Episode 149: Take Back Your Time ⏱
Feeling stuck with how to better manage your time and actually move the needle with your projects? This episode is for you!
Today we'll be discussing ways to take back your time and better manage your week.
Keep listening to hear:
Effective steps to take before your week begins to map out your goals
What to ask yourself before charging ahead with your day
Why you need to set intentions for how you set intentions (so meta)
How your energy management will affect your time and productivity
Ways to be more productive this week that won't require hustling or flirting with burnout
Links Mentioned During the Show:
Shareable Quotes:
Feel free to share these on social media!
Transcript:
You know that sticky stuck feeling where it doesn't seem like you can create some momentum in your week or you've just started working on a task and already an hour went by and you're like, where has the time gone? This week we're going to be talking about some effective of ways that you can take back your time, not only with time management, but we'll also be talking about managing your energy and what you really need to consider before you actually take action and spend your time every day. Keep on listening for some helpful tips to help you take back your time this week and be more productive.
Welcome to the mindful productivity podcast. I'm your host Sarah Steckler and this is the place to be, to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me. As we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts now.
Welcome back to the show. You are listening to episode 149 of the Mindful Productivity Podcast, and I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. Before we get into all of the things we're going to be talking about today, when it comes to effectively taking back your time and better managing your time, I want to talk about one thing that can be a symptom of struggling to get things done or leaving the end of your day feeling like you haven't really accomplished much. And that can be just feeling overwhelmed, having a very cluttered mind, a cluttered brain and not knowing how to even prioritize or how to even begin to focus. So the first thing I want to recommend, if you're in this headspace where you're like, I don't even know where to begin, then trying out some of these strategies today might not be as effective as they would be if you do this one thing first. So my big recommendation to you is to first do a brain dump. And if you're wondering where to start or how to effectively do this, I highly recommend going back to episode 138 of the podcast where I walk you through a guided brain dump to get you started doing this on a regular basis.
I love to do this just about every single day for both my personal life and my business will allow you to really declutter your brain, take out some of that mental plaque, so to speak, and then gain clarity. And when we have clarity, we can have momentum and create momentum in what we want to work on. This is also a process that I have created for you inside the Daily Productivity and Brain Dump book which is available on Amazon. You can also find it by going mindful productivity podcast. This is now the best selling journal or planner that I have available. It has surpassed the Mindful Productivity Guide in sales this month so far this year. And people are telling me that it is so simplified and helpful that they are actually able to use it every day in their business to help them declutter their mind. So that is the first thing I want to tell you is that that is the number one place to start. In fact, most of the time if you're thinking about doing anything, it can be so incredibly helpful to do a brain dump before you even get started in planning out a project or an idea you have or even a big move in your household.
Anything like that brain dumps can help you more than you may even realize. So here's the thing about time management. Time management relies heavily on your ability to manage your energy because it doesn't matter what kind of plan you have, if you feel burnt out or if you just don't have the energy mentally, physically, whatever, then you won't be able to effectively use your time. It's also important to realize that time is something that's kind of hard to measure, right? Like, we have it, but it's not something that we can tangibly hold in our hand or look at. And so sometimes it's easy for it to, quote, unquote, get away from us. It's easy to feel like we don't have a hold on it or a grasp on it. But I want to point something out because if you go to Google and you look up effective time management skills, there's a number of things that come up and a number of strategies that pretty much everyone across the board is going to agree with, right? When it comes to time management, people are going to talk about skills like prioritization, delegation, decision making, multitasking goal setting, problem solving, strategic thinking, scheduling, all of these things.
Isn't it interesting though, that these are all things that you are most likely doing before you spend your time, before you take action on something? So a lot of time management actually happens before you're actually in the time that you want to manage. So today we're going to be talking about some of those things that you can do to get started so that when you think about this week ahead, you actually have a better idea. So that's the first thing I want to touch on is that part of the reason why you may be having trouble managing your time is because you're not getting clear on how much time you actually have. We will tell ourselves that we have tons of time. I know when I have a quote unquote free day in my business where I don't have any calls, I'll be like, I've got like 810 hours possibly of time in front of me. I can get anything done. But the truth is we have to actually look at what time is available to us because I know that when my husband gets home at 05:00 p.m., I'm not really going to want to do any more work and there's not going to be something that happens past that time for me, no matter what I tell myself at 08:00 a.m..
So it's really important to look at not only what your day looks like, but realistically, how much time do you actually have available to you and how much of that time can you actually use effectively, it doesn't matter if you are in a vacuum, right? Like if you had a room and no one was going to distract you and nothing was going to come in and you had everything in front of you and you weren't going to have to use the bathroom or drink any water. Like. Let's just say you could be a time productivity robot for a day if even if you had no distractions. You're still a human being. Right? You're still going to have to take breaks and some of the tasks or projects that you're going to work on are going to require different amounts of energy and effort on your part. I know for me, there are certain tasks that I do in the back end of my business that require very little mental energy and so I could hypothetically work on them all day long and leave the day not really feeling any more mentally tired or exhausted. On the other end, when I'm doing things like curriculum development in my courses, creating new stuff, or even creating content like this podcast, I know that I'm limited in my capacity.
