← The Rachel Hollis Podcast
The Rachel Hollis Podcast
992 | Better This Week: Your Calendar
00:44:21
Upgrade to the Ad Free Premium Podcast Experience - https://rachelhollis.supercast.com Get your copy of Rachel's Book Here: Audible, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Millon, Bookshop.org, or wherever books are sold! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices In this episode of The Rachel Hollis Podcast, Rachel shares practical strategies for using your calendar as a tool to create a more intentional and productive life. She argues that your calendar reveals your true priorities—not just your stated goals—and encourages listeners to schedule their most important personal commitments first, batch similar tasks together, color-code appointments to reflect key priorities, regularly review their schedule, and learn to say no to obligations that don't align with their goals. Rach emphasizes that even small changes to how you manage your time can le...
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The teacher's pet that will forever live inside my heart. Always loves Back to School. And while my own children might not feel the same way about it that I do, I love this time of year. I love getting new school supplies. What backpacks are we going to take? And getting your back to school shoes. When I was a kid, you got one pair of shoes a year. So the Back to school shoes, huge deal. And if you are in the market for your own pair of back to school shoes, Famous Footwear makes it easy to get ready for the school year with great shoes at great prices. You can find brands like Jordan, Nike, Adidas, Birkenstocks for the hippies like me, New Balance, Skechers, I mean, you name it, Famous Footwear has got it right now it's bogo. Buy one pair, get one half off at Famous Footwear. Shop in store to get $10 to spend this fall. Some exclusions apply. Plus join famous rewards to get Famous Footwear's best benefits, including free shipping. I love my phone but not my carrier. What do I do? Well, there are 250 reasons to join T Mobile. Like what? You can keep your phone and your number and T Mobile helps pay it off up to $800 per line. So I wouldn't have to buy a new phone? Yep. So, plus your plan price stays the same for five years on experience plans. Nice. Find your reason@t mobile.com via virtual prebate guard card typically takes 15 days after rebate submission price guarantee on Talk text and 5G data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Have you ever looked at your week ahead and been super bummed out by all of the appointments that you have in your calendar? Like back in the day, I was really lucky in that I had an amazing executive assistant and her job was to take all of the information, all of the things that people wanted, and then she would disseminate that into meetings in my week. And when we first started to work together, we had to work really hard to get to the place where she understood what actually was deserving of time on my calendar. What were things she needed to push back on, what were the boundaries that she needed to put in place so that I didn't have a bunch of essentially wasted energy inside the very few hours I had to work on the things that were most important. That process took us a long time. And even knowing that I needed to have that kind of process with my ea, that was years and years in the making. That was years of having weeks or months pass by where I didn't make any progress on my goals. That was tons of time. When I first got support from a team member, when I first got an assistant years and years ago, where I would just let them do anything, I'd let them put whatever they wanted on there because I just didn't want to have to control it myself. I didn't want to have my own boundaries. I didn't want to say no to people. So I just let the assistant do it. And what that meant is that I would show up on Monday morning, look at my calendar and be super bummed out because I had a bunch of things in there that were too late to cancel on. And now I didn't have time to do any of the things that actually mattered. That's the thing about your calendar. I don't care if you are a stay at home parent or you are an entrepreneur, or you're working your way up inside of someone else's business, or you're a college student. The thing that nobody tells us about the calendar is that it is not just a record of your schedule. It's sort of a confession. It is the one place in your entire life where you can't tell yourself a story because you are sitting there looking at the evidence of your life. What I mean by that is that your calendar is a reflection of your true priorities. Your calendar is what you are actually working toward, not what you say you want to work toward. Now, in a perfect world, those two things, they would be connected to each other. They would be totally in lockstep and aligned. Your calendar would be a reflection of your goals, but that's not often how it works, and it's not something that anyone ever taught me. So in this episode of the Better this Week, we are going to talk about how you can have a phenomenal calendar, an atomic calendar, the things that I do inside of my own calendar that have