← Courage & Clarity
Courage & Clarity
119: 15-Minute Weekly Planning Method (Updated!): 4 Steps to Prioritize, Focus & Grow Your Business
00:42:21
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Steph Crowder
Foreign welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello. Hello CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. This is episode number 119 and I am so excited to talk to you today about a system that I developed in my business that I have been using for, gosh, the better part of 10 years. Maybe like seven years or so. This was developed in 2017 and has seen me through so many seasons of my life. It is a system for planning your time, managing your time, prioritizing and getting stuff done. And this method has gotten into the hands of over 10,000 people over these years. I'm talking of course about my 15 minute planner method and this is the method that I created to help you plan your entire work week just once in 15 minutes and actually get it done. This time we're going to get into what this system is. Some of you, many of you know what it is, have seen it before. We're gonna revisit it and we're also gonna talk about my updated thoughts and my updated tips and strategies for really improving on this system once you've tried it. How to really make it your own. Why I believe it is still the best way to plan and manage your time even if you have very little time. I hear you. As you may know, I am a mom of two kids. We have very busy schedule in this season of life. I do not have a lot of working time at all. I have about four good hours a day and that's when everybody's well and doesn't have the flu and there's not a snow day and I'm still able to run a multi six figure business. So before we go any further, I'm so excited to share this with you guys today. Even if you've seen the 15 minute planner method before, this is totally free by the way. If you've seen it before, you've never seen it. You never Heard of it. You're like, what is this? I need you, if you're somewhere safe where you can, you know, type this in, go to stephcrowder.com plan because the 15 minute planner method has been totally updated and upgraded and she is looking fresh. Now, if you've been with me for a while, maybe if you, if you've been following along and listening to the podcast since at least last summer, you may know that I went through this big, exciting rebrand. These gorgeous photos. Well, now the 15 minute planner method has finally gotten her glow up as well. And so I can't wait for you to check it out again. Totally free. This is almost 20 pages that breaks down everything I'm going to talk about in this podcast and more. And especially if you're a visual person, which I think most of us are, you really need this download to walk you through. I have pictures of my notebook, how this looks, real examples. It's super, super simple. And having the visual cues and the step by step will really help you actually implement this. So go to stephcrowder.com plan, type your little name in the box and you will receive your 15 minute planner method delivered to your inbox. And I cannot wait for this to get into your hands. So the 15 minute planner method is a system that I like. So many things in my business that are the most successful and I think the most helpful, maybe you can relate to this in your own business, in your own life. It was something that I created for myself. It was something that I created to keep myself on track. Because here's the thing about me. I have tried every planning method out there. I mean, seriously, I. I really feel like I've tried it all. I have a closet full of planners. I still enjoy buying planners, which is like my toxic traits. Like, I invented this system that I know is effective, but I still am like, ooh, I wonder if that paper planner has something I haven't tried. Or that digital product, right? Whether it's like Asana or Trello or now we have these AI tools that can help manage our time. I am a sucker for a good planning option, okay? And I think where that comes from is this relentless pursuit to feel like we are planning our time, quote, unquote, properly, right? But the thing is, in my heart of hearts, I know that I've really tried it all. I have done really detailed planning. I have done zero planning. In fact, I often ping pong between the two, right? I have tried timing myself. I have tried using goals. I've tried Paper planners, I've tried digital planners, right? You name it, I am positive that I've tried it. And maybe you relate to that as well. The analogy I always use for this is for so many years I felt like I had an entire kitchen of fancy cooking gadgets. Like every little like niche cooking gadget that you'd see on qvc. I have it, I bought it, I tried it. But you can have every fancy cooking tool in the world. Whether or not dinner actually gets onto the table is like a whole different story. Right? It's like just because you buy the fancy tool and you have the beautiful kitchen doesn't mean that you're actually making the dinner, that you're actually fulfilling the task of getting it done. And when I created this system back in 2017, it