Revolutionise Your Workflow with AI and Smart Planning

Ever wondered how to make every minute of your workday count? Learn how to transform your productivity as I dive deep into my own journey from chaos to order in our latest episode of Mindset & Action. I'll share actionable strategies like batching similar tasks to cut down on context switching and designing your day to avoid distractions. Discover why skipping emails first thing in the morning and setting dedicated times for various tasks can help you maintain a seamless workflow, even during the busiest promotion periods.

In this episode, we also spotlight innovative methods to enhance productivity with the help of AI tools such as UseMotion and ChatGPT. Hear practical advice on why keeping Friday afternoons free can be a game-changer and the significance of not cramming your calendar to allow room for unexpected delays. I’ll reveal how outsourcing non-income-generating tasks to virtual assistants can free you up to focus on what truly matters in your business. Join me on this journey to supercharge your productivity and stay aligned with your overarching goals.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:40

You're listening to the Mindset in Action podcast, the place to be to grow and streamline your business. I'm your host, donna Eade. Let's jump into the show. The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Mark Twain, welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:04

Everyone, I am so glad to have you here today for this episode where we are going to be talking about supercharging your productivity. Now you will know, if you've been listening for the last few weeks, that I am on a mission to get myself back on track with my productivity and my planning. It's something that kind of just I don't know went out the window in the new year and I have felt very disjointed with what I'm doing Like, unless it was my promotion for opening up my podcast cohorts, which is coming again in September. So if you're interested in learning how to get started with podcasting with me, make sure that you're signed up to my email list. Make sure you are following the podcast to make sure that you know when that happens, you can go over to my website actually and download the freebie that I've got on there, which is my three-part audio on how to build your authority with podcasting. It's available at donnaevecom forward slash three-part audio and if you go there and download that, then that will get you on my list. It will give you my three-part audio to listen to, of course, and then it kind of takes you on a little journey so you then get access to my on-demand masterclass as well. So there are a few things in there that you can go through and some offers in there as well. So that's a really good one to go through if you're interested in starting podcasting with me in September.

Speaker 1: 2:32

But today we are focusing on everything else. You know, when you're promoting something, everything is focused on that promotion, and I get that because I've done it. But what happens to everything else your social media strategy, your admin, your content, everything just kind of you know there's, it's all there and it all needs to kind of work together. And I was talking about this a few weeks ago, where if you actually kind of plan and get yourself sorted, then you can have more cohesiveness throughout everything that you're doing and it all kind of works together better. So today we're going to be talking about supercharging your productivity and I'm going to be hitting on some of those things that we spoke about a few weeks ago, but diving in a little deeper into what I am going to be doing what I usually do with these things and how I'm getting myself back on track. So if you are somebody who is sitting at home thinking I need to get more organised, I need to be more productive I know I could be getting more done if I just had a system in place. This is the one for you.

Speaker 1: 3:41

So the first thing that I am back doing is my batching. Batching is really a game changer. If you can batch things, it takes less time and it gets you ahead of the game, which is what I was talking about in the previous podcast and I will link it in the show notes for you so you can go and have a listen to that, because I was talking about how you can prepare yourself for unexpected absences in your business. So batching for me is really, really powerful, and one of the biggest things that saves you time with batching is the reduction of context switching.

Speaker 1: 4:19

So context switching is literally whenever you change what you're doing during your day. So, for example, you start your day, you open up your email and your plan is that you're just going to go through your emails, delete any of the spam, cast your eye over the emails that are there to see if there's anything important and then you're going to go and get on with the first task of the day. So you open up your emails, you start deleting like highlighting the spam to delete that and then all of a sudden you are looking through what's left to see if there is anything important that needs your attention. You read a subject line that catches your eye and you click on that email. You open up that email and they're talking about something that's interesting you and there's a link in there and you click that link. All of that is contact switching. Every click you make is a context switch if it is not focused on the task at hand. So the task was to look at the subject lines, look at the email, see if there was anything important. Then, if you clicked on an important email that is part of what you are doing You're looking for those important ones. But if it's just something that catches your attention, that's a context switch. Straight there. You've clicked and opened that email. Weren't supposed to do that. Then you are clicking on a link in that email. Weren't supposed to do that. Opening up a web page, reading a web page weren't supposed to be doing that and before you know it, your five minutes in your email in the morning has turned into an hour and you don't know what you've done with your time.

