Episode 169: The Simple Standard
Productivity is often overcomplicated. Build a giant system, find the perfect online tool, make it look appealing. There's an expansion in coming back to simplicity, an allowance that encourages us to escape the never-ending cycle of perfectionist planning and instead, lets us surface the tasks we need so we can take sustainable action.
In order to be productive we must be aware of 5 things which we'll be covering in this podcast episode, they are:
The Simple Standard is simply this:
What is taking up space in your mind? (Clarity)
What do you want to accomplish? (Outcome)
What are the tasks needed to reach that outcome? (Actions)
What kind of effort will those tasks require from you? (Energy)
When do you need to complete them by? (Time)
I can't wait to walk you through this process and remind you of how simple productivity can actually be.
Additional Resources:
+ Click to Expand & Read Transcript
You're listening to episode 169 of The Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. And in this episode we're gonna be talking about the Simple Standard, which is all about coming back to simplifying your productivity and coming back to the basics of what you need to do on a regular basis to accomplish your goals and reach your project outcome. Productivity is often super overcomplicated. Right. We're thinking about building a giant system, finding the perfect online productivity tool, making it look good on paper or in notion. Right?
There's an expansion in coming back to simplicity. There's an allowance that encourages us to escape this never an e cycle of perfectionist planning, and instead let's us surface the tasks we need so we can take sustainable action. Keep listening today if you want to learn how to optimize your projects and learn how to plan them out in a way that honors your mental energy and your energy capacity. Walking through the five different pillars of the Simple Standard and you can learn more about how you can take action and use this process yourself.
Let's go ahead and get into it.
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 podcast. I'm really excited to talk to you today about what the Simple Standard is and how you can use it and implement it today in your life and your business because there are so many areas that this will be applicable to before we jump into what the process is and how you can simplify everything. I want to just touch on why I think we tend to over complicate productivity all the time. Myself included. There are times when I really just want the perfect system, right?
I want this Pinterest or Instagram version of look at me. I'm being so productive, or I want to find the one magic way to do things. And just like running a business and being an entrepreneur, I truly believe that productivity and even things like studying are all based in an experiment, and when you can kind of adopt that mindset a little bit more, it becomes a little bit more fun, not as discouraging because to use the parallel of studying. For example, when I was in College and doing a lot more studying, I found that there were different ways to study for different topics.
Right? If I needed to take an exam that was a written exam, I would obviously study in a very different way than if I was doing a multiple choice exam, an oral exam or something like that. And in the same realm, productivity will change and shift depending on what you're working on. Is it a life goal? Is it a personal goal? Is it a business goal that requires you to sell or do a lot of marketing, right? I mean, those are obviously parts of running a business, but within your different business goals, you're going to also have different productivity plans and processes and standard operating procedures.
So I'm reminding you today to give yourself permission to experiment with productivity in my business. I do things so many different ways in terms of idea generation, capturing my thoughts. I use a variety of tools and planners. As you may know, I've created. I did quite a few planners at this point, so I use the Brain Down book daily. Right. I use my Mindful Productivity Guide for bigger picture, higher level planning. And if you want to get an idea of my process overview, you can also go back and listen to Episode 168, where I talk about my planning process in a bigger overview kind of way.
In sharing all of this, I think it can be powerful to come back to some simplicity within productivity and kind of back to basics, like remembering what productivity actually is. So the Simple Standard is a process that I created that is also now a hard cover planner that you can buy on Amazon. So I will link below this podcast where you can find it. And what I'm going to be walking you through today is going to help help you use that planner, but you can also utilize this regularly.
Right? You don't have to have the planner to do this. It's going to help you understand what you need to identify before you get started on a goal or a project. So let's go ahead and walk through some of the five steps. Well, v five Steps of what the Simple Standard is. There are five main questions within the Simple Standard and real quick, I'm going to go through the five main themes of them, and then we'll go through each one more in detail. So the simple standard includes clarity, outcome, actions, energy and time.
So what do all these mean? Well, the first one is getting clarity and gaining clarity on what you need to do. And the first way to do that, I truly believe is making sure that you make time to declutter your mind. So the big question here is what is taking up space in your mind? There are tons of ways to start projects, and you could obviously start mapping it out right away. But there's something really, really powerful about taking time to pause before you get started and map out what is currently taking up space in your mind.
