How to Simplify Your Week Using Themes (Ep. 4)

Have you ever found yourself stuck in the paralysis analysis of figuring out what to do? We lose so much productive time figuring out what to do at the expense of actually doing it!

In this conversation, I’m going to share how you can simplify your week using themes and stop wasting time pondering what deserves your attention first. By the end, you’ll have a personalized template to create a clear, structured approach to your week that will help you make progress and clear the overwhelm of wondering when you’re going to fit it all in.

Because we don’t need to get caught in the perpetuating cycle of wasted time and overwhelm that’s keeping us from living life on our own terms.

01:55 Benefits of Theming Your Week
04:21 Implementing Theme Days
09:39 Common Hurdles and Solutions
13:43 Pretending to be a Movie Star Technique

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Transcript

0:01

You ever found yourself in the paralysis analysis, figuring out what to do next, we lose so much productive time trying to figure out what to do the expense of actually doing it. In this conversation, I'm going to share with you how you can simplify your week using themes. And stop wasting time pondering what deserves your attention first? By the end, you'll have a personalized template to create a clear, structured approach to your week. That'll help you make progress and clear the overwhelm of wondering when you're going to fit it all in. Because we don't need to get caught in this perpetual cycle of wasted time and overwhelm. It's keeping us from living life on our own terms. As women, it's easy to feel over-scheduled over tired and some days just over it. It's time to ditch the guilt. Still get things done and have time left for ourselves and the most important people in our lives. How do we do that? You're about to find out. Hey there. My name's Jenna. And here you'll find the latest biohacks mindset shifts and calendar control strategies to help you. Yeah. There side of busy. I'll bring you insights on how to get more done during the Workday, so you can shut it off and prioritize what truly matters. In today's conversation. I'm not only going to help you banish the paralysis analysis by simplifying your week with themes. But I'm also going to give you a template that you can use so you can know when you're going to fit it all in that most important work during the week. And then you can shut off that work. And prioritize the rest of life. But make sure you stick around to the end where I'm going to share with you how pretending to be a movie star can help you simplify how you organize your week. Let's dive in. So we use themes. Or categories to simplify our lives in so many ways. We use theme parties to tell us what to wear for a night out like an eighties, birthday party, or maybe theme days at school for the kids when they wear spirit wear or pajamas. Right. We even can do themed dinners or nights where it's going to be top us night or taco Tuesday, right? It's a short putt to help us understand what we're going to eat. Or what we need to bring. We can apply this same concept of theming to our wheats and how we organize our time. So the goal of creating a theme or category of work for a day helps, you know where to put your focus rather than wasting all that time, figuring out what you're going to do when you actually sit down on your. In your chair. On a Monday or a Wednesday, you know what you're going to do, right. You save that time, figuring it out so you can actually get right down to doing the work. What's even better about theming your days. Is the intentional creation of containers of time. So, you know, you're scheduling your highest leverage work. That's the work that's going to move you towards your goals and help you make progress. That's the work that's going to help you feel accomplished. And sometimes that's the work that we sacrifice. If we don't actually intentionally plan our weeks and we let them just control us. So another bonus of theming your days is that when you do similar kinds of work together, That require the same kind of brain power and mental energy. You find yourself getting in a groove and you can get more work done in less time because you're putting those kinds of work together. Think about it, like when you are, if you do any canning or pickling at home. My grandma would have said, I'm not going to stop making raspberry jelly to start making pickles. The idea behind it is that I need a whole different set of tools and skills. And so why would I waste so much time switching from one thing to another when I could just. Theme and do one thing. So not only are we saving the time of figuring out what to do, we are saving the time of switching between lots of different tasks that take different mental loads and capacity. So. What could theming your week look like? Well, sometimes it helps when I give clients examples. So let's say you're an entrepreneur. You run your own business. You might think about the kinds of work that you do in different containers or themes? Based on. The creative energy that it takes, let's say you market your organization. And so you need to write blog posts and social media and marketing emails, or maybe copy for a new website page, right. That requires your creative brain. And you likely don't want to do that work. Right after going and looking at your profit and loss statement. So you