COVID Productivity Plan: Tame the Squirrel!

How To Stay Productive

Current situation: Home all day with a 17 year old #shelterinplace #sendwineandchocolate #nowiknowwhyidontworkfromhome 

If you’re working from home now, you know there’s a distraction around every corner - meals, laundry, pets, urge to nap, etc.  It can be really hard to be productive.

I have to get really intentional with my time. 

As techie as I am, I still have a calendar/notebook.

Here’s how I use it daily:

• Themed Days

• 3 Must-Do’s 

• SATs

• Tracking

SO LET’S START WITH THE THEMED DAYS. 

Theming your days is CRUCIAL. The most effective entrepreneurs I know only do specific tasks on certain days of the week. Meetings only on Tuesdays, social media posts only on Wednesday, etc. Theme your days and stick to it. So here’s what my week looks like in terms of theme: 

Monday:

• SATs

• Editing

Tuesday: 

•  Meetings/Calls

•  Photoshoots

Wednesday: 

• Photoshoots

• Writing

Thursday: 

• Bookkeeping

• Editing

Friday: 

•  SATs

•  Photoshoots

Depending on your line of work, you’s modify this to accomodate your most frequent tasks. The key it to make sure you plan your week around your themes. Don’t schedule meetings on days that aren’t slated for them. It’s ok f you have to make an exception once in a while, but be sure to get back on track. Have you ever noticed how fast a “quick” coffee meeting can end up taking 2 hours? Not productive. Consider scheduling back-to-back meetings at the same coffee shop or even at your office. This will also keep you on schedule.

Theming your days keeps your focused. Task switching throughout the day is not efficient. When you are planning out your week, you already know which days to schedule which tasks based upon your theme. I do this on Monday mornings, you may want to do this on Saturday or Sunday evening. I take weekends off, so I do it on Monday morning. The goal is to try and plan my entire week on Monday. 

I know that on Wednesdays, I write. So I will schedule Instagram, Facebook and blog posts for Wednesdays. It might be difficult to resist working on now, but I know that I have very little focus time so I have to stick to my themes. I schedule client calls and photoshoots for Tuesdays and make bookkeeping and editing on Thursdays.

3 MUST-DOs

Minimum should be three, but if you can fit more in then go for it!

The three things that you 'must get done' need to fall within your theme. If you have the luxury of working on your business all day with no interruptions you might want to pinpoint 6-8 things that must get done. 

After you’ve decided what needs to get done that day, you need to assign a set amount of time to it and work hard to get it finished within that time.

For example: if I am working on writing and scheduling posts, I allocate an hour or two. Once I’m done - I’m done. This is critical in staying focused. Sometimes if I don’t get it done, I’ll allocate more time to it, but I schedule it. Get through the task so that you can move on.

Sometimes I plan 15 minutes to brainstorm social media and blog posts. I set the timer and brain dump. You’ll be surprised at what you can come up with when you are against the clock. Later you can refine and expand on your ideas.

SATs (small annoying todo’s)

SATs helps me tackle my squirrel brain. Before I started this system, I would be in the middle of doing something and another task would pop in my head and I’d fall down the rabbit hole. Now I use BRIGHT sticky notes to write down every thing that pops in my head so that I don’t get distracted. When I do this, I don’t task switch. I stay working on my task at hand, but know that I’ve written it down and I won’t forgot about it.

I schedule SAT tasks for Mondays and Fridays. These are the little tasks that aren’t urgent but need to get done. Things like dentist appointments, writing thank you’s, meal planning, etc. Then I block out an hour in my day on Mondays and Fridays to complete those small things. If necessary, I move these sticky notes from to week until completed.

TRACKING

it’s important to track each day so you can look back on it and check your progress. As business owners, you should be working towards a goal. Perhaps set up small incremental actions that can be done daily and tracked.

That’s it for today! I hope everyone is staying well, safe and inside. These are some strange times we are living in and look forward to the near future when we can say “remember the toilet paper shortage at COSTCO?”