Productivity Tips For Entrepreneurs Using The Full Focus Planner by Michael Hyatt

Stephanie:
Hey guys what's up, it's Stephanie and welcome to the fifth episode of the glam life real estate podcast. So today we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, productivity and time management. And I thought it was appropriate since we are ending the giveaway. So the giveaway we were running was Focus February. It officially ended last night, which is February 9th, 2020 and later today we're going to be awarding and notifying the winners the two lucky winners of the prize. So the prize was a full focus planner, a full focus notebook and some fun erasable gel pens and we're giving away two of those. And I thought it'd be cool to just talk about what that system is and why I thought it was so important to give it away and just what it's done for me in my life. So I just thought that we could talk about that.

It is the beginning of 2020 but if you're listening to this at a time where it's not, this is still totally applicable. I'm going to break it all down for you. So here we go. So I want to say a quick shout out to all of you guys that are leaving reviews. I am so thankful. If you don't already know guys, if you'll go to your podcast player of choice, hit subscribe, go to write a review. That's the main way that they know that you're liking this show and you find it valuable to serve it to more people to benefit. So I've got one review here from SarahAhHandLoren if I'm saying that right and it says fun, insightful and inspirational. This podcast is great if you're a realtor, salesperson, anything real estate. So thank you so much that review. I really appreciate you listening and if you guys will just go on and write your comments, I would totally appreciate it. So let's get to the show.

Intro Music

You're listening to the glam life of real estate podcast where we talk about everything from productivity tips, social media strategies, business hacks, and more to get ahead of the curve and crush it as a real estate sales professional. Whether you office out of a model home or your car car, where leopard print and high heels never go out of style. Here's your host, top producing real estate agent, social media strategist, and fur baby mama Stephanie Lindamood.

Stephanie 

All right, so today as I mentioned in the intro, we're going to be talking about the Full Focus Planner system. So this system is from Michael Hyatt. He's a New York times bestselling author and he wrote the book "Free To Focus" that came out in 2019 and that's what I read probably like third or fourth quarter of 2019 and was loving it. And that's when I got the full focus planner.  I heard about this originally on Amy Porterfield's podcast. She's got a podcast called The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast, so check it out, it's awesome. And so she shared her process of how she stayed organized and kept everything going. So that's how I found out about Michael Hyatt and I listened to him on her podcast. So before we get going into that, let's talk about and get a gauge on where you may be. Yeah, the time management, productivity, managing your energy, all that.

So let me just ask you a couple of questions. First question is, do you ever start your day with a feeling of overwhelm or panic that you have too much to do and that it all needs to be done now? Like you've got 10 things to do and you don't even know where to start because they're just all important. Do you ever feel that way? Question number two, do you ever find yourself mentally fried at the end of the day? And when you think back on your day, you wonder what the heck you accomplished. But you know that you didn't even sit down to eat lunch like you were totally legit productive doing something. It's not like you're eating Bon bons and watching soap operas, but you have no idea what you did and it didn't even move the needle on anything that you wanted to do or hit from a personal goal standpoint.

All right, question number three. Do you come to the end of your day and feel restless or ever experience anxiety with the ever-growing to do lists that's running through your mind? Can I get an amen? And then last question, do you find yourself thinking about what you needed to get done instead of being present and in the moment with your family or loved ones? So if you answered yes, any of these questions, you are going to get so much out of this episode today. So first of all, let's talk about what state many of us find ourselves in.  So according to a recent Gallup poll, 8 out of 10 Americans say that they're afflicted by stress on a daily basis and almost half of those surveyed said that they don't feel like they have enough time to do the things they need and or want to get done.

Does that sound like you? That sounded like me before I started this system. Trust me, those in the middle of their lives. So those about age 30 to 49 more of those people are in this category as well as those 18 to 29 as compared to those that are 50 or older, which report both a lower amount of stress and less in this age group, the older age group still that they don't have enough time, which makes sense due to the season of life they're in with maybe their career slowing down or childbearing just due to their age. So basically that tells us that 18 to like 49 we're all fricking stress. We don't feel like we have enough time. So in his book, free to focus author Michael Hyatt shares his journey and basically he starts the book out in a hospital, right? Like he's in a hotel, he feels like he's having a heart attack.

