Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season I'm talking about consultants and consulting. And today, I wanted to address a question that I've gotten from a consultant, which was about productivity. I'm going to take a contrarian approach to this, because I think most people, when they think about productivity, it's like, “How can I get more done in less time, be more efficient and push harder?” And I think for most of my people and my clients, they want ways to do this differently. They want ways that allow for flow, creativity and spending more time in heart space, in an intuitive space and so, that's what I'm going to describe to you. When my clients do this, they are far away more productive, more effective and by the way, they earn way more money, which is a wonderful side effect.

So, I’ve got six ideas for you here. Just want to offer them, you don’t have to take them all, you can just try them on and see which of these really works for you. So I had a client that I met back in February of 2020, right before the pandemic hit. She had three goals for our VIP day and one of them was to figure out how to work herself out of the business because they realized that in order to grow, she was kind of a bottleneck and she wanted to do more kind of leading and being CEO of the business and less of like working in the business.

What I had her do was to design her ideal day, what would that look like? What was great was she had a business partner there with her who, as we were outlining what the day would look like, was kind of graphically recording it, drawing it out with some images and this wonderful, you know, drawing with some words on it. But it was like the image for the perfect day, which they later had made into a poster that she put into her office. She talked about like, when does she want to get up ideally? What does she spend those first few hours doing? And there's exercise in the middle of the day because that kind of refreshes her and gets her back on the right track and there's definitely going to be writing during that day. And she has the time that she spends with her team but mostly it's a day that she works independently. So, our goal for this year has been for her to have as many of those days as possible.

What I think is the takeaway from this is for you to do your ideal day, like if you had the perfect day that you could plan, how would your day begin? What would you do during it in terms of growing your business, working on your business? How would the day you conclude the day, like, what would it look like? The opportunity here for you is to design your ideal day, when would it begin? What would you do during that day? Now it's a workday, you're working on your business, in your business, you're doing whatever needs to be done but like, what's the funnest stuff for you to do? What are the things that fuel you? And if you say to yourself, like, if I had one more day a week, what I would do for my business is, like put that into this day. So what was really interesting was when she looked at this day as we had designed it she said, “It doesn't feel like I'm working if I'm doing this.” And I had to point out to her, “You realize that thinking about your business, like having this much concerted and focused thinking time would be amazing for the growth of your business.”

Now, as you go about implementing your perfect day, I mean, what I would say is go through your calendar and mark off a day of week that is going to be this ideal day, just get that to where it's known, it's known by you and your clients and everyone that this is that day that you work on the business. I would suggest that it not be a Friday just because to me, Friday has the weekend already started feeling so I think it's better if it's a Monday, if you can start the week that day, then you have you're going to have an amazing week, or you might, you know, see where it fits into your week. In implementing the ideal day, what comes up very often is what I want to have is the next step for you, which is rules.

I've talked about rules in the past, but I feel like we can never talk about them enough. I'm constantly bringing them up again to my clients and they evolve as you get better at some things, you might need to add more rules and you don't have to kind of have certain rules that you did have. So, what are the rules? They are like, these are the rules, guidelines, boundaries, and limitations that we live by in our work and we put them in place because we need to have boundaries known and protected. So, for example, no work after 5PM, no work on the weekends and those might be aspirational, those might be things that you work up to, because if you're working until, you know, 11PM every night, then you might want to have, you know, start at work after 8PM and then kind of work your way up to something that's really reasonable for you. If you always have to work on Sunday evenings, that's fine, then the rule would be: I don't work on Friday afternoons because I'm already working on Sunday evenings and I'm switching those times out, so give yourself a break in that area.

Think about when you are at your best and then you might decide no client meetings during those hours so, for example, if you're a morning person in the first two hours of your workday or when you really want to focus on you and getting stuff done, then you can block those out. If we go back to the idea that this is about productivity, imagine if you had your best creative and productive time during the best hours for you, you could do amazing things in your business but what happens is a lot of times we give those away to clients because like all the clients said, they'd like to do this at this time. So a rule is, “No, no, I don't have meetings at that time.” And you're going to do your very best to stick to that, ok?

