Ep 205: Boosting Your Productivity So You Get More Done

It's about having the clarity , self-confidence and unstoppable belief to go after and get everything you want . If you'll come with me , I'll show you how Well . Hello friends , I hope you had an amazing week . Today we're going to talk about how to get more done .

That is always a good topic , because our brains will always tell us that there isn't enough time and that we're just too busy to get all the things done that we want to do . And this is an interesting one for me because I always thought that I was very , very productive .

But it was only when I really got going in this business that I got honest with myself about my old ways of working in my brand marketing career , which was , I would say , highly intuitive . I tended to leave all of the to-dos in my head and I just have a great memory and I would just work intuitively . I would just do things as I remember to do them .

But when I changed my approach because of this business and I not only had this super demanding corporate job , but also this growing business .

I needed a more structured way to make sure that I was getting the most out of every minute of my day , so that I still had free time and the time to have a personal life , that I was getting the most out of every minute of my day , so that I still had free time and the time to have a personal life that I wanted to have .

So I think you're going to enjoy this episode . It's super easy in terms of an approach , but incredibly powerful , and it'll make sure that you get every second of productivity out of your day . So enjoy this episode on how to get more done . Today , I want to talk about how to get more done . Now I will be honest with you .

It's only been probably in the past year that I've really gotten in touch with the fact that this was an area where I needed to grow myself , because really for most of my career , one of the things I've been known for is getting a lot done . You know I've always been thought of as productive . It's been one of my secret sauces .

I'm very responsive to people .

I , you know , kind of am able to get a large volume of work done , and I would say that most people who end up in some aspect of marketing share that trait , because it's one of those areas where you're only really usually successful if you can keep all the different plates spinning , you know , and they're spinning at the right rate and you're delivering the

right stuff . And so I convinced myself that I just knew how to get a lot of things done . But one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this today is that it wasn't too long ago , I would say within the past four to five months , I started asking myself some questions and coaching myself on why was I not getting more done in my business ?

Now , most of you who listen to this podcast know that right now , my business is a very passionate side hustle for me , and that's purposeful . And as the busier my business gets , it's a little more challenging , which is why I started asking myself this question , because when I was early , I was just getting it off the ground . I didn't have any clients .

You know , it was one thing . It's kind of one thing to kind of put the shape to the business .

But when you're busy in your corporate career which I still very much enjoy , and you have a blossoming slash , busy side hustle that forced me to come in touch with the fact that I was not getting as much done as I wanted to because I was not managing my time well , and if someone had tried to tell me that I would have pushed back hard , I would have said

, well , that's not true , because that's one of my strengths , right . But here's why I wanted to talk about this today . I believe that our brain will frequently get in the way of us being our most productive , or with us trying to kind of maximize our work output , right .

There's so many ways that our brain will try to convince ourselves that either we already are very productive which I was trying to convince myself of , that which I was trying to commence myself for that or sometimes we have an inner perfectionist , and so , really , when you dig into that , you realize that it might not be so much that you're too busy , or you

don't have enough time , which is why you're not getting things done . It might be that , underneath it all , you're a little afraid that the work that you deliver won't be good enough , right ? And I think there's yet another form , and this is part of what I encountered as an entrepreneur .

It's more about tackling new things and there's a fear there too , and for me that can usually come with a lot of overwhelm I don't know what to do . I don't know what to do next , but instead of kind of getting in touch with that , we'll tell ourselves I'm too busy , there's not enough time .

Like I was telling myself I can't have a corporate career and run this business . It's just too much . Like I've got all these clients now and I don't have enough time and I've got this crazy brand I'm running and it's just , it's too much stuff .

But really , when I started to peel away the layers of the onion , what I learned about myself was that I know what to do in my corporate career because I've done that for over 20 years and you know , no matter what problem gets thrown your way , when you've done something for that long , you can usually figure out what to do next and you have a great deal

of confidence in your ability to do it because you've been doing it for so many years . So you've got lots of evidence that will tell you like you know what to do and so even if something really hard gets thrown at you , you're able to kind of just dive right in and do it . But what was happening to me in my business was why this whole thing came up .

I was telling myself that it was just too much , it was too busy , I didn't have enough time , and then for a while I started really dreading my time spent on my business , where really I didn't want to feel that way . I started this as a passion , right .