Speaker 1: 5:51

It's so easy to do, guys. It is so easy to do, which is why I never open my emails first thing in the morning. That is my number one tip for you. At the end of the day, if somebody is emailing you, it's not a life and death situation. It can wait. If it is something that needs immediate attention, then you can always have an auto responder that sends back. I only check my emails at certain times of the day. If this is urgent and you need a response before these times hit, please whatsapp me, call me, dm me, whatever, because there's really nothing that is that urgent that it can't wait until lunchtime. So I always look at my emails at lunchtime. I never open them first thing in the morning. So batching eliminates that context switching because you know that. Okay for this period.

Speaker 1: 6:43

So I'll take my podcast batching, for example. What I do is I have open the tabs of the podcast outlines that I'm going to be doing that day and I don't have anything else open. So I might, I probably do. I'm not going to lie. I probably got three other windows open. They've got a hundred tabs open on each. Let's not get started on that. But I have a window open that has my documents for my podcast outlines however many I'm recording that day and then I have Audacity open.

Speaker 1: 7:13

So I press record on Audacity, I do the first one, I close that down, I save it, I move on to the next one and I can get that done a lot quicker than if I was going to record a podcast one day and edit it and get it up, for example, because that's all context switching. I'm going from recording to editing, to scheduling down. Like, stop recording, I'll go and make myself a cup of tea because I always need to lubricate after doing my podcast episodes. So I'll go and make myself a cup of tea and I'll come back and I'll look at my phone and all of a sudden I'm on Instagram and I'm not editing my podcast. So it's really easy. But if I've got to just record and I can just go, boom, boom, boom, I haven't moved from my chair, I haven't got up, I haven't made a cup of tea, I haven't had a chance to pick up my phone and I can just get through them.

Speaker 1: 8:26

So if anything you can do in batches is going to reduce that context switching time and I did a podcast a while back now where I spoke about how much time you'd lose, and I think over the course of a year you can lose up to five weeks because of context switching. So it's a three second thing that switches the context that you're doing. So just that switching motion is that five weeks, and then if you get down a scroll hole of something, then you're actually losing even more time than that, which is incredible. And when you think about it, wouldn't you much rather go on holiday for five weeks than sit there and, you know, be context switching all the time? So batching is really powerful to help you avoid that context switching, get more done with your time, be more productive and help you with other areas, such as being prepared for absences at work or just being ahead of the game when it comes to those things. So batching is really important.

Speaker 1: 9:33

The second thing is scheduling. When I talk about scheduling, I'm talking about your calendar, how you plan out your days. This is something that I let go a while back, so I was very big into my calendar blocking and then it wasn't working for me, and I know that I've explained to you guys that you need to kind of review it every three months, make sure it's still working, because you know maybe a project's finished, finished, so you don't need those hours for that project anymore. You can do something else with those hours. But I kind of just fell off with how I was doing it and I didn't do the review and so instead I just started deleting things, deleting blocks from my calendar, because I wanted to like spend a day doing my podcast and just do it all in one day and then do a day on admin and just do it all. So I didn't need the blocks. But what that meant was, when I came to my calendar, my calendar was empty, all with the exception of meetings with people, networking meetings and one-to-ones and podcast recordings and things like that, and my calendar was blank. So I would come to my desk and I would go. Well, I don't really know what I'm doing today because there's nothing in my calendar, so I had no direction.

Speaker 1: 10:45

So one of the things that I am going to be bringing back and implementing is a form of calendar blocking, and I'm really interested actually in using something that keeps getting advertised to me on YouTube, which is I think it's called Use Motion. If anybody out there has used Use Motion, drop me a text. So underneath this podcast, there should be a button that's like text that says text me, drop me a text and let me know how you found it, because it sounds amazing and what it is is. It's like a calendar, like calendar, like google calendar. You put everything in there, but if something gets deleted from your calendar, it will shift things around. Or if something is a higher priority, it will shift things. So it uses ai technology to go okay, well, this thing's more important than that thing, so you need to do that today. So we're going to shift everything here into this space over here that's come available because this has been cancelled, so it shifts everything about for you automatically. And it sounds like an absolute dream, I have to say. So I am.

