How I organize my week to stay productive as a course creator and coach

Again, I had the time in my day to focus on content creation because that is the heartbeat of my business. If I'm not creating content, I'm not getting in front of my audience, I'm not generating leads and I'm not generating sales. So I sat down and I looked at my calendar. I looked at the hours that I had available to work. Thank goodness school is back in session. So now I have a complete day from 8:30 to 3:30 to work. And I started to chunk out my day in time periods, almost like school and periods in school. So I have eight core chunks of my day. Of course, the day starts with my morning routine, but I'm going to share it with you. And it's not that complicated, but it runs from about 5:30 whenever I get up till 8:30 when the kids are officially off on their way to school. Then I roll into about 30 to 45 minutes of what I call admin check. And again, I'm going to share what I'm doing on each of these chunks here in a moment, which then rolls into two hours of my sacred time, an hour for connection and lunch break. You've got to schedule that open for calls on Tuesdays through Thursdays, a work day shutdown routine, and then my evening routine, which is everything that involves getting the kids off the bus, making dinner, running to soccer practice, throwing laundry in all of those mom things. Now you notice that I mentioned Tuesday through Thursday. Monday has a little caveat because it is the day that I meet with my team. So I am going to be sharing more about my Monday routine in just a moment. And you might be wondering, well, why do you chunk your days up like this? Well, the simple answer is routine. I love a routine. I love not being able to think about what I need to do next or what I'm doing next. I love eating the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day so I don't have to think about that. If I could find the perfect T shirt in the world that I loved, I would buy 10 of those and just wear them every day as well. But what's really important about a routine is you're going to be more productive. I'm kind coming off a summer vacation and we literally had no routine and I am struggling. Not only do I feel overwhelmed and stressed out, I just feel like I don't know what to do or where I should be going. And so when you have a routine, you know exactly what you need to be doing every hour of the day of work. You can stay focused and you're not wasting your time. Just let me scroll Instagram. Because I do notice when I'm not following my routine, guess what I'm doing? I am scrolling the gram, finding ways to procrastinate. The second reason it's important to be breaking your day up into these chunks is so you can stay focused on the same task for longer periods of time. Because again, you're going to get quicker and more productive with those tasks when you stay in that area longer. So for example, when I'm in sacred time, which I'm going to share more about here as well, I can just focus on that one thing and I'm not getting distracted looking at the gram, checking my emails, checking slack, doing all these other things. That two hours is for me to focus and basically get it done right. And then when I am in my call block, I can focus on the phone calls that I have. So taking notes, getting the videos uploaded so that they can get access to them right. It helps you be more productive than switching so many hats in a short period of time. I feel that I made it clear or broken down the real really key benefits of chunking your time up like this. I would love to hear from you. Do you do something similar like this? I believe it's called time blocking as well. Or most things you're just flying by the seat of your pants, which is totally fine. That was me my first couple years of business as well. Let me know down in the comments. Do you time block? Are you flying by the seat of your pants or are you wanting some routine in your business? Let's talk down there. So now that you can kind of see how my work week is broken down to stay stay productive and have time to create that weekly content which we are going to get back around to, let's walk through what I'm actually doing in each one of those chunks to remain productive. So I don't have anything unchecked on my to do list on Fridays. But before I can slot specific things into these eight chunks of time throughout my day, I've got to do a little bit of planning on Sunday, every single Sunday. And it's only about 15 minutes of planning since I do quarterly planning every 90 days. And that's a much lengthier process that I talk about in detail in this video right here. I already have an idea of what I am working towards, what projects that I have on my plate, what I need to actually get done each quarter, each month and each week. So on Sunday I will sit down and kind of Just brain dump all the thoughts that I have in my head for what needs to get done and then I'll use my full focus planner and start sketching out what my week is going to look like. So it has this page right here where it breaks down the days. The first thing I will do will pop in any specific appointments or any calendar events that I have and then I will look at the list of tasks that I brain dumped and see where they fit into throughout the week. I'm also looking are there specific due dates for the projects that I'm working on? And also is it a content creation week or not? Because I have what some people would call like an A and B week in my schedule where A weeks are when I'm creating content content and B weeks are when I'm working on project based tasks. So once I have my calendar mapped out in my full focus planner and I'm making sure I don't have too much in my days of the week, I will determine what are the three big rocks for that week and Full Focus has that as well. What are my three main focuses for the week? It's just a check system to make sure I am working on the things that we that are going to help me get those three big rocks done. And I'm not scattering all over the place with other things. But these