💡 Simple Strategies For Organizing Your Business 💥
We all want to get ahead of our business tasks, but how exactly do we do that? In this special episode, Cara Harvey takes the mic to share simple and effective strategies for organizing your business! Cara is a mompreneur and host/creator of A Purpose Driven Mom. She shares the batching system she uses for her business that improved her productivity big time. Plus, Cara gives a peek into her personal Trello Board to demonstrate just how the system works. Make the choice to go from overwhelmed to in control. Tune in and get time management and productivity tips to take your efficiency game to the next level!
#impactfulentrepreneurshow #guestinterview #organizeyourbusiness
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💡 Simple Strategies For Organizing Your Business With Cara Harvey 💥
Impactful Entrepreneur Show Guest Interview
When it comes to building your business to love what you can teach people, the value you can bring to them, staying organized, planning your work, working your plan, and getting everything organized, you feel overwhelmed or lost even. Do you ever wish that you could wave a magic wand, have someone show up and organize your business beautifully, so all you have to do is show up and do the work? A lot of us would love that feeling.
In the past, we talked about the benefits of batching your work. This episode is going to be a little bit different. We are going to let Cara Harvey, who is a Productivity Expert and Coach, completely take over the channel for the day, show you the nitty-gritty details of how to get your business completely organized and plan out your work, so you can execute it, be done with time to spare, and have a super low-stress business. She will show you how she organizes. Do you want to take a peek inside her toolbox? You are going to love this. Let’s do it.
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I hope you are excited to dive into my session on How to Create a Batch System for Your Business. I have got a lot of great stuff planned for us. It can be like you and me sitting across the target cafe table, six feet apart, and working on our batch planning together. We are going to cover a lot in this action-packed session, including how and why you should be creating a batch system, how it can help you through extra productivity, how you can systematize your tasks to know what to work on when, and how to map out your content plan out and use time-blocking to efficiently use your day.
We are also talking about one of the hardest things, which is asking for help in the delegation. When you start to do that, you will be more efficient in your business. Before we jump in, I would love to introduce myself. My name is Cara Harvey. I’m the Founder of A Purpose Driven Mom, where I help moms 3X their productivity so that they can take massive action on their goals.
I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I do not know if you can connect with that phrase. I have heard it a lot more because I do not think a lot of us planned to be sitting doing what we are doing. I was a school teacher for eight years, and I loved it, but I was so incredibly burnt out. I know we have school teachers reading. It is so hard no matter what your career is. When you give so much of yourself to something, you get a little lost along the way.
About my seventh year in teaching, I remember the exact moment that happened. I was on an admin track. I was the principal of our summer school program, and the last day of summer school overlapped with the first day of regular school for teachers. I sat in my car and cried. I went home to my husband and said, “I do not think I can do this anymore.” I had been burning the candle at both ends.
At the school where I worked, the kids went to school from 8:00 to 5:00 and every other Saturday, but I lived there. I was there 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM. I came in every Saturday, and I came on Sundays to make my copies. It was my life. I forgot that it was okay to have a life outside of it. Right around that time in year seven, when I said to my husband, “I need something else,” he said, “What do you want to do?” He is a numbers man. He said to me, “If you want to leave teaching, we still need to pay our bills. What is the plan?” At this point, I had been dabbling in network marketing. I realized that I could maybe make this into an actual career. I could possibly have this be something that I do long-term.
I had already started to make a little bit of income and money. I realized that if I could figure out a way to work efficiently, then this could be the thing. I worked that year, and I hate the word hustle, but I did it. I was working my teaching job and with network marketing, and I was able to not replace my teaching income but make the bare minimum I needed to leave.
That year, I left to become my own boss, and I failed miserably. It is not my business that failed. My business was successful. I had a team of 200 plus people and I was making six figures in the business. It was going great, except I was back in the same place as when I was teaching. I was burnt out and lost. I felt like I didn’t know what to do. Right around that time is when I had my daughter. I have felt God is saying like, “Maybe we do something different because this does not feel good to you and you can make a better impact.”
