Makena: Hello everyone, and welcome back to Way of The Muse Podcast. I’m Makena Sage. I’m one of your hosts, and I’m here today with a solo podcast episode. 

Gigi’s got a lot of travel going on, and we like to switch off – sometimes do them together, sometimes we each do individual episodes. Today is one of those, and we’re going to be talking about how to get more done in less time.

I’m really, really excited about this topic because this is something that so many people struggle with. I see it all the time in my friends, family, and clients. It’s something that I just happen to be good at, to have developed a lot of skills in, and I’m excited to share them with you today.

People tell me that the things I’m going to share with you today really make a difference for them. Even one small tweak can save you so much time. 

And time is really our most valuable currency in life, right? It’s something we can’t get more of. We have however much time we have, and hopefully it’s a lot and we live long, happy lives. 

At the same time, it’s not something we can get more of, so it’s really powerful to learn strategies to be really effective within the time that you do have, so that you can spend more of it with your loved ones, doing things you really love.

That’s really my intention with this episode today. It’s going to be very practical. It’s going to be very hands-on in terms of really giving you strategies that you can take away – as we always do. I want this to be mind-expanding for you, that you’re able to really make some positive shifts as a result of listening today, and that you think of multiple people in your life that you would love to share this with, who could really benefit from it.

That’s how we know we’re doing our job and fulfilling our intention with this podcast. So keep that in mind as you go through today. 

I really want you to not just listen passively but to go, “Okay, how can I apply this and try it on?” Then reach out to us and share.

I’ve been so enjoying hearing from many of you who have been messaging or emailing us or commenting on social media posts and letting us know how these episodes are impacting you. 

Otherwise, we’re sitting here creating all this content kind of in a void, and we don’t know, right? So we hope that it’s touching you, we hope that it’s impacting you, but it really means a lot to us when you reach out.

You can always email us at support@wayofthemuse.com to share your feedback or your ideas for episodes. Please, like I said, share this with the people in your life if you get value out of it.

This episode today is really for the person who maybe struggles with getting as much done as they would like. So if that sounds like you, you’re in the right place. 

Or if you feel like you aren’t as effective in the time that you do have as you’d like to be – you’re like, “Ugh, I have this time, I sit down for a few minutes, and I just feel like I’m not getting that much done.” And also, if you feel overwhelmed a lot. 

Any or all of the above – this is really going to support you.

As I mentioned, it’s going to be very practical. We’re going to get hands-on in terms of what you can do to start to change this right away. 

So this episode, unlike some of our episodes, is going to be a little less about the mindset side of things. We do talk a lot about your attitude, your mindset, your energy and aliveness, and some of these other topics, which are super important and very powerful – but they’re just not the approach I’m going to take today.

If you want a little bit more of the mindset side, or just a different angle on this topic, you might want to check out the episode we have called How to Work Smarter, Not Harder. 

That was a few weeks ago, I believe. We’ll link to it in the show notes. 

That one was really for people who want to get better results in their career or business and make a quantum leap. They want to grow beyond where they are in terms of income and impact, but they can’t see how to do it because they’re already so busy and working as hard as they can.

That episode is really about how to grow your success in your career or business without just working harder. At some point, you max out how hard you can work, right? We see this often – people are doing as much as they can sustainably, or maybe it’s even not sustainable. That episode is great for that. 

Again, it’s called How to Work Smarter, Not Harder.

But today’s episode is going to be about things like calendaring and how to be more effective and efficient in the time that you do have with the things that you need to do. 

There are going to be things you need to do in life – some of which you love, some of which just have to get done – and we’re going to talk about how to do those as effectively and efficiently as possible.

First, I want to share a little bit about why I’m qualified to talk to you about this. Some of you know me well who are listening – you might be a client or a friend. Some of you don’t. 

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am an incredibly organized, focused, and effective person. It is just one of my superpowers.

It’s not necessarily that I was always that way. From a super young age, I was actually a pretty messy kid. I’m still kind of messy at times. You can ask my husband, Sunny – I leave things places and make messes. But I always clean them up and I’m super organized. Everything has a place, and our house is very organized. But I do create messes and clean them up. 

So you can be a messy person or even a little bit of a disorganized person and still learn the skill set.

I used to forget things all the time that I needed to do. Things would just slip my mind, and I almost think that’s why I became so organized – because I needed to. 

