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Manage the Busy: Productivity Tips for Moms and Wellness Coaches

Manage the Busy: Productivity Tips for Moms and Wellness Coaches

Michele Duwe from Miss Task | Manage the Busy: Productivity Tips for Moms and Wellness Coaches

As a health and wellness coach, you're no stranger to the constant juggling of family, endless to-do lists, and running your own business. It's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of busyness, feeling like you're always running a million miles per hour. When a friend asks what you've been up to, you might automatically reply, “Oh, you know, just busy with family and growing my coaching practice. Everything's going great, but it's pretty crazy!” Sound familiar?

But is this automatic response merely a mask to cover up the chaos we feel swirling around inside? 

You are devoted to your family and your growing coaching practice, and managing the ever-present busyness can sometimes feel like an uphill battle.  

So, how do you differentiate between genuinely productive work and mere busy work? How do you ensure you invest your precious time in areas that truly enrich your life and business? How do you manage the busy in your life when it begins to feel out of control?

Choosing Calm and Ease

Why do we answer with busy? Is it for the connection?  Do we not want to burden them with everything going on in our heads? I don’t know about you, but we're all busy and running around crazy. I mean, that's a really easy way to describe our lives, right? 

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I head to my journal to read past entries. Success leaves clues, and history always seems to repeat itself. 

I will share this entry with you from a time when I chose to feel calm and at ease no matter the circumstance.

Journal Entry June 2, 2022: 

While we all have a lot going on, I don't really feel busy. In fact, this year, I consciously chose to embrace the feeling of calm and ease. 

Does calm and ease come easily all the time? No. I’ve learned that I’m the only one who can control my reactions, so I’m proactively choosing calm and ease. 

Even last Sunday, when our golden doodle, boy, she can be so naughty, jumped on top of the counter at 8 PM and ate my whole loaf of gluten-free cooling banana bread with chocolate chips and walnuts. I'll tell you what: I was pretty disappointed that she did that. So instead of taking my nice hot, relaxing shower before bed, nope, not this girl. I was listening to my vet. Explain to me how to induce vomiting. Thank God for Dr. Jerry.

That was a perfect opportunity to let the crazy in, but I didn't. Nope, I didn't. Instead, I embraced calm and ease. Did it take everything in me to keep it together? Yes, yes, it did. It took every fiber of my being to embrace calm and ease and not want to go off the deep end feeling overwhelmed, but I did it anyway. 

I don’t know about you but after reading this journal entry, it may be time to chose calm and ease to manage the busyness.

What drives you crazy? 

So how exactly do you manage those feelings of being busy and overwhelmed when they keep popping up in your life? In spite of situations, you can't handle and are out of your control? 

Here are two ways that I've created in my life to be able to help manage the busyness. First, make sure you have a great routine for scheduling your week and being okay that you'll have to let some things go. Of course, this will feel difficult, however, for right now you know that something has to give. Learn to accept not everything ought to be done by you. Basically, know that sometimes your schedule will get off and you'll have unexpected things come up that you didn't have planned or scheduled. 

Oh trust me, I have done so much thought work on this. In this situation, nothing would throw me off my game more than if my schedule or the outline of my day would get off in any way, shape, or form.  It drove me crazy. When the crazy happens embracing calm and ease, will not throw me off my game nearly as much.

Plan Your Week To Manage The Busy

You may be wondering, how to create a great routine for scheduling your week. The trick is to pick a day that actually works the best for you to plan out your week. You may do this Monday first thing, Friday afternoon, or over the weekend. Despite what you think, planning doesn't have to be a long-drawn-out process. Actually, I encourage you to set a time limit on how long you're gonna spend planning out your week, may I suggest up to one hour.

Basically, you can simply sit down and map it out ahead of time. When you decide ahead of time what you’ll do this is huge for not feeling so busy because you can see what you have going on and laid out ahead of time. Make sure to find a day that works the best for you, and map it out.

Michele Duwe from Miss Task | Manage the Busy: Productivity Tips for Moms and Wellness Coaches

Points are often overlooked when you're mapping out your week. Block time to get out the door. Or maybe it's just me, that needs 10 minutes before I plan to walk out the door.