allowed me to be the most productive version of myself, these are not just ideas. This is what I have been doing for over two decades. So. So every Wednesday here on the show, we do episodes called Better this Week. And the idea is that we take one particular part of our lives and we look at how we can make that one thing better this week. Not in a year, not six months from now. But what can you actually affect right now? In these episodes, we've talked about making your arms better this week, making your summer more enjoyable, more fun, more fulfilling. This week, if you haven't been listening Better this week, check out Wednesday episodes. But for today, we are not talking about how to overhaul your entire life. We are talking about some new habits that you are going to start doing this week so that by Friday you can actually point to something that you've made change against. Okay, so this week or doing the calendar? All right, so here's what I really need you to understand that I didn't get when I was in my 20s. I really didn't lock into this until probably mid-30s. Your calendar is the most honest reflection of where your life is headed. Because your calendar is how you fill your time. Now, I don't think I need to mention this, that you should have a calendar and that you should have a schedule and you should have some record of where you need to be in certain places and what you are doing. But that's not something that I figured out how to do until I was all the way into my first or second job. And I only really learned how to manage a calendar because I had to manage a calendar for my boss. But even my 19 year old son has a calendar, a Google Cal, just like I use. And he is able to manage his day to day life based on what that calendar says. We all know that it's helpful, right, to look at a calendar and understand that you have an appointment with your dentist at 10:30 today and here's the address, right? We all know that's important, but that's not the magic of a calendar. Let me make a bid for you having a more accurate calendar. If it's not something that you currently do, a calendar is you looking at your life from up above. So in entrepreneur terms, there's this idea that the most powerful thing an entrepreneur can do is not to work in their business. Like in the day to day minutia, you know, working with customers, answering the emails, answering the phone, paying the bills, that's working in your business. What actually takes a business to the next level is working on your business. It's when you can get out of that day to day and look at your business from up above and that's when you see like oh man, I'm really falling off on marketing and oh dang, you know what, like we haven't actually been doing great with our cash flow. If you don't ever step outside of things, you can't actually see where you're headed. The calendar is that for your life. I remember so distinctly years ago I was in a meeting with my EA and I was trying to figure out how to make my calendar work better. And I was feeling very frustrated because of how things were being aligned But I also was so bad, I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. So I was trying very cautiously to explain to her that I didn't like how she was scheduling things. So for instance, she would schedule things kind of late on Tuesday and then I'd have really early morning meetings on Wednesday. And she didn't batch things together. The appointments were just kind of willy nilly. She would just ask people when they wanted to meet and whatever they said, she'd put it in. And so I was trying to explain to her why it was frustrating. And I didn't really know the term batch work quite yet. And I remember that she asked a question that really changed everything. She was super intuitive and even though she didn't know what she was doing wrong, she was very intuitive with this question. She was looking at my calendar open on my laptop and I was kind of pointing things to her like, hey, I don't like how it goes late on Tuesday and then it's early on Wednesday. And she was said, oh, is this how you look at your calendar? And I was like, what do you mean? She's like, do you look at your calendar at the whole week? And I was like, 100%. I am either looking at the full month or I am looking at the entire week. I very rarely would look at a single day unless I just had back to back crazy meetings. And she said, oh, I have my calendar and your calendar. I only look at calendars day by day. And because she was in the day setting, she could never see how meetings stacked up against each other and she could never see the flow of a week. So I am a huge proponent to you getting on a calendar. This is not an ad, but Google Calendar is free. It's so fantastic. I have used it for a decade at least so that you can see your life from up above. So that's number one. You get to see this like high up above framework. How's my week going to go? How's my month going to go? The second thing that a calendar is amazing for is evidence of how you are actually spending your time. So if by chance you haven't been keeping super accurate records of how you spend your time, then I would love to encourage you to use this episode as