As I became a mom, I realized that I had to move my priorities around. That is when A Purpose Driven Mom started to toss around in my head. I thought, “I’m already helping moms do more than health and fitness, which is what my network marketing company was about. What if I tried to help them make schedules or routines? What can I do?”
It started to go well for me. I started to see success but not right away. There were those months of $0. I did not know if this was the right path, but I knew if I stuck with it, it could all come together. When my son was born, I officially made the switch from network marketing to A Purpose Driven Mom as my “full-time business opportunity,” and I’m so thankful that I did.
Over the past few years, I have not only been able to help thousands of women in the courses that I have about productivity and time management but I can impact them through my podcast, which is the A Purpose Driven Mom Show. I get to see moms who struggle to find time for themselves and their goals, and I get to help them find that time. That is what I want to help you do because if you are an entrepreneur trying to make space and margin inside your day to work, and you do not have a batch system, you are wasting so much time, and you are not being efficient.
If you don’t create your content plan in advance, you cannot batch in advance.
It is okay. We are not here to point fingers. We are here to show you some a-ha moments, and I want to see them. I’m over on Instagram at @APurposeDrivenMom. Take a picture at any point. Let me know that you are reading this, and I want to know your big takeaway. Drop me DMs, I will send you a voice memo, and we can chat because I do not want this to be another presentation. I want you to take action.
A question for you is, on a scale of 1 to 10, how efficient would you say you are now at managing your time and your business? This is very interesting because now you can feel like a 10, and tomorrow you can feel like a 2, so give an average. When it comes to managing your time and all the things that fall on your plate, where do you fall and land? What does it feel like for you? Wherever you are at right now, what I hope and pray is that we are able to jump you up from 2 to 4, 4 to 6, 6 to 8, and 8 to 10, wherever you want to go by the time we are done talking. This is without any implementation. If you are ready, let’s do it.
Here are the pillars of batching that we are going to talk about. We have got four. Pillar one is How To Categorize Your Tasks. I’m going to show you how I do all of this via Trello. If you are like, “What is Trello? I do not want to learn Trello. I don’t like technology.” Do not worry. You can do everything that I teach you on a piece of paper.
With the Trello board that I have, I’m going to make sure I submit it with my presentation because it is a template that you can copy and I have done a lot of the work for you. You are welcome in advance. I’m going to show you how to do it. We are also talking about how you can pre-map your content plan out. Pillar three would be Creating Your Time Blocks, and the fourth pillar is Pre-Planning Your Work, so we have a ton to talk about.
Categorize: Creating Batch Groups
Let’s jump into step one, which is creating your batch groups. There are two ways that you can batch your time. One of them essentially is a batching bite task. This is saying, “On Mondays, I’m going to write every email I have to write for the whole week. No matter what it is, if it is for my membership, my course, a newsletter for a podcast, or whatever it is.” That is batching by task.
You can also batch by the content pillar. This is saying, “I’m working on a project.” You say, “I’m working on my membership.” I also batch my content pillar. I do my initial batching with, “Mondays are emails, Thursdays are podcasts, etc.” I will also batch my project, write all the tasks I have to do for a project down, and I will work on it where like, “Wednesday is membership day, and I only work on the membership.” You can work on these simultaneously. You can switch it up with what you do each day. This can work in whatever way you want to.
The first thing I want you to do is to create a list of all the things you do for your tasks. I wrote it out on paper, and then I’m going to jump on over to Trello because that is my zone of genius and where I love to spend time. Here is an easy example. I need to write a blog post. What are all of the steps and all of the things I need to do to get this blog post up and running?
I need to do my SEO research that I want to create my outline. After my outline is done, I like to go through and make headlines based on my outline. After that is done, I can create all my images. I like to find some affiliates that fit in that blog post. I then write, draft out, take all those outlines, write those paragraphs out, edit, format, write the social media, make a newsletter blast for it, and promotion.
That is a lot of steps and things that have to get done. When we start with this step, can it feel overwhelming? Sure thing, but it does not have to because it can feel empowering and help us batch together. Let’s jump into Trello. I’m going to give you a bird’s eye view of how we are going to do it on Trello, and then we are going to break it all down.