They take him to a hospital and in the end of it all, thankfully it was just acid reflex. They said, look, you've got stress, you're overworked, you're overstressed and you're constantly on 24 seven and doing that too long isn't good for you. So can you relate to that at all? Like, are you constantly racing through your days even though you know you shouldn't be? Are you constantly busy but never seem to get ahead? So unfortunately that's how many of us spend our lives. Okay? Especially if you're an entrepreneur, you're a sales professional because so much of what we do is reactionary to serve our clients, to make the deal happen. And we always feel like we have to be on right? So the question is how do we fix all this? How do we be less stressed, more focused and feel like we have more time to do the things that we want and feel our best and live our best life?

I thought you'd never ask! So that takes us to the full focus planner system. So many of us take some time around the holidays at the beginning of the year to identify new goals and aspirations that we want to tackle. And then let's be real. A few weeks later, what happens? We get caught up in our day to day. We're overwhelmed with tasks and to do's. Just life gets busy, right? And the big goals we have for ourselves get lost in the busy-ness. I mean who really has time to chase big dreams when you're working all day and bringing work home with you, the phone never seems to shut off. Even after working hours, your weekends or days off are filled with oil changes, soccer games, homework to help with laundry, not to mention that things that just pop up on a daily basis that will make your head spin. By the time most of us get through our day, we're wiped out and the nice to accomplish with love, to feel better about myself.

Personal growth goals fall by the wayside. What changes? This is when you have a system that on a daily and weekly basis breaks down our big goals and the bite size steps we can accomplish way more than we think we can. Most people underestimate what they can do in five years and they overestimate what they can get done in a year. If you're like me, I overestimate what I get done in a day and historically I filled my daily calendar with tons of tattoos that one never get done and two are usually too big to do all in one day that none of it gets done. So I've had to figure out how to take all those to-do's and limit them. I've had to figure out how to make the tasks smaller and more bite size so that I can make progress. But guys, a lot of this is an intuitive, so it's okay if you're struggling, it's okay if you're just going through life super busy right now.

So much of it's about having the awareness and we're going to talk about that awareness today and that's why I wanted to talk about the solution and let me just start right here. Whether you buy a planner, great or you do this on piece of paper, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm just here to share a solution that's worked for me and kind of walk you through it so that you can kit some of the juicy details on maybe how to edit, tweak what you're currently doing.

Full Focus Planner Walk Thru

So what I'm going to do is just kind of walk you through the planner and I'm going to walk you through how to use it and the ideas behind it. And then we're going to talk about how to implement it.

Annual Goals

So the first section of the planner is called the annual goal section. And basically what it does is it's going to give you 10 slots where you can write down annual goals and you'll want to write down things that are important to you.

If you don't have 10 that's okay, but you don't really want have more than 10 which was kind of hard for me. So you want to have 10 and then there's the next piece of turning the page and then you can put in the why. Like why is it important to you? And you can really document like what this means to you and why it's important. And it's really important to have something to attach those to. If you don't get through all that, it's okay. Just at least get your 10 goals down so you have somewhere to start. Okay. The beauty in this is that your annual goals are going to be part of your planner and the plan or something. If you go with it, it's going to be something that you reference every single day, so you're going to have these with you. So instead of maybe your goal is being written down on a random piece of paper or they're in a diary or worse in your mind, you're going to have something, one universal spot where everything is, and for me that was huge because usually when I would goal set, I would have this pretty journal with all the goals for the year.

And then I've had some other daily thing where I'd write down my to do list for each day and it just got to where I had all these multiple places that I had things at and I never had one universal place. So that's point number one is having a universal spot for everything. Is really going to help you because you can refer back to everything very easily.

Quarterly Goals

So once you write down your annual goals, the next step is this is to decide which three to four goals you're going to focus on for the quarter. I know they're all important, right? I was like, Whoa, I'm already getting anxiety. They're all 10 important right now. Right. Okay, I know. So we're going to have to narrow it down a little bit, and this is what was eye opening for me is, Oh crap, I was probably trying to do way too much.

