Episode 170: How I Use Weekly Theme Days in my Business

Having Weekly Theme days in my business has allowed me to create more focus and energy management as I work through my focus projects. It's less about what each day is and more so the permission and container each day provides that allows me to truly focus on one thing at a time without feeling as scattered or distracted by other equally as important priorities.

Join me for this episode where I'll be walking you through some of my current theme days, how they help, important considerations, and some ideas for better managing your own time and energy.

Links mentioned during the show:

• Create your own 4x6" Pocket Planner during our next LIVE round inside Publish with Purpose.

• Grab the Planner Publishing Guide here.

+ Click to Expand & Read Transcript

Hey. Hey. You're listening to episode 170 of The Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. And this week we're gonna be talking about how I use weekly theme days in my business to structure out my focus, projects, my tasks, and how I give my brain permission to focus. Because I'm very creative, I would consider myself a multipassionate. It's very hard to get myself to focus sometimes and creating a container of space where it's like this is the main thing you're going to be working on has really been helpful in my business.

So if you're interested in learning more about theme days and how you can use them yourself and maybe tweak some of the ideas I share with you, then keep on listening.

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 Kos and to calm and start your days with intentions, 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.

Hello, friends.

Welcome back to the podcast.

I thought I'd do something a little bit different this week and give a little update on a couple things I've been listening to, reading, watching and drinking. Just in case you were curious. Maybe you'll find something fun. I always like to hear about what other people are doing, because then I often hear about something I'm like, I want to check that out, too. So the first thing and in no way am I sponsored by them, obviously, but I'm a big coffee drinker. Love coffee. I will straight up just drink black coffee all day every day.

But I think it's important to note that when I say black coffee, me and my husband make a giant pot in a very cheap coffee maker that I think we bought at Walmart for, like, $18, and we put six tablespoons of ground coffee in an entire pot. I think that's important to notice or note because I feel like people make coffee a variety of different ways, and we make our black coffee pretty mild, so we're able to drink it black where I think some people make it so incredibly strong that it's so bitter that it's not enjoyable to drink without anything in it.

So that's important to note that when I'm drinking black coffee, it's probably maybe a little bit more diluted to some people, I don't know. And as much as I love my black coffee, I have been driving a lot more to Starbucks. I think the pandemic kind of started this because there wasn't a whole lot for me to go and do. So going to the drive through at Starbucks became this event type thing that I would do at least once a week. I would take Bella, she'd get a little pup cup and it's fall now here in the Pacific Northwest.

And I recently tried, and I'm not the biggest Trier of new things. Like, out in the wild, my husband will always be like, oh, there's a new drink on the menu. New thing. I'm gonna try it where I'm kind of like, stick to my tried and true things that I like. For example, when I was little, anytime we go to a restaurant, as soon as I found something on the menu that I liked, I would literally order that every single time for the rest of each entity.

And I would rarely, ever try anything else ever. And so I'm trying to get better about trying new things. Anyway, my husband tried the new Starbucks has this new Apple crisp. I think it's a macchiato. It's like an ice to drink. And he tried it. And it is incredible. I'm not a big fan of the pumpkin spice latte. It's too much. It's too much sugar. It's just a little much for me, but the Apple crisp and it's, like, layered. So you definitely want to make sure you mix it or even stir it.

But it has these different layers to it a flavor, and it feels like your, you know, those commercials where, like, someone eats a piece of chocolate and they're taken into an Oasis, like a forest. And you're like, Well, that's never my experience. That's how this drink felt. It was like going into a fall, like for escape with little Foxes running around. And I love it. So I got another one today. It was like, my second one I bought. I really been enjoying it. So that's the first thing that's been my little treat recently.

The other thing that I have been up to lately is I got really into the I think it's on FX. It's the American True Crime series and season three just released not too long ago. All about Clinton's impeachment. Right way back in the nineties, I was very little. I think I was, like, ten if that maybe eight when this all went down. So I remember hearing about all of it with Monica Lewinsky, but never really knew the full story. Like, now that I'm older, I can see, oh, my gosh, like, so much of her side wasn't told, like, she really, you know, like, they did her dirty in a lot of ways.

