You Need This Schedule for SUCCESS | Achieve More in 11 Minutes

If you're curious about my to-do lists, my weekly schedule, and my monthly goals, I'm going to share them with you today on this video. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe in entrepreneurs, and I recently got a great question from one of my newsletter subscribers—love you guys—Dion, who is asking about my schedule and routine. Dion wrote in to say, "Hi Evan, thank you for your recent emails and for your inspirational videos, which I have now started to implement into my daily routine." Awesome! "This brings me to a question relating to routine and how you organize your day. Would love to know what your to-do list looks like, your weekly schedule, your monthly goals, and beyond. I think it would help a lot of people like myself plan their day and achieve their goals in a workable format if you were to share how you plan. Hope that makes sense, Dion. So this is a great question. Let's start with the to-do lists. So with my to-do lists, I use two systems, tools. One is my email and one is Evernote. Email I'll use for email, obviously. When somebody emails me something and I I need to review it, I'll usually give it a star. I use Gmail, you can star it, and then I'll come back to it on Monday, will be my time. I have a chunk of time set to be able to manage those tasks. I don't have a set time of the day where I do email from my general inbox, and so I'm doing email typically from my tablet when I'm waiting in line or I'm outside or whatever. When I have downtime, traveling, that's when I'll check my email. And it's not always conducive to reviewing documents and doing kind of the bigger projects, And so I set aside a specific time for that, and I'll just start when I know I have to come back to it. I'll also use email for the videos. So in my morning schedule, I'm checking my YouTube channel, looking at the comments that you guys have, and if I promise somebody I'm gonna make them a video, often I'll say, "Hey, this is a great question, I'll make a video reply for you," then I will send myself an email and copy and paste that in, and then on Wednesday, which is video day, I'll look at all those emails and start making videos to answer those questions. For everything else in terms of to-do lists, I use Evernote, and that's where it's not reactionary, right? The other ones were reactionary, where I'm getting an email or I'm getting a comment. Here is more purposeful planning, where I'm making a list of things I need to do, and I love Evernote for that. It's easy to update, and I have access to it on my phone, tablet, computer, laptop, everything. And what I'll do is I'll just make different folders for each of the main things that I'm working on. And so I have in my weekly schedule set times to do set projects, and when it's time for that project to open up, I'll go to my Evernote folder and see all the things that I have to do. I usually have a to-do list at the top in each folder of the kind of priority things I need to get done, and then ideas. Below, right? If I have an idea for something, I'll just add it to that Evernote file so I'm not, you know, staying awake late at night trying to remember and hope I don't forget it for the next day. But it may not be a priority, like I gotta get working on this right now. So when I'm starting up whatever task, I'll load the Evernote file, see what's most important, and if I finish it, then I can start working on the other ideas that I came up with. The next question was about my weekly schedule. So my mornings usually start the same way. I will wake up, I'll have my lentils, I will write down 3 things I'm grateful for. I will check my YouTube comments and my social media comments. I will also check my email folder from my VIPs, which will be my family, my staff, and the people in my movement coaching program, and get back to those people pretty quickly. Then everything else is different depending on the day. And I'm a huge believer in chunking similar tasks together and not being bombarded and being super reactionary. I believe in really trying to be proactive in scheduling your week to get what you want to get done, done. So Monday is my get stuff done for the weekday, and that usually starts with me looking at all of the things that I starred during the week, right? All those emails that I put a star attached to, I'll look through those and get those done. So reviewing documents, getting back to emails. I will plan out the Facebook campaigns and the Twitter campaigns for the week. My team will have put together pictures and things for me to approve. I don't actually design anything, but it's more, you know, anything going out has my name on it, so I want to make sure that it's been approved and I like it. So I'll look at all the stuff that they've sent me, and just, it's admin day, you know, it's get all the stuff done for the week day. And so I've divided my day into 3 chunks. The first chunk is just doing that stuff. The second chunk is thinking about my authors. I have a website where authors can contribute content, and so I'll spend in each chunk an hour and a half. And that second chunk, I'm worried about my website and SEO stuff and author feature requests and any issues that I need to deal with around that, looking at the new backend that we're working on and so on. And then the last chunk on that Monday is gonna be about my Zouk ZugaGuides and expanding them and adding more to them and promoting them and anything related to the ZugaGuides happens at that time. So why it's great is because, you know, people, my team might email me and say, hey, here's something new for the author backend, or here's something new for the ZugaGuides that I want you to check out. And if I just responded to it right then, quickly, right away, it's great, I guess, for my team that they have a fast answer, but