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Foreign. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Kate show. It's episode 258, and I'm talking about time management. This is a big one for a lot of entrepreneurs because how many times have you found yourself saying, I don't have time for that? I feel overwhelmed. I am maxed out, and I am too busy. If you've ever felt this way, you're not alone. Because when we run our own businesses, time management has to be like one of the biggest skill sets to develop, aside from, of course, financial management. And I always find it interesting when people are surprised when I tell them, you think you want to get good at marketing? Get good at managing your time and money first, then worry about marketing. Because if you can't get a handle on all of those, or for today's purposes, if you cannot get a handle on your own time, it's going to be extremely difficult for your business to be successful. So today I am going to share with you seven things that I have started doing or that some of them have been doing for a while. Honestly, that helped me manage my time more efficiently. Now, I recently did a mindset experiment in which I stopped talking about how busy I was because I found myself complaining a lot about how I just had too much on my plate and I felt like I couldn't hand it off to anybody. It was all on me, and it was very frustrating. But it was also coming from kind of like a victimized mindset, which is the opposite of being productive and the opposite of being successful. So it's something that I had to stop, but only I could stop it. So I started doing a mindset experiment. What I did, like I said, is I stopped complaining about how busy I was and how I didn't have enough time. Now, this mindset experiment was inspired by a coaching experience I recently had. So shout out to Andrea at Andrea Lebras Coaching. And I was very intrigued about this experiment because I was like, could this overwhelmed mom of two little kids, a wife and a business owner suddenly have tons of bandwidth? Well, I guess we'd find out. I didn't have anything to lose. So to begin my experiment, I did not remove anything from my to do list because I felt like that would have been cheating. And instead, I looked at my to do list and it happened to be on a Friday, and I don't work on my business on Fridays because I've got both kids home with me. And so I was in full mom mode. But of course, as you all know, being a mom means you still have a ton to do. So I looked at my to do list and I was like, okay, I can do this. I can get these things done, and I can also have quality time with the kids, and somehow it's just all going to work out. So took a deep breath because just the thought of that was pretty stressful. And I went into my day, and as the day progressed, I realized I was getting everything done, even with all the interruptions that come from having a toddler and a preschooler. So every time I had to stop what I was doing to break up a fight or kiss an owie, or serve a snack or put somebody down for a nap, I kept repeating to myself, I have time. I have plenty of time. Whereas before, I would be like, oh, my goodness, I can't get anything done. I am so frustrated. And then I would start taking out that anxiety and stress on people around me, which is not great for anybody. And a few days later. So I'm a few days into my thought experiment at this time, my husband was like, so do you have a lot of work today? Like, what's your day look like? And he was almost afraid to ask. I could see it in his eyes. Because normally I would say, oh, yes, I have so much to do, and I'm not sure how I'm gonna get it all done. I'll probably have to work after the kids go to bed, AKA no quality time. And that's just been my typical response. But instead I was like, you know, I have a fair amount to get done and nothing too crazy. Was that a lie? Well, no. I did have a lot to get done. But I realized that if I just changed my perspective on it, suddenly it didn't have to be. I had so much to get done. It would just be, yeah, I have a full day, and that's fine. I don't need to be upset about having a full day. I could actually be grateful for it in a number of ways. So when I shrugged and said, I have the normal amount, no big deal, he was a little surprised. But, you know, whatever. He's gotta get used to this new version of a wife that he has. And in the weeks since then that I've been practicing the art of creating bandwidth because it is definitely an art. I've picked up on a handful of other habits and brought in some of my older habits that have allowed me to compress more productivity into each hour without operating from a place of stress. Now, does this mean I'm never, ever stressed? Of course not. But I'm A lot less stressed than I used to be. And that is life changing. And it also reminds me, by the way, of the Bible's wisdom on this, because it's a very human struggle to have the urge to get all these things done and then also feel like 24 hours in a day is simply not enough. So one thing In Psalms Psalm 46:10 says, Be still and know that I am God. So just acknowledging that we can stop and acknowledge him and our world isn't gonna fall apart because we are not the ones holding together the world. He is. He is God, not us. Another verse that has brought me a lot of comfort is from Matthew 6:33, and it says, seek the kingdom of God above all else, meaning that should be the priority. And live righteously and he God will give you everything you need. I mean, it's pretty point blank, right? Keep the main thing the main thing, and the rest will follow later on. In Matthew chapter 11:28. Then Jesus said, come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. How many of you have ever felt weary or like you're carrying a heavy burden? That would be pretty much all of us, right? Especially if we're running a business. Especially if we're also parents. It's a lot to manage. And whether you subscribe to a biblical worldview or not, consider this. The guilt, shame and stress that comes from poor time management, the way it makes you feel about yourself, it's one of the lowest emotional frequencies, which means it weakens you, it makes you more susceptible to failure, and it can also really damage relationships. So it is imperative that