inspiration. Get on Google Cal, and build out what happened last week. If you don't actually keep really succinct schedules in your calendar, like build it out for last week. So even if it's just kind of a guess, like, well, I think I did this from 10 to noon. And then I remember that day I got coffee with Sophie at three. Like, just put those things in there so you can start to get an idea of how you are spending your time. I remember years ago doing a podcast episode with Jay Shetty, and he said, you know, the two things that tell you what your actual priorities are is your calendar and your bank account. What you spend your time on and what you spend your money on are the most accurate representation of who you are and what you actually prioritize. So there's mad power in your calendar, which is why it might need a makeover. I also think of it as this, like, accountability buddy, to some extent, because your calendar doesn't care what you say you wanted, right? It doesn't give you credit for effort. It doesn't care what your intentions are. Your calendar doesn't care how sincere you are. It doesn't care, like, what your dreams are. Your calendar just holds evidence that you did or did not do something. It's just over there quietly keeping track of where you actually showed up, hour by hour, day by day, telling you what really happened, not what you wanted to happen. So for those of you who've been in the community for a long time, you are familiar with this episode that I have done over and over and over that happens in the week between Christmas and New Year's. That episode is the annual calendar audit. If you would love to listen to that episode, if you're like a super nerd, you didn't know it existed, you're ready to go so hardcore on your calendar. I will link to that episode in the show notes so that you can go grab it. But the point of the calendar audit is that you review your entire year and you use that information to figure out what. What you need to do more of, what you need to do less of. Like, it's amazing, but for as long as I've been doing it, I get notes from people who are like, well, I don't keep a very accurate calendar. And my answer to them is like, okay, well, you can scroll through the photos on your phone and kind of get an idea of what you were doing each month of the year. But if for no other reason than you've always wanted to do your annual calendar audit, maybe this is time to start keeping a more accurate schedule of your life. I love my phone, but not my carrier. What do I do? Well, there are 250 reasons to join T Mobile. Like what? You can keep your phone and your number and T Mobile helps pay it off up to $800 per line. So I wouldn't have to buy a new phone? Yep. Plus your plan price stays the same for 5 years on experience plans. Nice. Find your reason@t mobile.com via virtual prepaid GuardCart typically takes 15 days after rebate, submission price guarantee on TalkText and 5G data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. You know that thing that you love? You'll find others geeking out about it on Facebook. Whether you're looking for community or inspiration, Facebook helps turn passion into action. Obsessed with running a marathon? Discover a neighborhood run club group, start training and meet your new neighbor. Thinking about cooking more at home? Connect with meal prep groups to discover recipes in a new community. And as you're scrolling the feed, you may even find reels showing you top running shoes or the best tools for your culinary journey this summer. Find more on Facebook so just a couple of things I would recommend if you are getting into the calendar life or you already have a calendar that you really love but you want to get some of my best tips, here's a few things that I swear by. We've already talked about the Google Cal. My other piece there is that I have. Let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 different Google CALs and I have had way more. I've got a bunch hidden right now. So if I have a project come up, I'll create a calendar for it. I have a family calendar. I have my personal calendar, podcast calendar. I have calendars that I share with people on the team. I have calendars that are only for me. I just love it. So that's number one. Number two, I learned something from my husband who is English that I cannot recommend to you enough. I am mentioning that he's English because this is not an American thing to do, but it makes such a massive difference when you are in your digital calendar. I'm sure other calendars do this as well, but for sure Google does. You can set your calendar to be like European style calendar or North American style calendar or at least American style calendar. And I didn't even know there was a difference until I met Kez and he looked at the calendars in my house and he looked at on my computer and he's like it is so weird how you guys split your weekend in the calendar. I'm like what are you talking about? American calendars start on Sunday. If you look at the week, it's like the first column is Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday right So you look at the week and it's bookended by Sunday and Saturday. That is how American calendars are set