really came from you, all my audience. I would hear people say things like, I fall out of the habit with planning and it just never sticks. Or you know, sometimes I over plan. Like I keep thinking I can get 10 to 15 things done, but it's never enough time. Right. Or my struggle is follow through. I love to plan, but when it comes to actually doing it, I don't do it. And finally, you know, I sometimes have whole weeks where not a single thing goes according to plan. I'm kind of having a week like that myself, to be honest. Right. And so after hearing so many people in my audience, my community, talking about how the really the number one thing they were struggling with was knowing what to work on and then actually getting it done, I decided to formalize a process that I had created again for myself. Super, super simple. And I created the 15 minute planner method. It was really the only thing that I had ever tried that moved the needle forward in my business. I think one of my superpowers as a business owner and coach is I'm really, really good at prioritizing. That's the thing is I've been working for a decade now with very limited time and I'm able to get more done than a lot of my peers and a lot of other people. And I think that's because I've gotten really good at understanding. We're going to talk today about something that I call growth based actions. We also call them GBAs. Innately, once you practice this, you'll get really good at knowing what the difference is between a GBA and a other kind of task, which tends to be administrative tasks or appointment based tasks. But a lot of you all are mixing all of the things that you have to do and you're Looking at a big to do list that has everything from write an email to, you know, that one person who asked you to be on their podcast, to coaching clients, to recording a podcast episode, and you're like, I have this little time on my schedule that I have, you know, to work and I don't know what I should be working on. I don't know what I should be doing to actually move the, the, the needle forward in my business. How do I juggle the things that need to get done and the things that I want to get done that just keep not getting done? Like the number of clients I have who are like, I always wanted to start a podcast or yeah, I always wanted to, you know, get on TikTok or I always wanted to try Facebook ads, but it just keeps not happening. If you feel that, if you feel like you have things on your list that you know are important, many, many, many of you tell me I'm just not consistent. Like, I know I should be creating content, but I'm just not consistent. I know I should be on social media and I'm just not consistent. This is going to really help you with that. Okay, so I'm going to talk you through this process. I'm going to, you know, talk to you literally about what your paper should look like. We're going to do this on a regular piece of paper. If you've heard me talk about this before, I want you to try to come at this with fresh ears because I'm willing to bet it's been a minute. I'm willing to bet it's been a while since you've actually done this process with me. And if you're brand new to this process, I'm going to, I'm going to talk to everybody like a brand new beginner. Because I think that's where the magic is, right? Even if you've done something before, a lot of times I'll have clients and listeners come back to me and they're like, I finally picked up the 15 minute planner method again. Like, I forgot how good this was. I really got away from this. So unless you've been doing this super consistently, I need you to listen to this episode as though you've never heard it before. Get out your piece of paper and let's get down to business. Okay, so all you need right now in order to do this is a piece of paper and a pen. That's it. Like literally white paper, lined paper. It doesn't matter. I prefer like a full size piece of paper, like an 8 by 11. You know, printer paper or. I lately have been coming a little, becoming a little bit of an iPad, girly. I have an iPad mini and a, like a pencil. You can do it on an iPad as well. Okay. But really you just need a piece of paper and a pen. And I'm going to help you in this episode get your entire week planned. It doesn't matter if this is Wednesday or Thursday. You're like, oh, but it's not a fresh week. That's okay. I actually, I'm recording this episode on a Thursday and I just did this method for the rest of my week, which is basically just tomorrow. And what I'll do is I'll, I'll. I will use the method to figure out what I'm going to work on tomorrow, Friday, because I really need a reset. And then I will actually take a lot of items and use that momentum to go into planning next week. So you can do this anytime. Don't let yourself have the excuse that it's not a new week. That is part of the problem is you just have to get started. You just have to be willing to be quick and messy with it. And I really think that's part of the beauty of the 15 minute planner method. Before we dive into the steps, there is a analogy that I've been using, or I guess it's a little story, a little demo, if