Episode 17 | How To Use Your Time More Productively

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Welcome to the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen and I took an Etsy startup and launched it in big box retailers within 12 months. As a creative with an entrepreneurial drive, I left my full time career in healthcare to find better harmony between career, family and self care. We believe you can have it all. Yes, you can launch and run a successful scalable business while maintaining harmony in all aspects of your life. We believe we can learn from each other and draw on many experiences to create the best life possible. During each episode, we will share proven life hacks that will keep you on top and striving every day. There should be no hesitation.Make a plan. Take action. We are here for you. This episode of the Boss It Podcast is brought to you by the Full Focus Planner. Guys, trust me, it's super difficult to run a business, plus have yourself organized with everyday life. Trust me. I know. We have found that the Full Focus Planner is the best planner to help me and it's the best planner that will help you stay focused every day. What I love most about this planner is that this, it does a really good job of breaking down your quarterly goals. And then it helps translate them into weekly goals and daily goals. Head over to the link in our show notes to check out this fantastic planning tool. All right, guys, let's get started. Hello. Welcome to another fantastic episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today. So last time we spoke about productivity and how important productivity is in your entire life for business or for your home life. And so last time we spoke specifically about the three pillars that make a productivity. We have time. We have focus. And we have energy. And we touched on all three components. We also touched on how all three components interact with each other and how when you're looking to schedule in events in your calendar, you should look at all three pillars to help you ensure that you're getting the best productivity during that time slot. So today, we are going to speak specifically about time and dive a little further on how you can look and evaluate your time to ensure that it is not what's hindering your productivity. Last time, when we spoke about time specifically, in episode 16, we spoke about working in the cracks of time, finding the most appropriate time to do your work. And also we spoke about busy work and how busy work can be delegated off to somebody else. And if you missed episode 16, go back and listen to that episode as soon as you're done with this episode, because it definitely gives you some insight on how all three pillars intersect with each other. And it will also dive into those topics on time that I just mentioned, working in the cracks of time, busy work, and then also finding the most opportune time to do your task. So today I want to just speak a little bit about observing your day. I know it's easy to get lost in the mix of things, the day to day, especially right now. Many people are still working from home. We're in the heat of the pandemic here in North America and our area is still in lockdown. So what that means is non essential workers are working from home and then everybody else does go onsite. Luckily, our schools are still open at the moment. It could shut down any moment to be honest. And we do have the ability to get lost with our day to day. It's the same thing over and over again. So what I'm going to suggest is to go and observe how you're using your time. I want you to look at your week for seven days straight, and I want you to account for every single day. And I know seven seems like a lot. Saturdays and Sundays could look a lot different than your Mondays to Fridays. And everybody has different things happening on different days of the week. So if you can go ahead and examine your week, fully account for every minute of your day, you may find big chunks of time that are not being utilized appropriately. And I'm going to do air quotes for appropriately because it's up to you to define how appropriately your time is being used. You need to decide on what are your goals, what are you trying to accomplish? And is it time that is preventing you from accomplishing those goals? Many people will speak about how they over-scheduled themselves and they have unrealistic goals of how much can be accomplished in that time block. So even considering that. That's a huge, huge burden on many people. And then they think that they're just not adequate. No, it could be that your time allotted is not appropriate. And the example I have for my own personal life is the amount of time emails take for me to answer and go through. My inbox is full of thousands of unread emails. I definitely need to get some assistance in that category. And that goes back to busywork, which we spoke about last time. So that is one of my goals for 2021 is to hand off the inboxes to somebody who can assist me with that big task. Because I thought emails would take me maybe, maybe 20 minutes to half an hour every morning. And when I did this activity of going through my day, for seven days straight, I realized very quickly that I can easily do my emails for an hour to an hour and a half every single day. And those are including the business emails for our product based business, Also Sophia, Boss It Club. And also for my clinic. My clinic cannot be delegated off to anybody else, but that job also requires a lot of emails back and forth, especially now with the pandemic. I am offsite so everyone is communicating with me through emails. So that is the first exercise I suggest everyone complete. Go through your Monday all the way to Sunday, and every day I want you to try to account for your time. And what you can do is maybe set alarms for every hour of the day to just quickly evaluate. So the alarm would go off and then you can go into your notepad in your phone and just put down like Monday. And then you can say, from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM, I made breakfast for the children. And then the alarm would go off at 9:00 AM and then you go 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. I was cleaning the kitchen. That's an example of my mornings on Monday to Friday and then, so on and so forth. So my suggestion is to try to use that activity to basically set the baseline for where you're at. And what you might realize is that you may be spending more time on things that you would consider an essential or not productive. For example, a lot of people will go onto social media and then they don't realize how much time they spend scrolling. Or another example is I decided to look at how is this, the other day, for whatever reason, I just got lost in looking at houses and I spent an hour just looking at houses and that was not a part of my schedule. So if you do need those hours of downtime, or you realize that you need to recharge and that helps you do that that's great. Just being mindful that you're doing it rather than it eating into other time, that has been allotted for your productive work. And again, I did air quotes for anybody