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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
When the Tech Turns on You: What to Do When You Want to Burn It All Down
Ever experienced that heart-sinking moment when your carefully configured tech simply refuses to work? That overwhelming urge to launch your laptop into orbit isn't just frustration—it's your nervous system in full fight-or-flight mode.
When I recently attempted to set up a simple email address for my rebranded business, The System Seer, I found myself ready to throw something despite years of tech experience. Despite understanding domains, DNS records, and email hosting, I still hit roadblocks that triggered intense emotional responses. This happens to all of us, regardless of tech proficiency.
What's actually happening in these moments goes deeper than technical glitches. Our primitive brain interprets tech failure as personal inadequacy, triggering those intense fight, flight, or freeze responses. The frustration feels disproportionate because subconsciously, we're making these failures mean something about our worthiness as entrepreneurs. Those stories—"Maybe I'm not cut out for this" or "What if I'm not smart enough?"—resurface with each technical challenge.
The path through this emotional minefield starts with remembering that technology is purely logical. Computers follow programmed instructions; they don't harbor personal vendettas. Most "glitches" are actually missed steps in a process that become apparent when you develop systematic troubleshooting skills. Going line by line through setup processes often reveals simple oversights—like the two DNS records I forgot to configure that solved my email issue.
Equally vital is knowing when to ask for help rather than trying to DIY everything, tackling one system at a time instead of overwhelming yourself, and prioritizing nervous system regulation when emotions run high. Step away, breathe deeply, move your body—only return once you're calm enough to approach problems logically.
Ready to transform your relationship with business technology? Visit thesystemseer.com to learn more about the System Seer Playbook—your guide to building systems without the emotional rollercoaster. Share your biggest tech frustration in the comments!
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Welcome to today's episode of Effortlessly Productive. Today we are going to be talking about what to do when tech turns on you. All of us have had those times when we just literally wanna burn it all down because we are so frustrated with the tech side of our business. That's what we're gonna be chatting about today. I'm really excited to bring this episode to you because I've had this highly requested by quite a number of people recently. But before we dive in, I just have a little mini announcement about the podcast.
Speaker 1:So summer is upon us, my kids have one more week of school and, with the chaos of summer and traveling and vacations, I have decided, in order to give me and my family just a little bit of extra space and capacity this summer this is the first summer that my kids are mostly going to be home that I have not signed them up for a ton of camps and I would like to spend a lot of time with them, especially as they are getting a little bit older. So the episodes for this podcast are gonna be going to bi-weekly instead of weekly, so every other week just for a couple of months. So by the end of August we will be back to every single week. But if you're wondering oh, did I miss an episode? What happened? Is my podcast app not loading? Is YouTube not loading? It is not you. It is that I have decided to just give a little bit more space through the summer. So, with that being said, we are going to dive in to what to do when your tech turns on you and you're like I am done. We are just, we're just gonna burn this whole thing down. Maybe I am not meant to have tech in my business, maybe this is not for me, maybe I'm just kind of capped where I am, and I wanna start off with a little bit of a story, because I think often somebody who would say that you're not tech savvy they look at somebody like me and they are like oh, like she's so good with tech, like it all just comes so easily, she must never have any problems, and that could not be further from the truth. So I want to tell you a little story about a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1:So, as you know, I have been shifting my branding from AVM coaching, which I have used for a number of years now, and it's been amazing. Those are my initials. I love my name. However, I knew that there was something waiting for me with my branding. I knew that my branding was going to have a little bit of a shift at some point, because I wanted to kind of embody this, just this other brand, this other like alter ego, if you will. However, it took me a few years to find her and I want to give you a little bit of permission, because I know so many people who are like I have to come up with my name, my business name. I have to know this. I have to know who I want to be, what I want to teach before I can get started. And it is an evolution. I invite you to look at it as more of an evolution. As you probably know, I have been shifting my branding over to the system seer, which is super exciting. I am so in love with my brand and it feels so right. However, I knew I also needed that journey over the last few years in order to find her. So I have been shifting my branding.
Speaker 1:I bought a new domain name, so I still have my abmcoachingcom. I also have the systemseercom and also systemseer, just in case people get a little bit confused and forget the in front of it. So I have these new domain names and I wanted to create an email address for myself. So I am annie at avmcoachingcom and I also wanted to have an email address that is annie at thesystemseercom. So I go about setting up this brand new email address and I am over in Google Workspace and I am creating this. So I have my domain actually bought and hosted through my Coach OS software, but we need to get an email host set up. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, that is okay.
