In this episode, we’re going to be covering how to create and plan your daily schedule. Having a systemized process for planning your day to day in your business is super important.

So whether you’re just getting started, you’ve been in business for a couple of years, or maybe you’ve potentially just transitioned from working in an office to working from home, today’s episode is for you!

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Why Planning Your Schedule Is Important

• It helps you set boundaries
• It helps you evaluate what opportunities to say yes or no to in your biz
• It promotes deep focus work away from distractions
• It helps you be productive versus being busy

Step 1: Set Aside Time To Plan

Start by setting aside 30 or 60 minutes a week to really plan out your schedule. I used to plan my schedule for the week every Sunday but then ended up changing this to Friday because I wanted to reserve my weekends for me and my family. Find what day works best for you!

When you plan, you want to not only look at big projects but also look at the recurring tasks that you are doing in your biz because those chip away at your time too. 

Hot Tip: Evaluate your recurring tasks to see if they are still serving your biz. Don’t just do a task because that’s what you’ve always done! Ask yourself if it is actually moving the needle forward in your biz.

Step 2: Reflect On Your Schedule + Your Tasks

Some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s working well with me and my current daily routine? 
• What is my biggest time management frustration?
• How would my life improve if I use my time better? 
• When do I feel the most hectic during the week? What am I doing at those points in time that’s causing me to feel frustrated? 
• What do I wish I had more time to do?
• Is there anything I can delegate to a team member now? Or, if you’re a solopreneur, is there something I would like to delegate to a team member down the road?
• Is there anything you are doing manually in your biz that you could automate?

These questions will help you build your schedule! For example, maybe on Mondays, you have a lot of meetings and you find that it really puts stress on you at the beginning of your week. So maybe you can look at moving your meeting days to Tuesdays so that you can ease yourself into your work week. 

Step 3: Pinpoint Your Most Productive + Unproductive Times

Being aware of your most productive and unproductive times during the day is going to help you build your schedule. For example, if you find you are most productive during the morning, schedule your tasks that take a lot of focus during this time!

Hot Tip: Don’t force yourself to be productive. If you’re sitting at your desk forcing yourself to be productive, you are wasting your time. Get up and take a break so you can come back with a refocused energy. 

Step 4: Build Your Schedule

Take your recurring tasks and your projects while keeping in mind your most productive times and build them into your schedule. 

To do this, find a planning tool that works for you! This could be Google Calendar, ClickUp, a paper planner or anything that is useful for you!

Time Blocking

Time blocking is basically the practice of planning out every moment of your day, whether it be on a weekly basis, or a daily basis. 

But there really are two different types of time blocking

1.  Day Theming: For example, on Wednesday’s I’m going to focus on nurturing my community, on Thursday’s I’m going to focus on admin tasks
2. Task Batching: For example, checking your emails every day at 9 am, checking your slack messages every day at 10 am.

I personally use a hybrid option of the two because that is what works for me. As business owner’s we want to evaluate what’s working for us. We don’t want to just do something, because that’s what everyone says to do. So I have found that a hybrid method of time blocking is what works best for me.

So for example, when I say I do a hybrid method if my theme of the day is nurturing my community, I actually break that down into steps that I would want to do throughout the day.  And then I would make sure to build those into time blocks throughout my day. 

General Best Practices For Planning Your Schedule

• Add in time for breaks throughout the day (including lunch). If you don’t write it down, sometimes you won’t do it! 
• Set reminders throughout the day to get up and move around
• Schedule times to log off of the computer for the day
• Remember that time blocking is optional

Life happens and time blocking can be super hard to stick to. I have found that time blocking really works best for me when I use it as a guide more than anything, just because I feel like that’s more realistic to life. So when projects come up that have due dates that don’t fit into your theme days or your time blocks, it’s okay!

The biggest thing across the board is to really figure out what works for you to plan your schedule (and with everything in your biz!). And remember that things will change as you go through your business. It’s all about creating a schedule that works for you personally, and making sure it’s evolving with your needs, your business’s needs, and the needs of your personal life. 

If you’re ready to start systemizing your biz, check out our course, Elevate to get a clear-cut and concise path to elevate your systems today!

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