Nothing made me productive until I found this routine
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Don’t get it twisted…
I'm not a productivity extremist, I'm just a business owner with a lot on my plate and a lot of dreams I want to achieve!
Now last year I slipped into a very unproductive work routine.
I wasn't accomplishing the amount of work I wanted to, and I wasn't nearly as productive as I wanted to be either.
I had so many goals I wanted to reach, but somehow finding the time to make them happen, well, didn't happen.
Relate?
Or is it just me?
I made excuses for my poor productivity and blamed it on the fact that I had a ton of travel and a lot of calls at weird hours because of my time zone.
But regardless of my excuses, I knew I needed a complete reset of my work routine when I did my annual reflection in December.
I took myself away to a lovely hotel, ordered room service and got cozy with my usual Google doc full of reflection prompts that I go through annually.
If you want that reflection document by the way, grab it below!
After this weekend I knew if I was to have any chance of accomplishing my business goals this year, I needed a work routine change!
Now the first thing I realized I was totally failing at requires me to go vegan to demonstrate this to you.
Think of it like this.
If I decide to give up on my junk food diet and become a vegan, of course in order to actually be successful on my first day as a vegan I would need to find some vegan recipes and go buy some vegetables.
And yet if I never find the time to search recipes in a cookbook and go to the grocery store, what's going to happen?
Of course for dinner tonight, I'm going to end up at Macky Ds (insert your guilty pleasure fast food outlet here!) feeling terribly about myself.
You can make all the lofty goals you’d like, but without preparing, you’re giving yourself about a 100% chance of failure.
If you try to reset your routine without first identifying your goal and thinking up the list of tasks you would need to do to get you there, it's a little like when I open my fridge to cook a vegan meal without having any vegan recipes or any vegetables on hand.
If that happened, I'm not going to be successful as a vegan, instead I'll be unintentionally intermittent fasting or back at the closest fast food drive thru I can find.
“Can I have the McFlurry please”
People so often have identified the goal correctly, like make $250k annually, but they haven’t thought of the road to get there and what they need to actually DO to achieve the goal!
Like to make $250k a year online you’d need to grow an audience and make a digital product. The tasks to reach that goal are
1. Picking a scaleable marketing strategy,
2. Do said marketing strategy consistently and
3. Get those eyeballs onto an email list and
4. Make a digital product and
5. Launch the thing.
Just like becoming a vegan, you first need to prep by picking the tasks which will move you forward towards your goals and setting that work as a priority, instead of just letting whatever work which appears on your to do list be the priority.
But even if you manage the preparation phase, you still have a long way to go - you need to also plan how you’ll use your time and energy!
Imagine I have a bag of coffee grounds that represent my time and energy in a day.
I have a limited amount, and to be honest, they’re already all used up! I
n my case as a course creator I spend my time and energy on serving my students, making course updates, admin, and marketing. And here’s the cup representing the work that gets me towards my goals. It’s feeling a little unloved right now.
Last year this cup always seemed to be empty and I never found the time for it, which was a problem.
But just pouring more grounds into here and ignoring all the others wasn’t an option, my business would crash and burn without the rest.
So what should I do?
Say screw it, pour the grounds in and hope for the best?
Nope. I need to time track!
You would be shocked and amazed at how much time the things you’ve always done, or those recurring tasks or the documents your accountant asked you to get together will take you to do.
In my business I time track with my whole team, and I was shocked to learn what we were really spending our time doing!
Like spending hours tracking our statistics each week, even though honestly we never did anything with that data.
I also realized one time that I had spent hours making a video for a chatbot on our site, only to later realize only 2 potential customers used the chat option during our sale, making it reallyyy not worth the time it took to create!
One other time I realized Instagram was taking up hours per week, and yet 99% of our sales came from our blog and email list which took a fraction of my time, so we scrapped doing Instagram all together too.
Now don’t just willy-nilly start pouring coffee grounds all over the place, first track your time and then make a few strategic decisions on what you could cut which, while nice, doesn’t really move the needle!
Then decide to stop doing those tasks and allocate those grounds to your goal!
Okay so you’ve prepared by deciding what tasks will move you towards your goal and scrapped a few things, pouring those grounds into your goals cup, so that’s enough to reach your goal right?
Not quite!
Let’s say you drop your kids off at soccer practice.
“Bye honey, here’s your shin pads, you’re going to do great! Remember your slide tackle!”
Would you then go straight from practice to fill up your car… even though the tank is almost still full?
No of course not!
You’d instead drive around for the week, do the soccer drop off, head away for the weekend to the countryside, run a few errands, hit the gym, and then when the tank is almost empty, you’d go to the station and fill it up!
It takes effort to go to the gas station, so of course you wouldn’t do it every day.
It takes time, you’ve got to find your keys, put on your shoes, drive to the station and head in to pay your $2.00, so instead you batch it and every week or so when the tank is getting low, you fill it up, as opposed to doing it every time you drive your car.
Entrepreneurs, myself included, however, are totally guilty of filling up the gas tank every time we drive the car with how we complete our work.
Some admin work appears on our task list and we do it right away.
Of course, it’s unproductive and inefficient, it takes time to get into that task and complete it, and maybe we’re trying to do work in an environment that doesn’t fit.
For example I take a lot of time to plan my YouTube videos, which takes creativity.
And for me creativity takes a few hours of uninterrupted thinking time, and I do my best work in an inspiring, distraction-free environment, like a cafe or coworking space, not my apartment where unfolded laundry keeps calling my name.
Or when I go to film, I need to do my hair and makeup, set up my lights, ensure the camera battery is charged and shoo my husband out of the place so I have a quiet background.
So batch your work, think up the tasks you do which require a similar space or setup or mental capacity and try to batch your days accordingly.
Here’s what I came up with.
I identified that this year my goal was to grow on YouTube, and to do that I needed to write scripts, plan thumbnails, and film videos.
Then I needed to clear out my schedule, pouring grounds out of the other cups, eliminating busy work that was sucking up time but not producing any useful results and I needed to put that time into my big goal cup.
And finally I needed to batch my work, so tasks that required similar space, preparation, or mental capacity could be done together.
On Mondays I write scripts and plan my YouTube thumbnails.
On Tuesdays I write scripts !
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On Wednesdays I film. So that’s the day my husband heads off to his members club to work so I can have the place to myself.
Of course I still have other work to do.
On Thursdays I serve my students by making updates to courses and planning out the content and ideas for our next big course sale and doing Q+A calls. I also put my personal mastermind calls on this day so I can do all calls and meetings on one day, so I don’t need to remember appointments all week.
Then on Fridays I take some time to reflect, basically a condensed version of the annual reflection I do in December which I told you about, and I do the admin work for the business too.
Now I have to admit, even if you do all this which I explained here, if you're still using a *physical planner* to organize your life and business, you not going to get very far!
A pretty planner is fine for when you're a student, but it's no way to run a business!
So watch the video below to get a tour of my project management system to see how I organize, prioritise and manage all the tasks both myself and my team do in a day.