[00:00:00] these little simple things that we can do. To block days, to block times, to block experiences in a way where we can have more of what we want and less of that frazzled, right?

We want life to feel fulfilling. We don’t want to feel frazzled all the time. Hey, hey friend, welcome to Balancing Busy Podcast. I’m Leah Remillet, and it is so good to be back with you. If this is your first time listening to an episode, I took a summer sabbatical that turned into [00:01:00] almost four months. It was glorious and amazing, and I covered everything I learned.

about myself and the adjustments that I’m making in my business in my last solo episode, which is number 115. So if you’re curious, just jump back to episode 115. Okay. Today though, I want you to imagine this. You sit down to work and instead of feeling swamped, you are feeling empowered. You feel organized.

I mean, you open the desk drawers and you’re like, Oh, everything looks good. I know where my pen is. I know where my notebook is, all the things. You are focused and you jump in and you’re like, I know exactly what I’m meant to do. I know exactly what I want to work on. And I’m ready. I don’t even feel intimidated by any of it.

That sounds dreamy, right? Well, let’s turn that dream into a reality. That is my goal with this episode to give you actionable insights and blend what are really like those timeless, [00:02:00] Strategies with some fresh ideas. So that’s what we’re going to do as we talk about practical productivity. And that’s the thing.

I love studying productivity. It has been my favorite deep dive for, gosh, 15 years now. And there is so many tools that are so powerful, but often they kind of work, but not all the way. And I think that’s because we need this modern twist. We need things that maybe 30, 40 years ago were time tested and worked, but not tested against.

our smartphone, everything is available and pinging us all the time era, right? So that’s what we’re getting into. Innovative techniques specifically working for women to help us reclaim our time, boost our efficiency, and make room for what truly matters in life.

I have tested these. I love them. This is my idea of a good [00:03:00] time. So let’s get into it. Okay. 

First, let’s talk about time blocking, but I want to give it a twist because this is something that we have been talking about for years and years and years. It’s so powerful. It works so well. The honest truth is my best days, my most productive days is when I time block, no question, every single time, but it’s hard to stay consistent with it.

Right? Like it really is. I can have days where I’m like. In it and in it and in it and time blocking. And then it’s almost like I get a little fatigue. I get a little worn out. Maybe you’ve experienced that too. So let’s talk about a little twist on time blocking that makes it work for us where we can maintain it more long term.

. Now if you want to get a little bit deeper into this, I did a really fun series. Okay, fun to me because I love productivity. But I did this, it is, it’s fun, okay? I did a really fun series a while back about the most famous productivity strategies out there. And they’re each short. They’re only about like ten minutes long.

five to eight minutes where I get into, okay, what’s the [00:04:00] strategy? Where does it come from? How do you make it work and how you make it fail? And one of those was time blocking. So if you want to hear more on that, it’s an episode 89. So you could go to eight nine dot balancing busy podcast. com to find it, or in your app, just start, you know, scrolling down.

Okay. But today we’re giving time blocking. a modern mom spin. So instead of just blocking out hours, that’s the traditional way we think about time blocking. I want to encourage you to think about blocking in the idea of themes. So those could be theme days, they could be theme afternoons, they could be theme all kinds of things.

This can include a whole day or just an area of a day or even a part of your day that needs to happen. And. And it’s great because our days can get complicated. Things can stack up and there really is decision fatigue. It’s a real thing. I mean, I think we’ve all felt it [00:05:00] where it’s like, Oh my gosh, I’ve had to make so many decisions all day and I’m just kind of like done, right?

So having some of these theme days, theme days, Parts of your day implemented in it can just make things run a lot smoother. It can look like assigning themes to each day of the week. So ones that I’ve tried are like marketing Mondays, wellness Wednesdays, and clearly, you know, on Monday I would really work on all my marketing projects.

That would be my focus. Uh, wellness Wednesday was where I would schedule a massage every single week. And maybe you like take a little bit more rest time. You only work half a day or not at all. You do a really great yoga class, whatever it might be, follow up Friday, one of the things that’s so critical, anyone in any form of sales is follow up.

And one of the biggest things that gets in people’s way is that they don’t schedule following up. They don’t ever get back to the customer, the client, the potential client, [00:06:00] and the person who did follow up ends up getting them. So actually having a day of the week where it’s like, this is follow up Friday.

First thing I’m going to do is make all my calls. All my emails that I need to reach back out because I haven’t heard from him yet, whatever it might be. You could also go with family Fridays. We love having Friday movie night. I don’t have to think about it. You know, what’s, what are we doing on Friday?

Friday movie night. And you could take that further to be like, and it’s Friday pizza night, right? Like Fridays, we’re watching a movie, we’re having pizza. You can invite your friends if you want. This is what we’re doing and everybody knows. And then just to make it a little bit easier. Again, this is where I love like a family night.

