#35: 3 Must-Have Things You Need to Manage Your Time

When I talk about what I do, and how I coach people and why it is that I talk about "the work plus the woo", it's because 100% of the people that I work with, no... scratch that - 100% of the entrepreneurs that I know want to focus on leveling up their energy, want to develop a meditation practice want to and corporate so much into their personal and spiritual growth, but they struggle with finding the time because it's just overwhelming running their business.

But I've learned, that it isn't that the things that are needed in their business are overwhelming per se, it's that they lack the skills needed to managing some pieces of the foundational part of their business in some way. And this isn't spoken with judgment. This is an objective observation of something that I see all the time period it's really common. Because most of the time, we get into business as entrepreneurs because we have a passion for creating or selling or coaching or teaching, but we don't necessarily have the technological training or the business and strategy background to be able to organize all of the things. And it's holding them back from leveling up in their success in business, but more importantly, and more important to me, is that it's causing stress.

EPISODE Show Notes

Time Mgmt Class Masterclass Waitlist

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, my name is Corinne Oflin and you're listening to the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. I am a USA Today bestselling author, non-profit executive and organizing nerd with over 20 years experience running my own small businesses. I teach entrepreneurs, solarpreneurs and small business owners like you how to organize your business, find more time and deepen your alignment practice to experience more calm and confidence every single day. If you're looking for that intersection between practical business advice and spiritual goodness, then you're in the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into this week's episode of the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. Welcome, welcome to the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, corinne Oflin, and this is episode 35.

Speaker 1: 0:50

When I talk about what I do and how I coach people, they always ask what's this whoop and work, what is the point of having both of those things? And the reason why I talk about it the way that I do is because 100% of the people that I work with and you know scratch that 100% of the entrepreneurs who I know they want to focus on leveling up their energy. They want to develop a meditation practice, for example. They want to incorporate so much into their personal and spiritual growth, but they struggle with finding the time because it is just so overwhelming running their business and getting it all done in a day. And I've learned that it isn't just that the things that are needed in their business are overwhelming per se, it's that they lack the skills needed to manage some pieces of the foundational part of their business. And this is not spoken with judgment. This is an objective observation of something that I see all the time. It's really common because most of the time I mean think about it.

Speaker 1: 1:56

We get into business as entrepreneurs because we have a passion for creating something or selling something or coaching other people or teaching other people, but we don't necessarily have a business background. We don't have the technological training or the marketing or strategy background to be able to get the overarching view of all of it, to be able to organize all the things, and it's holding a lot of us back from leveling up and it's preventing success in business. But more importantly and more important to me is it's causing stress. When you are running your own business, you are the CEO and you're not yet at the point where you can hire a team, so you have to figure out how to make it all fit, how to make it all work, how to do all the things that it takes to run a business and, as I talk about so often on this show and in my community, the skills that you need to do those foundational things in your business successfully. Those are all core capabilities, right? They all fall under executive functioning and they include things like self restraint, stress tolerance, working memory, emotion control, focus, task initiation, planning, prioritization, organization, time management and defining and achieving goals and being flexible. And all of these things are skills, not personality traits, and I'm going to say that again for the people in the back these things are skills, not personality traits, so that means that they can be taught. So if you struggle in one of these areas, there's a reason to hope right, because there are solutions available to you. It really is just a matter of reaching out and going on a discovery expedition to see what works for you.

Speaker 1: 3:51

So on this episode, I want to talk about time management strategies and, before I forget, I'm going to be teaching a class on stress-free time management in the near future and if you want to get on the waitlist for that, you can find the link in the show notes or by going to my website at CorinneOphlincom. I have travel coming up. I'll be going to DragonCon and a couple of conferences in September, so it's probably going to be in October at the time I get around to being able to host this live. But if you're interested in my class, stress-free time management, get on the waitlist and I will make sure you get notified when it's time. Okay, so time management strategies. If you do any searching online for how to manage your time, you're going to find more solutions than you could possibly consume in a lifetime, and I am definitely of the mind that you should explore and try all the different things, because you don't know what works for you until you find it right. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and it is vital that you continue to test until you find the things that fit for you and then, once you find out what works for you, stop looking and get to work.