In my teens, I started to really develop this skill, and some of that came out of the work I was doing with Gigi around that time. I worked in her businesses starting at a young age. 

She really trained me on how to think in a systematic way – to follow through on things, close the loop, and think things through. She taught me how to think that way. Even though she’s more of a visionary, she’s also a very systematic thinker. She may have a hard time organizing herself, but she can teach you how to organize.

So I started developing that skill. Then, when I went into university – going from being homeschooled my whole life, which required me to be very organized – I had to be self-motivated and keep myself on track. 

When I got to university, it all ramped up into overdrive. I was a straight-A student with a 4.0 GPA, working multiple jobs on campus, partying way too much – I fit everything I could into those four years. And I did that partially because I was so organized and able to juggle a lot of different things.

After school, I grew my first business to six figures within 18 months, and then transitioned into coaching six years later and doubled my revenues multiple times after that. I’m only sharing this brief background – which some of you already know – because I want you to see that a huge piece in all of this is how I was able to be so effective: because I was structured and systematic about the way I utilized my time.

I was a little too far on the other end of the spectrum – of squeezing so much in and overworking myself. But I developed some skills there that you can take, and you don’t have to overwork yourself. You can take them to maximize the time that you do have.

And because Gigi’s a visionary, I really became an expert – through my work with her – in how to support people who are more creative, more visionary, who have all these different ideas and can’t seem to structure and organize. Or maybe people who would identify as a little bit more ADD, and help them take their ideas and bring them out and structure them.

She taught me that if we try to put structure to something right away – which was my tendency – we stamp out the flow of creativity. And so that’s never my intention with anything we do. It’s never to put you in a box or take the fun out of things. We often say the phrase, structure creates freedom.

Structure creates freedom. So what do we mean by that? Well, if you want freedom in your life, then a certain amount of structure is actually going to give you that. It’s going to give you the ability to have freedom. 

Because if you’re not structured at all – think about it – are you really free? If you have no structure and systems in your life and you’re just flying by the seat of your pants and reacting all the time – is that really freedom?

It’s one kind of freedom, but then there are probably messes popping up all over the place, right? Things you were supposed to get done that you forgot, deadlines missed, late fees – whatever it might be. It doesn’t really end up as true freedom. 

Not to mention financial freedom – if you’re in that constant reaction mode without systems in place, you probably don’t have the true freedom you desire.

So we help people see – and that’s what we’re going to talk about today – how can you set things up in such a way where you have enough structure and rhythm (we love the word rhythm) in terms of your schedule and your flow, to create more flow and more freedom in your life.

So I’m trying to think of a practical example of that. If you have a lot of bills or something piling up in your life and those always stress you out – or your financial side of things, which is often what people put off – well, if you set up a regular sort of “money date” with yourself (which we’ve coached many of our clients to do), and you make it fun, put on some music, maybe pour a glass of wine or tea, and you sit there and do those tasks, those money tasks, on a regular basis, and you start to really love into your money – which is something I think I talked about in my episode around Money Mindset (which we can also link to in the show notes) – what starts to happen there is you start to free yourself up.

First of all, you free yourself from the worry and the back-of-your-mind stress that’s preoccupied with the fact that there’s all this stuff that hasn’t been getting done. Then you start to clean up or stay on top of the things that need to be taken care of.

When you do that, think about how much time and energy you free up – just by having a regular date with yourself once a week for an hour or so, where you are really focusing on your money, paying your bills, or whatever those things are that need to get done.

That is one simple example of where structuring something – putting it into your weekly rhythm – creates a lot of freedom for you. It frees up time, it frees up energy, and it frees up mental and emotional bandwidth.

So that’s one small example. 

The more you start to do this in your life – and I’ll share practical ways to do this – the more you can create open spaces where you’re not distracted or preoccupied or thinking you forgot something. You can be really present with your loved ones or while caring for yourself. That’s why this is super, super important.

My clients tell me again and again that a couple of my gifts are clarity – helping them clarify things, what to focus on next, what they really want – and structure. This is one of the biggest ways that I contribute to their lives. So, as I was thinking, “What can I really share on the podcast that would be valuable for you?” – this is what came up.

This is one small piece of structure, which is: how do you set up your time and your to-dos to be as effective as possible?

So, that’s enough preamble – let’s get into some actual strategies. What can you do?

So I want to begin with not so much your list – because you probably have a long mental list or an actual list of things you need to get done – but I want you to set that aside for a moment and answer this question.