And I've been really interested in hearing more about what happened. And now that I'm an adult, I can see all the corruption involved and how so much of the media took it. Anyway. The point is, I've been really into learning more about this. So I started watching that series again. I think it's season three of that show. It's called Impeachment, and I've really been loving it. I think I really love shows where they do such a good job of reenacting real people, like seeing Paula Jones like, the way she speaks is spot on.

I think Clive Owen plays President Clinton, and that's wild and beanie. I can't remember her last name. She's the sister of the guy from Super Bad. This is how great I am in names. She plays Monica Lewinsky. She's amazing. And Sarah Paulson plays Linda Trip. And you can't even recognize your point is been really into that. So I've been watching that. And they've been releasing a new episode like every Tuesday. I watch it on demand, and because I can't binge through it, I've been really impatient.

So I started last night. I actually started watching there was like another documentary about the Clinton saga, and I've been watching that. So I've been really big. That's been my little hyperfocused thing for the past week or so has been learning all about that. The other thing I'll update you on is that we are going to be running a new live round of published with purpose. So if you're new, this is your first time hearing about it. I run a program where I teach students how to create and format and self publish their own Journal or planner on Amazon.

And there's some really big, fun, huge updates happening right now. In fact, you can now create and publish hard cover books and journals and planners, which is a game changer, something my students have been asking. Is that ever going to be an option for a long, long time? Now it is so quickly making tutorials on the back end so that they can create those as well. But this fall, we usually run two live, 60 day sprint rounds every year. So all of the materials are inside the program, like, you can go through the course and just do the thing.

But if you want access to live weekly calls and support and ideas with other creatives, then we do two live rounds that are eight weeks every year. Well, this fall I created something a little bit different in my business. I created a pocket planner, and this is a four by six inch planner, and it's called a pocket list planner. You can find it on my website. But essentially, I wanted a place to house all of my reference lists, like, typical grocery lists. I wanted, like, mental health checklist, all those kind of things.

So they're now in this one little booklet that I can carry around with me. And it works perfectly because it fits in a lot of my a six size planner covers that I carry around. And so I made that. And my students were like, oh, that's really fun. And I was like, what would you all think if we did a live mini round where we walked through exactly how to create something like this? It could be a planner, it could be a guide. And what if I made it really easy with templates and a preformatted cover so you could literally just take your ideas, put them in there and upload it right away and not have to worry about or my margins.

Right. Right. Or what are all the things I need to consider with all of that? So we're gonna be doing that. People were like, yes, let's do it. So October 18 through November of this year, we're going to be doing a three week mini live round, and it's going to be really fun. It's going to be structured a little bit differently than most of our calls. So usually we do Q and A calls. This time, I'm actually going to be walking people through step by step what we're going to be doing.

And if you're listening to this podcast in the future and you're like, oh, I want to do that. Everything is going to be in the program. So if you decide to enroll later, we're going to have all the replays up of this. We'll have all the tutorials, the Canva templates, everything in there for you. And maybe I'll run another live round of this or creating different types of sizes of custom planners. We'll see. But I'm excited to experience and try this new thing. So as I always say, everything in life in business is a big experiment.

You got to go out there and try it, see what works. It doesn't. So I'm excited to report back on how that live round works and how it goes. And if you do want to learn more about publishing your own planner, you can always go on over to publish a planner. Com guide, and you can grab my free planner publishing guide. You can learn more about the process that I use. Okay. So let's get into theme days and how I use these now, this is not necessarily time blocking.

So there's times in my business where I will time block out my actual day in chunks. And I love to do this with Google calendar. Sometimes I'll also do this in paper planners or something like that where I'm blocking out, like, okay, from like, eight to ten. You're doing this with my life and the way my brain works, time blocking ahead of time can be very intentional. But what actually happens or how often I get distracted? Those time blocks rarely look as perfect and pristine as they do on paper or in my Google calendar.

