Episode 48 | 3 Tips on How to Manage Your Life Zones

Sophia Noreen: Hello everyone, welcome to another amazing episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today.  And today, I want to talk about systems, not any type of system but systems in your life. We have brought this topic up many times in the past when it comes to your entrepreneurial journey or how it applies to your career, but how we spoke about it when it comes to systems in your life.

Remember guys, we are not working in a bubble, we have a life that surrounds us. We have children, we have family, we have school, we have a vocation,  we have friends, we have a social life, and I know when you start your journey when you start working for yourself,  it's very difficult to prioritize other systems. Prioritizing other things that you may think: Oh, I can do that later, or I'll accomplish that when I do this.

A great example that I can think of is your health.  Many people, when they start their entrepreneurial journey will sit at their desk for hours and hours without even realizing that the time is passing because they get into the natural flow. If you are starting out, you may not realize that you are sitting at your desk for three to four hours before standing up.  

That can be detrimental to your health.  Not only will you get body aches but you also may have long-term side effects from being too sedentary just because you wanted to go and live your best life as an entrepreneur.

So today, I want to give you three tips on how you can ensure that all of your systems, all of the big categories that you feel are important to you in your life are being prioritized and are not getting forgotten about as you continue on this new journey of running your own business. So I'm going to give you three tips today on how you can ensure that you're living in harmony with all of the categories in your life that you want to prioritize, and even those categories that you do not want to prioritize but are essential to your wellness and health.

Let's start with tip number one.  We need to take stock of what categories you have in your living zone. Some individuals will have categories that will be with them for a certain segment of time, some individuals will have categories that are lifelong,  but at the end of the day, we need to ensure that we're not forgetting about specific categories, especially if they're transient so I'm going to give you a few examples.  

So a category for me now and likely for the entire duration of my life will be my children. I have children and they are a big segment of my life, they're our largest segment right now because obviously, they're young. But as they get older,  likely they will take less time and less energy,  and we'll talk about that in the next tip. But basically, the first tip is I want you to get a piece of paper and I want you to write down all of the categories that you want to prioritize in your life and even those categories that you should be prioritizing like your personal health and wellbeing,  which many people actually forget to count. You need to make that a separate category.

The reason we're doing this is that many people forget to take stock, and that's the term I like to use. Many people forget to take stock of what they are responsible for, and when they start their entrepreneurial journey, they will override certain categories. Personal health actually is one of the big ones.  You may start denying yourself certain things like daily exercise or even getting up and chatting with your spouse or your significant other or your partner or your friends because you're so busy. A lot of entrepreneurs will also deny socializing.  They will say: Sorry, I have to work or their grinding for 14-hour days when they used to potentially go out with their friends in the evening, pre-pandemic or even for a chat on the phone. these are categories that you need to understand that exist in your life, and you should ensure that they will continue to exist in your life even if you have to potentially tweak them here and there. 

You do not want to forget about them because trust me, there's a reason why they're there. There's a reason why your friends, your family, should be a big segment of your life.  It's very difficult going through the entrepreneurial journey, and you do not want to be there by yourself. If things are not going so well, you may need to speak to other people. You may need to speak to your family and friends, and they may not always be around if you have denied them or neglected them for years on years when you're working on your entrepreneurial journey.

So I want you to get a piece of paper, write down all of your big categories. For me, I have my family, I have my friends, I have my children and yes, I've separated out family and children.  I also have another category for my spouse because they also need to be prioritized. I have my clinic work, my personal health, I have my personal mental health and physical health so I can put those in two different categories, two different buckets.  

I also have a household that we need to worry about. We have a functional household, and that people have to get things done. And unfortunately, or fortunately, I am the manager of the household. So if things are not going as planned, then likely I need to step in and say: Hey, by the way, there's a task that you forgot to do today, and that is my responsibility. So even owning up to the responsibilities that potentially you don't want to have, especially if you are running a household and you're like other people should really step up.

Sometimes you're just going to have to say that that is my role at the moment, I will try to pass on the baton to somebody else in the household,  especially when it comes to doing household or domestic chores. You want other people to eventually take ownership of that, especially if you are planning on carving out a piece of that segment which we will talk about in tip number two,  to allocate towards your entrepreneurial journey. 

For example, I also have, in addition to the clinic which is my part-time job at the moment,  I also have the product-based business, Also Sophia, and then we have Boss It Club, so that's a whole other segment of my entrepreneurship journey. That's a whole other segment that I need to ensure that is getting completed with my time and my energy.  So that is the first tip. 

I want you to go through all of the categories in your life zone. I want you to say: Okay, these are all the things that I am responsible for, or that I want to prioritize in my life either for myself or for my family.  I want to ensure that I'm not forgetting about these segments in my life because I'm running a new business, or I'm trying out a new job career. I want to ensure that they're prioritized. 