So yes, you want to try to focus on three to four big goals. Now, if one of your goals is just like exercise, like maintain my exercise workout routine. Okay, that's just something ongoing. I wouldn't necessarily call that a big 10 goal unless you're trying to accomplish something new. Like, Hey, train for a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I kind of look at, Hey, the ongoing maintenance stuff that you want to keep up, that's great. But I didn't necessarily put that as my big 10 unless it was something really new. Just to kind of side note that in. Um, otherwise if you're gonna put it in as one of your top 10, then go ahead and put it as one for the quarter because that's just something you're trying to do ongoing. But I wouldn't let it get to be more than four or five.

Okay. The other thing to realize is the planners for the quarter. Okay. This isn't an annual plan of, this is a quarterly planner. So every quarter, assuming you fill it out, you're going to get a new planner, you're going to set it up again with the annual quarterly goals, which sounds like a lot of repeat work. The cool thing is though, every three months you're going to reassess everything to where if something's working for you or something's not, you can tweak it as you go. You don't have to feel like you're committed to something for a whole year. Okay? So it's just for the quarter. So you get in there, there's three months for the three months in the quarter, and then you map those out. So if you know you've got a vacation planned for the second month, throw that in there. If you know you've got other stuff, conferences going on, etcetera, you've mapped that out so you can see them.

And then there's going to be this thing called rolling quarters, and basically it's going to be quarters down the road so that you have visibility so that if you know in six months you have something going on, you can put that in there. So basically just think of it as a roadmap for the year. I love this because again, it's keeping everything in one place.

Daily Rituals

Okay. So once you're done with the quarters and you've set up your annual goals, you're going to go into what's called daily rituals. This was one of my most favorite parts of the whole entire system. Okay. So the daily rituals are broken up into four sections, the morning ritual, the Workday Startup, the Workday Shutdown, and the Evening Ritual. So let me explain.

Morning Ritual

We'll start with the morning ritual. So basically what you want to do is map out what you want to do in your morning ritual and calculate the time.

This is before you open up your phone and your email to anything, work related, social media, all that stuff. This is like you time, like what is part of your morning routine to get you ready for your Workday startup. Okay. So this to me was incredibly eye opening because when I wrote down everything I wanted to do as part of my morning ritual, I realized I needed to get up a few hours earlier. Which side note is why I was feeling so stressed out that I didn't have enough time in the mornings to get it all in. When I wrote down that I wanted to do a meditation, I wanted to read the Bible, I wanted to go do a workout, I wanted to walk the dogs, I want a time for coffee. Then I needed to get ready, like that's like four hours. So it really opened up my eyes to, okay, if this is the kind of morning you want to have to get all these things done to so good, what time do you have to wake up and then documenting it because then in the morning, I'm not trying to figure out what I'm trying to do that day.

So just take a moment to think about your morning. Do you agonize about what to do and when to do it or do you react to whatever just gets thrown your way? Or do you just wake up to an alarm clock going to hit snooze because you really aren't clear on what the day holds for you? So what's the harm of catching a few more Zs? Right? Cause what do you have to get up for anyways? The rituals will help give you clarity on what to do, when to do it, and you'll have more energy when that alarm goes off because you'll have more of a sense of purpose, I promise. Okay, so you're going to document what you want that morning ritual to look like.

Workday Startup & Shutdown

Then you're going to document what's called the Workday startup. And the Workday shutdown. Same goes for these. You want to clear structure for what you need to do at the start and end of each workday.

Sometimes also midday and it's great because you have certain, I have certain things in my business that I have to do every single day at the beginning, end of the day, right? You've got to check in return emails, return calls. I got to check on my active and pending listings. I've got to check showing and feedback. I need to check social media and do my posts, so there are certain things that I've got to do every day regardless of the Workday that having that documented as far as how much time I think it's going to take and I know I've blocked that in in the morning and at night and then if I need to during mid day, that way if I get caught in a meeting that's three hours long, I'm not worried about when am I going to return emails, when am I going to call people back?

I already have that as part of my schedule. Okay. It also takes away that anxiety that everything has to be done in real time. Right? Cause when your phone goes off, you get a text message like yes, there are emergencies you have to get to. But a lot of times I think a lot of the stress out because we feel like we have to be so reactive. If you're responding back a couple of hours later, same day, it's perfectly acceptable. So what it does is it helps take your distractions out of the day because you know you've already got that built in to your day, both the front end and on the back end. Now I understand we can't get rid of all distractions and many of us work in an environment where clients are coming in our door. But if you can batch some of these tasks together and have a time you complete them and build an ideal calendar, you'll be surprised at the peace of mind you have because you already allocated that time to be spent doing those tasks.

