Stopping these three things made my business easier to run

Kayla Droog Consulting
Feb 3
8 min read

I don't know about you, but so much business advice out there makes me feel like I should be doing more all the time. So much more.

And if you have not encountered me before, you should know that I feel like that is typically garbage advice.

Most business owners that I talk to and that I've worked with don't need to be doing more.

They need to be focusing on the right things. They need to be focusing on tasks and projects that are moving them forward towards the goals that they are trying to achieve.

And the times where I have been able to make a significant shift in my business have been the times where I've stopped doing things that no longer serve me, that are no longer moving me forward to where I want to be.

And today I want to share with you three things that I stopped doing that made my business so much easier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svIwReJw6Us

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Why doing more doesn't make your business easier or run better

As I already mentioned, doing more in your business does not mean better. Doing more typically does not mean that your business is getting any easier either.

The number of clients that you have or projects that you have on the go — it depends what kind of services you have — that doesn't necessarily dictate how busy or easy your business is either.

What you choose to focus on, the way that you approach or structure your projects, tasks, and the things that you're working on, the systems that you implement in your business to support you and support your work and support your clients, those are the things that really matter.

Those are the things that are going to make the biggest difference in making your business feel easier to run.

When I was much younger and more naive, and early on in my business, I was doing things the way I thought I should be doing them instead of thinking them through for myself and figuring out what worked for me. I was making things way harder on myself than I needed to be.

I was taking on an invisible mental load that I didn't need to be that was making things harder.

The three things that I stopped doing (at least mostly. It takes time to unlearn some of these things) decreased that mental load, which makes so much difference in your business.

The days that are the most taxing in my business are not necessarily the days where I have the most amount of stuff to do. It's the days with the most emotional labor and mental labor.

So those could be days where the number of hours are shorter, but it takes maybe more energy to deal with and manage things.

So here are the three things that I did to reduce that load.

People pleasing isn't good customer service

The first thing that I did was I realized that good customer service is not the same thing as being a people pleaser. I am very much a recovering people pleaser, so this was so hard for me to do.

It took me the first few years of being in business to really wrap my mind around this, because I figured that the way to keep my clients happy, to keep them sticking around, coming back, paying me more, raving about me to other people, and recommending me, was to bend over backwards for them as much as possible.

So I would answer notifications as quickly as I could.

I was answering things in the evenings and on weekends. There were times where I took Saturday morning meetings. There were times where I was jumping on tasks as soon as they came in. I was doing not just same day turn around, but more like same hour turn around.

And I was exhausted. I was burning out. It wasn't sustainable.

It worked when I had my first handful of one-on-one clients and it wasn't too bad to stay on top of the things coming in from them on a day-to-day basis.

But as I started to get more clients and more complicated projects, it just wasn't sustainable to be constantly answering emails and texts and jumping on tasks as soon as they came in.

And even though in my contract I had never stated that I offered same day turnaround time, or instant email and text responses, I had trained my clients to expect that. So when I started pulling back to the still very good level of service that was laid out in my contract, it started to feel to them like I wasn't delivering, like they were getting poor service, even though they were just getting standard service, because I had been people pleasing for so long.

And when I was able to make that shift, to set some of those expectations, it made my life easier. It made running my business easier. It actually improved the level of service that I was able to offer for people. Because I wasn't burning myself out and spending all my time on one person, I was able to distribute my attention over everybody.

I was able to make my business more consistent and sustainable.

I realized that boundaries are there to support both you and your clients, and when there are clear expectations and a clear way that things work, it just makes everything run so much more smoothly for everybody.

So when I started implementing boundaries and systemizing my business, everything just got smoother and clearer. Clients were happy, and I didn't have to keep my phone on at all times in order to make them happy.

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Forcing yourself into certain systems isn't sustainable

The next thing that I let go of to make my business easier was trying to force myself into systems and ways of doing things that didn't work for me.

I have tried so many things to help me be more productive, stay on top of my tasks, and get things done.

