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Hello and welcome everyone! Recently I had to step back and take a moment because of a health scare. I am very much a person who just keeps going and going and doesn’t slow down even when my body tells me to. But, I had to slow down recently and it’s funny, you seem to have all these great ideas as soon as you slow down. As I am recovering, I started to think about things I have been doing in my own business. Now, I have had a team for a long time–but I realized that I wasn’t delegating as well as I thought I was–with this recent layup I was forced to really think about what needed to happen in my absence. Yes, I make mistakes too! But, this time to sit and be quiet and think allowed me to really focus on what needs to happen moving forward.
So today we are going to talk all about how you need to give yourself time away from your work sometimes in order to move forward.
Many friends of mine and people I have worked with and worked for have struggled with this, so, don’t feel alone. If you are like me, and you are constantly going, and setting goals, and making to-do lists and setting high standards, then this episode is for you.
I sit down every morning with my cup of tea, and I make my list of the three things I NEED to accomplish over the day, I go through my mindset mantra, and I set my goals for the day. I realized the other day that I truly do A LOT in a day–but–I am so tired at the end of the day and by the end of the week I feel totally depleted and burnt out. I had to have a moment with myself and realize why I am feeling so mentally bogged down and really just at the end of my rope.
This moment started with my clients–as many of my revelations do. With this health scare, I was starting to meet in person less and when I would meet with them in person I was watching people and talking to them about the goals they were setting. There was one meeting that I was sitting in and the client I was with said to me “oh my gosh, I can’t do this, I feel so taxed.” The two of us took a look at her to-do list and started to dissect it and this lead to my revelation. It was interesting to me because I teach people to make these lists, but I wasn’t realizing this huge mistake.
I know you are on the edge of your seat to find out what is burning us all out.
What I realized is that more often than not… most people try to create at the same time they are trying to analyze. You can’t blend the two! You can in the beginning for a short period of time but if you create and immediately analyze you are using two totally different parts of your brain and it is overly taxing. When we try to bring these two sides of the brain together you are going to burn yourself out.
My client was trying to brainstorm ideas for a new project and they were analyzing why the program wasn’t working, and then shouting out and creating new ideas, and then they were going back and analyzing the profitability…all in a 20-minute conversation. I was just a viewer into this conversation and I was getting mentally taxed, I finally had to step up and tell them to stop!
A lot of people don’t see this connection though, they just see things being ticked off their to-do list and not understanding why they feel burnt out and not accomplished. It took really slowing down for me to see this. When I slowed down I was able to really look at my own schedule. Some of the things I started to think about and look at were the things I could do differently. What could I do differently that would allow me to continue accomplishing everything that I needed to get done and not feel depleted at the end of the day?
I came up with three things, and I want to share them with you.
The first one is, figure out blocks of time for your creative tasks. I used to tell people to find their most productive time of day and fill it with your tasks. BUT, I have come to realize that the creative tasks should probably be done first, and everyone is different, but this is what I am suggesting because I have seen it work. So you take this time to start with your videos, your posts, your sales, your content… Now be careful. What I used to do was create in the morning, create my content, plan it and create it, but then right after that, I would have a meeting. When you are in a meeting you need to be analytical, you need to be engaging, and you need to put on a show. And then I would take a five-minute break and I would go back to creating content. Maybe brainstorming content, or coming up with ideas for my next podcast… I just couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t sit still and concentrate.
Now, I am not a neuroscientist, but I am guessing that I was making those connections in my brain go crazy because I was switching gears so frequently. That is why I am suggesting that you do your creative tasks first. Batch these tasks and work through them. I like to have two creative tasks and then when they are done, I move onto my analytical tasks.
If you block out your time to create this content or be creative it can be for a full day and you can create for an entire week and then this allows you to block out time for all of the analytical stuff after that. You can also break it up half a day for each. For a lot of local business owners they have an issue creating content, so if you set this time aside to create then you can focus the rest of your time on the analytics that needs to happen behind the scenes.
Learning how to group these tasks and block out time can really be a game changer for you and your business.
Think about when you are working on a big project. So the first phase of the project is typically the brainstorming phase. That’s the phase that’s super creative. You have to go through that phase so that you know what you’re doing. The next phase is actually doing all of the execution and having all of those tasks and everything gets executed and implemented, and that’s definitely more analytical. Then the third phase, which is when the project actually happens and things flourish and things get harvested and all of that happens so that you can do the debrief.
So it goes from creative to analytical to creative to analytical, but you’re doing it in chunks of time, it doesn’t happen all at once. When you do it that way with a project, a project flows a heck of a lot easier than if you’re kind of doing it backwards.
You need to take time to block out your creativity and then also taking time to block those analytical things, batching stuff together to see if you can have a full day of content creation.
That is why my second tip is actually batching your projects or tasks into creative and analytical. I have found that when I started batching my content and reorient my daily schedule it helped me be mindful which is my third tip.
Be mindful of your energy. So many business owners think that if they just work harder for longer they will see success. Here is the secret though. Your energy is the key, it’s the secret sauce, and if you run out of energy you can’t pour into your business. We need to be mindful of what we are putting our energy toward and what we’re using it on. So the more we can learn, I mean, planning your day out, I am all about that. As I said, I teach it, and it is so key to success, having a plan for your day, having things scheduled, having goals, but focusing more on the process that you create to achieve those goals.
We might be tired after a day using these tips… and we will be tired because we’ve been working hard, but we still feel really, really good because we got stuff done. We got all of our content planned for an entire month planned, created, scheduled, ready to go for an entire month, and we know it’s going to connect to our customers that come through our door every day because we gave ourselves time to brainstorm and time to talk to people. We gave ourselves time to write down ideas and then put it into that content instead of rushing and trying to do it on the fly.
at the end of the day then, or at the end of the week, we had time to analyze. We had time to give certain things to our teams so that they could execute them. We had time to have the meetings,meaningful meetings, important meetings, really engaging meetings that we needed to have with people because we focused on the types of tasks that we were doing and how to put them into chunks of time so we could get them done and get things done in a more effective manner, and also continue to move our business forward. And I’ll tell you, this slight change that I’ve made in my day and how I schedule my tasks out and how I block my time and how I schedule my entire week out has just made a huge difference.
Like I have said before I work with so many local businesses and I see them burning themselves out, I was one of them–until I slowed down and really took a look at WHAT I was doing and HOW I was doing it.
So if I can give you any piece of advice, it’s going back and look at your tasks. Go back and look at your priorities and go back and look at how you’re planning your day and your week and try moving some stuff around so that you’re blocking a good amount of time off so that you can do all of your creative work and then you’re blocking another good amount of time so that you can do all of that analytical, that more connecting, teaching, meeting type work that you need to do. The two can coexist together. Obviously, they have to, but we have to learn how to work through those tasks and how to work through those things so that we’re not feeling overwhelmed. So I hope this episode helped you.
I would love, love, love to hear from you in the comments or leave me a review. Let me know what part of this episode was most helpful and how maybe you’ve applied some of this to your day. I guarantee, if you focus on planning your tasks, just make these slight tweaks to them, I will guarantee that you will get more done and you will be consistent with getting your content out there and consistent with connecting to your customers so you can get them back through your door time and time again
If you enjoyed this episode and in some way, it inspired you to start taking action, I’d love to hear about it and know your biggest takeaway. Send me a DM on Instagram @theresacantley and let me know what your favorite part was.
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If there is a topic you would love me to talk about or a question you may have, send it to us at theresa@theresacantley.com and we’ll feature it on one of our future episodes.
LINKS:
Episode 36 – Do you have a hobby or a business?
Episode 35 – About Being Brave
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