up. The problem is that this is like kind of a mind screw in that you never really feel like you have a good amount of time to rest or a good amount of time off because you're never seeing your weekend as two days together. If you're European, your calendar starts on Monday, goes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then you have Saturday and Sunday next to each other. It's so simple, but it actually is a huge game changer. Just change it. You can change it in your settings and it really does allow you to see, I don't know, a more restful week, because I used to think of Sunday as the beginning of my week. Sunday is meant to be a day of rest. It's a day of reset. It's a day of replenishing. It is not meant to be the first day of your week. Like, get your grind going. At least not for me. So that is my second piece of advice is have different calendars for different things and set your calendar to start on Monday. All right, now let's jump in to how you are going to set up your calendar to be the most efficient and to get you closer to the person you want to be and the goals that you want to achieve. All right, I'm going to go back to the entrepreneurship circle to pull out another piece of advice and I'm going to flip it. If you are crushing it as an entrepreneur, you pay yourself first. You pay yourself first. There's a great book that's been around forever called Profit First. Highly recommend it. If you own a business. If you own a business and you don't actually make money, I love you, but you don't have a business. You have a job that doesn't pay well. It's harsh, but someone needed to tell me that once upon a time. And maybe you needed to hear it too, even though you thought you were coming into talk about calendars. Back to our conversation. If you're doing entrepreneurship correctly, you pay yourself first. Before your bills, before your fund money, before anything else touches your account. You move money from your business account into your personal bank account. We don't need to get into it. You can read the book. But by choosing to set up your business finances in that way, you. You ensure that you always have enough money. Because the thing in business is that no matter how much money you make, the business will always eat it. If you are an entrepreneur, you're nodding your head. Right now you're like, absolutely. So if you don't put systems in place to ensure that you actually take money home, then you won't. And it's not because you're not working hard, and it's not because you're unlucky. It's just the system that you have for how you spend, how you pay, how you move the money around space. Your calendar works the exact same way. And once you start looking at your calendar like this, you cannot unsee this. All right, here's how this goes. If you wait until you've scheduled everything else to plan the things that matter most to you, and I'm talking self care, working out the time to write your memoir, the date night with your boyfriend, the. The doctor's appointment that you know you need to stop pushing. If you schedule yourself last, that is what you will always be. And that is why you are not fully living into your life. There's always going to be a day to push the thing to. And our priority becomes everybody else ever what everybody else wants, what everybody else needs, all the things other people want you to do, and they're taking up most of the important time. So that your stuff, your personal stuff, your most important stuff has to fit into the fringes. It has to fit. It, like, gets the crumbs of your life. So in the same way that that book encourages you to pay yourself first, I am going to encourage you to schedule your most important things before anything else. Schedule what matters most before anything else gets in your calendar. What this looks like is you go to the next free week. Let's say. Let's say you're looking at next week, and you look at, you know, Monday through Friday, if that's how your work week flows, and you say, okay, what would I love to have accomplished by the end of this week? Well, you know what? I'd love to get three workouts in. I would love to have coffee with Gina. I'd love to go on at least two walks with my neighbor. It doesn't matter if anyone else thinks that those things are a priority or if anyone else thinks that those things are important. You think they're important, so they need to go in your calendar and they need to be sacrosanct. The stuff that you put in that calendar should not be adjusted. Now, what this means is that sometimes this, that sacred special time is at 5am Right? We've talked about this endlessly. I would not be where I am, you would not know my name if I did not find a way to squeeze life into 5am the life that I wanted was to be a writer. I did not have time during daylight hours to be a writer. And I've never been a night owl. Some people wake up and come alive at night. Your girl wants to be asleep by 9:30. If I am awake after 9:30, something's gone horribly wrong. Okay, I want to be asleep by 9:30. So I'm not one of those people that puts the kids to bed and then can do like, you know, well, I'll write until 2am or whatever. The time that I had was first thing in the