Summer Refire: How to create a schedule that fits you
This first episode of the Summer Refire is all about how you can create a schedule that fits you, your life, and your business.
This episode would fall under the DESIGN part of my productivity ecosystem, because planning for routines that help you reach your goals is ra key part of designing your business operations in a way that helps you be more productive.
And if you have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention the productivity ecosystem, you can go back a few episodes (to episode 31) to get the basics, or read the blog post.
The start of a new season is a great time to reflect on, and maybe adjust, your schedule. For many of us, the season changing means that our time availability, responsibilities, and even energy change. I hope that you enjoy this summer refire, and that even if you’ve listened to it before, you get a nugget from it that you haven’t picked up on before.
*Giveaway information*
You can win a one-hour pick-my-brain session with me. You can ask me aaaanything when it comes to your productivity, schedule, work-life balance – anything within the realm of things I usually talk about here on the podcast – and get personalized advice.
There are two ways you can enter the giveaway:
1. Share about the podcast with a friend or on your social media, and either send a screenshot of the share to my email jenna@jennahellberg.com or DMs, or share about in IG story and tag me @thejennahellberg so that I can see. (If your account is private I may not see the story; in this case, send a screenshot of it to my DMs)
2. Write a review about Building Balance on Apple podcasts, and send me a screenshot of the review. If you don't have access to Apple podcasts, you could leave me/the podcast a note here: https://jennahellberg.com/note
If you do both, you get two draft spots in the giveaway.
Out of everyone who shares and/or reviews within the month of June 2022, I’ll pick a winner on July 1st and get in touch with them (hopefully you!) by July 5th to schedule the pick-my-brain session.
Shownotes
This first episode of the summer refire is all about how you can create a schedule that fits you, your life, and your business. Planning for routines that fit you and that help support you to spend time on the things you want to work on is really a key part of designing your business operations in a way that helps you be more productive.
So this episode would fall under the DESIGN part of the productivity ecosystem.
I think that the start of summer (or winter – I know a good chunk of my listeners have the opposite going on) is a great time to reflect on, and maybe adjust your schedule, as for many of us the season changing means that our time availability, responsibilities, and even energy change. I hope that you enjoy this summer refire, and that even if you’ve listened to it before, you get a nugget from it that you haven’t noticed before. Let’s dive into it!
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In this episode I’ll show you how you can create a schedule that fits you
I wanted to talk about this in the first episode, because it’s so hard to move through your week in an intentional way, if you’re solely relying on a to-do list but don’t have a structure in your week.
If you are worried that a schedule will make life too boring or rigid, I would encourage you to still try this out.
A schedule doesn’t have to be about knowing what you do every minute, as it is about having a general outline that helps you plan out your tasks into your week in a way that fits with all the things you want to do in your life outside of just getting things done.
There are a bunch more ways that having structure actually brings you flexibility and freedom, but I’m gonna do a whole episode about that because I think it is suuuper important to talk about. But for now, one example is that if something goes wrong in your day or week, it is so much easier to deviate from a plan you already had versus trying to remember all the things you gotta do + fit them somewhere – and you don’t know where to fit them because your schedule is a mystery.
But the best benefit I can think of is the amount of mental capacity that is freed up, when you are organized – because your brain doesn’t feel like it has to solve the “when do we do the things” problem 24/7.
On another note, you might already have a schedule, but feel like your schedule is a mess or like you’re just not the kind of person who can stick to a schedule. In this case, I would venture to guess that your current schedule just doesn’t support your needs and isn’t matched with how you want to live your life or how you best work – so it makes sense that it feels like it’s not working for you. But it’s maybe just not a good fit for you.
I’ve recently tweaked my own schedule because I felt like something just wasn’t right, or as smooth as it could be, so I’m super excited to talk about this.
But, let’s move on to the schedule creation!
Step 1 – roughly outline your week
What I usually do is I draw one of those “school week schedule” type things with the timestamps on the left and then our classes blocked out – but in this case I include the weekend days too.
So each day gets its own column and then over on the left write out the hours that you are usually awake.
You can also do this in a spreadsheet btw – totally up to you. I love outlining things on paper before I make things digital.
A side note: you can use different colors for different types of blocks on your schedule (something to consider)
Step 2 – fill in mealtimes
Sooo food is a huge thing. We all need fuel and nutrition – so this is what I put into this weekly schedule outline first. Everything revolves around meals!
I block out time for breakfast, lunch, dinner – and these include some extra time to account for cooking and things like that.