And I really encourage you, if you’re listening to this podcast episode, to pause it and write this down – to engage. Don’t just passively listen and hope you’ll remember it later. Text it to yourself, or whatever you need to do.

But the question is this: What are your two biggest goals right now?

And I would love for one of these to be personal and one to be professional.

So, in other words, if you have a professional goal of getting a raise, or if you have your own business and you want to make a certain amount of income in a month, then that could be your professional goal.

If your personal goal is to start moving your body more, get specific around that. Is there a certain amount you want to move your body? Do you have a certain size pants you’re trying to fit into? Or a personal goal could be something like taking a trip you’ve been dreaming of. 

Whatever feels present and meaningful to you right now.

So think of one main professional goal and one main personal goal, and ideally write those down.

Now, what I want you to do is, before we think about anything on your to-do list, I want you to make a list – long or short – of what tasks will really move the needle to help you make that goal happen.

Let’s take the example of an income goal, because that’s common for our clients – they’re growing their careers or businesses. So, let’s say your goal is to make $10,000 in a month, and right now you’re making $5,000 to $6,000. Then you want to really ask:

What would move the needle here? What would make the difference to help me bridge that gap?

Write those things down.

For most people, this could include reaching out to all of your past clients – not necessarily trying to sell them something, but just reconnecting, seeing how they’re doing, is there any way you can be in service to them, just connecting and genuinely getting curious about them.

That’s a great example. Business often opens up for people through those reconnections. Sometimes past clients will refer you to someone, or they’ll sign on to work with you again. As we’ve shared on the podcast before, many of our clients work with us for years and years – sometimes they go for a while on their own, and then they come back. 

My mom has clients who’ve worked with her for 15 to 20-plus years who are in some of our programs.

This is part of why – it’s because we keep those connections and we’re really in service to people over time.

So that’s a great example of an activity that could move the needle there.

Or if you want a raise in your career, or a promotion, then what would really move the needle there? Do you need to have a certain kind of conversation with someone in the organization? 

Or do you see – like, what would position you as someone that they should give that raise to? Is there a certain project you’ve wanted to work on that you’ve kind of been putting off, and could you start to take some action toward that project to really show that you’re invested in the company and you are deserving of that raise or that promotion?

So what is going to move the needle to get you from where you are to where you want to go in these two top goals?

That could be a very short list. It could be two or three things, or just one thing in each area. 

But the reason we’re starting here may seem counterintuitive – you’re like, “I’m busy, I have a million things on my list, why are we focusing on this other area over here and adding more to my list?”

And it’s because we really want to kind of flip your focus, or have you looking at the most important things you want to be moving forward.

That’s part of what we do as coaches with our clients – otherwise, these goals and these visions and these dreams get put on the back burner and we’re just busy in life. Everybody’s busy and has so much going on that months or years go by and we don’t make progress toward those things that we really, really want.

So we want to flip the focus here. We want to have you go, how do I make sure I’m moving these couple of things forward that are most important to me?

That’s why we distilled it down to just one personal and one professional goal. And when you do that, then it just puts things into perspective – because your to-do list is always going to be there. It’s probably always going to have a lot on it. I hate to say it, but that’s the nature of life somehow. There’s just always a lot, right?

Unless we just really live a super streamlined, simplified life – for most people, there’s a lot of things on that list, and it doesn’t seem to get shorter as you go along. And the richer and more vibrant and, you know, the more you have going on in your life, the more that’s there.

Now, of course, you can get support, and there’s a lot of things you can do there, but let’s just say in general – that list is going to be there.

And so this is something Gigi really taught me, is how to say, “Okay, if the list is always going to be there, then am I moving the most important things forward?”

And then we can get to the list.

So that’s what I want you to think about first.

So once you know what those activities are that are going to help you move the needle to really get results in your top areas of, you know, personal and professional goals, then what you want to do is go to your calendar.

I don’t know if you use Google Calendar like I do, or if you have a paper calendar – you really want to see what’s the system that’s going to work for you. 

Some people love paper calendars, and that really works for them. 

Some people love digital calendars or some kind of tool there, or Outlook. So whatever that is for you, as long as you check your calendar regularly, then you want to go in, and you want to say: How do I make this the first thing I do in my day?

And so I call this your Power Hour, and it’s one of the core principles we teach in our business coaching programs and masterminds. And it seems so simple, but it’s so effective.