are the three big projects and here are the tasks that I'm doing to get these three things done. And that just takes me about 15 minutes. And then every morning I will write out my daily big three in my full focus planner as well. Just as a reminder, this is what I'm staying focused on because of the three big goals that I have for the week. So let's roll my morning routine because I've got feelings about morning routines. I'm not a morning person nor do I believe that you need to be a morning person to be a successful business owner. That whole storyline is a load of crock. I tried waking up at 5am every day and I just was tired and even more crankier. And so what I have come to find out is I can get up between 5:30 and 6. I have that window there. But if I don't get up up and actually exercise. And by exercise I mean walk. Like if I know that I have to get out of bed and do a hiit workout or go run or do something that's sweat inducing, I'm probably not going to do it. So the way that I have found to incorporate exercise and movement into my daily life is something that I like. I walk two to three miles every morning and it's on my treadmill so that I can watch Real Housewives from the night before. And the biggest reason I'm doing this is because I know I am not going to get it done. If I wait to do it later in the day, I'm going to be tired, the kids are going to be home, laundry, dinner, all these other things are going to pile up. And so I've just got myself into a routine to get up, do my walk and be done with movement for the day. After that, I then obviously take a shower. I pretty much only do my skincare routine. Then I have, you know, my lotions and potions that I put on my face to continue to look young. And then I roll right into mom duty, right? Making lunches, making breakfast, supervising teeth brushing, getting the clothes laid out, getting them on the bus. I really make sure since I have this chunk of time from like 5:30 to 8:30 blocked as my morning routine, that nothing is scheduled here and it makes sense. But when you just have it blocked into your calendar, you see it, you don't have any problems about planning anything else during that time period. So then once the kids are on the bus, I do have a little bit of wiggle room between the time they get on the bus, if the bus is on time, and when I actually start my workday. So this just allows me to refill my coffee, maybe clean up the mess from breakfast. But my day will officially start at 8:30 and that's when I do my admin tasks. By admin tasks, I'm looking at my emails. I'm just doing a quick scroll through. Does anything need to be responded to? I'm also checking my slack for my team to see if they've had any questions to see where they're at on their projects. And I'm also taking some time to just scroll through if any coaching clients needed specific questions answered until I got to the time later in my day that I will be answering their questions. So that takes me about 30 to 45 minutes, which then rolls me into my sacred time. My sacred time is two hours every single day between 9 and 11. It's where I have full focus on specific tasks like writing a sales page, setting up funnel automations, video scripting, video recording like I am right now in my Wednesday sacred time, or even creating new content for my coaching clients. Anything that is going to take a chunk of my time, it needs my undivided, uninterrupted time. And brain focus. Now, if you don't think you have this time yet into your schedule, I would start to back into it. Because if, if you feel you're not productive throughout the week and you're not getting anything done, it may be because you're not allotting time to focus on these tasks that need to be done. So I would challenge you to start taking a look at your calendar and see if you can just block one hour every day at the same time to start working on these type of tasks and see if you could eventually back into two hours a day. Because I didn't just start here, there was a lot of moving around with calls in schedules and appointments to the point where I can now get to this, this 9 to 11 period. And I really like it because my brain is the most sharp in the morning. I also, when I am filming in my sacred time, need to do it in the morning because the sun will blast the side of my room. So I need to film in the morning. And so it will take some time to get to it. But I'm going to tell you, if you need to be more productive and you need to get more things done in your business, you need to make the time to do it then. The next part of my day is something new that I'm incorporating in here in the fall. It's connection and it's where I want to take time to work on building relationships and finding new friends. So I will use Voxer to connect with some of my business friends. I am also in different communities and forums that I will take the time from 11 to 12 while I'm eating my lunch to actively engage and connect with people in those communities. Now like I said, Tuesdays through Thursdays are the exact same schedule. So after lunch I then have a two hour chunk time for phone calls. So this is time for my one on one mastermind clients to book hot seats with me. It's my time to have one on ones with my team. It's my time to book podcasts or anything that involves zoom or the phone is during this time. And it is better for me to do calls in the morning because like I said, I need kind of like the biggest brain power the most focus in the morning when I can work best. And then I have the time open in the afternoon for phone calls. Now something that I do some quick, quick tricks here to allow this time to be as most productive as possible. I will close down my schedule for the week the Friday before. So before I log off on Friday, nobody can book any calls with me the following week. So I have a good idea on Sunday what calls are actually happening. And one doesn't just pop up on a Tuesday. And if I have extra time or nobody books a call on that particular day, I will just roll into anything that I was supposed to be working on next