So taking stock, ensuring that you've listed everything. You may have to speak to your significant other, your partner, your family, your friends,  just to ensure that you're not forgetting something, because sometimes we were so used to habitually running through life that we may forget: Oh right, I do like to volunteer once a month or once a week at my church, my temple, my mosque.  Those are things that sometimes we forget about, so make sure you do take stock and you do ask others about what things you do regularly that you could be forgetting about. Once you're done with that task, that's tip number one, write down all of your broad categories in your life zone. I want you to look at each category and ask yourself how much time or energy do you believe this takes you on a weekly basis?  And the reason I'm saying weekly is that truly, most things are rotating on a seven-day cycle. Sometimes a frequency could be a little bit more or could be a little bit less, but I find that you can take a snapshot of your week and have a good understanding of your flexibility of time, your flexibility of energy, and also the flexibility of just ensuring if you have enough time to start your entrepreneurial journey. Sometimes people jump in headfirst and they realize: I don't get the time to do all of the stuff that I wanted to do, and then we have to make provisions different ways. 

So your tip number two is on the same page,  you can write down how much time approximately, so approximate your time. For example, it takes me about,  I would say one day a week to do Boss It Club. So that's eight hours of my week, I spent entirely on Boss It Club, including podcasting, any type of social media, and then any type of coach creation development or any type of coaching.  That is a snapshot of Boss It Club.

I can do that for each one of my categories and ensure that I'm not taking on too much. The reason I like to use time is that time is one of our limiting factors. We also want to look at energy. So you have to ask yourself, do you feel energized after you do each one of those tasks in your life zone? Do I feel energized by doing Boss It Club? Yes, yes I do. Do I feel energized by doing my laundry? No, no I don't.

The goal here is to assess how much energy each life zone is taking from you, and this task could be a bit difficult to assess because you may feel guilty. For example, my children, take a lot of energy.  They don't always fill me up. If we have the analogy of your cup and we have the half-empty cup or the half-full cup,  you essentially have a cup of energy and you have to ask yourself, is this drawing energy? So depleting my cup. Or is this filling me up?  

And the goal is to see which tasks in your life zone are filling up your cup and which are drawing down your cup? The goal really is for you to say: Yes, filling up my cup. No, depleting my cup.  I would do that for each category. And again, there may be some guilt associated with this because let's face it, we don't all want to feel that our kids are depleting our cup. You could also put that sometimes depleting my cup of energy, sometimes filling my cup of energy and we can go deeper later on about why there could be some things in that life zone, in that segment, in that category that could be filling you up and sometimes depleting.

So that's tip number two. I really want you to go through each life zone, each category in your life zone, and say, is it filling up? Is their energy cup being filled or is your energy cup being depleted, or is it somewhere in between?

The last tip, tip number three is you have to make some choices. This is an exercise where individuals will have to say that this task, this life zone is really filling up my cup.  I feel like I want to continue doing it. Then there'll be other tasks such as for me anyway, cleaning my house is a task.  Managing the household is a life zone.  If I don't take care of that, it will not only drain my energy, drain my cup but it'll make me feel less productive. So I like having a very clean and organized house for the most part.  Obviously, there are exceptions when things are happening on a daily, but for the most part, I want a clean house. So that's a priority for me, and I feel like, because I feel depleted in energy when cleaning it, I need to figure out systems in my life to ensure that I'm not having to do it all the time.  

Obviously, it's still my responsibility. It's the family's responsibility, but I want to make sure that there's a system in place that we're all sharing the responsibility equally, and or we delegate it out to somebody else. And then we have to speak about, do we have the resources for that? Are you able to hire somebody to come into your home and clean it?  That's a luxury. Not everyone has the luxury of having a housekeeper or somebody to clean their house once a week. So when you go through your exercise and you start looking and you start saying that your kids really do deplete your energy, and this is a hard one for parents. 

They do deplete my energy. They're not always filling my cup. What can I do now, what system can I create that will allow me to fill my cup? I do enjoy spending some time with them, but I don't want to be with them all the time. So you may want to arrange a babysitter if you have the luxury of having a babysitter. You may want to ask family or friends if they can take the children once a week while you go and do some errand that you love to do.

These are things that you need to consider because one of the fundamental things about starting your own business is at the beginning, it may fill your cup, but over the long-term, it may drain your cup. We have to look at your energy resources as finite, it's not infinite. You only have so much energy in the day, and we have to be really, really careful of how we spend our energy. We don't want to be trying to get out of bed every day and saying: I have so much to do.