So one thing I have done throughout my business is have, like, a theme day where specific day of the week or a specific day of the month. I'm podcasting or doing batch content or something like that. But what I recently started experimenting with was depending on what I have going on, like a certain focus project that I'm working on. The kind of like on either Saturday or Sunday. I create a theme for every day of the week. Coming up Monday through Friday, I basically give every day of the week a bigger picture theme, and then what that allows me to do is break down all of my tasks and put them into those buckets.

That also really helps me, too. Like I said in the intro, because I really struggle with struggle with time management. But I also struggle with focusing on one thing and making it a priority when I know that there are other things in my life in business that could easily be just as important, or they could easily become the main priority themselves. But I have to decide we have to make these decisions of, well, today this is going to be the focus. When things are not necessarily more important than the other, they're all equally important in getting me to my goal.

I really struggle with where to start from. So creating these theme days during the week lets me know that by the end of the week, by the end of Friday, you'll accomplish everything, but you'll be more focused. And so Monday, you can just focus on this one aspect of something. And then Thursday, you can focus on this, and it allows me. And it has kept me from being as scattered in my business. So I don't know if you relate to that. I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I'm going to walk through the five theme days that I've been using the past couple of weeks, and again, these change.

So these are not, like, set in stone themes within my business. Some of them definitely are more consistent than others, but we'll just jump into it, and I'll show you kind of like what I've been doing. So I have five theme days that I've been working through, and the first one is Monday. So the past couple of weeks, Mondays, I have been using specifically for podcast, batching and content planning. And one thing I will say is that I have to be in a space in my business where I know what's coming to be able to make this work.

So a little behind the scenes, the way I create my content is I basically use my podcast as a creative outlet, and it relates to my business. I talk about the things I offer. I talk about my journals and planners and such, but I also use it as a place to talk about things that I'm really passionate about, or I think would be fun. Or I'll get DMs from some of you on Instagram being like, oh, could you talk about this? And I'm like, yeah, let's do it.

They're not always topics that relate directly to an offer. They're not always topics that relate to something specific in my business or my niche, but I was like, if I'm gonna run my business and I'm gonna be sustainable with what I do and I'm gonna create something and a business model that continually brings me joy, then I have to do this for fun. Like, the podcast has to light me up. I mean, we're on episode. I say we and I mean me. I'm on episode 170 of this podcast.

I have not been able to do this just about every week for the past over three years. Now, I can't mask I have not been able to do that because I followed some strict regimen and made all these rules. I have allowed myself creative opportunity. I've allowed myself to be goofy. I've allowed myself to talk about where I stand, my values, things that are really fun, things that relate to just being a human. That's what's made it fun. Coming back to this theme day, podcast, batching and content Planning I have to be in a place in my business where I kind of know what I want to talk about, and I don't always necessarily have the podcast episode itself relate to something I'm selling.

What I typically do is create fun topics that I know people want to listen to. And then when I'm about to launch something or promo something, I usually will do my own kind of ad at the beginning or the end of podcast episodes, or I'll create a call to action in my email newsletter or on Instagram. Right. I'm calling in people's attention by providing what I think is really fun and valuable content for free on the podcast. And then when I have something that I'm doing and I want to invite people to it, I do.

So my content always doesn't necessarily directly relate to that, but it's semi relatable. I hope that makes sense. And I think that maybe that's a little bit different than what most people tell you to do or teach you to do. Like if you're going to be talking about publishing purpose there and how to create a planner, then make sure that you have eight weeks of episodes that are always about planners. And I don't know. I mean, that could be helpful, right? But it's not something I'm Super passionate about talking in terms of like it is something I'm Super passionate about talking about.

But there's other things within those weeks that I definitely would want to touch on. So anyway, that's kind of like my mindset around that. But coming back to the actual theme day. Oh, we want a tangent. This Mondays have been podcast batching and content planning, and this involves several different things. So, for example, last week, a lot of this was more kind of like outlining some of the stuff and not necessarily recording. So within podcast batching, creating content, there's obviously different elements and steps to that.

