Plan Your Day With Me! Business Planning for Solopreneurs

There are eight key parts to my day every single day. This really helps me stay organized and get more things checked off my to do list. Honestly, this is how I've been able to grow my business from making $20,000 the first year to over half a million dollars this last year. Caveat. I've only been working six hours a day in my business and I still get my kids on and off the bus while growing my business. And I'm going to tell you what I do to plan my day to get it all done. Hey there, I'm Trina if you are brand new to my channel and I'm dedicated to helping solo entrepreneurs get to consistent, sustainable 10k months in their business without falling victim to the hustle culture. Now, I'm going to start off right now and tell you I'm a sucker for a good routine. Listen, if you've ever heard of the word decision fatigue, it is real. That is why when our husbands, our significant others, ask us where we want to go for dinner, guess what? I don't want to make that decision. As a business owner, I'm making decisions all day, every day and I don't want to make anymore. And so being able to follow this routine that I have for my day allows me to, first of all, feel comfortable, limit the anxiety, and know exactly what I need to be doing throughout the day to allow me to stay productive. The other secret to being productive day to day is knowing the bigger picture. The Last Last Couple Videos We've really been diving into this planning series and I've talked about not only how I plan my entire week, but also how I plan my entire month. So those two videos are really important to watch as we now get down to the nitty gritty of the daily planning because you're going to know much easier what to focus on during the day if you know what you're focusing on during the week and what you're focusing on during the month. There are three tools that I use literally every single day in my business to keep me on track, keep me focus, and stay productive. This is my Full Focus Planner, Google Calendar, and Asana. Now I am a firm believer that you do not need to follow exactly what I do with the tools that I use. I don't want you wasting any time to jump on a tool that I'm talking about and trying to figure it out. I just ask for you to look at the concept or the process or the way I'm using these tools and fit them into the ones that you're already comfortable with. Seriously, don't waste your time learning a new tool because I say this is what I use. Take the time to figure out the overall process I'm using it and plug it into what you already have. Now I will say Google Calendar is a must for me and I'm going to walk you through how I block my days out in Google Calendar so that you can see how I know exactly what I'm doing every hour of the day. And I'm keeping notified by my phone because it's linked to my Google Calendar when it's time to shift that task. So my day starts out every day with a workout. Now let's talk about morning routines. Because I said I'm a sucker for routines, but I have strong opinions about morning routines and I honestly believe the whole concept of morning routines was created by a dude who didn't have to take care of kids or raise kids. Because when I was trying to figure out a morning routine that worked for me, I constantly felt like a failure because I wasn't getting up at 5am like they said, I wasn't reading, I wasn't exercising. I wasn't doing this whole hour long morning routine that they say you need to do to be successful. And then I realized, are these guys getting up with a one year old in the middle of the night? Are these guys the ones that need to take care of your child that happens to get up at 5am and you can't tell to go back to bed? Are these guys the ones taking care of the kids and getting them breakfast? No. So if you have small children at home, one don't worry about making a typical morning routine. Your goal. Find some type of routine that works for you. For me, when my kids were smaller, all that meant was splashing cold water on my face to wake up. Like if you have a two year old running around in a diaper, you understand that's literally all you can get done in the morning. That's okay. Second, if you are not a morning person, do not think you need to get up at 5am to be successful. Absolutely not. True. I still don't get up at 5am I'm going to tell you what time I get up here in a moment. But you do not need to be a morning person to be successful. And I just really wanted to talk about this because I've been thinking about a way I could bring this up and I figured how I plan my day would be a great place. But I've had a hate relationship with morning routines and Past coaches telling me, oh, you need to set up a morning routine. You need to do all of this in your morning. You need to find out what morning routine is going to work for you and what morning routine is going to give you energy throughout the day. With that said, let's talk about my morning routine. First of all, not getting up at 5am Absolutely not. I do go to bed around 993 0. But an easier time for me to get out of bed is 5:35 5:45. That means the first alarm goes off at 5:30 and hopefully by 5:45 I'm rolling out of bed and getting dressed to go work out. Now let's talk about that workout too. I'm not gonna get bed at 5:45 if I know I have some extraneous workout about to happen. Yeah, not going to do it. What I've realized is for me to actually get out of bed and do something that's going to give me energy throughout the day, it needs to be something that I want to do. It needs to be something that I like and that I'm not going to dread. So for me, that's been to