195: What Would YOU Do With an Extra 21.5 Hours Each Week? (I'm curious...)

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Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Foreign guest today is Melinda Whelan. Melinda is a productivity tech and system strategist who helps female entrepreneurs streamline their businesses and reclaim their time. And Melinda, this is one of my favorite topics. I love digging into all things related to productivity and all that good stuff. Melinda, before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?

Okay, yes. As you said, I am a productivity tech and systems strategist so I help people find more time in their business and their life and streamline their workflows and their businesses behind the scenes so that their work can be easier and more simplified and they can get more done and not be as overwhelmed.

So Melinda, when I was preparing for this interview, I went deep into like your website in your YouTube channel and all of that. And I notice on one of your YouTube videos you told us that entrepreneurs like, like me, kind of. These solo entrepreneurs may even have just a little small teams, but mostly we're doing it all by ourselves that we are wasting around 21.5 hours per week. And I was thinking, oh my goodness, is that me? So walk us through. What do you mean by that and what are some of the ways that we are wasting time that would total up to almost Half or actually more than half of our work week.

Yeah, there is so much that plays into that that it's almost hard to calculate. And it could even be more time than that. It obviously could be less. But there are so many things that we do that we don't have awareness of. The main thing being context switching, or what I call bouncing, is a really big contributor to time waste. So if you are focusing on something and then you check your phone, or if you're focusing on some social media and you go to Facebook, for example, to post something, but then you go down the rabbit hole every time you do something that isn't what you're focusing on, it can take up to 20 minutes to refocus to get back to what you're doing. So not only is it that time that you're taking to get back into what you're doing, you're doing it multiple times a day. And so that adds up. So even if it's not 20 minutes, that takes you, you know, to get back into focus, Even if it's 10, 5, that adds up over each day. And then there's also things like distractions that come up, people coming in, dogs barking, having to restart things. So there's a lot of different things that play into having your time being taken away or sucked away without you even noticing it.

So what I heard you say was social media is one. So we go to post something on social media, maybe on Facebook or Instagram, and then we start scrolling and kind of get sucked into all of that. What about email? Is that another kind of time suck or what was.

Oh, yeah, there's. There's so many time sucks. You know, creating content, doing blog posts, if you're creating a video, doing email, checking email multiple times a day, Sometimes you have to. Sometimes you need to check it for whatever reason you have going on with how your workflow is. But if you're checking it as a way to procrastinate or you constantly have that, oh, I'm waiting on that email, I'm waiting on that email. That's taking you away from what you could be focusing on. And so setting with email as, as an example, setting times during the day to check your email, so checking in at first thing in the morning so you don't miss anything. Checking it in the middle of the day and then checking it toward the end, but before so you still have time to work on stuff. Having more of a systematic way of checking it is going to help you. Because if you're constantly going back to it that's, that's causing distraction.

Okay, so I have a productivity expert in front of me. I'm thinking about, like my workday, right, and everything that I wanted to get done today. So I use the Google Tasks app, if you would. I kind of put, you know, everything in there, and I estimate, you know, how long I think something's going to take. And a lot of times it takes a lot longer than I, I anticipate. But like, one of the tasks that I had for myself today, I did a workshop in one of my memberships. So I had to, like, do the slides and get prepared for that and a couple other things that I had to process it and load it into the membership, send out the emails to the members reminding them of the worksh shop, you know, letting them know when it had been processed. Then I recorded another podcast interview. So those are the kind of things that I had on my task list. When we have, you know, all of that stuff, tasks, whatever that we need to get done in a day, what would you recommend or what is the most efficient way to kind of go through those tasks and kind of knock them off of our to do list?

Okay, so there's two things. There's the, the one thing, which is what you're asking the direct on the day, how do you get those things done? And I would like to add a first thing and, and that would be to plan beforehand. So like you said, you think it, you know how long it takes, but then it usually takes longer. So starting back on Sunday or Monday or whenever you mentally get into your next week is when you start thinking about that day of workshop or that day of recording or that day of being with clients so that you can kind of reverse engineer your time because, say, for example, all of the stuff that you needed to do for your workshop, it was going to take probably the exact amount of time that you had. And knowing that it might probably take longer, looking at it at the beginning of the week is going to help you maybe do it some the night before. You know, maybe you work on it for 30 minutes while you're watching TV, or maybe you put another little bit of time sometime before that. So the component of actually looking ahead and being more active rather than reactive is going to help with that. And then the actual day of kind of, it still ties in with that. When I do what I call a weekly review, I know the things that I have to do and I take top tasks from those things. And so your overall week is going to have your main tasks and Then your day, you have those two or three really big ones and putting the little tiny things in order that you need to do and actually visually looking at the time that you have is going to help you. So even if you have whatever calendar you use, whether it's writing or digital, if you use Google Calendar and literally putting each task in there is going to visually allow you to see if it's going to fit. So those would be a couple of things that I would say.

I love that and I love kind of scheduling the task and the activity on the calendar. I somewhat do that, but not the very specific ones. I kind of just block it off and say, you know, here's the, here's the, you know, block of time, if you would, that I'm going to be there.

So I love that.

Brings me, you know, to my next question because I'm, I'm sure you have some favorites here. So can you give a sneak peek into some of the systems or tools that you recommend for productivity efficiency? Really anything that's we as FEMA online business owners could use to be, you know, to not. To not be wasting those 21 hours plus a week?

