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How To Create Your Ideal Business Schedule

How To Create Your Ideal Business Schedule

by | Jun 26, 2024 | Productivity, Uncategorized

“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~ Annie Dillard

One of the very first things I ask all new clients about is their working schedule. More often than not, people readily admit that their schedule is all over the place and is something they know they need to work on. Even so, the vast majority of those will also admit that they feel some level of resistance when it comes to scheduling their day.

Rather than see having a schedule as liberating, they typically see it as something that will restrict their freedom and despite craving more structure, find themselves railing against having a schedule.

I totally get it. After well over a decade of working 9–5, I fully embraced not having a schedule when I first quit my career in pursuit of running my own business. For years I had to get up at 5.45am to catch a train at 7am in order to get to work for 9am, followed by feeling trapped in my place of work for the next 8 hours, only to repeat the same gruelling journey home again. I’ll admit, a schedule like that is enough to drive anyone to question their life choices, no matter how appealing the salary.

Despite this, I soon realised that having no schedule meant that I actually felt like I was either always working or never working and as a result doing very little to move my business forward. Having structure is what helped me to be able to really work when I’m working and rest when I’m resting.

The piece that people miss, however, when I bring up the topic of schedule, is the word IDEAL. Having a soul-sucking schedule is nobody’s idea of fun, but what if you could create a schedule that honours your passions and desired lifestyle and maximises your chances of creating a successful business doing work that helps you to change the world for the better? That’s what I’d like to show you how to do today.

Step 1 — identify when you don’t want to work

When designing your ideal schedule, given that life is more important than work (no matter how important your work is), I invite you to consider all of those times on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis that you DON’T want to work.

In my ideal schedule for example:

On a weekly basis, I don’t work on the weekend (Saturday and Sunday), this for me is FAMILY time. I also don’t work before 9.30am, this for me is MY time to exercise, shower and enjoy a slow and mindful breakfast.

On a daily basis, I don’t work over lunchtime, taking at least 1 hour for lunch on Mondays and Friday and on Tuesday — Thursday taking 2.5 hours as I have one or both of my sons home for lunch. I also don’t want to work beyond 6.30pm as my boys are home from school by then and that when we start family time.

I also have 2 x 30 minute breaks a day. One at 11–11.30am and one at 4.30–5.00pm.

In terms of annual holidays. I know that I want to take 2 weeks off in August for our family holiday as well as time at Christmas and Easter and I usually block these off for the year ahead. Most of the business owners I work with have never booked off their annual vacation time ahead of time. If that’s you, I highly recommend it. I typically take 7 weeks a year off.

On a monthly basis, I also usually take the 5th week of the month off on those months that have 5 weeks. This year, that’s March, May, August and November. I organise my 1:1 subscription and my group program so that I can take those off.

Now it’s your turn, when WON’T you work on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis? Once you’ve removed the times you don’t want to work, you should now have your working hours.

Mine for example are as follows:

Monday to Friday, 9.30am — 12.30pm and 3.30pm to 6.30pm.

That’s 6 hours a day, 5 days a week = 30 hours a week. 45 weeks a year.

I choose to work full-time because my boys are in school and I like bringing in a full-time income. I’ll share with you later how I bring flexibility into those full-time hours.

Step 2 — Identify what types of work you need to do

One of the most common questions I receive is what should I be doing to grow my business on a day to day basis? Of course, this will vary from business to business but I do believe there are some activities it’s important to incorporate into your weekly business schedule. These are:

  • Client hours — for me these are my 1:1 sessions and group program calls
  • Lead generation hours — these for me are my working together calls and times I am speaking or presenting to other people’s audiences. For many of my clients it might be when they are running gift sessions.
  • Admin — love it or hate it, we all have admin and inboxes to manage.
  • Content Marketing — this should include time to create, repurpose and promote your content.
  • Authentic outreach — if this isn’t something that you already do on the regular, I recommend scheduling time specifically for this activity.
  • CEO time — this is what I call the time I need to spend working “on” the business rather than “in” the business — it might be, for example, when I create the content for a new workshop or make changes to my website or create new systems or processes.