morning. Then. Then I had to get the babies up, had to get them to school, and then I had to go to work. You would not know my name if I didn't fight for my time before the sun came up. So when I say that you schedule yourself first, I don't mean that you're like, well, screw it, man. I'm going to write from 9 to 11 every day even though I'm at the office. Like, that's probably not going to work. Your boss is probably going to be upset. But I do mean that with fresh eyes and an open heart, you go in and you plan the week of your dreams. And I would highly recommend that you don't over schedule yourself here. Because when we get excited, we're like, oh my God, I'm put everything on there. And all of a sudden your day is like, you know, from 7am to 10pm at night it's full. But that's so stressful. That's a little too type A even for me. But I do suggest, even if it's only one thing, that you go ahead and you drop that in right now and then fill in all the other things after you have prioritized yourself. If you're not sure what your priority should be, if you're not sure what you should put in for you in that calendar, make sure that you listen to Monday's episode of the show. Monday's episode is a premium podcast episode. If you're not familiar with that, every single month I teach a master class on a specific subject, and that is for premium members only. And it is a video podcast. So you get the video, you get a worksheet that goes along with it. There's an entire community of people who are committed to working on their life in a deeper way beyond that master class. You also get every episode of this podcast absolutely ad free. So if you don't like listening to ads, that's your thing. It's 10 bucks a month. The link is in the show notes if you want to check it out. That episode comes out on Monday and every single time I release one of those we include the first 20 minutes for free. So if you're not sure if it's your vibe, listen the first 20 minutes and see if you think there's something cool there. I love my phone but not my carrier. What do I do? Well, there are 250 reasons to join T Mobile. Like what? You can keep your phone and your number and T Mobile helps pay it off up to $800 per line. So I wouldn't have to buy a new phone? Yep. Plus your plan price stays the same for 5 years on experience plans. Nice. Find your reason@t mobile.com via virtual prepaid guard card. Typically takes 15 days after rebate submission price guarantee on TalkText and 5G data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores. Now get ready to save big with up to 60% off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi's, Adidas and Free People. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Idea number two to make that calendar fantastic is probably my favorite thing and the most nerdy thing ever. And I actually have a YouTube video about this. I thought you guys were gonna love this episode like a year or two ago I made it and I think like eight of you cared. But I did this episode where I explained my super crazy color coded calendar system. Say that three times fast. And I was like oh my gosh, people are going to geek out so bad. And apparently I'm the only one who geeked out. But There is a YouTube video about this if you're curious. But let me just give you an overview. My calendar beyond being several different calendars is completely color coded and it's color coded in two ways. Number one, each one of my calendars, if you have a Google Cal again this is going to make more sense. But each one of my calendars has sort of a theme color. So like my personal calendar is this light blue and my podcast calendar is this eggplant purple and my family calendar is orange. I have all these different colors. That's number one. But then number two and this is where it gets sexy. My calendar is color coded and the colors mean different things. So I can look at a month of appointments from the full month calendar I can't even see what those calendar appointments are. I can't see the words. But based on the color, I know what's going on. Now, this all started from my annual calendar audit. Remember I told you about that the very first year I did the calendar audit, which, by the way, I learned about from John Maxwell. I think he talks about it in a book. It's definitely something that he taught me over the years. But essentially the idea is he would sit down every year in that week between Christmas and New Year's, he'd. He spends like a whole day and he reviews his calendar and from that he gets some information, he figures out where he wants to go. Well, the first year I did it, I loved it. But I also was kind of depressed when I was done. Because if you've never done it before, you will do your first audit and you will be shocked at how much time you wasted. You'll be shocked at how much time you wasted. You'll be shocked at how much money you wasted. You'll be shocked at people that you allowed into your life that shouldn't have been there. Like, it is a revelation. And doing the calendar audit every year is so fantastic because you gut check yourself and throughout the year, instead of waiting to the end and being like, oh gosh, you get there so much faster. All of a sudden