Speaker 1:This is like the nitty gritty tech stuff and I will be perfectly honest, I can navigate my way around domains. I can navigate my way around adding DNS records. Those are just things that tell, like the back end of the internet, if you type in the system, seercom or avmcoachingcom, where on earth the website and all of that stuff is. So we are in the back end updating all of these records that are like more coding type of stuff. If you've ever done that. We're entering IP addresses, we are entering host names. It's a bunch of really, really dense techie stuff.
Speaker 1:So I go set all this up and I send myself a test email and it does not come through and I'm like, okay, well, let me try sending from that email address. And I can't even find that email address in my list of email addresses to send from. I have like 2,700 email addresses, it feels like with all the companies and my husband's business and all the things I have going on, all of my old email addresses that I've used throughout the years. So I finally get that email address added to the list and I go and try sending from that email address and it is not working. I went and double checked everything. I'm like I really think I have this set up correctly. And that was one of those moments where I was like, okay, I am feeling my frustration really start to rise right now. I've double checked everything. I think I set this up correctly. I've done this before. I think I set this up correctly. I've done this before. What am I missing? Before that what am I missing? Question came through.
Speaker 1:It was that moment that I think a lot of people hit, where they literally just want to throw their laptop out the window. And I will be completely honest, I messed around with it for a while and it still wasn't quite working right. I still was not able to send or receive emails at that email address and I literally wanted to throw my computer across the room. First of all, this is completely normal. It is completely normal to get frustrated. It's completely normal to set something up and it doesn't behave the way that you quite expected. Or you load up your software for the first time and you're like, oh my goodness, I don't even know where to begin. That is a very normal experience. So it's not a situation where this is like you versus tech.
Speaker 1:What is happening in this moment is we are actually hitting a point of nervous system overload. Our nervous system is going oh my gosh, this isn't working correctly and we are having either a fight or flight response, and that's usually where you want to throw that laptop across the room or out the window, where you're like so frustrated because our brain is interpreting this as almost a sign of like it's not safe, right, I tried to do this and it didn't work, and I'm making that mean something about me, and what I'm making it mean about me is probably that I'm not smart enough to do this. I am out of my element, I don't know what I am doing and that part of our brain that is so primitive that it thinks that if we cannot fit in, if we cannot figure things out, if we cannot solve this problem, that we're going to be ostracized, that we're not gonna be part of the community anymore. So this is part of like that belonging, that not wanting to look stupid, that not wanting to look like we don't know what we're doing. That comes back to a very primitive part of our brain and very primitive conditioning that we do not wanna be left out of the community Because way back in the day that was very dangerous, right. We could not survive if we were on our own as a human or very few humans could actually survive that. So we have a very strong instinct to not want to be seen as stupid, to not want to be seen as like I don't know what I'm doing, I can't carry my weight, I can't do my part. Or we go into freeze where we are literally so overloaded that we just get stuck and we're like I can't move forward, I can't do anything, I can't move back, my workday is over, I am just in this place of freeze, and that is also a nervous system response. That is where we get into that burnout of like oh my gosh, like another thing. You're so overwhelmed, you're so stuck.
Speaker 1:So I think, first of all, just recognizing that when we hit these responses of feeling overwhelmed and stuck or like you want to throw your laptop out the window because you're so frustrated and angry, that is literally just your nervous system in overload. And that's a really good thing in one way, because we can. Number one, we can work on that and we can fix that. Number two, it's not that you are stupid, it's not that you are overwhelmed, it's that your nervous system is just having a response to an experience it has had before and we can work through this. There are some other things going on as well.
Speaker 1:So it probably is that maybe you don't have a clear structure, a clear structure to your business, a clear structure of hey, this is what I'm trying to achieve. Here's the order of things. A lot of the time, especially with that overload or that overwhelm that we experience, it's not that one thing that sent us into that overwhelm. That was one of the little pieces of the puzzle. So maybe it's that you're like oh my gosh, I just started using this brand new software, or I'm trying to get this whole system set up and your brain is going oh my gosh, I have to do this all at once, so you don't have a clear structure in place of I'm going to start with A, once I have A done, then I'm going to move to B. You're trying to process it all at the same time. You don't have that clear order of operation. And, again, the really good thing about all of that is that we can fix that Number one. It is totally normal, it is what we all experience and all go through, and all of that is fixable. All of that is stuff that we can tackle when we have the right strategies, when we have the right processes, when we know what to do in order to start to regulate our nervous system. We just need some tools in our tool belt, and we're going to dive into how to actually start to overcome this.