And that just means the first thing you do in the day, if possible. If that’s really not possible, you can do it on your lunch break, or do it at the end of the day, but the later you push it, the more likely – or the less likely – it is to get done.

So your Power Hour is, as soon as you can do it in the day, spending 30 minutes to an hour on the things that move the needle to get you to your top goal. 

No distractions – turn off your phone, don’t check your email. I mean, you might need your phone for whatever you’re doing, but if you don’t, put it on airplane mode, whatever you need to do there, or do not disturb, so you’re not getting incoming calls and texts while you are outreaching, let’s say.

But this is your time to just set a timer for 30 minutes to an hour and go for it.

People go, “Well, what can I really do in 30 minutes to an hour?”

And you would be shocked, right? If you did that five days a week – an hour of really focused energy towards your number one goal for an hour every weekday – that’s five hours a week, that’s 20+ hours a month. You’ll be shocked. In a month, you’ll be amazed. 

And in 90 days, if you stick with it for 90 days, you will be shocked at what you can get done.

But you have to be consistent with this, and you may feel like nothing’s really happening at first. So that’s one thing I will say.

I was just leading a business training for our Wealthy World Changers Mastermind, and we were talking about Power Hours, and a couple of the women shared their stories – who have been coached by us and have gone on to make $10,000–$15,000 a month plus in their businesses.

And two different women shared stories of starting their Power Hours and really taking the strategies that I taught them in terms of what to be doing in those Power Hours to grow their businesses and grow their incomes. 

And they said when they first started doing it, it was like crickets. It was so slow. There wasn’t much response coming back, and they felt really discouraged.

But because they had my coaching and support, and because I kept telling them, “You’ve got to stick with it for at least 90 days. You’ve got to stick with it for at least 90 days,” then both of them said that it was right about the 90-day mark.

So imagine that. You know, first couple of weeks, you’re going for it, you’re doing your Power Hours, you’re excited. And then you kind of start to lose steam, probably about the one-month mark, right? You’re like, “Why am I not getting more results in my business,” let’s say, “and more clients? Like, it’s just not working.”

That is the point at which 90% of people quit. Somewhere between probably the 30- and 60-day mark.

Now, if you can be in that 10% of people who doesn’t, if you pick a strategy, an approach that you believe in – and if you don’t have that strategy or approach, then that’s where, again, choosing a coach to work with or choosing a framework or a methodology can be really, really powerful.

So, if you want to learn one, we have our Simplified Business Bootcamp program that takes you through this entire structure that these women followed. Or if you want more hands-on support, then we have programs like our Mastermind.

But I’ll just say, whether it’s us or somebody else, is you want to have your approach that you really feel clear and strong about. Maybe you come up with that on your own. But you’ve got to trust the strategy that you’re following is going to work and be willing to give it 90 days without giving up.

As long as you have that, and you are in that – let’s say – 10% of people who keeps going, who sticks with those Power Hours day in and day out. You get to day 60, maybe nothing’s really happened yet. You get to day 75, you’re like, “This is crazy. I’m almost there, and it still hasn’t happened.”

Do you know how many people quit before the finish line? It’s probably 95% or more.

But if you are in that small number of people who keeps going, there’s some kind of magic in it. I don’t know why. 

Then both of these women shared that that’s when it clicked. It was like right at 90 days. You know, one of them was starting her coaching business, and she had these $8,000 packages she was selling. And right at the 90-day mark, just about, she sold two packages in one day – so $16,000 all of a sudden, like that.

And then she went on, and a couple of weeks later she sold another one. And she went on. And so she started to build this momentum. But the momentum took time to kick in.

So I could go on forever about this, and it’s really a little bit of a tangent from this topic today, but I feel really passionately about it – to share why is the Power Hour important? And why is sticking with it consistently over 90 days or more important?

So I’m using a business example, but this could be true in your, you know – let’s say again, it’s getting in shape is your goal – then same thing.

You need to have a strategy that you really believe is going to work. So maybe you hire a personal trainer, or you’re doing some kind of nutrition plan, or all of the above, or you have ChatGPT help you create one. 

But you’ve got to go, “Okay, this is it. I’m going to stick with this for 90 days and really be consistent.”

If you do that, you may start to see a little bit of results as you go along, but really, past that 90-day mark, you’re going to be shocked at how much has changed.

