Ep 53: Redefining Efficiency: Habit Stacking, To-Do Lists, and the 4-Day Workweek

EPISODE 53

Transform your work life and productivity

 
 
 

Imagine clocking out of work at noon on Thursday, knowing you've accomplished all your tasks efficiently and ahead of schedule. This isn't some utopian fantasy, but a reality we'll sketch out for you in this episode. We'll take the traditional work week and flip it on its head, suggesting why you might want to take Wednesdays or other mid-week days off, and how to make 'No Meeting Wednesdays' a norm at your workplace. We'll also challenge you to avoid pushing important tasks to Fridays, to prevent a pile-up of to-dos.

“The amount of task-switching we do causes so much time-waste. Focus time allows you to optimize your workflow and shorten your work hours.”
— Christina Edwards

Ever heard of 'habit stacking'? It's a strikingly effective way to infuse new habits into your daily routine. We'll dive into how this technique, along with disciplined time management, can pull you out of the whirlpool of procrastination and burnout. Scheduling time for tasks and rewarding activities is paramount, and we emphasize that sometimes, allowing yourself to fail is the key to building confidence and mastering new skills.

Now, let's address the elephant in the room - the fear of imperfection. It's time to unlearn the notion of flawless execution and instead, break tasks into manageable chunks, set realistic deadlines, and visualize your success. Believe us, taking an actual lunch break can work wonders for your productivity. As part of our Smart Growth Method, we'll cover how to establish a workflow that keeps you at the peak of your performance.

So, are you ready to transform your work life and productivity? Let's get started!