it kills my time and productivity because now I'm just being reactionary to what they're sending me. So instead, I save it, you know, to the folder and know that, hey, on Monday I have time for this, I'm gonna look at it, and I'm gonna get back to you. And so that frees up the rest of my week to do other things. Tuesday is my writing and researching day. So I'm writing the book, that could be where I'm spending my time researching, writing for the book. Now I'm spending a lot of time on my YouTube videos and researching the famous entrepreneurs and finding clips. And now that I have a a system for that. I'm gonna try to involve my team more into it because it's super taxing. It takes me the whole day Tuesday to find all that information to make the videos, and I'm hoping that that can be now delegated and I can go back to writing my book. So anything related to research or writing, or if I'm asked to write something for an article or a guest post somewhere, that'll all fall under my Tuesday category, and I book off the whole day to be able to free up my time to to do that. Wednesday's video day. So today's Wednesday. I don't know when the video's going live, but today actually is Wednesday. And I have the mindset now where, hey, I gotta be enthusiastic, I gotta be exciting. Monday, Tuesday might be the, I don't need to talk to anybody, I can just sit there and work. And now Wednesday's more extroverted self and answering your questions. And I'll make 13 videos a week typically. And record them and send them off to my editor Christina to put together for you. Thursday is my public-facing day. That's when all the meetings happen. So meetings, phone calls, Google+ Hangouts, media, corporate initiatives, things that I'm working on where I need to talk to somebody else that's outside my company that's not an email happens on Thursday. So I try to line up back-to-back meetings. If I'm meeting somebody, it's usually at a local Whole Foods cafe, and then I line up back-to-back calls and hangouts. I find with the meetings, I give people a 2-hour window on a Thursday, so I don't know exactly what it is. I wanna say it's Thursday from like 11 to 1 would be meetings face-to-face, and then I give them the time slot and they can either book for this week or next week or the week after. And usually, because my schedule fills up, they're looking at 3 or 4 weeks out, but it saves so much time of having to go back and forth and back and forth. Does this time, this time, this time work? And then the afternoon is going to be all phone calls and hangouts, or Skype calls or whatever. Those are all again back to back to back to back to back. There's a little bit of travel time obviously to get from Whole Foods to back here, but again it works and I enjoy it and it's my public-facing day. It's the day I have my radio show and basically anything where I am out talking to people it's for the most part on that Thursday. And then Friday there's nothing scheduled. Friday is maybe my travel day if I'm going to an event. Friday could be a project day. Friday Jason might come over and we'll work on something together. Friday is super buffer day, and I find people often pack so much in that they have zero buffer time, and you get stressed out and you don't get your stuff done. And so I find that by packing everything at the start— Monday is intense, right? Monday is everything for the week done. If I only had to work Monday, I could get everything I needed for the week done to run my business, and then that gives me the time to actually go and do other projects that I'm excited about. So I find having that buffer at the end super helpful, and sometimes I use it and sometimes I don't. It just depends on what's happening in my life and my business. And then in terms of monthly goals, I check a number of stats religiously every month when midnight hits on the first The first of every month I have an Excel file full of all these things that I track. Things like on my YouTube channel, how many views, how many subscribers. I'll check how many people are on my newsletter list. I'll check how many sales we made. I'll check how many web visitors we had to our website. And some of the data is immediately actionable and others I just keep just, just to track and know. The biggest goal I'm working on right now is I want to be the number one YouTuber at the agency that I'm at. So I'm represented by a talent agency, and they represent experts who are off, you know, delivering their expertise in all sorts of different formats. And I want to be the number one YouTuber at the agency. It was a goal I set when I first joined about a year and a half ago, and I am the number two YouTuber, and I'm like this close, this close. I've had months where I've passed and then go down and passed, and So the challenge is, you know, I'm growing. I love you guys for all the love and the comments and the traction and the sharing, but the number one person is growing too, so it's not— it's a moving target. So I want to be consistently number one, and that's my biggest goal at the moment. I find having that competition— it's a friendly competition, you know, I'm friendly with the other person— but I find having that competition kind of helps drive me a little bit more. So those are my to-do lists, my weekly schedule, the things that I look at monthly, and my goals. I'd love to know— I'd love to know from you guys what the most important tool is that you find helpful in your business. Leave it in the comments below. I want to see if I'm missing something, if there's a blind spot that I have. Your favorite tool that helps you run your business, leave in the comments below. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you like the video, you want to see more, Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and the newsletter. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.