If you have never used Trello, welcome. It is where I like to map, brain dump, and plan all of my things. I use a couple of systems when it comes to my business to make it more efficient. My trifecta is Trello, ClickUp, and Airtable. If you have never used Trello, I am going to make sure I submit this board. You are going to hit Create A Board from the template. You have to create a free Trello account. You give whatever name you want. You save it to whatever team you want to have it on, and it is yours. Once it is yours, you will not see a bar, and you are free to edit it and make it your own.
Strategies For Organizing Business: If you don’t create your content plan in advance, you cannot batch in advance.
Let’s walk through pillar number one and step one, and that is going to be brain dumping all of the things that have to get done. I have already done this work for you. Again, you are welcome. You do not even have to do it. You can add specifics. The reason I like to do this is because it tells me what I have to do. This is the ideal world. For my podcast, for example, we do not have it up on YouTube now, but we would like to have it up on YouTube. I might write down “Add to YouTube” as something on there so that we can vision casts. I can say, “This is where I would like to go.”
Here is the blog workflow. Keyword research outlines exactly the same from the presentation, create a video, format it, and pin it to Pinterest. Here is my podcast workflow. I want you to brain dump if you write a podcast. You do a content plan, outline the episodes, record, make your images, make the wave videos for promotion, do social media posts or do a review of the week, edit the episode, and it goes on.
Here is an example of how I broke down everything I got to do for social media. In Instagram images, we got to do the captions, research hashtags, Instagram daily engagement, analytics, and answer my DMs. Here is something for videos, an example if you used YouTube. You have got to find stock images and personal images. You got to make freebie images, mock-ups, and everything.
The podcast flow is sequential. I do these things in this order. The video image is not sequential. This is everything I have to do when it comes to making videos and images for my business. What is cool at Trello is you can drag these cards. I recommend you brain dump it all out, and then you can drag them and put them in sequential order.
Let’s say Youtube is one of your pillars. I have got a whole bunch of lists for you, and at the very end, you can hit add another list. If you have got another content pillar, you can put it here. I put shipping. Maybe you want to say, “What are all the steps for shipping, coaching, Twitter, or research?” However you want to break it down, you can even make it for a product. For me, that would be my membership and then I would break down all the things I do for my membership thing.
Let’s do a YouTube example together. These things are here under videos, so you could drag them over if you want, or we can start over. If I want to do YouTube, I want to do content research, outline, record, and edit the video. I need to come up with a thumbnail and do some hashtag SEO research. We want to upload it. We need to pin it to Pinterest and promote it to email lists, IG, and Facebook. I’m going through and I’m writing all my tasks down. That is step one. Step one is a brain dump to get out of your head.
This might not be all things that are happening now. This could be an ideal world. Inside Trello, you can use little labels. Let’s go to YouTube, for example. Pretend we have got YouTube as one of our content folders. We could go here and add labels. We are going to make a label and it will be “in progress.” This is the stuff we already do, and then we are going to make another label and call this “future vision.” This is stuff I would like to do.
For us, I film my Facebook Live once a week and toss it on YouTube. We pretty much upload it and put it on YouTube. That would be in process. Let’s add a label to that. Everything else is so random. I do outline the video, so I will put that in. I’m not doing much research. I’m just guessing. To be honest, it is such a random strategy.
I would put that as a future vision. I would like to do this, but at this point, I do not see where it fits. I will record video and this is something I have to do. I do not do any editing of the video. Maybe one day, we will do that. We do make a special thumbnail for it, so that is in progress. I’m not doing any SEO research. We do pin it to Pinterest. I promote it to my email list and share it on my social. I then embed it into a blog post.
After you have created this, I want you to do this. Is it in progress? Is it my vision? Where am I at now? That is going to give us a better look at holistically where we are going to spend our time. Once we’ve done that, I want you to do a time inventory. When you are creating systems and routines in your business, I always recommend to start with the end in mind. What is your vision? Where do you want to go?
We waste more time complaining about not having enough time than actually doing the things.
Go back to create your baseline. “Where am I?” This will allow you to see things you can group together. It will also let you think about where you want to work in your zone of genius. Maybe you have something on your time inventory, like filming a video when your kids are awake, and it takes you nine hours because you have to keep pressing pause. That is not efficient, but you won’t know that until you do the time inventory.