Speaker 1: 5:04

I'm in a creativity group and we are doing a workshop of this book called Creating Time Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim your Life, by Marnie K Macrodakis and I hope I'm pronouncing her name right and this class it's been. It's not a class, it's a workshop. We're doing it all together. It's been really interesting because the book guides us through all the different ways that we have relationship with time, and a lot of the group has expressed you know we don't really think about it in the ways that we actually do have relationships with time, and how impactful that is in the way that we get through the day, in the way that we talk to ourselves, in the way that we think about life, and so I wanted to find a way to share some time management strategies that are kind of universal, that are not prescriptive, but could perhaps be foundational in that, should you begin to follow these things that I'm going to share with you and there's only a couple they will help you find a path that you can then tailor to your own needs through that exploration.

Speaker 1: 6:16

Right, and so the first thing that I want you to think about is this question what is your relationship with time? And what I mean by that is do you consistently run late when you prep for things? Do you always need a few last minutes to get something truly ready? When you're working on something, do you lose track of time, does time fly, does it drag? Or do you consistently find yourself running out of time to do the work in the time that you allotted for a certain frame of time or do you have a good grip on measuring how much time things are going to take? Right? You time block an hour to do a project or a piece of a project and, like, four hours later, you still haven't gotten to that milestone for the day. One of the biggest things that comes up when we talk about goal setting is identifying how much time you actually have to do a thing and then how much time you think something's actually going to take to do right, and it's an eye-opening experience to discover where those two intersect. Right, because they very rarely fit together, because we always think we have more time or that something is going to take less time than it actually does. And the key here is that we all have patterns here, and taking the time maybe a few days, maybe a week to identify your patterns. This will give you a roadmap to move ahead.

Speaker 1: 7:36

Often, when we run into trouble with time management, it can be because we also struggle with prioritizing our tasks, and this is one of those things that I really struggled with when I was younger and even now, when I get stressed, it is still the one place where I can be guaranteed to slip up, and for me that's prioritizing, because when I get stressed, everything looks like a priority. So, for example, I'll be working on something like project A and because I'm feeling stressed or for whatever reason I'm having stress, I will start to get distracted. Because then I procrastinate, because I get you know, the stress piece wants me to not work anymore and I'll do something like checking email, for example, or checking my texts, and as soon as something comes in where somebody else needs something from me, I will drop whatever it is that I'm doing, I will stop working on project A and I will take care of whatever it is that I can do. You know, quote, unquote real quick, because I know in the moment that I can get that done. And it's like this dopamine hit and I know that this is a symptom, right, because I have identified that pattern for myself. So when I see myself doing that, I can pull myself back. But that was not always the case. So that's where the value comes in in tracking what you're doing. But it is, it's something that comes up often, and so my next question for you is what is your relationship with prioritizing?

Speaker 1: 9:04

I think the ability to prioritize things is an underrated skill. That is actually vital, because if you're not able to prioritize the way that you spend your time, then you can't actually make reliable plans. I mean, think about it. There are a lot of tools that you can use for prioritizing and, like everything else, it's so easy to get lost in all the options. Right, there's, like this incredible, not even a buffet. It's like a never ending assembly line of time and task management tools out there.

Speaker 1: 9:35

But one of the easiest to learn is something called the Covey Quadrants, created by Steven Covey. The Covey Quadrants are a lot like the Eisenhower matrix, and I will put a link to that in the show notes so that you can see what I'm talking about. But the Eisenhower matrix focuses on the urgency of tasks, where the Covey Quadrants focus on time in addition to the importance of things. So basically, what you do is you draw out a big square and you dissect it with a plus sign. So you have four quadrants and quadrant number one is urgent and important and you have not urgent and important. Then you have urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important, and these things go across in a matrix. So they're like you have one column marked urgent, one column marked important, one mark not urgent, one mark not important. And then the cross sections are where things get identified, and what you're supposed to do is identify all the things that you need to do and then you drop them into one of these four boxes based on their urgency and their importance.

