Episode 18 | How to Increase Your Energy to Increase Your Productivity

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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 everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Boss It podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today. Today, we're going to be continuing our conversation about how to increase our productivity, especially as we come close to the end of 2020 and we enter 2021. And what a year 2020 was. In the previous two episodes, we spoke about how to increase our productivity. And we're going to continue that conversation. In episode 16, we spoke about how there's three pillars of productivity: your time, your energy, and your focus. So all three of these pillars really do impact your productivity overall. And then in episode 17, we spoke about time specifically. After you listened to this episode, go back and listen to the previous two. If you did not catch them yet, because trust me, it will continue to increase your understanding about productivity and how you can apply this information to your own life. Remember, the goal is always to take what you have learned and apply it to your own life circumstances because if you're listening to this podcast, I know all of us want to increase our productivity. Today, we're going to shift the conversation and we're going to talk about the second pillar, which is energy. Now in episode 16, we spoke about how all three of the pillars, time, energy, and focus do intersect. And that is what will basically help impact your productivity. I can give you an example from my day, at the end of the day, between 9 and 12, I have the time, but sometimes I don't have the energy because if I have not slept well the previous night, if I have not eaten well throughout the day, or if I had a lot of other activities that were physically enduring during the day, I may not have the energy. And then even though I have the time, if my energy is not there, I noticed that my productivity goes down. And I'm sure you have similar situations in your own life that you can attribute the intersection between time and energy and how one or the other maybe be impacting your productivity. We also gave the example of how focus can impact your productivity. And if you throw focus into that example, sometimes what ends up happening in the evening between 9 and 12 at night, when I am trying to develop products for the product based business, Also Sophia, I have other variables that might be coming to play such as my children need more assistance going to sleep at that time. Or if, for example, friends want to chat on the phone, my focus is now taken away from the task at hand and I become less productive. So you can see very easily how productivity is affected by these three components. And today we're going to speak very specifically about energy now in episode 16 if you missed it, we spoke very briefly about an example that I had regarding my productivity related to energy, and that was my vitamin D deficiency. I'm not going to give health advice specifically. But what I am going to say is if you feel you have very low energy, it could be contributed by your health. And I highly advise that you go speak to your physician, family, doctor primary care provider, or your nurse practitioner, because it could be that you are deficient in one of the essential vitamins. It could be that you're iron deficient and there could be an underlining cause of potentially why your energy is lower or you feel like your energy is lower. So after ruling that out, I would look at other strategies as to how to increase your energy. And another one of the strategies that we spoke briefly about in episode 16 was your sleep and your sleep hygiene. Not everyone knows this inherently, but not many people act on the advice is that you need a very good sleep routine. And we're going to go a little bit more into a few of these strategies. I am going to link the article from the CDC, the center of disease control and prevention, which speaks specifically about sleep. I'm going to highlight some of the strategies that they provide, and then just give you examples of how I've applied a few of these in my own life, because I know these examples really do help you then think about how you can apply them to your life. Now, again, sleep hygiene is very important, especially if you're the type of individual that is suffering from some type of insomnia or you have a hard time winding down at the end of the day. Again, I'll preface this by saying that if you are having sleep quality concerns, you should bring this up with your physician when you do have your annual physical checkup. Or even if you're going in for a general checkup, you should have these conversations because sleep and quality of sleep do affect your overall wellbeing and your energy and eventually your productivity. But it could also be related to another underlying health problem. And you want to make sure that you've checked off all the boxes before you have ruled out any concerns that it might be an underlying health issue. Now in episode 16, we spoke about how we should really try to turn off our devices 90 minutes before going to sleep. I know as an entrepreneur or self-employed or somebody who's just really busy, you constantly are looking at your phone. You're constantly looking at your computer or at the end of the night, some people wind down and they watch TV. Now, if that is not affecting your sleep, that's great, but you never know. It could actually be because the blue light has actually been shown to affect your melatonin levels. And as we spoke about in episode 16, we did say that your circadian rhythm is connected to your melatonin and this could be delaying the onset of sleep. So that is my number one tip. And unfortunately, I'll be completely honest: I do not follow it as I should. I do have the phone with me in my room. Another tip that the CDC does suggest is removing all technology from your room. That's including your TV, your phone, your smartwatch or anything that is going to give out that blue light. I know on the market they do have these glasses now that will help you reduce the amount of blue light exposure. I haven't yet tried it myself but you never know if that is something that you want to invest in and try out by all means. It's not going to cause you any harm. So alluding to the 90 minute wind down is basically before you go to sleep, you should have rituals. And rituals would come into the play of habits and creating those habits. When I allude to habits or rituals, it's that you're doing these structured activities before bed regularly. You're not doing it sometimes and not doing it other times. You're doing it regularly. So for example, a good wind down