It is going to tell you where you are wasting time, and I do not want to point any fingers, but we love to waste time on things that do not matter, so we are going to learn that. It is going to help you to fill the gaps and do your workflows. If I’m doing a time inventory for my podcast, I have this whole list I made on Trello of everything I wanted to do, but maybe I forgot a couple of steps because I have the Curse of Knowledge.
The Curse of Knowledge is where you think all the steps, and then you try to teach it to someone else, and you realize you missed a million things. What I want you to do is I want you to create a time inventory. This is something I do on a Trello card or on a piece of paper and I do it for about 3 to 5 days. What you are going to do once you have done your time inventory is you are going to go back into Trello and write down how long things take. You could do it a few ways. These are just estimated times.
Say I was doing my social media. I was posting in my Facebook groups every day and that took me seven minutes. I realized that when I’m doing it, I do not plan out in advance what I want to say in my Facebook group. I’m wasting time thinking, “What would be a good post?” I go to Google, and I’m like, “Icebreaker questions for your Facebook group.” It is a few minutes later and you finally get a post up. You would type all that like, “I wasted time finding a post. I opened Facebook and got lost in the scroll.” Write all those little notes. I want you to write them down for yourself so you are going to have a good idea of how long things take.
Our next step is delegation, which you might not be ready for right now, and it is fine. No worries at all but I want you to start thinking about delegating. You do not have to be the person doing every little thing in your business. It was not until 2021 that I hired my first person. For two years, I did everything by myself and then I hired someone else. When I hired someone else, it was the scariest thing that I did, but it was amazing because I did not have to do it all and be everywhere.
My brain was free to be the CEO and visionary of my business. By asking for help, delegating, and hiring things out, I freed up a bunch of time and made a lot more money, so it worked. We have a team of four and then a whole bunch of freelancers that work for us, which is incredible. You are going to go through and label things that you can delegate. You are going to delegate things that you do not like doing, things you are not good at, things that take you forever, and things that you do because it allows you to procrastinate.
I do not like making images and sales pages because I’m not good at it. I want to delegate those things out. I hate checking my email because I get overwhelmed. Delegate those things out. There are also things that take you forever to do. I write all the copy for my emails, but I am ready to hire a copywriter because it takes me a little longer than I would like.
There are also things that we do that allow us to procrastinate. I love planning. I can’t always delegate all the planning out, but I can delegate some of it out because I will make that my procrastination tool. I have a friend who loves design. Whenever she is procrastinating, she goes to Canva and makes a whole bunch of Pinterest pins. I’m like, “That is not the most efficient use of your time.” You can find tons of people you can hire out too.
I have had high school kids work for me from church. They do some of my social media. I have had them do photoshoots for me and random things like watching my kids. I have a teenager and he has downloaded videos for me and things like that. You can find interns at colleges. You can go to OnlineJobs.ph, and you can hire abroad. You can also find moms in your local area looking for some help. Do not feel like, “I can’t hire out because I do not make money.” You do not make money because you do not hire out. Think about the ways that you can do it.
Also, you do not have to delegate everything now. Why don’t we create a wish list together? Start to record your processes so that when you are ready, you know exactly what the job description is. You know what it looks like. I have made this mistake where I have hired people with no system in place and it was a whole mess. It took us months to finally make a system that worked. It frustrated them and I was frustrated with them because we did not have the system first.
Strategies For Organizing Business: If you don’t do this planning, you’re going to waste so much time because you don’t know what you’re supposed to be recording.
What I want you to do is go back into your list. Let’s go to blogs. I made a label here in Trello. This label is called “Can delegate.” I want you to think, “Do I have to be the one doing it?” If it does not have to be me, then it gets a label. This is a keyboard shortcut on Trello with the labels. If you stick your cursor over the little pencil, you can hit the number four, and it will come up red, which we have already pre-identified as “Can delegate.”