you will, that has helped so many people better understand and categorize the different tasks and demands on your time. And that is the rocks, pebbles and sand demo. Okay, so let's talk about this. Some of you have heard this, some of you haven't, but it's like it never stops being helpful to think about this. So once upon a time, there was this college professor who did this demo for his class, and he had two jars. In the first jar, he went ahead and took rocks, pebbles and sand and just threw them in a jar in. In the jar in a random order. Like a little bit of rocks, a little bit of pebbles, a little bit of sand. Just like total chaos. And then he tried to screw the lid on top. After he'd filled it up, this thing was overflowing. There was no way that the jar was going to close. Right then he took a second jar and with the same volume, so he didn't change the number of rocks, pebbles and sand. He was more strategic with how he put the items into the jar. So first he put in the big rocks, put in those big rocks, gave the jar a little bit of a shake, allowed the rocks to settle a little bit. And then he went in with the pebbles, dumped the pebbles in. And the thing about the pebbles is that obviously they are smaller than the big rocks. And so when he gave that jar another shake, some of the smaller pebbles could fit in between some of the cracks and crevices that were left behind by the rocks. Now you can guess what happened when he went in with the sand even more. So. The sand is super fine. We all know sand gets everywhere. Just one trip to the beach will teach you that. So he topped off this jar with sand. And even though it looked like he had a lot of sand, that sand went into all kinds of cracks and crevices that were left behind by the rocks and pebbles. What do you know? When he went to screw the lid on the jar, everything fit. Same amount of stuff, same size jar. The only thing that had changed was the order in which he put his items. Okay? Now, the jar is meant, in this case, is meant to represent your time, your week. Okay? The problem that a lot. One of the problems that a lot of us have is we just start taking our rocks, our pebbles, our sand. I'm gonna teach you what those are in just a minute. And we just start throwing them all over the place. A little here, a little there. And then we're surprised when we don't have enough time for the things that really matter, right? But it really shouldn't be that surprising. When we think about the demo with the jar, we have to be more strategic about how things fit into our calendar. So in the 15 minute planner method, I want you to think of your big commitments, like your appointments, when you have to show up somewhere, like it's on your calendar. That is going to be a rock. Your coaching call. If you're a coach, your team meeting, your doctor's appointment, your kids cheerleading practice. Those are rocks, okay? They're gonna go on your calendar first because they have a time. We said, yes, we're gonna do it. We go through on our commitments. Cause that's just. We are just that girl, that guy, that person. That's just who we are. We fulfill our commitments. Those go on the calendar first. Okay, Pebbles are going to be your growth based actions. I'll come back to those in a minute. But you're gonna schedule those growth based actions next. You might be like, what, What? What's a growth based action? Don't worry, I'm going to get there. And then finally, and my goodness, this is where a lot of folks are going wrong. One of the number one problems I See, and how you're managing your time is here and only here is where we dump in the sand. Your sand is like your baseline tasks, your stuff that has to get done every week. Your email, your social media, your chores, your, you know, getting back to like client responses, things like that are your sand now. A lot of times people, it's just like the beach people, I've got sand. All you guys are tracking sand all over the place. You're doing email here, there and everywhere. You're responding to your clients here, there and everywhere. You're on social media, looking at your comments. You have are tracking sand all over your calendar. Okay? You have. The thing about sand is it gets everywhere, okay? And the same is true with email or like these piddly. Not saying they're not important, I just mean that they're very time consuming and also they never stop coming. There's like an endless supply of these tasks. You clear your email inbox next hour, there's more email in there just like sand. You can never get rid of it. So what we really have to do is be strategic about how we're dealing with our sand, okay? You have to really commit and this is where discipline is required to only doing your sand tasks. When you say you're going to do them, stop, you know, compulsively checking your Slack channel for your clients or your email inbox or your Instagram comments or whatever it is that you find yourself. Just like going down the rabbit hole, you tell yourself, oh, but I'm doing business tasks. But really, if you organized and grouped those tasks together, you could knock them out in one hour instead of