true priorities, and where your focus might be misallocated based on progress towards your goals.

Words of wisdom from a President to you 💡

After his second term in 1961, Eisenhower reflected on lessons from his presidency in several pieces for The Saturday Evening Post. These words of advice on time management still offer wisdom to busy professionals six decades later,

"These are nothing more than sturdy, down-to-earth rules that, in the busy life of high officials who seem to be always compelled to deal with the urgent ahead of the truly important, can, by their availability in the mental reference library, often point the way to satisfactory solutions."

In today's fast-paced world, there sometimes seem to be more urgencies than hours in a day. But whether you're running a country like Eisenhower, writing bestsellers like Covey, or trying to hit more personal or professional goals -- everyone's time and energy are limited resources. There's only so much you can realistically do. Being able to identify which of your tasks are true priorities allows you to be more productive in the pursuit of your long-term success, without running yourself into the ground over fleeting urgencies.

What are your thoughts on the urgency trap? Have you used the Eisenhower method to prioritize your tasks? Tweet us @reclaimai to share your thoughts! 👋