So there’s magic in that number for some reason. I do not know why. But it just – again, maybe it has to do with the fact that most people give up before then, and so there’s power in sticking with it.

So we’ve talked about getting clear on your two biggest goals, what are the things that are really going to move the needle, and then making that the first thing you do every day, ideally – or as early as you can – and five days a week, minimum 30 minutes, and do that for a minimum of 90 days.

This is like the secret formula. I don’t know how to express how powerful this is to you, but hopefully, you’re getting a little bit of an inkling of it.

And from there, we can start to look at time management, and we can start to look at everything else on your list.

So imagine if you spend 30 minutes on your personal goal each day and 30 minutes on your professional goal and did your Power Hour – that’s one hour a day – and then you still have, you know, 23 hours left in the day. Of course, we need to sleep. Let’s say we sleep for 8 hours – okay, we have 15 hours left. Some of those are going to be for personal, but you’ve got a lot of time left to get everything else done.

People say, “I’m too busy to do that.” I say, no, you’re not. It’s just a matter of how you use your time.

Do you ever find yourself scrolling on social media? Most people do. So if you’re really honest with yourself, how much time do you spend in a day – before you go to sleep at night, or when you wake up in the morning, or whenever – just kind of mindlessly scrolling?

What if you spent that time on your Power Hours instead? Or even a fraction of it? Some people are scrolling for two, three plus hours a day, if they’re really honest with themselves.

So in that, it’s a matter of how you use your time and attention.

So now we want to look at everything else that’s on your list.

So I want you to get a piece of paper, and if you can’t do this right now, then you can write it down, pause the episode for a moment, write it down, and come back to it later.

You’re going to get a piece of paper, and you’re going to write down everything you can think of that is on your list of things to do – your mental list, you know, personal, professional, whatever, things around the house. If you want to make separate lists, you can, or you can just dump it all into one piece of paper – all those things that are bouncing around in your brain, things you’ve forgotten to do, whatever.

It’s going to feel like a lot the first time you do this, but this is a great exercise to just get it out of your head and get it all collected in one place. And this could be a physical piece of paper, or it could be a note in your phone – whatever works for you.

Now here, we want to go look through the list – and we have a more in-depth process around this that I’m not going to go into right now because I don’t want to overwhelm you from this episode – but let’s just say, at a minimum, you want to look at the list and go:

Is there anything on this list that is not really a high priority right now?

That if it doesn’t get done in the next 30 days, it’s not that big a deal?

You know, it’d be nice to do, but it’s not going to make or break something.

If that is true, then you want to cross that thing off the list – or better yet, create a For Later List. And you can say, “Pick this list up in 30 days,” and put the date on it or something. 

And then go to your calendar and actually put a little block on your calendar to check out your For Later List and see if there’s anything on that list that needs to be moved up to your For Now List.

Does that make sense?

So we want to really focus in on, out of this laundry list of things you need to do or want to do, what really needs to happen in the next 30 days? So what’s the highest priority?

So you can either do this by crossing out the other things, putting them on a For Later List, or just putting a star next to the things that do need to get done more quickly.

And then from there, we want to organize your list into categories.

So again, there’s two different ways you can do this. There’s probably many different ways you can do this. There’s lots of tools out there that people love to use – Trello is one, that’s a visual tool – or there’s many different softwares.

But if you want to keep it simple, you can either do the physical path to this, which is to use Post-it notes and put them up on the wall – which is Gigi’s favorite way to do this – or you can use the more linear digital path, which is more my approach, which is I use Notes on my phone to keep myself organized.

So Notes on your phone, or pieces of paper, or Post-it notes up on the wall – those are two great ways to start to separate the things that you do want to get done in the next, let’s say, 30 days, into categories.

Now, I’m going to tell you my categories, but you can choose your own. This is just how I kind of put things into buckets in order to help my calendaring process – my structure for my week.

So I have Deep Work as one of my categories. Deep Work is, like for me, this is any kind of writing projects. I used to be a professional copywriter for many years, and so I write all of our copy – for our websites, for our podcast, everything. All that copy is written by me. And I do get support from AI to some degree, but I always – it’s really me writing it, and you know, getting some tweaking and refining from AI.

So I know, because I’ve done this for a long time, that I need to be – it needs to be the first thing I do in my day if I’m going to really be writing, let’s say, an extensive piece of copy or doing a big project. If it’s little things, sometimes I can squeeze those in – if it’s just writing a, you know, show notes for this podcast or something like that, sometimes I can squeeze that in later in the day.