Simple, simple system to like make my life run smoother. Let’s just go with this movie analogy. And let’s say that, okay, you have movie night, you know, it’s pizza, but then everybody sits down and you spend the next who knows how long watching different trailers, everybody having an opinion of what movie you should watch until you end up giving up and not even watching the movie.

Make a simple rotating schedule where [00:07:00] each person in the family gets to have a Friday. So it starts with dad, then mom, then oldest, then middle, then youngest, then baby, whatever, right? And then you rotate it back through. And so they get to pick, no one’s allowed to argue. Just a simple way to streamline and make it so that It just runs smoother, right?

So just thinking about these little, these little things that we can do, these little spins on time blocking or blocking out parts of our life to just make it all run easier. So of course, you know, I talked about pizza Friday, but that’s one of the reasons why I think taco Tuesday is so beloved, right?

You don’t have to think about what’s for dinner. It’s taco Tuesday or pizza Friday or Fend for yourself Saturday or whatever that might be. When it comes to home things, having different days that are assigned. I love to have Monday as my cleaning day. It’s like, okay, Monday. So here’s the real truth. I have called Monday ugly Monday for years.

I mean, I [00:08:00] am talking like. I don’t know, some of you have heard me say it way, way back, probably 15 years ago, right? Monday is ugly Monday for me. What does that mean? It means I’m not going to worry about really getting ready. I’m not doing any podcast recordings. I’m not doing any trainings. I’m not doing any private calls.

There is nothing where anyone is going to see me. And so it is like get her done day, right? Where I’m like, I might stay in the workout clothes way longer than I ever would normally because I’m going to. Go from my workout to just getting the house cleaned up to getting things done. So I just call it Ugly Monday because it’s like, this is my day to just get things done.

And everybody knows, my whole team has always known, you don’t schedule anything for me on Monday because it’s Ugly Monday. I do not want to be in front of a camera in any way. And it just. is this theme in my week where I know it’s my get everything back together. So I can spend half the day on the house and putting everything back together there from after the weekend.

I can get that grocery delivery order all set up first thing in the morning. So it’ll be delivered in the afternoon. And then I can spend the [00:09:00] afternoon working on marketing projects, working on the big projects that I know are going to move my business forward. They’re my needle movers, but it can be anything.

easy to miss out on the time of that. So that’s something that I’ve done that I’ve loved and has really helped me for ever. You might also have, you know, Saturday mornings is chore time and everybody gets things back together. Or you purposefully schedule Zoom meetings on very specific days. So you’re like, this is actually do my hair day, right?

My interviews are typically all taking place on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I know that I’m going to be ready those days and it just works for me. So these little simple things that we can do. To block days, to block times, to block experiences in a way where we can have more of what we want and less of that frazzled, right?

We want life to feel fulfilling. We don’t want to feel frazzled all the time. And since decision fatigue is such a real thing, being able to have things like this [00:10:00] in place, it doesn’t make me have to stop and go, What am I going to do today? What’s for dinner tonight? What should I be working on right now?

It’s literally like, Oh, well, it’s Ugly Monday. I know what I’m doing. Oh, it’s It’s Friday, we’re having pizza, and it’s movie night. Oh, it’s You see what I’m saying. All right, so. So to take this to the next level, using a digital calendar that allows you to color code can really help you to start seeing your themes.

So you actually block in that the first Monday of every month is to check through all your analytics, all your numbers, see where you’re doing. And maybe the last Friday of each month is when you reconcile your accounts and make sure that all your sales that you’ve had over the month are all Document it correctly.

Or maybe it’s weekly where it’s marketing Monday and follow up Friday, whatever it might be. But scheduling those in, color coding them, being able to see them, having them on repeat. It will help you to stay consistent, and ultimately. Everything we’re ever [00:11:00] talking about is to help you be more consistent in the things that make your life better.

Right? That really is what it comes down to. How do we balance the busy? We stay more consistent in the things that elevate our life and give us more peace. And we find ways to remove the things that create chaos and Feeling overwhelmed and, you know, all those, those negative aspects that we just don’t want to have time for.

All right. The next one I want to talk about is the power of micro tasks. So, um, The truth is, when we look at why we’re procrastinating, so often it is because we’re feeling a bit of overwhelm around the thing that needs to be done. It feels daunting. So the easiest and fastest way to break that cycle is to come up with micro tasks.

There is so much power in micro tasking. So implementing micro tasking breaks down tasks into tiny manageable chunks. For [00:12:00] instance, instead of write a blog post, break it into outline the post, write an introduction, and so on. The lower the resistance, right, the more we’re going to build momentum. The lower the resistance, the easier each one of those little steps looks, the more we’re going to build momentum.

