150. How to Take Control of Your Time: The Systems I Use to Actually Get Things Done (productivity and time management tips)

I balance a lot of different things in my life. And if you have noticed, the theme of this show lately has really been focused around discipline and time management. I feel like January was really my month where I was fully focused on resetting and getting organized in February has been the month where I've put pedal to the metal and really hit the gas to start locking in on the direction that I want my year to go. The first six months of the year to me are really focused time because honestly, and let me know if you relate to this, once we hit the summer, it feels like you blink and the year is over and then it's the holidays, whereas January through June always feel so, so, so, so much longer. So what we're going to talk about today is sort of a build off of some of some, some of the prior episodes that I've shared relating to managing your life admin and then also becoming more disciplined. Today, we're going to get into time management and how I manage my time and lock in and actually get all my stuff done. So on the upfront here, I want to say that I don't think time management is about doing a million things in the least amount of time. I actually think that this type of mindset and this approach to time management is what leads a lot of us to feeling really burned out or overwhelmed or mentally stimulated or carrying the mental load, which we've talked about in prior episodes. I do feel like for most of my life, especially in the years before I became self-employed, and that's not to say I don't want to, I want to promise this by saying everything we're going to talk about today, it doesn't matter about your employment, whether you're a self-employed or not. But I do feel like up until I gained control of what I do every single day, I felt like I was constantly reacting to things that came up. Like I've become a much more stable and focused person since being self-employed. I always used to feel like I was busy, but I wasn't in control of the things that I was doing. My days were really full, but the things that were most important to me always felt like they were bookends of my day, like my workout or socializing or meeting up with friends or whatever. It never felt like it was the forefront highest priority. And obviously, when you're working a traditional job, you have finite time outside of that job to prioritize all the things. But I do think we have a really glorified being overbooked, and I like kind of don't understand why we're doing that. Because ultimately for me, my goal is to manage my time and manage my work and manage my responsibilities in a way that when I'm working, I'm working and I'm getting things done. And then external of that, like I have space in my calendar to be present and just sit into like really actually enjoy my life in doing things where I do feel like people are applauded for being booked and busy. And I just think that's because nobody wants to sit with their thoughts or like be alone for a little bit. So that's a whole other conversation though. I will say once I started working for myself full time, which it's now been, it'll be four years at the end of March, which is really crazy. I learned pretty quickly that how I manage my time is how I manage my life. And I have really started to figure out what does and doesn't work for me. Obviously, my routines and the things that I do and how I manage my time shifts and they definitely shift season to season. Now that I'm in a place where we have four very extreme seasons, how I operate in the winter is a little bit different than how I operate in the summer. But generally speaking, I stick to the same couple of key principles here. What changed everything for me though was realizing that being good at managing my time is not a personality trait and being disorganized isn't necessarily a character flaw. It's something that I can systematize. And you've probably noticed this in some of my previous episodes where I talked about how to stop being overstimulated and manage your life admin and then also how to be more disciplined. We need to stop associating, being like not disciplined or having poor time management as something that's wrong with us and to really look at it as just a system's flaw that's very easily solved through a container or through some rules. When you don't have a system of your own, your time gets managed by everyone else and everything else. And I think that is ultimately how so many of us end up feeling so completely out of control in our own lives. So what I'm going to share today is all of the structures and stuff that I use to manage my time in a way that I feel like actually ultimately supports my life. What this is not, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, is like a color coded Google Cal. Believe me, I have tried that. And as much as I want to be a Google Cal girl, I am just not. It really is mostly, we'll call it a framework, but it's really just how I think about time management and like the actionable tactical things that I do. So I'm going to walk you through that big picture all the way down to like the notion planner and things that I use. So the first thing we're going to talk about here is externalizing everything and really taking all the thoughts that are jumbled around in your brain and getting them out of your head. Your brain is not a