Yeah, yeah. So I have one that's my favorite. I'll get into that in a second. But the four main things that I would say without saying any specific names or any specific platforms would be to have a project management tool. So that would be something that would actually take care of, organize all of your things, such as tasks, projects, links, all of that kind of backend stuff. Having a cloud system to put documents, all of your assets on, having something to design with, so something like Canva and then having your actual working tools. So email responders, scheduling. So those are the four categories of things that you will, I don't even want to say should, that you will use or will need as an online business owner. And then so to just have that as a, you know, broken down into four simplifies it and then simplifying it even more, making it to where there's one for each thing. So one project management tool. And I use Notion. I've gone through Trello, Asana and Notion. And right now I use Notion. And it's amazing. And I'll tell you a tip that actually goes into what we were talking about a minute ago with that I use Notion, Google Drive, Canva and FG Funnels. And so minimizing the amount of working tools that you have, streamlining that down as much as possible is going to save you time. Because if you've got you know, Acuity and Squarespace and Dubsado and all of these programs. You're using your context switching, you're going back and forth, you're trying to remember what's where. And then you also have to use other tools like Zapier to integrate things sometimes. And so having it narrowed down to trying to get one per category is going to make it really streamlined and save you time with that. And going back to that tip, when I use Notion, it's the first tool that I've used and it does not mean that it's the only one because I'm sure that there's, there's many, but it's the first tool that I have found where you can integrate your Google Calendar and you can integrate your task list directly onto your calendar and it syncs it either place. So you can look at your Google Calendar and actually see your tasks lined up into your calendar rather than having to type them in or just use a simple, you know, task list and having it go on there. So that's my favorite part about Notion is the task syncing with the calendar.

Really? So it does your project management plus kind of all the tasks and the calendar and it does it all at once?

Yes, yeah, yeah. And project management, I mean that can be, it can hold all of your offers and services, projects you're working on, tasks, client work, volunteer work, content, all of that kind of stuff can go in an, you know, an all in one project management system like that.

So that's interesting. I mean, I'm familiar with Notion. I've used it a little bit here and there, but not to the extent that you are, you know, describing there for sure. And I know that a lot of people who are listening here use Canva and I feel like my Canva account is a complete mess and we have, you know, have a team in there too. And I don't feel like we're utilizing it to the best of our ability as a team. So that's something that we have on our, have on our kind of schedule, if you would in Master in 2025. So do you have any tips for people who are using Canva and how do they keep it organized?

Oh yeah, I, I've actually considered creating a little mini course on organizing Canvas. So it's funny that you brought that up. I work in Canva almost every day. It's, that's my procrastination nation is living in Canva. I love, I love everything about it. I love designing and so I guess my, my, if I had to say one piece of advice, it would be to have a naming system of sorts. And it could be just as simple as you deciding right now. Anything that you work on has letters or numbers attached to it. So if you have a program or, you know, like a guide that I have, that's called the Time Mastery Guide tmg. So anything that I create has that in front of it. So even if you don't file it, you can search TMG and it'll bring it up. So if you're, you know, if you're not gonna file things or you don't want to spend time on creating files, even if you just name whatever it is that you're working on, having some sort of acronym for it or some sort of number that automatically says that's what it is, you'll be able to find it without hassle. And so just making sure to name things and then also having a folder system is going to streamline things and help you as well.

I like that. And we have implemented a folder system, so I'm hoping that that's going to help us going forward there. Melinda, any last minute tips for the audience? I.

Well, I have a lot, but to.

To keep it left.

Well, so one thing, and I was thinking about this.

So the.

This is my favorite analogy, and it came from a friend of mine. And ever since I heard it, I use it all the time. And it's to help with when everything's a priority, when you're overwhelmed, when you feel like you don't have time to do all the things, the statement is not everything is a glass ball. And so if you think of yourself as juggling all of the things that you have to do, not all of those balls that you're juggling are glass. Not all of them are going to break if you don't do them. And so thinking about your tasks, whether it's today or this week or you're just in complete disaster overwhelm with, you know, all of the things kind of thinking about, okay, all of these things I have to do, are they really glass? And you know, for you, today it was that workshop. That workshop was your glass ball. And you know, maybe you have some links that you need to fix on a landing page because you know that people are going to go to it after that workshop and you know they're going to click on it tomorrow and they need to know, but that doing the workshop was glass. And so if you think about that, you can kind of prioritize what really needs to get done. And when the other ones can get done. So that's my favorite analogy of trying to sort through all of the mess and stress and narrowing it down to what you really need to get done. And that's if, you know, if you don't have anything in place and you're trying to figure it out, that can be really, really helpful.

I love that. And I gotta. I gotta remember that. What's my last ball for the day?

Yeah. Yeah. Because if you think about it, if you drop a plastic ball, it's not gonna break, right? Like your Christmas ornaments or your holiday tree ornaments. If you break the not or you drop the non breakable ones, they don't crash. But if you drop the, you know, fancy ones from that were, you know, given from your mother and they crash, then you don't want that to happen. So that's the important one.

So, Melinda, can you let folks know where they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.

Yes. So my. My social is at Orderly Entrepreneur and my website is theorderlyentrepreneur.com and the freebie that I have is the Time Mastery Guide. And it is both a guide and a workbook that walks you through six different time saving strategies that you can use to help close that gap of all of that time that we talked about at the beginning.

You know, that 21.5 hours. So I definitely want to close that gap for sure. So. But Melinda, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all of your wonderful knowledge with us.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.