Ed Gandia explains how to structure your workweek around your energy levels, using buffer days on Mondays and Fridays to ease into and out of work. This approach reduces stress and improves productivity for business writers and freelancers.
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. One of the things that I vowed to change when I went out on my own in 2006 was to structure my work week in a way that better match my own rhythm. I've never liked getting right into it early on a Monday morning. I did that for six years in one of my sales jobs and I hated it. That's just not me. I know that a lot of people thrive on that. They want to get right to it. Great. Not me. I need to ease into my work, not jump right in. Same thing at the end of the week. I found, and this has been a more recent thing, that I don't want to go full throttle to the very end. I do sometimes and I feel it for sure it's not good for me. I find that it sends me into the weekend with greater stress and anxiety and I don't want that. So that's why these days, my Mondays and Fridays are not typical production days because I need to ease into the week and then out of my week. Mondays are a buffer day for me. This is when I do a bunch of different things. The whole idea of a buffer day is to do the things you need to do so that your production days as are there as productive as possible that they you can ensure you can, you can focus your time and your energy and resources on doing great production work. So Mondays, this is when I plan my week. I work on the business, I catch up on loose ends and so on. I don't typically schedule calls on Mondays unless the rest of my week is going to be shorter or something's going on. And I don't work on intense projects. If I'm working on a project, it's typically more on project setup and maybe some of the early stages of the project. I reserve the intense project work for my production days which are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Fridays are a hybrid for me. This is something I continue to experiment with, that Fridays can either be a free day and that's kind of the ideal, but most often they're split between free time and buffer time. So for my buffer time on a Friday, I'll typically do my weekly recap. I'll work a little bit on the business. I'll catch up on things that I didn't get to during my production days. I'll run errands and so forth. Some of that includes production work, some Friday buffer time. I have to admit, you know, sometimes it's that catching up I didn't get to this particular task or whatever. So that's the catch up day. But here again, the whole idea is nothing too intense. At least that's my goal. I don't want a Friday to be like a typical production day. For my free time on a Friday, the idea is to do something fun that can include a longer workout at the gym. I have a meeting with some friends every Friday morning, so I take my time there. Some time with friends and family, maybe a hike or something active outdoors. Okay, all that. Definitely love Fridays for that. Now, is this a perfect model? Far from it. I've spent too many buffer days on production work and delayed time sensitive projects have a way I found to seep into what's supposed to be some free time on a Friday morning, let's say. But the key is I'm intentional about this. I'm intentional about how I bucketize my week and how I theme my days. And I make a true effort to set these boundaries. When it doesn't work out, I try to learn from my mistakes. Sometimes it takes me making a mistake 12 times or so before I finally admit defeat and make a real effort to correct it. Yet even when it doesn't go perfectly, I still revel in the fact that I'm mostly easing into the week and easing out of it. Almost always I can at least match some of my work to the energy and rhythm of my life. My weeks are a million times better structure than they were when I worked for someone else. And I'm just grateful that I get to set the direction and pace, not someone else. So the question today is, look, what's your rhythm? And how are you organizing your weekly and daily structure to match that rhythm? It's worth taking some time to think about this and making the tweaks or changes you need to make to better align these two. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode and just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book Earn More in Less Time the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com or you will also find the detail show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.