Speaker 1: 10:41

And it sounds really simple, because it is right, but the process of doing this is actually quite illuminating, because you identify right away whether or not you can identify something as being urgent versus important, because those are different things, right, like everything is urgent if you can't prioritize, everything is important if you can't prioritize. So this is a really simple exercise that you can use, because it can be a good starting point for figuring out where to go from here, and I think that quite often we get into this analysis paralysis when it comes to using all these different tools out there, and so this is not something that needs purchasing. You don't need to sign up for anything. It's a piece of paper, it's a whiteboard and a pen. You make a square and you draw the diagram and you start filling in the boxes using the things that have to be done that are on your plate right now. From there, you can then move forward and say you know what.

Speaker 1: 11:39

I did not really have a hard time identifying which went where. I had a problem with tracking, which brings me to my next question, which is how do you keep track of it all? This is an area that can trip a lot of us up to, because this is the tools and the apps and the schedulers and the calendars and all the different things that we actually do need to stay on track, to stay focused, to prioritize and just to stay on time. So one thing that a lot of coaches share is their toolkit. Right, here's the list of things that I use to get through the day, with all of my tools on it and links to, you know, check them out and those things can be really helpful if you're struggling. But again, you know, the tools that I list on my toolkit might not be tools that work for you, they might not resonate with the way that you work, they might not be solutions for you, and you know. So there's this rabbit hole potential that you could fall into with trying to figure out how does Karin do it, how does this person do it, how does that person do it. I want to emulate their practice. You know that only goes as far as it goes, because if it doesn't resonate with you, you're not going to stick with it, and if you don't stick with it, it's not going to work. So that's why the things that I'm sharing in this episode are really kind of like the zoom out. They're the large picture view, the universal foundational pieces that you need for time management so that you can start here and then you can inch forward, but you'll have a foundation from which to work effectively.

Speaker 1: 13:14

You have to be really careful with the shiny object syndrome when it comes to other people's processes, and you know I really I don't think I stress this enough, because it's one of those things. I mean, I have fallen victim to it as well Like I want the most affection, I want the most effective, I want the thing that's going to solve all my problems. And you know what? There isn't a one size fits all for anything. So we have to eyeball what other people are doing, be aware of what else is out there, you know, try things on and then see, because only when we determine that they are actually working for us are they worth anything to us.

Speaker 1: 13:55

You know, full stop, because when it comes right down to it, I think you need a place to keep track of your stuff and you need a place to keep track of your appointments. Like for me, I use the full focus planner, which is a paper planner, and I use Google Calendar. Those two things keep me going. They're very, very simple and I don't have 400 different pieces of things to keep track of in the world. Do I have other things? Yes, I have things like Calendly, asana and Evernote, but those things are kind of supplemental. If I were going to go on a trip, I would bring my device that has all of my Google and I would bring my paper planner, my full focus planner. Those two things alone give me access to my Gmail and my calendar and my paper planner. That's all I need to get through. So I think that we need to simplify, we need to find the lowest common denominator. What is the simplest thing that I can do to get back on track with time and task management, organizing my time and organizing my time, and that's it.

Speaker 1: 15:07

I think that we tend to overcomplicate things, especially in the areas where we're struggling, and I think that if we just give ourselves permission to make it easy, we can demystify a lot of the things that we struggle with, because I think the tendency is to try to overcomplicate things because we think it needs to be hard and it actually really, really doesn't, and this is one of those places where it really doesn't need to be. So, again, we all work differently, our brains work differently, our skill sets come from different places, our comfort level with technology versus paperworking. We're all unique, right? We're all individual people, and so it's really important to keep track of what you're doing. Try things on, stick with what works and jettison the things that don't work, but give yourself permission to stop looking once you find something that feels like it's working for you.

Speaker 1: 15:59

You know that said, the things that I have shared here I think are universally important to finding your way, because you need to understand your relationship with time, you need to learn how to prioritize your time and you need to find a way to keep track of everything in a way that is effective for you. That's it. There's three things, guys Time, priorities for your tasks and keeping track of it Full stop. That's it. So that's all I have for you this week. Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you next time. And remember part of being a calm entrepreneur is developing the systems, habits and know-how that lets you know that you are the one in the driver's seat for your business. You get to choose how you think and you get to choose how you work. So you got this, my friends. Thank you for listening.