it's March and you're like, no, no, no, I am not going to waste my time doing this thing because I don't want to have to write about it and be sad at the end of this year. So for me, one of the things that I remembered that first year that I was so bummed about is I had worked my tail off. I had worked so hard that year and I had done well, not as well as I hoped, but I had done well with my business and I had done things I wanted to do. But I could not find any examples of self care. Like for the whole year. I was much younger then. But I don't even mean like coffee with my best friends. I don't mean, you know, I'm not talking about like, oh, a spa weekend at Almangari. No, I was so far from that. I wasn't even like getting a manicure. I had nothing in my calendar that made all the work worth it. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like this is so important for anything that we are working to in our lives. It doesn't have to be extravagant, but you need things in your life that are a reflection of why you are working so Hard. I was just on vacation. The most delicious and amazing summer vacation with my husband and my son. I just did this whole slideshow on Instagram, if you want to see our adventures. But we were on this adventure and we went to multiple countries and we just had the most amazing time. The three of us were doing all of these things. And I had this moment that I often have when we travel as a family where I think, oh, yeah, this is what I work so hard for. This is what I'm giving my children. I'm not like a bad girl. I'm not a fashion girl. I don't really care about things like that. My kids are very similar. But I do splurge on experiences, and that is so worth it. The memories for me are so worth the cost of the experience. But I got to the end of that first year and I did that calendar audit, and I was like, I didn't do anything. Like, I didn't try and have fun at all. All I did was work. So I thought, okay, if I'm going to prioritize myself and I'm going to actually plan for fun, because, yes, you can plan for fun. First I need to know what are things that would feel fun to me? So I made a list, right? I was like, I love when I get to get a massage. I love a mani pedi. I love having coffee with my girlfriends. I love having dates. I love, you know, I like, listed out all these things that I really love. And then I was like, great, now I'm going to make it my goal to have at least one thing per week that's really fun. Now remember, that can be as simple as just grabbing coffee with a friend. And so the first time I ever tried color coding my appointments was with the color yellow. Yellow is my favorite color. And so I made that the color of self care. So anytime something was in my calendar that was self care, it was yellow. And that way I could look at my week at a glance and go, oh, there's no yellow. What can I plan right now? Something super simple. I'll call Becky. We'll go on a walk together, you know, or I'll have the neighbor come over with her kids and we'll, you know, have some wine together while the kids are playing in the floor. Like, we'll do whatever we can do as mommies to have a little fun. But I would intentionally plan something so that I had some yellow in my calendar. It was really simple. And I saw like a 100% improvement, like an immediate improvement on the Joy that I had in my life because now I was intentionally planning things that worked so well for me that I was like, well, what are other things that I want to be more intentional about that I can make a color and then I know if I don't see that color, I'm doing something wrong. The one that I've mentioned over the years at conferences and in keynotes that people love, especially my entrepreneur crew, is I have appointments in my calendar that are the color green because they make me money. If I don't have some green things in the calendar, I'm not being a very good entrepreneur. Right? I have a color in my calendar for when I am doing something on camera. Like, I taped the premium podcast episode today, which meant that I had to do my hair and I had to do my makeup and I had to put a cute outfit on. If I can look at a glance and go, oh, I've got that light purple in my calendar that morning, it means that I need to put some effort into how I look instead of showing up and recording this like a bog troll. Okay? So at a glance I can look at my calendar and know what things are. Just so you don't have to go watch the full crazy YouTube video, let me tell you. Oh, the other thing is that Google just added like all. Okay, so the other really cool thing, sorry, let me just this back up here. Is that Google just added like 20 new colors, which is so exciting for those of us who do the color coded thing because forever you only had, I don't know what 10 to choose from. Now there's like a bajillion. And if you were, you can, I'm sure, Google this because it's Google and it'll tell you how. But when you're going to color code something, if you open up the the colors, you'll see like, God, I don't even know how many there are here. And you click on the little pencil, you can edit, right? And then it gives you a label. You can label each color. So if you share a