spending like five minutes here and five minutes there all day long on those types of tasks, right? So more on that in a minute we're going to talk about growth based actions, okay? Growth based actions are your secret sauce, okay? This is the key that makes the whole thing work, okay? Your growth based actions are the stuff you want to do but you never get to, right? This is where you get that feeling that you're always working and never accomplishing. Because this is the important stuff that we never get to. If you've ever seen, I believe this is from Stephen Covey's book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He shows this matrix. It has a name, but I know that I can see it in my head. It's this matrix of the difference between urgent and important, right? And there's these four boxes, there's urgent and important. Like this is like urgent means like it's yelling at you. Right now, okay? It's like right now. Right now. Right now. Important means it actually matters. So paradoxically, we can have things that are urgent but not important. An example is a telemarketer calling you. It's urgent because your phone is ringing. Your, your brain is like urgent. It's happening right now. It's not important because we don't need to talk to the telemarketer. Okay? So we have urgent and important that is like happening right now and it actually matters. You need to handle that stuff right away, right? We have urgent and not important. That's the telemarketer. We really just need to have the discipline to ignore the ringing phone when it's not important. We have not urgent and not important. That one's obvious. We never need to do those. It's not urgent. It's not important. It can just go, right? It can just delete. This is just where you can delete those. Here's the tricky one. Not urgent, but important. Not urgent, but important. It's not urgent. These are your pebbles. These are your growth based actions. They're not going to jump up and down and scream for your attention. They're not going to ring and ding. They're not going to make you feel like the house is on fire, in fact. And that, that's actually why you never get them done, right? Because you're like, that can wait. Nobody's gonna care if I don't do my podcast this week, right? Doesn't matter if I don't make a tick tock like I said I would. You know, if I don't send emails to get on other people's podcasts this week to do lead generation, it's really important. But like, I just can't get to it this week, right? Here's the paradox of it. This stuff is actually the engine of your business, right? If you spend your days just showing up to your meetings, which are your rocks, and chasing down your admin tasks, that's your sand. You can, you can spend whole days doing just that and you're gonna feel busy as hell. You're getting on meetings, you're taking your rocks, you're taking your appointments. Especially for those of you who see one on one clients, this is really for you especially. You're gonna be like, I'm busy because you're doing your appointments and you're checking your email in between, you're doing your admin tasks in between and your pebbles are lost completely. There is no time left over for your growth based actions. And then y'all are surprised when you're like, my business isn't growing. Well, of course not, right? I'm saying this to make it make sense. It actually makes perfect sense. If you're not doing your growth based actions, you're not gonna grow. I always think of this as like the gasoline in your car. Eventually the gas is going to run out if we're not putting gas in it. And yet we find ourselves being surprised when we're not doing growth based actions and y'all stop growing. You're like, what happened? And it's like, I can tell you right now what happened. You were busy, you were working, but you're not growing. Right? The health of your business depends on how well you do here. Okay? No pressure, no pressure. But it's really, really important. This is not admin work, okay? You're going to be tempted to add in things like social media. And when I say social media, I don't mean intentional content creation. I mean like scrolling or like responding to comments or like engaging with people, which of course, again, I didn't say it wasn't important. Okay? It's important. It's just not a growth based action, right? Same with your email. So, you know, you're going to probably be tempted to even make the argument, but these things grow my business, right? But here's, here are some ways that you can kind of really. People love to argue with me about like, no, but really this is a growth based action. And here's what I tell them. Unless there's a strategy involved, like planning out your social media, right? Making scripts for your TikTok, making your editorial calendar, actually filming content. If it's not strategic, it's not a pebble, okay? It's sand. Right? You have to ask yourself, this is also helpful. Two more questions. Is it a project or an ongoing task? Okay, A project is going to be more of a growth based action. An ongoing task you can treat more like sand. It doesn't take a lot of mental brain power to do an