Speaker 1:So I know that in that moment though, like I said, it's a really intense feeling, right, it's that feeling of either being so angry and frustrated that you want to throw something or being so overwhelmed and stuck that you literally want to crawl up as a ball on the floor and just cry your eyes out. Right, it is that weight, that invisible weight of pressure that you are putting on yourself. This is part of why we go into these nervous system states is that you are putting on yourself this is part of why we go into these nervous system states is that you are putting some kind of pressure on yourself to get this done. For a certain reason, you're also, like I said, probably making it mean something about you that you can't figure this out, that you hit a roadblock, that you don't know what that next step is that you need to take. There's some kind of pressure there that is probably invisible. It's probably happening in your subconscious. That is part of why we are going into this state.
Speaker 1:We also may be dealing with some perfectionism, and why I'm bringing that up is I've struggled with perfectionism, like crippling perfectionism, for so many decades of my life. It is something that I finally recognized what was going on. There were many years that I told myself it's not perfectionism. I just I have this level of excellence that I hold myself to. But when I started to really dive into it, I realized no, this actually is perfectionism. It is a fear of looking a certain way to the outside. It has nothing actually to do with like me internally. It's me internally wanting to be perfect and be a certain way, but not because of me, because of what I'm afraid that is going to look like to everybody around me, afraid of the judgment of myself.
Speaker 1:When we have this perfectionism, often what happens is we don't even want to start to try to do something if we think that we may fail. So we hold ourselves back from even getting started, from even trying. Because if we don't even really try, then we can always tell ourselves well, that didn't go the way that I wanted it to. I ran into these roadblocks, I got stuck, but you know what? That's okay, because I didn't even really try, I didn't even really give it my effort. So it's a way we can let ourselves off the hook.
Speaker 1:We also may have a fear of failure. A lot of us have that fear of I'm going to fail at this. How many of us have that story of I wasn't cut out for this? I don't know that, being an entrepreneur, that I was really meant for this. What if this isn't for me? What if this is for everybody else? What if I am gonna put in all this work for so many years and I'm never gonna have that success that I dream of? That? I have that vision of that. I think I deserve that. I do deserve. So a lot of that fear of failure starts to come up. And when we have these little bits of evidence of like, oh my gosh, you were failing right, I tried to get my email address set up and it's not working, oh, another check mark in the subconscious of why I failed and why this was not meant for me and I was not meant for this.
Speaker 1:We have lots of past experiences of getting stuck and maybe you had a past experience where you got stuck and you were not able in that moment, you didn't have the tools to pull yourself out of that stuckness. And when I say the tools, that could be like even somebody else who's a resource for you. You didn't have the support. You didn't have the support. You didn't have the nervous system, awareness and ability to regulate that nervous system back to the place, to start moving again.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is, whatever that reason was, you got stuck in the past and our subconscious is using that evidence from the past. It's going oh, we've been here before when this happened. Before we just stayed stuck and we weren't able to get ourselves out of it, or we got stuck in that moment and just kind of gave up, we didn't even try. So our subconscious, our head voice, thinks that we are going to just be stuck in that place again, right. And so that's part of why that feeling in that moment can be so intense because our past is coming back again. It's proving that story about ourselves again, and that hurts, that doesn't feel good. We don't want to experience that again. So that's why it's so intense.
Speaker 1:And then we have all these beliefs of again, like I talked about, I'm so stupid, I'm not good at this, I'm never going to be able to learn this, like, what if this isn't meant for me? What if I'm not good enough to be an entrepreneur? What if I'm not enough to figure this out? Those stories run on replay in our head and those actually create our reality. We actually manifest those. As a life coach, we could go through what is going on in our subconscious. Maybe that's for another episode, but those are the things of why this feeling is so intense in that moment, and so I want to offer you a few little shifts that we can make here. So, first of all, I want to remind you this is a reminder for myself as well.
Speaker 1:When I get in these moments, I remind myself that technology is logical. It's not a person who's throwing a wrench into the way, into the system, just to screw me over. The computer does not think that way. Tech is totally logical. It is following a series of instructions that have been programmed into it, and maybe there is a glitch. Sometimes we do actually run into glitches. That happens. That's more of like oh my gosh, I didn't set up this automation correctly, or like whoever designed this forgot a step in there, and we can reach out and say, hey, this isn't working. Can you just double check that everything is set up correctly? Usually, though, what is happening is that we have missed a step in the process, and this is where I encourage you to get really good and start to practice troubleshooting.
