How I'm Getting Things DONE! [My Weekly Planning Routine]

Please tell me I am not the only person that has about a hundred things going on in my head at one time. I literally feel like my head and what's going on in it is like that game, that Nintendo game back in the 80s, Pong, where the ball is bouncing back and forth, only at like 100 times that speed. Now, I want to make sure I'm not alone here. Let me know if you can relate to this, if this is kind of what you're feeling inside of your head and comment below. Heck you, yes, if you totally feel what I'm feeling. Because in this video, I want to share with you how I get out of my own head, get organized, and finally get things done. Many of you have asked me, trina, how do you get so much done in a day, in a week, in a month? This is my secret. By taking action in a way that doesn't add too much to my plate that overwhelms me, but setting in place a plan that I can actually get things done. If this is your first time here on my channel, my name is Trena and we are trying some new things here on my channel. And this channel is all about. About helping you build a business you love without burning yourself out. And I know you probably have a lot of things on your plate right now, so let's just run through all the things that are kind of taking up my head space here. So I have two kids, a three and a five year old. I'm doing virtual kindergarten with the five year old. I have a husband, I have a house. With the kids comes laundry, dinners, breakfast, you know, all the stuff that comes with kids. I also run a business that I have over 250 students. Students. I have five employees. I have five clients inside of my high level YouTube strategy channel management agency. Oh yeah. And I'm trying to find time to take care of myself so that I don't burn out. So lean in closely because I'm about to tell you my biggest secret. And look, I don't want you telling anybody else. This is between you and me, okay? This is how I handle it all. I don't. I don't do all of those things well. Absolutely not. Question. Why do you think I film right here in this designated area? Because I don't need to clean anything up. This is my space. The kids can't put their dirty clothes here. The kids can't put their toys here. There's no leftover dinner plates here. There's no unfolded laundry here. If you would walk into my house Right now, that's pretty much what you would see in my house. Yes, I have laundry right outside of that door, straight out of the dryer, in the basket. Not folded specifically. As women and as moms, society has kind of forced upon us this image that we need to be this homemaker. And it causes guilt. If you aren't doing the laundry, folding it, putting away, if you aren't making dinners every night, if you aren't taking care of your kids, if you aren't doing work and business. Well, that whole work life balancing it is a total myth, and it doesn't work that way. At this moment in my life, when the kids are home and there is virtual kindergarten here at home, and my business is really growing, something has to give. I obviously need to make sure my kids are bathed, fed, have clean clothes on and obviously alive. But the rest of the home life thing gets kind of pushed under the rug for now. And that's okay because I have five employees as well, and I am providing income to them for their families as well. So maybe you can start to understand why there's that pong game going on in my head when I've got all of these things trying to juggle at once. So I'm going to share with you this little notebook that I use when I start to feel like I'm drowning. This can literally happen at any point in time on a weekend in the middle of a work day when I'm trying to sleep, which is nine times out of ten when this happens. And from somebody who has suffered from a panic attack as well. This is literally what has been able to keep me sane and allow me to kind of sit, stop that panic attack before it starts, because I will just keep swimming like Nemo did. But at some point I get tired. And so this is my way of resting my brain, so to speak, and kind of getting centered again. So here's what I do. I literally pull up a fresh piece of paper and I just start brain dumping all the things that are going on in my head. I have to get it all out, then I can start figuring out where it all goes. Is it critical that I do that or not? And how am I going to get it done? Once I have that list written down, I look at it and I evaluate. Can I remove something? 9 times out of 10, there are some things that, yes, it would be nice to get done, but it's not critical. Right? It's that matrix. A lot of productivity channels talk about where it's the important, urgent, not important, urgent, Important, not. Or urgent. Not important. Not urgent. Right. There's not important, not urgent things. Obviously they go right out the door. Then the next thing, after I look at that list, I start to categorize things. And when I say categorize, I'm looking at things that are set, similar batching, content and batching. My tasks have been the number one way I've been able to get as much done as possible. So when I talk about batching, I'm doing similar things in one day. So on Mondays, that is completely client days, I'm focusing on their projects and their asana board. I'm focusing on their strategy, what videos they need to be filming. I'm focusing on what thumbnails we need from them. So I'm purely strategy based for my clients on Monday. Wednesdays are purely content creation. And as I think more and more about my strategy in YouTube for 2021, I'm probably going to be saving every single Wednesdays as content creation day, whether it's here, filming new videos every single Wednesday, filming Instagram reels, maybe going live. I block similar tasks in each day to make it much more easier for me to get things done. So like for example, on this particular list, I have client video strategy. I have set up a funnel that I've been meaning to put off, film that webinar, film a course module, add the webinar to the funnel, set up a funnel. Obviously a lot of things going on in here. Set up projects with due dates for a new employee that I have. So things that I can group together. There are all the funnel things. Right when I'm thinking about funnel, I'm in that kind of mindset. So that's going to be one