routine, you do see this a lot with children. Parents put a lot of effort into doing it the wind down routine with children but for some reason we forget about ourselves, right? So you're going to want to really take what you do for your children, if you do have children, and try to mirror it in your adult life. For example, a lot of individuals will give their children baths before going to sleep. So what's actually happening is as your body's cooling down, the cortisone levels are also falling as your body is preparing for sleep. That cortisol is very important because that is the hormone that helps with energy. It is the hormone. That's like your fight or flight. So if you're in a fight or flight situation, your cortisol levels will spike. And if you're ready to go to sleep, they will fall. Now when you cool the body down, that's. signaling to the body that it's time to go to sleep. So adding a routine where by you're having a quick shower or a quick bath before bed might actually help reduce those levels of cortisol and also help slow down your metabolism and prepare for sleep. So you see how parents do that for children? You could try to do that for yourself as well. I don't have a quick shower or bath before bed, but then again, I don't need that in my routine at the moment. I am able to hit the bed and go to sleep within the 20 minute time period which is suggested also by the CDC. If you're not falling asleep within 20 minutes of going into bed and turning off your phone, if your phone is in your room, try to remove your phone once you get into bed and you're consciously trying to put yourself to sleep. They say within 20 minutes, you should fall asleep. Now another good sleep resource at the CDC actually links to is sleep education org. And they suggest that if you can't fall asleep within 20 minutes is to get up and walk around. A few additional tips that you could try before going to sleep is really setting the tone in your bedroom. You could try to put a diffuser with essential oils. You could try lighting a candle. You could try putting on music, but my number one piece of advice for us, very busy entrepreneurs are very busy parents is to remove your devices through your room. My suggestion is to do a little journaling before going to sleep or reading a book before independence. that is not sitting on your iPad or your Kindle or any of your e-readers. Another tip from the CDC is continuous sleep, not being interrupted during the night. And I know if you are a parent and you do have small children, you may still be going through the cycle of waking up and falling back to sleep. So of course that is just the situation you're in. And if you can consciously say that is my situation, try to accommodate your evening routine to go to bed earlier. Try to stay in bed longer if possible, so that you are getting a cumulative of seven hours or more of sleep a day. That's within a 24 hour period. And so that is also very important. And the reason why we're talking about energy is because if you're not getting the amount of sleep, you're not getting the best quality of sleep, then it is going to affect your energy. You may be carving out the time as we discussed in episode 17. You carve out the time. You're ready to go. You're going to get to the task and you realize, oh my gosh, I'm just so tired. I just can't focus on this. And we're going to talk about focus of course, in the next episode. But do you see how energy is so important and it can be directly affected by your sleep. Another thing I want to talk about is setting rituals and habits and automation. Now we spoke about all of these in episode 17 as well. But again, I want to bring it up because it takes energy. Each time you are doing something novel and every time that you take on a new task, you'll notice that it takes a lot more energy just to figure it out. And then the second, third, and fourth time, it becomes easier and easier. Why? Because it's habit formation. When it becomes a habit, your brain is automating the response and it will take less energy and you'll become more and more productive. You'll go quicker and quicker. So I want you to make sure that if it's something that needs to be done regularly, that you make it into a ritual or a habit. You do the same task at the same time of the day. Given the example of how we have an accountability group to help us do our exercises at the end of the night. Another example that I gave before was how I've set up my social media. So it is an automated situation where I'll do all my content planning for the week on a specific day of the week. And then I use later.com to help automate the posts. Another example that I've given in the past is how the family has now contributed to cleaning up every evening between 7:00 and 8:00 or between 6:30 and 7:00, we are getting the house kitchen cleaned up and everyone's doing it. It is becoming a habit and it's becoming less and less onerous on the one person in the house that was doing it previously. Plus it's becoming less and less onerous on the individuals involved because it is habit formation that's taking over. So those are a handful of ideas of real life examples that you can apply in your life, be it in business, be it in your house, be with your family. The idea is if it's something that's repetitive and continuous, you need to automate it by doing that, you'll reduce your energy required and therefore you can use your energy for other more productive things. It also ties back into the concept which I have not touched on yet is called decision fatigue. Now there is such a thing as decision fatigue. I'm sure you've had it before in the past where there is so many things coming at you at once that you need to make a decision on all of them. Let's face it that's a lot of input into your brain processing and then output and eventually your body and your brain are like, no, that's done. I'm done with that. So that takes energy. And one way of combating decision fatigue is by again, automating a few things in your life where you're not the one making the decisions every day, or you've already decided. So that is not going to impact your energy on the day up. I've really interesting strategy that we've seen very successful human beings do is selecting their clothes or limiting their wardrobe down to the very bare minimums. I think Mark Zuckerberg has really nailed down the strategy of limiting your wardrobe as one of those decisions that you need to make regularly. If you just Google Mark Zuckerberg wardrobe philosophy, you'll see exactly what I mean. If you haven't heard about this concept before the man literally only has grey t-shirts and jeans in his wardrobe. How fantastic is that? Now he's "I don't want to be burdened with this additional decision I