storage unit. It's meant to think into synthesize, not remember every little teeny tiny detail about everything. So if you have tasks and plans and responsibilities living in your head, what ends up happening is they create constant background stress and mental overload. This is literally the definition of the mental load. And even when you're not actively thinking about them, they're taking up space in your brain. And obviously this erodes your ability to focus. It erodes your ability to think critically. It erodes your ability to perform at your highest level at work or in other aspects of your life. So getting organized really starts with choosing a place where everything lives. I recommend a digital planner for the sake of organizing your more professional life and then a physical planner and or a notebook for your personal life and your day like day to day either to do list or brain dumps or whatever. I actually have two notebooks now and I'll do a full notebook ecosystem tour at some point. I have this notebook, which is really like my work journal, things that I'm you know brain dumping, task list, strategy stuff, whatever. I'm about halfway through it. And then I recently just got this new journal that I'm going to be using as my more personal journal. This one though is like a journal cover so I can put other journals in it. So eventually when I finish off this first journal, which if you're not watching on YouTube, you should be watching on YouTube, but I'm just showing the two journals that I have. When I finish this work one, I'm going to get another insert for this and use that as my work journal so that I only have one. But anyways, a digital and a physical I think are two important elements because as much as I want to say having one or the other is most optimal, I do think they serve two completely different purposes. And I have found in the past I used to be like a big digital planner, digital organizer, but I have really started to embrace the beauty of pen and paper. And I do think it has such a different, not to be so woo-woo, but like a really different energy to it. And it serves a different purpose for me. So from like a hard tactical, I need to execute on these specific tasks. It's in my notion, which I'll talk about. And then for the ideation and creativity and creation of things, I feel like writing it down helps me a lot more. Anyways, like I mentioned, I use notion and I will go through more towards the end of the episode like specifically how I organize everything that we talk about. But in general, anytime something comes up like a work task or an email that has a task attached to it, it goes directly into my notion to do list for that particular day, whether it gets done that day, to be determined, but it gets written down and plugged into there so that I don't forget about it, because I will forget about it if I don't write it down there. And then at a later point, I will make sure it gets scheduled into the proper day. If I'm in a situation where I'm out of the house, I don't have immediate access to my notion, I will write it down in my notes app, and then I will load it into my notion later on the next time I get home so that I actually remember to schedule it. The more you trust and use a system, particularly, I recommend notion. I think notion is the greatest digital system of all time, but you can also use Google Cal and the reminders are to do list within there, just depends on your preference. The quieter your mind will ultimately become, because your focus improves when you're not trying to remember everything. So that's like really the most important thing is to have a place where you can externalize the ad hoc stuff that pops up throughout the day. because every single day something's going to come up. There's going to be an appointment reminder or an email you need to reply to or a scheduling conflict or whatever, especially if you're working a traditional job. So you have to have a place where you can aggregate everything. And I know that that sounds so simple and it is so simple. But I bet you there's 50% of the people listening to this, don't have that. And you're just really nilly writing things down. And in notebook, the reason why I think a digital planner for work stuff is so much more efficient is because you can move things around where I found in my corporate job. I actually got told in my corporate job that I was not proactive. And as a result, I actually created a tool called the Own Your Career Template, which I think for organizing your corporate deduces, I would recommend that over a notion. I'll make sure that's linked in the show notes as well. I don't talk about it really all that much anymore because I'm not in my corporate job. But people still use this and they still buy it all the time. The reason why I created that in the first place was because I was dealing with a lot of mental overload at work and I didn't have a place to keep things organized week to week. And at that point in time, I don't even know if notion existed. But either way, the challenge that I ran into was, my manager told me I wasn't proactive and that that was really embarrassing for me. So I created this space to organize everything in that actually really helped a lot. So having a central repository for aggregating all of your stuff on a daily basis, that's digital is so helpful. Because when you write everything down that you need to do in a notebook, it just becomes