ongoing task, right? Whereas a project is going to have more of a lift to it. You're going to have to spend time actually like moving the ball forward with this project. Okay? Another question is this is a big one. Is it reactive or proactive? Reactive. Things like email. Email comes in, you respond, that's reactive. And remember, we live in a reactive world. This world wants you to be reactive. This world's like phone rings, we answer it. Doorbell rings, we answer it. Email comes in, we answer it. So you are doing something very countercultural. By even challenging yourself on this. Most people aren't going to do this. They walk into their day and they say, what you got for me day? Right? What's gonna happen to me today versus having the courage to be like, I'm actually going to decide what matters today now that of course we don't control what happens to us. The phone rings, your kid is sick, I get it. But you're always gonna be further ahead when you are proactive with what you wanna get done, right? So if it's reactive, it's not a pebble, it's not a growth based action. If it's reactive, even if it's client stuff, you're reacting to, what, like your clients need feedback on something that's still going to be your sand. Some of y'all, y'all are surprised to hear me say that. You guys are like, but that's the most important thing. I never said it wasn't important. It's just that it's not a growth based action. And yes, you could argue the better you serve your clients, the more business you're, you're, the more your business is going to grow. I hear you and I respect it and I agree. But if we're really talking about meaningful growth of your business, it's not going to get it done, at least not in the short term, right? So let's think about being proactive. What are proactive things? Proactive things like creating. So here's a, here's an interesting example. If we're thinking about like administrative stuff, you could still have Pebbles. So here's the difference. I had said reactive was things like replying to emails. Emails come in, I respond, that's reactive. It's not a pebble. Here is a pebble coming up with text snippets for your customer support. So coming up with templates, right? Like strategically asking yourself, what are the 10 most common like responses that I have to give an email over and over and over again. And making an SOP for that, that would be a pebble. That would be a growth based action. How is that going to help you grow? Because it's going to save you time later. And it's also eventually going to help you be able to hire and hand off those tasks to somebody else. Okay, That's a growth based action. Here's more examples of growth based actions. Blog or pod podcast content. So that's going to be growing your audience, coming up with your YouTube, your blog, your podcast, right? You are intentionally growing your audience, working on your offering, making more Offers money making activities. My clients know these as MMAs. We talk about them all the time. This is growing your revenue. Okay, hey, listen, even intentionally taking a course, taking a program can be a pebble because you're growing your skill set. It's intentional. And also remember, important but not urgent. You're going to be like, I can catch up on my coaches, you know, workshop that she did. I'll catch up on that next week. Right. It keeps falling off your list. It's a pebble. A lot of times, not always. Growth based actions are fun and exciting to work on. They feel expansive. Sometimes they do feel like drudgery. So don't be, don't over, don't overthink this one. I have plenty of growth based actions that I don't wanna do, but a lot of times they are pretty exciting to work on. Like growing, you know, Cause it's growth, right? Grow. I mean growth can be uncomfortable, but growth is exciting too. Scares you a little bit. It's a good chance it's a growth based action. Okay, so let's start to talk about how these fit onto your calendar. So we've talked about what some of these things are. So the very first thing we're going to do, I'm going to kind of get into the steps now. Now that I've really laid out like what these different things are, our very first step is we are going to do a brain dump. Okay? You're going to get everything out on paper. This is what I like to do. I like to pull up my calendar. So wherever, like I use Google Calendar, I always tell people if it's not on my Google Calendar, there's no chance I'm going to show up. I'll forget. So I pull up my calendar and I see what's already on there. So I grab my paper and I draw a line down the middle of my paper. That plain old white piece of paper I had you pull out, draw a line right down the middle. By the way, visually, this is all in the PDF that you're going to download when you go to stephcrowder.com plan. Okay? Line down the middle, right. Brain dump in the top, right. So that column to your right. Right. Brain dump. And just start writing all of the things that you can think of that you could do. Even if you're not gonna do them this week, I still like to write them down because my goodness, the relief that I get of feeling like they're out