need to make today. So I'm just going to have the same thing in my wardrobe." And therefore it's easy for me to plan. The man could probably get somebody to dress him, but if he wants to spend his resources elsewhere, that's great. And he doesn't really care about how he presents himself. He can wear a t-shirt and jeans and be just as comfortable. In your own life, you may not want to take on Mark's strategy, but what you could do is you could preplan your dress for the week, if you're an individual that really prioritizes how you look throughout the day, or if you need to go into the office. I know a lot of us are in quarantine we are recording this at the end of 2020. So you may not b e burdened with this chore every week, but think about something else in your life that you can apply an automation to, which would help you reduce your decision fatigue. A really great example for every household, is your meal planning. Now a lot of people are like meal planning is, it takes a full day to do that. Yes. But if you know your meal are done for the week, you have all the grocery that you need in your fridge to either prep or prepare your meals for the week or you've pre prep, and you've pre-prepared, then you know that day you're not going to be spending your energy to make your meals from scratch because you've already started the whole entire planning process. You would be surprised about how much energy it takes you to just plan your meals. And if you try breaking up your meal prep throughout the week. So for example, you plan all your meals on the Monday. You ensure you have all the groceries in the fridge, or for most people who are actually working a nine to five Monday might not be a good day. So try the Sunday. And then if you are really ambitious, you could even go ahead and start prepping by chopping everything up. Of course, this is not a novel concept it's been done before, so why not try it? Why can't you do it? I will say that I have not tried this strategy yet. I think I have to start the strategy now because as it's getting busier and busier with new initiatives in the business, I'm realizing that, oh, no, I'm not carving out my four to five all the time strategically. I'm thinking, Oh no, I have my four to five window. So my time is set, but I look in the fridge and I'm like, Oh no, I don't have all the ingredients. And I don't know what I'm making. So my productivity in that aspect has been shot. I have not planned appropriately. So my energy level is going up. I could have saved that energy for another concept that would potentially push the business ahead. I've now used that to help meal prep when I could have done that on the Sunday, for example. So be conscious of decision fatigue, understand that if there's certain things that you can do on the weekends or on a different day of the week, when you have less decisions to make. I would suggest to automate your practices. So you're now using that energy at that time, rather than during a day, when you already are heavily booked with either meetings or strategy or your content creating, just make sure you're conscious of that. Okay guys, we've gone through some really big concepts again, regarding energy and how energy could be impacting your productivity. From the top we have touched on your health and how, if you're feeling really low energy and you feel that it could be an underlining concern with your health, go visit your primary care practitioner be it a nurse practitioner or your family physician. I gave an example in episode 16, about how I had a vitamin D deficiency. And once I had cleared that vitamin D deficiency, I was flying like I was able to do a lot more and I was a lot more productive. We also touched on having a really good sleep routine and having very good sleep hygiene and things that you should do in order to ensure that you are getting seven hours or more of sleep a day within a 24-hour period, especially for individuals who may be having small children at home, make sure you make up your sleep throughout the day. I will be linking to the CDC as a great resource for you to get started on learning more about how you can increase your sleep or have better sleep. We also spoke about habits and rituals and how automation could be helping you reduce the amount of energy that you require to complete a task. So again, look at your day to day, your week to week, it does go back into looking at your scheduling, which we spoke about in episode 17 of how to track your week. And now look at how much time it's taking you, for example, to do the meal planning, which we spoke about and how meal planning could be automated or how your content creation could be automated and things like that that could be impacting your productivity. And the very last thing we spoke about was the concept of decision fatigue. One fun fact about decision fatigue is that we make approximately 35,000 decisions a day. Isn't that ridiculous? Everything from what am I wearing today? When am I going to eat today? Should I use the bathroom? Those are all decisions. So of course your brain is going to eventually hit a threshold and they have termed that as decision fatigue, we spoke about strategies about pre-selecting your wardrobe. If you want to be as ambitious as Mark Zuckerberg, you can take on his strategy with his wardrobe. We also spoke about potentially trying to meal prep and meal plan, and the list goes on and on. So again, look at your day. For example, if you have a lot of meetings on Monday, you may want to reduce your other decision-making requirements during that day. For example, if you meal prep, you could try to meal prep on a different day of the week and not on the Monday. So again, it's about owning your time. It's about owning your schedule and then understanding how energy is going to be affecting your time, your schedule, and also ultimately your productivity. That's all for today. I hope this episode was helpful. I hope you are getting a few actionable items out of these episodes. Again, of course, if you're driving or if you're doing something where you don't have a pencil and pen, make sure you go and look at the show notes or the transcripts when you get home and take the notes and apply it to your own schedule and your own life. If you have been able to take a few notes, make sure you put an actual goal into play for the upcoming week. And we will be back next week for another fantastic episode about productivity. This time, we're going to be focusing on focus and this will help you get ready for 2021 and allow you to become more productive. Okay, guys, as always make a plan and take action. And yes, you can have it all. Bye for now. 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. 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