harder honestly to keep track of. And every day you have a new page and it just, that doesn't work for me when it comes to work tasks. What I will say about the notebook, I'm going to really hone this, or beat the dead horse on this, is that it's so helpful for the brain dumping. Brain dumping digitally versus brain dumping physically is a totally different experience. So anyways, I will do a full notebook journal ecosystem tour sometime soon. I'm working on really figuring all of that out, but in my effort to become more analog, I'm prioritizing writing things down in pen and paper. Moving on here, I want to talk about the skill that has really helped me with my time management overall, especially with so many different and competing tasks. Again, not only in the workday, but also external in my life. And that is learning how to prioritize things based on impact instead of urgency. So most people think that their time management problem is that they don't have enough time. But what's actually happening, or most of the time, is that the loudest things in your life are dictating and deciding the order of your day. I used to live by my email, and it would literally decide how my day was going to unfold. Even if I went into the day with a different plan, it would derail my ability to get stuff done that I needed to get done, because I would just get sucked into getting to inbox zero and clearing out my email. Now, I usually don't even look at my email until the middle of the day, or at least until I get my most important task done and out of the way. Sometimes, too, I even just save it completely until the end of the day. The system that I found that works for me is like, when I log into work, obviously, I'm scanning my email to see if there's an inbound brand request or something urgent that needs my attention. And if all I'm seeing are either junk emails or support emails or things that don't need an immediate reply, I'm tabling it until I actually get one of my most important tasks for the day completed. Urgent things are things that they feel like they need to be handled right now. So that could be text messages, emails, someone asking for a response, a random task that you remembered from 3 p.m. yesterday that feels critical, but it's probably not, or something that just popped up. Maybe it's like a team's message or a Slack message or something. And if you don't have a plan in place for your day, you default to urgency because it's honestly easier to respond than it is to be like, I'm going to do the more important things that actually need to get done. It makes sense because urgency creates a little bit of pressure and pressure creates movement, but urgency and importance are not the same thing. A lot of tasks that feel urgent are really just maintenance tasks. So they're keeping your life running. They're keeping your workday operating. They prevent problems. They keep things from falling apart. And they do 110% matter. But they do not necessarily move your life forward. They don't build momentum towards your goals. They don't create progress. And they generally keep you afloat. And usually they're things that other people are asking you to do. So when I'm thinking about just recent examples in my own life, I did an interview with a reporter. And I took maybe like 30 minutes to write out a bunch of answers. And I was a very thorough. And this reporter came back to me a week and a half later with 10 more questions that required another hour of my time. And to me, I'm just like, I already gave you a lot of my time. I don't have the time to prioritize this request for you at this point anymore. So to me, that's like a non-urgent task. And honestly, I don't even know when I'm going to get to it. Another non-urgent maintenance task would be personal finance dashboard support emails. I get at least two of them a day, even though I have incredibly thorough videos about the setup. Somehow, I still get a high volume of them. Those are non-urgent. I do respond to them within 24 to 48 hours, but it's not something I'm doing as soon as I wake up in the morning and look at my email at something that I do at the end of the day when everything else is done. Another one is creating graphics for my Instagram content. That doesn't require creative brain energy per se, or scheduling out videos for a lot of my videos. I run the transcript through chat and have it summarize and put timestamps together and stuff for me. So that's another thing that it's necessary, of course, for me to actually put out the content I'm doing. But it's not something that is urgent. It's more light work that I can schedule into quieter times of my day. So when I'm thinking about the things that are needle moving, those are the ones that I give my full attention to. First thing in the morning, you're like right when I lock in, when my brain is firing at its most efficient, we'll say. When you spend too much time on urgent maintenance stuff, you end up with this feeling where maybe you felt busy all day or you feel like you had a really long day, but you don't actually feel like you got anything done. And I know that that's a familiar feeling that a lot of us have had. And when I look back on patterns where I'm like, oh my god, I feel like I've just had a vortex of a day. Nine times out of 10, it's not because I'm doing things that are actually moving the needle forward in my business or my life. It's because I'm cleaning out my email or