Speaker 1:Troubleshooting is a skill set, and I come from this from many different angles from the tech angle also, from my husband's automotive shop. There are very few technicians left who know how to actually troubleshoot, because it is a logical process that we take our brain through, but we have to learn how to do that. It's not something that is necessarily innate. Some of us come by it more naturally than others, but it's something you can learn and you can get better at Troubleshooting is actually a skill, and so I highly encourage you, especially if you are somebody who wants to do a lot of your own tech stuff, or even if you're like, hey, I don't want to do a lot of it, but I do want to understand, just in case I run into something. I want to understand how this works.
Speaker 1:When we start to develop our troubleshooting skills, it is just realizing that we're going to go through line by line and we're just going to check Okay, we're going to start here at ground one. Do I have this one thing set up correctly? So in the case of my email address, I was like, okay, let me go double check that I did actually add my new domain to my email host. Is that new domain in there? Okay, new domain is in there. Next step is making sure that there actually is an email address that has my name at the beginning of it. Okay, that is there, and so it's starting to go through the logical process of what could be happening, and I will tell you when I did do this.
Speaker 1:I finally hit a point of going through, step by step and again, all of the email DNS domain stuff. Like it is a lot more techie we're going to get to that in a minute of what to do when it is literally techie over your head, when you're like I don't understand computer programming and so like I don't even know where to start with the troubleshooting process, that is okay, I'm going to give you a solution for that as well. So we need to go line by line until we find it, and I finally realized that there were two DNS records that I had forgotten to copy over. When I went back through and I just checked my steps one by one by one, I caught where my mistake was and as soon as I fixed those and DNS can take a little bit of time it was about 10 minutes later I tried sending a couple more test emails and they were in my email box. So the problem was fixed. But I would not have found those if I hadn't started going through the troubleshooting steps, looking line by line of what happened.
Speaker 1:And again, this might not be a situation where you're like, oh, I understand email and DNS settings and domain name stuff well enough to be able to troubleshoot that, but whatever else you are building, if you set up an automation, let's say, and you think it should be sending you an email in that automation and that email is not coming through. It's like, ok, well, let's think about some steps here. Is it going to my spam folder? That's always like a really good place to start when we're looking at email. Right, ok, it's not in the spam folder. It probably didn't send. So let's go into the automation and see how is that automation starting? What is the trigger that is starting that automation? Is that trigger actually being triggered by what I'm doing? Am I filling out the correct form? Am I purchasing the correct course, like whatever it is that we're starting that off with? And then you just go through the steps, right. So I encourage you to start to build your troubleshooting skills.
Speaker 1:Again, it's all that logical thinking and remembering that when we are dealing with tech, it's not like an opinion thing, it is a very logical thing, and nine times out of 10, it's that we've just missed a step along the way. Sometimes I've had things where I'm like it's not showing correctly, like this web page I built, and I'm like, oh, because I forgot to hit the publish button. Right, there was a step that I just forgot along the way and that is okay. So start to learn how to track things down one step at a time. I will also say we should not try to DIY every single piece of our tech.
Speaker 1:There is some stuff, like I said, that is over my head and I reach out to support and I ask for the help because I don't have access to the backend coding. There is nothing I can do. And if you're like that is so overwhelming to me, the email setup if that is overwhelming to you, if you're like I literally don't have the knowledge base to even begin to set this up or troubleshoot, there is nothing wrong with calling in some help, with finding somebody who is an expert at that stuff who can help you. Please lean on the support systems that you have. So that is a huge shift that, rather than believing I have to do this all myself, I have to figure this out myself. I am totally alone in this process and if I get stuck, I'm just stuck because I don't know what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:We can have a huge shift there to leaning on the support systems that we have, asking for help. That's why I have so many clients who come to me and they're like okay, I could totally go build a funnel, but I'm trying to move stuff over from another platform and right now it's feeling really overwhelming even just to like move my images and videos to your CoachOS software. Can you help me with that one step, because once those are in there, I'm totally good to go running with the funnels. It's just the actual moving of all of my image and video files that has me stuck. Or I want to start email marketing and I know how to go in and compose an email, but I have this email list and I'm having a really hard time getting it imported. Can you help me get my email list imported? Sometimes it's a really small piece and, yes, we probably could figure that piece out. But just having somebody take care of that one little tiny thing can be that thing that launches us off and suddenly we're not stuck anymore. So lean on that Ask for help.
