Finding Productivity Work-Life Balance
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First, as an FYI, this is a companion post to the recent interview I did with Kevin Sonney of Productivity Alchemy, which you can find here or on your favorite podcast provider. This episode was a year-later catch-up to the interview I initially did in 2019, which can be found here, but I don’t think you need to listen to both to understand this blog entry, as I’ll include some background info for each item. Of course, feel free if you want to 😄. And a big thank you to Kevin Sonney because he is a wonderful host and person and I so appreciate him taking time to chat with me all about how we get stuff done.
Right, with that bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s get down to business. So why am I even doing a companion blog post for this? Frankly, because I didn’t make notes the way I should have (read: the way I prefer to since that way helps me keep track of things) before recording the episode and so I didn’t cover some of the stuff I’d wanted to. Stuff that, I dunno, might be helpful for someone out there, so here we go.
Incorrect Expectations ~ So in the interview, I mentioned how I went through a major life change and picked up a part-time job at a grocery store and subsequent (and extremely incorrectly assumed) that I would be able to do the same amount of work at home as before, but with twenty-four or so hours less per week there.
Original photos source: Pixabay
[Cue the sound of distant laughter like Kevin mentioned]
So yeah, it’s safe to say I started feeling pretty inadequate pretty soon into my new schedule.
The Solution ~ As I mentioned in the interview, I say down to journal. And by journal I mean emotionally and mentally barfed into a notebook. I wrote down all the major things I do.
Emails: this means all the reading that goes along with them.
Instagram: both posting and commenting/keeping up with people.
Writing: I almost want to say “duh” to this, but this is actually more complex than just “sit down to write,” but I’ll get more into that in a moment.
Advertising/Marketing: and the massive time-suck that is finding keywords and setting them up and studying analytics and on and on and on.
Everything else: my VIP newsletter and keeping up with this blog and Patreon rewards and all the other in-betweeny stuff.
So once I had this in front of me, it was time to prioritize them. Writing was the first thing, obviously. Books don’t write themselves, so that needed to be my number-one. From there, I assigned myself new writing goals—seven hours at least during the week, broken into one-hour sprints. Before that, I’d had sort of a daily word count goal, but…
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1) Time researching notwithstanding, I can generally do about 1k words in an hour, give or take, which was pretty close to my original goal.
2) There are some days where a lot of deletions happen, which affects the way I do my word counts, or some days are just slower, but usually just sitting down at the keyboard and banging away at it helps me figure out what to do next.
After that comes all the inbetweeny stuff. Most of that has hard deadlines, so it even supersedes writing sometimes when things get tight. Next is Instagram. That might surprise some, but my IG community is really important to me. And while I’m still not as active on there as I would like, it’s something I’m working on.
Emails got the biggest shakeup of all, mostly because of how much I had to let go of. To be fair, I get a lot of emails. And can you believe I used to read thru them all? You can see why I had to slice through that like a ninja with a vendetta against butter. Some I’ve just started automatically deleting, some I just look at the Subject. And I pretty much completely gave up on running my own. I’ve had a lot of trouble with it in the past and TBH, I don’t really know what I’m doing despite quite a few classes on the subject.
After I finished going through this process, I added each of these things as tasks in a recurring weekly list in my planner and they are listed in order of importance. Because, as I mentioned in the first Productivity Alchemy interview I did, the more stuff I can offload from my brain, the better I can manage everything.
TL;DR—I deconstructed and then reorganized my entire work life, cut the chaff, and have everything broken down by bite sized tasks in my planner.
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Starting Slow in the Morning ~ This is my big achilles heel. If I have to get up early, I totally can, but my getting ready process in those situations is the most stripped-down, bare-minimum list of tasks. In the pre-CV19 era, if I was getting up early to go travel somewhere, my car got packed the day before, I was already packed when I got up that morning, outfit was already picked out, etc. So for any mornings I have to get up early for now, I do the same level of prep so that when I get up, all I have to do was eat, grab coffee, get dressed, and leave.
For the days where I go into the grocery store job later in the day, though, I cannot bring myself to rush. And this is where my one-hour writing blocks come in handy. So after I drag myself out of bed and have breakfast (I’ve started to standardize this part too because the braining is hard first thing in the morning), I take my coffee into my office and work on one of the things on my planner’s list. Having things broken down by hour-long chunks allows me to know what I can get done and how much before I have to leave for work.
The Things I Didn’t Remember To Cover
Credit Where Credit is Due ~ I feel this is important advice, even for myself. And this is something I'm trying to get better at. I said during the interview that I hadn't gotten a lot of writing done during that week I'd been so busy, but I just wasn't giving myself proper credit. Most of my job is writing, even if it's not book-writing. My blog posts, my newsletter, and Patreon updates all count as writing, but I didn't credit myself for them... so, yeah, I'm bad about this advice, which is why I've added a crediting system for writing in my planning when I do these things too.
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Give Yourself Permission To Be Flexible ~ Doubly so during these weird times. I love systems and having a plan as much as the next person, but as changes happen, be gentle with yourself and try to give yourself permission to throw the playbook out of the window (does that sportsy analogy work? I don't know sports). I had to switch book projects from something more serious (the book that was my big goal for this year) to a silly sci-fi story because that's what I need emotionally right now. And the writing is coming waaaaaaay easier now that I made the change. And change won't be immediate and perfect. I learned that the hard way when I was adjusting to my new schedule, so know that adjustments may be required as you go.
If you enjoy hearing different people’s processes, then I highly recommend subscribing to Productivity Alchemy. It shows that there’s no one way to do anything and it’s very inclusive and positive. Again, I am very grateful to have been able to chat with Kevin. But also remember, as we’re all stressed out, it’s also okay to not be as productive right now. Take care of yourself, friends.
Thanks for reading.
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