#305: Finding your weekly workflow

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries, this episode is much shorter than usual rather than my typical 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you. This is part of the audio Insights I publish for my private coaching clients every weekday and I thought you'd find it helpful. So here we go. Hope you enjoy it. I started hating Mondays sometime in elementary school. So much so that I'd often get depressed Sunday afternoons as it dawned on me that a new school week was about to start. Yes, I hated school. But it wasn't just school that I hated. The disdain for Mondays carried on into my first, believe it or not, 20 years in the workforce. Could I blame it on work of any kind? Well, maybe, but that couldn't be the full story. I liked work. I just, you know, even I liked the work that I was doing. But a few years ago, I found not only the cause of the Sunday afternoon depression, but also the fix to this dilemma. After much introspection and experimentation, I realized that my problem wasn't that it was just lazy and wanted to have never ending weekends. That wasn't it at all. It was all about how my week started at school. I was expected to dive right into my first class every Monday morning, just like I did every morning, every school day morning. The schedule never changed. It was the same Monday through Friday and it was the same intensity every single day. In fact, sometimes I would argue the Monday mornings were the most intense. That's when many of the tests happen and so forth. It was the same thing at work. I was expected to kind of get right into it every Monday morning, early. Often these mornings were filled with meetings, appointments, expectations, stressed out people that had to work with because, you know, it was Monday and everyone hated Mondays. And I found it very difficult to deal with all those demands. So suddenly, after a relaxing weekend, it felt like diving right into an icy lake right after walking out of a hot tub. Yeah, really, I found it that painful. It was horrible. So I did an experiment a few years ago once I had my own business, actually several years into having my own business, because I realized and recognized that I had the power to set my own schedule, but I wasn't taking full advantage of that. So I started blocking out Monday mornings. No client work, no calls, no meetings, no client projects. What did I do instead? Well, different things. Mainly, I would look back at the week that I just passed and reflect on that. I'd reflect on the weekend. I'd then look ahead at the week in front of me and think about what I wanted to accomplish. That would turn into some planning, some reading, some journaling, that sort of thing. It was very organic. And then sometime after lunch, I felt ready to ease into some client work. Maybe one, two o' clock or so. The result was transformational. Now that might sound like a hyperbole, but I assure you that it's really not. It really was transformational. I needed that time to ease into the week and because I never had it, I felt unprepared. I felt rushed, stressed and anxious. So I learned over years to hate Mondays, which negatively impacted my Sunday afternoons, which is not a good thing. Changing my Monday routine created a very positive domino effect that made the rest of my week incredibly productive and even fun. To this day. That's how I start my week. I ease into it, then hit it hard in the middle of the week and then ease out of it into the weekend. Which is another revelation I later had. And that's a topic for another discussion. My point is this. You have to find the weekly flow that works best for you. Some people prefer to hit it hard right out of the gate and front end load their weeks, then ease out of the week starting let's say Thursday afternoon or so or Friday morning. Others prefer the opposite. They want to ease into the week and then just kind of back end load their work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Others like me, the work follows more of a bell shaped curve with most of the work in intensity on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. There's no right or wrong here. The important thing is to experiment and find the flow that's best aligned with your energy, your needs and your personality.

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