Step 3 – fill in any regular commitments
If there is anything that happens regularly that you can’t (or don’t want to) change. An appointment of some kind, a class, or picking up kids from school, etc.
If you are employed by someone else, this is also the step where I would block off the hours you are at work.
Step 4 – block out your free time
So blocking out time for not-working is important, because if we plan for our work first, there is a risk that self-care or free time doesn’t get accounted for enough. When you block this out first, you can see how much time you actually have for work and can plan tasks for that time more realistically.
So decide on the blocks of time when you don’t want to be working – and you want to instead be resting, having fun, doing social things, or taking care of tasks and chores at home, running errands etc.
If you do want to give some of these blocks a name or theme, go for it! For example, a friend of mine cleans the apartment at the same time every other Saturday. Another one of my friends has a 45 minute block for yoga set aside in the morning while her husband takes care of things with their toddler.
Sometimes the more details you can put down, the more excited you get about keeping yourself to your schedule.
Step 5 – plan your work or creative time
The time you have left is essentially the time you have to devote to your business or creative projects.
In my case, it means there’s a few hours of time before lunch and a few hours of time after. Sometimes I love to do creative work tasks on a weekend day for a couple of hours too, if I’m feeling inspired and I haven’t planned anything in particular for the weekend.
Consider your energy
I would encourage you to examine those time blocks that you have left. Are there certain time blocks that are at a time when you’re more energetic, versus are there blocks where you tend to feel a bit more like a sloth?
Because I know that I’m at my most energetic and productive in the morning, I generally make sure that I work on the most focus-requiring tasks in the mornings. That usually means writing, recording, creating Instagram posts, etc. Things like that, my deeper work.
Then, I know that my afternoons hours are a time when I have a harder time motivating myself to do deep work, so I usually plan for lighter, more mechanical tasks and that’s also when I like to schedule calls with people. When there’s another person on the other side of the screen, it is super energizing to me and pretty much cancels out my afternoon energy slump.
Consider themed days (or parts of the day)
You can also plan to do certain types of things on a certain day of the week, for example maybe Mondays are for creative work or Fridays are for research or planning. But I will speak to this more in a future episode, but I wanted to mention it here, in case it was something you wanted to keep in mind. For now the *most* important thing is that you figure out a schedule you enjoy and that works for you – and that is then a foundation that you can build on and improve upon.
So that’s it – that’s a framework that you can use to figure out your schedule, and that you can get back to every time you notice that it might be a good thing to make some changes.
Final thoughts
You maybe noticed that I said “usually” a couple of times while talking about my own version of the schedule – that’s because I’m just doing my best to follow my plans but because energy can fluctuate so much or life sometimes happens, I don’t stick to this 100% of the time. Maybe 70% of the time.
The important thing for me isn’t to follow the schedule minute-by-minute – it’s more about me having this idea of a flow I want to have throughout my day, to have these general guidelines to stick to, to have those anchoring moments in there.
For example, I have to change my schedule a bit for summer vs winter because of the summer heat. In winter I usually take Nova the dog out in the afternoons, and in summer I gotta get her outing in early before it gets too hot. I still know that the outing is accounted for in my schedule – it just means that half the year my morning work hours are an hour shorter and the other half of the year it’s the afternoon hours that get cut.
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Oh WOW how strange it is to listen to myself from a year ago – I’m glad those beginner podcast days are behind me!
I kind of needed this episode myself right now, because I need to adjust to summer again *and* I’ll also be spending some time alone this summer as Marcus is traveling for work, so I’ve got to account for chores and things that he usually takes care of. So I’m gonna be right there with you, charting out my days.
Hei did you know that if you share my podcast with a friend or on your social media within the month of June 2022, you can win a one-hour pick-my-brain session with me? You can ask me aaaanything when it comes to productivity, schedules, work-life balance – anything within the realm of things I usually talk about.
So if you share with a friend, grab a screenshot of that and send it to me in am email or on my IG, or if you share on IG maybe you can take a screenshot of your favorite episode and say why you liked it. And don’t forget to tag me so that I see it!
And if you’d like an extra giveaway possibility, you can also write a review for Building Balance on Apple podcasts. I would really appreciate a review, because hearing what has been helpful to you about the podcast not only helps me create better content but it also helps others decide whether they’d benefit from listening to the podcast. So if you write one, take a screenshot of your review and send it my way because I can't see the content of reviews that have been written outside of the US – I can only see the ratings, so please send a screenshot of it my way. That would mean so much to me.
I’ll pick a winner out of everyone who shares on July 1st and get in touch with the winner by July 5th.
Thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me, I hope you have a beautiful week. Bye.