Summary 

When your calendar is jam-packed from sunrise to bedtime, it’s easy to believe you don’t have time for rest, fun, or even your personal goals. But what if the real problem isn’t your lack of time… but your lack of blank space?

In this episode, I’m sharing a real-life story of how I fell face-first into this trap, what it cost me (personally and professionally), and how reclaiming even a little breathing room can unlock massive shifts in your energy, productivity, and weight loss journey.

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The hidden reason high-achieving women often skip blank space (and why it backfires).
• How wishlists disguised as to-do lists quietly create overwhelm.
• The sneaky ways your tired brain steals time through “fake rest.”
• Why blank space is just as critical for weight loss as it is for productivity.
• Two practical ways to reclaim your time without blowing up your life.

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Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. I am coming back to you to talk about the power of blank space on your calendar. And I say this as I record this podcast, this is not the first time in the past month that I have been recording a podcast episode from my car as I have been hashtag mom chauffer for my kids and their afterschool activities. So I want to talk about why it is that smart overachieving women often skip, miss, don't have blank space on their calendar. What's the real reason behind us not doing that? The power of what blank space could do for us in terms of achieving your next dream goal, either professional or personal. The cost of withholding it. The cost of not figuring out how to get blank space on your calendar and why it's so necessary if you're brand new to me. Hello, I am Dr. Priyanka Venugopal. I am an OBGYN physician turned stress and weight loss coach, and I am here to share personal stories, science-based tools and skills that you can really take and learn from. We all learn here together, but I really love sharing my personal, real life experiences and. Actual epic fails that I have navigated as a busy, professional working mom, the real life, the real scenarios that I fall flat on my face, that I really mess up, that I experience the ramifications of that failure. That includes not having any blank space on my calendar and the lessons that I learned from it. And I hope that all of you that are listening to this podcast, at least over the last many years, because this podcast has now been around for a few years, I hope that all of you have started to feel us de-stigmatizing failure. The reason that I love sharing my failures so forthcoming and as transparently as possible is because one of my missions for all of us professional women is for us to de-stigmatize and stopping being so afraid of messing up. I think we get so afraid of messing up that we hold back, really putting forth a full effort. We hold back even trying, we talk ourselves out of things that we could do, things that we could accomplish, journeys that we could go on because we hesitate in the possibility of imperfection and just that fear holds us back from actually achieving massive wins. So one of the intentions of me sharing stories like this, today's inspired by of course my own massive epic fail and my lack of blank space on my calendar. I really do hope that these stories help you feel validated if you have experienced fails like this. Because in my experience now that is the human condition. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how many diplomas you have on your wall, or how capable you are, or what skill sets you have, you could be the most trained and skilled person in your field, in your career. However, the human condition is still going to be full of failures. If you're going for growth, if you're going for the next big goal, whether it's personal or professional, you're going to experience rejection, embarrassment. You're going to face falling flat on your face, mistiming something, doing something not perfectly. And one of the things that I really want with the mission of this podcast and the storytelling style that we have here, is to literally take away that deep soup of discouragement that a lot of us find ourselves in. Before we get into this episode, I want to make sure that you know next week if you're listening to this podcast episode live on Thursday, October 16th, I'm hosting a live free training, 10 pounds down, 10 hours back on Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. You can go and grab your seat over at burnstressloseweight.com/training. And the intention of me creating a training that focuses on losing weight and getting time back is because these are two results that you can have that actually go hand in hand. I hear a lot of women saying, I don't have time, or I'm too busy, some flavor of I don't have time, or, I'm too busy. I have too many things going on. My life is really busy. This season is really complicated. I have things with work. I have things with kids and afterschool activities, and I just don't have time to focus on myself. And when life is easier, then I will take care of myself and claim, and my argument for anyone that ever tells me that is if you think that you don't have time, usually you have a math problem. We don't even realize how many invisible, tiny moments we are squirreling away and losing in second, guessing, ruminating, getting confused, undoing a lot of wins, feeling a lot of regret, feeling uncomfortable in the prime of our life, feeling physically uncomfortable in your body. To me, these are all stolen moments, so in my experience now, and this is what my clients tell me, when they start taking the skill sets, they learn in Burn Stress, Lose Weight, our group coaching program, and they put it to work for them and they start achieving wins and they realize that they can actually do this. Simply, they get back at least 10 hours of time per week, which is what inspired the training, 10 pounds down and 10 hours back. It's 10 hours of time back per week. Because when you solve this problem and when you realize that it's possible to lose weight while supporting your metabolism and your hormone health, and you can do it with making certain key, simple decisions, you won't just lose weight and feel better in your body and start living and feeling your best, you get time back, lost time back. So that's the intention of that training. If that sounds like at all something you want, then I encourage you to go grab your seat. Don't wait. And I do encourage you to come live because live attendees are going to be getting a special custom blueprint. It's going to be a PDF that's going to help you diagnose exactly where your strategic or mindset gap is, and the next step that you need to take. When you find that you have a strategic gap, I don't know about all of you, but I love a really good protocol that feels like a flow chart that you can really simply follow so you know exactly what you need to do exactly where your work is. You might have a few strategic gaps and a few mindset gaps. That's not at all a problem. It's still going to guide you on exactly what the very first step should be for you, so you don't get confused with where to start. What should I be doing right now? We can waste a lot of time with that. So. I do encourage you to block the time and come live, and it's gonna be one of those trainings that I really hope blows your socks off. I think it's going to be the best hour of your week so that you can really feel like you have a game plan walking into the new year already ahead on next year already ahead, on the scale already ahead on