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TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs. Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go. Maybe you've heard me talk about the four-day work week. Maybe you've seen that in a couple of blogs or articles that have caught your eye lately, or just this idea of working less than 40 hours a week. Today I want to talk about a flavor of that that I've noticed in my own life a little bit of habit, a little bit of slipping back into old habits and some ways that we can intentionally recalibrate, like the Monday through Friday, 8 to 5, 9 to 5, whatever it is your typical work hours look like and inject a couple of things Inject a more successful and optimal work environment and, of course, I would love if you could work less hours and accomplish more, which you can. So today we're going to start with this idea of the four-day work week and some of the common mistakes that I see people make when they decide they want to work towards this or start doing this. The first thing is Friday. They always make the day off Friday. If you've listened to the podcast, if you've been on any of my live webinars or workshops before, you might have heard me say break the rules. This is a rule to break. Don't assume that a four-day work week means that you have to work Monday through Thursday and Friday is your day off. Of course you can take Friday off if you want to, but here's what happens with waiting until Friday. Waiting until Friday sort of presupposes the idea that if I finish everything I'm supposed to do, then I get to take Friday off, which inevitably sort of leads us like domino effect of things filtering and getting clunked on your calendar and added to your to-do list on Friday, because there's a lot of stuff to do and it feels really hard to finish it all. The first thing I want to offer is you don't have to wait until Friday to take the day off. You can take Tuesdays off. You could take a Wednesday off. The second thing is you can do a half day. You can decide that there's one day a week that you work a half day and give yourself some spaciousness to do whatever you want. That is unnot work-related in that half a day. I want to just open your mind to some ideas of what does a different and more optimal and more just, better work week look like and kind of starting to unlearn some of the ways that we've been taught that a work week has to look and Decide on purpose, decide with purpose on how you want to wake your work week look instead. One of the things that I've started doing Since, say, early this year pretty early on in the year was no meeting Wednesdays. No meeting Wednesdays, that means right now, my calendar is blocked off on Wednesdays, actually work on Wednesdays, but there are no meeting slots available. I do not meet book meetings, I do not see clients on Wednesdays. It is an open day in my calendar and that has been really, really helpful for me, because what I was noticing that I was doing is I was clunking Focus work or clunking project work where I needed some focus time on Fridays, or I was putting them basically randomly whenever my schedule it fit. And no meeting Wednesdays was a way to give myself uninterrupted time where I knew I did not need to hop on a zoom call. I'm not teaching, I don't have any coaching, like it's free. Of course, in the event, there is a time where I do need to teach a live training on an occasional Wednesday. I get to decide if I want to do that, if I can open up my calendar, but in general it is not an open and available time and that has been so helpful. Also think I'm starting to train my brain that on Monday, monday's, on Wednesdays, that's when we do deep focus work. So that means that I might be working on some slides for a new training. That means that I might be working as more of the CEO in my business, working on some planning. That means I can free myself up to take also a bird's eye view and take a step back and look into my business and what I need to work on. I can use it as planning, I can use it as projections, I can use it as things like that. Or I can say I've been needing three hours of just dedicated, dedicated, uninterrupted time to accomplish this. Now I'm going to focus on this task. So no meeting. Wednesdays have been really, really helpful. If you have a team, if you have a staff, highly suggest that something you work on implementing, even if it's half days, the amount of switching, like code switching and just task switching, and we hop between something that does require deep focus and something that doesn't like maybe an all hands, meeting or a meeting with a staff member, or a discovery call or Anything right. That amount of task switching is where we lose a lot of time, and that is why we see people typically, especially in America work 40 plus hours a week. If you actually optimize your time, you can accomplish more and work less hours a week. So no meeting Wednesday has been really, really helpful. The next thing I want to talk about is this idea that I've seen so many people do with the four day work week, which is Friday is my day off, and I get it because then you get a free day, three day weekend. It makes sense why we would do that. Here's this idea that I wrote down my notes for for today's podcast, which is don't wait until Friday to do the thing you deeply want to do. So I have this like running to do list that I've had in the notes app of my phone. That is just. It's. It's an evergreen list. I add to it and as I accomplish something, I take it off the list, okay, and what I noticed is there's a stack of tasks, the stack of ideas, the stack of things, the stack of notes on this list that haven't left the list three years. Okay, and there's part of me that's probably like oh, I'll get to that on Friday and maybe your flavor is I'll get to that on Saturday. It doesn't really matter, but that version of like I'll get to it on that magical day when there's nothing planned. And I'm just going to read through some examples that I have used or that I have seen some clients and colleagues use as things that would end up on that to do list that never actually get done. And you're going to see in this idea that some of them are things that sound good, like, sound like things you want to do, and some of them are things that don't sound like things that you want to do. The point is that they they are things that aren't getting done because you're clunking them on. They feel like either low priority, or I don't have time for this or I'll do it later. Okay, here's some ideas Return the packages, if you have anything that requires you to go to a place and mail them. You know what that's like. It's like I'll return that, those packages at who knows when. Take yourself to lunch, call your best friend, sleep in, get a foot rub, send that email, reach out to that teacher, that person that funder that thing. Clean out that closet. Take that new yoga class. Who try that new gym? Get the film developed. This is a true one. This is on my list and the place that I'm at right now is I'm like I don't have to get the film developed. But where do I get the film developed? I have four rolls of a 35 millimeter film I need to get developed and so many of those shops that used to do it in person have closed down. I think there might be one left or I can mail out the film to get a develop. I just it has sat on the to do list for A month. Get the film developed. Call your insurance slash. You know the insurance companies, all the calls you have to make that you don't want to make. You know those ones. Schedule the