of my head, that I'm not. Just, you know, they're not. These tasks aren't just existing in my head. You will see when you look at my real example of a brain dump I did many, many moons ago. I have things on there like getting my daughter her doctor's appointment, ordering contacts, getting Christmas gifts, even. Like, this was, like, weeks before Christmas. I wasn't gonna get Christmas gifts that week, but I still just, like, needed that to be on my. On my list, right? So brain dump. Everything that you can think of, everything you can think of, even if you don't do them this week, you go until you can't think of anything else that you need to do. Personal projects, work projects, everything in your darn brain. Get it onto your paper, okay? Now from here, I like to start to build my week. So to the left of the line on your paper, you're going to write this week, okay? At the top of the. At the top of the. The. The column you're going to write this week and then write out your work days, okay? Whatever days you're working, you can include the weekend if you want. But I usually just do Monday, Wednesday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And what I start to do is I look at my calendar, my Google calendar, I look at my brain dump, and I look for things that are my big rocks, my appointments. So we are gonna just write down scheduled commitments. So a rule of thumb is if you have a place that you need to be, you write it down. So in when you look at my. My PDF, if you're following along, I'm on page nine right now, you can see that I wrote down Monday, 1:30pm Team. I had a team call on Monday. That was the only place I had to be on Monday. So Monday is blank other than that, right? And then you can see me go through the weekend on Thursday. I actually have no appointments, right? And it's really great when you can find that white space that's going to be a perfect space to use for my pebbles, okay? So I want you to also remember this is very important. These aren't necessarily the most important tasks in your week, but these are the things that you've committed to. So if you have to show up somewhere, write it down. This is just like putting those big rocks in the jar, because we first need to identify what time do you even have to work on things. And also take a quick pause after you've written down your appointments, after you've written down your big rocks, and ask yourself if you're still good with everything that's on here. This is one way that I've evolved. This is new. For those of you who think you know all this, this is new. I didn't used to do this. I'd just be like, whoop, it's an appointment. It's on my calendar. I'm just gonna follow my calendar now because I'm a serial over committer. And maybe you are too, my dear listener. You might be a upholder, you might be a woman. And a lot of us tend to over commit, right? So I take this moment to look at my commitments and ask myself, am I still good with everything here? Okay? Is there something I want to get off my plate right away? Do I still feel good about these commitments? And if you wanna make to what you've committed to, now is a great time to do that. Okay? So you've got your appointment scheduled, you've got your big rock scheduled. Now it's time to add your growth based actions. And again, this is really where that magic happens. So here's what I like to do. All right, first of all, you've already put in your appointments and your commitments, your big rocks. So now make sure go to your brain dump list and cross off anything that you've scheduled. So if you put something in your brain dump like go to the doctor and that doctor's appointment is now on your calendar, cross it out, congratulations is on your calendar. It doesn't need to be on your to do list anymore. Okay? So you're gonna cross things out that are big rocks. You're done with those. Now I want you to start going through your list and make a special mark for your growth based actions. Right. A lot of times I will just do a little star, like a little asterisk and I'll just go through my list and be like, which one of these are growth based actions? Okay, that's the first thing you're gonna do. Go through your list and identify the growth based actions. Now you're gonna inspect your week and you're gonna look for, for Pebbles, I like to look for long stretches of white space. Right? So like that Thursday that was empty is a perfect example. In my example that I show you in my PDF, I'm on page 12 now you can see that on Thursday I added these. Like I was doing a lot with goals. I was teaching a goals course right then. So I wrote goals and course on my Thursday because I was gonna work on the things that I needed to do for that particular project. So I personally love. This is also about knowing yourself. But for me, an empty day when especially the Morning is like my best brain time. That works really well for me. Now, quick caveat. I don't want you guys to get stuck here. If you're like, I don't have any open days, that is okay. I don't want you thinking to yourself, I have to have an open day in order for this to work right. You just need bunches of