These Systems Will Help You Accomplish Anything

back to business. And I like today's episode because it is my short and easy process for how I look at time, how I become more effective, and the systems that I use in order to create the life that I want. For those of you who've listened to this podcast for a while, you have seen many iterations of Natalie over the last six years. From when I first started this podcast. I am literally not the same person today as I was back then. And for people who know me, they ask me, how do you do this

the way I do? This is the process that I lay out in this episode. It is the framework that I use and I am disciplined about using this and implementing it every single week because I know where I want to go and it's just a matter of what do I need to change, and where do I need to spend my time in order to get there? I am relentless about this, and to the extent that you are relentless about this, you can have the life that

you want to. I hope you enjoy. These are the systems that turn my chaotic schedule into a life I actually control. These systems help me go from overwhelmed, making no money in a job that I hated, to co-founding my dream business and getting married to the love of my life. So let's dive in to the frameworks that actually work. The first system to help you accomplish anything is to start using a calendar to control. You and

Beyonce have the same 24 hours in a day. I read that quote on a card once and my mind was instantly blown. At the time, I was 19 years old, juggling all of the things, not creating any sort of success. Still a student and thinking about the fact that Beyonce and me have the exact same amount of time. And yet look at what she's doing. She's an actress. She's a dancer, she's a singer. She's a mom. Beyonce was doing all of the things, and she was not that

much older than me. So when I realized I started trying to figure out how do I find tools to help me use my time better, and my go to tool that I recommend every business owner, every future entrepreneur, or everybody who just wants to make more money uses is a Google Calendar. Now, you could really use any calendar. If you're not a fan of Google, that's fine, but you have to use a calendar to track where you're

spending your time. Because let's face it, if you don't have the results that you want, it literally means that you are not spending your time on the right activities. If you don't have the amount of money you want to make, it means that you haven't learned how to make money, which means you haven't spent the time to learn the right skills. If you don't have the husband of your dreams, how are you spending your time in order to become the type of person that your future

husband would actually want to date and hopefully marry? So tracking where you spend your time is the first step. If you don't know where you're spending your time, you will always feel like you are not in control of time. And one of my mottos that I remind my team of almost on a daily basis is I create time. I say that all the time, so there is never a reason for me to say I don't have time. I'm too busy. Those are not real excuses because I remember, hey,

wait a second, I create time. That means that I can make time for the things that matter most. I'm going to get to where I want to go, but if I don't make time, I feel like I'm a victim of time. I don't use my calendar to structure my time. Everything feels chaotic and like I can never get ahead. I can never get what I want done. This is a fallacy, and this is one of my strategies for actually being effective. Use your calendar to track

where you're spending your time. What you need is a tool that is so simple for you to use that isn't perfect. It doesn't have to be beautiful. You don't have to convince yourself. It needs to be this color coded, nicely organized with good handwriting planner. Throw all of that out. I used to get caught in this trap where I would want to get organized, and I would want to be successful. So I would buy a planner and then

I would spend four hours planning everything perfectly. But when it came to using that planner and making tweaks to my schedule the next day, I had already stopped using the planner and I never picked it up again. And I would keep buying these planners every 2 or 3 months in order to start the process all over again. You do not need some perfect process. You're using a tool that is effective for tracking where you're spending your time, because this is the foundation in order for these next

four steps to actually work. This next system is my four step framework. And the first step is to look at your calendar and see what you can entirely stop doing. What's wild about this idea of creating time means that you can actually stop doing things that you currently do. A lot of people just start adding more, adding more, adding more. And yes, in order to be more effective, in order to expand your business, in order to learn

new skills, you are adding something. But the first step is actually to figure out what you need to stop doing for me back in the day before I created real success. I was confused about where I spent my time, and I would think that I needed to do all of these things and create these never ending to do lists of things that were of medium or low importance. So instead of doing something that would actually move my career forward, I would use this idea of going to

target as being effective and being busy. But I didn't need to go to target, when really what would have moved the needle in that one day was to move the one email forward that I was avoiding. So before you even use a Google calendar, this is easy to implement. What are things that I'm doing that I don't actually need to do? So some examples of things that you don't need to be doing. Taking on the project to clean out your garage, or going to the grocery store

when Amazon could deliver it. Instead, these little things that we add to our to do list are the things that stop us from doing the most important things. So moving forward, we're going to stop doing the unimportant things so we can make time for the things that matter most. Now, don't even get me started on how much time you are likely wasting on things like YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, TikTok,

all of those things. Could you stop doing that so that you are able to create time in the short run to get closer to your goals and be more productive? Now the next step is learning how to delegate. Look at your life and decide what can you delegate to other people? So in some situations, you can't entirely stop doing something. Let's say you can't entirely stop going to the grocery store because you are responsible for feeding your family. However,

how can you delegate this to Amazon? Amazon can effectively deliver your groceries to your house without you spending a whole hour picking out everything, searching through aisles, checking out driving. They're driving home. They could just deliver all these things. And better yet, you would now have a system because it could just go on repeat order. So you get

exactly what you need inside your house. This is just one idea of delegation that can totally transform how you think about making more time because most of the things that you do, you might actually still need to have those things done in your life. You can't just stop them entirely. But who else in your life or in your business could effectively take those things off of your plate?

