Batch It or Botch It: Preparing Your Business for Q4

The quiet before the storm offers the perfect opportunity to prepare your business for success. Rather than jumping straight into planning holiday promotions, now is the critical time to establish systems and boundaries that will carry you through the chaotic Q4 season with grace and effectiveness.

Success during busy periods depends on how well you've structured your time beforehand. When was the last time you audited how long tasks actually take you? That podcast episode that once consumed two hours might now take just 30 minutes with your improved skills. Understanding these realities allows you to schedule your week strategically, batching similar tasks on designated days to maximize productivity without the mental drain of constant context-switching. Monday for client work, Tuesday for content creation, Wednesday for admin tasks—creating this rhythm now builds habits that sustain you when things get hectic.

Boundaries prove equally crucial for maintaining sanity during busy seasons. Honest conversations with family members about your availability, clear work hours, and deliberate limits on social media engagement protect your mental health and energy reserves. While emergencies may occasionally require flexibility, established boundaries during normal weeks ensure disruptions don't completely derail your business. Consider shifting focus toward sustainable, owned content like blog posts, podcasts, and videos that you control completely, embedding them on your site and repurposing for email marketing. This strategy not only preserves your time but ensures you're creating content that directly addresses audience problems and guides them toward your solutions. Ready to transform your approach before the holiday rush arrives?

Chapters

• 0:00 Planning Ahead Before Holiday Chaos
• 0:38 Auditing Time and Batching Content
• 1:38 Setting Boundaries for Work-Life Balance
• 3:17 Creating Sustainable Content Strategies

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Many of you listening are most likely insiders, and you know that I like to try to stay ahead of the curve. We start talking about Black Friday sometimes in August in the past. I want you to start getting ahead, and the best way to do that is not necessarily to plan your Black Friday sale. That's not what I'm talking about right now. What I actually want you to do is set up systems and boundaries. Actually want you to do is set up systems and boundaries, because you are going to get into a busy time as we go into September, october, november and then into the holidays. Is the chaos, right? So you need to make sure that you are setting up systems for yourself and the boundaries that go along with it. So how are you planning your week out? We've talked about the importance of batching your content, batching what it is that you are doing within your business, so that you can make sure that on Monday you're doing certain things, tuesday you're doing certain things. Wednesday you're doing certain things. Thursday, friday, same thing, right? We want to take a look at our schedules and see what's going to work best. This is the best time to do an audit of your time and decide how long something is taking you to determine how you are going to schedule that into your week. So, setting those systems in place, making sure that you know that, yes, maybe it used to take you two hours to do a podcast episode six months ago, but now you're firing those off in 30 minutes or however long it is taking you, and make sure that you're scheduling that into your week so that you can make sure that you not only have it but also can get ahead. This is a great time to really start to get ahead for yourself as you start to see how well organized you can get.

Speaker 1: 1:38

The other thing that we want to make sure that we talk about is this idea of boundaries. You need to have boundaries in place for your work hours, for your time with your family, making sure that you are doing the things that are bringing you peace and energy. If you are finding that you are doing things that is hurting your mental health whether it is social media going down spirals or it's dropping everything because a family member needs help, but you're finding that you're totally drained have a conversation. Put boundaries in place for that. You need to have these conversations, whether it's with your significant other, whether it's with a mother or father that's aging, whatever it might be. You need to have these conversations and obviously there are times where boundaries don't necessarily have to exist, especially in an emergency situation. Right, something out of the blue happens, but you want to have those boundaries during a normal week so that, if something like that happens, you're ahead on your content, you're ahead on everything that you would normally try to do, because you have set up systems that are going to allow you to batch and get ahead when it comes to your business. Making sure that those boundaries are going to be there is going to be really, really important for you.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Too often, I hear clients tell me how they got pulled to do this or pulled to do that, or they went down a rabbit hole with social media. Put those boundaries up with social media. Decide how long you were going to be on it, decide what platforms you were actually going to use and if it's actually going to benefit you, because if it's not, then I need you to take a step back on it and decide where you're looking to go. Put together a strategy that may be more successful for you, that maybe requires less time and energy to be on those platforms, or maybe you're going to just put your eggs into the basket of creating content on platforms that are more sustainable blog posts, blog content, youtube videos, podcast episodes that can all go into a blog post.

Speaker 1: 3:40

Remember we talked about this earlier in this week how it's really important to make sure that you are the one owning everything, so putting everything into that blog post so that it is embedded and then repurposing into email. This is where our focus needs to be, and we need to have those actual settings, procedures in place so that we can make sure that we are getting it done. Each week or each day or however often. You are looking to create content for your people, answer the problems, give them the solutions and make sure that they can find exactly where they need to go in order to apply it and, potentially, work with you. So make sure, moving forward, that we have boundaries in place and you have the systems in place for yourself to make everything that much easier.