You've picked your top priorities for the week and you've scheduled them in. But now for day to day, do that the night before because you're still fresh in context, you know what's happened.
For the day.
Because morning you is going to be really, really busy and you're going to feel like everything's urgent.
So always do a handover document the night before.
One of my most asked questions is is Steph, how do you.
Do it all?
How do you plan your week? How do you have everything running so smoothly? And I get it because from the outside it looks like everything does run smoothly. I've got the podcast, I've got my business, You've got the kids, got the house, all the things.
But the thing is, I've had to go through.
A lot of trial and error to find the systems and you know, the ways I should plan out my life because the way my brain works is very different from you know, your regular type A type of people. And the thing is, people assume I have some really complex system to keep the wheels turning, but the reality is I don't. It literally takes me a little bit of time on a Sunday, and this very specific system that I want to take you through to stop me from pulling my hair out most of the time.
Most of the time.
So if you've ever bought a planner and you just can't seem to stick to it, like you see, you know all those beautiful TikTok videos and Pinterest photos and they're just just no, there's no mess in sight. I
promise you this episode is not like that. I, as you guys know, I have terrible handwriting, and the systems that I use are for the people that do need to break things down that we struggle to figure out what is, you know, the most important thing I should be doing with my time, because a lot of the time, when we're feeling overwhelmed, everything feels important at once and we can't really think logically when we're in that state.
It's the amy a Magdala kind of thing again.
So today I want to be walking you through my exact process, step by step, the brain dump, a sorting, the scheduling, the daily system, all of it. And you can do this tonight and by the end of it, you also know why my Google calendar is when and my planner is the how and how you can work this system together, and it's going to change everything.
Welcome back to Stepping Up.
But before we get into it, there's a quick life update because I feel like I feel like when I go to write these life updates, like I script my episodes because obviously they're solo and you don't really want to run out of things to talk about, which, let's be honest, would be pretty hard for me. I always kind of get to this and I don't like it's like I get amnesia and I forget everything that's going
on in my life. And it's kind of funny because especially lately, it's been extra busy, like more than usual. But then I go to write my little life update and I go blank. But if there's one thing that I'm really really into at the moment, it's you know, claud and Ai. And now before you guys skip through this, I'm not a tech bro. Obviously, I am someone who
really struggles to start tasks. But I've always been really fascinated and I've loved anything automation like smart home, and I think it's for me, as I said, because I struggled to start tasks and I just feel like there's not enough time in the day that this is why I'm so into it. And this kind of started for me back before I hired the new team I've got now with SPP, and I was actually drowning, like which is actually going to be the next episode I talk about,
but I could not keep my head above water. And I'm saying like I was getting four hours of sleep at night.
It was terrible. I do not promote that whatsoever.
And I just was like, you know what, And I went so far deep into like automating. I built a whole new database for the business and stuff like that, but even down to you know, automating things at home, like having your subscriptions like with Amazon, so you automatically get sent toilet paper things like that. Whatever you can
do to automate is just my jam. So right now, I'm sure you've seen at least on your Instagram page that you know, claud code is having its moment and it is actually amazing, and I just I'm not going to go into it, but I'm just going to tell you some cool things I've built with my AI that I'm really into at the moment.
So I've actually created an AI assistant.
And when I say this, it's not just like I'm talking to chat ABT, like I've built this like ecosystem where I can actually talk to my AI assistant who I've created through Telegram, and I called him Dobby, remember from Harry Potter Elf Dobby, And he saves my life.
So every morning he sends me a morning brief which he like reads my calendar, he checks like my emails on my Slack messages, and he kind of just like gives it to me in this like the least overwhelming parcel is possible, and I created, like you know, you can create these workflows and skills. And again just a disclaimer, I don't believe and you know, I would never replace my team with AI. I don't think that's going to happen, Like I don't want that to happen, and I don't believe that should.
You know.
AI is just a tool in our tool belt, and it's just going to help us save time so we can do the more important things.
So like for example, like you know.
