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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
Why Hustling Harder Isn’t Scaling You Faster (And What Will)
Hustling was my superpower. As valedictorian and achievement addict, I believed I could outwork anyone. This mentality propelled me through academics and into entrepreneurship—until it didn't. What happens when the hustle that built your business becomes the very thing holding it back?
This episode explores the frustrating ceiling that high-performers hit despite putting in extraordinary effort. If you're wondering why your business has plateaued despite your consistent content creation, sales strategies, and late-night work sessions, you're encountering what I call "scaling on chaos." The problem isn't your lack of effort or skill—it's attempting to grow without proper systems, support, and structure.
When you wake up each day recreating the wheel—manually sending client materials, desperately trying to remember what content to post, and handling everything without automation—you're not just wasting time. You're depleting your nervous system and creating unsustainable patterns. This nervous system dysregulation (operating in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode) combines with your lack of business infrastructure to create an invisible ceiling that hustle alone cannot break.
The solution requires both business systems and nervous system regulation. By implementing automated client onboarding, content repurposing frameworks, and other key systems, you free mental bandwidth and create sustainable growth. Whether you're stuck at $3,000 or $10,000 monthly revenue, these foundations are what will propel you forward without the burnout. Ready to transform your business approach? Check out my new System Seer Playbook, designed to help you identify and implement the exact systems you need right now to scale with ease. thesystemseer.com
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Welcome to today's episode of Effortlessly Productive. Today's episode is for all my fellow high performers, overachievers. If that is, you stay tuned. We are gonna be talking about why hustling harder isn't scaling your business faster, and we're also gonna chat about what will. So a little bit about my backstory, growing up, especially with academics.
Speaker 0:Things came very naturally to me. I was good at school. I was good at taking tests, I was good at achieving things and as that went into high school, part of it was that I was willing to put in the work, no matter what. I was willing to study my butt off until midnight or 2 am, if that is what it took. I was willing to work harder than anybody else and I could outwork them right. That was my superpower is. Give me anybody and I will outwork them. And also, again, the school part of it came very naturally to me and I also loved achieving right. I loved those awards. I loved some of the recognition that came along with that. I loved being proud of myself for what I had done, loved acing those tests right. I was getting those little dopamine hits from every one of those and I started to wear that achievement as a badge. Right. That became part of my identity was I was somebody who would show up, do my best, work harder than anybody else and I would achieve the top. I was valedictorian of my high school class. I got tons of accolades in college. I was in charge of a lot of different clubs and earned a lot of different titles and recognition, and it was because I could literally hustle harder than anybody else.
Speaker 0:And then, when it came to business, things were a little bit different, because the hustle got me so far. It got me off the ground. It got me to a certain level of achievement. It got me off the ground. It got me to a certain level of achievement. But what I found with that hustle is that I would hit that burnout and, if I'm really being honest, if I look back in high school and in college like I was also hitting that burnout. However, I think that as you become an adult and you have a house to manage and you have all these other responsibilities, and then, especially once I had kids and was navigating the schedules of three children or three little babies and toddlers at home and a marriage and all of that, that burnout would happen a lot faster. And it was because my nervous system was being taxed by lots of different areas, so I wasn't able to just solely focus on that hustle.
Speaker 0:However, I found in business that I would hit these points where it literally did not matter how hard I hustled. It wasn't even necessarily that burnout that was happening. It was that I would hustle and hustle and hustle and I would see a certain level of results, and that was exciting and fantastic. However, I would get to this point where the results wouldn't come anymore. I would hit a ceiling. It was very frustrating, especially as somebody who for most of my life I could outwork that right. I could get to a certain point where I could just work a little bit harder, study a little bit more, put in a little bit extra hours on the paper, say no to going out to a party in order to do that.
Speaker 0:It was frustrating for me, and that was the point in my business where I realized that I needed to figure something out that would make the business a little bit easier. Because what I realized is it was not a lack of effort, right and I know this is true for you too. It is not a lack of your effort and it certainly is not a lack of your skill, you know how to work hard, you know how to perform, you know what you are doing. You have so many skills in your tool belt. I guarantee if we were to sit down and have a conversation, you could tell me about all these different courses that you've taken and all the things that you have learned, and all of this stuff, all of the different strategies that you have for your business, your social media strategy and your sales strategy, and what you're posting, and all of that.
