Scattered to Focused: Deciding What Deserves Your Energy

Speaker A: You didn't start your business to be the bottleneck, answering every question, fixing every fire, and stuck in the weeds of business operations. Hi, I'm Donna Dubay, Certified Director of Operations, and I've been where you are, doing all the things, convinced hustle was a sustainable strategy. But here's the truth. No team, system or automation can fix a business that lacks focus and direction. This podcast is your weekly dose of real talk and practical strategy, from workflow optimization to business systems and strategic planning. The kind of behind the scenes work that actually moves the needle. If you're ready to step into your CEO role and build a business that's scalable and sustainable, let's do it. She's 43 years old and she built something real. A business that pays her well. A team she's proud of, a reputation in her industry that took years to earn. And yet most mornings, she sits down at her desk and feels behind before she's even started. Not because she doesn't know what she's doing, because she knows too much, she's tracking too much. She's responsible for too much. And somewhere in the back of her mind, quietly, is a question she doesn't let herself ask too often. Is this, all of this actually moving me forward, or am I just managing? If that's you right now, welcome. You're exactly in the right place. I'm Donna Dube, the host of the CEO Amplify podcast, and I'm so glad you're here. Today's episode is about something I see underneath almost every conversation I have with business owners who are smart, capable, successful by most measures, and still somehow stuck. It's not a strategy problem. It's not a mindset problem. It's not even a time problem, though it often shows up that way. It's what I call an energy and attention problem, Specifically where your best energy is actually going and why. The answer to that question is almost never what you think it is. By the end of this episode, you're going to have a filter. A simple, practical, two question filter that will change how you make decisions about your time and your priorities from this week forward. All right, let's get into it. So I want to paint a picture, and I want you to tell me honestly how much of this sounds familiar. It's Monday morning. You've had a good weekend. You feel clear. You sit down with your coffee, and for about four minutes, everything seems manageable. And then it starts. A contactor has a question. A client needs something. An email pulls you sideways into a problem. You didn't see coming. You jump on a quick call that runs overtime. Someone on your team is waiting on a decision that only you can make. And by noon, you've been busy for hours. And the thing you actually plan to work on, the thing that genuinely matters for where your business is going, it hasn't been touched. You tell yourself you'll get to it tomorrow, but of course, tomorrow looks exactly the same. And here's what I want you to understand about this pattern. It's not a discipline problem. It's not a focus problem. And it's not because you're not cut out for this. It's because when you haven't clearly decided what deserves your best energy and attention, everything gets a piece of it, and nothing gets enough. And the cost of that is bigger than most people are willing to look at. It costs you momentum because meaningful progress doesn't happen in stolen moments between everything else. Right? Meaningful progress requires sustained, protected, intentional focus. It costs you your team, because when you're scattered, they get scattered. They don't know what to prioritize either. Work finds its way back to your plate because the whole system is organized around urgency rather than importance. And over time, this is the part that quietly breaks my heart. It costs you the vision you had when you started this, the freedom, the impact, the version of this business that exists in your head and just never quite materializes. Friends, the hamster wheel isn't a season for most CEOs I talk to. It becomes the operating system. And the longer you run on it, the more normal it starts to feel. How do I know? Because I've been there. There was a period in my own business when I had all the clarity in the world about what I wanted to build. And if you'd looked at how I was spending my days, you would have seen almost none of it reflected there. I was busy, genuinely busy, busy delivering, busy supporting, busy responding. But I wasn't building. And at the moment I got honest about that, really honest, everything started to shift. The shift didn't require more hours. It required a better filter. So today, I want to give you something concrete right now that you can use this week, not next quarter, this week. So I call it the impact versus effort filter. And I use this inside of my client work, and it creates clarity fast. Sometimes a little bit uncomfortably fast. So here's how it works. Every task, project, initiative, or idea, uh, on your plate gets measured against two questions. Question 1. How much does this actually move the needle? If this gets done, does it grow revenue? Deepen client results or strengthen how your business runs? The answer is not theory. In practice, does it actually matter? And then question two. How much does it cost me to do it? Your time, your mental energy, your attention. All of it is a resource and all of it is finite. All of it is being spent somewhere right now. When you put those two questions together, everything on your plate falls into one of the four places. High impact, low, low effort. These are the things you're going to do first, always. These are your highest leverage activities, the ones that create real results without depleting you. High impact, low effort, right? Most CEOs I work with are not spending nearly enough time here. And when I point that out, the response is almost always the same. These things feel too simple, too easy. Surely the work that matters should feel harder. And that instinct, my friends, that's costing you. Okay, the next place is high impact, high effort. So these matter, but they need to be properly planned and resourced. Don't try and squeeze these things into a Tuesday afternoon between client calls. Block off real time in your calendar, bring in support to help you, and treat them with the weight that they deserve. The third place is low impact, low effort. The tasks that fall in here, you want to delegate these, batch them, get them off your plate as easily as you can. They need to happen, but they don't need to happen with your best energy and attention. And then finally, low impact, high effort. And this is the category I want you to sit with, because this is where the real drain is hiding. These are the things that feel productive. The offer you've been tweaking for six months that still isn't quite right. The marketing strategy you keep half starting and restarting the internal process within your business. You keep meaning to document the project that's been on the list so long it started to feel like