And the other thing is if you are in a situation where you're getting distracted by clients walking in more so than other professions, having a list of things you need to do before you leave the office or the first thing you do when you hit the office will help focus you to where if you're distracted and you're halfway through that list and someone walks in, you can pick up right where you left off because you don't have to wonder where you were at. So let me give you an example of how it's been helpful for me to map out my workday startup shutdown and then kind of fill in my day. So give you an example. Used to, I would get up and before I did anything like meditation or workout, I would fricking go check my email, which then you get sucked into a million different things.

Even if nothing bad's happening, there's just stuff to do, right? And then you look up and it's like noon and you've not done anything you were wanting to do personally. You're still following up with people are still in the business and you just have that feeling like [inaudible] right? You're just reacting to everything. You have no control and you're just not sure what happened. So what I do, is I know that if I check my email before I get my workout in and if I get, you know, my meditation done and all of that kind of stuff, I'm going to get sucked in and mentally I'm not going to feel like doing any of it. Cause when I'm in work mode I'm in total work mode. So the thing I do is I don't really look at my phone until a certain time during the day.

If I know I'm going to be heads down in a project or in a meeting or in a client appointment or I need to be focused, I turned my phone on silent and what that allows me to do is focus on the people at hand, focus on the task at hand. One is respectful of the people you're with, but then two, it's the task at hand also. Then when I do respond back via email to whoever was emailing me or calling me or texting me, I'm focused solely on them because I've handled what I need to handle when I was present for it. All these distractions, they're not good for us. So according to an article in the daily mail, scientists warn that each time we get a ding on our phone or something alerts us of a new notification or message. We are literally changing the chemistry of our brain in addition to the fact that these notifications start stressing on our body and we release more of a hormone called cortisol.

We release that and it rises in our body, which can leave us feeling more and more anxious. They also note that productivity levels can drop up to 40% when we're constantly being interrupted because your mind is doing this thing called task switching. And when your task switching, it's like you're going from email to text to talking to somebody and your brain just has to take time to get back onto the same task. But if your productivity's declining, it's messing with your hormones, it's not good. So the best way to illustrate this point is to ask the question. Since you've had your tablet or smartphone, do you feel like you have more time or less time?

I'm guessing you into the same way I did when I asked myself this question, which was I feel like I have way less time, even though this is supposed to make me more productive and these devices and the, this is a technology will make us more productive and efficient, but we have to have a plan to use them versus them using us. Makes sense. Okay, good. So then the last part of the daily rituals is to create an evening ritual.

Evening Ritual

So next we're going to be outlying an evening ritual. Now I'm not going to lie. This is the hardest one for me to keep and I can tell you that when I do keep it, I feel great within the evening and then as well the next day. So the evening ritual is a group of things you want to get yourself to do so you can mentally shut down at the end of the day and get ready for bed and get ready for the day ahead.

So an example of things that are part of my evening ritual include journaling and doing a gratitude list, doing a quick meditation and maybe doing some stretching. Look over the day at what I've accomplished and then plan out my next day and what that looks like. Plan my workout time and my meals set out. I'm a water bottle and a pre-workout like thermos thing that I have. Let the dogs out, tuck them in, set up my workout clothes and then wash my face and brush my teeth. So this is very powerful for me when I do it at night because when the alarm goes off at 6:00 AM I know exactly what I'm going to do. I know exactly what we're kind of doing, where I'm doing it, what I'm wearing, and I know what the rest of they looks like. So when that little voice in my head says, Oh, you can work out tonight, you can go back to bed, you'll have time later today because I've already mapped out my day.

I know what the day holds. So how are we doing? Are you guys with me so far? So keep in mind that everything we've talked about, the annual goals, the rituals, the rolling quarters, all this is stuff you're going to set up one time in the planner. You're not doing this daily. This is stuff you set up one time. You get it in there and then you're done.

Ideal Week

So the last piece of the puzzle before we move on to just using the planner on a daily and weekly basis is to sit down and construct what's called and map out what's called your ideal week. Now for me this is one of the harder parts to do because it asks you what you want your ideal week to look like, not what your status quo is and what your cra cra calendar looks like. It's what you would like your ideal work week and off week to look like.