gutter cleaning. Put on that CEO hat, right. Do planning on the business Goal setting Projections. Be the visionary. What do I want for a Q4? What does that look like? What does Q1 look like? How did I do in the last quarter that audit? Right? Those are the things that when we are on the hamster wheel, we don't actually get off the hamster wheel to actually stop to do. So you can see this was a flavor of things that sounded nice Get a foot rub, that sounds good. Schedule the gutter cleaning Sounds annoying. Right, it is a mix, but oftentimes we stick these things on a magical air quotes Friday thing and we just put it off and put it off, and put it off and that may not seem like a problem. But here's why it is a problem. It occupies space in your mind and some of it not all of it but some of these things will start gnawing at you of like, oh, I got to get that done. Why haven't I done that? One of mine that was on my to-do list for years it was actually on my to-do list for years Was to get a really important piece, an article that my grandfather was in the paper and I had the article. It had been like carefully stored in a Manila folder and it said get Papu's article framed. Okay, this had been on my list for years and one of the reasons why I hadn't done it yet is I couldn't really figure out because it was like sized funny what I wanted the frame to look like. I wasn't sure about the frame or I wanted to go to Like I just was like in a bunch of indecision about it and of course there was no like real time bound, time sensitive reason for me to get it framed, other than the longer I wait, the more likely I am to like misplace it right. But other than that it just didn't feel like a huge sense of urgency. But every time I looked at the to-do list and I saw that on there I was like crap, I got to do that, I want to do that, why aren't I doing that? Why is it taking me so long to do that? And boom, there's the judgment that sets in when we leave that to-do list like just in the air and we don't start tackling it one piece at a time. Earlier this year I had a week of what did I call it? I had a planning week. We're just going to call it a planning week. I probably had a name for it, but I had a planning week in my business in May and I use that as a way to see where I've been, so like check Q1 and Q2 and plan for Q3 and Q4. And I gave myself a week it was actually four days and I left that as no client meetings and it was a really, really productive week because I wasn't working in the business right, and I wasn't doing any teaching. I had no live anything that week. So it was really productive. And that was the week I framed the article I'm staring at it right now and I went to the store and I gave myself 45 minutes I think an hour. I was in the store looking at different frames, looking at different mats, and I finally settled on this mat that this very textured, heathered, almost gray, like a woolen, it has like a nub to it. This mat, it was beautiful and I said to her a lot. It was like this reminds me of the blazers he used to wear. And she was like boom, that's your mat, that's the one. And so it was so special to like take the time, pick out what I wanted and find the frame that felt good, find a mat that went with it and have it taken care of. And now it's on my wall in my office. I'm staring at it right now and it's making me smile, and it's off the to do list. It's really really important to not wait until Friday or some other place. That is far, far down the road, because when we do, the list gets longer. As the list gets longer. Our overwhelm gets higher. You with me, like the two are related Overwhelm gets higher. The judgment about why it's taking you so long to do that gets higher. You start thinking loops like why haven't I done this? By now? It starts knowing, and maybe even some of the other ones like I gave you, like I gotta call this person, talk to my accountant, or I gotta call insurance person, or whatever that version is. It starts to feel bigger than it actually is. I find the thing that I'm dreading the most, thing that I'm putting off the most, is often something that takes 15 minutes, but my brain it's like sludge. It's like hours and hours and hours. Instead of getting into the space of like satisfaction or pride or connection or just clarity, like it's off the list and feeling that that satisfaction of it just being done okay. So giving yourself space whether you work a five day work week or you work a four day work week, giving yourself space to attack both the things that Our tasks that aren't so fun to do but need to get done or you want to get done, and things that are kind and nourishing and important, to Rest, calendaring those and making time for those within your work week, I think, are so, so important. You start to develop the skill of Getting good at taking care of what needs to be done, building the skill of Following your deeper desires. So maybe you're somebody who's like I want to learn watercolor, or I really want to hike, or really I'm into reading, but I haven't read a crime novel like I love the crime novels, right, I haven't read one in forever. Traveling to a specific place, like I want to do research on that, take yourself out for coffee once a week and start giving yourself space to do that. The weirdest thing happens when you do that. When you do that and it has nothing to do with work or mission or working on or anything like that Spending time doing that stuff that is like a deep desire, but also a needling thing you've been thinking about. Somehow I find that when I do those things I'm more focused and more successful at the other stuff. So Getting that picture framed wasn't about getting that picture framed. It was about it just being like done and enjoying it right, and it was about like, oh yeah, I can do this. And it was about it getting it out of my mind and out of the space of like minutiae of the loop. Same thing with, like trying new things. Signing up for a water color class, trying a new gym, like whatever the thing is starts actually build that muscle of Couple things, of trying new things, building that muscle of like following your gut and your intuition, of like I kind of want to try that. What will that be like? It starts to make you really humble and good at maybe failing or not being so good at something. The first time Was talking to my son about this the other day of like the first time you do anything Kind of generally not so good at it, and so it's really important, especially as an adult, that we give ourselves opportunities to not be good at this thing so we can show ourselves like, oh yeah, I can, I can, I can stair step my way there. Right, and how you do one thing kind of translates to your, your work life, organizational life, and it's like, oh yeah, I can stair step how I am at fundraising. I can stair step how I am and how I show up in discovery meetings. I am improving each day. It's like the two start to be parallel pieces Instead of. What I don't want you to do is build the skill of delay, delaying, and getting really, really good at kicking in the can further down the road and getting really good at doom scrolling and getting really good at telling yourself you don't time to do it anyway. Getting really good at white knuckling it to deadlines right, I'd rather you get really good at saying every Wednesday I take a, I take no meeting Wednesdays and on no meeting Wednesdays I work solely on big picture projects and things that require focus. Or every Friday I take myself out to coffee and I read those crime novels or I do some research on my next