This is the build your life coaching business podcast where you can learn to make more money as a life coach. My name is BJ Butler, an ex corporate guy who helps life coaches with everything online business so that they can focus on coaching. Every episode helps you get more clients, make more money and eliminate overwhelm. But if you don’t want to do it self acting as your chief operations officer, I’ll lead a team to do it for you. And here we go. Hey, welcome back. Let me ask you this. Do you know how to stay productive? Do you know how to get the same amount of work done in less time but also get the right work done as a life coach? Really, as an online business owner, there’s a range of different priorities of tasks that all need to get done.

So if you have clients already, then you need to help those clients. You have coaching calls, you also have consultations coming in. You’re also probably creating new contents to keep those consultations coming in. If you don’t have consultations, if you don’t have current clients that you’re serving, then maybe you have a day job. But regardless, you have something that every week there’s something that’s due, but there’s also this other set of tasks that have to be done in order to really move the needle in your business. Let me tell you this from my perspective, all coaches, all online business owners are great at getting work done. And coaches, yes, I’m talking to you even when I say online business owner. As a coach, you have an online business.

If you have ever gotten a consultation, if anyone’s ever heard of you from some means other than you speaking to them personally, if they heard about you through the Internet, you are an online business owner, but are you getting the right work done? You know what you need to do. This is true for everyone. You know what you need to do. But things come up. Tasks take longer than you expected. You get sick, something you needed from someone else is late and your work gets pushed back, we’ve all experienced it. But here’s what to do. Here’s how to do what you said you would do in all walks of life.

And everything that you’re doing, doing what you said you would do is how to be successful. So here are two systems. Now, these are two tools and they’re tools that you already have that I’m going to be talking about. It’s a task tracker and a calendar. By task tracker, I mean to do list, but it’s how you use it. So first of all, on the to do list are what are the tasks to be done? The most important thing about your to do list is that it’s easily accessible to add to. In addition to having the to do list, there’s this little mini system that has to be done on some sort of frequency and that’s you have to organize your tasks based on priority. For me, I keep my to do list digitally.

I just use the reminders app on Apple. That way I have it on my laptop as well as my phone. My phone is when I am anywhere, I most likely have my phone and I can add to my to do list. When I’m working. I will use it on my laptop. It’s very easy for me to get to and every morning I reorganize the list so that the most important ones are on top. I did say most important. I classify this prioritization list both in terms of most important and most urgent.

Urgent and important are not necessarily the same. Important means this is what will affect you. The most urgent means the due date is soonest. But what happens is that the due date gets closer and closer. All of a sudden it becomes really important to you. Now, I do mine digitally. Yes, it’s really easy to reorganize digitally, but no one can say that digital is better than paper in every circumstance. It really just depends on what’s best for you.

Okay, so what do you do once your tasks are prioritized? We’ll get to that in a second. Next, I’m going to be talking about your calendar. Your calendar, obviously is when are tasks going to be done? And the most important part about your calendar is that it is very visual just by glancing at it. And you need to look at it on some frequency and you know what is going on, what you’re supposed to be doing and what you’re doing next. Well, this is more in my opinion, for me, it’s very important to have alerts so that I am alerted when I need to be doing something different. Now here’s the must do system when it comes to your calendar is that you’re pulling tasks from your to do list onto your calendar and you’re scheduling them because when they’re on your to list, they get jumbled, they get lost. It’s hard to see what exactly you’re supposed to be working on, but when you put it on your calendar, it’s very visual. You can see what you’re supposed to be working on.

I do my to do list system. I prioritize it and then I put it into my calendar. I always make sure that I know what I’m doing for that day and have all the important tasks scheduled for the next week. What this means is that every task that you put on your to do list ends up on your calendar. Every task on your calendar has a start time and it has an end time. When it has that end time, that’s a deadline. That is a deadline that you told yourself that it needs to be done by. And if you go through this process, you’ll learn that it doesn’t feel good to be running behind.

So, yes, some tasks will take longer than expected. You can adjust how long each task takes. You can reorganize as the day goes on. But the point is that this is pushing you through your day. It’s also pulling you through your day. This is a goal that you set, that you are striving towards, pulling you towards what you wanted to accomplish. So what do you do if there’s a long task? Because long tasks we can get lost in. We will dilly dally.

We’ll procrastinate. So here’s where the Pomodora technique comes in. What it says is that you spend 25 minutes working diligently on the task, and then you take a five minute break. That five minute break rewards your brain for doing that work. And during that five minute break, you probably don’t want to be looking at a screen. You might get a little snack, but it’s a break. It is time for your brain to relax because you’re going to go into another cycle of 25 minutes, five minutes off, and you can do that anywhere between one and three times. And then you’ll take a longer break and repeat.

It teaches you, it builds a muscle in your brain that. It teaches you that when you work hard, you get a little treat. You work hard, you get a little treat, you work hard, you get a longer treat. And what it does is that it’s fighting Parkinson’s law. Parkinson’s law says that the task that you are scheduled to complete will expand to fit the amount of time that you scheduled it in. If you take a task from your to do list, you put it on your calendar and you schedule it for a long period of time, it’s going to take that whole amount of time. That is human nature. We tend to procrastinate.

It will just take that amount of time. But the Pomodoro technique will keep you pushing through. Another little tip that you could do is that when you’re scheduling a buffer time, like you don’t know exactly how long a task is going to take. So you say, oh, I think if everything goes wrong, it could take an hour. If everything goes right, it could take 30 minutes. So I’m going to schedule myself an hour just in case. But that’s where Parkinson’s law comes into effect. And, yeah, it’ll take the whole hour if you think of it that way.

But you can schedule it for 30. You could go to 40 minutes. And at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, you schedule a buffer time where you’re completing all the tasks that you didn’t have time to do, things that took longer than expected. So adding a combined buffer time versus putting buffer into each task will help push you through the day. Another can do you don’t have to do is that at the end of the day, reorganize your to do list. Add those tasks to the calendar for the next day or for the week. This frequency is up to you. I do it once a day and that’s enough for me.

Now, does every minute need to be scheduled? That’s up to you. Once you get started using this time blocking process, you’ll figure out what you need to do. What is actually helpful for you versus overly constrained. Maybe your buffer time is on scheduled time, maybe unscheduled time is there because you know things are going to be popping up. But that’s really, it is just those two tools, the to do list and the calendar. But it’s really all in how you use it. The great thing is, I’m sure you’re using these tools today. I mean, even calling a to do list a tool might sound like I am making it more complicated than it is, but it is really important to nail down how you’re using these.

And that’s it for today. I’ll catch you next week. Bye.