I'm sure you guys might have done this before, like when you don't have much food left in the house and you decide to give you know, Chat, GBT or whatever what you've got, and it can whip up like an ingredients list and a recipe for you in two seconds. It's all about just you know, like that's what this whole podcast is about. This episode is you know, getting back the time to do the things that are actually more important and like that you actually want to be doing.
So for me, like I've built skills that you know, that can transcribe this entire podcast and from there it can tell me like which parts it thinks I should be you know, cutting as a real and then it can go into the video and cut it for me. Like these are the things I've been building, and it saved me like hours and hours and hours doing the things in my business instead of working on the business. I've even started building an app for the girls. Can
you tell I like to do all the things. So I'm building this app for the kids that has been really really fun, and I've actually got them to be part of it because i know, like the thing is AI is you know, whether you like it or not, it's going to be a huge part of our kids future. So I'm trying to teach the kids the foundations, so
like you know, reading and writing, that's all important. But yeah, as long as the kids have the foundations like, you know, before we got the calculator, it was the same thing. And then I'm hoping that this can really be a tool for the kids as well. You know, even I'm going to set up a Missus Weasley like little Ai assistant and hack our robot vacuum at home and she can help me keep the house clean. Anyways, I could talk about this all day, so I'm going to move
on now. But you know, you can do so many things these days, and it's just all about finding the system that works for you. Now, before I get into the episode, I'm so excited to say the hot Mess hotline is officially back.
Now.
This was huge in our first in my first season, you guys really enjoyed this. So basically, you know, if you've got a problem, a messy life situation, a drama or anything that you need me to organize the overwhelm for you, just send it in and you can just do it by the link in the show notes and I'll do an episode on it. So think of it like I'm your big sister and I'm just like helping you out here. So basically, if there's anything in your life currently where you're feeling like, is it just me
or why is this such a shit show? Send it in and I'm going to help you out like I'm your woman. So make sure you click the link in the show notes and send in your messy situation.
All right, So this is where we start.
Before I even you know, pull out a highlighter or look at Google calendar, I will do this one single task that's going to kick off everything. And this is so important, and I know some people are probably going to roll their eyes when they hear it, but it's the framework and actually how I do it that's really important. And this is where we're going to do the brain dump. So every Sunday night, I'll sit down with my planner
and I dump everything out of my head. In my planners, I've got the monthly brain dump page and it's cut into four sections because there's all these different areas of our life. And that's because for me especially, I feel like, because there's all these different areas of my life, I struggle to remember all the things. But if my brain looks at a list and I just you know, I've written home at the top, or I've written work, it helps my brain kind of zone in on that area and.
Just let it all out.
So it's really about kind of allowing your brain to block out the rest of the noise and just focus on one.
Section of your life. But here is where I want you to kind of go a bit more. Ham.
I'm going to be doing categories in this, and I don't want you to judge what you write.
I literally you can do it in your planet, you can do it on a piece of paper.
I want you to write everything that is literally in your brain that you're being holding onto before you come.
Into the week.
You could be like, oh, the kids have an excursion on Wednesday, or I have to buy them a new school toop, or I haven't replied to that email. Or in December, I need to go have lunch with Margaret. I don't know why I always use Margaret. I'm sorry Margaret. But everything that's in your brain, let it out, like, dump it all out. That's why it's called a brain dump. Now for me, I will set a timer for this for about five to ten minutes because I will continue
to keep going. And that's just going to give you some guardrails so we don't go too crazy. So anything like appointments, tasks, worries like meal, ideas, anything the kids needs, like anything like that. You're going to write it out and that is called cognitive offloading. So that's going to clear the space in our brain. So now we can
also plan for the week ahead. And it also reduces your anxiety, so yeah, that helps to Okay, so now we've got this really long brain dump that you know, there's a lot of trauma dumps in there as well, but that's fine. We can just kind of ignore those. So now you've got everything on paper. Your page might look a bit insane. That's fine, that's normal. But the next step is we're going to start sorting through the chaos. And this is where most people do get it wrong.