Speaker 0:However, usually what I find is that, despite this effort and despite this skill, where we start to get hung up, where that problem comes in, is that we are actually trying to scale on top of chaos, and what I mean by that is, yes, maybe there is some chaos going on in your personal life and all of that, and maybe that is playing into it right, and we're going to talk about some of that nervous system dysregulation in just a minute. However, what I mean by that is more chaos in your business, that you are trying to do all the things manually. Yes, you are hustling, you are sending those messages and those emails and doing all the things, writing the posts and staying consistent with all of that. But my guess is that there are areas of your business where you have no systems, you have no support and you have no structure. If you're waking up every single day and maybe you have a to-do list but you're, in a way, kind of flying by the seat of your pants, that you have these processes in your business, that you are doing literally everything manually and each day is like you were starting over from scratch, you were starting from ground zero, then that is a huge sign that we have no systems. If things are not happening automatically in the background in your business as well, that means like there's not that system in place. Again, if you are waking up and kind of having to recreate each and every day, that means there's no structure. So when we try to scale our business on this chaos, that is why we hit that limit, we hit that ceiling.
Speaker 0:We are going to chat a little bit about that because, again, you have all the strategy in the world. Let's talk about content for a minute. So I'm talking about, like, social media and maybe email marketing. If that is something that you are doing, my guess is that you know everything, all the different kinds of posts to put out there. You know about putting posts and stories and you need to do carousels and reels. You have all of these different topics that you want to be talking about on your social media. Maybe you call them, like your core content pillars or something like that. So you have the strategy. Maybe you've taken a messaging course so you know exactly how to say the things that you want to say, and that is all amazing. Maybe you've taken an email marketing course or learned by trial and you know, hey, if I structure my subject line this way, it's going to get more opens. And if I do this format in my email marketing, or I run a flash sale every weekend. Those are all things that are strategy and those are amazing, and we need that strategy so badly in our business.
Speaker 0:Where the problem comes in is if we don't have a structure to hold that strategy. That's where that burnout is, because, again, every single day, you're waking up and going, oh my gosh, okay, I have to write a post, and today's post is going to be a carousel. Oh, and I should probably also put out a reel. And what am I going to do these? On what topic are we talking about today? And I have to create all these stories and there's no system in place. I have to create all these stories and there's no system in place. Maybe you're having to remember all of this and like, oh, should I send an email today? What day was it that I was supposed to send an email? When did I last send an email? There's no structure and no organization to that. You are spending so much time. However, even more importantly, you're spending so much energy. It's that mental bandwidth of having to figure it out, and that is where we come into that burnout. That is where we hit that burnout spot.
Speaker 0:And when I'm talking about burnout, burnout is a sign of nervous system dysregulation. Nervous system dysregulation. Nervous system dysregulation means that you are operating either in fight flight, maybe fawn or freeze mode, and the reason I keep saying burnout is because that is a word that I hear so many entrepreneurs tell me. Either they have experienced or they're deep in the middle of it and they're questioning do I even want to go on? This can also just look like maybe sometimes you wake up to your business and like a frenetic kind of like crazy energy. I know I do. Sometimes I'm like, oh my God, I have all this stuff to do today and you're just kind of all over the place and you're not really focused and you're just doing a lot of stuff. That can be a sign of like, either like fight or flight mode. To be honest, burnout is a sign of freeze. So these are all symptoms, these are all places of nervous system dysregulation. So, as I am talking about this, if this is hitting home and you're like, oh yes, or maybe you're in a place where you're like avoiding, right, you're like I know I have all these things to do in my business and I have all this strategy, but I'm going to go do this over here, I'm going to go fold the laundry, I'm going to go clean my house, I'm going to scroll social media Again, that's probably flight, right, we're talking about some avoidance there, like running away from what is happening. So all of this is that nervous system dysregulation. All of this is that nervous system dysregulation.