I like to outline my blog posts, so what I’m talking about, and I still write them. Could I delegate them? Maybe, but somebody else could be doing all the research, editing, images, and opt-ins. I would need to create the video that I want to put in there, but somebody can format it, schedule the social media, publish it, do the Pinterest, and add it to our promotion board.
Look for only I need to show up. This allows us to see where we do not have to do it all. We have gone through and broken down our tasks, written down all the things we need to do, done a time inventory, know how long things are going to take us, and know what we can delegate out. Hopefully, you feel a little more empowered instead of overwhelmed. You are like, “This is a lot, but the future tells me I do not have to be doing all of it, and I can make a smarter plan. It is time to make that smarter plan.”
Pre-Map Your Content Plan
Step two is we have got a content plan. You may know all the things you have to do. You have got every single one down, but if you do not create your content plan in advance, you cannot batch in advance. My goal is always to have this month completed before next month. For example, I’m recording this. It is November. I want all of December done before December starts. This month I want to work on the December podcast, socials, and all of it, so in December, I can work on January, projects, connecting, and collaborating, and I do not have to be in the weeds writing the blog post that is due tomorrow.
We have all been there. It is Tuesday night, and your podcast goes out on Wednesday, and you have not recorded yet, so you stay up to 2:00 AM. When we go ahead and create content plans, smart and batch the planning, we can then go back to the doing. Someone laughed at me and they were like, “You make a plan to plan.” I was like, “I do.” Week two of every month is where I batch out my planning for the next month if I have not already done it. This is where I’m making adjustments and editing.
Before the quarter starts, I start this planning in advance. This is an example of a blank content plan. It is simply a Google sheet. Not a big deal. This is for Q1. I created mine and I started it at the beginning of October. Right when the quarter started, I started to plan. What I do is I take an hour every Monday to plan and work on this stuff. It takes me a whole month to plan it well in doing it this way, a whole another month to start to batch it, and then start to get it done so I can get ahead.
Here is a finished product. This is my actual content plan for the quarter. We have got our dates, promotions, and our launches here. We got weekly themes, freebie midroll if you have a podcast, and then I do Lives on Monday, a newsletter Tuesday, some social media posts, and a podcast. You might stick a blog in here, whatever it is. Here is how we start. We are going to work vertically, not horizontally, this time around because when you work vertically up and down, you can easily come up with ideas compared to having to go across and be like, “What fits this theme?”
First things first, drop your dates. Second thing, what was the promotion you were doing that week and what is your launch? Each quarter, I do a big product launch for my own product. I then do a small launch for maybe a masterclass I’m teaching or a JV that I’m doing with someone else, and then I do an affiliate or a partnership. I tend to have three big things.
In January 2022, you can see it has been a little crazy. I have got a million things going on here. This is my actual content plan. If you want to hang with me for any of these things, this is what we are doing. I go ahead and say, “What is my promotion?” I had a different summit, JV, or an affiliate each week. As you can see here, I got some blank space because I’m not promoting anything, so I highlighted it. I have got a beta course coming out. I’m doing a flash sale, and there’s a bundle. I have got all these things.
I start here with, “What am I promoting? What is happening?” This way, I can theme my weeks. I do that first. Once I have come up with that, then I go to the themes and go from top to bottom, “What do I want my theme to be?” This is my message, runway, and where I’m going to have all my content around. Week one, I’m talking about action planning for your goals. A good example is the Blogger Breakthrough Summit.
Put in 15 minutes a day, every single day, to work on this planning piece. Because if every day you're doing some sort of planning, then that's how you get ahead.
My theme was mompreneur routines. You can see this because of my promotions, Genius Bloggers’ Toolkit, Bloggers Breakthrough, and my beta, which is a system course for mompreneurs. I have got four weeks where my theme is routines for mompreneurs. Once you have got that, you move to the next one. If you have a podcast, “What freebie pre-roll and mid-roll makes sense here?” I was promoting the summits. If I have a weekly checklist and webinar, I make them all in advance.
The reason I make them all in advance and write them all down now is so that when it is time to batch out my podcast mid-rolls, I can take one day and I already know my entire quarter’s worth of mid-rolls, and I can record every single mid-roll I need for the entire quarter, and then it is done. I can then batch them out. If you do not do this step, if you think, “I’m going to sit in batch. I’m going to record my podcast mid-rolls on Thursday mornings,” but you do not do this planning, you are going to waste so much time because you do not know what you are supposed to be recording. I can sit down at my mic, record all of these, have all my links together, and I’m done.
