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Let’s discuss these 7 easy tips to up-level your productivity! As an online marketing coach, I get this question a lot – how can I spend time on Instagram AND email while writing my book, producing a podcast, or serving clients?
I get it. As an entrepreneur myself, life gets a little overwhelming a lot of time time!
So I put together a list of 7 things I do that up-level my own productivity. And here’s the thing – not all of these tips may work for you but I know at least a will, and perhaps in the overwhelm of your thinking they may not even have occurred to you. I always love hearing how others run their day, so I thought I’d share how I run mine.
And if you didn’t get a chance to listen last week to my interview with my podcast coach, be sure to put episode number 50 in your queue, Time Management for the Christian entrepreneur with Wren Robbins.
Are you ready to up-level your productivity? Listen in!
Resources
*This episode contains either affiliate links or links to my products. Should you choose to purchase, the show will go on! Woo hoo!
Get your Cultivate Planner!
Listen to the Just One Simple Thing Podcast
Join our Insider Mentorship!
31 Days of Prayer
Listen to Ep. 50: Time management for the Christian entrepreneur with Wren Robbins
Listen to Ep. 40: How to fit in time for Instagram
Listen to Ep. 67: Top 5 Instagram Features For Marketers In 2023
Plan your year
- My first suggestion is to plan your year. You need an overarching calendar to work from so you’ll know what your life will look like – vacations, yearly and quarterly goals, affiliate sales or product launches, and actually be honest with yourself about needing time off. Because you do! If you need a suggestion for what type of planner to use, my go-to is the Cultivate Planner, because not only is it practical, with space for brain dumps, yearly. quarterly, and monthly goals, but it’s beautiful and I like working with pretty things (you probably do too)! I’ll link the cultivate planner in the shownotes.
Plan your week ahead
- Plan your week ahead. I do this on Friday, you may do it over the weekend.
My suggestion for this is to use a daytimer with hourly blocks – my favorite way to plan, and room for lists when things come up. When you’re planning your week, jot the tasks in the time blocks and add extra for padding (because tasks always take more time than we think they will)!
Stop jamming your day
- Stop jamming your day and focus on 2-3 main tasks for your work time. Studies show 80% of our tasks don’t move the needle. That means only 20% does. Now I know what you’re thinking – how do I kNOW what moves the needle? Sometimes you don’t when you’re first starting out, but you simply can’t do all the things. As my friend Christa Hutchins says, make a plan and stick to it, even if it’s just for 2 weeks. When I new idea comes along, write it down, but stick to the plan until the 2 weeks are up. (I heard this in episode 77 of her podcast, Just One Simple Thing – we’ll link that too if you’re having trouble with all the ideas!)
Tap into your superpower
- Tap into your superpower for main tasks and offload tasks that either suck your brain or could be done by someone else. So let me break this down – your superpower is the thing only you can do and you’re really good at it. For instance, my super power is giving advice during live group coaching calls. People ask the questions and I know the answer, I don’t have to say wait let me research that for you, I just know, because I’m well versed in my field and good at coming up with ideas for implementation on the fly. What I’m not so great at is solving tech issues or smaller tasks that take up my time, like course creation. So I either hire someone to do that, trade hours for a service, or decide to ditch the project until another time. When you know your super power, you can use it to leverage your time and services and often find the other little tasks you do aren’t even necessary.
Get a coach or mastermind
5. Get a coach or mastermind. I started really moving the needle on my business when I started a mastermind. We brainstormed ideas and hashed things out and in the meantime I realized some of what the others were doing was ideas I could use as well! A mastermind is great for sparking content and biz ideas, and we do this really well in my Insider Mentorship community, so if you’re looking for content ideas, engagement, and a super supportive community of Christian entrepreneurs, with particular focus on online marketing via Instagram and newsletter writing and you’re tech savvy with 500 followers or more, check out the link to the Insider Mentorship and apply to join. You can free up a lot of brain cells with a mastermind or a coach. I now have a business coach because I have a legit business that needs to generate legit funds, and it does, because I’m not stuck in my head but always getting brilliant ideas because that’s what she does! Send me a message if you’re looking for a coach and I can introduce you.
Assess quarterly
- Assess Quarterly – Remember your yearly goals and plans? Stay on top of them monthly (that’s why I love my cultivate planner, it has a place for me to plan the month and then assess what worked, but it also has a quarterly reset to revisit my yearly goals. Sometimes when a goal isn’t working, maybe it’s time to either tweak or shelve it for a while. Based on the time that you have (and let’s face it, I think the biggest reason we all struggle is because we’re not honest with the amount of time we have), adjust and rethink those goals. Seasons change and so do family dynamics and circumstances, and we need to take that into account and not just keep plowing through or beating a dead horse.
Repurpose content
- Repurpose content – content creators have SO MUCH CONTENT! Break it down everywhere in simple forms. Recent advice is to take a one-minute video from your content that delivers just one simple tip and share it on all social media channels. You can do this easily with your scads of blog posts and podcast episodes. Stop making more content and use what you already have! Pick 3-4 overarching topics and talk about those topics and stop entertaining more ideas or trying to do what others do.I think a lot of times,we content creators are hard on ourselves because it always seems like there’s more to do but if you think about it, much of the time we just have FOMO because we happened to look up and notice someone else doing something that sounds fun. Shiny object syndrome is a real thing, y’all. Curb the rabbit trails! Another thing that goes along with this is, stop tweaking and second-guessing your content, whether it’s written, spoken, or video. Listen, if I waited until I thought my speaking was good enough for a podcast, I’d still not have a podcast, and we’re two years deep. Seriously, you can tweak your Reels to death. Save your time and your sanity and hit publish on the blog, the Instagram post, the podcast, the Reel, the video, the story, the live, just go for it! We’ll never be perfect, but we surely won’t get better by NOT doing the THING!
Bonus tip: Bathe your day in prayer
Of course I can’t wrap this up without stating the obvious – bathe your day in prayer. Each day I ask God to show me what to do and leave and to accept what I can’t change and distractions in my day. Sometimes those are warning signals to STOP. God still sees what you’re doing! He knows all about what you’re trying to accomplish. If He has called you to it, He will surely guide you through it. And consider this from the book, 31 Days of Prayer by Ruth Myers, “Lord, You alone can give true significance to my work and activities. So I call on You to prosper all that I do. Let Your favor be upon me, and give permanence to what I do.
Let’s recap!
There you have it 7 ways to design your day and up-level your productivity. Plan your year, vacations, goals, conferences, launches, everything. Plan your week and focus on the 20% plus padding – don’t jam pack the thing. Tap into your superpowers and offload tasks others can do or perhaps just chuck them all together. (Don’t’ forget, there’s probably a teen nearby who could create graphics or manage tech issues). Get a coach or mastermind – studies show that accountability is the key factor to sticking with goals and community leverages the power of moving forward! Assess your goals each quarter and ask God, do I really need to do this right now? Is this still working, or have you changed the dynamics? Are you calling me to this now, or was it only for a season? Is it me or is it YOU? And finally, repurpose content. Work smart, not hard! God doesn’t call us to running ourselves to death, we do. I saw a t-shirt the other day that said “Even Jesus took naps. Take more naps. Be like Jesus.”
What’s your takeaway from today’s podcast about how to up-level your productivity? Screenshot this episode, share in your stories and tag me so I can see what you’re going to do next! It’s always nice to know when you’ve hit a nerve and boosted someone in the right direction.
Until next week, remember to share your unique message your way in your own authentic voice!