Speaker 1: 11:46

I'm toying with the idea of trying that, but I am definitely going to be bringing back my calendar blocks in some way, shape or form, so I'll probably fill you in on that in about a month's time or something, once I've actually got that done. It'll probably be longer than that, actually, because I'm batching, so I've already got my episodes for the next few weeks sorted. So maybe in my next batch maybe I will review what my scheduling looks like in my calendar and how it's working for me. But I really do advocate for having it in your calendar the things that you're going to do, even if that is on a Friday afternoon. Before you clock off, that you look at the following week and you look at what you want to get done and you start to put things in the calendar so that there is time allocated.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Because the other thing is, if you don't allocate time for things, things can like just take over. So you might be, like I say, giving the example of opening those emails first thing in the morning. You just start to scroll and you don't get anywhere. But if you've got something booked in your calendar at 10 o'clock, you know that you're not going to go over the 10 o'clock mark because your computer is going to ping you and say it's time to start doing x and that will stop you in that procrastination or, you know, distraction and allow you to go, okay, back on task. Let me do this. So if you can at least, at the very least, put in your calendar at the end of one week, what you're going to be planning on doing the following week and get some stuff into the calendar is going to help you move things forward.

Speaker 1: 13:20

But I really do believe that when you've just got a white blank calendar looking at you, even though you know you've got loads of stuff to do, it's really easy to just get pulled into all of the distractions that you can get in business, especially when it comes to doing your social media. So you start putting your social media posts up and then all of a sudden you're in one of your groups and you're commenting on things in there and you're enjoying yourself and you're having a great time and you're connecting and you know you're networking, but it's not actually moving the needle forward on your goals. So it's really important to look at what your goals are and schedule your calendar according to those goals and schedule time for social media. So putting in, you know, a 30 minute lunch break I always have a lunch break. It moves throughout the day. I have to say it can go anywhere between today I had it at four o'clock, I think. So it could go anywhere from like one o'clock to four o'clock, depending on how late I ate my breakfast and what I'm doing. So I always schedule in a lunch break. So schedule in a lunch break plus 10 minutes of social media time or something like that, so that you can do those things.

Speaker 1: 14:26

But I also find setting an alarm to help me, like, get off those things. I don't do it for projects, but if it's something that I know that I could get distracted and pulled away down a rabbit hole, I'll put on a timer that will bring me back to reality. The other thing is is, when you are creating those blocks in your calendar is not to overpack it, because what people will often do is they will put so much into their calendar that they haven't got time to finish things, because things always take longer than we think they do. And if you can not count and not do the context switching, you'll obviously save yourself time, but just giving yourself an extra half an hour to do something, or an extra hour if it's a big project, just to give you that freedom. And then I always have Friday afternoons free, the idea being that I can stop work and do something for myself which rarely happens because I'm terrible at going off and doing something for myself, but the idea is there and then what happens is if other things that are important need to get finished, I can push things because I've got that afternoon where I can actually catch up and do stuff in the afternoon. So really good option for you there. Then the next two things I'm kind of going to bring them in together because they are and VAs everywhere will hate me for this, but I'm going to bring them in together because they've got similar functionality within your business to help you with your productivity. And that is looking into AI and outsourcing.

Speaker 1: 16:01

So I already mentioned UseMotion, which is an AI calendar system that can help you Works a little bit like having a personal assistant would. If a personal assistant was doing your calendar for you, that's what that would do. Having a personal assistant would. If a personal assistant was doing your calendar for you, that's what that would do. So you can use things like AI to help you streamline things and get things done quicker. So for me, I use it to help me generate podcast outlines. I use it to generate blog posts. I use it to generate pins. I use it to generate social posts not all the time, not for everything, but generally. Those are the kind of tasks that I am setting ChatGPT up to do and it helps me by doing it, and then I can read through it, make any changes, and that's a lot quicker than me typing out, because my typing is atrocious Quite frankly, it is atrocious. So anything that can save me typing, I will do. So that is a great way to use AI to help you and then outsourcing as well, as soon as you are able to.

Speaker 1: 17:05

If there is something that takes up a lot of your time that you don't enjoy doing, let that be the first thing that you give to a VA to do, and even if it's something like an hour a week. So I'm looking at getting a VA in my business to help me with the aftermath of my podcast. So once my podcast is completed, edited and scheduled, there are things that I do with it, including setting it up on my website and creating 10 pins for every podcast episode to put out on Pinterest. I don't have to do that. I could get somebody else to do that and it might take them, you know, 30 minutes for one. So I could pay them for a couple of hours a month to do that job for me and they could get four episodes done, you know. So that's what I'm looking at. So you might have something in your business similar to that. Maybe it is blog posts. You don't like to do all the laying out, putting images in and shifting it around. Maybe you could get a VA to do that and it's just something that takes you time that you can then get back to do the more exciting fun things that you enjoy doing, but also the income generating things that you do. So it's really getting outsource. Help is about outsourcing the things that aren't necessarily income generating and are more admin tasks that can take a long time. Outsourcing them to a professional that can get it done quicker than you can and more efficiently, and then you can focus on those income generating ideas. So that is my kind of little look into my productivity at the moment.