feeling better. So don't wait. Go grab your seat over at burnstressloseweight.com/training, and I will meet you in your email inbox with all the details and the zoom link. Without further ado, let's get into today's podcast episode, why you need to have blank space on your calendar. So let's talk about what inspired this entire podcast episode to begin with. So a few weeks ago, I shared with all of you that fall is one of those seasons number one that I love. It's my favorite weather. It's crisp and brisk outside. I love going for walks when the leaves are changing. I live in a part of the country that really does have all four seasons. I love the fall. I love the weather. I love the coziness. I love the warm sweaters. And also fall is one of our busy seasons, particularly because we transitioned from summer vacation into the fall and we have lots of school and afterschool activities, and it's a big change for us. Now what I did when I was planning the fall and when I was thinking about the structure of what our calendar was going to look like, I looked at my calendar. I just looked at the math of what my calendar looked like, so I had lots of start and stop times. I know when my kids get home from school, on the school bus, I know exactly what time they have to get to soccer practice or swim practice. I know what time my son has piano, so I looked at the calendar and I blocked all these times out with starts and stops, and I looked at some of the work projects that I'm working on. I have some really, really fun things coming up down the pike, and in my mind, I saw space on my calendar to be able to do all of those things. Basically, in short, I said yes to a lot of projects because I saw space on my calendar that I could actually work on them. And as I got into the rhythm of planning out what my fall was going to look like, I felt really excited. I felt really excited about accomplishing all these projects, about having this fall season, doing all these afterschool activities, being present with my kids when I'm with my kids, and really leaning into work when I'm doing work. And I started to feel this excitement, kind of kept saying yes to more things. Now, here's mistake number one. Mistake number one that I think a lot of us make is our to-do lists become wishlists. What I mean by that is it sounds really good when you're making all the list of things that you want to accomplish, the dream that you have for your week or for your month or for the season, but if it doesn't actually have a real spot on your calendar, like really on the calendar. It's really just a wishlist, and the reason that we do this is because having a wishlist actually feels really good. Our brain flashes forward and it imagines, that's why it's called wishing. It imagines that we have accomplished and done all of those things. You'll know that this is you if you love making long to-do lists, but you don't actually take the list and then stick it onto a calendar. It's because making the to-do list feels really good because our brain is envisioning, imagining and kind of wishing that it all actually gets done. So I have made that mistake many times where I've had a running to-do list. It's basically ever growing. And because I never used to put it on my calendar, it stayed a wishlist. It never really got done. It created perpetual overwhelm. I always felt behind because the list was never done. I felt really frustrated with myself that I couldn't do the things that I said I was going to do, and I started to have this just feeling of feeling behind all the time. It is the worst feeling to feel behind all the time. And yet I was living in that soup for quite a few years until I realized that this was simply a strategic problem and I solved it. So I learned how to take my to-do list, which I'm gonna call a wishlist if it's not on a calendar. It's a wishlist, and I learned how to put it onto my calendar. Then I made mistake number two. Mistake number two is making calendar decisions and decisions around activities and things that you have said yes to, and responsibilities and projects from a place where you leave zero blank space in your calendar. So it's like you can go from meeting to meeting and a lot of the reason we do this is again, the educational system and a lot of our careers are back to back to back. You go from class to class to class meeting to meeting to meeting, right? Things are stuck onto your calendar in this back to back fashion, and so our brain gets trained that. That is just the normal way of functioning. But what this does is it doesn't take into account that we are not actually robots. A robot might be able to work back to back to back, but humans require breaks. Our brain, after working focused for a few hours, actually gets very fatigued. We start to notice dips in creativity, in coming up with creative solutions. Our quality of thinking starts to go down and when we haven't built in a purposeful blank space on our calendar, we start using a tired brain and a very fatigued brain to solve complex, high quality problems. So this is exactly where I landed. I had solved mistake number one, which is my wishlist started to get onto my calendar, but I made mistake number two, which is I forgot to build into fact that sometimes things go off plan. Sometimes I'm going to get a call from school about a sick kid. Sometimes a project takes longer than expected. Sometimes my perfectionism gets in my own way and I take double what I think I'm going to take. Sometimes I get such a poor night's sleep that my quality of thinking is just terrible and it's not the best day to do high focus work. So what I realized over this past month is I basically built out six weeks worth of projects and deadlines and work that I had to get done. And of course we have to enroll in the mom life. The mom chauffeur the afterschool activities I had all on my calendar. It looked perfect, perfect with no spaces. But I did not take into account that I am a human brain that it's going to get tired. That needs breaks. Here's what starts to happen. Here's the cost of not building in breaks on purpose. My tired brain, my very fatigue brain started to want to tap out. This is where I started scrolling my phone. I mean, I have a pile of things that I need to get done, so I'm feeling behind. I can feel myself falling behind on things I need to start catching up. But because my brain is so tired and it doesn't see an end in sight, it doesn't see the break built into the calendar. It just sees the next assignment, and then the next project, and then the next to do. Because it didn't see the break, my brain started creating very compelling, convincing, and convenient stories to steal breaks in tiny moments. This will be you when you find yourself snacking to stay awake, snacking to give yourself a boost of energy, scrolling your phone mindlessly on Instagram or watching a reel's rabbit holes just because you need a little bit of a break from your work life, I always think about urges like a siren song. So the urge to snack, scroll randomly procrastinate is usually a signal, not because of a lack of discipline around food, but usually to look at a different part of your life. And in this case, it was overworking the cost for me of not having blank space built into my calendar this past month. And again, it doesn't have to be a lot of blank space, like a long Yoda time or a big meditation session, but small moments that are built into your week that give you a chance to catch up, that let you be human, that let you go off track, that give you some buffer space so that if you do fall behind on a project, that you know that there is space for you to fill it in.