And then we start looking and instead of being like, Oh, I haven’t even started. I haven’t even started. I haven’t even started. We start feeling like, Oh my gosh, I’m already halfway through because it was these micro

I literally did this when decorating for fall and Halloween, I did not just write decorate. I broke it down and said, replace the wreath on the door, get the bins down, decorate upstairs, swap out the frame TV for fallish looking art, decorate downstairs. It was, what is that? Five steps, I think, I don’t know, something like that.

Instead of just. [00:13:00] decorate for fall. And it made it feel so much easier. I do this whenever I’m entertaining, I do this with business projects, I do this on a regular basis. Plus, it gives you all those great endorphins of feeling like you’re checking off so much stuff, which is like the most amazing feeling.

You can also use this to kind of gamify your productivity. It makes it feel fun when you’re like, Oh my gosh, look how much I’ve already done. Now, endless to do lists where each item on it is really big, that’s daunting. But kind of a long to do list, but because it’s all these micro tasks, and then you are just cranking them out and like cross off, cross off, cross off, you know, you know, I can feel it right now.

I’m like, Oh, that’s so exciting. It feels so good. So that is why micro tasking, you know. Is such a powerhouse move when it comes to being productive. All right. Next, I want to talk about the two minute rule, but we’re giving it a little bit of a revamp. So again, This is one of those productivity strategies that [00:14:00] has been around forever.

It was inspired by David Allen’s classic rule. And what I want to do is I want to just take it a little step further and just add a little twist. So I love the rule. In fact, it is also in the productivity series. I think it is. I know for sure it’s in episode 52. So if you go to 52. balancingbusy. com, I have an episode called Stop Procrastinating.

Three tips that actually work. So if you are like. Oh my gosh. I don’t want to raise my hand because I’m already running late, but I’m totally a procrastinator. You’re going to want to listen to that episode and the two minute rule is one of the things I’m going to touch in there. Spoiler alert. So that was , 52. BalancingBusyPodcast. com. Okay. Now here’s our twist for today. If it takes less than two minutes, then do it immediately. Okay, that’s same old. That’s how the two minute rule works. If you can do it in two minutes or less, you just take care of it right then. You do not allow yourself to say, I’m going to come back to it.

But here’s the twist. Set a timer for anywhere between like [00:15:00] 10 and 30 minutes and tackle as many small tasks as you can. This can clear your mental clutter. So quickly. So one of my favorite ways to do this is like room reset or a bunch of little things in the house that need to be taken care of, need to be handled.

And I’m like, okay, I’m setting a timer for 30 minutes and I’m going to see how many of these little things I can just get done. And I just start running all over the place and getting, massive momentum and I feel so accomplished and I’m like, Oh, that looks so much better. So it’s like taking a bunch of the little things.

And it’s interesting, right? Because it always depends. There are times when I’m like, no, take the biggest thing, the one that you’re trying to avoid and do that first. And that would be my general, Go to solution, but when we’re just talking about the house is kind of crazy or the, you know, there’s something that just needs to be, I think it really works in picking up in cleaning and tidying and like taking care of house things, setting [00:16:00] a Timer for however much time you have 10 to 30 minutes and then going for as many small things as possible those small things It’s like compound interest, right?

They just start adding up and you look around you’re like, oh that feels so much better I also love doing this in my inbox. So I love to set a timer for 30 minutes And then I’m going through as many of those emails that I can get done in two minutes done in 30 minutes It’s like boom boom boom and I feel so good anything that I don’t need to look at at all is being deleted And then all of a sudden my inbox is looking so much more manageable and so much smaller When we pair this with a done list, after your timer goes off, just jot down everything you accomplished, right?

So you’re like, I did this and this and this and this and this. And it just has this really, really powerful effect of making us just feel really productive, really powerful and happy. It not only provides the sense of achievement, but it’s also going to help you to track your productivity patterns, which can also be really great because you can start to [00:17:00] see it.

And recognize maybe where you’re doing things that don’t really matter and then the things that do really matter. So there’s also this ability to like just track your productivity or maybe I noticed that when I get stressed, I tend to want to clean the house. If the house is clean, I feel better. It’s kind of an easier, no brain.

It doesn’t take, you know, thought. I can just go in and start cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes, whatever it is. But sometimes that’s actually not really what I need. What I need is to sit down and record the podcast episode. What I need is to go take care of the project that feels kind of daunting.

Now, that’s what I would go to. Micro tasks, because probably I need to just make those smaller. So it is, there is this balance, of course, right? It’s finding what the right thing is for that situation, but there is power in taking the two minute rule and then giving it a bigger timer of more time and then just seeing what you can accomplish.