Step 3 — Identify when during your working hours you want to do each type of work

When we work on what is important. Many people will, for example, argue that the best time to do creative work is in the morning, when our brains our the freshest, but what works for one person may not work for another. Taking time to explore what feels ideal to you is key here.

To give you an example, here are some of the things I have found work best for me.

I don’t like doing video calls first thing. I like a slower start to my day so I don’t allow clients to book sessions before 11.30am.

I don’t like to do more than 4 video calls in any given day so the maximum slots you’ll ever find available on my schedule is 4 and on many days it’s far fewer than that.

I also like a slower start and end to the week so I only have one 5pm client call on a Monday and the rest of the day is dedicated to content creation (and my new art class!) and Friday’s are kept call-free and what I call my CEO day when I can catch up on client work, marketing and product and service creation.

The beauty of having Mondays and Fridays largely free of calls is that when friends or family come to visit or we want to go away for a long weekend, I can usually book these days off without too much hassle. It does mean I have a pretty intense Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday but having a light Monday and Friday and the weekend off in between works well for me.

Step 4 — schedule these as recurring appointments in your calendar

It’s one thing to have your ideal schedule written down on a piece of paper and quite another to have it scheduled (and colour coded) in your online calendar. Personally, I recommend Google Calendar and here’s a screenshot of mine.

This image is my IDEAL schedule which I have as a seperate calendar inside Google calendar but my actual calendar looks pretty similar — I won’t share for confidentiality reasons.

If you are worried about having your days blocked off like this, know that you can mark appointments in Google calendar as busy or free so that you can have something showing in your calendar as for example “save for client session” but marked as free so it’s still bookable via a scheduler.

Also, your days don’t have to be as scheduled or as full as mine! Yours might look very different.

Having my schedule like this might look restrictive to some of you but actually the fact that I have a slow, leisurely start to my day, a long Spanish style lunch, morning and afternoon breaks and largely call free Mondays and Fridays is a dream for me after years of 9–5pm and hectic commutes through central London!

Step 5 — lean into your schedule with grace and compassion

Going from no schedule to following a full schedule is not something I would recommend. I’ve been working on my schedule for years and given much of my day is non-negotiable because it’s with paying clients, I have to stick to a schedule for the sake of my sanity.

If you have less client commitments right now, you’ll likely have more freedom to move things around and test and tweak your schedule to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s natural that it might take some time for you to fully lean into following your schedule so it’s important not to beat yourself up if you don’t follow it perfectly.

The most important thing is to give yourself grace and notice where you’ve scheduled to do something but consistently fail to follow through, looking at why that might be and making adjustments where necessary.

I often talk about building for growth. So even if you don’t need a schedule this defined right now, it’s easy to find yourself in a position down the line, where you’ve become a slave to your schedule. So why not design it to suit you now before you find yourself working evenings and weekends because you gave potential clients free reign to choose when worked best for them rather than you?

I’m curious, how does this land? Do you have a schedule already or has this piece given you food for thought? Feel free to hit reply and let me know.

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The 5 Strategies I Use To Beat Procrastination

The 5 Strategies I Use To Beat Procrastination

by | Jun 5, 2024 | Productivity, Uncategorized

“Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.”
~ Spanish Proverb

The dictionary definition of procrastination is this:

The action of delaying or postponing something.

If you’re anything like most business owners I know, you’ve experienced procrastination.

Most likely when you attempt to do something that will move your business forward. Common tasks that you might find yourself procrastinating on include: marketing, writing copy, creating new products and services and/or doing your outreach (cultivating connections across your network).

When we delay or postpone taking action on the very activities that will help us move our business forward, we are, in essence, sabotaging our chances of success. Overcoming procrastination, therefore, becomes an important endeavour.