It seems I find a number of last-minute items that somehow seem important to me, during those precious moments. Instead of getting out the door, again maybe it's just me, but for some reason, I notice that the water dish is empty for the dogs or, oh, did I feed them today? Of course, look there's clothes in the washing machine that need to go on the dryer.

Hey. Maybe that's just me? Those last minutes are when I seem to find all those little things that add up.

Therefore, I always buffer in 10 minutes for, and it's specifically in my calendar, time to get out the door because I know me and for some reason, I need that time. Also, make sure you include your time to truly get ready. Not your PR of the fastest time ever that you’ve gotten ready, plan for the amount of time it will realistically take.

Be sure to work backward from your appointments so that you make sure you have adequate time in your calendar to plan for getting yourself to your appointment on time.

 

Big Rocks

Another big rock to plan in your calendar, big rocks are the big, important things that you wanna make sure happen during your week. A few examples may be to make sure you have time set aside for yourself. Time for whatever it is that helps fill you up leaving you a little bit calmer and at ease in your life. This may be meditation, prayer, journaling, exercise, or whatever it is that you need to do to make yourself feel calm and at ease.

Without a doubt, those big rocks you put in your calendar are all important things that cannot be overlooked or missed to make sure that you have time set aside for things that allow you to manage the busyness.

 

Letting Go to Manage The Busyness

Secondly, is by letting go of some things. Oh, it's okay. You can do it. It's really not that big of a deal. You know in your heart there are things in your life right now that are no longer serving you, but you've kept doing them and doing 'em because you've always done it.

It's okay. It's okay to let them go. I'm giving you permission right now to let those go. Please check in with yourself, check in with how you're feeling is this really something that you wanna do? What if, you reserve your valuable time for things that bring calm and ease to your life?

Certainly, let go of the things that are no longer serving you at this time in your life. This is where I personally need to check in with my feelings of calm and ease.

After all by embracing calm and ease, and I'm learning to accept that I can not load extras into my calendar, activities I know are really gonna be pushing my schedule. Going out for dinner to often or trying to put too many things in one day.  I know now that I'm the type of a person if I have more than one, two max big activities I'm gonna be drained completely.

Plus he can have people come over to the house. I'm not that girl. I'm the girl that needs to limit the number of activities that she does in order to feel calm, at ease, and manage her busy feelings.

When I load all of those extra things into my schedule, well, you guessed it. I'm not gonna feel very calm. I'm gonna feel busy.

I want to be able to manage the busy feeling and embrace, calm and ease. There, I am aware by taking a step back and reviewing all the items on my calendar for the week.

That way I know if someone asked for me to do something during the week, I can go ahead and look at what I have planned out in my paper planner or on my calendar and know, Hey yeah, this, this is not gonna work.

It's gonna be opening that door back up to the feeling that I'm frantic and busy and trying to get everywhere.

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This is how I know when I’m scheduling too much

How do you know when you’re scheduling too much? Do you have a trigger that alerts you?

How do I know? When my day is getting to feel frantic and busy because I start to dream at night that I'm trying to get places. Here is what happens in my dreams, I need to get someplace and I can't get out the door to go. The reason is that I have all these things that I'm trying to gather and put into either a suitcase,  a basket or a bag. I’m struggling to get everything gathered up because things are everywhere and I'm frantically trying to organize and pick them up so that we can get out the door on time. 

This dream is my trigger, once it begins I know that I'm doing or trying to do too many things. It a signal that I need to take a hard look at my schedule and figure out what need to go. If letting things go is hard for you right now, I'm giving you permission to let it go.

Throw it over

Despite what you think, you do not have to do everything. You only need to do the things that keep the ship afloat. Everything else may be thrown overboard. 

If you're getting asked to be the next person to run a committee, are you the best person to be running that committee? Maybe the answer is yes. At least consider what you’ll have to say no to if you say yes to a new committee. Regardless, you need to make a conscious decision if that time commitment will allow you to manage the busyness or instead of fulfilled it will leave you exhausted and busy. Should that be the case, say no. Add the committee to your Someday/Maybe list, once your calendar frees up a bit then at that time you may consider joining another board. Even though you’re making a conscious decision to say no right now. In the future, it could be a yes. 

