Get More Done with Google Calendar: Business planning for solopreneurs

One of the biggest questions that I get asked and then I end up helping my clients with is how do you get so much done and how do you organize your day to do it all? Well I time block and I use Google Calendar. These are my one two punch to really staying productive every single day in my business. And I want to walk you through the process that I do to set up my Google Calendar and how this giant post it note fits into it all. Hey there, my name is Trina. If you are brand new to my channel, I'm here to help you grow to six figures and be beyond in your online business. It doesn't matter if you're a course creator, content creator or service provider, I'm here to help you create a system to scale your business to six figures and beyond. Now if you are going to scale your business to six figures and beyond, you're probably juggling a lot of things on your to do list. I've absolutely been there. Like I said earlier, I live and die by my Google Calendar. So I want to show you how I use my Google Calendar and then more importantly how you can color customize your Google Calendar. Because I know you may be thinking Trina, I want to do Google Calendar but how do I customize the colors to make it look on brand? I got you in this video one of the most important things you need to do before you get into Google Calendar is figuring out what you're going to be working on. Now I have an entire 90 day planning system if you would like me to share that process with you. But in the comments below 90 day video and in that process is how I break down what exact projects I'm going to be working on and when I'm going to be working on them. I start out with a post it like this so that I can easily see does this project fit in this month or do I have too many projects and do I need to easily move it a month or move it two months? And by understanding how many projects I have on my calendar each month will allow me to know is this realistic or there are too many post its over here or do I need to move things or take things off of my plan? Then once I have my plan it's time to get into Google Calendar. Now I do want to talk about Google Calendar here real quick and why it's important to get digital. I love a good planner. In fact I use Full Focus planner as well. But when you are juggling phone calls, you're moving phone calls away, you're Doing coaching calls, you've got dentist appointments, you've got kids. You really, you really need to get electronic here because it's going to be hard for you to share your calendar not only with your significant other, but, but as you build to six figures and beyond, you're going to need to be able to share your calendar with a team too. Plus, nobody can book a call with you on a full focus or any type of paper planner. So let's just focus on Google Calendar for right now. I want to first show you an example of how I set up my Google calendar and I use one color predominantly. I am going to show you how to color code it. I may have switched over to this color code example that I'm going to show you, but the concepts are the same. It just takes a little bit more extra work to color code. So this is what my calendar looks like. You can see this is the 9th of January, a real life calendar. I have my entire workday time blocked. All right, this is really important. I know it seems weird to account for every single minute in your day, but this is going to be life changing because as you start to understand the time you actually have to work in your business versus on your business and you add time for lunch and you add time for calls. You see how important this gets. So what I'm sharing with you here is basically how my day normally starts. My children are usually on the school bus, usually by 10 after 8. And so going into 2023, specifically I'm focusing on self care and the one thing that I want to do more of is meditation. So what I have decided the best way for me to do this block 15 minutes as soon as I come into my office to do that meditation. So at 8:15 when I'm sitting here in my desk, I am going to turn on my meditation app and do that. Then for the next 45 minutes I have a workday startup routine. And if you follow the full focus planner, there's a process in here for your workday startup routine. And what that is for me is basically skimming through emails and deleting any that I don't need to respond to, checking, scanning slack to see if any of my team members had questions and just kind of doing those administrative things. I like to keep my morning startup routine as short as possible because I need to get to the part of the day that's really going to utilize my brain and that is this focus time. This is how you're going to get projects done in your business, is finding Two hours every single day. Try to make it the same time every single day of the week to do focus work. Now I learned this process from my coach, Julie Chanel and the way she talks about it is this is the time that you need full brain focus on a project. So for me that would be, you know, writing a sales page. That's also for me recording YouTube videos. Right. I can't be distracted. This can also be client time when you need to be working on client work that needs your full attention. That's what this focus time can be. And it's best to pick a time of the day when your brain is most focused functioning. I know for me, afternoon slump is real and I cannot get things done in the afternoon. My best brain power is in the morning. So that's what I'm going to focus on, getting the most done that I can, the hardest things done when I can. Then we move down here and 100% block time for lunch. If you want to actually have a lunch and I recommend you do so every single day at 11:30, that's when I wrap up my focus time and I go get my lunch so that you actually eat your lunch. Then in, in the afternoons I try to theme my days. Now on Mondays, those are my team afternoons. These are my team days. So we have team calls. This is where I'm also focusing on team performance appraisals. Anything team related happens on a Monday afternoon. Team admin stuff, right. Monday is very team focused. Now if you don't have a team, you could theme