might have a creative container. That you put on one day where, you know, traditionally that's when you have the most creative brain, you're not worn out from the fires of the week and you can really focus in developing and writing that creative work. That might be one container. Entrepreneurs might also have containers like financial or analytical reviews. Maybe you have an administrative day where you take care of all of the paperwork, all of the backend stuff like bookkeeping. Maybe you would theme days based on external meetings. Or client meetings and internal meetings. If you have a team. If you have a product or service that you're selling, maybe you have a specific day that's related to product related tasks. And finally, maybe you just have a day for growth business development and what working the things you do to grow the business. Right. So I hope that gets your brain turning in the right direction of what are some of these themes that I could start thinking about? Now let's say you're a team leader. Let's say you do some work that you're responsible for, but you're also in charge of helping grow and manage a team. With that some of your themes might look like internal meeting days. Or team meeting days the days where you really focus in, on serving and growing the team. Maybe you have specific training and development days, either for the team themselves or for you to learn and grow professionally. So you can show up better for your team and your organization. You might also have strategic direction, days or high level project planning days. You probably still take some client or external meetings. So you might want to think about that as a container of time. And you likely also have some kind of financial or analytical review as well. So thinking about. These. Containers of time that really theme your work together. Can help you, as you think about what you're going to do each day of your week. So, how can you make themes work for you? Well, I'm going to give you a list of questions that you can stop and start this video at any time, but really grain storm through these, because this really helps you create your own personal roadmap. To creating a structured plan for the work you're going to do during the week. So the first question to ask. What are the tasks that I complete every week? Right. Sometimes we don't take a step back and realize all of the things that we do every week. So just take a minute and brainstorm. There's no wrong answer. Write out everything that you do each week. Once you have that list. Then start thinking about the kind of brain power and mental energy. That each of these tasks take, and then you can ask yourself. Which of these, can I group together? What makes sense? Here's some creative work and here's some creative work. Let's put those together in a creative day. Here's a lot of analytical work. Maybe those things make sense to group together and batch in another analytical day. How can you group these together to create meaningful themes or categories that make sense for the role that you're in? And then finally, as you have a group of categories or themes, you can ask yourself what day of the week do I typically have the best energy and brain power to show up and do each of these. For me, I like to do creative work early in the week because I have my most renewed energy from resting and recovering over the weekend. And I'm really excited to show up and do the work on a Monday. So I do creative work on Mondays. I like to save administrative work for Fridays because it tends to be that by Friday, my brain is not really ready to do a lot of heavy lifting. And so this is where I close loops from the week. I might put in speaker applications because that's one way that I grow my business. I might make sure that certain people have the paperwork that they need. But this is my administrative day to really tie up any loose ends before I go into the weekend. So start thinking about. When do you have the right. Mental energy and brain power to do that group of work. And then you can start sketching out. Where these things might fit. You can assign your creative work to a Monday or your external meetings to a Thursday. And play with this. This is not meant to be a map that is set in stone, but really a guidepost to understand. Where you can get certain kinds of work done to save yourself that time. All right. Now that you have some themes. In mind. Here's some common hurdles that I hear from clients when they're implementing theme days. We really get excited when we start thinking about all the benefits of what a theme day can do for us, right. The time that we can save by just sitting down and getting to the work. But sometimes some concerns surface. So I'm just going to cover these right out of the gate. So you can start leveraging themes without worrying about getting stuck in these ways. Okay. So hurdle number one that I hear is I can't dedicate a whole day to a theme. Oh, my gosh. There's no way. No worries. Can you just give it a morning? Or an afternoon. For example, there's a team leader I work with who is a director of project managers for a construction company. She dedicates her Wednesday mornings to team member. One-on-ones. Then she needs to focus her attention elsewhere for the afternoon. And that's just fine, but by centering her attention. On Wednesday mornings for her team, she can channel her energy to show up well for her team during