I'm doing bookkeeping or I'm responding to messages and stuff that those are important things, obviously, but it's not project work that's going to necessarily like generate revenue. So it's an example of working hard, but staying put in the same place. So the goal, ultimately, of all of this to be clear is not to eliminate the urgent tasks. It's to start letting those urgent maintenance tasks take over your day and really identify them when they come through and almost like compartmentalize them into slots in your day where it makes sense to draw attention to them. So when you're prioritizing by impact, this means you are deciding what the most meaningful use of your time is before the day actually starts before your phone starts taking over your life. That is why I have a brick because my phone, again, and I know you can relate to this is a vortex. So I literally lock myself out of it. This has helped so, so much with time management. But for other people's start making requests, do not disturb as my best friend. Literally, my phone is on Do Not Disturb 24/7. I never, ever, ever really take it off and let them expect a phone call. Before the world starts pulling out your attention, so before you get sucked into the news and all of the atrocities that happen on a daily basis, you need to decide where you're giving your attention. That is like the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate first step in learning how to manage your time. It really boils down to being proactive instead of reactive. I do think that poor time management comes from a place of not being able to self-regulate and really getting sucked into things that quite literally have nothing to do with you or don't have anything to do with what you need to accomplish in that particular moment or defined period of time. I actually like to prioritize my tasks for the next day, the night before. I showed this in a recent day in my life vlog, so I'll make sure that that's linked up on the screen if you're watching here on YouTube. But at the end of each day, what I like to do is I will close off my to-do list so I literally go through and check off all my different boxes. And then I put together or refine the task list for my next day. So usually on Sunday nights, I plan out high level my week and I'll plug in my different tasks that I need to accomplish based off of different themes for the day. So like, Mondays are usually admin days for me, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, depending on my schedule. One or two of those days are filming days for me. Fridays are like wrap up, planning for next week, kind of days. So the night before, I'll look at what did I accomplish today? What else do I need to accomplish this week? And what am I going to put on my calendar in schedule for tomorrow based off of, do I have calls tomorrow? Do I have a workout class I need to plan for? Like, what do I have going on? And what this does is it helps me prioritize. So when I get into working the next day, I'm not scrambling to think about what is or isn't important. I've already mapped out those high impact tasks. And I aim to get one or two of them done before I un-brick my phone, before I get into my emails, before I respond to texts. So I know that I'm actually doing the things that are most important to me, before I let everyone else's priorities get in my way. So let me make this practical, because I think this is where most people get stuck. And I used work as the example, because I obviously think that's where most of us think about time management. But time management spans beyond just work stuff. And it covers all of the things that we need to balance in a day, like going to the gym, nurturing relationships. If you're following along with the monthly curriculum, like weekly learning, hobbies, all that kind of stuff, if I asked you right now, what matters most to you in your current season of life, what would you respond? And then, you know, I want you to think about if what your schedule and your day-to-day tasks look like, and if they reflect your answer. So maybe it's your health, it might be your career, it might be building a new business, or starting something, it could be your relationships, and dating, or nurturing your current partner, it could be stability, it could be leaning into more creativity, it could be healing, you could be on that kind of journey. Maybe it's feeling more organized and less overwhelmed. That really is the real question is, are your priorities reflected in your current calendar or structure of your day? Because what we say matters and what our schedule actually reflects are usually two different things until you make the actual effort and intention to better align. And this is where self-respect comes into this conversation, and I talked about this in a previous episode as well. If you keep telling yourself that your goals matter, but you never actually make time for them, you start to trust yourself a little bit less and you start to feel like you're failing even if you're technically doing a lot. Because we confuse being busy with being productive and efficiently using the time that we have, which is the only resource we'll never get back. So I really, my ultimate goal, if I could do anything, is to change the way we approach busyness and stop glorifying being busy 24/7, because I really think that this constant stimulation and constant busyness is a roading our ability to actually build