So you guessed it. I am definitely going to encourage you to do a brain dump within this process. And inside the Simple Standard Planner, there are four sections in the front of every single project section that ask you four different questions to walk you through this process. What this essentially is helping you do is brain dump out your ideas. So it's a template that allows you to think about what are the current ideas that are in your head? What are the thoughts that may be taking up space in your mind?
What do you want to let go of that kind of stuff? Because when you can take time to do that, what you're telling your brain is we're capturing this information and we're putting it here. It's like safe and sound. And now you can focus on this. It's a lot like wanting to start playing basketball with a friend and saying, Well, I'm going to hold on to my coffee mug and my cell phone at the same time in both s of my hands, there was no way that you could dribble a basketball or shoot a hoop or any of that kind of stuff.
If you were doing that and doing a brain dump before you get started on your project is much the same way you're saying, hey, I'm going to put these things down. I'm going to free up my hands, free up my mind, and I'm going to gain that mental clarity. So that's step one, step two, is identifying your outcome. So what do you want to accomplish, right? Because productivity at the end of the day is essentially being able to identify y a goal, take action on it and see an outcome.
And within that, there's different elements that will touch on. But you really need to make sure that you're identifying what the outcome is. So the big question here is to ask yourself, what do you want to accomplish? I have been so guilty of starting different projects or coming up with different ideas in my business, only to not actually sit down and ask myself this question, right? I've got a brand new idea, or I want to create a brand new project or who have got a fun planner idea like, Whoa, hold the phone back up.
Press pause. What's the outcome that you actually want to accomplish with this, right? What is the outcome that this project or product that you're creating is also going to create for someone else, but essentially at the end of it, what do you want to see? What are you actually working towards? For example, let's say that a project you want to work on is more of an ongoing thing. And one of the things you want to work on is podcast batching. So you could totally write that your next project is podcast batching.
But then what's the outcome of it? Really right. So maybe the outcome could be I want to get ahead on my podcast by two months and I record a podcast every week. So I want to record eight podcast episodes, and I want those eight episodes to build, and I want to teach my audience something, a specific theme and lead them into my next course launch so that I can make business, make money in my business and keep doing what I love a much more clear outcome that is going to help you with the next step.
This process is a lot like creating a plan for a road trip, right? I love road trips. I love driving cross country. I think it's a lot of fun, but I wouldn't just get in my car and say, I'm going on a road trip. I'm driving cross country without knowing where my destination was, without knowing. Well, I want to go from this state to this state or from the West Coast to the East Coast. If I just started driving, I wouldn't have an end goal. And maybe your goal could be the process of exploring something without a plan.
That could be a whole other thing. But for this process, knowing where your destination is is going to allow you to map out different ways to get there. Because let's say that I want to drive from Washington to Maryland, something my husband and I did back in 2014, when we moved across the country. When we knew where we were going, we were able to map out our routes and say, okay, we could go this way. We could cut down through Idaho if we wanted to, or we could go down to the lower part of the States are higher, and we were able to map out what that looked like.
That allowed us to break down our road trip into our five or six days. I cannot remember how long it took, exactly. And then what kind of pace we wanted to take, where we might stop, what hotels we might be able to book ahead of time. And that just made the process that much easier when you're creating a project in your business or your life, it's much the same way once you've identified your outcome, it's also much easier to start identifying your tasks within it. That will get you from point A to point B.
So this is where we talk about step three, which is your actions. In other words, what are the tasks needed to reach that outcome that you've clearly defined for yourself? So coming back to the podcast batching example, we can now ask ourselves, okay, if I want to record eight podcast episodes and I want them to to lead into my next course launch. What are the different episode names that I might want to come up with? Right. So that could be a task is spending ten to 15 minutes brain dumping all of your podcast episode ideas.
Another task could be mapping out the titles for the podcast. Another task could be creating an outline for episode one, creating an outline for episode two. And within those tasks, right, you could have templates or standard operating procedures. I do this for my podcast there's a new template with a notion every time I create one that helps me map out the content I want to create, what research I might want to do, and then it's all in one place. So you may have more subtasks within tasks, but essentially you're mapping out this whole process, and the more that you can do this ahead of time, the better.
This doesn't mean that you have to know every single step that you're going to take. I'm a big fan of taking action and taking initiative when you can and not getting stuck in, like planning paralysis. However, the more that you can think about ahead of time, it's going to make it a little bit easier so that you kind of know what to do when especially if you ever have those days where you have the energy and the mental capacity to work and work towards this project.