We don't want you to feel like that. We want you to feel energized and uplifted and ready to conquer whatever goal you have on your bucket list.  You want to say with confidence: Yes, I feel like I have control of all of my life zones and all of the life categories that I have going on. 

So in tip number three, you strategically need to look and assess which items are giving you energy or are filling that cup, and which are depleting your cup? You also need to look at the time. So you may need to understand that if you're looking for space in your calendar to cut out to start this new journey, and you don't get the time then you'll have to look strategically and see how can I carve out time?  

Potentially, I do need to delegate cleaning my house once a week to others, because I don't have eight extra hours a week to donate or to delegate, or to use myself to build my business. You may have to make those tough decisions,  or you may have to say to your partner or your family: Listen, I can't spend this much time doing these things any longer. I need your help to do it. 

And so, again, having those conversations and being open and transparent, and that likely could be an entire book because I think sometimes we will not be able to have those conversations easily.  For whatever reason, we feel like it's still our responsibility to be taking on such onerous tasks that we don't feel that is filling our cup. But if you don't have enough energy and time because your life zones are already filled with everything else, then likely even if you wanted to start a new business or go on an entrepreneurial journey, it will be difficult because you don't have the energy resources and you don't have the time resources.

In the beginning, money is really secondary.  There's a lot of things you can do yourself now, you can DIY a lot of things in both product-based and service-based businesses. So really, the limiting factors that come into play are usually time and energy. It doesn't matter if you have a boatload of money or if you get funded, or if you have an investor behind you, if you don't have the time and energy to basically invest, it will be very difficult for you to execute.

Okay, so let's take it from the top. The first tip is to look at your life and put them into broad categories. Everything that you're responsible for, everything that you do on a daily basis, everything that you want to prioritize for yourself or others, and even things that you may not want to prioritize, but you know that is good for yourself and your health, but all of these things into broad categories. These all fall under your life zone.

You do need to do this exercise, and I think even if you're an entrepreneur or you're not, I think it's very important for all of us to take stock of what our life zones are. Next, tip number two, you're going to go ahead and assess the time it takes per week and how much energy it takes?

So is it filling up your cup? Is it depleting your cup or is it somewhere in between? And you can use that nomenclature for the ease of this exercise because I feel like the energy is one of those terms that is hard to define. Some people will define energy as taking too much energy, too little energy. It's a difficult term in a very personal term to define, so I like using the cup analogy because it's very visual. 

And then finally tip number three, you need to look at your list, categorize. You need to see what the time and what the energy components are for each, and then you have to make some decisions. You may say to yourself that I need help. I know that this is taking me too much energy and time, I need help.  And then obviously we're not going to talk about it today, but obviously then building a system to help you execute or help you delegate because we don't want you to be suffering through things that you don't want to do.

We don't want you to be having to do things that are draining your energy, or for example, with my children, I perhaps do want to spend time with my children but I want to be realistic, I do need a break. So I'm going to hire a babysitter or I'm going to ask my friends if they want to babysit, and then I'll take turns and I'll babysit their kids, or I'll ask their grandparents. 

These are all strategies that you can use so that way you feel more uplifted, you have the energy, you can execute daily. And then if you are looking to start a new career, or if you're looking to start a new business,  then you have the energy, you have the clarity of mind and you have carved out time in your day and your schedule that is not going to hinder or interfere with things like your personal health, your personal relationships or things that you just want to prioritize in your life like the example I gave, I guess would be like a clean house.  

I know it's difficult sometimes to take stock of your life zones, of your broad categories. I know sometimes it can become overwhelming because you're like:  I have so much to do. How am I going to achieve all that? Don't become discouraged. Do it at a time when you would be journaling or time that you're doing any type of mindfulness practice. You may want to just take the time after completing a mindfulness session, for example, because then you're calmer your sympathetic nervous system is dampened down, and the sympathetic nervous system is like your fight or flight. 

So we want you to be really calm when doing this exercise, so that way you're not necessarily going to get anxious by writing everything down on the list. We want you to be really relaxed. We want you to be able to think with clarity, and hopefully gain a little bit more insight on your life, your life zones, and how you can then apply any type of strategies to make them more fulfilling.  And then, of course, carve out a little bit of extra time and energy for whatever new journey you want to go on, be it a new career, be it a new business, be it anything in education. 

I know that many entrepreneurs like to take lots of personal development and education courses, but if you don't have the time and energy to do it, signing up for that is not going to help. You need to actually execute and finish what you have signed up for.

Okay, guys, that's all for today. Big exercise, so gets pen to paper. Of course, complete it when you feel calm and you don't feel too overwhelmed because again, this exercise is going deep and we'll see you guys next week, same time, same place. And remember, make a plan and take action, and yes, you can have it all. Bye for now.