calendar, like back in the day when I shared one with an assistant, or I share my husband has access to my calendar, he also can look, oh, it's. It's purple. What does that mean? He can click on the label and he knows what that means. So it's just a helpful tool for anyone who is as type A as I am. But it makes me super happy and I recommend it. I'm going to add one more thing to this mix, which is slightly different but super helpful. If you are in a similar business to me in any way, where you have to ensure that you have finished a project. So part of having a podcast is my first step is that I lay out the calendar of the podcast. I lay out a month at a time. I go, what do I want to talk about this month in July? And I start thinking through my episodes. I put all of those into the calendar as the entire day. So it just creates like a square. The whole calendar that I'm looking at right now is a square. If I have recorded that episode, that square, I change it to eggplant. If that square is red, like, I'm looking at this episode, I'm recording for you right now. Better this week. Calendar, episode 992. In my calendar right now is the color red. As soon as I record this and get it uploaded for the team, I'll change that to purple. When that calendar turns purple, the team knows that the file is in frame, which is a tool that we use, a software that we use. So they know that the file's in frame. We don't have to have a conversation about it. They know to use the calendar as the source of information. And let's go one step further. If you have more pieces to that, you can create a key. Maybe there are easier ways to do this. I know that there are people who get such a boner for asana, for Mondays, for any kind of software that I hate those things. I hate them. They are so overwhelming for me. I don't know if it's the creative in me, the visual learner in me. I know project managers who are so turned on by those systems. I absolutely hate them. This is the simple way that I do it. So if you're like me and those overwhelm you, our team knows. If it's red, Rach hasn't recorded it. If it's purple, she has. And then we have, like, a little key of symbols that we also put into the calendar. So sorry if this is going so granular. Just like, skip 30 seconds forward. Once the editor has edited the episode, he puts a little plus into that calendar. And once it's been programmed by our programmer, like, meaning once it's been scheduled to show up for you guys, there's another plus, which means that I, as the host and producer of this show, can look at my calendar and know, oh, fantastic. We're, like, completely scheduled, and the only thing the team is waiting on is this particular episode. I love that we can be efficient and we can have a system and we don't have to have a conversation about it. We have been doing this for almost a decade, so at this point, like, we don't need to be going back and forth like, hey, is someone posting the epic? No. Efficiency is king. So hopefully, hopefully something I just said there is, like, you realize you need to be doing your own kind of little something. Start with just one thing that you want to add to your life, like I did with the yellow, and see if we can't get some yellow in your calendar this week. My third idea for how you can make your calendar super efficient. This one's a little bit harder, but it's so important, and you already know it's important. So stop fighting it and just learn to say no. Okay, Here is a inconvenient truth. Your calendar is likely full, and it's not because you are disciplined or driven or in high demand. Okay? If you are like me back in the day, your calendar is full because you say yes to everyone. All right? You say yes to volunteering at the kids school. You say yes to the committee. You say yes to the extra project even though you're not getting paid for it. You say yes to coffee with someone who wants to, quote, pick your brain because you felt bad saying no. You said yes over and over and over. And that is why your calendar looks the way that it does. If you actually want to have the life of your dreams that requires you doing work that matters to you, in order for you to have the space to do work that matters to you, whatever that is, you've got to start saying no. The way that we are going to do this is practically. We're not going to be, like, sort of esoteric here and like, oh, I'm going to say start saying no. I want you to find one thing that is currently on your calendar and cancel it. One of my favorite things that Bob Goff ever told me is that he quits something. I think it's every Thursday. I mean, I've heard him talk about on podcast, like it's a thing. Every Thursday he finds something to quit. It's like, it's so. Because he's just like, I want to keep, you know, getting rid of stuff that I shouldn't be doing. And I say, you follow after Bob and you find something to quit. Quit the committee, quit the thing you volunteered for. Quit the coffee you don't want to have. Find something to say no to. It is really not that big a deal, but it will teach you how to begin to free up that space in your calendar so you can use it for what you actually should be doing. Also, can I just ask if you find