EP 210 Maximize Your Day: Creative Strategies for Time Management Success!

Are you ready to dive deep into the strategies and mindset to help you optimize your business, prioritize your family, and stay true to your vision? Get ready to transform your life and business one episode at a time. This is the Align youe True north podcast and I'm your host, Brooke Elder.

Do you want to know the real reason why you are feeling overworked? If is because you are probably not managing your time correctly. And one of the things that I get asked about a lot is around time management. How do you manage your time, especially when you have multiple clients that you're working for and you also want to have a life? Well, I'm going to show you today exactly how you can do that. And I also have a free gift for you.

So stay to the end and I will tell you how you can get that free gift.

So let's first talk about time management. This is one of those things that a lot of people all say that they have a problem with, but it's something that they don't really want to fix. It's really amazing to me. I've gone into lots of different, like Facebook groups and I've talked about what is the one thing that you struggle with the most in your business. And overwhelmingly the answers that I get is either finding clients or something to do with time management.

And when I very first started in my business, I was like, oh, I'll just make a time management course and I'll put it out there and sell it. And no one bought it. This is something that people don't really want to fix, but it is something that is always there and it's something that we need. And so I'm going to go through today some of the things that you can do that are very simple that can help you and start helping you think differently when it comes to your time.

First, when it comes to time, I want you to think about time as a container. And so you have so much time to get something done. And there's been tons of studies out there that say, like, if you give yourself five hours to get something done, it usually will take five hours, but if you give yourself three hours to get that same test done, you could actually get it done in three hours. And so when we start to compress our timeline down a little bit, we actually can get more done.

We do better when we have some sort of constraint. And what really happens when we start setting goals? So this kind of goes into goal setting a little bit. But when we start setting goals and we start condensing the time. So either we have a really big goal, so we're going to accomplish something very, very big and that may take a little bit longer.

So maybe it's like a three month goal or it could be a year long goal or a five year goal, but it's got to be a really, really big goal if it's going to have a long time frame or if it's not that big of a goal. But we can shorten the timeframe that adds those constraints. And when we have those constraints, what happens is there actually becomes a deficit between where we're at and what we think we can do and what we actually can do.

So it's just like if you have ever worked out really, really hard and you know like you've done eight reps and you're like, I just can't do anymore, but you're like, I'm going to push myself and you actually can do two or three more reps. That's because our brains are saying this is our limit. Where our body is saying, no, we actually can go just a little bit further. And it's the same thing when it comes to doing tasks or anything like that.

Because what happens is in that gap between what we think we can do and what we actually can do, that's where creativity then steps in. We start having more of these creative moments so we can problem solve faster. And this is when we get into flow. So if you've ever heard anyone talk about flow or you've experienced flow where like things just are happening and working and your ideas are coming in like it just like you're in this, this time of flow, right?

And that is because you are working in that time. That, that gap between what you think you can do and what you actually can do, that's what creates this momentum. And so when it comes to time management and thinking about all these containers that we have, you want to start thinking about how can we start condensing some of the time that we have. And I'm going to give you some little hacks that's going to help you in this. So one of the things that I do is I like to do time blocking.

Now there are two types of people. There are people who love to have like their time mapped out down to the minute. Most those kind of people who like you, you can say, okay, this hour I'm going to do this and then this hour I'm going to do this. You love that kind of STR structure. You are probably one of those operators and A lot of you are operators in this that are listening or watching this. And so that is probably going to be more like the way that you do your time mapping.

But if you are more of on the visionary side and you don't like to have those constraints put on you, you want to be a little bit more free, you can do, still do time blocking, but I do blocks for those types of people. I'm someone that like I like to have each block mapped out for me. Like each hour mapped out. You could do a block of like four hours and give like some options of what to do during that time.

So just so you know, you can either go like super granular on this or you can go a little bit more high level, just depending on what feels comfortable to you. And so what I like to do is I get just a blank week calendar and I look at it and the very first thing that I do is I'm going to block out all my family time because that is the most important thing to me.

So I block out all like when I have to take my kids to their extracurricular activities that they're doing date night with my husband time for like we have movie night every week. And so I map that out and so I put all of those non negotiable times on my calendar. Then I look and see do I have any standing meetings. So I'll put in all those standing meetings that I have throughout the week. Then I can look at it and I can start seeing these chunks of time that are available.

And so you can do this one of two ways. You can block out certain times for let's say Monday as I work on this client, Tuesdays, I work on this client. So you can break it up by client. But depending on how many clients you have and the kind of work you're doing, you may want to, instead of breaking it up by client, break it up by tasks. So what are you doing for them at those certain times? So let me give you an example of this and this will start making a little bit more sense.

So when I'm looking at my time and the things that I need to do, I try to group similar things together because then you don't have what's called context switching. This is where let's say if you get distracted, if you have maybe you're a little add and so you're like working on a social media post and then you're like, oh, I should check my phone. And then you're like, oh it I now know I need to get back to this and you're writing that post, you're like, oh, my email just went off.