And for a lot of people that's hard because you're kind of like, I have no idea because I've never been in control of my own calendar. So the way I started this to actually get something down on my ideal week was to plug in my daily rituals. Okay. So in Michael Hyatts book, free to focus when he kind of shows you how to do all this. There's also videos on YouTube that map all this out, but basically he says that his morning ritual starts at the same time every day, which for him, at least in his book was 5:00 AM. So, you know, I feel like I'm pretty like high energy and motivated, but that's a little much for me on my days off. So yes, on my work days, my goal is to get up at 6:00 AM to get my morning ritual in, but I'm going to be honest with you, on my days off, we're hitting that snooze button and we're snuggling with the puppies and we're, we're, we're taking some time off.

Batching Your Time

So whatever's ideal for you, like I get it. It's ideal to get up at the same time every day regardless of if you're off. Cause that helps keep the habit. But that's just not real for me. I'm just being real with you. So whatever you want your ideal we till look like, start plugging that in. So I applied in my morning routine, my evening routine or slash ritual. And then you can plug in your Workday startup and shutdown on your work days. And what I can't stress enough to you is please don't plug in Workday startup and shutdown on your days off. You guys need time off of work to rest and rejuvenate. If you can't do that right now, make that a goal of yours. Okay, next on trying to figure out what your ideal week looks like. Michael has a concept of batching where he basically says there's three different types of time that you have.

Front Stage Time

There's front stage time, backstage time and off stage time. And let me explain front stage time is anything that refers to activities that are core to your role. So give you an example. If you're a salesperson, that would be things like following up with clients, meeting with buyers, writing contracts, etcetera. That's like how you make your money.

Back Stage Time

Backstage time's going to be all the crap. We don't like to do planning internal meetings, calls to like your lender. I'm responding to emails, expense tracking, training, all the things that support you in your role. But like it's, it's just hard to get done. You don't want to do it. You know? A lot of times we don't make time for it or the enough time.

Off Stage Time

Finally there is off stage time.  Off stage time means just that..off, and many of you don't even know what that word means because it's foreign to you because you're always on trying to make a sale and I totally get it.

But this is the time that you're supposed to be with friends, family, yourself, hanging out, going on vacation, all that good stuff. And trust me, once you start working at this system, you will find more offstage time in your calendar. So again, if we're not at the ideal state yet, it's okay.

So basically you've got your daily rituals plugged into your ideal calendar, right? And now you're like, okay great. Well Stephanie, I have a kind of job where I don't get to control it. Clients are walking in my door every day. Right? Like I don't control when they come in, they can walk in at noon, they could walk in at 6:00 PM I have no idea. Well that's, I get it. That's how my days are. It can be as well. So the idea is to group the front stage time on certain days or again if it's not possible certain times during the day, backstage time on certain days or times and then you're off time.

So for example, when I set up my calendar, I have certain days where I have scheduled time slots to meet with clients and business partners, which is my front stage time. I have other days where I know I have time scheduled for backstage time where I can have planning meetings, I can schedule internal meetings so that mentally when I'm doing front stage activities like meeting with clients, I'm not worrying about emails piling up or catching up on paperwork or catching up on planning or running reports because I know I already have that built into my week just on a different day so that I can focus. So think about your business. If you usually have clients that, let's say your normal business, the majority of the time they walk in at 4:00 PM or later, right? Or let's say you work weekends and that's your selling time.

Don't try to schedule a ton of planning and organizational stuff on those days. If Tuesday mornings for you are slower, great, they'd plan more of that stuff then. And then when you have clients that are calling to make appointments, try to steer them to make an appointment at the time slots you allocated for front stage time. Again, it's ideal. It's not gonna all happen in a perfect, unless it's a perfect world, right? This is just ideal. So the other thing you could do if you really are struggling with like, Hey, I'm, I literally may have someone coming in at all different times of the day, I can't focus. The other thing you may want to do is come in an hour or two early where you can literally just close the door. I used to do that, right? If I got really busy at work selling homes and I literally was going to be busy from 10am to 7pm with clients, I would come in a couple of hours early to where I could just literally shut the door, lock it so nobody could come in, or I would stay late. There were some nights where you know you're there till nine or 10 o'clock at night just trying to catch up. It's not ideal, but again, if that's what you need to do to get caught up, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

The other thing you could do is schedule an assistant. So like let's say you have Tuesday mornings where you're like, Hey, I'm not going to schedule client appointments. If someone walks in and they would just want to look at the model or you know, do a preview. It's something that won't distract you. You can have an assistant walk them through that process. Great. Then you can still be focused on what you need to do. So it's just being mindful versus just thinking, well, I'm just here all day long. I can meet with you anytime.