get on the treadmill for 30 minutes, but it allows me to watch something on my iPad if, you know, you've been around here for a while. I love Bravo, Trashy tv, Real Housewives, Summer House, all of those things. So if I know I'm getting out of bed to a walk, which isn't going to be strenuous, and B, watch something that I want to watch, okay, it is much easier for me to get out of bed. I've been doing this process for about four months now and it did make a difference for me. Even the walking in the morning. I'm not even walking that fast on a treadmill. I'm going like 3.8 or, or 4.0 and I'm walking for 30 minutes. I'm not really working up a sweat, but I'm getting active. And I honestly, which I didn't think could happen, feel more energized throughout the day. I know it sounds so cliche, but it was true. And it wasn't me needing to do like some hiit workout or some muscle routine. But it got me to get out of bed cause I was doing something that I didn't mind doing and I got to enjoy watching TV while doing it. And I will reiterate, I. I'm only at this point right now because my kids are 6 and 8. They can get up on their own, they can turn the TV on and turn on Disney plus and watch Bluey while I finish my workout. If they happen to get up early, I don't need to be at their beck and call. This has only happened over the past year when my youngest got to 6 years old. He just turned 6. So do not fret if you are a business owner. If you are a solo entrepreneur trying to figure out how to make a morning routine work for you and you've got little kids at home. If you give yourself grace here, you don't need it to be successful. I promise you I didn't have it the first five years in my business and I'm making over half a million dollars. Okay, I think point made. So I will actually block this time off on my Google calendar. So I will block from 6 to about 6:45 workout and shower because I do want to get a shower in the morning because it does also actually give me energy as well. I'm usually an evening shower person but since I'm walking I will do a morning shower then that means I'm blocking off 6:45 until 8:30. Basically for kids during this time, packing lunches, making breakfast, wrangling kids to get dressed, brushing teeth, brushing hair, getting their book bags packed and out the door. I'm not trying to squeeze anything else in. And so my business day literally starts at 8:30. This is when my work day startup routine happens. Now if you follow the full focus planner, they talk about a workday startup routine. But there are four things that I do every day when I start my business at 8:30. First, it's been journaling. I've gone through a challenge of journaling every single day and I do believe it has helped me really get out of my head and be more productive during the day. I highly recommend trying it if you haven't. I don't follow any specific prompts, which was hard for me to figure out. And I don't try to do like three journal pages at once. For me I decided to dedicate writing two pages on this book right here. That's pretty small pages and if I can just journal two pages every day, that's all I focused on and it takes me about five to seven minutes to do. Then I move into deleting emails. So I'll just pop into my email in the morning, delete all the ones that don't need to be there. Then I will go on into Slack, check in on my team, see if they had any questions that I needed to follow up on, go into the slack for 10k on replay for my coaching clients. See if they needed any help, see if they need any responses to questions that they had. And then I will eat my breakfast either while reviewing questions that they had, or possibly watching a YouTube video that I saw that I wanted to catch while eating my breakfast. Now, on Mondays I do have an extra part of this workday startup routine and that is providing audits to my 10k on replay clients. So every single Monday before 8am they can submit a form to have me audit something of theirs. It just gets my eyes and gives them feedback on something they're working on in their business. This could be YouTube video scripts, thumbnails, this could be sales page, email sequences, business models, but that takes me most days. There's about six to eight of those audits submitted every single week. That takes me an additional 30 to 40 minutes. So again, I block this in my calendar as my work day startup routine. The next part of my day is where I actually work on things. So I block off every day from 9:30 to 11:30 to focus on my big three that week. Now if you watch the last video where I talk about how I plan my week and how I choose my big three and then the previous video I talk about how I plan my month and how I know what I'm working on, when and how I theme my weeks, that is how I'm knowing exactly what I'm working on every single day during my focus time. This is the time I'm working on achieving my goals. What is the goal I set out to get done this week, this month, this quarter. And I'm working on those little tasks to do this also during this time, it's tasks that literally need my full attention. Attention. Scripting YouTube videos, writing out course outlines, creating a slide deck for a new lesson inside a 10k replay. Things that need my absolute total focus. Thus full focus. And as you can see, I do this two hours a day. So I literally only have about 10 hours a week to focus on working towards my goals and that is if I work on a Friday or not. Now a really cool thing that you can do to really utilize your Google Calendar is actually putting in your Google Calendar on your full focus time what you're focusing on that day. I like to use a sauna. I also showed you how