who's listening and not watching the podcast. So after you've gone through the exercise where you have understood how you're using your time, I want you to then look at your goal. So say one of your goals is to reduce your weight by five pounds. Because 2021 is just approaching, many people have weight loss or healthy living goals. And we will use that as a great example to get started. So say you have the goal to lose five pounds in January 2021. And you would like to throw in an hour of walking each day. So we have to now make this into a habit that is the easiest way to use your time. If you go ahead and you can turn one of your goals into an actionable habit or an actionable task, which then converts to a habit, it takes a lot less time to get started and a lot less energy. And we spoke about energy as one of the pillars that we covered in episode 16, and we will do a full episode on energy. So we will visit the concept of habits again. But for this specific episode on time, habits are also very important because you will do things so naturally that you won't even realize that it is in your agenda. A good example I have is every day at 9:00 PM, me and an accountability group get together and we do an ab workout. And we've been doing this consistently since September. And it's so natural now that not only does it take less energy... well, most of the time it takes less energy but it's become a habit. And because it's a habit, it naturally falls into the schedule and it takes less and less time. So at first it would take us about 45 minutes to an hour to complete our ab exercises now, if we're very diligent, we finished within 25 minutes. By going and looking at your goal, making it into an actionable task and then doing it every single day will eventually lead to greater results. So you're maximizing your time and it becomes more natural. So you will not be using as much energy, which touches on one of the pillars of productivity. Basically with habits, not only are you maximizing your time, but you're also reducing the amount of energy it takes you to complete that task. Think about one goal that you'd like to accomplish. And then I want you to break it down into one actionable task. And then I want you to do that task every single day at a set time. We are creatures of habit. No pun intended, but we are creatures of habit. And we like things to be predictable. So if I know every day at 9:00 PM, I'm going to get a call from somebody who's going to help me stay on top of my fitness goals. It's easier and easier for me to do that habit on my own. And it also will result in greater success later down the road. So if you have not tried this before, please do that with one of your goals, make it into an actionable task and then do it every single day. Another great way to maximize your time is to develop systems around your time. So systems are really great for maximizing your time because, you know what's coming next. You know how the tasks at hand will line up to produce the result. So what I mean by that is because the system is working, it will take less time for you to accomplish that goal. So one of my goals is to post regularly on social media. I have a system in place to help me do that. What that means is I do my content creation on one day specifically of the week. What I do to accomplish that task is I use an online scheduling platform. So after I develop all my content for the week, I use a social media platform to automatically post all of the content I've created. This system has not only automated. But it also has saved me so much time because I'm not going back and forth with the task. I completed all at one time of the week and it's done. And we've talked about things like time blocking. So If we time block, for example, for a two-hour period on a Sunday, and we do all our content creation for the week, then we are not going in and out of a task, which also saves time. And we've talked about task switching in the past. And on average, if you task switch, it takes about 12 minutes per switch to get focused again. So that's why we suggest to chunk your time into big blocks and then go and develop a system around that. So in this situation, we've time, blocked a big chunk of time off on Sunday, and we have done our content creation. And then we have built a system around that where we go and we automatically post that to social media scheduling platform, and that will help us go and keep up with consistent posting on social media. And for people who are interested, we use later.com. I love that platform. I'm able to post to multiple sites at once. So definitely worth checking out if that's something that you're looking to use or looking to invest in. Another way you can build in systems for your everyday life could be things like laundry. For example, we have a system where we try to do laundry every other day of the week and the kids know to pile their laundry up. It gets collected and it comes down for the wash. And I usually run the laundry between 7:00 and 9:00 PM at night. So while we're getting things done for the evening, laundry's going and getting folded and hopefully being put away the same night. Another great place for expanding your business, if you are looking to start handing off aspects of your business is things like hiring help for even editing this podcast. For example, I have a great team that does the editing for us, and that is a system in itself. We record and then I let them know that the recording is ready. We usually have it ready for them by the Wednesday, and they have a few more days to complete their edits and then we will post it. So that in itself is a system. And then one last example I'll give you a for a system is even having that accountability group, which we touched on earlier for fitness. That in itself is a system because we have it at a specific time with specific people on a specific platform. And we have specific exercises. So that in itself is a system to help us achieve a goal. Basically a system is a series of activities or actions that have to occur for the result to be met. So the actions involved with the accountability group is somebody has to trigger that call. And then when the call is triggered, all of us jump on and we all complete the action together, but the system is in place. So it's easier to execute the goal. My suggestion for you is to look at the goals that you want to accomplish and see if you can build a system around it. It can be a goal at home. It can be a goal for family. It can be a goal for work, look at the task and see if you can build a system around that task and be very specific. See if you can try to align it up with the time of a day, the time of the week, and that way you can ensure that there is some accountability for that system to occur. Okay. So the last tip I have for time and how it can help you increase your productivity is setting expectations with everyone. What I mean by setting expectation is to let everyone know what you were planning to do during that time when you time block, you need to set expectations. A good example I presented in past episodes is when I used to go for yoga, I'm not going right now because the gyms are shut