But you don't maybe have the energy to think about what to do next. I hate that when I know I have a lot to do, but I'm like, where do I even get started? Why didn't I make myself a better plan? So mapping this out can be crucial for that step. Step number four is all about your energy. So the question here is, what kind of effort will those tasks require from you? This is a step that has been relatively new in my business the past couple of years and something I wish I had done throughout high school, College, grad school, all of that.
And that is identifying your energy. So in the planner, there is a whole task list where you're mapping out everything you need to do for your project. So there's a column for your due date, and that is do in terms of what are you going to actually do? It the task itself. And then there's a column for your energy level, marking it one through three. And one thing I like to do in this, too, is create or pick out a highlighter color for each level of energy that it takes.
So maybe green, yellow, and pink or something like that. And I will highlight different tasks, different colors depending on the amount of energy they take. So what do I mean by this? Well, there are definitely tasks within my business that require focus, but don't require a whole lot of my smart brain if you will like a whole lot of cerebral type of energy. They're not things where I'm creating brand new content or podcasting or need to eloquently describe what's going on in my brain. There are more things like entering a number in a Google sheet or copying a template and notion, or even some of the things within podcasting like exporting this podcast when I'm done with it and uploading it to my podcast host.
Those things don't require a ton of mental energy, but they're still very important, important tasks, and they all need to happen in a specific order by a specific time. So what I will often do when mapping out a project is I will write down all of my tasks that need to be completed, and then I will go back through and try to rate them by how much energy I think they might take. So one would be something like exporting the podcast. Two would be something maybe a little bit more involved, like maybe outlining something, and then three would be like, that's my most high energy, right?
Like hosting a call or being on Zoom or going live on Instagram those things that I only have so much capacity for, and I couldn't do 8 hours a day. And even if I only do a couple of those tasks in one day, I know that I'm going to only have that much more access to my creative brain for the rest of the day. Mapping out your energy level, then allows you to look at your project, and when we get into the next part, which is thinking about your time, you'll be better able to map out and schedule when you're going to do those tasks.
So if you have a project that's due within the next week, you don't have to put all of your high level energy tasks like level three tasks on the Friday before it's due. You could scatter them out so that you could pace your energy. Right. And prevent some of that burnout and prevent some of that mental fatigue. And I find that this step can be so incredibly helpful. It's also really great if you're having a slow day or for someone who mens rates and you have changing energy cycles throughout the month or something like that, or maybe just a mental health day.
I definitely get those a lot where I just wake up and like, Nope, it's not happening. Those are days where if you can work and you want to, you can choose all the level one task. So the tasks that are not very draining, then you still know that you're moving the needle towards your project and you can feel accomplished for that day as well and really just honor your energy cycles. I think it's so so impactful and important. So we're on to the fifth step already.
And that is time. And the question here is when do you need to complete these tasks by? Right. When do you need to complete all of these things by and again, you get to decide this if you're working for yourself, but it can be really helpful. And I know that me personally, I am deadline driven. So if I have a deadline for a bigger project in general and then I have deadlines for specific tasks that's going to motivate me. Maybe you're not deadline driven so you can figure out what might motivate you.
But knowing when you need to complete something by is important. But I also will say that I work best from go dates. So due dates in terms of when I'm going to actually take action. So instead of creating like a you need to create this outlined by Friday. I actually like to instead say you are actually going to do this outline on Wednesday and create the date of when I want to do it. And in this time category, you're not only thinking about when you want to do them by, but you're also getting an idea of your time estimate.
How much time might this take? So when you go to schedule these tasks in Notion Asana, Google calendar, however you do it, you then can know, okay, I'm going to do this task, but it's probably going to take me at least this much time, at least 20 minutes or maybe an hour or more. So doing that is going to allow you to create a realistic project plan for your project and not feel super stressed out because you won't be putting too many projects in a 30 minutes window, you'll be able to actually create them and get ahead of schedule if you can.
And what's great too, is that if the tasks take less time, then you can obviously keep going with them. So this is the simple standard. It is coming back to these five components and not getting so overwhelmed in using the right project management system. So in this planner for every project, there's 25 sections for space for 25 different projects. And in this planet I'll walk you through what these pages look like. So you're about to set up a project. So you open up the planner and you'll see in the beginning there is an upcoming projects page with lists for all of your 25 projects and the page numbers that they are on.