Okay. And then of [00:18:00] course, there’s no way I can be talking about productivity and not bring up our intentional tech use. This is a topic that, you know, I am very, very passionate about. I have talked about. Our phones, how we handle them, social media with our kids, I’ve talked about it in so many episodes, episode 96, 97, 107, 109.

You can go to any of those by just going, putting in the number of the episode. So 96. balancingbusypodcast. com, any of those, but I also had recorded one that was just for us mamas and that’s episode 108 where it’s literally about balancing screen time as a mom. So that episode, like. All of these episodes, they’re the episodes I’m most proud of.

If I could get people to listen to, you know, just a handful of episodes only, I would be like these ones, 96, 97, 107, 109, and then 108 for us as women. Now, here’s the insight. We all know it, but it is worth repeating over and over and over [00:19:00] because, you know, we accidentally fall into little habits we don’t like.

Be intentional about your tech usage, create tech free zones in your home during specific hours, maybe family dinner or early mornings or that hour right after the kids get home from school or when you’re working on a project and you really shouldn’t be allowing that ping to break your concentration.

It will do wonders for helping you maintain focus and And aren’t those really, like, if we get down to it, kind of the two things we want the most, we want to be able to have focus for what matters most, whether we’re talking about our careers, we’re talking about our family, we’re talking about our friendships, we’re talking about any of those things, and then we need connection, we crave connection, and the craziest thing about our phones is that even though it seems like it’s this way to connect us all, and it is in a lot of ways, it is also one of the things that can make us feel isolated and alone.

Which is so crazy that juxtaposition of it, but it’s true. [00:20:00] And so intentional tech use is critical. Okay. To wrap this all up, here are my thoughts. Productivity, it’s just not a one size fits all thing. It can’t be. And it’s about continuous improvement and adjusting and recognizing and believing that there are seasons of our lives.

So something that works in one season may not work at all in the next season. And those seasons sometimes can change from day to day. So just understanding productivity isn’t one size fits all. So test things, try things, and then you’ll see. Really be honest about if it’s working. Don’t feel like you have to do something just because the experts say you should.

If it’s not working for you, ask yourself, okay, is this about I need to make an adjustment or is this just not the right strategy for me right now?

And then here would be my final bonus tip that I think is something that so often gets missed. Cause you it’s an extra step. It’s a little time consuming, but it’s so powerful. In your entire week, okay, in the full [00:21:00] 168 hours that you have, I would love to encourage you to take only 15 minutes, just 15 minutes at the end of the week, and just reflect on what you feel like worked and what didn’t.

Did your theme days help? Were there too many distractions? Was your Was your Friday movie night hectic or was it fun? Do you feel like your phone got in the way too much? Did you love testing out Ugly Monday? Just ask yourself how the week felt. You will learn so many insights, which is going to help you to find that fit that actually really is your size instead of continuing with something that actually isn’t working, but you feel like you’re supposed to make it work.

When you do this, the solutions, they’re just going to become more obvious and you’re going to start feeling more empowered because you can see for yourself what is and isn’t working. Remember, the goal, it’s, it’s just not to fill [00:22:00] every single minute with busyness. It is to create a life that feels great.

So try out these techniques, mix, match, figure out what resonates for you. And don’t forget to share your experience because I love, love, love, love hearing from you. If you found today’s episode helpful, will you take a minute and share it with a girlfriend? Just grab that link, copy it and text her and be like, Hey, I loved this and I would love to chat with you about it.

Tell me your thoughts. When we connect with each other, it really does make all the difference. And it means so much to me as a podcast creator to have this shared. The way I want this podcast to grow is I want it to be a friend, sharing it with a friend, a somebody who loved it, sharing it in a Facebook group saying, Hey, this episode might be what you need.

In fact, I had somebody screenshot recently and text me and say, Oh my gosh, look, and it was a mom group there in, in another state. And. Someone was talking about social media and they put, someone else said, you should [00:23:00] listen to this episode and it was the episode where I shared everything we’ve done with social media for our kids and phones and all of that.

And I can’t even tell you, like, my heart was swelling. Like, I was like, this is my dream. This is my dream and it’s happening. So please, please share this episode. And then the last thing I would love to ask of you is if you have not. left a review. Will you please take a quick moment and leave a five star review and say why you love this podcast?

It helps us so much. It helps me to grow. It helps me to get even more amazing guests. It helps me to know what you love and try to give you more of that. And it just means everything as a podcast creator. So. That would mean the world. Thank you so much. If you do leave a review, send me an email or a DM because I’d love to say thank you.

Okay. Until next time, let’s keep balancing that busy. [00:24:00] 

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