place. I want to travel to build on this idea of habit stacking. So whenever you're trying to start a new habit Lots of books out there about habits and habits stacking, but it's really really helpful to like put a new habit, a sandwich, in between two habits that already exist. Okay. Maybe that's why I don't love Fridays as the day off, because it just kind of bleeds. Thursday bleeds into Friday and Friday becomes the catch all for everything you didn't do on Thursday, right? Versus taking a Wednesday off or taking a half day on Thursdays or something like that, where it's like it's in between the habit, the sandwich of the rest of the work week. Okay, so that's one way that you can look at it. If you're saying to yourself you know, I don't even know where to start with my to-do list, because my to-do list is both personally and professionally and maybe there's some self-care on there or some rest on there, or extra, extra, wait, what's the word? Recreational, extracurricular things on there, I don't even know where to start. There's too many different options, there's too many places to go. What I would say is I would calendar in like a block, like two, three hours or at least an hour on a specific day a week where you're like, boom, or we're going through that list, and some days that means we're returning the packages, and other days that means that we are calling your insurance, it's getting only the gutter guy, and other days it means taking myself out for coffee, I'm calling my best friend, I'm planning for the next quarter, just so you can start to get in the habit of that ritual. Because I think that frantic, frazzled, overwhelmed energy that starts to creep in beginning of the year maybe it starts to creep in fall right Is when the list gets longer instead of shorter, and it gets longer when we loop. When we loop, we are literally taking time, that we could be taking time to actually accomplish these things and instead we're just spiraling out and talking about how much time all of this is going to take with me as we wrap up this episode. Here's what I want you to think about. I want you to think about setting some priorities that you're leaving on your to-do list. Look at them and make a star or bold them, the ones that really jump out as, like you know what not I need. But I actually really want to accomplish this. I really want to take this off the to-do list for good. I want to make it happen in the next month. Then break it down into some smaller steps or chunks. So if it requires you to do any research or get on the phone or call the right person or ask for a referral, break it down into those steps so it doesn't feel so overwhelming. The next step I want you to take is embrace imperfection. When we think it's got to be perfect which maybe I was thinking for a while, like I don't know what frame I want for this piece to get framed on, then we just spin and we just think, maybe later, right, and whether it's something like that or it's just something that you want to be perfect. It can be a complete roadblock to you taking actions. So just say I'm going to do this as best I can do it. Or actually don't say that. Don't say as best I'm going to get this done and it's going to be great, it's going to be fine, it's going to be, it's going to be done Right, it's not going to be perfect and I don't actually want it to be perfect anyway. Like I don't need my gutters to be perfect, I don't need this, this, whatever it is, to be exactly perfect. I want it to be done Right. So embrace perfection of it, practice self compassion. So, working on that loop, that inner critic, that self talk that happens as you start to encounter any delays or setbacks, or just go through this process, there may be times on Wednesdays where I need to free up my calendar and meeting Wednesday is meeting Wednesday. That's okay. I don't have to make that mean anything grandiose about the type of business I'm running. Okay, if anything, I would make that mean today, like I'm awesome, I'm so glad that I have this, this availability on Wednesday, and they have structured my business in a way that if a client needs me to show up on a Wednesday. I got it. I got it Right. How you talk to yourself is really, really important in this process. Setting a deadline, set some deadlines for these things. If you have 10 things on your to-do list, write a little deadline next to them. When are you going to get them done? Do you need a week, a month, a year? Set spacious but firm deadlines. Visualize success. We're going to end with visualizing success. Visualizing success doesn't mean perfection. Visualizing success just means what do I want my work week to look like? That it's not currently looking like now, and what are the steps I need to get there. What does success look like? So, for a while, I was working towards, not working towards. For a while, I did have a four-day work week that gave me, I would say, most of Fridays off. I tended to work just a tiny bit on Friday mornings and then I would take the rest of the day off. But what I noticed was, when I worked on Friday mornings I'd sometimes work Friday afternoons too like again, that bleed right, it would just bleed into later on in the day. So visualize what you want success to look like Maybe successes. Instead of starting every morning at 8am. You're starting every morning at 9.30 because you're giving yourself time for a walk, anda, meditation, or just to prep, to meal prep, or just to call your best friend, like anything, right, so that would be another thing. And then, for anyone that works for a team, works for an organization, a company that has a team, and you're like Christina, I have this much flexibility. I will start here Start taking lunch, start taking a true lunch. Leave, leave the building, leave the house, go take a lunch, even if the lunch is on your porch, even if the lunch is at a cafe and you've packed your own lunch, like literally just to go. The act of taking lunch, where you're giving yourself space that isn't work related, is really, really important. That's another one that I constantly remind myself to do, because it's really easy for me to just do a working lunch. Right, well, just do a work lunch. No, take a lunch, take a lunch, take a lunch. Again, you would be surprised the more time you take to counterbalance work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. Actually freeze up your brain to focus and, when you are working, to put out better work, higher quality work. Telling you, I'm a perfect case study for this. This is the truth, so give it a try. Let me know how it's going. And if you try anything like no Meeting Wednesdays, or if you try working towards a four-day work week, I want to hear about it. Tell me what's working for you. Tell me what this maybe share with me. What's on your to-do list? What's on the list that's been on there collecting dust for the past three years? What are you working towards getting off the list this month? I will see you next time. I am cheering you on and let's tackle this list. If you ask me, everyone should have a coach, especially you. I want to invite you to schedule a free discovery call with me. Go to splendidatlcom, forward, slash contact. You'll see my calendar there. Book a call with me. You'll learn about my smart growth method, where we can grow your business or organization sustainably, with ease and massive impact.

You Get To Have Purpose And Profit. I’ll Show You How.

 
 
PodcastChristina Edwardspurpose and profit, marketing, entrepreneurship, purpose driven, nonprofit, social impact, mindset, productivityComment