Productive Efficiency - What's a Day in the Life of Evan like? Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Wally, who is asking, how do I stay so productive and what does a typical day in my life look like? So Wally, thanks for the question. This is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And I used to be a crazy workaholic, working, you know, all hours of the day. And as soon as I got married and had a kid, life starts to change, and you want to be able to spend more time at home and spend more time with your family. So right now, my main schedule, I try to work from Monday to Thursday. So most of my work is done from Monday to Thursday, and then from 1 o'clock in the afternoon to 6 o'clock at night. So I'll work 5 hours a day, 4 days a week for the most part. And when I'm doing this, what I try to do is create 1.5-hour chunks of time. And so what I mean by this is every day I'll divide my day into 3 main chunks with 15-minute breaks in between. So one, one might be email, one might be working on projects, and I'll go through a couple later on in the video. But I find I'm most productive when I can work in a 90-minute chunk and get as much done as I can in that 90 minutes, and then take a complete break, uh, 15 minutes, go outside, check the mail, breathe in some fresh air, relax, clear my head, come back and do something completely different. So I only check email once a day. I don't answer the phone unless it's scheduled calls. Most people don't even have my phone number, but the Those who do, I don't even answer it unless it's a scheduled call. So I try to keep my day free from as much distractions as possible. So not answering the phone is one big thing. The other is no email. So I'll only do email once a day. And every day I have a chunk of time, an hour and a half that I spend on email, and it makes sure that I can spend the rest of my time being super productive. So if you're only working 5 hours a day, you don't have a lot of time to get a lot of stuff done. So you have to be super productive in that time that you do spend. So my email is an hour and a half of that, and if I don't answer everybody within that hour and a half, then it goes to the next day's email. Um, so I find that to be super helpful for me. I used to be an email freak and answering all the time, and I found that it prevented me from being able to do some real work. So typically, uh, how my week will work right now, I guess. On Monday, again, I'll get in the office at 1:00, and I'll usually check email. And then in the afternoon, I'll have 2 chunks of time. So, you know, I'll just say chunk and chunk. What I'll do here is task for the week. So this could be writing blog posts, doing my Facebook stuff for the week. I'll try to schedule as much stuff as possible in advance. So like Facebook posts, I might plan out the entire week on Monday so that it's all ready, set to go. My YouTube videos, I'll have already them, they'll be all edited, and then on Monday I'll set them up for the whole week to go out. So as much as possible, if you find yourself doing repetitive tasks, you either want to chunk them up together so you're more productive doing those tasks, you do them all at once and then schedule them out. Or also look for ways to automate things, delegate things, or maybe even eliminate things. So as I've grown my business, we brought on a team of people who help me with a whole bunch of different things in my business. So this could be different tasks, and then I also leave some time for what I call CEO time. And these are important tasks that I use to grow my business that is not working on my business— in my business, but more working on my business. So it could be hiring new staff, working on a new project, testing out something new that I want to work on for the website or my business, um, things that are, will grow the business that aren't kind of admin, keep me tied into the kind of day-to-day with my company. So that's Monday. Monday is always a super busy day. I don't schedule any calls or anything else on Monday because I'm so busy creating everything that I need to do basically for the entire week. Anything that has to get done for the week basically gets done on Monday and then I'm done. So that's Monday. On Tuesday, I'll also get in at 1 o'clock and I'll check my email, and then that's it for the day. The rest of the day, I still have my two other chunks, and both of these are just CEO time. And this just gives me a chance to work on big projects that sometimes things that sometimes take a lot of time. So if I'm writing, you know, a book for example, or creating new content that I want to expand my business, or I need to do interviews, something that is really going to help grow my business, that'll be here. So I found that having an entire day to be able to focus on that really helps. So I'll be done my email at 2:30 and then have a 15-minute break, and then 2:45 to 6 o'clock with a little break in between, but basically I'm working on all CEO business growth stuff. And you'll find that your growth can really take off the more you're working on your business versus in. So setting up systems, setting up processes, hiring new people, other plans that I have to grow my business, testing things out, that's all part of my CEO time. So Tuesdays are a lot of fun. I've gotten all my work for the week out of the way on Monday, and I still have my email to to handle on Tuesday. I still check the once a day, but then I have the rest of the day to be able to do stuff to grow my business. Wednesday is a touch different. Wednesday I'll usually get in at 10:00 and I'll start doing my