time. You just need like pockets of time. If you don't have a fully open day, that is okay. You will see other examples of like, for example, on my Wednesday, I had a 12:30 coaching call and a 4:00 mastermind and I put my podcast in between and you can see I did it in a different color. Okay, so you don't need a big open day. I don't want you to have the thought like, I don't have big long open days to do this. You don't need that. Although when you have them, please use them. Use them well. But you just want to look for that open time where you can work on those projects. Now, I also love doing it this way because there's a lot of flexibility. I know what I'm working on roughly, but I can go with the flow when the time comes, right? So I just write podcast. I might not necessarily know what the hell I'm going to talk about yet, yet, but I just know that I'm going to publish a podcast. I'm going to record a whole podcast during that time. You can do as much detail as you want if you want to set a goal for your session. You know, like I do like to try to have some completion goals. So for example, if I'm writing a blog post, I'm going to say I want to complete this blog post. Right? I'm going to have the first draft done. If you can be specific, I think that's really helpful. But you don't have to get too caught up in doing those things. Okay. And then for this next step for I believe we're on step four now. You can top off with your sand. So what you're gonna do, you've. So if I wasn't super clear, you've gone through your brain dump list, you've put asterisks or special marks, ideally in a different color, next to your growth based actions. You've taken your growth based actions and you've put them into your days. Right? Okay. On Tuesday I'm gonna work on the blog post. On Wednesday I'm gonna work on the podcast. On Thursday I'm gonna work on the. Right. Once I Have scheduled those. I'm going to go and cross things off my brain dump because guess what? They're scheduled into my week. One thing I didn't mention that can be super helpful is bunching, like things together. Okay, so this is where you can, you know, for example, I'm trying to find a good example of this. If you are. You know, for me, I know I was going to record two different podcast episodes. I was gonna record episode 68 and 69. It was in my brain dump. You can see this all visually in my PDF. I went ahead and just wrote, grouped those together and wrote podcast. Right. And I know that during that podcast block, I'm Gonna Record episodes 68 and 69. I have a launch coming up. So this is another example. I have a lot of different tasks I need to do for my launch. I need to write my emails. I need to think about. I'm gonna be playing with some Facebook ads. I need to make sure my webinar slides are ready. I could group all of those together and just write launch activities for a white space in my time. Right. And bonus points, this is also updated. This is how I do it today. Different than how you may have heard it in the past when I go to schedule this on my Google calendar. Cause now I'll put it on my Google calendar. Cause I can see it on my phone. I can see it on the go, which really helps my brain. I will just make a event from, let's say nine, nine to noon. And I'll write launch activities. And then in the description, I'll make a list of what I need to do. Great. All those things that were in my brain dump, they now have a place to live across them off that brain dump, I'm just going down the line, puzzle piecing. Like literally think of those rocks, pebbles and sand. It's like, I'm taking those rocks, I'm taking those pebbles. I'm plucking them out of the brain dump jar and I'm dropping them into my week and I'm crossing them off when I've scheduled them. Okay, then last step is we're going to top off with sand. So what I want you to do is go through your list, your brain dump list and make another mark. I use, I like to do an X in a different color. For your admin work, put a X next to those tasks. So again, these are tasks and maintenance work. Right? So things like my Christmas gifts, that's a task that I know I need to knock out. And I know it's Going to get done during my admin time. Now what? Here's my theory about admin work. It always gets done. Okay? You guys need to stop stressing out about your admin work. It always gets done. I know that for some of you, somebody listening to this right now and you're like, this is I, this is not enough, like planning for my admin work. But here's the thing, you're probably thinking, like, people are waiting for me to write back to them. Like, what if they get mad at me? Here's the thing, in my experience, people really don't get mad. I am a like really chronically not great at getting back in people via email. You're human. It's okay. You don't owe people your responses. I mean, your clients are one thing. You still, I still would argue you don't need to like jump when the second they send you an email. Have processes in place, okay? Have a 24 hour rule. We get back to our clients within 24 hours. But beyond that, you don't owe people a response. You just don't. Right? And so the other