that time. And they can expect the consistency of her support. So. Can you just dedicate a morning or even two hours on a Thursday afternoon to that theme or type of work? The second common hurdle that I hear as my weeks are nuts. Can't predict or control my days like this, your grades. Crazy. But breathe friend. This isn't about controlling your days or your weeks so much as helping you create more clear expectations around your work. Give you some clarity around what is the kind of work you really need to do each week to move you forward? And this also. Shines a light into the busy work that doesn't move you forward. That might be distracting you from doing the meaningful work. That might be the work that you feel like is so crazy. That is keeping you from doing the stuff that really matters. All right. So theming allows us to intentionally create containers of time. So we know that the most important work gets done. Will you honor these a hundred percent of the time. Probably not, but that doesn't mean you're not going to get great benefit from starting to think about how you can simplify your work. If your work is at the mercy of the market or client timing. Then you just start with what you can control. Maybe it's a two hour pocket of time on a Wednesday afternoon. Start small. We can't optimize what we don't start. And the third common hurdle that I hear from folks who are starting to think about. Uh, planning and theming, their days in this way is. I don't even know where to start. That's okay, friend. There's likely someone else who does something pretty similar to what you do. All right. So reach out to a friend, schedule a brainstorm, and you'll both benefit from this session on comparing the kinds of work you do every week and how you might theme those together. And if that doesn't work, you can always reach out to me and we can schedule a brainstorm together. All right. I haven't met anyone yet that I can't help. Find at least two to three themes that they can use to optimize their time. In a moment. I'm going to show you how pretending you're your favorite movie star can help you simplify how you organize your week. But first. If you've already created your theme list and you've assigned them two days of the week. You're crushing it. Great work, create a recurring calendar invite and start practicing those themes. But I know that some of us need a little bit more help getting a handle on this. Right? How do we approach batching our work and categorizing it in a meaningful way that doesn't create excessive overwhelm? So I've put together something really valuable for you. It's a free resource called five strategies to calm the calendar chaos. In it, I share with you three filters you can use to help you prioritize your to-do list. With this, you can skip the paralysis analysis and get the most important work done. You can sign up at theothersideofbusy.com slash chaos, or just click the link in the show notes. So you want to know how pretending to be your favorite movie star can help you simplify how you organize your week. Think about your time or your containers? In three categories. Onstage time. Backstage time. And offstage time. It's so onstage time or these times where you are getting paid for the actual work, right? This is when your favorite actor, actresses. Running lines in between the action and cut, getting direction. This is what they get paid Buco bucks for. They also have their backstage time. This is when they are doing the work. That is a part of the role, but isn't actually what they're getting paid for. Right. This might be. practicing off-screen. This might be doing research to really get into a role. Or getting into shape. For a role, right? This is the backstage time, the things that they need to do to do the job well that they're not actually getting paid for. And then finally they have their offstage time. This is the time they spend. Away from the job so they can rest rejuvenate, recover and show up. To the job. As their best selves. Right? I like to think of my favorite actress on a catamaran sailing in the Mediterranean. That is her offstage time. So, how does this apply to you while you're onstage time? Are those things that you do that you are truly getting paid for? If you're an entrepreneur, it's the time you're meeting in front of clients at your business development time. It's what really grows the business. If you are a team leader or an individual contributor, you're onstage time is the actual job description of what you got hired to do. You're backstage time is the stuff that you do that you don't get paid for, but really helps you do the work. These might be things like professional development, reading up on industry news and articles as a business owner. It might be doing your marketing, doing your bookkeeping, right. Important things to grow the business or to lead a team, but you don't get paid for those. And then finally your offstage time is the same. It's how do you rest recuperate, rejuvenate yourself so that when you come back to work, you can show up as the best version of you deserving of getting paid. Those Buku bucks. With that. If you found something helpful today, will you send me a DM on Instagram? I'd love to hear from you. And I check all of them. I'm at Jenna dot Piche, or you can just click the link in the show notes. Until next time may the work that you do create meaning and the life that you deserve. I'm rooting for you.