you get control of your time and put more generous boundaries on your bandwidth. Isn't that a weird thought? Generous boundaries on your bandwidth, meaning the boundaries will actually allow you to increase your abilities. I think of it as a swimming pool. And I can have a small swimming pool, or I could have a bigger swimming pool. And maybe the beat, when the swimming pool gets bigger, it also gets a little bit more shallow. That's okay, I can still do more with a bigger swimming pool. So when you are trying to figure out how to get control of your time, just remember that you still need boundaries. This does not mean you get rid of all your boundaries and you say, yeah, I can do all the things. There will always be time for everything. Because that's of course not realistic. We're just talking about being good stewards of the time that we've been given. We've all been given seven days a week, 24 hours a day and however many years God decides to give us on this earth, so we have to use that wisely. So if you are ready to start doing that in your business and have time to manage your money and your marketing and grow your business and not feel stressed out by it, then let's dive into the seven things that I've learned and I'm hoping will help you as well.
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All right guys, so before we can dive into the conversation on bandwidth and productivity, I have to ask you something. Why is productivity so important to you? I'll go first. Being busy for the sake of being busy has been my go to coping mechanism for all of my adult life and honestly, it's really hard for me to turn it off. I tend to feel more valuable when I'm busy and I tend to feel worthless if I'm not busy. Now busy could mean I'm busy mopping the floor or cleaning the bathroom or replying to emails or doing some sort of client work. And as long as I'm busy, then I tend to feel really good about myself. Now your reason for staying busy all the time, or feeling like you should or or piling so much on your to do list? Your reason for doing that might be different from mine and you need to nail down what your reason is. Because your why Just as we talk about the why in marketing is important, the why in your time management is also important. Are you trying to prove something to yourself by getting all these things done or by attempting to? Or are you trying to create the feeling of productivity just through being busy? Because as we all know, being busy doesn't not it doesn't really mean productive. It can, but oftentimes it's just a facade. Knowing your why is important because it's often the root of your busyness symptoms that you're facing. So whatever your reason is, just be honest with yourself and face it boldly. Now, let me share with you the first thing that this is actually something I've been doing for a while and it has served me very well and that is setting work hours and sticking to them. Now, depending on your personality, you might be a natural workaholic or a natural procrastinator. Neither of them are good, by the way. Setting specific routine work hours will fix either end of that spectrum. So for workaholics like me, knowing that I have a predetermined end time for my workday helps me to stay focused and say no to distractions during the day. For procrastinators, this is going to force you to work even on the days that you don't feel like working. Now, I recently heard an aspiring entrepreneur say that her biggest issue was simply not wanting to work on the tasks she needed to do when her work hours came around so she wouldn't work. And like the workaholic in me was shocked. I was like, oh, I didn't know saying no was an option. I thought we just did it no matter what. Not that I think my way is better, by the way, because I could work myself into oblivion while my house plants died around me and my family didn't get any quality time from me. They would just get the work leftovers of me. Neither situation is ideal. What it really comes down to is practicing self control work when you've scheduled yourself to work and stop when your work hours have ended. Also limit the distractions. For most of us, I mean, the distraction would be our phone. So what I've done for myself is put in some safeguards. I have an app timer on some of the social media that I enjoy and that app timer is five minutes a day. That's it. That's all I need. And there are certain apps like Instagram that I don't even have on my phone. If I need to look at Instagram, I will log in through my laptop. I make it very difficult for myself because I don't want to be sucked into it. Because it's funny how at least in modern culture in first world countries, we can be like, oh, I am so busy, yet I spent a half hour scrolling Instagram and doing absolutely nothing. That doesn't work. If you have time to scroll social media, we have time to be working on our businesses, we have time to be productive. Now, I'm not saying that you can't go scroll. I'm not saying you can't go take a break, but quite honestly, and studies have shown that scrolling on social media is not relaxing, but taking a walk is. So if you need a break, a mental break from whatever it is you're doing so you can come back and be better at it, consider taking breaks that don't involve screens. And that is something that I am trying really hard to be better at. And sometimes for me it just means listening to a podcast. So maybe that's what you guys do. You listen to my podcast, hey, what do you know? But that is helpful to me because it lets my brain focus on something else without looking at a screen and therefore being over stimulated. But I digress. So set your work hours and limit your distractions and then use self discipline. Stick to it. I know self discipline is really out of fashion right now, but you gotta do it if you want to be successful. The second thing that I recommend you do, because this is something I've been doing for a while, is sort your tasks by Essential and preferential One of my toxic traits, especially early on in my business, was thinking that every task in my Asana calendar had to get done on that specific day. And I would therefore chronically over schedule myself because I'm also really bad at estimating how long certain tasks will take me. And now you might be thinking, wait