  The problem for me this past month is because I didn't see any of that, I started to experience overwhelm. I started to feel behind, and the more I started to feel behind, the more that my brain offered all the three C stories to take a break with snacking and scrolling, and they were very compelling because my brain was tired. And a tired brain does not make high quality decisions. Not only did I then get further behind because my tired brain was randomly scrolling Instagram, I was getting further behind on being productive and getting things done. So what does having blank space on your calendar have to do with weight loss or with achieving your body goal? It's actually very similar. So just like having blank space built into your calendar for productivity in the. Place is essential. It lets you be a human. It accounts for the fact that you might mess up, take longer than you need, go off track. We have to have blank space built into our expectations when it comes to weight loss. So often we get into this rhythm of believing we should be losing one pound per week every single week until we hit our goal. And maybe, you know, because you're a human, that your, your body's not going to lose weight like a robot. But we kind of subconsciously expect that our weight loss should be in some form linear. It doesn't take into account real life seasons where maybe you need to slow down or based on where you're at in your cycle, or how much sleep you're getting or how much stress you're experiencing. Maybe those are seasons that you're not going to have linear weight loss. So the cost of not building in blank space, which is basically changing expectations around how weight loss should be and what it should look like, is that creates a lot of frustration, and then that dips into disbelief. When you don't start seeing weight loss results week after week after week, or you don't see the scale come down linearly, you start to believe like something is going wrong rather than the reality, which is you actually should have been building in blank space onto your calendar to begin with. I know sometimes we are under the impression that we need to completely catch up to be able to build the blank space in, but it's this false lie that we tell ourselves that never actually happens. That's what I did. This is exactly what I did, which is why I'm in the parking lot of swim team practice recording a podcast episode because this was the only time that I could dedicate to actually telling the story and sharing with you on the podcast exactly why this matters.

