How to simply plan your days to reach your goals

What are some of your daily, weekly, and monthly goals?  What thoughts come to mind when creating a plan to reach these goals?  Let's talk about the nitty gritty of planning, your schedule, and tracking. When helping my clients plan each day we focus on four simple steps: 

1. We write down what we say we're going to do. 

2. We do the actual thing. 

3. We allow the urges that come up.

4. We then repeat that process.

The fourth step is probably the most important because it takes CONSISTENCY. 

Repeating the above steps day to day, and experimenting with what works and what doesn't.  My clients have tried several different planning methods that simply didn’t work.  Many have brought me their own schedules they whipped together, they've tried creating spreadsheets, or they just weren’t taking any steps towards trying to plan their days.  

I knew I needed to help them get organized in some way, so I put together a weekly schedule worksheet that I give my clients, and that you can also download for free in my online trainings.  I also have a daily time tracker that has been very beneficial for me and those I work with!

So what’s so great about the daily time tracker? 

It’s all about your planned result and your actual result.  When we're planning our day, we're not just putting down “writing time”, right? We don’t say to ourselves “I'm just going to write that paper I'm working on between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM.” 

This is a planned result.  The point is it's not just writing time, and it's not just what we're going to do during that time. It is what we are going to achieve. What are we actually going to accomplish?

For example, I wrote 500 words or I posted that piece or I sent those emails. That's the plan result. The reason I put it in two columns on the worksheet is so that you can track your actual results. And this is the part where we can see what actually happened. 

You might say that you plan to do something at 8:00 AM over on this column, but we want to see what you actually did from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. 

Sometimes my clients will say, “I'm going to answer emails during that time, and then I'm going to answer the emails for my students”. Then they’ve spiraled into a rabbit hole, and ended up watching multiple YouTube videos or scrolling endlessly through social media. And then before they know it, it's almost 10:00 AM and they only have minutes until the next meeting. When we talk about actual results, we would mark that down. We would put on the worksheet: I went down the social media rabbit hole.

If that's true, what happened in those moments?  What urge did we have to get distracted with something else, instead of doing the tasks that we said we were going to do?  It’s time to figure this out! 

Remember, sometimes you need to focus on the daily piece, and other times you need to step back and look at the bigger picture, or monthly goal. 

What are we talking about here? It’s all of those layers I work on with my clients.  The four steps.  You can follow these steps and do them yourself, BUT I'm more than happy to talk about this process with you!  The accountability and cheerleading that you get from me is why my clients decide to hire me.  We all need support and someone we know will push us to achieve our goals!  

Are you interested in learning more about other topics I help coach my clients in?  Make sure you're on my email list if you're not already, and you can receive weekly emails with my expert advice on how you can better manage your time as a busy professor!  Believe me, you will not be disappointed! 

How to Set Aside Shame so You Can be Productive

Know what your next steps are, but can't seem to get past feeling ashamed? You're not alone. Check out this week's video.

At first, you might think, “What does this have to do with productivity?” But actually, I find that a lot of my clients and students get paralyzed by shame and don't know how to move past it, so that they can take those next steps.

Shame in school, career, and family life

There can kind of be a wall here of “I know what the next steps are, but I'm not ready for it yet because I'm feeling too much shame.” This can appear in a lot of different domains. We're all dealing with shame in different ways – one of the first things I recognize. But in school, perhaps it looks like, “I'm not going to look into those graduate programs” or “I don't want to find out more information about that because I actually don't think I'm good enough to take those next steps.” “There are a lot of people who are better than me out there.” “I'm not good enough.” “I feel ashamed that I'm older” – perhaps on going back to school.

It sounds very similar in the career domain when we say, “I’m in this job and when I look around at everybody else around me, they're much more productive and successful. I feel ashamed that I'm not there too.”

In family domain, if you feel parental guilt and shame about, “I don't think I'm being a good enough parent.” “Why do all these other moms seem to have it figured out and I can barely pull together in a day?” Those issues and all of these different domains we're dealing with on a regular basis.

Working through shame

To relate it to productivity, I want to say if you know what your next steps are, there are two tips to working through that shame, quick tips. We'll talk afterwards about longer term delving deeper into shame. But two quick tips for you today would be:

1. Make sure that you can recognize the shame.

First, sometimes people don't see that they're saying a shame-filled statement. Recognizing when you say these things to yourself would be the first thing.

2. Share it with someone

And the second thing then is to share it with someone. Maybe it’s a trusted friend, a spouse or even somebody you met in an online community that you would feel safe saying, “I feel ashamed about” and fill in the blank. And the reaction – this is why it needs to be somebody you trust or somebody that has a lot in common with you, the reaction is going to probably be “me too” or “I felt that shame before, absolutely.” And that's so important because when we recognize that other people are dealing with shame or we get that “need to” feeling, we say, “I'm so glad that I'm not the only one dealing with this.” That's one of the keys to this that we're not alone in dealing with this.

Those are two quick tips, but if you're interested in delving deeper into shame there are two resources I want to give you today because I'm studying this myself, trying to understand more about it, you could study this for a lifetime because we're all dealing with different levels of shame. I think you'd be surprised.

We all deal with shame

Think about the person you admire most — they too deal with shame. Two people -- Tara Brach is a clinician and meditation instructor who's written several books about dealing with acceptance and self-compassion and shame. She has a lot of great resources. And then Brene Brown as well is known as the shame researcher. She has dedicated her research career to understanding shame and vulnerability. Both are excellent professionals that I admire and turn to when I'm looking for resources about shame.

I hope my two tips have helped you today with thinking about it related to productivity. I'd love to hear from you today that you shared your statement with someone and that you're looking forward to your next steps to being productive on whatever path you're on. I’ll see you next time.

Tell me below how you're implementing these steps!