Even if I had eight back to back perfect hours of time to record and batch podcast episodes, I know that that is not actually a sustainable thing that would actually be possible. I've tried it the most amount of podcasts I've been able to record in a day to date, I think is about four. And that is after doing all the research ahead of time, I just couldn't talk anymore and it just made me feel like anything I put out after that wasn't going to be effective. So even though people may give you all these different strategies, right, like have a time batching day or a time blocking day, that might not work for you. Because for a lot of people, creating a month's worth of content in one day is not something that you can actually do. It sounds good in theory, but it's not going to work, right? It's kind of like how maybe you want to go on a run every day or let's say you want to run 2 miles every day throughout the week or throughout Monday through Friday, right? You're not going to be able to run all of those all of those miles on Saturday, right?
We don't batch our days with our personal lives in the same way we don't go, well, I'm going to run 20 miles on Saturday morning instead of running 2 miles every day or whatever I can't math. My point is that we expect ourselves as creatives to do these similar things or we think, well, I can batch content once every couple of days and do that, but all these other people are telling me that I could do a month worth in a day, so maybe I should do that. You really have to get clear on what works for you because a lot of these strategies are going to be more like neurotypical ways of doing things. And depending on how your brain works, you may have to use a different way of doing things. And again, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if your way is different. It's really about when it comes to mindful productivity. It's about figuring out what works for you and sticking to it. So as you can tell, this podcast episode isn't going to be about telling you that every Tuesday you should be doing this whole thing every Tuesday or that you have to work a certain way in your business or you should have a perfect morning routine.
Again, it's going to depend on you. But there are some things that I think across the board can be helpful. So I want to get into some of those right now. The first thing that I want to talk about in terms of really taking back your time is trying to figure out what decisions that you can make ahead of time. And I don't just mean in your business, I mean down to the very basics. In the past couple of weeks, I have decided that I'm no longer going to struggle with what to eat for breakfast. For example, some days I would wake up and I would just be like, I don't even know what I want to make. I would have a bunch of different ideas in my head so I wouldn't eat breakfast and then I would get to work. And then in about one or two, I'd be like so famished and shaky and upset that I didn't eat breakfast. To the point where I said, okay, if I were to make this decision ahead of time for myself, that would really help me out. So here's what I do now. Right now I am currently eating a certain amount of oatmeal.
Every morning I make like half a cup of oatmeal. It has so much water, I have a banana and peanut butter and flaxseed over it. And that's my breakfast. And so I don't think about it. And it's nice because now it's kind of an autopilot thing. I get up, I go on my walk, I make my oatmeal, I sit down with a cup of coffee and then I get to work. And because that idea or that decision has already been made for me by myself, it doesn't take up any more mental capacity in my brain. It's the same reason why you heard people like steve Jobs, he would wear the same outfit all the time right now. That doesn't mean that you need to make your life super boring and have all black sweatshirts and pants in your wardrobe and that's all you wear every day. But there can be some critical things that you make, decisions that you make in your life that can be very helpful, right? It could be helpful for you to decide what meals you're going to have in the beginning of the day, and then maybe every week your dinners are different.
It could be helpful to know that Mondays and Tuesdays are the days that you have calls in your business. That's for me personally, it could be helpful to know that you prefer to work in the mornings and then you definitely need either an afternoon break or a nap or whatever. Get clear on what things are working for you now and try to make all of those decisions ahead of time. It can also be helpful to make decisions ahead of time about what your space needs to look like. So number two here is really setting up your space for a productive and distraction free environment. This is really going to help you take back your time. I find that this happens a lot with my desk in my office especially. I'll let things pile up throughout the week and then Monday morning will hit. And right now I have calls with my publish with purpose students and I can't tell you how many times, like half an hour, an hour before my call, I'm going, oh crap, I have to totally clean up my desk. Otherwise I'm not going to have room for this, that and the other.
If I already did that ahead of time and made decisions ahead of time to clear my space on Sunday evening, then it wouldn't be in that little kerfuffle the morning of. So take time to think about decisions that you can make to create a productive space and what that might look like for you. The other thing about taking back your time is to plan your week ahead. And I know you've heard this. It's something, it's one of those trite pieces of advice that productivity people give out. But it really can be helpful. And I will tell you that when I don't take time on either Sunday night or Monday morning to really think about what I'm working on this week, then most of the time those things don't get done right. It's why people that write down their goals and what they want to accomplish in life tend to have a better probability of actually accomplishing them because it's on their radar. Now, planning out your week doesn't have to be something where it's this long planathon or you spend more time planning, right? I almost call it like planning porn. It can be so fun to look up videos about how to plan or watch other people plan on YouTube, whether it's using project management systems or a physical planner.