Another way that rules show up in business is stop, so stop doing X, so no, none of this you can also try and always do this or we always do this kind of things. And, you know, for example, like we always return phone calls within X amount of time or we always return messages to clients, things that you want to have as rules for your team but a stop list is important as well, especially with productivity. If you're wanting to get more stuff done, you can inevitably look at things that you're doing and realize that there that you're doing a ton of stuff that you shouldn't be doing. So for me, I've been working this way for a really long time, so I have ideal dates in my business. I have rules that my team and my clients know and still I realized in the last couple of weeks, like I'm doing some things that are not in my joy & genius zone and they make me cranky. I don't want to do them and I feel resentful of doing them so guess what? I went to my project manager and I said, “I don't want to do this task anymore, let's find someone else who can do that.” Look how easy, so get creative with thinking about the things that you can stop doing, that you don't have any business doing because they make you, you know, in my case, it makes me a crankier version of myself and that is not a productive state for me.

Ok next idea and I want to offer this as a game changer is half hour meetings. Half hour meetings, like what if the default for all of your work was half hour meetings? Give it a shot. I mean, I hear a lot of already kind of “That's not even possible.” resistance to it. It's made a big difference for me and you can begin to do this in many areas. You can start with internal meetings, you can start this with new clients, it's a little harder to start with clients who are already used to something. But hey, we're coming up on a new year and I have a message that's going to go out to say, “Hey, in 2021, I'm going to do half hour meetings, the default.”

So, this is obviously going to be different if you do it on sites with a client and you need to be there all day long or, you know, you're meeting for four hours at a time. I would see if you can set some different boundaries around those kinds of meetings you know, like we meet for 45 minutes and then we take a fifteen-minute break. That way you can catch up with things that are going back at the home office or you can check in with things. But in general, I think a half hour meeting default, you know, you can start this as a default in your calendar as well, just set that up as a default and see what happens.

The amazing thing is it feels like but we need an hour for our meetings we won't get anything done in half an hour, you'll be amazed, you'll be amazed at what happens. People prepare better for a half hour meeting because we don't have as much time, and they're more efficient in the meeting, which means less chit chat, less kind of digressions and things like that, because they see that half hour mark coming up and so, you can get a lot more done. It's one of those really simple things that you can do that makes a world of difference and you wouldn't think it would work.

The next thing is kind of a conceptual idea, so we kind of zoom back out and like, look at your day, your week, your month, and that's time tracking. So if you're used to this, then it's easy for you but if you're not, it's super hard. I'm not used to it personally, it's super hard, painful, annoying. You're just writing down everything that you're doing to see how long you spend, how much time you spend doing things. Now, what's nice is, I have team members who tracked their time and I know some people who tracked their time for productivity reasons and things like that. That's what you're doing here, you're going to track your time just for a few days, you can do it for a week or so if you have a pretty typical week and you want to know like “Where does all my time go?” Then you can track something like that. What we're looking for is where's the opportunity, right? Where are your big-time sucks, where things get away from you or where are the opportunities that you can kind of maybe time block and get more done in certain amounts of time?

But time tracking is super informative and if you feel extremely resistant to doing it, then you should definitely do it, because I think there's probably information for you in there. What I notice when I do it is just distractions. There are just numerous things that pull me off task that need to be done right now that get in the way of my work and what is really easy about that is I can do time blocking to where I set aside time for doing a task and then anything that could be a distraction I remove that so, I go to a different office, I go and shut the door, I work from a location where no one knows where to find me. Obviously, all of the devices are on silent and things like that but it's basically something that you can take a back charge of once you know what's going on with that. So, time tracking is a really great thing to do. It's also really helpful if you feel like your project work isn't profitable, if you've done value-based pricing or flat pricing and you're like, “Oh, this is feeling like not like, too many hours are going on to this project”, if you time track then you'll know whether that's a feeling or whether it's actually true.

The next thing and we've talked about this in the past, but I feel like we can't talk about productivity without it, is having a number one priority for your day and you can choose three things that you want to get done in the day. I do three things for my week that I want to work on, but I do have a thing that's one thing a day that I want to get done. On the Saboteur episode, when Christopher was with me, we talked about the idea that the word priority is singular. It has evolved over the 20th century to be a plural like priorities but originally that word was priority, which meant one thing, right? Prior one thing that we do. So this is actually building on the idea of having a number one priority for the day. You want to decide that the night before because it can really help your morning to be clear and what is really funny about it, we said at the time and then do your number one priority first and christopher said, “It’s number one like when else would you do it?”