If you can try to, again, steer them to certain times of the day to where you're on in that front stage time, that's really going to help your efficiency. The last thing you're going to want to do is plug in your offstage time. Side note, this also includes vacay time, so my recommendation is at the beginning of each year, grab a calendar, take your family, your spouse, whoever's in your life, and if there's nobody, take yourself and figure out and pencil in when you want to take your vacations for the entire year. Yes, I just said that for the entire 12 months. One, it's going to give you something to look forward to too. I'm here to tell you in sales and entrepreneurship, there's never a good time to take a vacation when you're selling and you've got a hot hand you don't want to take off cause you don't want to miss a sale.

If it sucks and you haven't sold anything in two months is sure as heck don't feel like going on vacation cause you feel like you might get fired tomorrow or you don't feel like you have the money. So there's never a good time to take a vacation. But if you preplan it and pencil it all in, it has a way of working itself out. I highly, highly recommend doing that. If you're listening to this and it's not the beginning of the year, take a calendar out and figure out for the next six to 12 months in front of you what you can schedule and get penciled in. Okay, so another notes to make. T guys, this is an ideal week. Do not stress that this doesn't resemble anything what you're currently living. It's probably not going to. If it did, you wouldn't be listening to this episode because you'd be like staff.

I got it, I'm great. Okay. And the reality is even once you make progress, we get it. There's things you can't control on your week. There's things you have to do, there's places you have to be that change and come up. But again, this is giving you a blueprint to where if you have a choice on a certain day to do X versus Y, you kind of know where you're going. So it just helps you start to make small changes and steps toward what you desire and what you want your ideal week to look like.

Ooh, okay. This is a lot y'all. I could make this a totally another episode and split it up, but I think we should just keep going cause I think we're on the right track. So we have our annual goals, we have our quarterly targets, we have our daily rituals and we have our ideal week all documented and mapped out.

Now again, I said earlier, I'm going to say it again. You're going to start another journal next quarter. So if you need to tweak or edit anything you can, once you see what works and maybe what doesn't for you. So don't stress out about getting all this perfect. Okay. A lot of it is just get started, get into action. We know action leads to clarity. So I need you to get into action so that you can get clear on what doesn't work and what does work for you. Okay? Get some erasable pens. It'll be fine. All right, so the next step is daily pages. This is where you can actually start. If you don't want to do all that setup, okay? You're like, Oh crap, why don't we just go through all that? So when you get a planner, when you watched any of the videos, they kinda know that a lot of what we just went through is going to be a little overwhelming.

So they kind of just say, Hey, if you just want to baby, step it in there. Start on the daily pages to start on the first Monday. Write down some big three goals, write down some tasks, write down your calendar for the day. Ease into it. I took you through if you were flipping through the planner from the get go, which depending on your personality type types, you're type a like me. You're going to do it that way. If you're a different personality, you may want to baby step it in differently. It's however you want to do it, but at least now you had the background and some information as to what it's going to look like.

Daily Pages

Okay, so on the daily pages, they're going to give you an area for each day of the week. It's going to start on Monday to write out your big three goals. Then they're going to give you a section to write other tasks and to-do's.

There's going to be a section of like a timeline for the day to see everything mapped out and then there's a whole notes page. Okay, so the key on the daily pages instead of your big three things that you want to accomplish, being random to to-do's, it's going to have you focus on what are the top three tasks that move you towards your big goals. And that's why I went through all this stuff at the beginning is if I were to start it with the daily pages, well you wouldn't know how to answer those questions because you wouldn't know what your big goals are. Right? Cause you wouldn't have gone through it. So that is why I think it's important to really look at your annual goals, what you wanted to do quarterly, cause that's going to help you lead into the daily pages. Okay. So you're going to write down your big three for the day and then below that you're going to have space to write things down.