But for me, writing, for the most part, needs to happen first thing in the morning – after my Power Hour, let’s say. Or maybe I do my Power Hour at lunch because I know I need to get into that writing first thing. That, for me, is what I mean by Deep Work – is any kind of project that I know needs a really deep level of focus, where if I get distracted, starting to do little things, it’s going to be really difficult for me to get in the zone.

So those are Deep Work projects.

And then I have other kind of larger Projects – so any kind of big projects, things that’ll take more time. It’s not just like a quick hour or less kind of thing. Then that’s kind of big projects, right?

So we’ve got Deep Work, Big Projects, and then what I call Minor Tasks. You might call this admin. You might call it whatever you want, but Minor Tasks.

Now, this is kind of in more the business arena for me – these categories. You could have the same categories, or different ones, for your home. Or “Home” could be its own category – like things that need to get done around the house.

Minor Tasks or admin – you could have a Personal Minor Tasks, and then a Professional one.

So if there are things you need to do for your work, then that’s a category. And if there are things you need to do personally, then that’s another one.

So you can play around with this and come up with your own categories. Ideally not too many – maybe like three personal and three professional at a maximum.

So again, you’re going to take each of these categories that you’ve created, and you’re going to put your – if it’s Post-it notes on the wall, then you’re going to line them up under a Post-it note that says “Minor Tasks.” You’re going to put all your Minor Tasks – or maybe it’s “Business Minor Tasks,” right? – everything under there.

And then if it’s “Home,” then everything under there that’s for your home. Like that, right?

We’re only doing this with the high-priority projects that need to happen in the next 30 days.

I know this is very, like, detailed, so I just want to take a moment to have you stop and take a deep breath. Because if this isn’t so natural to you, and you know, organizational stuff feels overwhelming, just know that – pause, breathe, you’ve got this.

And I’m teaching you something very, very in-depth here and very practical. But I promise you, it is – once you try it – it will help you so much.

So shake it out, move your body a little bit, do whatever you need to do, and then – you know, if you need to pause and come back to this episode, do that. Don’t procrastinate on it. But this is a really, really effective system, okay?

And over time, this is going to become second nature.

That’s the other thing I’ll say – is that for me, when I put anything on my to-do list, it’s automatically categorized, right? I’ve got the days of the week and what needs to happen, and then I have, okay, here’s my big projects, here’s my Minor Tasks, and I’m kind of filling it in on my calendar as I go and shifting things as I need to.

So it becomes very second nature as you go. But this is going to help you make it really visual. It’s going to help you take it out of just this long list of things and start to really see: what’s the rhythm going to be? What’s the flow for your week going to be that’s going to allow you to get all of this done – or at least a lot more than you were before?

So, going back to – you’ve got your categories, you’re putting things in those categories – and then all you have to do from here is start experimenting with time blocking.

You’ve probably heard of time blocking before. If you haven’t, I’ll describe it a little bit.

You go to your calendar and you go, “Okay, in my week, could I – first of all – theme my days at all?”

Could I theme my days at all?

So for example – and I’ve had clients do this even who are in corporate jobs. Of course, they can’t do it a hundred percent, but to some degree, they are able to structure things. So this is not just for entrepreneurs.

But I will give you an example of how I theme my days.

Mondays for me are what I call team days and kind of admin. They’re also the day when I usually meet with Gigi. We have a long call. We usually record the podcast on Mondays, and we talk about whatever we need to talk about – like our big conversation for the week. We might talk throughout the week too. We have a longer two- to three-hour call on Mondays. I have open time to work on any little tasks in the business. This is a Minor Tasks day – you know, making phone calls, checking work from the team, having calls with my team.

So that’s really what my Monday is about. I usually have a call with Gigi in the mornings, and then I have sort of admin day – admin and team day.

And then Tuesdays are my main coaching day – sometimes Tuesdays and Wednesdays – coaching and calls day.

So if I have calls with current clients, I’m leading programs or, you know, prospective clients – people who might want to come in and work with us – 90% of the time those calls are going to be on a Tuesday or a Wednesday.

And that really helps me to kind of concentrate things so that I’m not doing calls all throughout the week. Which again, it uses a certain part of my brain, and so it really helps me to kind of categorize that and theme my days.

Now of course, I’m not on calls all day long, so in between, I might be working on Minor Tasks – because those are kind of easy for me to knock out in between calls.