to do that earlier in my weekly planning video as well. But I like to just pull up asana and know what I'm working on and it allows me to check things off. I'm a lover of checking things off. I like the Google Calendar aspect so that it reminds me on my phone that it's time to change what I'm doing. Now, here's a really important part of your day that you need to think about. That most of us don't schedule in and it's taking a break for lunch. And I've fallen victim to this. If I don't literally put in here lunch and I don't schedule anything, like I cannot schedule anything during that time, you will end up skipping lunch, you'll end up trying to squeeze lunch in somewhere. You'll get hangry. And it's not going to be fun for you, your clients or your team, if you happen to have a team. And so I really do encourage you to block time and every single day for lunch. An extra tip here is if you watch my weekly planning video, I talk about meal prepping. I also prep my lunches and I will make them in advance so I can just go down to the refrigerator, pull it out and eat. So it takes me less time. Quick tip now from 12 to 3 is open for calls. And you may think, Trina, that's a lot of time. Open for calls. Monday through Friday, 12 to 3 open for calls. Well, technically not Friday. I don't take calls on Friday. I want to try to, at the minimum, wrap my Fridays up by noon. And Monday afternoon is team calls. So Monday I not only have my weekly team meeting with everybody, but I also have my marketing meeting as well. And then Mondays are also the times where I can schedule one on ones with my team members. I have three full time team members and so I need to be checking in with them and getting their performance reviews and seeing, you know, what's working, what's not in my business. So Mondays are team afternoons. So that literally leaves just Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, four calls. And what do I mean by calls? This is a time when I have my own coaching call. So I'm a part of two coaching programs and there's a call that happens Wednesdays at 12 and Thursdays at 1. This is also when I open time for my 10k on replay clients to book hot seats with me. These are 20 minute hot seats, so it allows me to give them more personalized feedback on something. This is also when I will schedule any podcast interviews that I want to do if I'm going to be a guest expert in somebody's group, if I'm doing a strategy session with a client, if I'm doing a discovery call. These calls do tend to add up. So yes, they do take up A lot of my time Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Now the bonus happens every Thursday the week before. I will lock my calendar for the following week so I can't have any more calls booked after Thursday when I end my day. So I have a good idea on Sunday what my calls look like per each day coming forward. If I have extra time and I don't have clients or I don't have calls during this time, it allows me to just work on the tasks that I already have list out for that week. Now since my day ends at 3:30 I need to have a period in time where I'm decompressing getting things done so I can walk out of this room and literally leave work in here. So Starting usually around 3 I have my work day end routine. My workday and routine includes going through my inbox again. If I need to reply to some emails I will do it during this time period. Usually I don't have a lot of emails to respond to because my operations director Aaron is responding to predominantly most of the emails that come in because they're usually customer service questions and she's got those covered. But I will go through my inbox, do another large delete of anything that came in. I will also check in on my team in Slack again see what they got done that day because we like to post the things that we are working on each day and see if they have any questions for me. I will also pop into my 10 count replay slack channel again to make sure they are all good. I will also look in my asana to see if there's anything to follow up there as well if there was a thumbnail that I needed to review or a blog post that I needed to review and then I will look at my full focus planner, see how did I do with my big three for that day and if I didn't get them done do I need to delegate to somebody else? Do I need to just remove it? Because sometimes I've done that where I've moved something from my big three throughout the entire week and just realize this probably isn't a priority. I'm not finding time to do it. Do I really need to do it and just get it off my list? Or do I need to move it to the next day or ultimately to Friday which is my catch all day and then the last thing that I will do is sit down and write what my big three will be for the following day. This just again allows me to get my thoughts all together, kind of start to wind down from the day get my brain space into mama mode because when we walk out of the door, it's my mode. And I don't want to be distracted thinking about other things in my business while I'm eating snack, while I'm doing homework, while I'm making dinner, right? So this is a process that just allows me, since I do work from home in my office, is in my house, to leave work at home. Like I said, planning my day is really pretty easy when I have that bigger picture marked out. So if you did not check how I plan my week and how I plan my month video, I will link them to a playlist on your screen right now. Because really, when I'm sitting down every morning to work, when I come to work, I already know exactly what I'm working on. So I'm not wasting any of the six hours that I have to get work done in my business.