Like pick up, dry cleaning, fold laundry, all those things. Yet they still need to get done. Yes, you need to go, you know, buy stamps or whatever, balance the checkbook. But those things are gonna happen just because of life. They're not going to, those aren't the things that in five weeks you look up and go, wow, that really moved the needle on me increasing my income or helping, you know, make it healthier. Those are just things that we just have do to live and be in society. Right. So we still, there's still a place for them. We still need to record what those are, but they're different than those big three that we want to accomplish today. Okay. That way you're prioritizing and setting apart the really big stuff from the day to day and that helps focus you on some bite size but important tasks to help you get to your bigger goals.

Then there's the note page on the right hand side, it's a whole page. I like using the notes page to write. You could do anything with it. It's super flexible. You can do a gratitude list. You can do affirmations if you're grocery shopping or meal planning for that day. You can throw that on there. If you have a meeting, you want to make notes from that. You can use it however you want depending on the day. Once you get through the very first week, so this is the very first week at the planner. Okay.

Weekly Preview

Then you're going to get to what's called the weekly preview and this is really, really cool. So the weekly preview is going to be a place where you'll reflect on the week prior, okay, on what your biggest wins were, what you accomplished, what worked, what didn't, et cetera. And then it will lead you and flow into looking backwards to looking in front.

So you'll go from looking at the previous week to now looking at the weekend front of you and it will ask you what are your big three objectives for the week that we're going to advance you towards your goals and projects. And that is what's going to help you when you start doing your daily pages on identifying your big three for the day, cause you're gonna then go back to your weekly preview and go, okay, what did I say I needed to get done this week? The big three rocks that I needed to accomplish. And you're going to start chiseling away at those rocks with the three objectives daily. The reason I'm making this point is because the very first week of the planner, you didn't have a weekly preview. So you just started out on daily pages and you're just, we're kind of flying by the seat of your pants and coming up with these top three objectives and tasks that were important to you.

Once you get through the first full week and then you get to the weekly preview, then it's going to lead you down a path to set up your second full week a little bit better in my opinion. Okay. All right. Part of the weekly preview is it's also going to give you space to focus on and plan your self care, which includes sleep, mills' workout, who you're going to connect with and how you're going to rest and relax. Cause guess what most of us have, we don't even take the time to think about that kind of stuff. Maybe we think about what we're going to eat for the week made. We think about workouts. We don't think about sleep, we don't think about how we're going to relax, so this puts the priorities of ourself care front and center on a weekly basis. Again, it may not be perfect.

It's probably going to be really messy the first few weeks. It's just like anything else. But the more awareness you have, the more intentionality have, the closer you're going to get. Cause guess what? If you write down that one of your goals for the week is to stretch for five minutes before bed and do a yoga class and maybe do date night with your spouse. Even just the act of writing it down is going to help that come into fruition because you're going to be more focused on it. Okay, so that's really important to get focused on what's important for the new week. Once you complete the weekly preview, you'll turn the page, you'll be at Monday, which starts the next, you know the first day of the new week and you'll just keep working to the planner until you hit the end of the quarter. Once you hit the end of the quarter, you'll want to get a new planner.

At first I wanted to throw up cause I was like, wait a second, I just spent a crap ton of time filling all this stuff out. What if I want to refer back to it? Like what if I need this stuff? Well, okay, the cool thing is look on the bright side. If something doesn't work for you, if you've evolved and now you want to edit something, you only have to do this quarter a time. If you don't and everything works great for you, all you're doing is sitting down and literally copying everything you wrote the first time over. Okay. And then what you can do is if you have notes, like let's say you have legit business meetings where you've like, like I bullet journal. So I have bullet journals where I want to refer back to like whatever automation workflows or email lists and work, you know, just things that I want to refer back to to where I wrote him once.

I don't have to want to have to write them again. You can label them and keep them right? You could label, Hey Q1 of 2020, Q2 of 2020, that way you've got your library if you need to refer back to them. So that kind of helped with that anxiety. So if you're sitting here thinking, this sounds like a lot, here's a really good place to start. Don't go out and get the planner. If you don't think you want it, just whip out a piece of paper and write down the three most important things that you want to get done today and draw a box around those things. Okay? Then below that, fill in a section of all those little pesky to-dos that you want and do need to get done. Like, let's be legit. They still have to get done, but they're not the big ones.