  I want to share with you what I'm doing about it. Now that I've caught it. I didn't even realize, first of all, for a few weeks, I didn't even realize that this was a problem, that I was even feeling overwhelmed. Weeks were going by and it was just. Running on fumes a little bit. And then this past week I realized because I was being a little bit irritable with my kids, I was being snippy. My telltale sign is generally when I'm being snippy or irritable with my kids. And I noticed myself in that mood this week. I was like, what's going on? Why are we feeling like this? And that was when I realized that I basically had over committ to some of the projects this season. I said yes to a lot of things because I really wanted to do all of those things. I didn't want to say no to any of it. And because of that, I built a calendar that might have looked good on paper, but wasn't actually realistic. So here's how we can turn it around. The very first step is just becoming aware that this is actually the reason that you feel overwhelmed. You've overcommitted, you've said yes to too much. You didn't prioritize the things that you really wanted to prioritize, and you overfilled your plate, and now we have a choice. We can decide. I'm just going to keep the overwhelm, the full calendar for now, and I'm going to accept and acknowledge that I'm going to feel like I have a lot on my plate right now, and nothing is wrong with that. It's just for the season, and I'm going to make a mental note to not make this mistake again next time. The other option that we have is we can take a look at all the things that we have said yes to, all the responsibilities, the to-dos, the tasks, every project that you thought you could fit into your calendar, and take it through a decision making framework where you ask yourself, is this really an urgent and important responsibility or task that I really want to do. Take a fine tooth comb over every responsibility that you have both in your career and in your personal life, and ask yourself, is this actually going to help me feel better? Is this going to help my family feel better? Is this going to actually move the needle forward on a priority goal that I have. And if your answer is at all in hesitation or a no, put it off. Say no to it for now. Delegate it. Train somebody else in your life to do it and take it off your plate. I do believe that this can be hard to do, particularly if you're someone that's used to saying yes, you're used to saying yes to any ask of you, you want to say yes to all the projects because again, the wishlist of doing all those things feels amazing, but I think it's so important that we also really focus on the reality that having the wishlist that doesn't actually get done might feel good when you're in the planning phase. But when it comes to execution, it feels really terrible. It guarantees overwhelm, it guarantees frustration, and then it comes out in tiny little ways. I have decided to actually stick with it, let my plate be a little bit full for a few more weeks, because I'm 80% through with most of the projects that I had said yes to. There were a few things that I had in my mind that I've decided to hold off on simply because I could see that my brain is tired and I'm going to want to build in that break into my calendar before I decide to commit to any more things. One of the skills that you learn in burn stress, lose weight is a process that I call magic action structure. It's basically taking your wishlist or your plan and it's actually plugging it into your calendar. This is probably the reason that I caught it when I did and didn't get to total burnout and complete overwhelm with the responsibilities that I've had this past month. But understanding how to take real life decisions that's going to move the needle with you, losing the weight you want, feeling better in your life right now, and putting it into the structure of your life is going to save you so much time. In a moment, I'm going to share a clip from a client who was on the podcast a few months ago, and she shared the impact of what magic action structure did for her. She used to feel like she was constantly putting out fires, always behind, never had time for herself, and together we challenged how that was actually not the case. She found so many hours of tiny moments that were getting lost in confusion and second guessing and simply making decisions that went onto her calendar started to save her so much time. However, I hope that this podcast episode also shed light on the fact that, yes, we want to put things on the calendar. That's what magic action structure is all about. I've talked about on the podcast before as well, but building in space to account for you, being a human and not a robot is equally important. It's a lesson that I think I really needed to learn. I had to revisit it myself, and it's one that I really want all of you to think about. Having decisions on your calendar is so important for you to achieve your next growth goal, but we have to do it in a way that also treats you like the human that you are. You're going to have mess ups, you're going to go off track things, you're gonna get messed up. And that's okay. It's normal. We can pick up right where we left off. And also building in those blank spaces is going to save you overwhelm and frustration in the long run. And for anyone that has ever believed, I don't have time for blank space. If you look at how much time gets lost in procrastination, in random moments of snacking and scrolling, that you're taking a break from the work you're trying to get done, that's the exact amount of time you need to have back in your calendar. Imagine instead of it being stolen where you're not even feeling rested. You know when you scroll your phone mindlessly, or you just randomly snack, you're not even feeling rested. Those moments are not clean rest. They're not clean pleasure. They're gone in a few moments. The moment you put your phone down, the dopamine hits gone. I'm talking about having blank space on your calendar where you actually feel real rest, where you create real connection with a friend or a loved one where you have real joy that lasts for more than 30 seconds. I claim that. All of us actually do have that time in our calendar. We just have to repurpose the time that we're wasting.