Speaker 0:When we have that nervous system dysregulation combined with that lack of backend support in our business, that's where that becomes a ceiling. And when I say backend support, that can look like systems, things that are happening automatically, that structure that holds all of the strategy that you have to keep you organized so you know exactly what you're doing every day and, hopefully, all of the strategy that you have to keep you organized. So you know exactly what you're doing every day and, hopefully, some of the time that you are having it just done automatically or done ahead of time, no matter how much content, no matter how much sales strategy that you put in. If that sounds familiar where you're like, I create and create and create content all day long and I have all these strategies for selling more, but I have hit that ceiling and I don't know why I can't get any more results and I don't know why. That is a huge sign that we've hit that ceiling. So we need to do something about it and one of the best things we can do is give ourselves and give our business that support that we need and those systems and that structure. Those are just as important as the strategy. So really, we're going to start to add in these systems and an example of a system.
Speaker 0:So I've talked a lot about content. We can have a system for keeping us organized with our content and a system for repurposing some of our content. Right, if you are creating and creating and creating and some of it feels maybe similar to stuff that you did last month. We don't have to just copy paste, but we can repurpose what we've already done. So if you actually have a process for doing that and keeping yourself organized and knowing what you're repurposing, what you're sharing, when maybe it's even repurposing that email that you wrote and you're taking that and you are now turning that into a couple of social media posts and maybe a YouTube video and maybe a blog on your website, taking that same thing and using it again, over and over again and tweaking it, that is an example of a system.
Speaker 0:Another system that I find is so helpful and so important for entrepreneurs and takes such a huge weight off of them is a client onboarding system. So when somebody joins a program that you have or downloads something, maybe they request to download something free are you having to manually email them and let them know or send them the thing they requested or tell them how to get access to it? Are you having to do all of that and remember to do it, or do you have an automated system that introduces them to you, sends them an email? Maybe they can download whatever it is they've requested automatically? Maybe it gives them access to your course, rather than it just being like in a Dropbox folder or a Google Drive folder where you have to manually send them the link. Is there a library where they can just log in and access it and can they access that automatically without you having to get in there and do it? So that would be an example of a system that you can see. It sounds small If you think about all those manual actions.
Speaker 0:If we are all of a sudden having to send an email or send the download that people requested to each and every person, that might be okay when we have like 10 people a month requesting that, but what happens when you have 100 people a month or 1,000 people a month? That's where we hit that ceiling right and that's why it's so important to have these systems and these structures in place to support you, to support your business, to help your nervous system stay in that place of regulation. As I said that, the idea of having to manually reach out to a thousand people in a month to send them something they requested, that started to give you anxiety. That means that that is that nervous system kicking in right. Your nervous system is like oh my goodness, like no, thank you that sounds awful, and when we think that that is gonna be awful and that's gonna be more than we can handle is going to be awful and that's going to be more than we can handle, that we're going to drop the ball on people. That's where we keep ourselves small, that's where we keep our business small. That's where we hit that ceiling. So that's why this is so important.
Speaker 0:So if you've been listening to this episode and nodding your head along the entire way saying, yes, that is me, oh my gosh, you are describing me as where I am in my business, I have hit a ceiling and maybe your ceiling. Maybe you're stuck around like three to five thousand dollars a month. That's an area where I find a lot of people really get stuck and hit that ceiling. Maybe you've hit ten thousand a month and you're like but I really want 20. I really want to make this massive. I really want to be able to make an even bigger impact than I already am.
Speaker 0:If you've been nodding your head along and you're like, yes, yes, yes, this is what I mean, I invite you to check out my systems year playbook. This is a brand new playbook that, if you're listening this episode, when it launches. It is coming out in probably about a week, so, excited about this, this is something I've been working on to help entrepreneurs both help them with that nervous system regulation so that they can build these systems and build that structure into your business, and it walks you through both of them. It actually will help you customize a plan just for you, because our businesses are not the same as anybody else's and what you need right now might be different than what somebody else needs right now. What you need right now might be different than what you need in six months.
Speaker 0:So this is a system, a process that I'm going to take you through in this playbook to help you discover what the areas are that you need to systematize the most right now. It's going to help you prioritize and walk you through putting all of this in place. So it is step by step, and it is both the system the business systems and the nervous system support that you are craving. So go ahead, go to my website, check it out and grab it. Thank you so much for tuning in today to this episode of Effortlessly Productive. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and I will catch you on the next episode. Bye, everybody.