a life we want to have. So here's what prioritizing by impact actually looks like in real life. What it is is choosing ahead of time, one to three impact actions for your day. So these would be things that actually move the needle towards the direction of whatever is your highest priority right now or highest priorities. And the key is that they need to be specific. So let's say you are someone who is trying to start a side hustle. Working on my business is not specific, spending 40 minutes writing, filming, creating content, whatever, that's specific. Getting healthier, not specific. So if you are someone who really wants to prioritize health and fitness, but going on a walk after lunch or scheduling five workouts a week, that's specific. Getting organized, not specific, spending 30 minutes, clearing my inbox or spending 30 minutes clearing out one drawer in my kitchen a day, that's specific. Impact actions are usually the ones too that are most uncomfortable, which is why our default is to react to the stuff that comes up because it's also a form of avoidance, right? It's a way for us to feel like we're doing something without actually doing the thing that's going to make a difference because doing the thing that's going to make a difference is really uncomfortable. They require focus, they require you to get into a zone of not distracting yourself. They often involve doing the things you've been putting off. So it is a little bit harder to actually prioritize the impact stuff as opposed to reacting to the stuff that just pops up throughout the day. But for example, when I think about in my own life, impact and getting the most out of my day, there are a few important priority areas. Like I wouldn't say at this point in time, I'm focused on only one thing. I would say at this point in time, I'm really focused on balance and intention. So mine are my health, my business and like my mental health. So my physical health versus my mental health. So when I'm thinking about my physical health, this is my daily workout and steps. I spend an hour a day walking and or working out and where this fits in my season depends on or where this fits in my day depends on the season. So you know, in the winter time, usually it's at the end of the day and the summer time, I break it up. But for example, I don't let maintenance stuff related to work get in the way of completing this. So let's say it's the end of the day and I have five personal finance dashboard support emails in my inbox. But I haven't gone on my walker, got my steps in. I'm taking my steps because that's a higher priority for me. It's a more urgent like impact needle moving activity for feeling my best. Whereas the PFD support emails, I can answer those tomorrow. They are not something that I need to prioritize over prioritizing my physical health. So I hope that that makes sense. Another example would be my business. So I dedicate two hours a day to deep focus work. Those are generally the first two hours of my day where I'm not in my emails. My phone is bricked. I'm getting through something that's actually pushing my business forward, whether that be long form content creation or mapping out a specific strategy for something or completing tasks related to a brand deal that I'm working on. Those are things that are actually going to generate revenue for my business and keep my business alive, which is ultimately how I live and exist. And then the last layer here that's important to me is my mental health. So this is 30 minutes of quiet time or reading or doing a hobby, so needle pointing or reading about my nonfiction topic up the month or sitting in silence or going on a walk without my headphones. Like, I need to have that quiet time in my day or else I become so mentally overstimulated. So really my point here is that I'm not letting the maintenance of the day to day derail the things that are most important to me and that is how I actually execute and get things done because I'm not getting distracted by the little things that take a lot of time but don't move the needle forward. So urgent task to summarize this up feel easier because they are generally reactive. Someone is pulling you into them. You don't have to decide and you're really just responding. Whereas impact tasks require intention. They require you to choose your life and that's why they're a lot easier to avoid. Moving on here to the tools that I use to organize my time. So as I mentioned, I am not someone who lives or dies by a Google calendar. I'm not a color coded girl. I have tried that, believe me, but I have found that rigid time blocking really doesn't work for me because if something goes a little off schedule, it disorient me a little bit. So instead, I like to do containers and they shift and change all the time. Like a few weeks ago, I did a vlog behind the scenes vlog where I had intended to do a few things but as I'm going through certain elements of work, like sometimes you sort of get into the zone and tasks have to be shifted or changed and that's why I don't like doing hard rigid time blocks. All that to say, I use notion and I have a very specific monthly that ladders down into weekly planners. So I built this out myself. It's a work in progress. I am working on bringing this to life and making it available for sale. I just need to like really refine it because right now it's a little bit like just jointed. But anyways, it's structured with a few key sections and