I'm going to go check my email. And you check that and then you come back. This is context switching. Every time that you go from thinking about one thing to now thinking about a different thing, it actually takes you more time to come back to the original thing to actually finish that. So when you have all of this context switching going on, you're actually wasting time. And it may be 20 seconds here, 40 seconds there. Maybe it's like minute, two minute, all of that time adds up.

So when you're doing your time blocking, you want to look at how can I reduce the amount of context switching? So if you are doing email marketing for a client and you have four clients that you're doing email marketing, I would schedule out a time that you could work all four of those clients, do all their emails all at once. Because even though, yes, you are switching between clients, you are still doing the same task.

Now, if you have clients that are in, like, totally different industries, then that might be a little different. And that's why this is where you need to use your discernment of what works best for you. But I want you to, when you're putting your time blocks together, start thinking, how can I reduce the amount of context switching? And that's going to be putting similar clients together. Maybe, maybe you have like three clients that are coaches and then you have two clients that are doctors.

So they're very different. So you can work on. Maybe in the mornings you do your coaches, and then in the afternoons then you work on the doctors. Okay. So you want to just put as many of the same kind of things together so you're not context switching as much. So one of the ways that I do this is I have, like, I break up my days by theme. So I have Mondays as my admin day. So all my admin tasks I do on that day. And then Tuesdays is my coaching and then my con, my content days.

And so I will coach and then I will do all of my content on that day. And then Wednesdays is my marketing day. So anything that has to do with marketing, I do on that. So that way I'm staying in the same mindset through the whole thing. Everything that I'm doing now, marketing is a very big concept. And so I take that as marketing is one day, but then I break it up into, like, smaller things. So it could be working on funnels, it could be reaching out to people for joint venture opportunities.

Or it could be talking with clients or talking with potential clients. Right. And so you can break those up. But I like having those same days because it just helps me to organize things a little bit better and it helps you to not get overwhelmed. And then this also will help you set boundaries with your clients. So if you are working on, let's say you're working on your client marketing, for example, you can say, okay, that's something that I work on every Wednesday for you.

So if there's anything you need, you need to get it to me by Wednesday, so that way, or really by Tuesday so I can work on it on Wednesday. So this also helps with, with that communication with your clients. One other thing when it comes to looking at this and your time mapping and figuring all of this out is you don't want to give yourself big huge chunks of time. So let's say you don't want to like map out like six hours to do something or three hours to do something.

One of the things that I like to recommend to people is called the Pomodoro technique. And so if you want to learn more about this, then there's lots of YouTube videos and stuff like that that walk you through like how to do this. There's also like, like Pomodoro dice that you can buy on Amazon that like you put it on your desk and it will keep time for you.

But the whole thought of this is that every like 50 minutes or so that you're giving yourself a 10 minute break and so you're working on something, you're doing very deep focused work for that amount of time and then you give your brain a break and then you can go back in and you can do more focused time. And so this also gives you really good times to reset your brain. And so that way if you are going to be switching to something else, you're giving yourself that time.

So when you were looking at our transitions in between our time blocks, you want to make sure that you have some time to transition. Don't just go from one thing to the next because we're still, that's still context switching. Right? We need to give our brains a little bit of a break. This is a good time to like go for a walk or it could be to go fill up your water bottle or you know, whatever it is that you do. Maybe it's like for one time block you are sitting and working.

The next time block you're going to get up and maybe I have a treadmill that it goes under. My desk so I could walk while I'm working. And so that may maybe that's something that you want to do. So find different things to help with that transition.

Because when we're actually switching from one thing to another, if we're changing our environment, even for just a little bit, even if it's just like you walk into the living room and then you come back to your desk or whatever it is, when you change environments and then come back, it helps our brain to transition better. And so when we are switching contexts, it makes it much easier for us to dive right in and get right to work.

So these are just a few little steps as you're putting together your time management to help you be more productive. And it also will help you to be able to take on more clients if that is something that you're looking for.

Now I have a special gift for everybody today. So if you go to alignyourtruenorth.com productivity I have a free training for you called the Productivity Project. And this is going to walk you through exactly what I just showed or I talked to you about about of how do you set up this time blocking? What does that look like? But then we're going to dive into looking at the things you're doing. How is, is this something that you want to keep? Do you need to delegate something?

It's going to help you through that. It's going to walk you through how to set up a 90 day game plan. So it's time blocking. Yes. So your time management, but it's also to help you in goal setting. So you get that for free. All you need to do is go to alignyourtruenorth.com productivity and it get you that for free. I am so excited for you to start diving into this and figuring out how you can get more done in less time. Because without all that context switching you can get so much more done.

It actually saves you about 30% if you aren't doing this context switching. So it's just think about giving yourself 30% more time. That's what this is going to do for.