Speaker 1: 18:51

You know the last six months it has been pretty bad. I have found myself really not focused, and there's other stuff that's involved in that which will come out in another podcast episode that I'm going to do soon. So it's really one of those things that it's a combination of things that have led me to the point where I feel like I just don't have my ish together when it comes to my business at the moment with all the back end stuff. You know, outwardly I think it looks good and I think people think everything is fine, I'm treading water, it's all groovy, but behind the scenes here it's just like what's going on. I feel a bit like a zombie when it comes to the other stuff in my business. So this is what I'm doing to help me get back on track. As I said the other week. You know, this is all part of me getting back on track and I wanted to bring you along with me for that, because I know we all need those parts in our business.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Where we go, you know, let's stop, let's refresh, let's readjust and do this again. Let's get refocused, and this is a great time of year to do it as well, because we are in to, you know, coming to the end of another quarter. We are halfway through the year, so it is a good point at which to stop and take stock, because oftentimes, you know, remember those goals that you had in January. Have you actually looked at them? Are you keeping track of them? Are you on target? Are you behind? You know, evaluate where you are with them, because I think a lot of times we make these big New Year's goals and I've talked about it before and we just kind of, yeah, that's great, and then you never look at them again until maybe next year. Maybe next year you'll look at them and you'll go, oh wow, I didn't do that, did I? But you did something else instead, which is fine, but it wasn't the plan.

Speaker 1: 20:50

And you know, if you want to grow in business, you really need to have that pathway in front of you to follow. And if you go off on a tangent, yes, you might still achieve things and you might still have the revenue coming in that you want and whatnot, but it's now off the path that you were planning to travel. So are you going to continue down that path or do you need to get back on the other path? Going to continue down that path or do you need to get back on the other path, and is that going to take you more time than it would have if you were focused on the goals you set in the first place? So all of this is linked together and, like I said the other week, looking at that big picture and being able to plan a chunk of time ahead and get ahead with it really helps you to kind of stay focused on those things.

Speaker 1: 21:36

So, as it is that time of year or just over halfway through the year, now you know, take stock, have a look. What are we doing? What can I do better? What can I improve? What are the things that I do in my business where I know I'm losing time? I'm losing hours, because our time is our most valuable resource and we don't get it back. And I feel like a lot of times we think, oh, this five minutes doesn't matter, this 20 minutes scrolling on Instagram doesn't matter. I needed a break, whatever. But that added up over time. It's time that you could be spending with your family. It's time you could be traveling. It's time that you could be exploring your location. It's time you could be in nature. It's time you could be horse riding. It's time that you could be doing any of those things that you're really passionate about and that you love to do, and you're losing that because you're off task.

Speaker 1: 22:31

When you're in your business and it's really easy when it's work for somebody else I always find that if it's somebody else's business, if it's somebody else's work, if I'm doing something for someone else, I always get on and I do it, and I get it done by the deadline, not a problem. But when it's my own stuff, it's all a little bit more, you know. Oh well, yeah, I haven't done it today, it's fine, I'll do it tomorrow, and it doesn't have the same urgency, and so I don't know if that's something that you find as well, but I find it fascinating because I love working for myself, I love working from home really is my big thing and I love not having a boss to answer to. However, when I had a boss to answer to, I got a lot more done. So I don't know whether that's just me or whether you find that as well, but finding that consistent sort of motivation to keep going and keep pushing on, especially when things go wrong or, you know, aren't quite going the way you want them to. It's really hard to keep pushing yourself forward when you are self-employed, which is why your community is so important, and I found that myself, like my community, has been instrumental in keeping me above water when it comes to that treading water that I was talking about earlier, because it has been tough these last six months. So there we go.

Speaker 1: 23:57

Productivity guys, what are you going to be doing in your business? What do you do in your business? Let me know, do the text me thing. If you've got access to that on your podcast player, come and follow me on instagram or linkedin. Come and join my group on facebook, which is start a podcast um uk. You can come and join me over there and have a conversation with me. I would love to hear from you, but that is it for this week. I will be back next week with a guest, so join me then and I will speak to you soon. Bye for now, thank you.