#097 - How can I organize my time and resources and stay focused?

I received a question that I thought would be helpful for you all and it's how can I organize my time and resources so that I can stay focused? Now this is an issue, I think, for all of us, especially right now. We have so much information and content and distractions bombarding us every day. My name is Shelley Hitz. I'm the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com and I have taught a lot of different trainings and have podcasts and blog posts all about productivity. And I'm going to give you my top three ideas that just came to my head as I was seeing your question. Number one way to really organize your time and stay more focused is to use what's called the Pomodoro technique. You may already be using this, but if not, I highly recommend that you try it. So the pomodoro is where you work for for a chunk of time undistracted on one task and then you take a break for a short period of time and then you come back and you work again. So typically it's 25 minutes of work undistracted one task. So you're putting those blinders on, you're telling your brain, you're giving your brain a deadline, you're saying you're only going to do this for 25 minutes, sit down and do that task, then give yourself a five minute break. Now we do group writing sessions all the time in Christian Book Academy. We we have our productivity parties which are group writing and working sessions and they're an hour. So we typically will work for 50 minutes and then take a 10 minute break. We also have our two day virtual writing retreats, Friday and Saturday, usually the last weekend of the month. And again we use the pomodoro method. But we have found that for most writers, 50 minutes, 5o50 minutes of work and then 10 minutes of a break tends to work better because once you start to get into the flow, you just want to keep going. And so unless you have ADHD or something else, I typically recommend doing the 50 minute chunk of time and then take a 10 minute break. It's also good for your body. My degree is in physical therapy and I had specialized in ergonomics and work related injuries. And I just know even from personal experience, when I resigned my physical therapy job and I started working online and on a computer all day, I ended up getting an injury in my arms and my neck. And so just having that 10 minute break or that five minute break, it can really help your body too physically. But it then it restarts things there. It's almost like a reboot. Take a break and don't just scroll social media during your break, but walk around, pet your dog, get a glass of water, stretch, do some things and you'll find that you have much better focus and that you're getting a lot more done. And if you want to do it with a community of kingdom writers, we'd love to have you inside Christian Book Academy. Like I said, we have several opportunities for you to join us in this Pomodoro technique. So number one is the pomodoro. Number two is having themed days. So I don't know what your work schedule is. I don't know if you have another job or if this is your full time job. Typically most of you in my audience, you have some sort of other job responsibilities and this is more of a side thing for you, the writing, publishing and marketing. But whether it's a full time thing or a side thing, I still recommend considering themed days. So what do I mean by this? Well, you could have one day a week, let's say Mondays, that you decide you're going to work on your marketing and you write your emails to your email list, you schedule them out, you can schedule blog posts, you can schedule social media, you can schedule podcasts, YouTube videos. I mean all the things you can schedule, you can typically do most things. Unless you're doing like a live zoom call or a live webinar or a Facebook live or something that has to be live. You could do all of those things in one day. And I often call this batching too. So like you batch similar tasks together. So instead of doing a little bit of marketing on Monday, a little bit on Wednesday, a little bit on Friday, your brain gets into marketing mode and let's say you, you decide it's going to be Mondays and then you just get in the flow and you tend to be more productive, you tend to be more focused and get more done. For me, I do this full time now and so what I have found has worked for me with theme. Todays is Mondays is like my admin day. So that's anything related to like little admin tasks of technology or bookkeeping or you know, looking at my stats or you know, just all the little things that can pile up, I put those into the bucket on Monday. Tuesdays and Wednesdays tend to be my deep work days. So Tuesdays I tend to focus a little more on attract strategies. So if you haven't yet, I have a video. If you haven't watched it yet. I have a video on the five step marketing plan and attract is the first step. So I tend to work on attract things on Tuesdays and then on Wednesdays I tend to work more on the other steps of the marketing plan and specifically the invite stage where I'm inviting people to join Christian Book Academy to purchase my book. You know, things like that. But also the engage and the nurture phase. Thursdays is or Wednesdays is when I tend to record the my podcast for my nurture content. So I have these theme days and then Thursdays is my live day. So like right now, today is a Thursday and I'm recording this video for you. And then I have later on today I'm hosting a live workshop for Christian Book Academy. We have our war room prayer meetings for Christian Book Academy on Thursdays. Um, the exception to that is we do a virtual writing retreat kickoff CJ and I do on Friday mornings. But for the most part I try to keep things on Thursdays that's gonna be live. That way I can get in the mode, I can get my hair and makeup done and I can just stay focused. So consider themed days. So number one was try the pomodoro method or technique. Number two, consider themed days. And number three, work in sprints. So it doesn't mean that you have to be doing something all the time, but what I found works well is to have a specific time. Let's say it's one month, you're really going to work on your blog and maybe you. Right. And you get things scheduled for months in advance, maybe even the whole year, but you're really focusing on that for this month. Or maybe you have a week that you're really going to have a sprint, that you're going to work on one particular thing related to your book. So sprints can be helpful too. And every month in Christian Book Academy we have what's called our 15 minute writing challenge. It's kind of like a little sprint. We encourage our members just to write or work on something for related to marketing for 15 minutes a day. And everyone loves it, gets a lot done. And we're also going to be trying something new coming up in the next couple months called Take Action Weeks, where we have a week where we encourage you to take action in a certain marketing task and if you complete it in that week, there's some prizes, there's some benefits, and some, you know, different ways that we want to promote you. But it's a sprint. It's just getting in the mindset. Of like, okay, I'm going to do this for this amount of time. It's kind of like the Pomodoro where you're giving your brain a deadline. You're saying, this is going to be my focus for this week or for this month, and then you do it. Now, I wouldn't do too many sprints. Like, we're only going to maybe do our take Action weeks once a quarter because you don't want to overdo something like that because then it grows to not be as effective. So those are just a few ideas that I think you could implement right away to find some greater focus to organize your time. And as far as resources go, we have a great video inside Christian Book Academy and it's in our tech library about how I organize the folders and files on my computer. And our members have really enjoyed that, so you can definitely check that out. We'd love for you to join us@christianbookacademy.com but I hope that you found this helpful again as a recap. Number one, try Pomodoro technique. Number two, theme days and number three, try working in sprints again. My name is Shelly Hitz, the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy. Com.