So that’s Tuesdays and sometimes Wednesdays.

And then Thursdays and Fridays, I really leave fairly open most of the time. And those are either Deep Work days – so I might, you know, get up on a Thursday morning or a Friday morning and really focus on a writing project or some kind of project that needs more intense focus – then those might be days that I go out and meet people, or go and run errands, or whatever it might be. Or they’re overflow days – if I need to schedule a VIP day with a client or something like that.

So that’s really how I’ve themed my week. And then, you know, within that of course, I have hours I work. I have a lunch break. I have evenings free – whatever it might be. So I schedule my personal things as well.

My husband and I do Sunday mornings together – it used to be Saturdays, right now it’s Sundays. So we spend Sunday mornings together. We don’t plan anything on our Sunday morning. We take our time, we sleep in, we spend the morning in bed, talking, drinking coffee, really connecting. So that’s our connective time in the week.

Of course, we have time during the week – sometimes we also do date nights or other evenings – but that is, no matter what, that’s our go-to, what would you say – just our rhythm – to make sure that we get that really connected quality time in the week.

So I do this with my personal and my professional, right? We have a rhythm in both areas.

So these are examples. So you want to look at: with these categories of things I need to do, when can I put this into the flow of my week?

If you have a lot of things you want to do around the house, you know, maybe you’re putting an hour a week that you’re working on that stuff. Or maybe – you prefer – versus an hour a week, we’re more like this: we usually do once every couple of weeks or something, we have a block on our calendar on a Friday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon or something like that, where we’re working on projects around the house.

So you really just want to see what’s the rhythm that’s going to work for you.

If you need to have that financial time where you’re really doing your money date with yourself, then when could you put that in in your week that you will actually do it?

I think Mondays are a good day for that for a lot of people, because then they’re not putting it off. If they leave it till Friday, then they want to, you know, avoid it and just enjoy their weekend.

So you want to kind of create a rhythm and put these blocks into your calendar. Make sure your Power Hours are in there every day.

And here’s the thing – this is an evolving process.

Where I think people get stuck here is they think, “Oh my gosh, I have to do this exactly this way, and then if it doesn’t really work for me, then it didn’t really work.” But I want you to keep playing with this, and whenever you add something to your list, add it within one of these categories.

Is it a Minor Task? Is it a Deep Work project? And then go to your calendar and make sure you have time.

So for Minor Tasks, I tend to just put blocks of time on my calendar that say Minor Tasks, and then I just know whatever’s top priority, I’m going to work on that in that time.

For bigger projects, I would probably put the actual project in there. So I’d say, “Okay, Thursday morning I’m going to write this, you know, website page,” or whatever it might be. That may end up having to shift, but then I just shift it to my next open block for that kind of Deep Work.

So again, things can shift and evolve here. You can experiment to see what works for you, and I encourage you to – but it’s really to just get in the practice of creating that rhythm for your week, testing it out, refining it from there, putting things into these kinds of categories.

And then when you get to that time, just doing as much as you can in that category.

If you find that you get to that time – and, you know, it’s supposed to be a Deep Work time – and you really can’t focus, okay, then move the Deep Work to tomorrow morning, and today you just focus on Small Tasks.

So you look at what can you do from your list.

So it becomes this very structured yet fluid way to get things done.

And this is how I have been so effective – that I get so much more done in less time than the average person – because I’ve learned to both structure and time block, whether that’s theming my days or actually blocking in two- to three-hour chunks or something like that for different things throughout the week.

But I also know how to be flexible and fluid with it, and to some degree roll with what my energy’s doing in that moment.

If you find that you’re someone that doesn’t do well working in the mornings – we had a client like this – then maybe you need to shift your schedule around and, you know, take your mornings off and work in the afternoons into the evenings a little bit. Or do your Power Hour after lunch, and then get into your other projects.

So you get to set – if you work from home or if you have the flexibility – within the flexibility that you do have, you get to find your own rhythm.

There is no right way to do this.

Most people went to school and were raised kind of having to sit at a desk and do certain things at certain times. But the reality is, as adults, most of us don’t have that level of structure.

And I’m thankful in that regard that I was homeschooled, because I really learned to self-motivate and to manage my time differently.

And of course, sometimes you’re not going to feel like doing the thing that you need to do, but you’re going to feel so good when it’s done and it’s crossed off your list.