So the first step here is I want you to grab some highlighters, preferably spp ones because they're really cute. Now, I want you to go through every single thing on this list and with a highlighter or you can circle it, whatever you want to do. I want you to go through and highlight or circle everything in that list that is actually time sensitive and urgent. So this week needs to be done. If it's not, we're screwed kind of thing, you know what I mean. So it must happen this
week or something will break. The next thing I want you to do is you can grab a different colored highlighter and I want you to just note down what's important but not urgent, so it matters, but it can wait, like it could be next week if we have to. And then and in another color, I want you to highlight anything that is actually for the future. So anything that, like you know, in the next couple weeks, you don't even even think about this, but it's out of your
head and she's ready to be parked somewhere. And then from your urgent list, I want you just to circle three to five things from that list, and these are the things that you are going to then schedule into your week later. This is like your focus for the week. So now you've got the noise out of your head. We've sorted the noise into little piles, which is like organized mess, which is fine, but now we know which pieces of these need to be like at the forefront
of our mind. And the science behind this is it's called priority blindness. Now research shows that you know, a lot of brains, especially adkh ones, can't easily ranked task by importance, so everything gets flagged as equal priority, which isn't really the case. So when we can sort things externally, think like the sorting hat Harry Potter vibes. It really does help, you know, like to see things more clearly, because when we're trying to sort things in our head,
it's like the blind leading the blind. It's not going to happen, and you're having the paper out and the highlighters. That is the external sorting, you know, just use pink for urgent, yellow for important, and then leave the rest unhighlighted or even I want you to even go through this list and like cross out anything that you can delete or delegate, because anything that you don't have to do like that can physically be done by another human being, get rid of it, like give it to Bob. All right,
So we've got your urgent list. Before we can touch a single task, we're putting the lock stuff in first. And this is where Google Calendar and the planners stop fighting each other and start working as a team, which is great. Now, before we schedule in any tasks like your urgent ones that we've already picked, I put in what is already locked in. And I'm talking about school drop offs. I'm talking about pickups, meetings, appointments, the non negotiables.
This is your step. So these are your non movable blocks.
These go in first, and then everything else has to work around this. And then I think this is where a lot of people can get really hard on themselves and they go wrong.
And I used to do the same thing.
Is I felt like I had to do everything, anything that felt important had to be done in one day, and I never accounted.
For school drop off, school pickup, that.
Meeting I have at twelve. I also need to make lunch. I also have to get ready in the morning. Like all of these things take up blocks of time of our day, and then we wonder why we feel like we never have any time. And that's because you know, if you're overscheduling yourself, or if you're picking a Monday and you know your Monday's at your busiest day, we should probably be like, okay, our urgent tasks. I'm going to try and do two of these on a Wednesday. Like,
don't overbook yourself. Now, this is where your Google calendar and your planner are going to work as a team. Now, this is a big reframe that is super important. Your Google calendar is your when, and your physical planner is your how your Google calendar look For someone like me, I need it. I love analogue, I love paper. I'm a stationary hall.
We know this.
But I also have a team, and you know, the family calendar. I have things that are big going to be coming in and out. We have meetings that get moved, you know, I get an email saying, oh, we've got to move this meeting till this day, and.
It does come in really handy for that.
So you see your Google calendar as your source of truth with time. This is like your when, this is what's happening when. So then you know, we also have a family calendar that's Google as well. And I also actually set that up with the kids' school's RSS feed like it's actually.
It didn't take me very long. I should maybe do another episode on.
This, but basically it's kind of like I hacked the school's system, but I didn't in case they're listening, and it automatically will create events in my calendar. So I don't even have to worry about when cross country is as long as I look at it on the Sunday, it's going to be in there for me. And that
is honestly, it's been so so helpful. So my Google calendar is going to be telling me when things are happening, you know, the location, the time alerts, it's the schedule, but the planner tells me how how am I going to get through this week with my priorities, my brain dump, my habits. It's literally your method to get the task ticked off. And they're not competitors, they're a team everything.