So the theme of that day is that. But what happens in that day can vary. Sometimes it's recording, sometimes it's editing. Sometimes it's figuring out if I want to have some new guests in who I want them to be. Right. So those things all relate to podcasting. But that also gives me some flexibility. So some days I'm really on and I feel like talking a lot. And other days I don't think I could record anything to save my life. And so if a Monday hits and that's my theme and I don't feel like actually recording, I know that I can still work on the podcast outlines, and that gives me room and space to do that and then help me move the needle towards being consistent with all of that.

Moving on to Tuesdays Tuesdays I've been using as my organization and planning day. I also noticed just energy wise that Tuesdays are a little bit slower, and I typically don't have as much stamina. There's something about Monday morning where I get really excited and I get up and I'm like, it's brand new week, and I love what I do, and I often end up kind of cleaning our apartment and stuff between breaks of working. And so I kind of tire myself out a little bit. And Tuesdays I noticed I don't get up with that same vigor and enthusiasm, so it's a little bit slower.

I usually take my time, and that's when I really kind of like to step back and do a little bit more bigger picture planning and organization and my business. So when I say organization and planning day, I'm literally organizing my office or moving things around or organizing parts of my notion where it's gotten messy because I definitely have a dump page in notion where I don't necessarily know where something's gonna go, but it's gonna go in my residence calendar or something. I need a day where I can kind of come back to all that stuff and be like, Where is this going?

Do you need to come back to this stuff? I also use this planning day for bigger picture planning. Like you said you wanted to do a launch this time a year, or you said you were thinking about this. What do you need to kind of consider? And so it's a lot of bigger picture kind of stuff. Like, basically, if my business is the ship, I'm like, are we still like, we're floating here? We still do. We want to steam ahead here. Do we want to slow it down?

What are some barriers that we might run into, hopefully in alliance? You know what I'm saying? That's kind of what my Tuesdays look like onto Wednesdays. And again, these are all interchangeable. I mean, you could have your organization day on Friday. Who cares? Right? But this is what I've been doing. So Wednesdays, I've been using as my learning day, and this actually was of much interest to many of you. I got a lot of kind of just like messages or comments like, hey, could you talk more about a learning day because love brilliant.

And I'm sure a lot of people do this. But having a learning day in my business is a day where I'm going through materials or courses I purchased or templates, or I'm going through, like, YouTube videos that I've been wanting to watch. It is a day of receiving. It's also a day to give myself full permission to not have to do anything. You don't have to create anything. You don't have to use your brain. You don't even have to ask yourself after learning something. Well, how might I implement this in my business?

No, you're just taking notes, watching videos, listening, reading, whatever medium it is and you're just absorbing. I turn into a sponge on Wednesdays. So a lot of times this is a great day to go on a walk and listen to things. But whatever it takes to just just learn. And I find that this really gives me, like a midday mental energy boost because I only have so much creative brain energy every week. And taking Wednesday is kind of like the hump day to stop doing and start receiving allows my brain this really big, lovely break.

And then I also end up getting so many more creative ideas later because I'm not just constantly turning this wheel of like you have to do do do am giving myself that opportunity to take in information from other people. And that's really lovely. So currently, right now, I'm going through a bigger program, and this has been my day to kind of catch up on materials, watch videos, take notes, and I don't rush through it. I've got the whole day to do this. So when I learn there's often, I often have to kind of pause videos or re listen to them.

I will often read something or listen to something and then find that I have not actually been understanding any of it, like, three minutes will go by and I'm like, okay, I was literally listening to this, but my brain was thinking about making lasagna and taking Bella on a car. So I've got to go back. So that is what Wednesday is. It's a lot of giving myself time and space to really digest information and stay focused there. And then that's also really a lovely touch point in my business to be like, Are you going through the courses that you bought?

Are you going through these things? I've got a whole notion page in my setup that's basically all of the courses, tools, subscriptions, anything I've ever bought, and then all of my access to them. And then they're all organized by are they about marketing? Are they about content creation? Are they about self love? Are they about whatever? So I can go in there at any time and be like, what am I working on? And I've got places to track my progress and stuff too. So on to Thursdays, Thursdays are my curriculum creation and program update days.