this day as metrics review. Maybe you dedicate your time in the afternoon to look at specific metrics that are important for growing your business. Like email growth, email open rate, sales page views, abandoned cars. Right. Looking at those metrics that really matter to see how you are improving them or how you're going to improve them. You'll see every single morning for me is pretty much the same. Look, I love a routine. I love to know what I'm doing. I like to come in, do it and get rolling. The thing that does change in the afternoon is you will see these different colors are for things outside of the Trina Little business. So every single Tuesday I have a 10k on replay coaching call that happens after my focus time. Right. I also have coaching that I am a coachee in that is happening during this time as well. So what I have done is my afternoons from 12 to 3 are basically open for calls. Now these are open for calls for a lot of reasons, whether they're open for me to participate in calls, me to take one on one calls with clients, me to do podcast interviews. This is just open space, open for calls. And January for me is a little bit of a different month because we are doing daily accountability in my coaching program 10k on replay. So it's not what my typical calendar will look like. But on Wednesdays and Thursdays it is purely focused on opening space for people to book calls with me. As far as Tuesdays and Fridays I want to give myself some space. This is a new way that I am approaching my Google calendar. I've used it similar to this but I wanted to shift my schedule because I wanted to have more breathing room. I've been so tired of having so much to do that I'm literally doing everything from start of my day to end of my day. So what I try to incorporate it is some breathing room. So on Tuesdays in the afternoon, if I want to focus on something inside my business I can. If I want to focus on learning or going through a program I can. If I want to take calls I can. But every Wednesday and Thursday you'll see I have slots available for people to book calls with me and then Friday afternoons for me as well are going to be catch up days. Anything that doesn't get done in this focus time will be dropped into Friday. This is also going to be some probably administration duties as well. Cleaning out my inbox. I really want to get into a system of organizing my Google Drive and cleaning my hard drive off and so I really wanted to leave Friday is space to do some of that admin stuff or again have more space in my calendar. And I do have a very hard stop. I've got to get kids off the school bus so I like to have 30 minutes of a work day shutdown routine. Again something I learned in full Focus Planner. This starts at 3 o' clock every single day and I have certain things that I do during that kind of powering down time in my business where I can walk away from this office by 3:30 and not worry about it. So finishing checking on those emails, checking on my team in Slack and just perusing through any Instagram DMS that I may have gotten to get back to. Now let's look at how I made this color coded for my brand. You can see I've got the pink and I've got the blue and the orange. This does take a little bit of work to do if you are interested in doing it. The other way that I did it is I literally just put Every everything under my Trina little calendar. All right? Otherwise you have to make a calendar for every single part of your day. So you'll see focus Time is a calendar. So you create a new calendar by going to this plus right here. You go to create new. Come up here, whatever that time block is going to be for you added here. So maybe it is admin time. Create your calendar. You're going to come back to your settings. Now, let's say I'm going to add my admin time on Fridays from 12 to 2. So what I'm going to do is admin time. You can go to more options right here. You're going to select from the calendar admin time. You're going to hit save over to the admin time calendar. Hit these three little dots, go down here into the plus, add your hex code, right? Your hex code is in there. Save. And now you have it color coded. Now this can be helpful as you start to add your family's calendar in. So let's say you want to add that create new type in family calendar create. And let's say you want to make this really stand out because you're going to share this with your significant other and you're going to be able to see your whole family's calendar here. You'll come here in a family calendar. We can make it like a bright, super bright yellow. We'll save it. We'll just say, you know, don't Nora dentist come in here to more options. We can then change it here as well into family calendar save and boom, right there. And you can take all these calendars away if you want to just get specific timing. So again, if we just look at family as you start to add, you know, gymnastics and soccer and birthday parties and dentist appointments, you can share this calendar by coming in here settings and sharings and add your significant other to this so they can see it as well and then just become super easy to see in addition to everything that you have going on that really stands out. Now, the other way that I did it with blue is I just did one calendar in my Trina little calendar. That's how it was all blue. And it makes it a little bit less time to create. But you can color code it more this way. So I may stick with this way. I do like the way it looks. It just gets to be a little bit of a pain in the butt to create. Now thinking about doing a continuing series here in Google Calendar in Time blocking. If you want to see more about how I use this calendar, how I figure out what I work on during my focus time, how I theme my days. Post in the comments below. More Google please. And I'll continue to pump these out because I think this is so important that so many entrepreneurs Ms. Is a really strategic way to organize their time so that they are more productive now. I also had some major learnings in my business in 2020. Watch the video that's on your screen right now because I'm really sharing some mistakes I've made in 2020 and what I'm planning to do differently in 2023. Trust me, you want to hear this.