It's like I kind of like to look at it as the Google's like your like logical brain and your plans, your more you know, emotional brain, because it also shows everything else that's going on. Because when you think about it, if you put every single thing or every single habit that you want to do in your Google calendar, that would be extremely overwhelming, and when you try to share that with your team or your family, that's just way too much noisse. So it's good to have these two
working together. It's like a planning hybrid of digital and analog. And because analogue, you know, there's a lot of science behind why writing your you know, to do list down or you know habits down, you're actually like forty percent more likely to actually do that action it's just how our brains are wired. That's why it's also super important for when you're actually planning your life and planning your
day to day, that is, in a physical planner. Your brain processes things differently when you write versus when you're typing, and that's what each tool is good at, because paper planners are better for thinking and prioritizing, whereas the digital is just you know, it's like the facts, like yep, this is then at twelve, So you really need to have both working together. Okay, so now we have this week mapped, We've got your non negotiables popped in there.
We have it in your Google calendar, you have it in your paper planner. Now we're going to be scheduling in our priorities and our top three and quick three. Now, now, this method I'm about to go into actually change the way I plan and it changed my life but also my self esteem. As I said, I'm someone who I will overbook myself and I always will think things take a lot less time than.
What they actually take.
For me, if I have to go anywhere to be anywhere, the car trip's five minutes, it doesn't matter if if it's actually thirty minutes or down the road, it's five minutes in my brain. So when you have time blindness on top, that's what makes things really really difficult. So when it comes to tasks and you tend to be a bit of a high achiever or look, let's just be honest, you're a mum or a woman in this
bloody society right now with all the things happening. If you don't get all the things done, we do tend to feel like we failed, that we didn't do enough, and we do tend to forget that we are, as I always say, we're human beings, not human doings. So this is what was like my own guard rails for my day in terms of tasks. So every single day I will write down my top three things, which is my non negotiable tasks for the day. These are like the important urgent things for the day, and then my
quick three tasks. So these are small wins that I can knock out in like ten minutes or less. And these can also be urgent and important, but they are quicker. And the reason why I've done it in this framework is having only three larger tasks for the day. And when I say larger. These are more than I like to classify. Things that takes me more than twenty minutes is going to go in the top three, because if you do more than three of these, your day is
going to be gone. I also want to say, if one of these tasks for you is like going to take you six hours, just do the one I think you just like, it's really good to have a bit of a reference point.
And I've talked.
About this before, but with some tasks that I have to do every week, and I kept kind of not estimating the right time frame it takes. I keep this list, and on this list, I will have the things I do and the actual amount of time it takes me. So if I'm ever feeling a bit scattered or I'm like, you know, I'm not sure how LONGY say I have to write my content for the week, that actually takes me a few hours, and I used to try and
think that I could do that in twenty minutes. On my list, I literally will say content writing for the week, and it says two to three hours there. So when I'm planning my week, that's my reference point. I can go back to this list and be like, oh yes, when I clean the bathroom, it takes me my lifetime, and it's so so helpful for that to have like a bit of it like a reality check. Now, if I get my top three done for the day, I'm
winning it life like I'm good to go. And if I also get all of the quick three done, then I'm just basically superhuman with this framework too. I want to just let you know that you don't like, you're not always going to tick all of these off either. This is just like your maximum that you can hold. And the awesome thing about this is, you know, when it comes to self confidence, that really comes down to doing the things you said you were going to do.
So if you're telling yourself, Okay, I'm want to go to the gym in the morning, and you keep bailing on yourself, You're not going to have the confidence within yourself to go out and achieve the goals or do the things you want to do because you know your evidence from the past shows that you never do it.
It's like again the flaky gym front I talk about if you have a friend that always says I'm going to meet you at the gym and they never come, you're not going to really rely on that person, and when that person is yourself, that is really really hard and really off putting. You need to build up your self confidence by doing the things that you said you would. Now with your top three quick three, I do recommend before each day comes to write these the night before.