So this works out really well because as I mentioned, I just got done with a learning day. So I've been absorbing stuff, and now I'm usually ready. I'm, like, ready to go. We're ready to create, take things out of my brain, put them on the paper, put them into a plan of action. So on these days, I'm checking back in with curriculum within my bigger programs, and what I need to update or create published with purpose is a beast in the things in the publishing space are always changing.

So there's really not a month that goes by where something isn't being tweaked or looked at, or I'm adding in like, hey, you also need to be aware about this or blah, blah, blah blah. Like when we have the pandemic, there was some delays with shipping, and I need to update students about. And now that's not as big of an issue, but maybe it will be again, all these things that need to be updated and then I also take a look at bigger program updates and what needs to come first and all of that.

So this is different than my podcast batching and content planning, because while that Monday is for external content and marketing material, kind of stuff like content marketing Thursdays and the curriculum and program updates that's really internal content. So things that only my students have access to important updates I need to share with them behind the scenes stuff, all of that. So that's really, really important, because that's what people are paying me for in my business. That's what's running my business. So having this day is really crucial to making sure that all of that makes sense.

And as programs evolve as more and more students go through materials, there's definitely tweaks that I make to make things even easier. Right? Or I go, oh, we don't necessarily need to understand that in module one, we're going to omit that completely or that's going to get moved over over here. Or people don't really use this one training that much. So I'm gonna put it in a bonus section and link to it. Right. All those kind of things are taken into consideration on these days. And then we come to Fridays.

I love Fridays during the weekend. In my business, I usually kind of take a half day and a lot of times. What will happen is I'll just be so excited about the weekend and my husband getting time off for the weekend that'll usually take the afternoon off or kind of just stop working, cut out and take Bella on a bigger adventure to a park. So we try to go out to parks as often as we can, if not daily. But Fridays, I like to spend quite a bit more time.

So if the weather is decent too, this is usually a time where I'll go have a planning picnic. And if you follow me on Instagram over at Mindful Productivity Blog, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I love to take some planners, some journals, some stickers and washi tape, and head to the park under gazebo at a picnic table, sometimes with an actual blanket and do a bunch of planning. And I love that but before I get to that part of my day, Fridays are my weekly PulsePoint checkin and Journal time, and I've talked about this a lot.

I talk about this inside of some of my programs, and this whole layout and template will be included in Pretty Productive Life that's in the works. More on that later. But my weekly poll point check in is a time where I go through a standard operating procedure of checking different metrics in my business, checking in on how things are working. I've got a lot of integrations and tech stuff on the back end. So I'm making sure that you convert kit is talking to member Vault and all these kind of things and making sure that when students enroll, they're getting access and any tech glitches.

But I'm also checking in with what feels good in my business. So I have some different different journaling prompts I go through. Like, one thing I've really been stepping back from is pressuring myself to be on Instagram as much. So I still check in with myself like, hey, what's working? Are you seeing sales or community growth from being on there? What's different about your engagement? What changes when you're on stories more than feeling the need to post every day, all that kind of stuff. So I have all these different things that I check in with myself.

And then that's really nice because over time I can kind of see what's working and what's not. I can also see all my numbers and metrics and tapping into emotionally what feels good is important. But then I also love seeing all these numbers and stats because I think it's really important when you run a business and make decisions that affect your income and your profit. To look at numbers right to not only make decisions in your business based off of emotional stuff because, well, that's really important.

And I love to feel like aligned in that way. Numbers tell a very great, big, deep story that we often overlook and often times looking at numbers and metrics can completely reduce, if not eliminate, certain anxiety that I feel or certain perceptions or assumptions that I'm making in my business. And so that's really, really important. So Fridays are all about doing that. So was this helpful? I'd love to know sometimes it can be really fun. Just get an inside look at how other people do things and what other people consider.

So I hope this gives you some inspiration for maybe your own theme days depending on your life and business model. And I hope you give yourself permission to be flexible and experiment with your business, with your time, with your energy. We won't know until we try something new. So thank you so much for listening to the podcast. As always, you can find more resources, planners and everything else over at Mindful Productivity blog. Com. And I hope you have a great week and I will see you back here next Monday.