How To Make Time For Everything

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“How do you do it all?” A question that I get frequently but really dislike getting. Because the truth is – I don’t. I don’t do it all, and I ache for everyone who is searching for this hidden truth on how to do it all themselves, when it just doesn’t exist.

To be clear – is productivity and time management a specific skill of mine? Definitely. Do I run two businesses? Yes. Do I manage our household? Also yes. Do I spend a lot of time with my husband? Do we travel alot? Absolutely.

But I don’t have children. I’m not running multi-million dollar corporations. I put my own health aside in order to be productive far too often. I don’t do it perfectly, and while I do feel like my life is fairly balanced (as in balanced like a garden … not balanced like everything is given completely equal attention), I don’t want you walking into this episode with unrealistic expectations.

That being said, today I’m going to share 5 things I do that help me make time for a very full and balanced life.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Grab the 8 emails I send to my waitlist every launch – a new free resource for you!
This week’s action step: Send me a DM and tell me what the number one thing you’d like to fit in is, and let’s see if we can brainstorm together ways to fit it in!
This week’s book recommendation: Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee.
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate.

How do you do it all? A question that I get frequently, but really dislike getting, because the truth is I don’t, I don’t do it all. And I ache for everyone who is searching for this hidden truth on how to do it all themselves. When it just doesn’t exist to be clear, is productivity and time management, a specific skill set of mine.

Definitely do I run two businesses? Yes. Do I manage our household also? Yes. Do I spend a lot of time with my husband? Do we travel a lot? Do I have a lot of my own personal time? Absolutely. But I don’t have children. I’m not running multimillion dollar corporations. And I frankly put my own health aside in order to be productive far too often.

I don’t do it perfectly. And while I do feel like my life is fairly balanced, as in balanced, like a garden and different things need different amounts of water and some get more and some get less, not balanced, like everything is given completely equal attention. I don’t want you to walk into this episode with unrealistic expectations.

that being said today, I’m going to share five things. I do that help me make time for a very full and balanced life. You’re listening to episode 127 of the Chasing Simple Podcasts. And I’m your host, Amanda Warfield.

the first thing I do is that I plan things out months and months and months in advanced as I’m recording this episode right now, it is July 26th. It’s my birthday. It’s July 26th. This is airing September 27th. And that’s just one example. It’s July 26 and I already have my quarterly calendar for 2023 printed out.

And I already have things on the calendar for next year. I plan out everything, life business, very, very, very far in advance. And yeah, sometimes this causes issues and it’s not perfect, but so is doing the opposite. And at least this way, I have an idea of what’s to come and it gives me a lot more freedom, freedom and flexibility.

So right now it’s the end of July. I already know what my next launch is gonna be, which by the time you listen to this, my launch is gonna be over at this point. I already know when I’m opening up my one to one spots. Again, I know what my black Friday sales are gonna look like. I know when I’m having flash sales throughout the year.

I know all of that alls I have to do at this point is execute. And because alls I have to do is execute, I know what I need to do step by step by step, along the way in order to execute, which allows me so much more freedom in, can I take time off today? Just because I feel like it. Yes or no. It gives me so much more freedom to prepare for what’s coming.

It also allows me if I’m like, you know what? I just don’t have the time for this project. I can just ax it and take it off of my schedule versus wanting to add things on again, this is not fool proof. Sometimes things happen sometimes. Signals get crossed. Sometimes we have to move things around. Sometimes I need to add something in that I hadn’t thought about, and that causes issues.

It’s not foolproof, but by planning things out really far in advance, I’m able to give myself plenty of time to get it done. I’m also, if we’re talking about business projects able to give my audience enough time to decide yes or no, I’m gonna buy into this. And I also give myself enough time to take time off if I need it.

I only work three and a half, four days a week, that’s it. And that’s all I wanna work. And so I have to plan out really far in advance in order to get it all done in time. So that’s the first thing I do. The second thing I do is I, I have my batch weeks every month. I batch my content and. Not only do I batch my content.

So I’ve got my regular content batching week, once every month. I also batch my podcast interviews for my guests. So last week we heard from the incredible Liz Beadon I believe when we recorded that it was February and that just aired in September. I only do guest interviews twice a year and I set aside an entire week so that I can get in that mode, get those systems going.

And focus on that. And here’s the thing when you’re interviewing someone for a podcast, it’s not just, you hop on a video call. And you record and that’s it, there’s so much prep work that needs to go into it. You have to invite the person and then they have to accept, and then they have to send over their information and then they have to pick the date to record.

And then you have to prepare for recording, which takes time. If you want it to be a good interview, and then you have to do the interview and then you have to do the follow up and you have to, and there are all the things that go into create an episode and. It’s a system that I’ve created to batch my guest interviews, but I don’t wanna do that system once or twice a month, every single month, if I could just.

Twice a year set aside one week, run that system for those two weeks and then be done with it the rest of the time. And so by batching my content, and then by also batching my guest interviews, having these batch weeks in my business, it frees up so much space in the rest of the time, which really allows me to move the needle without marketing, getting in the way.

The third thing that I do is that I also have themed Workday, So each day of the week is themed to a different type of work that I’m going to be doing. And the reason that this is so helpful, and it’s the same thing with batch weeks, it’s just, these things need to be done weekly, almost.

The reason, this is so helpful is because our minds really love doing the same task over and over and over and over again, when we do one task and then we switch to another task and we switch to another task and sometimes we switch within task and then we go back to a task, our brains don’t like this, and it actually loses us time because our brains have to play catch up.