honestly, I feel like no matter how you prefer to plan whether you're like a day designer kind of person or you are a high level weekly or monthly task person, I think having a few key sections is a really good starting point. So I have a couple. First is I will map out the top of my week with my top three most important tasks and I also do this for the top of the month and then all of my weekly stuff ladders up to like my top three most important goals for the month. But anyways, we start with my top three MIT's. They're most important tasks. These are the three focus areas that I really need to spend the most time on and they like dictate how I am structuring all of the days of my week. Then in the next section. I have my full to-do list for the week where I will brain dump all of the tasks that are not only related to my MIT's, but also any like in-cillary or administrative things I need to do in addition to them. Aside from that, since a lot of my work is content focused, I also have a section for my brand partnerships that I'm working on that are either in progress or slated for the week to post or star or whatever. And then I also have another section for videos that I plan to film or ideas that I need to write down so they're all aggregated, nice and neat. So a lot of times like I'll brain dump ideas in my journal, okay? And then I will load them into my notion, like to film, to create, etc. So that I have a go to place where they're all there. Beneath those top key sections, I then have a to-do list for each day, and it's segmented out. So at the top of each day, I have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then I have weekend, because a lot of time, I'm doing some work tasks on the weekend. At the top of each day, I like to identify this specific theme for the day. So this is something that I have started, well, I haven't just started to do. I've been doing this for a while, but I started to do it when I first became self-employed. Honestly, it's something I should have done when I was in my traditional job too. But really, what this is, is it is a way to group similar tasks so that you're not jumping from a million different things every single day. So for example, I have days where I'm focused on filming. And on those days, I'll film, you know, long forum videos, I'll film some short forum videos. Usually I put a little bit of makeup on. And I'm just really getting in the zone with executing and filming out a lot of different videos. Then I'll have another day where I'm purely focused on admin and maintenance stuff. So that could be creating graphics. It could be scheduling out videos. It could be editing videos. Then if I have brands of do, I'll dedicate an entire morning or afternoon specifically to that. So I can really get into the zone in that regard. So having those themes is really helpful for me. And I generally follow a similar structure week over week, but obviously it changes, depending on again, whatever I have going on. And then for each day, I do my best to structure out to focused work blocks. The first work block is where I'm doing like my really deep, heavy, creative work off my phone, all the things. The second is usually lighter work or work that doesn't require as much creative focus. So it could be editing. It could be, you know, again, graphics, admin, whatever. It changes obviously, but generally I'll lump together similar tasks. So like if I'm filming in the morning, I'm not also going to do a filming block in the afternoon, because usually I'll be tired or I won't do long form all day long, if that makes sense, like I kind of try to structure it out. So tactically, for example, in the morning today, I'm filming to long form podcasts. This requires a lot of talking. It also requires a lot of like mental energy being on because I have to formalize and synth, synth, synthesize thoughts. Clearly, this is my second episode today. And so in the afternoon, I'm going to do some more filming, but I'm not going to do long form. I'm going to do short form that's quicker, easier for me to execute on and doesn't require the same amount of brain space, if that makes sense. So having and grouping similar tasks into each focus work block is also really, really helpful. And then for repeatable daily tasks, I actually have a checklist at the bottom of each day. And that's really related to posting or like taking a picture of my outfit or uploading things to different platforms. So I just have that repeated clearing my email is another one. And then for personal stuff and any events that I need to remember, this is where I use my Google calendar. So I'll always plug like my workout into my Google Cal or reservations or activity so that I don't forget. And then when I'm planning out my week, I'll pull up my Google calendar and I'll look at, okay, on Wednesday, have two calls. So that means I probably shouldn't be doing my filming on Wednesday. Instead, I'll do my filming on Tuesday when I don't have any call scheduled or, you know, on Friday, I have therapy, I have a reservation at six o'clock. So I'm going to really spend my morning doing deep work knowing that once I get back from therapy at three o'clock, I'm probably not going to get any heavy work done after that. So it just made an opportunity for me to be more realistic with the things that I can actually accomplish when it comes to work stuff will also balancing the personal priorities that I have. So this really