You train them. You duplicate yourself so that they take on that responsibility, which allows you to spend more time marketing your business, promoting your products and services, fixing your sales cycle because your salespeople aren't converting in the way that they used to when you were overseeing the department. When you think about the process of delegation, you have to ask yourself this question what is important that needs to get done but that I don't have to do myself?

The lack of delegation is why most businesses stay small. The business owner thinks that they have to sell the customer. They have to market why their business is the best they have to fulfill on the services for the customer. They have to be the customer success arm. Many business owners just hold on to every part of their business because they think that they are the best at doing it,

and that nobody can do it like them. But if you really dive into the way that you duplicate yourself in a business, you can remove yourself from certain activities that don't need you, so you can focus on more important things. And the question then that you have to ask yourself is, is my business growing? Because if your business isn't growing, it's likely that you are the bottleneck and you don't know how to delegate effectively. The next step is to look at your calendar and decide what

you need to continue doing. You need to track what you're doing every day to make sure that those things are actually working for you. I think of the continue bucket as this is my job description. This is what I am responsible for. What is my primary function to move our business forward? And my job description today with a $100 million plus business, is very different from the job description that I had when our business was doing

$12 million. What's weird about this, though, for a business owner, is that your title stays the same. So how are you updating your job description based on the most important problems in your business today? I believe that productivity spans into all aspects of life, including your relationships. If your relationships aren't doing so well, your marriage is struggling. You're having difficult times with your kids. You can use the

same framework. These four steps allow you to identify exactly what you need to change, so you can make those changes. Implement that time on your calendar and then watch to see are those changes working? And if they're not working over a period of time, you can fix it. You can change out one task that you thought was important, no longer important. You've now put it in the stop category, or you recognize that your relationships and your business or

your income is improving. So you're going to continue to do those things until it makes sense to delegate them. So you can now target new areas of growth. But all of this is connected to how do I become more productive with the 24 hours that I have to drive,

the impact that I want to create? What I do with the business owners I work with is I have them pull out their calendar, share with me where they're spending their time so I can better assess what they need to stop doing altogether, what they should delegate to

somebody else and what they should continue to do. Oftentimes those three buckets are very confused and they're struggling because the whole point of looking at these areas is to actually identify what you need to start doing to have your business grow so that the wheels don't fall off your business. While you are also pursuing this new expansion

and growth related opportunity. When it comes to the continues, if you are a leader in a business, what would always stay the same is you continuing to lead and develop your team members. For me, that looks like having consistent one on ones every other week with my team members, doing performance reviews with them and also ensuring that they send me end of week reports so I can remove any roadblocks or barriers that are in their way of

being successful in their role. I have done this for the last six years with every team member who reports to me, and that is the reason that we've been able to grow as fast as we've grown, because we have a system in place that is productive, that allows leaders to help their team members flourish and prosper inside an environment. The last step in my framework is asking yourself what you should start doing. I like to get really creative with the things that I need to start doing,

because I'm oftentimes just dissatisfied. I see other people doing cool big things and I'm like, I want to do that too. And it's frustrating to me that I'm not able to do those things. And so if you do have this mindset where you could have what you want in life, you just need to figure out how you use your time to actually go get those things. One of the most impactful decisions that I made in my career was deciding that I needed to learn how to

publicly speak. I had a very embarrassing experience early on in my career that made me get stage fright, and made me get incredibly nervous whenever I would speak to a group of more than 3 or 4 people. And this held me back for years. But then I thought about in 20 years from now, in 30 years from now, in 60 years from now, Natalie has, of course, figured out how to publicly speak. Like I'm going to be able to articulate myself at some point in the future.

So I have to start getting better at that right now in order to eventually get to where I want to go. So what did I start doing? I started giving mini speeches every single day, whether that was in a team meeting or a toast at dinner. I started to incorporate this skill set that I needed to learn, which was learning how to speak in front of people.

And I would literally add this into my calendar, make toast at dinner, or kick off all team meeting so that it forced me to get over this very uncomfortable thing that was holding me back from where I wanted to go. So you use your calendar to identify how you're going to start doing the things that you want

to be doing in the future with ease. And when it comes to starting new things, you have to be very careful that the things that you start are measured, because you don't just want a list of things that aren't making an impact, but are wasting your time. If you're going to start making public speeches, if you're going to spend time looking at new businesses to buy, if you're going to learn sales skills, don't just invest your time in those areas. Measure your effectiveness in those areas.

Make measurement senior to you doing the activity because the measurement is going to dictate to you whether or not you are improving. And if it's a good use of your time, if you're not improving and it's not a good use of your time, you should start doing something else that is going to get you closer to your goal. You need to start doing things that will make your life better, that will allow you to achieve your goals. If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely

not want to miss out on my new newsletter. It just dropped. I just started creating this content and I am obsessed. Every single week in your inbox I am going to send you business and which is exactly what it sounds like. How do you fit business and all the other things in your life so that you are up to speed on fashion, beauty, wellness.