So if I’m working on a piece of content and then I remember, Ooh, I need to go send this email. So I stop what I’m doing. Get out of my flow. I go send this email. I get back into the flow. I’ve wasted so much time. I’ve added 20 minutes or more. to how long it would’ve taken me to do that one task simply by the fact that I derailed my brain and then derailed it again to get it back on track for the original task.

If we can get in the flow and work in flow, we can work so much faster. So I theme my work days. Every Monday is a client day. I am solely focused on clients on Monday. Every Tuesday. That is my project day for the Amanda Warfield LLC business. I am working on whatever my current projects are in getting those done.

Every Wednesday is my magical escape vacation. Projects day, I’m working on whatever project I have for that business and getting it done. Thursdays are my admin CEO type days. I’m doing my finances. I’m doing my KPIs. I’m working on making sure I’m inbox zero. Before I go to the weekend, I’m doing odds and ins I’m scheduling Pinterest stuff, different things like that, where I am doing all the odds and the ins essentially left over from the.

and that way I know what I’m working on at any given time, my Thursdays are also typically be it’s work that I don’t need to be super, super focused for. And it’s not. incredibly time consuming tasks. It’s okay. This is gonna take me 30 minutes. This is gonna take me an hour versus on Tuesday and Wednesday, when I’m working on projects, it is very deep down head down work.

So Thursdays are also my meeting days. It’s when I do any kind of meeting, that’s basically not a client meeting cause that’ll happen on Mondays with clients, but I theme my days and that helps me get more done on each of those days. And I do the same thing with. You know, parts of my life as well, where I have themed days for what I’m working on, on any given day during the week, I have these set routines and because they’re routine, it flows and it’s easier and it’s faster to get it done.

So having themed work days really helps as well. And the fourth thing that I really suggest is to get help. I just hired my first team member and I’m so excited to offload some of my work onto her. She’s gonna save me. Hours each month and it’s going to be really, really helpful, but I’ve been outsourcing for months now.

I started outsourcing my podcast editing. gosh, a year and a half ago, maybe I’ve been outsourcing that forever. That has saved me a ton of time. I have started outsourcing sales copy occasionally I’ve been outsourcing here, things here and there, and you can decide to outsource a one-time project or you could decide to outsource an ongoing thing.

I know that hiring and bring in on team members is really scary. I was terrified. I’m still terrified. Let’s be real. It’s it’s new and it is a big deal. but outsourcing is a good first step to that where you can say, okay, I need some help. I need someone to take something off my plate. Let me get some help.

What’s something, whether it’s a project or ongoing that I would love to be done with, for me, the first thing was podcast editing because it was really time consuming and I hated it, which made it more time consuming because I dragged my feet as I did it. That’s always a good place to start. Other things that you can outsource though, that have nothing to do with your business.

You can outsource grocery shopping. Did that a long time ago. At this point, we’ll get our main shop from like Instacart or Russell will stop by on his way home from work. If we need one or two things, grocery shopping and I don’t do, I don’t go spend an hour in the grocery store every week anymore.

you can outsource cleaning. You can outsource errands. There’s so many different things. You can outsource some great examples. If you read Rachel Rogers, we should all be millionaire. She’s got a lot of really great like life outsourcing example. That you could do outsource some things in your life that are really, really time consuming.

And you don’t even have to just outsource to people that you’re paying, just delegate to your partner or your spouse, and say, I need you to do this. Like I told Russell with the grocery store, I was like, I’m not going and doing these one minute shops anymore. I’m gonna let you do it when you’re already out.

And you’re on your way, home from work anyways, delegate what you can if you need to. And then the last thing that has really helped me, quote, unquote, make time for everything. Prioritization. There are so many different things that I would love to do in my business that I just don’t have time for so many different updates.

I would like to make blogs that I would like to, there, there are a million, one tiny projects that I just do not have time for. And even though I would love to get to them, I have to recognize what my true priorities are. And I have to work on the things that actually matter and are actually going to move the business forward period.

the same is true in life when I’m not working. What are my priorities? Well, it’s either fill up my own cup if I’m burnt out or spend time with Russell. Those are usually my two priorities period. Am I saying that I probably should increase my own care for my health? Probably like that should be a better priority.

They’re not a hundred percent straight, but knowing what your priorities are, makes all the difference in the world for feeling like you have enough time. Because if you’re able to know this is what I need to prioritize, you’re much more likely to actually save time for it to intentionally create the space for it.

Something that is a big priority for us is weekly dates. And when we stop prioritizing it, it shows. , but when we are prioritizing that, it makes all the difference in the world. So those five things that really help me make time for everything. One planning, things out really far in advance, two batch weeks, not just for content, for anything that I can batch or that’s going to be really time consuming that I don’t need to do super, super often three themed, Workday, four, getting help of some sort and five priorities.

So your action step for this week is to send me a DM and tell me what the number one thing you would like to fit in is, and let’s see if we can brainstorm together some ways for you to fit it in, and your book recommendation. I promised you way back in episode 1 25, that I would have this recommendation for you is Do Nothing. How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headley. Now. In 1 25. I mentioned a faith Facebook that I really, really loved and that I recommended, but I also recognize that not everyone that listens, wants to read those kind of books. So this is another one that I read about the same time, frame that I read the other one, and also really, really loved this one.

Again, this has kind of been a theme for me this year is just this stepping back, less hustle. Being present kind of mindset that I’m really trying to get into. And this book I really loved because she goes into the history of how we got to be this way and how we became a culture obsessed with work and with hustle.

So highly recommend because not only does she have the history, but she also has some really great points and thoughts that are 100% worth reading. And now my friend, I hope that you will go out and Uncomplicate your life. And.

Episode 127: How I Make Time for “Everything”

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