My WEEKLY PRODUCTIVITY plan (be INSANELY productive DOING LESS)

I’m a big believer in working smarter and not harder, and I wanted to take you behind the scenes on my minimalist work week and how I do my productivity plan on a weekly basis. 

My productivity plan starts on Friday. This is when I actually start planning for my week ahead to make sure that I am only having to do the things that are necessary next week. So I’m going to take you into my computer and show you what my calendar and my schedule looks like to keep it as spacious as possible.

So this is actually quite a full week and a bit of a one-off week because generally there’s way more white space on my calendar, meaning no meetings and an open space, but we have some things going on where we have more external meetings, meaning meetings outside of our internal team next week, so it’s a little bit more full. And then it’s also the one week of the month where I do one-on-ones with my team, so more meetings.

And I generally theme my days. I generally don’t have any meetings on Mondays and Fridays. And then Tuesdays and Wednesdays are more of my external days. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I have our consulting calls with our Authority Accelerator clients, so I block those off from eight to 10 on Tuesday and one to three on Wednesday. And that’s my client-facing time where I’m actually speaking to them.

Anything in yellow is fitness. I make sure I put this in here. I don’t always keep them at these times, but it’s just a reminder to myself to make time for fitness. And anything in red is personal. So bank meeting with my husband for our home and then dinner with one of my best friends on Thursday. And then we’re actually going away on Friday, so I will not be working at all on Friday. And I will go ahead and cancel this gym session with my personal trainer and make sure I don’t have anything else set up for that day.

I find that preparation on a Friday helps me have a really great and spacious week ahead. And then I will go ahead and actually block off my entire calendar, so nothing else can be booked. And I delete any meetings or anything unnecessary that I don’t need to be at, to make sure that my time is used the most efficiently.

The last thing I do before I wrap up for the weekend (because I don’t work weekends – it’s one big boundary that I have in place) is I make sure that I write down the four things that I need to accomplish next week, and sometimes it’s just one thing. I really try and minimize my tasks and my projects to make sure that I actually have the clear space to get it done and I’m not piling a bunch of things on my to-do list. And how I do that, I talked about it in-depth in this video on how I am more productive doing less. So you’re going to want to watch that next, but a big key is the three A’s that I use.

So Axe, meaning get rid of things, because if it doesn’t need to be done immediately, then it just doesn’t need to be done next week. I can hold off till a later time, which a lot of things can be held off. There is an urgency on everything. And then the next thing is Automate, so what can I automate my life to take things off my plate. i.e getting meal delivery done, or having our dog walker help out with Mugsy a couple of days a week.

And then the last thing is asking for help, so is there anything that is coming up next week that I could really use my team’s help on, or a friends or family or whatever that may be. That’s something I used to be terrible at, but it makes a big difference when you can identify maybe that doesn’t need to be done by me and maybe there’s someone else who can help me with it. It saves a lot of time. And that is the final thing I do, I write it on my whiteboard and then I wrap up and that’s it until Sunday night.

Before we get to Sunday night, let’s talk about a few key things I do every Sunday. It is my rest and reset day, so I try not to plan anything, and I generally go for a walk with my dog in nature, and I head up the grocery store to get anything I need for the week so I don’t have to make multiple trips. Plus, this is also the day our meal prep gets delivered so that I have a few ready-to-go meals throughout the week to save me some time.

Sunday night, I sit down and I basically detail out what is coming up on Monday so that I’m fully prepared and I’m not waking up to any surprises, I know what’s on the schedule, I know what needs to be done. So that frees up mental space for anything else. You can see how detailed this is, it starts with meditation and a dog walk from the minute I get up, eat and get ready at 7:30, 8:05 is when I check in on clients. Slack and statistics for the business, so metrics that matter. And we have a sales meeting at 8:30, another leadership meeting at 9:05, 10:05 is my monthly finance meeting. 10:30 is a meeting with Lauren Shaw, who’s on my team, a one-on-one with her. 11:00 is a meeting with a consultant. 12:00 PM is a break and a walk around the block. So I include breathers and workouts and everything. 1:30, another internal meeting, and then 3:30 is a workout. And that’s how my day, wraps up.

I do this every night, Sunday to Thursday, to make sure that the week runs smoothly as possible. And then when I wake up in the morning, it’s pretty much the same thing each day as well. I wake up, I meditate, I make myself my lemon water, and then I check in on my daily priorities and must-do’s, which I do every single morning, which is check-in with my team, check in with my clients and check in on the stats in our business.

For me, and it might be the same for you, let me know in the comments, I am very much so if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind for me so I like to have things written down, if you haven’t noticed by now. Whether it’s in my note pad or I visually on my wall in my office have my Europe At A Glance planner, and I talked about that in this video when I planned my entire year in one day. And I also like to see visually what my yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly goals are that I want to be hitting, and I talked about that and broke down how I do that in this video on how to be more productive doing less, which I highly recommend you watch next, because it’s jam-packed for a lot of info that if you like this video, you’re going to like as well.

And surprise, surprise, I have the same four daily priorities pretty much every single day in the back of my mind, and they’re also on the wall in my office so I never forget what is actually growing the business. And so number one is generating leads for the business. Number two is ensuring that we have the best product and programs on the market, but really listening to our clients. The third thing is making sure that we’re getting social proof and testimonials to prove that, so making sure that we’re getting our clients to give us their feedback and to share the results with us.

And then the last thing is to make sure that we are maximizing profitability, so keeping a very close eye on the numbers in the business and ensuring that our expenses are not higher than they need to be. And outside of that, when I have those four basics that I need to go back to every day, it allows me to stay in my genius zone and clears up a lot of mental space to do the things that I’m really good at, and really the things that I should be doing, creating really strong relationships in our community and with my network, also working on free and paid content and just ensuring that I’m taking the best care of our clients as well, because those are the things that ultimately matter the most, and really are in my genius zone.

Monday and Thursday are generally my behind the scenes internal days in my business. It’s when we do internal meetings with the team and I get to do behind the scenes work. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are generally my external and content creation days, as I mentioned earlier, and this is when I do interviews, I do client-facing work, I do lives, and I do content creation.

Planning my week like this allows me to know what’s coming. And I heard someone say, it allows you to not go off script and kind of wing it. Because when I wing it, things go sideways. So knowing what needs to be done allows me the space of the things that I want to do. And it allows me to be really fully present, whether that’s with my team or it’s with my family, which is the most important thing to me. It also provides me with flexibility, which let’s be honest, that’s a big reason people get into entrepreneurship, and it allows me to plan out my week in a way where if I want to work on a Friday, I work. If I don’t and I want to just take some space, I have that flexibility to do so and I’ve created a ton of space in my calendar and a lot of boundaries as well to make sure that I’m not burning myself out.

And for example, this week I’m headed to the island for a really beautiful wedding for our friends, and I get to actually be present because I’ve been proactive in how I planned this week and every week outside of this. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. I built my business to compliment my life, not complicate it. I learned that lesson the hard way. I shared in this video, the ugly truth of entrepreneurship, my story and my journey with severe burnout. And I promised myself I would never get back there. So creating a minimal workweek and planning in this way to create a lot of space for myself to just be, and incorporating a lot of boundaries of what I won’t allow into my week, and being proactive about how I do plan things out and my productivity has given me that space and given me that gift, and that allows me to bring so much more to the table.

I really hope that resonates with you. If you want to build your business in a way that is a little bit more minimal and creates more space for you, I’ve created a free training that you can check out on how to turn your experience into a highly scalable online course business. 

Thanks so much for reading and watching!