And I've talked about this as a handover document. This is your handover document to your future self. So we've done it for the week. You've picked your top priorities for the week, and you've scheduled them in. It could be like Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, those those main tasks that were urgent that we talked about, make sure they're scheduled in. But now for day to day for your top three quick three, do that the night before because you're still
fresh in context. You know what's happened for the day. Because morning you is going to be really really busy, she's going to forget the context window, which if you do AI, you'll know what I'm talking about and you're gonna feel like everything's urgent. So always do a handover document the night before for the next day. Now moving on to the pretty step. This is using highlighters as the categories of your life, which is what I touched
on before. So when you're looking at you know a lot of written tasks or anything, that's just any information I need to digest. If it's not you know, in segments or highlighted or have some type of sequence, my brain feels like it's super overwhelming, so I won't even want to go in and read it all. I'm sure, like if someone's maybe sent you an email and there's no paragraphs or there's no subheadings, it can feel like a lot to get through.
So this is why we use highlighters.
And also stickers. And I just like stickers because my handwriting sucks. But we're going to be using highlighters to highlight the different areas or task types.
For your day and week.
So that's why I made these highlighters, the SPP highlighters I in the packet of and again this is okay, it is a plug.
I guess it's a plug whatever.
In the packet of highlighters I made, there's actually a sticker sheet and it has things like work, don't forget kids, events, cleaning, and you actually put the label on your highlighters because I will forget what color means, what one hundred percent. So for me, in my planner, my top like my don't forget label has gone on my like what is I think my pink one, So I've already forgotten and so that stands out on the page to me. So
I will highlight my top three. I will highlight you know, really urgent meetings, and then I've got you know, cleaning, which is green, and I'll like literally highlight you know, do the washing, clean the bathroom, anything like that. So it breaks up all this information in our brain. So then you can scan your planner for your top task. You can you can scan your planner for your kids drop off, you can scan your planner for work. And it's not all coming at you at once. It's digestible.
But when I when you do this, like you know, you can have all the colors in the world, but for me, this for me, that like the max is five for me. And look I did put more than five in the in the pack, but for me, five is my sweet spot. So don't go crazy and do
like twenty different colors. Now I've covered all of the more logistics, so you know you're not negotiables the things you have to do, your urgent tasks and you're probably listening to this and being like, well, Steph, where's the things for me, like my goals and my habits and my hopes and dreams. Well, we're up to that now. This is a step for that. So when it comes to like any goals or lifestyle changes we want to make, which is important to be, you know, it is good
to be, you know, striving for something. I wouldn't say a lot of different things at once, but for example, you're wanting to get your steps in, you need to be reminded of this goal quite often, and you also need to know the steps for you to do the steps. So for example, for me, I like to aim for eight thousand steps a day, and for me to do that, I know I need to usually go for a walk at lunchtime, like my brain break walk, or I'll go for a walk after school pick up. Some type of
walk in the day needs to happen. Also, I have my walking pad at home, so that's in there as well. And there's just certain things that I know, you know, on my meetings days, I know I'm going to be sitting down pretty much the whole day, so that's the day I'll do a quick.
Walk in the morning and a quick walk afterwards.
And if you're not tracking these steps you need to make, you're going to forget about your goals. And this is why I have a habit tracker in all of my planners, so there's like five or four spaces and you can write whatever you want. And these don't have to be crazy habits. These can be like taking your supplements every day. It could be like get off your phone at eight pm and you just ticket Monday through to Sunday. So
this is where we fill in our habit tracker. And studies also show people that actually track their habits are forty two percent more likely to actually achieve them. And there's just something that hits you with dopamine when you do tick something off, so it kind of gamifies it as well. And also like, don't put in habits just
for the sake of filling up a space. There will be seasons and like weeks in my life where I'm like, Okay, I'm starting to feel a bit you know, burnt out, so I will change my habits in that week's habit tracker to you know, saying as I say, get off the phone one at eight pm or read every day things like that. You don't always have to be saying ten k steps, go for a marathon, you know, you just change it up with.
The season that you're in. Now.