I really care about helping people have the work life that they want , because I don't think work is the most important thing . But I will tell you , I think it's a place where we can get a lot of gratification . It pays for our life and if our work life isn't good , it can really detract from our life . So I am super passionate about this .

So as I dove in , I thought why am I feeling all of this and why am I not getting more done ? I realized that it was actually very simple , but I would say simple and yet profound .

Because when you've spent your whole career , like I have , in brand marketing or whatever , and you kind of have a high degree of confidence and accomplishment and all of that , you know what to do and you're really confident in that , it's really hard or it was for me anyway to admit that when it came to running a business , that I had no clue what to do

next . And when I say that it doesn't mean that I didn't kind of have a good sense of how to run it or the content I wanted to do , or even the marketing of it or whatever it was kind of like .

It was a totally new paradigm for me , because when you're in a corporate environment , there's a structure around you and sometimes the structure is very organized and sometimes it's very chaotic , but it's a structure all the same and you understand how to navigate that structure and you understand that there's so many emails going to come in a day , there's so many

IMs you're going to get , there's so many meetings that are going to be on the calendar , and there's so many things that you're going to have to go tackle and do you understand how to juggle all of that . But when it's your personal business , there is no structure around you , there's no clients , there's no nothing , there's no emails coming in .

You have to create all of that demand .

And so what I found out is that the ways of working that I had in my corporate life did not translate well into the entrepreneurial realm and specifically here's what I mean by that . I have always been a person who , like my mother , used to say like I was happiest when I had lots of different things to do and I was doing them all at the same time .

Right , so I'd be watching TV and doing a hobby and maybe talking on the phone . I always had a thousand things that I was doing all at once and it's kind of how my brain works and I like it . So it's like I like the constant pressure and deadlines and things to do . I'm actually enjoy being busier than I do .

Having more free time , I tend to get more done . It's just sort of how my brain works , and so I learned to work very early in my corporate career . I was able to keep a running log and I was able to get a lot done right .

But again , keeping that running log and working more , I guess what I would say intuitively , while it works for me in my corporate environment or I would say I'll qualify that worked really well for many of my corporate years . It didn't always work well in every environment , but I never really connected to why .

I just would say , oh gosh , this particular environment is so chaotic or whatever , but the truth of the matter is that when you're working intuitively , you are really wasting time , time that you're not really connected to , because you're legitimately getting a lot of things done , but you're running off of a mental list that , the more you pack in your head versus

putting it down on paper or doing some type of organized time management approach , you're going to miss things and you're going to waste a good amount of time . And also , like every , I believe now I kind of think of your brain as like a . It's a very powerful supercomputer , but even you know your computer . It has to stay .

You got to keep the cache clear and it's like you gotta , you gotta make sure that you're not clogging up all the memory on your devices with junk , right ? And if you don't have an organized way of time management , that's what you're doing . You're packing all the stuff in your brain and it makes you more stressed than you need to be .

It probably detracts from your sleep . It distracts from being truly present in all of your personal life . Right , because if you're like me , you're ruminating on what you have to do the next day , and you're doing that because it's all in your mind , right Instead of down on paper .

I never really connected to that because I was always seen as , wow , she gets a lot done , you know . But then , you know , trying to translate that same mental approach to now still doing that in my career , but also having a business , it was too much .

It fell apart , right , and I started to get a little less done at work than what I wanted to do , which I don't like that . And then also in my business , I just was not moving it ahead at the pace that I wanted and as I got more clients , I wasn't able to really have any off time .

I was either working in my corporate or I was working in my business and didn't really have the time to do some of the things I wanted to do in my personal life .

So , all of that said , I came up with this approach to how I now organize my day , for both my corporate job and the time that I spend in my business every week , and it has completely changed my level of stress .

It's changed my ability to kind of get things done at the pace I want to get them done in both places and I call this approach high impact activity .

I think there are a million time management approaches and all of them can work , but this is how I do it and I'll walk you through what I do and then I will also tell you why this approach works so well psychologically , because it really does so . I call it high impact activity and it's actually very simple .

Embedded in it are principles of accomplishment and also focus and prioritization , and also embedded in there are the things that you need to do if you're tackling things you've never done before .