day. So it will allow me to get ahead of my to do list some days. But then there are also days where I'm slammed every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with phone calls. So now I mentioned how Mondays is a little bit different. So after lunch on Monday I have a team meeting call. This is usually about an hour long call. And it just allows the team to connect with each other. Since we're not in person, we have somebody in Chicago, we have the rest of the team here in Pennsylvania, but scattered through Pennsylvania. And it just allows us to connect and have that team synergy. It's also where we update on the projects that we're working on, the clients that we're working with, any questions, any issues that are popping up and for me to update kind of what is the trajectory for this week and our big projects for this week? I'm considering creating some more content here on this channel about team building and hiring if that's something that you would be interested in. What specific topics would you like me to talk about in those videos? Let me know down in the comments because this is definitely coming up in the next couple of months here on this channel. I just want to make sure I'm covering the things that you want to see because there is a lot that I could talk about when it comes to hiring and team building. Now after that team call, my time is dedicated to my mastermind clients. So what my 10 can replay clients are able to do is submit to me an audit. What this audit is, anything they want, my advice, feedback or eyes on. It could be a sales page, it could be a launch plan, it could be a content plan, it could be a course outline. But they submit it to me prior to Monday afternoon and I will do a loom video walking through my thoughts, my advice, any ideas that I have and get that to them on Monday afternoon. So I have that time block specifically to give feedback to my mastermind clients. Sometimes I'll have five of these, sometimes I'll have 20 of these. So I really need to make sure I have allotted time for that wide range of possible submissions. This part of my day is also time for me to pop into Slack and I actually do this every day in my workday. Shutdown routine. Uh, I'm looking at my mastermind clients to see what feedback or what questions they need answered. And I'm also jumping into my YouTube coaching experience Slack channel as well, which is something that we just started doing in August. And if you are interested in having a YouTube strategist and a team of YouTube coaches to to help you build a YouTube strategy that will align your videos with your offers so you will see not only more traffic to your offers, but more sales to your offers. Go to treanalittle.com forward/apply to check out what the YouTube coaching experience involves and feel free to apply to talk to myself or somebody on my team to see if this is the right fit for you. But during my shut day routine I am checking all of my Slack messages from my YouTube coaching clients and seeing where they're getting hung up, what are they stuck on, and how I can get their questions answered. The other piece of my work day shutdown routine, which is after my open to cause time period is again, I will scan through my emails once more. I will double check in on my team Slack and then I will I've been trying to tidy up my office, put away my notebooks. I've got new homes for them over here and just kind of have a clean slate. So when I come into my office the next morning I'm not not scatterbrained and everything is a mess. I'm really working on ways to basically bookend my work days. So I mentioned how once the kids get on the bus there is this time period of me to kind of transition to admin work. And then this end of work day routine is kind of my way to start winding down and transitioning to get the kids off the school bus because I don't commute. My longest commute is from the second floor of my house to the bus stop out the door. And that's when I just roll into that evening routine of whatever needs to be done mom life wise to get done. Now I will be transparent and say this productive work week is not perfect or productive every single week, but it does give me a pretty strong foundation to stay productive and to know exactly what needs to be done so I can stay focused and get everything checked off of that list. I did want to talk real quick about A and B weeks and how A weeks are my content creation weeks. So during my sacred time on this content creation week weeks Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, my sacred time on Tuesday is scripting my videos my sacred time on Wednesday, which is today as I'm filming. This is my filming time and then my sacred time on Thursdays are loose ends for this video. Any B roll, any, you know, images I need to get for my video editor, that's what I do on a weeks during this sacred time to keep my content creation consistent. As far as other content out of YouTube right now it is my number one and it is the only thing that I'm really focusing on that I'm double downing on. We do play with Instagram Reels and TikToks here and there. But for me to stay productive as a course creator and as a coach, I need to make sure I'm focusing on the platform that is going to get me the best ROI and that is easy for me to create. And I love creating these YouTube videos. And again, time and time again when we look at our metrics, our YouTube traffic consistently converts higher than any other platform. And so until we have enough team members to help us as pump out consistent content on other platforms, I continue to just focus solely on creating consistent weekly YouTube videos. Now if you want to get your Google Calendar set up like mine, watch the video that is on your screen right now because I go into a full detail and how I set up my Google Calendar. And if you're interested in seeing me do a vlog for my whole week. So like a week in my life vlog. Type weekly vlog down in the comments below so I know you'd actually be interested and watch it. Thanks for watching and I will see you next week.