currently. We're in the middle of COVID, as I had mentioned before, so the gyms are not available. So when I was going for yoga, I was set the expectation with my family that I'm leaving the house at eight o'clock in the morning or nine o'clock in the morning, and I'm not going to be returning for two and a half hours. And that time was blocked off. They were not able to interrupt that time and everyone knew that time was not available for me to be doing anything else. That's setting expectations. I set expectations with them. And then I also set expectations with myself because now I knew that I had set the expectation with them. I was obliged to go and meet my goals or meet my commitments at the gym. That is what I mean by setting expectations. When you develop your schedule, when you go ahead and you've decided that I'm going to do X, Y, and Z today, and these are the times I'm going to do it, you need to set expectations with other people around you. So that way they not only encourage you, but they hold you accountable. And that time then is blocked off for you to complete your work. So it could be things such as having the kitchen cleaned together as a family. We've set the expectation that everybody should be helping clean the kitchen right after dinner. That way, once the kitchen is clean together, we can go ahead and use the rest of the night for however we choose. We don't have to be in the kitchen all night, cleaning the kitchen together, right? Or one person doesn't need to be in the kitchen cleaning all night. That in itself is setting expectations. That's also a good example for how we systemize something that's done every day. So we've now said to the family, the system is I'm doing the dishes, you're doing the dishwasher. Someone else is going to sweep the floor. Someone else is going to take care of the countertops. And that in itself is like a system, but it's also setting expectations. It's also a form of habit formation because now everyone is used to doing that task every day. All right guys. So we've covered a lot of information today regarding how time can help with increasing your productivity. I'm just going to do a full rundown of what we have spoken about. So first we talked about a few of the items that were covered in Episode 16. So if you haven't listened to that, make sure you go back and listen to that next and how that will help you increase your productivity along with the intersection of the two other pillars, focus and energy. We also spoke about how it's beneficial to take a seven day snapshot of the way you spend your time. And one of the tricks I suggested to use was taken alarm every hour on your phone and on the hour, go into your notepad and dictate in notes what you had done that past hour. Then after you have evaluated your seven days, you can see where you would like to chunk out times for other tasks or you can evaluate and see how much time you're spending on tasks that you would deem is not productive and try to eliminate that habit. And then on top of that, we spoke about how to create habits that were deemed appropriate or productive. And that is completely up to your discretion. Once you've made your goals, you should be going ahead and creating a solid habit. And the best way to do that is by using actionable tasks and doing that regularly. And then once that habits formed, it's easier for you to not only complete that task it will also eventually take you less time. We spoke about systems and time blocking and setting expectations and how those concepts together also help achieve very dramatic results on how resourceful you can be with your time. So all of those together: habits, system, and time-blocking, along with setting expectations, really do increase what you can do during your time. Plus it will show you and highlight to you how you are using your time after you go through the seven day exercise of evaluating your time. There's also another amazing way to optimize your time, but I'm going to save that topic for another podcast. It's basically taking your goals and breaking them up into 12 weeks as opposed to making a year long goal. Many people refer to this as a 12-week year, and I'm going to link it to an amazing book below in the show notes. I listened to this book a couple of times. And this book is great because it will talk about how you can take your goals and you look at them week by week for 12 weeks. That is essentially when you should accomplish your goal by. So we're going to do another complete episode on that topic because that in itself is going to take a full episode. But that is another strategy for you to really understand how to goal set. And then again, it'll go and tie back into time, but we'll save that for another episode. So guys that was a lot of information. I hope this was helpful. I really do hope you take the accountability and go and do that seven day snapshot of your time. Try to use your phone because I find the phones are with you at all times. So it's very easy to quickly do a voice note or quickly go from voice to text in your notepad, in your book or whatever other app is available in your phone to collect texts and really understand how your day looks. And then after that you can optimize it. You can optimize it to the way you feel as suitable for your family. The biggest takeaway you should get from this episode is that you have to start by looking at where you're at right now, and then make small adjustments as you go. Try to make things into habits. Try to build systems, try to set expectations and time block. And from the past episode, we also learned that you should find cracks of time. You should look for time throughout your day at the beginning of the end and see how it intersects with energy and focus. And finally, we talked about busywork and episode 16. So make sure you go catch that. And with all those concepts together, I'm confident that you will be able to increase your productivity in the best way you feel is suitable for your lifestyle. And you will be so happy that you've taken this action because it will result in wonderful successes for you and for your goals. Okay guys, that's all we have for today. And I'm so happy again you've joined us. If you love this episode and you feel like it's helping you, please do share it with your friends, because I know they can also get a lot out of this topic And again, you can definitely visit us on iTunes and give us a fantastic review. If there's any topics that you would like us to cover, please do send us an email at [email protected]. Or you can visit us on line on Instagram bossitclub Talk to you guys soon and remember, make a plan and take action. And yes, you can have it all. So my fellow bosses, did you enjoy that episode? Now is time for you to make a solid plan and take action. But first, remember to subscribe and follow the Boss It Podcast so you receive a notification whenever we drop an episode. Remember to leave us a review on iTunes. Take a screenshot of your review and share it on Instagram as a post or a story and tag us @BossItclub. If Instagram is not your thing, no worries. Email your screenshot to [email protected]. 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