  I hope you'll enjoy this podcast episode and that you come on the ride with me to not just take your wishlist and put it onto your calendar, but to treat yourself like a human and have some blank space to, if you want to learn my strategies on how to claim 10 pounds down and 10 hours back, and you want to really walk into the new year feeling better than you have in a long time. I would love to see you on my training next week. It's happening on October 16th, Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. We will have a short-lived replay if you cannot attend live. I understand. But just remember that when you attend live, you're going to get a personal roadmap on exactly how to find your strategic and mindset gaps, which is going to be so important and you moving forward. And also it's just more fun to come live. You can go and grab your seat over at burnstressloseweight.com/training. I cannot wait to see you there. Have an amazing week, my friends.

   

  Hazel: Your words about magic action decisions the night before and making all those decisions when you're not in a stressed state has been such a, has relieved such a burden off my shoulders because I just go through the day without thinking. I just became so much more present at home, so much more present at home with my kids, with my husband, just more interactive with them. They gained a happier mom, a happier spouse, a more present mom, and I felt so much more peaceful. So one of the most interesting things when we had our first consult call, you had asked me, what do you do for play? And you had to like dumb it down for me because you basically, I was like, what do you mean whatcha talking about? Because I don't have hobbies, I don't have time for that. And I didn't have anything in my. Daily life. That was for me. And so now, now things are different. Now these little small tweaks in my daily habits that I implemented listening to your call was really helping my metabolism, my weight loss, it's been 20 pounds down March, April, may, right? So three months, 20 pounds, which sounds pretty impressive and I loved how you changed my mindset in 10 minutes over lunch. That was my first time being coached without even realizing. So I said, you know, if Priyanka can. Change and improve my life in 10 minutes. How much more so over the course of six months. What's so different about this program is that all of us, all the women in the group, are bringing in our everyday life, everyday stressors. In your work, in your family. Yeah. It's not even weight related at all. Because you understand that these are the moments that lead to snacking, scrolling, and if we don't figure out how to go through these experiences. Then we're never gonna get anywhere in the long run. This has ended up being so much bigger than what I thought it was going to be. Coaching with Priyanka is unlike any other experience that you'll probably ever have with your weight loss journey and more just your life, and you're going to receive a lot more than you expect. I'm super thankful. That I decided to join your program. I knew I had to do something different, and this obviously was very different.

  Dr. Priyanka Venugopal: Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out that you don't need to have a stress-free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses. With true strategy, we will game change how we show up, and how we hit our goals. If you wanna take what you are learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com, and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.