videos. So these videos, it's a Wednesday morning, I'm doing the videos. I used to do them at 1 o'clock, but I found that the light wasn't enough coming in. I got big windows here at my office, but I get more morning sunshine than afternoon sunshine. So I found the video quality was better when I was filming in the morning. So I'll come in and start doing my videos right away, and then after, I'll take a break. So do that, do a break, and I'll go with my wife, and we usually go to Starbucks and Chapters. Chapters is a bookstore here, so like Barnes Noble. And we'll just relax and plan our lives when my son is at school. We might read things that we want to read or talk about what we want to work on. It's just kind of relaxed time for the two of us. And then I'll get back in the afternoon. Afternoon. And here I'll usually do more videos. Um, but these will be the tutorial type. So sometimes people ask me to do videos and I'll explain it using my computer instead of being actually on camera, or I'll walk through tutorials of how I use certain software tools that I think might help you guys as entrepreneurs. So that'll be afternoon, and then I'll also do another chunk of email. So I still have the 3 chunks. One is the 10-minute, uh, sorry, the 10 o'clock video, the afternoon videos, and the emails. So again, I try to keep everything to 3. Main chunks of work every day, and then that kind of keeps me invigorated, keeps me going, gives me some breaks in between. And every day has its own day that I— new tasks that I have each day, and it kind of keeps me excited to keep going. So Wednesday's a lot of fun. I know after our— you know, I have my email still every day, but the rest of the day is all fun stuff, answering questions like yours and doing other video tutorials. So Wednesday's a lot of fun. And then on Thursday, Thursday would be my meeting day and then a little bit more CEO time. So Thursday, again, I'll come back to the 1 o'clock. I'll come in, I'll do email, and then for the 2 chunks, I'll do meetings and either more meetings or CEO time again. So I book all my meetings on Thursdays. Thursday is after I've done my email and I'll either do phone calls, we'll do kind of schedule them all back to back, or if somebody's coming to meet me, we'll meet at the Starbucks in my building. I have a Starbucks on the ground floor and I'll come and have meetings there and we'll be back to back to back. So everybody gets up to an hour of time and that's, that's what'll happen. So we'll meet, we'll have a meeting, have another meeting, have another meeting, or do phone calls in between. So I book everything for Thursday. It just kind of gets me in the space of meeting people, and I find it's less mental shifting, so it's easier to get stuff done. Where if I had a meeting on Tuesday and a meeting Wednesday and a meeting Thursday, then every time I gotta think, okay, what am I gonna do at this meeting? What are we talking about? Just get in the mindset of getting ready to meet people instead of working on projects. And I find if I can chunk all that into one day, it makes it a lot easier for me to kinda get it all done and do it all at once. So depending on how many meetings or phone calls I have, the second chunk might be CEO time again to work on projects or could just be meetings. When I finish the day on Thursday, I usually put an autoresponder on my email saying that I'm away until Monday afternoon, where I'll get back to them, whoever emails me. So that's my typical day, my typical week, I guess, in the life of my Monday to Thursday. Sometimes I, you know, I still experiment with this, with this plan. I would usually much rather do mornings than afternoons, but because of my family situation, my wife teaches salsa, so she's always available in the mornings instead of at night where she's teaching at night, and my son goes to school in the afternoon, and right now he's available in the morning, so we have mornings together, so we try to keep to that. But in general, what I would love to do is have my mornings to work on big projects and then check email in the afternoon. The one time where I'll kind of get an exception to this is if I'm really working on something and finding a lot of momentum, then I want to keep it going. So you don't want to kill your project just because your 1.5 hours is up if you find that you're really getting a lot of good momentum from it and you're really in the flow. So you find you're in a state of flow, you're making a lot of good progress, I'll just keep blasting through it. It doesn't happen that often though, and you don't want to fool yourself, right? You don't want to say, Oh, it's 2:30 and my 1.5 hours of email is up, but I'm really feeling the email, this is awesome, right? You don't wanna make an excuse and, you know, keep going on the email instead of doing the more important stuff for your business. So it doesn't happen that often, but when it does, you try to, you wanna work with the momentum that you have. So that's pretty much it. You know, I'll still do some reading of material, blogs that I like on the weekend and on Friday, but for the most part, all my work gets done Monday to Thursday, 1 to 6, and that's right now how I structure it out. So, uh, Wally, I hope that helps. Uh, if you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It helps me know you like them and we'll make more just like it. And, um, if you have some comments, I'd love to hear them below. I'd love to hear how your schedule looks. And if you have any suggestions as well, please leave them in the comments below. So thank you for watching and stay tuned for the next episode.