Speaker 1:Also, I highly encourage you, like I said, do not try to build 10 different systems at once. That is a recipe for either hitting that overwhelm, crying on the floor or throwing your laptop out the window. Even me, I do not try to build 10 different things at a time. I pick one system and I break that system down into all its little tiny pieces and I build them one at a time. It's a very similar thought process to that troubleshooting as well. Right, because it's a very logical thing. And this is part of why, as a visual person, I draw all this out. I'm like, okay, here's the one system I am building. I pick that one thing and then I literally draw out on a piece of paper all the different things that I need to build, all the pieces of that system, how they're connected, so that I can make sure that things are hooked up correctly. Then I test everything at the end to make sure it's working right. So I catch the mistakes that I have made and inevitably, almost every single thing I build. When I go back through to check if it's working, I'm like, oops, I forgot, I forgot to make that button go to the right place, right, so it's just that logical process. So again, building that skill of getting really good at those logical steps that we need to take to walk ourselves through is huge.
Speaker 1:Take one action at a time to move the needle. We don't have to have a fully automated business tomorrow. In fact, you will not have a fully automated business tomorrow. Even if you hire an expert and hire a team, they probably cannot build a fully automated system, a fully done business, in 24 hours. So don't you try to do that either. You don't need to do that. Take one little thing to move that needle forward today. Maybe that is something like you're like okay, I want to get started with email marketing, but there's all these things, all these things I have to learn and have to do and all of that. Let's just start with importing that contact list. Pick one little thing that you're going to get done and take action from there, rather than trying to complete an entire system all at the same time. Those are some really big shifts. Those alone will help your nervous system. I promise if you implement that and have those shifts of how you're thinking about building and how you're thinking about your tech, that will help your nervous system.
Speaker 1:However, if you find yourself in that place of wanting to throw the laptop or crawl on the floor and cry, it is okay. We can do some nervous system regulation. We can take some deep breaths even just standing up from your laptop. So if you're in like I want to curl up and cry on the floor mode, go get some physical activity Not saying you have to do a full workout. Go, walk around your house for five minutes. Just shake it out, dance it out, put on your favorite song and sing. Just get moving again, get your body moving again. And if you're in that place where you're like I am literally throwing this thing across the room, let's get up. Let's remove ourself from the situation. Maybe you walk outside with some bare feet on the grass to help ground yourself, take some deep breaths, bring it down right. We're going to bring that nervous system level down and then, when we're calm again and we're not in that fight or flight mode, we can go back and sit at our computer. But it's really important to get back into our body before we do that. So I definitely suggest just trying those things.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode and you want some more. If you're like I would love to know how to break these systems down. I would love to know even what systems to start with. I would love to have somebody in my corner walking me through all of this, and I would definitely love to know some things to do when my nervous system is totally hijacked and out of whack, in addition to because there's a million more things we can do to regulate our nervous system. Besides going and getting a little bit of motion, or like going outside taking some deep breaths, we have a whole host of things that we can do. I just don't have time in this episode to dive into every single one of them.
Speaker 1:If you are curious, if you are wanting that skill set, that toolbox to use for both regulating your nervous system and for helping you organize your builds and figure out what systems to build, in what order, what the pieces may be, I am so excited that my System Seer playbook is going to be ready very soon and it is actually in pre-sale right now. If you're listening to this episode when it is released, you can go pre-order it right now have a huge savings, by the way so run and do that. Or if you're listening to this episode later, about a month after it's released, the playbook is ready and you can go get your hands on it right now. It literally has a checklist for you to pinpoint where you need to focus or want to focus in your business. It then has a 30-day blueprint that will help you customize what systems to focus on, in what order, and how to go about making sure that you are building them, setting aside the time, but not hitting that overwhelm. It has all the nervous system regulation to go along with that. So when you do get into those builds and you notice maybe your heart rate's coming up, maybe that frustration is building, maybe you are going catatonic on the floor. It will have all the tools that you need to help bring yourself back so that you can be making forward progress in your business. So you can use this by using the 30 day blueprint, which is customized to you, or you can also go through it front to back so it is fully digital.
Speaker 1:Don't have to like buy anything and wait for it to come in the mail. I'm super, super excited for this for you. So if you're wanting a little bit of extra support, definitely go check that out. You can go to my website and, as you know, it is now the system. Seercom. Avmcoachingcom will also work too. I did not turn that off, so go to whichever one you want and check it out.
Speaker 1:I am so excited to help you start to get some of these systems built in a way that is not taking you into that overwhelm, where tech is not turning on you, where you don't just want to burn it all down, where you're excited to actually go implement and go get these systems built for you so that you can support yourself, so that you can have more capacity, so that you can literally magnify your energy and your time. You're gonna get so much energy and time back by having these business systems built and that structure in place. Things are gonna feel a lot less chaotic and you're going to be able to focus on the things that you love doing the most in your business, like actually helping our clients right. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I would love to hear what part of it spoke the most to you. Drop it in the comments and I will see you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive. Have a beautiful rest of your day.