So if you've got a little perfectionist in you and you've got a little fear around tackling some of these big new things that you feel like are high stakes things for you and you're putting them off because you're not sure really how to do it , that's all embedded in here too , and it's really simple . All I do is because I'm not a big .

I just want to say before I dive in I'm not a big person to do a lot of things in my calendar . I don't know why I personally resist that .

I will do focus time during my work week , but on my calendar to just make sure that I don't get totally booked all the time in meetings and I'm unable to take time for projects , but other than that I just don't spend a lot of time doing all the fancy calendar things . Now , if that's you and it works for you , that's great .

But here's what I do and it really pays big dividends and it doesn't take a lot of time to do . So . I have a Word document and it's always running , meaning I'm always updating it real time every day . It doesn't take me very long and I start every work week by setting a new document and it'll carry over from the week before .

And at start every work week by setting a new document and it'll carry over from the week before and at the top it says high impact activities for week of , and then it's got the week and then what I do is I have two sections to it , because I run a business and I have a corporate career .

So I have my corporate career there first , and that's obviously where I spend the bulk of my time . So that's my 40 hour work week , and then I have my business and there are certain things that I have to get done that week .

I have certain obligations to clients , so meetings with clients , and then I also have creation of content and development of this podcast and you know other things that have to do email and also advertising and marketing and things like that . So there's only there's a set number of hours for the business , right .

So I have two sections and then what I have to do for each one . I write under there all of the things that I have to do . So I basically take all of the things that were in my brain and that running list that I was telling you about earlier and I put them down on paper .

It could be small things , like sending an email as a follow-up to somebody on something . It could be big things , like I have to do a deck for a kickoff at an executive offsite , right . Or I've got a big speech coming up or something like that , right . And then , underneath the bigger things , I have a list of subtasks that I have to do .

So I list all of those things down , take them out of my brain and put them on paper . If they're small things , there's just an individual bullet point . If there are bigger , more complex things , I have to do , like I said , preparing a kickoff deck for an offsite or developing a new brand strategy of some sort .

That'll have underneath it a bunch of subtasks . I might have to look at , research I might have to do an outline for a deck . I might have to start working on the slides . I might have to look at research . I might have to do an outline for a deck . I might have to start working on the slides . I might have to consult a few people .

All of that will go in there . And what's interesting about that list is that if you're , like I said earlier , a perfectionist person who tends to procrastinate out of fear or uncertainty , that you'll actually be able to do a great job with that .

If there's any kind of fear baked into it like if you , for example , if you have to give a speech and you have a fear of public speaking and so you just avoid working on the beach this kind of an approach shifts you out of your dread or your fear or your perfectionism and into just focus by putting it all on the page and getting it out of your head .

Now it's down on paper and your brain will start solving for what's on paper , right ?

So if it's a bigger thing that you're fearing , it helps to really outline all the subtasks you need to do and it takes that big thing from being a huge idea that your brain wants to enlarge and make complex and hard and scary and it starts to break even the hardest of things down into small little subtasks that actually don't seem so hard anymore .

It starts to break even the hardest of things down into small little subtasks that actually don't seem so hard anymore . They seem very bite-sized and doable and less scary . So once I get that all down on paper and I'll talk about the business separately in a minute , this is just my corporate career Then what I do is I start to decide okay on that list .

To decide okay on that list . What are the things I have to tackle today ? And what I do is I highlight them in three ways . So the things that I have to do today , I highlight in yellow . The things that I complete , I will go back in and turn it from a yellow highlight to a gray highlight . So I'll gray it out . It means it's done .

I don't have to do it right . And if it's something I need to follow up on , like a touch base with somebody , if I don't hear back , I'll bank a note follow up with XYZ person by X date if I don't hear back . And I'll highlight that in yellow . So it's sitting there and it reminds me . It reminds me to do that Right .

And then if there's anything on there that I think , yeah , I need to do it , but it's these other things are more important I'll highlight it in red and for me that means I'll do it later in the week or next week . It's not flaming hot .

So that's kind of how I do it , and I do this at the beginning of the work week and then I always have that document open . I have a dual screen on my other screen . It's always there and I see it , and what that does for me is it allows me to focus . I'm able to know what are the things I have to do right now .

So if I run out of a meeting and I have 30 minutes before my next meeting , I have an open list of the things and I can look at it at a glance and say , oh , you know what . I can get three of those things done , whereas before , when it was all in my head , maybe I wasn't as productive with how I use that half hour .