a minute, didn't she just say to suck it all up and get it done? What is this now? Well, here's the deal. Not everything we call a priority is actually a priority. Tasks should be grouped into essential and preferential. Essential tasks absolutely have to get done, such as, you know, financial management, client work, answering some emails. Preferential tasks are things that we would prefer to get done, hence the term preferential. But they have no direct or obvious impact on our businesses, like creating a reel for Instagram or needlessly updating our website because again, it feels busy, quote unquote, but it's not actually productive. Now, those tasks might have a certain level of importance, sure, but they shouldn't take priority over the essential tasks. Also, if you forget things easily like I do, like my brain cannot hold a thought in it for more than a minute. I add all these essential tasks into Asana and I assign a date to them because it's way better than just creating a to do list where there's no deadline attached to it. And I really like how in asana it'll tell me if something is overdue. And I can also look at calendar view and See exactly what I'm doing that day. I know exactly what I'm doing the whole week. I know what my schedule looks like, and I know how to best allocate my time. And on that note, another thing that I've started doing both professionally and personally is if I have a task come up that's going to take me five to 15 minutes, instead of writing it down or putting it in asana to do later, I just do it. Like, right then and there, I just do it and then it's done. And then my brain feels so much lighter because that's one less thing that I have to remember. All right, so the third thing is to group similar tasks together. As you've probably noticed in your life, as I'm sure you've heard from other people, because this is a big topic of discussion, the more you multitask or the more you go from one different task to a completely different task to a completely different task, your brain has to switch gears. And the more you do that, the less impactful, productive, and effective you become. So if you can group together, like, with, like tasks as much as possible, you're going to be more productive and faster at everything that you do. I know the organizers listening right now or watching are like, oh, yeah, like, with like, that's what we do. Yes, because it works. So here, picture this. When you include all your essential tasks into asana, make sure that you look at calendar view and then start dragging and rearranging the tasks throughout your week so that you have almost, like, themed days. So, for example, on Tuesdays, I do pretty much all my phone calls. I might have the random call also on a Wednesday, that's okay. And there will be some things that I just can't reschedule. So if you're looking at your schedule and you're like, okay, I'm going to make this day my marketing day. This other day is going to be a client work. I have like three or four client work days, and then I'm going to have another day that's just for, like, internal business workings. That is ideal, but it's going to look a little different every week. But as long as you know you're grouping similar tasks together as much as you can, and you won't always be able to, but as much as you can, you're saving your brain and a lot of extra fuel wasting because now it will not have to switch gears as much. All right, the fourth thing that I recommend you do, and this is something that in certain seasons of business, it's easy, harder, and since certain seasons, it's easier. But it is to delegate or outsource your least favorite tasks. You know, maybe the reason certain things in your business take you forever to get done is because you hate doing them. So I have an example of that. Bookkeeping. I hate bookkeeping. I don't like it. I don't like numbers. I just don't. I was never a math girl. I'm not interested. I don't know how to use QuickBooks online. And even though I'm very techy, I don't want to learn it. Like, I just flat out don't. So I hired a bookkeeper. They do a phenomenal job. Best $500 I'll spend every month. And I'm happy to continue paying that, no problem. Because it gets done. It gets done accurately. If I were doing it, it would sort of maybe kind of get dumb, but it wouldn't be accurate. And I would have one more thing to stress about. So for a lot of my clients, marketing is their least favorite task. Some of them also hate the bookkeeping. And I get it because you started a design business or an organizing business or whatever you started because you wanted to do that. Not marketing, not bookkeeping. And because of this, my clients either never get any real marketing done and they feel awful about it. Obviously this is before they start working with us, or they become prolific content producers, prolific marketers with no strategy, which means they are just pumping out the blog posts, the newsletters, the social media posts, left and right and left and right and upside down and sideways, but they don't. Don't have any idea how all the pieces connect together. They're not getting clients from all these efforts, but they're spending a lot of time. And that makes them feel kind of successful, kind of productive, because at least they're being busy, right? Wrong. We don't need to fall into the busyness trap. That doesn't mean what you think it means, to quote the Princess Bride. All right, so if your least favorite tasks include essential things like bookkeeping and marketing and setting up systems and processes or developing workflows, find a way to outsource them. There are companies out there that specialize in it, and they can get it done in a very short amount of time. So the colossal looking task you've had on your to do list for months, if not years, that you keep moving further out and further out and saying, I'll do it next quarter, I'll do it next year, I'll do it in the summer, no, you're not going to. If you haven't done it yet, you're not going to. So give it to someone who will get it done and will do it well. Imagine having a work life in which you are only minimally involved with the things that you don't like. Wouldn't that be nice? Think of how much creative bandwidth that would free up in your head. All right, number five, quality