particular day. Then you saw I had a lot of filming today. Obviously that's this day right now because I have a quiet house, I can do my hair and makeup and I can just bang these out back to back. But knowing that Wednesday, then it's going to be a filming day, probably on Tuesday, I need to prepare for this video. So Tuesday will probably be a scripting day for me so that I can sit here on Wednesday and know exactly what I need to do. So that's when I start getting a highlighter and I start grouping them together. If you don't have a highlighter, like I didn't when this all started to happen. The most recent time I was sitting in the parking lot of tap class for my daughter. I grabbed a pencil, a pen and I just started writing things down and then I categorized them by little shapes. So I had squares, dots, triangles and stars. And that's how I started blocking similar tasks together. Then I take another piece of paper or I go right below that list and I literally write down the days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday because I don't work Fridays on most days because no child care. And I start plugging these batched projects into certain days on paper because let me tell you, I like my planner and I like my digital calendar pristine. So this is kind of my scratch paper to figure out where this all fits. Once I know which days these are going to happen, I then plug it into my Asana calendar. And this is literally what I live by on a day to day basis when I work. I kind come into this office, pull up my laptop and my Asana calendar is there waiting for me. So I know exactly what I need to do. I have all my client stuff color coded red so I know when I see a lot of red, it's a client day. I have all my content stuff color coded blue so I know it's a content day. And this is the way I know what I need to focus on. So I'm not getting sidetracked. Remember, I had all these things in my head that needed to get done. They aren't going to get done if they aren't on that calendar. And then I need to stay on track, follow the plan out by following my calendar. I also have to look at my Google Calendar as well because that's a calendar calendar my husband and I share and where we have all of our appointments. If I have people booking calls with me, it also goes to my Google Calendar. So usually every Monday I just marry up my Google Calendar with Asana to make sure I'm not piling too many things on a day where I also have like a dentist appointment or a client call. Sometimes when I do this process, I literally map out three weeks in advance because I'm trying not to cram everything in my head into one week. That's totally impossible. And so then I just start building things out from week to week, right? I only keep about three to four things per day on my task, otherwise if I don't do it, I'll get stressed out. And again it just starts that spiral into burnout. So I will literally start napping out in the next week if I have too many things to do on my list. So I still have a plan to get these things done. It's just going to take me two or three more weeks. Here is the biggest step out of all of this, Listen to me loud and clear right here. The last and final step is to accept life happens. I know a kid's gonna get sick. Hi, future editing Trina here. So as I'm editing this, the day after I filmed all of this, literally the day after we were told we were potentially exposed to Covid, so we had to quarantine for 10, 14 days. So everything that I said in here is absolutely true because I had no childcare. We are just gonna be getting childcare in the next two days because we can un quarantine. But this is the cold, hard facts that life will happen. And this couldn't be more true because it literally happened the day after I shot this video. I know a school's gonna get shut down. I know my husband may need to work at a time that I was going to get things done. But we need to accept that and not let it throw off our game. Things will need to be moved, and we have to be prepared for that mentally. Otherwise you'll start spiraling. If you're like me, if I keep it in my head. Mondays, I'm doing this, and that's getting done, and something happens. It's happened too many times that I'. Spiraled. I have to mentally tell myself, this is the plan. But plans don't always happen, and I have to accept that. So what happens is I will work on a Saturday or a Sunday to catch up. And this was also very hard for me because I immediately had guilt, mom guilt when I was working on the weekends, Especially when we first started lockdown back in March. Obviously, the kids had nowhere to go, and I had them all day long. Think I could film YouTube videos on a day where my kids were here? No. And so I had to shift a lot of my days to Saturdays and Sundays. And the guilt was huge because my husband was off and the kids were all doing things on the weekend outside alone with him. But I still felt guilty. It's a short time. It's just getting this done, and it's not forever. You need to tell yourself if you got to work on a weekend, it's not forever. Okay, Stick to the plan. Now I will share what I'm actually thinking about doing in 2021 is kind of this process, but for 90 days at a time. Thus, the brand new calendar you see back there is three months, 90 days worth. I haven't done this before, but I'm hoping this will start, stop some of that drowning that I get when I start brain dumping in this notebook. Once I go through this process of planning 90 days, I'm curious, would you like to see how I did it or what my plan looks like? Like I said, I wouldn't have implemented it yet to tell you exactly if it worked for me or not, but I could show you behind the scenes of what I did to plan 90 days. If that's a video you would like to see here on my channel, please comment below. 90 day plan, please, so that I can know that that's something you want to actually see. And as I said earlier, batching is key to this entire strategy. And if you want to see what my batching process looks like on a Wednesday when I'm filming these YouTube videos, because these YouTube videos are the only new content that I create to grow my business, watch the video that I have on your screen right now. Just click on it and it will take you into complete detail into my process of batching videos. So click on that and I'll see you over there.