thing to think about is we are more efficient when we batch our tasks. So every time you check your inbox, there are some incredible studies on this. You can check your inbox, your social media, the science tells us it can take 30 minutes or more to get your brain back on track from just doing that one email check. I promise it's not serving you. Okay? You have to remember the thing about sand is it fits into cracks and crevices. So what you will see me do is now in my, in my week, right on my piece of paper, I will find my admin times and in a blue pen I will just write admin admin on the days that I have some admin time. Okay? And what I'll do is I will go through my admin tasks from my brain dump that I put the blue X next to and those are going to be done during my admin time. So what I like to do in my Google Calendar is I will just have a calendar event that says admin and I will type, tippity type, type out what are the things I'm doing during my admin time? Clear my email inbox, get back to my clients who have questions. What are other typical admin things I do? Sometimes my accountant needs something from me, like CEO stuff. I will just make a list of whatever those things are. And as the week goes on, I'm just, you know, crossing those out inside of my Google Calendar event. If that makes sense. I'll probably, like have three or four different admin blocks throughout my week. And I will just be moving, copy and paste that list across the different admin blocks as my week progresses. Okay. This is also amazing for when life gets crazy. Kids are sick, your day goes up in smoke, something happens, you're like, oh my God, I had this big plan. What am I going to do? I also really like putting all of this in my Google Calendar after it's on my paper. Because you know what's amazing about Google Calendar is you can take your mouse, you can drag your event, and you can move it somewhere else. So instead of just chucking the whole week and being like, that's it, my kid had the flu, the week's over, it's Tuesday, right? You can just take a minute and be like, okay, this is another reason. I can just come up with so many reasons why rocks, pebbles and sand is so incredible. Because you've already prioritized your week, right? So you can look at what you're like, okay, something's got to go. Something's got to get bumped to next week. Let me look at how I planned my time. What doesn't have to get done this week? What can I move to next week's list? You've already done the work of prioritizing so you can really look at it and be like, what has to be completed this week and what is going to be okay to put on next week's brain dump list? A lot of times I start next week's brain dump on like Wednesday of the previous week. I just start a new brain dump. I do my 15 minute planner on Sundays and I often have already done a head start on my brain dump. So that reminds me, when you get to Sunday, look at your previous week. What didn't you get done? What got bumped, what was not perfect? Start your new brain dump, carry stuff over and don't worry about it. There doesn't have to be a lot of drama to this at all. And it helps so much to really know and understand what actually has to get done. And so that is the 15 minute planner method. Incredible, right? Here's what's super cool. If you want to do this with paper, that's typically how I've always done it. I love crumpling up my paper. Once it's on my Google Calendar, I crumple it up because it's done. It's a feels so good. But I also have in my PDF, I have a digital 15 minute planner. If you would like to print this and have that. You don't have to draw the line. You can see what it looks like. It's page 16. Um, or if you want to do it on your iPad sometimes I like I mentioned I've been doing that. You can do that as well. And so having this digital option I think is really fun as well. If you use the 15 minute planner method, I would love to hear how it goes for you. Please tag me. People always used to tag me when they would do the 15 minute planner. Take a picture of it. Tag me on Instagram. I'm at hey Steph Crowder. I would love to see you guys using this. If you have questions, if it's not working for you, if you are running into resistance, tell me about that as well. You can message me on Instagram. You can also reply to any of my emails and let me know how this is going for you. But I really hope you love this method. It has helped so many people over these years. It's again something that I have come back to over and over again. I love this tool. It will change your business. If you can start to work on growth based actions, you will watch the ball start to move forward. I literally have so many people who are like, I've never gotten this much done before and it truly is because of the prioritization that rocks, pebbles and sand really gives us. So my friends, be kind to yourself. Use the time that you have. I promise you it's enough time. We will get it all done. It does take some discipline, but you've so got this and I just hope it helps you so much. I will see you next time and until then, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.