There are many things that didn't work for me, and when I tried pushing it made it worse.

There are things that do work for me, but only sometimes.

Figuring out what actually works for me and how to lean into that instead of forcing myself to do things that are against the natural way my brain works made things so much better.

So, for example, I have tried time blocking. That is absolutely never ever going to work for me personally.

If it works for you, fantastic. I'm not knocking time blocking in any way, I'm just saying my brain hates it. It doesn't work for me and that's OK.

I've tried things like the Pomodoro method — that doesn't typically work for me either, because having to stop when I have finally gotten into the flow on something is a no thank you from me.

So I have to do a lot of trial and error to really find the things that work for me.

Sometimes using a project management platform like Clickup or Asana works for me temporarily or works for me for certain types of projects, and then maybe next week or next month, it doesn't.

I typically have to rotate through tools, techniques, and strategies.

I have spent money on things that didn't work for me.

It has been an ongoing process to realize that I don't have to fit the systems, the systems have to fit me.

And if they don't work for me, that is not a failing on my part. It just means this is not the right thing for me.

So just because people rave about a certain platform or a certain way of doing things, just because it works for them, that's fantastic, but it doesn't mean that it needs to work for you.

If I try something and it doesn't work for, then I let it go and I don't feel bad about it. I don't keep trying to force it.

And this is how I approach systems with all of my clients now too. I don't force a client to use a particular platform.

If you're following a framework of setting up systems, it shouldn't matter which platform you're using, because the road map should remain the same. It's important to pick a platform that makes sense to you and your brain, and has the features that you need, rather than trying to force something to be what you need.

You don't have to follow traditional work norms

The final thing that I let go of that has made a huge difference in my life is the need to follow traditional work norms.

Like many business owners, I came from a corporate type career for many years before I started my own business. Even though logically I knew that as a business owner I set my own schedule and can mostly do whatever I want, I still felt very locked in to that idea that between the hours of 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday, I should be working.

I should be putting in X number of hours per week or I'm not being productive enough.

And I still have times where if I'm out of the office in the middle of the day on a weekday, I still have that thought that I am somehow doing something I shouldn't be.

But what made a big difference for me is realizing that the structure of my work day and my work week should fit me and not the other way around.

I started structuring things based on the times of day and the situations that I am personally most productive, and following my energy patterns in a given day and a given week.

And really just giving myself some slack, because I have varying capacity from day-to-day, and it is not always predictable. If I force myself to a level of productivity that does not fit the energy level that I have on a given day, I'm not going to produce good work.

When I stopped trying to force myself to do things on a particular schedule or to put in a certain number of hours of work per day, my productivity actually went up.

If I have a day where I'm not feeling well in the morning and I have a slow start to work, but maybe I feel better in the afternoon and I have a higher energy level in the evening and I am able to actually focus and get some things done then that I wasn't able to get done earlier in the day, fantastic.

And then the next day, if my highest level of productivity is between 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM and I need to take time off after that to do other things, that's OK too.

I've really leaned into the fact that it does not matter when my work gets done, when I need to take breaks, as long as I am in a meeting when I say I'm going to be, and as long as my work gets done on the schedule I agree to with each client.

How that happens on my end doesn't matter. I can do what I need to do, work at the times that work for me, take breaks when I need to, and stop forcing myself to push through when I'm hitting a wall or it's a day where my body is just not cooperating.

And as I said, I think this has been the thing that has made the most difference. Leaning into my body, my capacity, the number of spoons I have on a given day (if you're familiar with spoon theory).

This has allowed me to be more productive in less time, because I'm not forcing myself to continue to try to get stuff done when I'm not in a headspace or an energy space to do it.

It's still an ongoing process of defining what productivity and rest and structure and success mean for me.

They're not going to mean the same thing that they mean to you, and that's OK.

But unlearning what I think they should mean to me and figuring out what they actually are for me has made a significant difference in my life.

And setting up systems and processes that support me when I have days where my capacity is lower has also helped to keep things more consistent and organized, and to keep me going.