Let’s walk through the rest of it. This is how I break my week out based on my themes. I do a Live on Facebook every single Monday that connects to my weekly theme. I’m going to go through and write them all down. “What are my weekly themes? How does it all fit?” If I’m doing Trello for three weeks, talk about tracking goals with Trello, how to use it as a calendar, where to start when it comes to your goals, all connecting to Trello. This is easier to think of ideas than going across.
On Tuesdays, I send newsletters or an email. One of the things I do is repurpose some newsletters. I linked from ConvertKit here. I link the actual email from ConvertKit, so I can open it up and use that one. I have got some emails that have performed well, so I’m relinking them. I will come up with what I’m going to talk about. When it is time to batch my emails, I’m not sitting at the computer saying, “I need you to write Tuesday’s email. I said that I was going to write Tuesday’s emails now. I have got to write all of them for the next month, but I have not planned what I want to write. I’m going to waste all this time.”
After you come up with the system we talked about in Trello, you’ve got to do the batching of your content plan for the quarter, or you are wasting time. I have got podcast episodes, so I batch those in advance. They all fit my theme. I then batch up my social media. Two times a week, I would do a value-packed teaching type of social media and infographic, or whatever. Two times a week is a personal lifestyle story, all connected to my theme. I will even batch those out. I will write all of them at once so that they’re all done and ready to go. I hope that made sense on how it worked.
This is where it ends, but this is where it starts. Take some time, batch out, and write all your promotions down one day, “On Monday, I’m going to pick up all my promotions. On Tuesday, I’m going to do all my weekly themes. On Wednesday, I’m going to do this.” By the end of the week, you’ve got your whole content plan done for the whole quarter, and the next week you can start working on it. The next week, you can move from planning mode to doing mode. You can start recording the freebies and doing SEO for the blog posts. You can break it down. That is how you get caught up and get it done in advance.
Create Time Blocks
The next is pre-assigning our content plan. Let’s go back to Trello. Once you’ve come up with your content plan and all the things you have to do, I recommend you to pre-assign it when you are going to do it. Here are some examples. I have created these little headers in Trello, in which all you have to do is click on the card, hit cover, pick a cover that you like, and hit the big side with the little lines over here. As you see, it looks like a little cover. You could put cards underneath it. That is a little Trello tip. Take it and run with it.
What we are going to do is we are going to batch out your advanced work. The third week of every month is a planning week for me, where I’m going to plan out stuff, so I can make sure everything’s in line. I’m going to make a card right here, and I’m calling it a planning batch, so I know that week three of the month, I’m planning. Week one of the month, I’m creating. This is where I’m doing the blog post writing or the podcast recording, all of those things. Maybe I’m also doing podcast batching, so you put those together.
Week two of the month, I’m going to do email batching. I’m going to make a plan to write next month’s emails, and then they’re done, and you do not have to worry about it. You can see that podcast batching is not going to all get done one week of the month. You can say, “I’m going to do a little here and a little here.” Maybe on week three, I will do my social media. That is when I write all my Instagram posts for the month. That is when I plan out what my Facebook group is going to be, hand it over to my VA, and she schedules it all for me.
Maybe in week four, you are doing admin. We’ve got all these other things. We’ve got blog posts, research, and video. How is that going to look for you? I want you to go in and say, “Out of the month, what am I going to be working on in what weeks?” You can do this because you have a content plan, and you know the end goal so that you can fill in the gaps. You can start by saying, “I know that by the end of December, I want all of January’s podcasts done.” That means that I need to work on the podcast stuff.
Strategies For Organizing Business: Once you've come up with your content plan and know all the things you have to do, pre-assign when you're going to do it.
I need to make sure podcasting goes in those first two weeks so that the last two weeks of the month, I’m not worrying about podcasting. It makes sense. You want your podcasts done for the next month so that you can work on the social media and images for the next month. You can’t do it in any other order. Once we pre-assigned those, the next one is how you create your time blocks so you can group your tasks together and not toggle through the day. We are going to talk about how you can create an ideal time block to work on.