 For me personally, I had to set the limit of only one board at a time.

Okay,  I lie. I'm lying to you right now. I didn't set the limit. My husband told me I'm only allowed to be on one board at a time because I tend to take on too much if I'm on more than one board at a time. He is 100% correct. Since this rule was established, I’ve also set my priorities to create a decision matrix. 

Know your time bank

Given these points, begin to know and understand your time bank. What is your time bank? Let’s figure it out. The simplest way to figure it out is how much time you spend sleeping. Take that number and subtract it from 24 hours. That's your time bank.

Should you sleep eight hours, that leaves you with 16 hours to manage the busy. 

What you decide to do with your 16 hours every day is up to you. How many hours do you have to get to do everything that you want to get done? 

You may try to justify this, but I did. 

Okay. One other point regarding busyness: It is really only a thought. I know, right? Plenty of clients have tried to tell me differently, and heck, I even tried to justify to my own personal coach when she pointed out that I was merely having thoughts that I'm busy.

Yeah, in the end, it is our thoughts. 

You guessed it your thoughts create the feelings that cause the actions that give you your results. You get to choose the thought of being busy. Yep, I know. Try that on for size and see how it feels. Heck, you may want to jump on my bandwagon and choose the thought of calm and ease. Once you look for all the ways your life feels calm and at ease. You’ll see how everything will begin to change in your life by simply choosing that one different thought. 

Thank you, friends, so much for reading. If you're ready to have somebody in your corner, helping you choose calm and ease, I'm a little bit down the path. I'm happy to help you. Together, in six months, we can work on calm and ease in your life. The link to my private coaching is below. I appreciate you. Have a wonderful week, and I'll see you back here next week.

Halfway There: How to Conduct a Successful Mid-Year Review

Halfway There: How to Conduct a Successful Mid-Year Review

And just like that, we are heading into July! It’s the perfect time to pause and reflect as we hit the year's midpoint. Seriously, take the time to evaluate your progress and gauge where you are right now with your business goals. With a Mid-Year Review, it allows you to check in and realign yourself. Let’s be real; the new year's excitement vanished months ago; it’s time to capture that magical energy as we turn the corner into the year's second half.

Benefits of a Mid-Year Check-In

Are you curious about the benefits of a midyear check-in for your online business or health and wellness coaching practice and why this benefits you?

  • Improved Decision-Making: By evaluating your business's performance, you can identify areas that need improvement and make informed decisions about your online strategy. Analyzing your strengths and weaknesses allows you to adjust and realign yourself with your annual goals.
  • Increased Productivity: A mid-year review helps you pinpoint business areas that aren't meeting your expectations. By readjusting accordingly, you'll become more productive and efficient in achieving your desired outcomes.
  • Enhanced Financial Management: This is the perfect time to review your finances, discover ways to save money, and increase revenue. Making informed decisions will keep you on track with your financial goals and ensure the financial health of your business.
mid-year review for online entrepreneurs

How to Conduct a Mid-year Review

  • Setting Aside Time Now, this is crucial; please schedule time for a mid-year review. It is up to you to honor your commitment to achieving your goals. Block off a few hours on your calendar and ensure you won't be interrupted. If feasible, book yourself an Air B&B and make it a business retreat. Do you know what would be really fun, invite your business bestie to the Mid-Year Business Retreat. I know, right?
  • Celebrating Accomplishments With all the hustle and bustle of running your business, it’s easy to forget to celebrate what you’ve accomplished so far. Big or small, don’t overlook these achievements—they add up to your overall success. Take a few minutes to celebrate; goal achievement takes discipline.

Key Components of the Midyear Review

  • Review and Reflect: Let’s dive into your numbers—they tell your success story and highlight areas needing a little TLC. Analyze your sales data, website traffic, and social media engagement to see the trends, patterns, and areas of growth or decline.
  • Evaluating Goals: Are your goals still relevant, and are you on track to achieve them? This reflection is vital for realigning your strategies moving forward.