Whilst I do still procrastinate from time to time, over the years I’ve learned various ways to minimise and even prevent procrastination from derailing my best efforts.

1. Pay attention

Procrastination is one of most insidious companions to our attempts at productivity. It’s pretty common for procrastination to rear its ugly head the moment we try to do something productive or creative in our business.

If we’re not careful, procrastination becomes such an embedded feature of our day to day working lives, that we don’t always notice when we’re in its grips.

Raising awareness of the fact that we’ve slipped into procrastination mode and doing what we can to understand what lies beneath it is the first step to overcoming it.

When you notice that you’re procrastinating, try reflecting on what your procrastination is trying to tell you. Is there fear around the activity you are trying to undertake? Is there a reason you’re avoiding taking action.

Acknowledge the procrastination instead of giving into the habit of it is key.

Another line of enquiry you might take is to reflect on the importance of what you are trying to do, in essence, asking yourself, what are the consequences of allowing procrastination to win here?

The key is to not let procrastination become a habit. Notice the way it shows up for you and recognise when you’re dealing with procrastination to get better at overcoming it.

2. Block out time

When we’re not yet fully booked with clients, we often have a lot of time on our hands to work on our business. This should be a blessing but more often than not it becomes fertile ground for procrastination to bloom. I wrote about the consequences of too much freedom here.

My advice is to not give yourself hours to do something. Give yourself a deadline. No more than 90 minutes in one sitting — start shorter if you are not used to time-blocking.

For example, I block out most of Monday to work on content creation but I make sure I have regular breaks and clear actions for each chunk of time. Block #1 might be dedicated to drafting my newsletter, block #2 to getting it to a final draft and block #3, sourcing a picture quote, one last proofread and sending it out.

It’s far easier to avoid procrastination if I give myself 3 x 1 hour blocks with clear goals in each than to simply give myself all morning to write a newsletter.

3. Plan ahead

Don’t sit down at your desk to work unless you know what you are going to do or you’ll waste the time you’ve allocated trying to figure out what to work on.

This is especially important if you’ve got a lot of time each day to work on a high number of things (i.e. a long to do list!). I like to give myself no more than 3 tasks to complete per day and I plan these either the night before or first thing in the morning before I get into things.

Having a huge to do list plus countless hours ahead of you to work on things is a recipe for procrastination, so avoid it by doing the thinking before you sit down to do the working.

4. Work with others

Something that has helped me massively while working on my business is co-working. I find that if left to my own devices, it’s all too easy to get distracted and fall into a pattern of procrastination but when working with others, I get so much more done.

Co-working works especially well for me when I get to declare what I’m hoping to achieve (planning ahead) in the session (blocking out time) and when I have to report back at the end of the session how I got on (accountability).

Co-working can be done in person or online. My favourite online co-working tools are: The Cabin, Flown, LWS and Focusmate.

5. Take regular breaks

If you stack blocks of working time together without breaks, it’s as good as not blocking out time at all. The key is to have full breaks between your working sessions.

My mantra when it comes to being productive in my business is to “Work when you are working and rest when you are resting.”

Problems arise when we sit at our desk and engage in procrastination activities, like scrolling on social media or mindlessly searching the internet. We come to blur the line between working and procrastinating. If I catch myself doing this I immediately stop and take a break.

Taking a break for me means stepping away from my desk and going to do something completely unrelated to work. This might be watching something on TV, reading a book or taking a short walk to clear my head.

When we don’t do this the boundaries between work and breaks become blurred, impairing our ability to focus when we’re working and impairing our ability to really switch off from work when we’re on a break.

And there you have it, 5 things I do on the regular to stay productive, avoid procrastination and ultimately have a better work-life balance.

Did you find these helpful? I’d love to know which of these you might try. If you want to let me know simply comment and tell me!

SIGN UP FOR MY SOULFUL STRATEGIES WEEKLY

 

Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.