They're not those big rocks that are going to move the needle for you. The way I think about the big three, if I'm not sure, because let's be real. Sometimes the little tasks that just make up the day feel like they have to get done. They're the big important ones. The way I think about the big three, if I'm not sure, is I ask myself, if nothing else gets sent today, what has to get done that moves me closer to my goals. Laundry doesn't move me closer to my goals. Like, yes, I want a clean house. But if my goal is to record four podcast episodes this week, see five builder partners and have two listing appointments, well I gotta run comps for my clients. I got to record the episodes, I got to create outlines, I got to go see my builder partner. You know, like those are going to move the needle for me with my goals.

So that's how I figure out what's important when I'm thinking about the big three, if I'm drawing a blank or if everything seems like they need to go in that section, that usually gives me a ton of clarity. It doesn't mean that some of the items below and that to-do section don't also have to get done. But when I think about my goals, if I don't do these top three, I am falling short of my goals for myself. Okay? Because you deserve to have goals for yourself. You deserve to have things that are important to you and you also deserve to be able to have the confidence that you're going to keep your promises to yourself. And that's a big deal. This is a big underlying benefit of this system. A lot of this having anxiety when we think about what we want to get done because we've let ourselves down.

I'm getting goosebumps just talking about this. Okay, a lot of us go to bed at night and think tomorrow's the day I'm going to get up and work out. Cause truly you want to improve your health but then you don't and then you feel bad and then the next day the same thing happens and slowly but surely you start to doubt yourself and you don't have the confidence in yourself because you're breaking promises every day to yourself. This system, having this awareness and intentionality in this focus will help you start building that confidence that you can count on yourself and when you can count on yourself, you can do a lot more than you realize. We don't recognize or realize the damage that breaking promises to ourselves does until we start to repair that and we see how beautiful we see ourselves and how much more confident we are.

If you want to have something tangible to print out. Okay. I have a free printable that I created like two years ago before I started using this system. This is what led me like I was struggling guys. I was um, self-employed. I work from home. I have, you know, clients all over the metroplex. I do a lot of social media, I do a lot of projects. I was crazy scattered and I was always busy, but I wasn't intentional and I wasn't focused and I felt like everything had to be done today and I was so burned out did I just created a system for myself and that's why I'm so passionate about this system I'm using now because I kind of created something very similar to it a while back and was using it. And that's why I really love what I have with the planner because I have pages and printables that were helping me.

But again, they were loose-leaf and then I would try to put them in journals and binders and all this stuff. That's why for me, the planners really worked out. But if you just want to start small, if you just want to dip your toe in and figure out, this is something, a habit that you want to start. I have a free printable that I created that you can download. It's called rock your mornings. Like a boss. It has both a morning and an evening page. You can fill out the morning, um, one the morning of you can fill out the evening one the night before. There's also space on it for affirmations for gratitude and a section of just brained dump. It's got a schedule on it. So if you, you know, want to say you're working out at 6:00 AM and then you've got an appointment at 10:00 AM, it's got all that in there.

It's got a check list area for your, your top things to do. And then it's also got a section where you could write down what you are planning to eat for lunch, breakfast, dinner, snacks, water goals and workout. Cause, like I said again, like I've been on this path of trying to figure out a system to be more productive and more efficient and more focused for a very long time to where I just created it myself. But I digress.

If you want to dip your toe in the water of getting this morning and evening routine, this is a great way to do it. You can go to theglamgirlboss.com/morningguide for your free guide.

I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please, please let me know by subscribing to the show and leaving a review, I feature the reviews on the show. So if you write one, I'll be able to read it to the audience. And it's how the podcast platforms know that this is bringing value and they will serve the show to more people so they can benefit from the content. So make sure you go to iTunes or wherever you're listening to this. Tap the rating and review section to write a review. And then if you want to join our insiders Facebook group, you can go to theglamgirlboss.com/facebook again, that's theglamgirlboss.com/facebook I hope you enjoyed everything here. DM me on Instagram. If you have any questions, I'm at MsStephanieLindamood again, that's @MsStephanieLindamood and we'll talk soon. Bye guys.