One of the things I do, and for the parents out there, is I have a list called, “Things I can do with my kids around to maximize my moments when my kids are around. I do not want to get frustrated at them. because I’m trying to work.” Be flexible as we create them and figure them out. If you copy this template, you will have this whole thing for you.
There is one up here. That is the cover. This is where you’ve got all of your daily tasks, the things you do every day, and you are not sure when you are going to do them. These are the things I can do when my kids are around. Maybe you do your manual pinning and see how it is got the time inventory, so how long it is going to take. Sometimes we’ll say to ourselves, “Your kids are playing now, but you do not have time to do any work,” because we can’t sit and get into the deep work.
It is okay not to always be in the deep work because sometimes we have to do with other stuff too. By pre-identifying how long something is going to take, I’m like, “My kids can play outside for fifteen minutes before they need me. I’m going to get started on the fifteen-minute task now, so I’m not overwhelmed,” because I have done the time block, I know how long it takes. I, therefore, can decide which task to do instead of complaining about not having enough time. We waste more time complaining about not having enough time than doing the things.
These are the daily ones, but let’s go down to the time blocks. A few things that I recommend you do. One is that you create whatever your time blocks are. Let’s say, “Monday, I’m going to work on my emails. Tuesday is when I worked on my membership. Thursday is when I work on my podcast. I have got them all written down here.”
Inside each of these cards is where I go ahead and write down what is going to happen and when. There are a few ways you can do this. You can make a checklist and call your checklist whatever you want. I have called it 5:00 to 9:00, 9:00 to 12:00, 12:00 to 3:00, 4:00 to 8:00, and 8:00 to 11:00. This is my full day. This is what every Monday looks like for me. I have said that on Mondays, I work primarily on my emails.
In the ideal world, let’s say 5:00 to 9:00 and 9:00 to 12:00 is work time, and my kids are going outside of the home to school or whatever it is. You can see I have got things written here. I do not have anything written during the day because I say, “I pick my kids up at 12:00 and then they go to bed at 8:00.” I do not work then. This is not having any work in here, so it is empty. I said that on Mondays, I’m going to do my emails. I plan out in advance. What am I doing? I’m working on newsletters 1, 2, and 3. I have already got it here, and these got great checkboxes in Trello so that I can track my work.
The other thing I would say is, “I know this is quiet time. It is not hard for me to write these emails because my kids are still sleeping. They are doing quiet stuff or whatever it is.” From 9:00 to 12:00, maybe it is a little louder. I’m doing something different, and that is when I can work on different newsletters. From 9:00 to 12:00, I said I’m going to work on my podcast promo email because it does not take as much brain space because it is already written for my show notes. I’m going to work on any sales emails. I have got it planned out, so I know what my day looks like.
My recommendation to you is to go into any of the blocks and say what you are going to be working on. Let’s say I work on my membership on Tuesdays, which is what mine looks like. This is my membership. On Tuesdays, I have a mother’s helper to get some quiet work done. From 9:00 to 12:00, this is when I film videos because that is my ideal work time. This is when I do Lives in student groups and things like that. Maybe in the morning or this time, it is not so quiet. That is when I engage in Facebook groups, etc.
Go to those blocks we have created because you have done all the work, you know what has to get done, and drop them in like, “When are you going to do those things?” This allows you to know when and where it is going to happen. When you pre-plan like this, you can pivot as needed.
Strategies For Organizing Business: Pre-planning will let you eliminate your procrastination because you know exactly what needs to get done and what else gets pushed off.
Pre-Plan Your Tasks
This next pillar is pre-planning out your tasks. I recommend you do this before the start of the month because once you’ve done everything else, you have a sense of what has to happen, “I write a newsletter every Tuesday. I need to write this one and another one. I need to do this social media.” This will let you eliminate your procrastination because you know what needs to get done and what else gets pushed off. You are like, “I can’t get behind on these things.”