So I notice that when I'm working with my clients on this, they'll have a number one priority but they don't do it first thing, because first thing is, as I just mentioned, it's client meetings. And so, we finally have time to ourselves during the day, like after many things have gone on and a lot of times what I find is if I haven't got my number one operated on in the morning, it'll be like 2 in the afternoon and I'm no longer in good brain time. Then it's hard for me to get the thing done, which was the most important thing, so, this is a two parter, it's to have a number one priority and do it first. That's going to be a huge difference maker for you, so it's not just like I got to get this thing done during the day, no matter what else happens, it's like this is the thing that has to happen and I'm going to create the kind of day where that no one thing can happen first thing. Huge difference maker in terms of productivity, it's the right thing to do and so maybe you don't get a ton done, but you get the right things done and that's going to make a huge difference for you.

The last thing and this is crazy, but it is Thinking. I've talked about this before, but I feel like I don't see it happening enough in people's businesses. For you to incorporate thinking as part of your workday, so getting that number one thing done in the morning, I've read there are studies that say that the more you have kind of thought about that and you've prepared yourself mentally for in the morning, I'm going to do my number one thing first. It's easier for that to get done, it actually makes it more possible for that thing to get done, so it's not just like, “Hey, I sure hope I get the thing done tomorrow and I put it up there and then am like, Hey you know I'm kind of like aspirationally delegate that to my future self, assuming she's going to be really excited in the morning to work on this thing, which is number one and very often those are heinous tasks if we admit it, like an important thing is usually a thing, it's not really easy, like writing website texts or, you know, creating the outreach program, things that are, you know, complicated and harder things that you want good brain time for. So, think about doing those things in advance mentally prepare yourself for the thing that you're doing the next day so you can partially do it and this is what I love about the way the brain works, as you're setting up that number one priority for tomorrow morning, you have all night to think about that. And so, don't like, think, think, think, but delegate that to the back of your mind, because our brains do tons of work in the background and they do work while we sleep. And then when you get up in the morning, if you've had an intention like I'm going to work on that in the morning, I'm excited to work on that in the morning you know, frame it for yourself and then it'll be easier and more effective. But overall, I want you to do more thinking, what can you think about? Think about ways that you can grow your business. Think about what to write, the content that you're creating, what to make a video about what you want to say, like hear my ideas, think about client issues, like how I'm going to get better results for that client or wow, that they're really having a conflict in this area, how can I help with that?

So probably you're already thinking about those things, but you're thinking about them while you're doing other active stuff like you know writing, talking on the phone with clients and doing other stuff and the ideal time to be doing that kind of thinking is when you're using an activity which is moving you, but not using an active brain. So, not talking on the phone, not typing and writing, not doing anything like that. What kind of tasks are these?

For a lot of my people it's dog walking because we're dog people and so we're out and walking the dogs and so, a midday dog walk, you can also walk without a dog I have heard. So if you wanted to take a walk during the middle of the day and make that part of your ideal day, then that's a time that you can be thinking about that client issue, thinking about the content you want to create, thinking about that kind of like hairball of a problem that you're trying to fix in your own business, like how do I break through from 500,000 to a million? Like what's going to be the lever in there? What do I need to do? What do I need to stop doing? So, walking, exercising, folding laundry, food prep, washing dishes, any kind of tasks around your home or your home office or your outside office, do those kinds of activities that occupy part of your energy, but don't take up a good brain time, that's a really good time to be thinking. I have a client who does amazing work in the hot tub. Hot tub is great! If you want to add that to your ideal day or if you say, you know, a few times a week I'm going to spend some hot tub time and I'm going to be thinking about what content I want to bring into the world.

So what I'm asking you to do here is when during the day, can you find time to think? Because I think it's important for you to bring this from outside the work space into your daily work life and actually do it then. So when can you bring it in? What kind of activities can you do? I'm going to tidy up my desk or I'm going to vacuum my office and during that time with intention, bring the intention to it. I'm going to work on this business problem so you can even plan during that ideal day. During this half hour, you can have a number one priority for your day and you can also have a thing I'm going to be thinking about during my thinking time. I want us to elevate thinking time during which it looks like you are tidying your desk or filing papers. Nothing that requires too much thinking and discernment, moving things around, moving yourself around, that is, conquering the world time right? Let's elevate thinking to that kind of a place again.

So, those are six ways that I think you can be more productive, bring better brain time and more brain time into your work and really transform your business and the way you feel when you're working in it. So I hope they were helpful for you, I’d love to hear your thoughts so please comment on this video, leave me a review or find me in the Facebook group. It's profitable, joyful consulting on Facebook. I look forward to hearing from you and I wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business.