furniture. You're protecting these things and I understand why. You've invested time in them, you believe in them. And letting go. Well, it feels like you're admitting something, but every hour you spend in this quadrant is an hour your high impact work doesn't get. So stop protecting them. Let them go. Here's the truth that lands differently almost every time I say it out loud, but Most of the CEOs I work with are spending the majority of their best hours, their clearest thinking, their peak energy in those bottom two categories, low impact, high effort and low impact, low effort. And then they're wondering why the revenue has plateaued, why the growth feels just out of reach, and why they're so physically exhausted despite Working so hard. It's not that they're not working hard enough. They're working incredibly hard on the wrong things. So I want to pause for a moment here because I know some of you are sitting with something right now. You're nodding along, and underneath, there's a slight uncomfortable feeling because you're not sure which quadrant most of your work actually lives in. You've been moving so fast for so long that you haven't stopped to look. And that feeling you're getting, it's important. Please don't push past it. This is exactly what the CEO bottleneck audit is designed to help you with. It's a focused 30 minute call, just you and me, where we identify your single biggest bottleneck right now. And you leave with a clear priority action plan. Not general advice, not a pep talk. A concrete, specific plan for where to focus your energy and attention first so you can actually start moving. So if you've been feeling the friction of this as something in the last few minutes landed, then I'll put the link in the show notes to book your audit. And I'd love to get on a call with you. All right, Let me tell you about a client I worked with. I'll call her Sally. So Sally's a therapist and runs an in person and online practice. She has a small team of other therapists who work alongside her, and they're all providing one on one service. From the outside, things look like they were working. Revenue was coming in, clients were happy, and Sally felt like she built something solid. But when she came to me for one on one consulting, she had 14 items on her priority list. 14 things. She was actively trying to move forward at the same time. And every single one of them felt urgent. Every single one of them felt important. So we sat down and we ran through the list. Impact versus effort filter. Took us about 20 minutes. And by the end of that conversation, three things had risen to the top. Just three. Everything else got delegated, deferred, or dropped completely. The first time I suggested dropping something back. Hmm. Sally pushed back. But that's important, she said. I didn't argue. I just asked her two questions. Important to who and important why and when. She actually examined it against those questions, really examined it, not just defended it. The answer surprised her. It had been important. Six months ago. It had, uh, drifted into habit. It was on the list because it had always been on the list. So Sally let it go. Within 60 days of narrowing to those three priorities, two of them were producing results she hadn't seen in over A year, cleaner operations, a team that finally had enough clarity to move without her. She didn't work more hours. She worked the same number of hours. But she stopped hemorrhaging her best energy on things that weren't moving the needle. And the difference was immediate. M. That's what narrowing does. It's not about doing less, my friends. It's about finally finding your best work. Enough room to actually land. So I want to be honest with you before we close. This filter is simple, right? Genuinely simple. But applying it consistently, that's where it can get hard. Because I know you're the kind of business owner and CEO who cares deeply. You have high standards. You. You feel responsible for everything in their business. And for someone like you, choosing means letting go. And letting go can feel like failure. Feels like you're dropping the ball, like admitting that some of the things you've been pouring yourself into weren't worth it. And I want to say something directly about that feeling. The fact that you care this much is not the problem. It's actually one of your greatest strengths. But when that caring gets applied to everything equally, when everything gets your protection, nothing gets your best. You built this business for a reason. I know you did. And I know you remember what that reason was, Whether that was freedom, impact, whatever. It was the ability to be present with your family without the business running in the background. The version of your business that you originally started, it's not out of reach, but it doesn't happen while you're scattered across 14 priorities. It happens when you get ruthlessly, lovingly honest about, uh, what actually drives your energy right now. So here's the question I want you to carry out from this episode and actually sit with today, not file away, not come back to later today. If I could only move three things forward this quarter, just three, what would they be? And once you've got those three things, I want you to write them down. Then I want you to open your calendar and look at this week. Look at where your time is actually committed, and ask yourself, honestly, does how I'm spending my time m reflect those three things? If the answer is no, you know something needs to change. I know you already knew it. So here's what I want to leave you with. You have not been failing. You've been operating without a filter. In a business that is very good at filling every available space with noise that ends when you decide it ends. The impact versus Effort filter is a start. Use it this week. Run your list through it. Let yourself be surprised by what falls away and what rises to the top. And if you get to the end of that exercise and you realize that the clarity you need is bigger than a framework can give you, that you need someone to sit across from you, look at your actual business, and help you see what you generally cannot see from the inside. That's what the CEO bottleneck audit is for. 30 minutes. One focused conversation. You leave with a clear priority action plan built specifically around your business and where you are right now. The link is in the show notes. And one last thing before you go the quieter, more focused version of you, the one who isn't constantly reacting, who leads instead of manages, who ends the week feeling like something actually moved forward. She's not a distant goal. She's what happens when you start protecting your energy and your attention. Like it matters. Because it does. Thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoy today's episode, I kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review. It would mean the world to me. Your feedback helps me reach out more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining and we'll catch you on the next episode.