over quantity. I once spoke with an interior designer who put her business on hold because she had a baby, which totally makes sense. I respect that. And quite honestly, our families are way more important than our businesses should ever be. By the time I spoke with this client, however, her daughter had started kindergarten, and she was out of the house five days a week. Five hours a day. Okay, that's 25 hours a week. And I was like, oh, my goodness, that's amazing. And I was about to tell her, oh, it's a. It's so cool. Your business is gonna get 25 hours of your uninterrupted time. But before I could even get there, she was like, I still can't grow my business, because what can I do in only 25 hours a week? Well, it's a good thing we were on the phone and not on Zoom, because if she had seen my face, I probably would have deeply offended her. Because here's the thing. I personally work about three hours a day. Seven. Three hours a day. Three days a week. Seven hours a day. See, I can't even talk. And that is how I'm able to run this entire business, because I've delegated, because I have systems in place, because I am trying so freaking hard to be organized. You can get a lot done in them, 20 to 25 hours a week. Trust me. So it's all, well, perspective. If you keep thinking you don't have enough time for something, then you won't. And for some entrepreneurs, that thought is enough to keep them from even trying. But just remember, the quality of your time is what mattered. It's better to have five or six or seven very structured, uninterrupted, very focused work hours in a day, versus 10 or 12 hours of semi focused, kind of structured, but not really, mostly scattered work hours. Okay? Quality of your work time matters, not the quantity. All right, my sixth tip for you is to use an auto recurring calendar to use your time wisely. You do have to plan for each day. And like I said earlier, you shouldn't be making those plans that morning. You shouldn't be making them the night before. Living in that day to day state of uncertainty, of really not knowing what your day is gonna look like or your week would be stressful for anybody. Instead, plan your entire week, at least a week in advance, and put your repeating essential tasks on loops. As soon as you check it off, like in a sauna, for example, it will show up again on a specific day and time, but the following week or the following month or whatever it needs to be. And for any one of you who's like, well, I would do that, but each week looks so different or each month looks so different, there's no way could do that. Allow me to push back on that and refer you to the points I laid out earlier. There are always going to be essential things that you need to get done in your business. Those never change. Figure out what those are and put them on loops so that they always get done and you always plan and make time for them. I use Asana for this. As you may have gathered, some people will use Google Calendar, but for me, Asana just works better because I can use Calendar View to keep track of everything. That's even where I put all my appointments, all my client stuff, and I use visual to keep track of my week. So everything is color coded. And I know if I have a lot of orange on the calendar, that means I have a lot of time sensitive appointments. If I have a lot of green, I know I'm just doing a lot of backend stuff that day and it works really well. I can also use it to keep track of my team and see what they're doing, see what their workloads are, assign more things to them, collaborate with them. I even collaborate with clients through Asana sometimes. It's very useful and it helps me stay organized. And as you all know, being organized is a way to be more productive and save time. Now the final thing brings us back to mindset, because it seems like a lot of our problems begin with what we're thinking in our heads. So I want to ask you, why do we have to be so busy? Why not all cultures are like this and why does productivity matter so much and what are we working toward that simply can't wait, that we just have to get it all done now? And are we possibly forgetting what's actually important along the way? These are the questions I ask myself. I don't always have all the answers. I want you to ponder that for yourself. But I can tell you this. I run this business, it's a socialite agency, because I unequivocally believe that God has called me to do this. And because he's called me to do it, he will also give me the bandwidth to do it. He will give me the time to get everything done. But or and rather he's also called me to be a wife and a mother. Those things take time and bandwidth too. And because he has ordained for me to have these multiple roles, he is going to give me the ability to do these things, not on my own. The Bible even says that, you know, we, we can't do all of this on our own. That's where we have to rely on him, the fruits of his spirit, not the fruits of ours. And when I started realizing that God, who is the Creator time, by the way, who Himself exists outside of time, he's given me all the time I need if I would just ask for it. And it's my job to be a good manager of it. And suddenly the words of guidance from my coach from earlier made a lot more sense when she told me that I do have time for all the things. She reminded me that asking for and accepting help, outsourcing and delegating, reprioritizing and organizing things that need to get done are all ways of getting time back. But the key to making it all work is remembering whose time we're operating on and that he has more than enough of it for us to do whatever he has called us to do. So if you feel like your marketing is a scattered mess or completely non existent and you're ready to get that delegated and off your to do list so that you don't keep pushing it into the future and it never actually gets done, you need to reach out. Go to katethesocialite.com, book a marketing audit discovery call with me. I would love to go through the nuts and bolts of your business and help you figure out how to make your marketing flow, how to make it run like a well oiled machine so that you don't have to be as involved as you think you do. Until next time guys. Keep your marketing simple, your message clear and I will talk to you soon. It.