You'll be able to circle what quarter that project is in and write down what month you intend on working on it. Then when you get into a project section, there is a two page spread that you'll open into, and on the left is where you'll find that clarity page that's going to allow you to do a templated brain dump to really declutter your mind and find your focus for your project. The next page is your project page that has places for your project. Name a check box to check off when you're done with the whole project.
Due date time estimate type, which is either ongoing one time or variable recurring. I'll come back to that in a moment and then a place for your outcome where you'll write down your overall purpose, your specific result, or specific result within a given time frame, and then you'll find the task list, which includes those columns for your do date, your task, and your energy level. So there's quite a few places for you to write down quite a few tasks. In fact, you can write down up to 56 for project, which I think is great and then there's also another page for additional project notes.
So if you have some spillover tasks or you need to kind of get clear on some other stuff or Journal around something or make notes for your team. Anything like that, you have that space to do it there now real quick coming back to the type of project. I want to give you some real world examples because maybe you've listened to this and you're like, okay, this makes sense. This is simplified, yet somehow I still feel a little bit overwhelmed. I do want to walk you through some examples so you can know a little bit more about what I mean.
Now, when you think of a project, there are three main types, and I've identified them here as ongoing onetime and variable recurrent. I'll give you an example of each. So an ongoing project would be basic administrative tasks that you want to do on a regular basis and creating a project plan for this also is kind of like creating a standard operating procedure that you can come back to again and again. So for example, a project that I could use for an ongoing would be my weekly PulsePoint.
Check in.
I do this every single Friday inside of my business, and I have specific tasks that I do every single Friday. It takes me about 2 hours where I go through and I track my business expenses. I track my sales and my business. I check in with specific stuff in terms of the back end are all of my systems connecting and firing and working correctly. And then I also go through some Journal prompts to ask myself what went well this week. What can you learn from blah, blah, blah blah.
In this project page, I could map out all the tasks for my weekly post point check in, and then I could use this as a reference guide to come back to every single Friday. Another type of project is a one time project. So this would be something like doing a specific launch for a specific course in a specific month. Right. And again, going through this process, you may actually be able to take out a chunk of those tasks and reuse them as a standard operating procedure for another launch that you do.
But that is where you would break down all of the tasks for that specific thing. So maybe there's specific people that you're working with or specific ads or content marketing that you're doing. You can map out all those tasks within here. The third type of project is a variable recurring projects. So again, this could be podcast batching, maybe every couple of months or every month. On the second week of the month, you do a podcast batch where you batch anywhere from four to six podcast episodes, depending on your content plan and any upcoming launches.
And you've mapped it down to a T, and you've got a project for it. And there's all these tasks that you do to map out those four to six episodes. Now you've got a project that you can use again and again. It's variable recurring, because maybe it doesn't happen every month, but it definitely happens maybe at least four times a year in your business. When you do, it varies. But now you've got a plan for it. So I love this process so much, and you can also use it for personal stuff, too.
In your business. Sorry, I keep hitting the mic and holding up my planner pages here, but you could also do this for something like planning out a family vacation. For example, my husband and I are going to be going on some cabin trips throughout the end of the year. And so one of the things I could do is write a cabin trip as one of my project names, and I could write down as tasks like all the different things I need to pack and consider all the things we need to do before we leave.
I like making sure we have someone to come watch our cat and check in, making sure they have keys, making sure we have ice when we leave the day of all that kind of stuff. So you could have a whole project list in here and again. What's cool is that when you're done with this planner, you've then got 25 lists that you can come back to and tweak and you can either keep the process going or you can add them to a project management system, whatever you like.
But I find this really helpful because for my brain specifically, it can be so incredibly helpful to actually tangibly write things down. And I've talked about this in episode 168 as well, but it really helps my brain to actually do a little bit of duplication and write things down and then transfer them into a project management system. Or if I already have them in something online. Sometimes it helps me to come back to a journaler planner and rewrite them down. Not something that's ideal, obviously, but that really helps my brain understand what I'm doing and keep those things top of mind.
So I hope this episode was helpful and reminding you that coming back to simplicity with your productivity and your project planning is super important, and using these five steps is going to help you create an action plan for your projects and map them out in a way that allows you to take sustainable action towards reaching your goals. If you want to use the Simple Standard planner, you can now find it. It's available on Amazon. You can also go to Mindful Productivity blog. Com simple Standard that will take you to a page where you can find resources and links and a video where I will be walking you through the planner as well.
So I hope you have a wonderful week. I'll see you back here next Monday. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. And I'll see you soon.
