Since launching my online styling courses, my business has been H.E.C.T.I.C; I’ve had to learn soooo many new skills around course creation and internet marketing, so to fit it all in, I’ve started planning my days like some kind of productivity ninja.

Now I’ve always been a bit of a super producer and a very savvy multi-tasker, but I’ve achieved more in the last 12 months than I personally would’ve in about twice that time, and it all boils down to some rigid AF day-planning.

I’ve learned that unless I exact ninja like discipline to my day-to-day schedule the weeks fly by and I achieve sweet fuq all.  Like last week for instance, when I ‘laxed on the routine, and by the time it was Friday cocktail hour, I realised I had wasted an entire week and had nothing to show for it! Sound familiar?

Now let me preface this by saying, this isn’t something I’ve always done.  In fact, I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade now, and have only just figured this out, so don’t be so hard on yourself if your day doesn’t look the same, but hopefully this will give you something to think about, and hopefully inspire you, dear creative, to exact a little discipline on your day.

So here goes,

This is what my day looks like, pretty much every day:

730-830am Yin Yoga on the beach listening to an entrepreneurial podcast, or streaming the latest online course I’m completing.  

My body needs to be outside, it needs to stretch daily and ideally needs a little Sun.  If I can tick this off first thing then I know it’s going to thank me for the rest of the day.  Now I could just take in the serenity and sea breeze but as an eternal multi-tasker I like to listen to something educational and thought-provoking for my business.

Plus I found that I’m much more likely to do the yoga that way, if it feels like I’m ‘achieving’ at the same time. (Useful mind-trickery technique).  So whatever new skill I’m trying to learn at that stage, I find every podcast/youtube/chat on the subject and I play these whilst I stretch.

Whats really great about this, is that at the end of the week, I’ve done 5 hours of entrepreneurial training on a new skill! Boom!

This is a practise I introduced after reading Hal Elrods The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed To Transform Your Life… (Before 8AM), it’s a great read and talks about how you should do these six things BEFORE you start your work day: Meditations, Affirmations, Visualisations, Exercise, Reading and Writing. Hectic I know, but I now do 5 of the 6 and it definitely works!

830-9am Check emails to see if anyone has responded to my emails, and send any that I need to send, in order to advance my agenda/projects/goals.   

This doesn’t mean replying to every email, it means checking to see if there are any that are urgent, or if anyone has replied to something that I’m waiting for.

And once an email has been replied to, it either gets deleted or moved to a folder.  So my actual inbox is virtually empty.  In fact, my goal is to get that as close to empty as possible each week.

So I know that when I check my inbox, anything in there is waiting on a response from me, and I can determine how urgent it is for me to reply to, based on my agenda/projects/goals.

(I learnt this one from Brendan Burchard…he’s one of the few people on this Earth who talks faster than me!)

9-12pm Project time.  Email is closed down, phone is on silent and all alerts are switched off.  

I’ve noticed I’m at my peak performance in the mornings, so anything that needs to be developed, produced or created happens here.  So I have a set of goals each month (which I will talk more about in next weeks post), and these are generally projects, for instance ‘Shoot bonus content for my online courses’, and there’ll be many different stages to this, which can’t all be done in one day.

But when I’m working on a project I have all alerts switched off so I can have maximum focus.

12-1pm The Ellen Show.  Yep, I watch Ellen every day over lunch, sounds fluffy I know, but it’s strategic, here me out.  

Ellen makes me laugh, love and generally feel pretty damn happy, sometimes I’ll even have a boogy with her! I love it! At the end of that hour my vibration is peaking!! And vibration is everything in this Universe.

Everything that manifests itself in life is there because it matches the vibration from your thoughts, so I’m constantly attentive to how I’m feeling throughout the day.  And an hour of Ellen each day is the quickest and easiest way to sky rocket my vibration!

(If you wanna learn more about vibration and you only have space for one spiritual guru in your life, let it be Abraham Hicks)

1-2pm Emails, phone calls, admin – anything that needs to be done to advance my projects.  

I also do anything in this time that I’m not looking forward to doing.  Say I’ve gotta send an email to someone and they’re not going to like it, I always do this here, right after Ellen time, cause I know that email is going out with love and light and it’s going to be received in the best possible way.  (See I told you it was strategic)

I also implement anything that was learned in this mornings yoga/podcast time.  If I don’t implement something new within 24 hours of learning it, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be forgotten.  It’s not just me either, there’s heaps of data around this.  So I immediately put into practise whatever I’ve learned, or I add it into my weeks schedule.

 

2-5pm Project time.  All alerts are shut off, and again I’m totally immersed in my project.  

Back to project time, totally focused, no distractions.  Here’s the thing, according to reports, it takes 20 mins for your brain to fully switch between two tasks.

So picture this, you’re working on a project, you get an email alert from someone pushing their agenda, you stop what you’re doing, reply to their email, then it takes you 20mins to regain your focus.  20 mins!! Imagine if you do that just 3 times a day – you’ve lost an hour.  What about 6 times?!

Don’t know about you, but I know I’ve spent entire weeks doing this (like last week) – it gets to the end of the week and you’ve got nothing to show for it!  Ya feeling me?!

Alerts are evil my friend, shut ’em off.  And if you’re in a business (or life) where you can turn your phone on silent, do it. Trust me.  It’s SO powerful.  Its like taking back control of your life, because you’re telling the Universe that what you’re working on is more important!  Try it, just for a day, see how you feel!

 

5pm+ Email time, responding to other peoples agendas.  Social media. 

This is when I’m at my most drowsiest, which TBH is really the extent of brain power that you need to reply to emails.  Lets face it, its not rocket science, so why waste all that vital morning wonderment on replying to other peoples agendas!?  Not smart.

This is also the time when I do social posts.  I could write a whole blog on this (and probably will), but I am really strict on the amount of time I allow for social media.  Not just because its the greatest time-waster on the planet, but also because I generally feel pretty shit about myself afterwards! Don’t know about you, but the minute I jump on social media, comparison-itis kicks right in, and my vibration plummets.  Again, not smart.

So that’s my day, rigid yes, productive fuq yes! 

Maybe you’d like to implement one or two of these ideas for yourself for a week and see how your productivity sky rockets?!  Leave me a comment with your results below, and as always I would love to hear about any other productivity hacks you have!

I’ll continue this post next week with some insight into how I plan my weeks and months and I how set both personal and professional goals to achieve maximum results.

Big thanks to miss Valentine for these shots!