Updating Your Vision Board During Your Mid-Year Check-In

  • Revisiting Your Visual Goals Why not reassess the goals you’re working towards visually? Your vision board should reflect your current ambitions and be a daily reminder of where you want to go.
  • Adjusting Your Vision Based on your midyear review, adjust your vision board to include new goals or tweak the existing ones to suit your pathway to success better.

Setting New Goals or Readjusting Old Goals with the SMART Framework

Set new SMART Goals or readjust an old goal that no longer feels in alignment with you and your business.

The key to goal setting is to ensure that you can visualize yourself achieving the goals AND they are meaningful to you.

  • S – Specific, Simple, See Yourself Achieving The Goal
  • M – Measurable and Meaningful to You
  • A – As if Now, Achievable, Attainable, Actionable, All Areas of Your Life
  • R – Realistic, Responsible
  • T – Timed, Time-Bound, Toward What You Want

This approach will ensure that you set clear and achievable goals.

Taking Action

Once your review is complete, it’s time to take action. Prioritize your goals based on your review, develop an action plan, and break down your goals into smaller, actionable steps. And remember, if you need help, don’t hesitate to ask for it. You can always hire freelancers, consultants, or contractors to support you in achieving these goals and taking your business to the next level.

Here are a few previous posts on goal setting for additional resources.

https://misstask.com/goals-daily-doing/
https://misstask.com/visually-tracking-your-2021-goals/
https://misstask.com/achieving-2021-goals/
https://misstask.com/mind-mapping-to-plan-your-goals/

mid-year review for online entrepreneurs

Time To Wrap This Up

Your mid-year review is your roadmap for the second half of the year. By keeping it simple and actionable, you ensure that you can easily follow through on your plans without feeling stressed or stretched too thin.

Remember, the goal is to make running your business as smooth and efficient as possible. Take the time to evaluate, celebrate, and realign yourself with your goals, and watch your health and wellness coaching business thrive in the months ahead.

Are You Ready to Supercharge Your Business's Success in the Second Half of the Year?

As a health and wellness coach, you've poured your heart and soul into your business, but are you truly on track to achieve your goals?

The mid-year mark is the perfect time to pause, reflect, and realign your strategies to ensure you finish the year stronger than ever.

Don't let the year pass by without taking a purposeful pause to assess your progress and make necessary adjustments.

Opt-in now and gain instant access to the Mid-Year Review Workbook, your essential tool for ensuring a successful and fulfilling year.

Text On Image "Mid-Year Review Workbook" with an online business owner in her work-from-home office
Turning Unproductive Days into Productive Wins

Turning Unproductive Days into Productive Wins

Michele Duwe from Miss Task | Turning Unproductive Days into Productive Wins

I'm not sure about you, but I know those days when I look back and think, what the heck did I do today? Did I accomplish anything productive? Hmm? What was it? I worked all day, but I feel I’ve got zero to show for it. Please tell me you can relate to this feeling. I'm guessing even the most productive people can have days where they feel incredibly unproductive as if they are spinning their wheels. And that's okay. It happens. The best thing any of us can do is give ourselves grace. First, let’s begin to get curious as to why. Here is one of the first questions I ask myself to get into the weeds of my unproductive day.

Ask Yourself “What’s in your head that’s causing this unproductive day?”

What story is going on in your head that’s causing this? Is this just one day or is it a pattern? Is it that you were unproductive or was your attention on the wrong thing? It’s interesting, one of the patterns that I see in Online Entrepreneurs when they are about to uplevel, they hide in the unproductive busy work to feel safe.

Grab Your Journal

Okay, Friend, grab your journal. Begin by asking yourself the curiosity questions from earlier. By journaling it will help you to drill down into the root cause of what is really going on with your unproductive day.

Daily Journal Hack

One hack that I’ve found is keeping a journal of your day inside of Notion. By journaling a bit everyday it will allow you to look back and look for patterns.

This is a concept that I learned from Marie Poulin and her daily journaling practice. I’ll put a link to her is the link to her YouTube video on using her daily journal in Notion. https://youtu.be/1Z06fqYhNgM

You see what is nice about journaling in Notion, as it has the ability to rolls up your daily journal into a weekly, monthly, and yearly wrap-up. The monthly wrap-up allows you to see how many times during that month were you felt unproductive.