This is an example of what the card looks like in Trello. For example, if I were to do email, I would make three different checklists. One would be,” What do I need to complete this week? What do I need to complete this month? What I have already done?” I do this in the fourth week. The Monday before the week starts, I sit in Trello and make these cards.
This is inside my goal Trello board. This is my personal and my regular life. We are going to scroll on down to the regular stuff. I’m going to go all the way down. Here’s what I have. These are my work batches. On Mondays, I do my emails. On Tuesdays, I do my club and my coaching. Wednesdays, I work on launches. Thursdays, I work on podcasts, social media, and team. Fridays, I work on projects. This is my email list for the entire month. I have got three lists to complete this week, to complete this month, and what I have completed.
It is the beginning of the month. I have not done anything yet because I do not add any of this until the end of the week, but before the month begins, I bring a newsletter. You can see I’m behind. I like for November to be done, but it is not. I’m going to be real with you. I’m behind, but my goal is always to get ahead.
I have gone through and broken down every email I need to write for December because these are my emails, student emails, call emails, prep emails, and all of it. On Saturdays, I move anything that I want to be done for the week. I also add in things. Doing the budget and the data review does not fit under emails, but I did not do it on Sunday. I had to add another item. You can always move things up and this is what it looks like at the end of the month.
At the end of the week, I will take anything that I did, put it up here, and congratulate myself like, “You go, girl. I’m so proud of you. I can’t believe you got those emails up. Nice work.” I move it here and I see what’s left. I then ask myself, “What needs to be completed next week?” I dropped those bad boys up here, so I know what I’m working on next week. When it is time to write the emails and the morning is the best time to run my newsletter email, I open this up and start working. I’m not thinking about it. I’m doing it. I’m starting with the end in mind.
This final step pulls it all together because we talk about it a lot. To reiterate the steps, by going through and brain dumping first, you have got your vision. Go to the baseline, do your time inventory and then say, “What can I delegate? What can I get out of here? I know where I’m at.” You are going to go through and pause, make your content plan and fill it in so you know which emails, socials, and what has to get done.
You are going to pop back into this bad boy and make your batches and time blocks, put everything together, and have it be crystal clear. When it is time for you to sit down and work, this is what you are doing when you are doing it. No decision fatigue, just get started. I would love to encourage you to do this time inventory, add the tasks you can delegate, make your content plan, and batch.
Here is my pro-tip. Put fifteen minutes a day to work on this planning piece because if every day you are doing some planning, then that is how you get ahead. You can’t say it is November 30th, and I want December’s plan 100% done because you are going to start December 1st and be like, “I do not know what I’m doing. I will try again next month.” Start now, fifteen minutes a day, just brain dump, and move baby steps.
This was fun to connect with. I went and talked very fast. Hopefully, you can reread this. I want to connect, so head over to @APurposeDrivenMom on Instagram. DM me and tell me your biggest a-ha moment, the biggest action step, and take away that you are going now. Brain dump one of your batches, then DM me and say you did it. I want a voice back and forth. If you have got Trello questions, I can show you a little video. I am committed to helping you make this the best.
I want to give you another free gift. I have a free workshop. It is called How to 3X Your Productivity Without Burnout. You can go to APurposeDrivenMom.com/ProductivityWorkshop to help learn how you can maximize your time and handle the distractions that life goes and throws at you all the time. This was fabulous. I loved hanging out with you and I appreciate you and your time. I’m so excited to connect more. Toss me any questions and tag us up on Instagram so that we can become internet BFFs. You got this, fifteen minutes at a time. The planning will make you more efficient in the long run. You can do it. I believe in you.
Important Links:
A Purpose Driven Mom Show - Podcast
@APurposeDrivenMom - Instagram
https://www.PurposeDrivenMomprenuer.com/Weekly-Checklist-Trello-Board/
About Cara Harvey
Cara is a wife, mom to a 14-year-old stepson, 5-year-old daughter, 3-year-old son, and a woman of God. She works as a productivity coach and her mission is to help busy moms take massive action on their goals and 3x their productivity without overwhelm or burnout.
She does this via her blog, podcast - The Purpose Driven Mom Show, virtual community groups, and e-courses that help women learn to prioritize their lives!