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Listen to this week’s podcast episode, Ep.249: Productivity, Effectiveness, A Near Death Experience and Leading Yourself, with Abigail Barnes, click here to listen!

In my conversations with managers and business owners, a common frustration comes up often: the feeling that there simply aren't enough hours in the day. We rush between endless meetings, manage overflowing inboxes, stay late at our desks and/or work through lunches, etc. All on the old-fashioned, flawed-but-conditioned assumption that visible effort = genuine output.

Yet, despite working harder than ever, many people feel disconnected from the actual purpose of their work. Entrepreneurs are especially bad at this bit too: we treat busyness as a virtue, ignoring the toll it takes on our health, our relationships, our long-term career satisfaction and our businesses.

This week on the podcast I chat with Abigail Barnes, creator of the 888 Formula, host of the Time Management Podcast, and founder of the 21-Day Procrastination Breakthrough Challenge. Alongside AI, life-changing experiences and leadership, this exact cycle of busyness was a key topic of our discussion.

Abigail spent over a decade working in financial services marketing across asset management firms, hedge funds and major banks. On paper, she was thriving, achieving promotions, earning pay rises, enjoying the perks of a corporate career. But internally, she felt an underlying ache, a persistent feeling that she was living a life designed by someone else.

In February 2012, while on a corporate business trip to Boston, a sudden, one-in-a-million stroke forced her into an intensive care unit and completely altered her trajectory. That medical crisis ultimately became the foundation upon which Abigail rebuilt her professional life. Today, she helps high achievers take their successful lives on paper and turn them into meaningful realities.

Sitting in a hospital bed far from home, Abigail experienced a profound moment of clarity when her immediate, instinctual reaction to the diagnosis was to ask the doctor if she could return to work on Monday. It was a telling illustration of the toxic conditioning that permeates so many corporate environments, where professionals feel that unless they are physically incapacitated, there is no valid excuse to step away from their desks.

The experience forced her to confront a difficult realisation: she was not leading herself well. She wasn't facing a near-death moment filled with peaceful reflection; she was experiencing acute regret over the goals she had put off and the life she had postponed. A realisation that sparked a fundamental shift in how she viewed time.

Time is our most valuable, non-renewable commodity. While money can buy time and time can generate money, you can never buy back the hours you've already lost. Stepping out of the corporate world to build her own business taught Abigail that waiting for a crisis to change your habits is a dangerous strategy, whether you’re navigating organisational shifts, economic uncertainty, new technology or the changing workplace they each create, the decision to take control of your daily schedule rests entirely in your hands.

Leading yourself means recognising your current reality, establishing firm personal limits and deciding how you want to spend the hours available to you.

To help individuals gain clarity over their schedules, Abigail developed a simple structural framework called the 888 Formula. The concept is built on the immovability of a twenty-four-hour day, divided into three equal segments based on science and societal norms:

8 Hours of Sleep: Grounded in biological necessity, the average adult requires seven to nine hours of quality sleep for cognitive function, cellular repair and physical health.

8 Hours of Work: The standard operational block dedicated to professional output, career development and generating income.

8 Hours of Life: The remaining time allocated to life admin, cooking, relationships, hobbies, personal health and family responsibilities.

The challenge most managers face is that these hours behave like balls moved between three jars. When you routinely work twelve-hour days, you aren't magically creating extra time; you are stealing hours directly from your life or your sleep. While short-term crunch periods are sometimes unavoidable, running on continuous overdraft eventually leads to chronic exhaustion and burnout.

Regaining control starts with a comprehensive time audit, tracking your activities for seven consecutive days provides objective data on where your energy is actually going. It exposes how Parkinson's Law operates in your daily routine; where tasks expand to fill whatever time is allocated to them. A report that could be completed in fifteen focused minutes often stretches across two hours simply because no firm boundary was set.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, auditing your time gives you the hard data needed to eliminate low-value tasks and restructure your workday.

Many of the barriers that keep us trapped in unhelpful working habits stem from internal belief systems (or ‘BS’). From an early age, we absorb assumptions about work, money, power and success from our environment. We tell ourselves that saying no to additional projects makes us look lazy, or that working through lunch is required to prove our dedication.

One of the most damaging mindsets in corporate life is people-pleasing. When you say yes to every request, take on tasks outside your scope, refuse to set boundaries and/or keep quiet to avoid upsetting your boss, you signal that your time has little value. Ironically, people-pleasers are often the least appreciated and most exploited workers. They carry the heaviest workloads while being passed over for advancement because management relies on their passive compliance.

Taking control of your career requires addressing these internal assumptions. If you find yourself in an environment that systematically devalues your time, expecting you to burn out for the sake of a spreadsheet, you don't have to stay. You’re not a tree; you can move.

Updating your CV, building new skills and seeking out an organisation that will respect your boundaries is a far more effective strategy than attempting to single-handedly reform a toxic corporate culture. Recognising your own worth is the prerequisite for convincing anyone else to value it.

As workplace structures evolve, the qualities required to lead effectively are changing. Abigail outlines six core traits that every modern manager must cultivate to lead both themselves and their teams:

Integrating these behaviours requires evaluating your weekly tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix (for example, other approaches also available!). The key bit is identifying what to execute personally, what to delegate, what to automate and what to delete entirely. By stripping away low-value administrative tasks, you free up the mental capacity needed to focus on strategic priorities, creative problem-solving and genuine team support.

When asked about the figures who inspire her, Abigail pointed not to historical icons on pedestals, but to day-to-day innovators, builders, explorers and even her own great-great-great-grandfather, who boarded a ship in the nineteenth century to build a new life in Hong Kong. What unites those individuals is the willingness to leave the safety of the known and ask a simple, courageous question: I wonder if…?

Just like real leadership isn’t about a crafted persona, real productivity isn't about filling every minute of your day with frantic activity, nor is it about proving your stamina to a manager. It’s about designing a life where your time is spent intentionally on the things that bring genuine value to your career and your personal world.

If you want your daily experience to change, you don't need a grand, dramatic overhaul; you simply need to start with small, deliberate actions. Audit your hours, set firm boundaries around your focus and protect your health.

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Listen to the full episode with Abigail, at: https://smartlink.ausha.co/leading-with-integrity/ep-249-productivity-effectiveness-a-near-death-experience-and-leading-yourself-with-abigail-barnes-leadership

Or, if you prefer video then you’ll find it on YouTube too: https://youtu.be/aih0oTYvHs4

Next week, I’m talking cybersecurity, A.I., technology and their implications for leadership, with the final guest of the month, Brian Beck, and coincidentally the 250th Episode of Leading with Integrity!! 🥳

I hope you’ll be back with us next week and in the meantime: THANK YOU for reading, listening, supporting Leading with Integrity. There’s no show or newsletter, no future of leadership without each and every one of you.

Be a Leader Not a Boss,

- David

In case you don’t know me that well, I’m David Hatch and I’m here to help you lead more like a Jedi and less like a Sithlord.

If you’re a new manager or first-time leader in a tech, expertise or specialist driven workplace and you’re feeling lonely, stuck, overwhelmed, or simply ready for your next chapter in leadership, the Integrity Leaders Community offers conversations, courses, resources and support to help you grow one step at a time. If you have a healthy love of sci-fi and want to learn more about leadership, then this is the community for you! Solopreneurs also welcome. 😉