Tracking this leaves clues as to when you are having unproductive days. When you pay attention you’ll begin to see a pattern of your productive over the month. 

Are you curious why this is important. It will allow you to plan for a big launch around your productivity spikes.

What do you do when you recognize that you’re having an unproductive day? Here are my top tips to save an unproductive day if you begin to notice you’re spinning your wheels.

Restart Your Unproductive Day

Can you do something simple to restart your day?

While we are not able to go back in time, we can reset and clear our minds. 

A couple of simple ways to do this is by:

Sitting down for a quick meditation to clear everything and calm your mind. The Insight Timer has great guided meditations.

Perhaps you’d prefer to pick up a journal to write out all the clutter. Or pull open a Google Doc and type it all out.

You see, these are great ways to reset your focus and start your day with a fresh mind.

Allowing you to let go of your unproductive day.

Good Mornings Start The Night Before

What are the things that you could do the night before to ensure that your day begins on the right foot? 

It could just be me, but if I cannot get 100% prepared for the next day, the night before, the next day, I feel like I’m running in circles. 

Unfortunately, it is happening more than I’d like it to. But it’s summer, the days are longer, and I’m outside attempting to become a gardener. I’m doing the lazy gardener hack. I’ll let you know if it was a success at the end of the growing season. But, so far so good.

Michele Duwe from Miss Task | Turning Unproductive Days into Productive Wins

Here is a list of the things that set up a productive day.

  • Wrapping up my day with my Journal in Notion. Reflecting on the day, how it went, what I’m feeling.
  • Clearing out what’s in my mind and getting all my chicken scratches from my planner and notebook into Notion
  • Planning the next day with tasks assigned to time blocks in my planner.
    Prepping the coffee maker
  • Making sure my Epic Water Filler is full and my first quart of water is ready to go in a mason jars sitting on the counter.
  • Filling the dog food dishes
    Laying out my clothes
  • Having my AirPods, iPad, and Pencil ready to go for the morning.

This sets me up to feel productive and organized. By doing so it sets the whole tone for my day.

 

Prep For Your Week

When you know a busy week is ahead of you, try to get yourself prepared. Take the time on Friday or the weekend to prep for the upcoming week. Prepping for your week cuts down on the decisions you need to make when you're already frazzled.

I make sure that I have my meals planned out and know the days we need leftovers and the days I’ll be home to make a meal. Inside Notion, I have an eight-week meal plan routine. Creating this meal plan removes the dreaded question: What’s to eat, Mom? It cuts down on decision-making after a long day of well decision-making. By having repeat meals, the decision has already been made for you, instead of taking the time to plan your meals or, worse, the in-the-moment decision-making.

My calendar has all the non-negotiable appointments for my business and life. In my planner, based on what needs to be done, I decide on the time blocks for my done-for-you content repurposing clients, private coaching clients, and things that only I can do in my business. 

Planning out the time blocks and when I’ll do the work eliminates the decision of what I will do next. It’s already been prepared,d and I know exactly what I’ll be working on next. This helps with decision fatigue; this is a real thing. Here is a post I’ve written about decision fatigue. https://misstask.com/reduce-decision-fatigue/ 

 

Look For Your Unproductive Clues

At the end of the week, pay attention to the things that didn't get this done. This leaves clues for you to evaluate.

Ask yourself: Why you didn’t get them done?

Did I schedule too much? Did I estimate the time wrong? If it’s a task that’s been on the list for a few weeks, it’s time to ask if I really want to do this.

Until you get the hang of it, ensure you have buffer time for those just-in-case moments.

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It’s Time To Wrap This Up

A quick recap for the skimmers: Feeling unproductive? That's okay. Give yourself grace. Determine if it's a one-off day or a pattern. Restart your mindset. Prepare the night before for a good morning. If you didn't prepare, do the essentials when you can. Evaluate your productivity regularly; it leaves clues for improvement. 

Thank you so much for reading, I appreciate you and I hope you have a wonderful week.