In this solo coaching talk, Kelly Alhooie explains her "Bucket Method" for reclaiming happiness and energy by structuring her calendar around four core buckets: personal time, family, business, and fitness. She uses the Pelvibiz Planner to first block out non‑negotiable, high‑priority periods—such as a personal retreat every 6–8 weeks, scheduled date nights, and a fixed morning gym slot—ensuring these essential activities are protected before any other commitments. Once these hard blocks are in place, she integrates external requests (e.g., client needs) around the already‑secured time, preventing the calendar from being hijacked by work and avoiding burnout. Alhooie emphasizes that this hierarchy preserves mental clarity, maintains energy for serving others, and averts the negative outcomes of neglecting health, relationships, or self‑care.
Chapters
So how I do this is I use Pelvibiz Planner to create different buckets. Now imagine this, I want you guys to imagine this, okay? And I believe whatever's most important to me first, that's the thing that will be priority. So I have different buckets. So imagine you have a bucket of family, imagine you have a bucket for personal time, imagine you have a bucket for business, and imagine you have a bucket for fitness. Those are kind of my tiers or my buckets. Okay. So then what I do is I first go to my calendar and I put where I want to take my personal time. That is my number one priority is where is my personal time going? And typically every 6 to 8 weeks I block out a whole week and I just take off and I don't think about anything except for like where I want things to go. That's it. And that right there is so impactful because it gives me clarity, because I'm not in like the stressful state. I'm in a relaxing mode and my brain can process of where I see things going and what needs to happen. And then I come back with such a clear head and it feels so good because it's just so an alliance of what I feel the next step should be. I also block out for family time, or if you don't, you know, it's just me and my husband and my dog. So we block out date nights. Okay, well, this is when we're going to go out for a date night. Okay, great. That's important. That's very, very important. I block out every single morning when I'm going to the gym so that no one can take that time at 6:30 in the morning. I am at the gym. No one can take that time. Okay, I block out when I'm going to do business stuff. It's going to be between this time and this time. Now you have these hard blocks. However, it's also going to be integrated. So I put that on the calendar first, what I believe is most important. Then after that, I then will integrate things that need to be had from other people. So let's say I don't know, someone named Sally in my program needs me to help them with a training or something like that. Okay, great. Well, now I look at my schedule because I've taken care of things that are already in alliance with me. So now I'm already happy and fulfilled. Now I can put Sally on my schedule without it interrupting my flow or my energy or me becoming pissed off about it because I now have taken care of all the things that align in my life so that I have energy to give to my people. Because when you don't have energy to give to your people, you're going to hate what you do. You're going to hate it. I don't care how obsessed you are right now with it. You will hate it because that thing will start to creep in even more and more and more onto that calendar. And you'll be like, Oh my God, I completely lost myself because I have given my arm, my heart, my toe to the business and I hate myself now. Oh, and by the way, I have this disease because I now neglected my health. Or, oh, by the way, my child's not doing well because I wasn't able to give them the attention that they needed. Like, you don't want to be there.