So just keep that in mind, and, you know, make it a game and have fun with it.

So there’s so much more I could really share on this topic, honestly – so many different strategies – but this has been plenty. This is a very dense episode.

I can, like, feel the energetics of it. I’m tuning into the people who are going to be listening to this and I’m like, okay, I hope that you can just breathe through it and just take one or two things and apply them.

Really, it’s not so, so much that we’ve covered. 

I’ll just recap quickly:

That this is, you know, looking at your top one or two goals – so one personal, one professional – what’s going to move the needle to get you there, and making sure you’re doing your Power Hour – minimum 30 minutes a day in each area – minimum, ideally five days a week.

Now, it could be one hour a day, three days a week. You get to – again, there’s flexibility. None of this is set in stone. You get to try it on and see what works for you. We’re never attached to you using our exact strategies. These are just things that have worked for us and worked for our clients.

And then from there, we talked about what to do with the rest of your to-do list, which is just: write it all down. Anything that can wait till later, put it on a list for later, put a reminder on your calendar to, you know, pick that up at a later date and go through it. And then really look at what are the priorities and put them into categories.

Whether you use Post-it notes or you, you know, do this on a list on your Notes or whatever that is – I gave you some example categories. You can play around with it, find what works for you.

Those categories are really created out of: how much of a certain type of energy and attention does this need?

So if it needs Deep focus, that’s one thing. If it’s like little things I can kind of fit in here and there, that’s another. If it’s things around the house, that’s a totally different category from maybe working on things in your business.

So it’s just that we don’t get distracted, because task switching – and switching types of tasks – is actually where we lose a huge amount of our energy.

I don’t have any statistics in front of me, but I’ve read them – and you can Google or ask ChatGPT or whatever AI platform you prefer to tell you about this – how much energy gets wasted and time gets wasted with task switching.

And so it’s not only switching between tasks, but it’s also switching between types of tasks.

So that’s really what we’re doing here with the categories – trying to get you more effective and efficient by putting things into groups where it’s going to be easier for you to shift between tasks within those groups because it’s using a certain part of your brain.

If I’m doing a ton of calls, that’s not going to be a Deep Work day for me because they just use totally different parts of my brain, and I’m not going to be able to gear myself up.

So people who think they’re not very effective people, or people who identify as very ADD – a lot of times they just haven’t learned how to work with their brains and how to work with their energy to really get things done effectively.

So once you have those groupings of tasks, then you go to your calendar, you put in your Power Hours, and you put in either theme days or time blocks, and you’re going to experiment with this.

Now, one last thing I’ll say to close here is just that if you are someone who has a very busy schedule and calendar, you may not be able to make these switches right away.

And what I tell clients to do – I used to have to do this all the time – is go to your calendar two to four weeks from now and start blocking things in then. Because it’s going to have less on it a few weeks from now than it does right now.

So you may not be able to make these changes today, but if you go and you start blocking in your rhythm that you want for a month from now, and then you experiment – and then if you know you want to tweak something, then you go a couple weeks out or a month out from there and you tweak and experiment.

So if you’re a very, very busy person, you may need to book these things a little bit further out. You’re going to have more flexibility as you go further out in your calendar.

So that’s my last pro tip, and I hope this has been effective for you. I mean, these are incredibly powerful strategies.

I cannot tell you enough just what a difference even taking one or two things you learned today – how much this is going to shift for you. How you’re going to become a ninja of your time, you know, a wizard of your time, instead of feeling like you are responding, reacting all the time, and kind of being pulled about by what needs to happen.

You’re going to become in the driver’s seat of your time and your attention and your energy.

So please, please, please think of a few people in your life who have maybe struggled in this area or expressed to you they would love to be more effective with their time – or who you just think would enjoy this episode.

And if you would share this with them, that would mean the world to me and to us.

That’s how we get the word out about this podcast. We don’t do any advertising. We don’t do anything like that. It’s all word of mouth. And also, it’s just how we spread these great tools that we’ve spent many years developing and refining to help people have better lives.

So thank you for sharing, if you would. If you have not already, please subscribe to the podcast as well on whatever platform you listen on. It’s one click of a button, and that too really helps us with our rankings and continuing to bring this content to you.

If you haven’t left us a five-star rating or review yet, it would mean the world. But more than anything, we’d love for you to share this with someone you love.

And we really thank you for listening – from me and from Gigi both.

We’ll see you in the next episode.

Bye.