keeps me organized, but it also helps me plan my day around it, which helps a lot with managing my time. So to summarize here, a few key things that help me first is having MIT's. So that helps me plan out my week. Second is having daily themes into dulyst and third is having focused time blocks. Beyond work stuff, since I know there's also a lot of you out there, probably who need help with managing your time outside of the daily office ground, there are, grind there are a couple of things that I personally do, none of which you haven't heard before if you listen regularly. So I'll summarize them. First is I have a super solid morning and evening routine. This is really how I book end my days so that I can kick things off feeling focused and then give my brain the time to rest in the evening. So I have tons of episodes about my morning and evening routine. If you want an updated one, I'm happy to do it, although I would imagine it will probably be pretty repetitive, but just let me know and I can add that into the schedule. Next is I schedule my workouts in advance. So I know what I'm doing when and if I need to be in a class where that class is and what I'll be doing. So for example, I go to Pilates classes, but I also go to classes at my gym. So like if I have a Pilates class, I'm not going to go to the gym. Obviously, if I'm going to the gym for a class, I'm also going to do my walk at the gym too. So I was just thinking about where am I going and how does that impact the way I'm building my workouts into the day. And then this also helps reduce the decision fatigue during the week of like, what workout am I doing? For example, today, I this was poor planning on my part, but it's actually impacting my ability to like map out my day. I had signed up for a hot bar class tonight at my gym, which luckily, there's no fee if you don't show up or anything. But it's not a hair wash day for me. So I'm not going to that. So I don't have another workout slated in, but I want to go to my gym. So it's just like I have to think about it. And it's annoying to me that I didn't anticipate this. And then last here is prioritizing my analog time. Big theme this year is getting off my phone. And this means in the evening, I'm focusing on a hobby. So reading needle pointing, cooking, learning, check out my curriculum video and also check out my episode about going more analog because I really, really think that if you struggle with time management, a huge element of that is having too much going on in your brain, you need to turn the volume down, put your phone away and pick up a hobby so that you can actually give your brain space to rest. Moving on here into wrap up, I also want to highlight one of the most important things that I do for time management, which happens closer to the top of the year. But this is applicable at any time of the year. And it could be adjusted to quarters to if you're like a quarterly planner, which I think honestly is a little bit more practical than a yearly plan because things change so much throughout the year that you can't necessarily always anticipate. But instead of setting a long list of resolutions, I like to choose a yearly theme. And I know I keep referencing back to episodes, but really like I've been talking about this because I talk about this in my state of the union episode. I use it as a lens to guide my decisions in priorities throughout the year. So my theme this year across the board, so across all the different pillars of my life, like my money, my clothes, my stuff, my friendships, my hobbies, everything, is to refine intentionally. I want my life to feel curated and intentional and minimal. So I have more brain space to focus on the things that matter to me and then enjoy my free time as much as I possibly can and really like relish in the time and freedom of my life. The reason why having a theme like this matter so much is because time management is really just decision management. So every day you are deciding what to say yes to and what you're saying no to a theme gives you a filter. Okay, so it actually ensures that what you are doing is aligned. When something comes up, I can ask, you know, just this just does this support the direction that I am moving in this year. And if it doesn't, it becomes a lot easier to either decline it or delay it or deprioritize it for the things that make more sense. So without a theme, everything really starts to feel equally important. And as a result, you end up exhausted scattered and you never actually make progress. And it's why you feel busy all the time without feeling like your life or your priorities or the things that are important to you are actually moving forward. So anyways, that's a summary of how I manage all of my time really boils down to prioritization, having a system for organizing out your days. and getting really honest with yourself of, are you prioritizing being reactive to things that are coming to you or are you sitting in the driver's seat of your life in your decisions? So with that, I'm gonna wrap up this episode. I hope you enjoyed, as always, make sure you subscribe to my subs, and you're subscribed to my YouTube channel if you are watching here on YouTube. And if you have a topic or conversation you wanna have, please let me know because I'm always looking for new ideas for the show. And with that, I will catch you in the next one. Thank you so much for being here and for listening. (upbeat music)