Maybe I was chitty chatting with some of my work friends or , you know , I was just wasting the time checking social or , you know , doing low value emails , right .

So what I'm saying is this approach gets every ounce of productivity out of my day , and what it's done for me is that I not only get a higher volume of work done , but there's less of a bleed into my weekends and my evenings . And I found that even the things that I really dread that seem hard and , like you know , just terribly overwhelming at times .

If it's a complicated thing that I have to do , by chunking it down into those sub things and always having that document open , I find there's so much less mind drama . I'm not telling myself it's impossible or hard or I can't do it .

I'm instead just diving in and looking at the subtasks and saying , oh yeah , I can send that email and oh yeah , let me gather two of those old research papers that I need to actually review tomorrow . That's on my list for tomorrow , right , it's like let me go ahead and get all that done .

I'm super organized and super focused and I don't spend any time telling myself that I don't have enough time and I'm not procrastinating because the things that I need to do I'm tackling as I need to tackle them . So that's how I do my corporate job .

Now for business , like I said , I have the lists the same way , but my business is really different , and here's what I mean by that . I do the same process . I know all the things that I have to do for that week and the bigger kind of content things I need to do , the bigger marketing things or whatever that I have to do .

But most of the things with my business also involve things I've never done before .

So I may have spent my whole career in brand marketing , but when it comes to starting your business , it's one thing to like like if you're in marketing , sometimes you'll have experience doing various channels of communication , like I've done advertising , I've overseen teams that have done email and you know web pages and web design and like all of the stuff .

But it's one thing to oversee it and work with best-in-class , knowledgeable vendors who do that work for you , and it's quite another to do it all yourself . You still have your same high standards that you have in your work day , but you have zero of the knowledge of how to actually get the things done on that tech platform .

So one of the reasons that I had such a problem with my productivity output in my business was that it was a lot of overwhelm because I was using the same intuitive work process that I learned early in my corporate career and I was trying to apply it to a completely different paradigm , a paradigm where I've never been a business owner on this level before , and

half the three quarters of the things that I'm doing now I didn't know how to do two months ago . You know you're teaching yourself , and so it's really easy to spend a ton of time as an entrepreneur in I don't know , or this is too hard , or I can't do this or whatever .

No matter how often you self coach or how in touch you are with your thoughts , if you're tackling things all the time that you've never done before , your brain will tell you that you can't do it and that you're overwhelmed and there's not enough time , and you will believe that narrative

. But the truth is , the thing that's different about this high impact activity approach for my business is that I do the same process with I know what I got to do that day , that week , the month , whatever , but most of it are things I haven't done before .

So I have to spend the time not only writing down the new course that I have to do , but I record all of the sub activities that have to get done , and there's even more , more than that . So I'll tell you what those are in a minute .

But I write down like every part of it researching the content , if I need to do that , doing the outline , doing the , the slide deck , recording the course , editing the course , creating the funnel for the course , creating whatever it is that you need to get done .

So all of those things have to be there , and then what I do is that's a list of subtasks under the project .

Sometimes , sometimes many times in my business , the subtasks have to have subtasks , because if one of my things says you've got to record your course , and then the second one is edit the recording , if I don't know how to edit , then what I've got to do is put in some subtasks that say you know , watch some tutorial videos on how to edit using X program , or

sometimes it's even pick an editing program , right . So you've got to do a little research on that . There are a million steps that have to be documented for everything that I do for my business . Now , this is because I'm at an early stage and because I'm not outsourcing all this .

So if I wanted to invest in outside virtual assistants or subject matter experts who could tackle all this stuff for me . It would be for me a much more familiar paradigm because I know how to orchestrate all that work , because that's what I've done my whole career .

But when you're doing it all yourself , you don't know what you don't know , and so you have to make sure that you're structuring your time in a way that , if you want to bootstrap it yourself , like I'm doing that , you give yourself the structure and the time to know . So I do the same process on high impact activity that I did for corporate .

I get it all out of my brain and down on paper . But then the big things , I not only list those sub bullets , but for the sub bullets I don't know how to do , like a tech platform or something like that Then my sub bullets have sub bullets and then it does the same thing for me that I was saying it does on your corporate job .