The last step that I do for you know, planning out my week is and it literally takes me five minutes or even less, because I am I'm a creature of habit. I like to do the same thing every single week as much as I can. And this is the last step, and this is planning your meals for the week. And pretty much most of my planners has a little space for your dinner. You can write in all your meals. And again, the reason why we do this,
it's not to be perfect. It's because dinners an't like the bane of my existence.
I've always really struggled. I used to feel like I always had.
To reinvent the wheel, that I had to make new and exciting dinners every week. But the thing is like, just don't fix what's not broken. Like if you enjoy having spag boll every Tuesday, keep doing that. If the kids eat it, keep it, don't don't mess up the system. So majority of the time I will literally just write down and repeat the dinners from the week before, but I still need to do that because I will one
hundred percent forget. And also I like to highlight and write down on like our fridge magnets or even obviously my planner if I have to take meat out of the freezer the night before, so when you have it in your planner, you can see, oh, tomorrow night is Taco's and you know that night you can take out
the beef out of the freezer. It's little things like that that's just making your life a lot easier and even seeing like, Okay, for example, on Mondays, I like to do a slow cooker meal or I've already prepped that dinner because Mondays are nuts for me. So it just kind of looking at your week more logically and being like, where is there the most resistance that I can make it easier on myself? And the thing is too our decision fatigue is going to be at its
worse at five PM. And for me, like our family, with especially with the girls, they need a lot of time to unwind after dinner before I can even get them into bed. So we have dinner at five PM,
like it's early. So if I'm not organized, there's no way I want to be able to like pull a dinner out of thin air at five pm if I don't know what I'm cooking, and if you do want to mix it up a little bit each week, just having like a rotation of ten dinners that you can just change up a little bit each week, that is just gonna like just stop you from thinking at all.
And having again theme days, so you could have like taco Tuesdays or take out Thursdays, just anything that you can try and use to just to lighten the.
Load a little bit. Just do it.
I'll also link below I did a whole episode on like meal prep and all those types of tips before, so make sure you click on that and it will just make that step even easier again. So that is my system, guys, Like I hope you know the little reframing of like the digital planning versus the analog planning and how they work together, like.
They're a team or a team. We don't. It's not a love hate relationship. It's a love love relationship.
I'm going to quickly run you through this process quickly so you guys don't forget. So we've got the brain dump, so everything out of your head and then we organize the brain dump by highlighting everything that's urgent, which is three to five things only, and we're getting rid of the rest of the noise. Number three is scheduling in your non negotiables to your week, so your events, your appointments,
and your top urgent tasks. And then we've got your Google calendar and your planner and how they work together. So your Google calendar is your when and your planner is your how. And then we've got your top three and quick three every day. And then we've got utilizing highlighters and stickers for your categories and also not forgetting ourselves.
So we're going to track our habits every week, and then we're going to plan our meals, and then we're going to sit down and binge watch Love Island, which, to be honest, I don't remember the last time I've watched reality TV. Not because I'm above it, not because I'm above it at all, because you bet I'm sitting on the couch scrolling TikTok. But anyways, that's it. That's
my whole system mostly. I hope that's helped, and it's really just breaking down the steps for you guys, because again the biggest question I'll get even you know in our SPP Instagram is people buy planners and you know, I did a whole QR thing you scan and it gives you a guide, But I also so don't really pay attention to things. So I just hope that this whole system has really helped you for your brain to understand why we're doing the things at this certain step.
So if you can even just do one thing from this episode, just do the brain dump. Just just get get like lighten the mental load for yourself, organize it, make it makes sense for you, and then you can keep that and use that when you want. And if you can do two things from this episode, do the
brain dump and the top three daily tasks. My book Mastering My Messy Life goes deep into like how I built these systems, but it goes into like how they came about and just all the other areas of your life and how I stopped fighting against my brain and started working with it. If you know anyone that's also feeling really scattered, make sure you share this episode with them. And I would love if you guys could write a review and make sure you subscribe to the show so
you don't miss one. And it also really helps me get the show out there more for more people with messy minds. And I'll talk to you guys on Monday, babe,