the courage to say no and to quit something? Pay attention to what you fill that open slot with. We tend to have this bad habit of saying no to something and then almost immediately filling that exact same slot with something else that does not matter. In fact, if you need something to help you resist doing that, open up the slot and then fill it with something you would prefer to do, no matter what that is, fight for that time for yourself. All right, my fourth idea for making your calendar better this week is to do something that I call batch work. Batch work is essentially a theme for your day. And I know that not everybody has full control of their calendar and how they schedule things, but I am convinced that our brains do better when we combine tasks that are similar. So on a Saturday, maybe that's the day that you do all your bits and pieces and your chores and you get gas in the car and you go grocery shopping and you get that all done in one big chunk. And maybe Sunday is the day that you review the week ahead and you figure out what you want in that schedule. And maybe Tuesday is the day that you do outreach to potential new customers. Like, whatever this is for you. And however this makes sense, you're a better judge of that than I am. Our brains really struggle when we have to jump from task to task to task. So one of the things that you can do to make it easier for them is to stop switching up so much. And that means that you put tasks together so you're not trying to do 10 different things in a single day if at all possible. I want to add here, too, that you do not need to be working on your goal seven days a week to see real progress with it. In a perfect world, we would all move a few inches forward in the direction of our dream every single day. But that is not necessary. I guarantee if you had two or three days where you made some real progress and you stacked that up week after week after week, you would start to see exponential results. Theme your days, batch your work, and see if it doesn't get easier for you to achieve things as you go. And again, I go into a lot of detail on batch work in that one YouTube video about my calendar that no one really cared about. All right, my last idea to make your calendar better this week is that you need to set your calendar up for success. The easiest way to do this is to plan. 10 minutes does not need to be something significant. 30 minutes would be amazing. But even 10 quick minutes where once a week you review last week, you ask yourself what worked, what didn't work, what would you love to see more of? And then you look at your calendar for the week ahead. This is the moment where you're like, oh, I don't have anything yellow planned. This is the moment where you're like, gosh, I'm in a lot of meetings with people in my office that probably could be an email. Could I get out of some of those? Could I delegate some of those? Could I do something different so I could have some more green in my calendar? Which are the money makers? Like, if you don't review the calendar, you can't do anything to it. So make sure you add some time into your week. Again, I love a Sunday for this to just do a quick review, look at the week ahead, and see where we're going. That is your assignment for this week, and it's pretty small on purpose. You do not need to redesign your entire life to start having an effective calendar. And you don't have to be as crazy as I am. You do not have to do the full color coded thing. Be optimized, like, do. This is two decades, literally 20 years of me figuring out how to be productive. So you don't need to go from zero to a hundred overnight. Pick one thing you heard me say today that feels like it might be helpful for you and just try. See if that thing will make this week feel better. And next Sunday, when you're back on the couch with your tea and you're looking at the week ahead and you have a better understanding of what went right and what went wrong and how to do it differently, that week will be even better scheduled than this one was. All right, guys, if you dug this episode, will you consider sharing it with a friend? Will you just, like, right now, text this to them or share it on your social. Let people know you really dug this episode. We would so appreciate it here as a team. I would also love to encourage you to subscribe to the podcast if you've never done it. It's free. Yes, we have a premium version. You don't have to pay for it. It's totally free to subscribe, and it means you will never miss one of our episodes. We will be back soon with more content, with more information, with more ideas that will help you get where you want to go in life. Until then, as always, I love you and I'm rooting for you. The rachel hollis podcast is produced by me, rachel hollis. It's edited by andrew weller and jack noble. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit capella.com to learn more. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co founder of angie. One thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. For decades, Angie's helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. Angie the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at angie Combination.