And it can also be really fun to get caught up in the planning yourself. But planning out your week does not have to take a long time. In fact, even just giving yourself 15 minutes to ask yourself, what am I going to focus on this week? What are the objectives that I would like to reach and how can I keep myself accountable? Like, what will that time look like? Right? So for example, something like that for me could be I'm working on some new curriculum for a course that I'm revamping and that is going to be my main focus for the week. The objectives of that could be creating a finalized outline, creating a launch strategy plan or something like that. And then maybe the ways that I'm going to be doing that are you going to spend this chunk of time on Tuesday and Wednesday focusing on that and then checking in on how close you are to finalizing those two things, right? And again, it's even just telling yourself how much time you want to allocate to something so it doesn't have to be a ton of time. And I also really recommend that you're not planning out your whole week to the brim, right?
You're not saying, okay, like from 08:00 A.m. To 11:00 p.m., every second, every hour of the day, these are all the things I'm going to do because that's not realistic and you're going to get frustrated. Instead, I recommend giving yourself a plan for your overall project objective and then how that might break down into one productive hour every day that you're going to be working. If you want some tips on how to make this work and have one productive hour a day, then you can go back and listen to episode 126 of the podcast. It was actually the most popular episode on the Mindful productivity podcast in 2020. So now we've established some of the main ways that you can take back your time and better manage your time. But I also want to talk about a couple of other things. So the next thing is that it can be helpful to this is kind of meta, but set intentions for how you want to set intentions, right? For some people, it makes sense to get up the day of and ask yourself a question like, how do I want to feel today? Or what's my main priority?
Or what do I really want to focus on? And setting an intention can be very helpful, or it can be helpful to set an intention and a focus for the week. So you get to decide how you want to set your intentions and what that might look like sometimes too, it could be as simple as creating reminders for yourself throughout the day. Hey, am I on track with my intention? How's it going? Right. Am I still focused on what I said I would do? Or did I go down a big spiral and see something shiny and start working on a different idea? So asking yourself how you want to set intentions is also incredibly important. Okay, another good important point to talk about is creating a fallback plan for yourself. So again, it's not planning out your day or planning out your week so much so that it has to be perfect. Otherwise you've quote unquote, failed. Creating a fallback plan means that if you notice that you wake up on a Wednesday and let's say if you're someone who menstruates, you're starting your period and you're totally exhausted, right? It's happened to me many times.
You want to have a fallback plan for things that you can do instead. So if you're someone that does creative work in your business and you need a specific part of your brain to do that work, if that part of your brain is not available to you because of stress or because of lack of sleep or because the dog woke you up all night, another thing can happen. Then you want to make sure that you have a fallback plan so you're still moving the needle forward in your business and the trajectory of your goals. So having a fallback plan can be very helpful. To give you an example of this, I have a list and it's more like an ongoing focus project of tasks that I can do on the back end of my business that require very, very little mental energy, not much creative thought. In fact, many of them, and most of them are all based off of standard operating procedures. So SOPs and workflows things that I've already documented in my business that I can go right into and start working on and I don't have to think about it because there's a checklist that literally tells me everything to do.
So if I'm having a slow day or I'm just not feeling it or maybe I have some kind of memory come up that's like super triggering and I'm just like I can't today. I'm just so sad. Whatever. Then I still have a project that I can work on and I can still make progress in maintaining some of the aspects of my business. Creating a fallback plan is incredibly helpful. And I also think it's also very important to give yourself space in between your productivity time, space to rest, space for breaks, right? Space to take a nap. You get to tell yourself what that looks like but give yourself bubbles of padding in between your projects. Don't just go hustle, hustle, hustle the whole week and then wonder why Friday night you're super exhausted and you can't even keep your eyes awake to watch the latest Netflix movie. You have to make sure that you're creating sustainable time for yourself so that you can really move the needle and be productive. So creating a fallback plan not only includes creating those more routine tasks that you can work on or focus on, but it also means that you're giving yourself space in between things to be able to really be sustainable with your work.
So really, ultimately, when it comes to taking back your time, it really is a matter of making your decisions ahead of time, thinking about the structure of your week, taking into account anything that may be happening, and really also honoring your energy. So let's say that you have a busy week coming up and maybe tomorrow you have quite a few calls on Zoom. If you're someone that gets invigorated by those calls, I wish I could be you. If that gives you more energy, then use that to your advantage, right? Make sure that you also are planning other tasks that may be more energy heavy in terms of what they require from you and make those things coincide. If you're like me, for example, though, where Zoom calls and one on one meetings or those kind of things really drain your energy and take things out of you and you're kind of left really needing to refill your cup, then make sure you're not adding a lot on your plate either that day or the day after. I know for me, even when I do big group calls in my business the next day, I typically am tapped out with my creativity and my ability to really think very clearly.
So that's not a day that I'm going to record a podcast. That's not a day that I'm going to work on curriculum. That's not even a day that I'm going to really show up heavily on social media. It's more of an inward day where I'm going to take things slow and I'm going to work on easier tasks in my business. I hope this episode and some of these tips were helpful for you this week. If you've been enjoying the Mindful Productivity Podcast, then please make sure to leave a written review on Apple podcasts that helps out the show and lets other people find it as well. Thank you so much for listening. We will be back next week with a brand new episode and as always, you can find more resources and all of the programs that I currently have available to boost your productivity.