Like you , don't procrastinate if it's all down on paper .

It might be a really long list , but if I only have 15 , 20 hours available to me for this business , I'm able to make the maximum use of that time , because I've thought of the things that I have to do at a level of detail that is needed so I can just glance at it and I don't dramatize the things that I've got to do , because now I've figured out what

all those things are , I just go do it . And then the satisfaction that I get by taking something from a yellow highlight that I have to get done today to a gray there's a huge dopamine hit I get when I gray something out . It is like checking the box . There's something about it that for me , is very motivating .

I'm just like wow , I am really getting the things done that I need to get done . So it's a very simple process . It doesn't take a lot of time , but what it does is it gets you hyper-focused on the things you have to do . And I think the huge side benefit of it all is that if you're someone who's got a narrative on , I'm really overwhelmed .

I don't have enough time , there's too much to do . I am afraid I'm not going to be able to deliver , so I'm going to procrastinate . Like any of that , stuff melts away when you have a focused list of activity .

There's no drama when you're looking at it and you're seeing the things in a yellow highlight , because you know exactly what you need to go do and you'll just go do it .

But when it stays up in your head , there's a lot of opportunity to take something that you need to get done and make it into this huge , dramatic , big deal , you know , and that something that you put off because it's too scary , or that you don't , you're telling yourself you don't have enough time , or whatever .

It's so easy to believe our brain when it tells us those things , and what I want to submit to you today is that there's a different way to think about it , and I also want to tell you that it's possible , depending on what you've got on your plate and whatever .

Like you know , it's possible that your old approach to how you work might have worked fine for you for years , but maybe you became a parent of one or two children , or maybe you're caring for an elderly parent , or maybe , like me , you're starting a side hustle , or maybe you're volunteering with the board .

Whatever , you're caring for an elderly parent or maybe , like me , you're starting a side hustle , or maybe you're volunteering with the board . Whatever you're doing , maybe there's new things that are added to your life that make that old approach to work no longer work for you .

So it doesn't mean that the things you used to do or the approach you used to do were bad . It just might mean that now , given the new turn that your life has taken , maybe you need to do something else .

Like , for example , maybe you were an individual contributor and now you're managing a team , so you not only have your work to do and it's probably more complex work but now you're helping other people too , so that's different too . You can't just have this mental running list in your head .

It's got to be in some sort of system that puts it down on paper so you can see the light of day and you can track what you've done and what you still have yet to do in a way that doesn't cause a lot of mind drama .

So that is my answer to how to get more done , and I have to tell you , if someone had come to me and said , carla , you need help getting more done , I would have pushed back . But for me , what made me realize it was my self-coaching and all of the demands of starting this business and wanting to have that be something that continues to grow and develop .

I had to get honest with myself about what was working and what wasn't , and this approach has changed everything for me . And it's simple , it doesn't take any time at all and it not only gives you the structure that you need to do the things you need to do , but it gives you the satisfaction of being able to check it off the list .

And I have to tell you , I'm not sure there's anything that feels better than that when I gray something out . I'm not sure there's anything that feels better than that when I gray something out , it motivates me to tackle the next thing highlighted in yellow on my list . So I hope you give it a try .

It's going to work for you , I promise it will take your productivity to the next level and it will take your stress during the workday down several notches , and we can all use a little more of that . I hope you found this episode helpful , and if you'd like a template , I've actually prepared one for you . All you have to do is head on over to Instagram .

I'm at the Purposeful Career , so if you're not following me there yet , please give me a follow and click on the link in my bio . That'll take you to a list of things and you'll find the productivity to-do list at the very top . Click on that button and all you have to do is download it for free .

That will give you your guide and I think , if you use the system , it will really give you more time back in your work week and , even more importantly , it'll just stop the mind drama you have around being too busy to get all the things done that you need to get

done . You have time , you just have to make the most of it . So with that I'll leave you till next time . Make it a great week . My friends , do you have a life coach ? If not , I'd be so honored to be your coach . I've created a virtual coaching program and monthly membership called Next Level .

Inside we take the material you hear on this podcast , study it and then apply it . Join me at thepurposefulcareercom backslash next level . Don't forget the thepurposefulcareercom backslash next level . Join me and together we'll make your career and life everything you dream of . We'll see you there .