 All right, so gosh, it's great to be back in front of people at WordCamp, good grief It's been like years it seems like because you know it has and One of the things that I enjoy about WordCamp is Seeing faces meeting people and listening to other people who do WordPress stuff with clients. How many that's you you do some WordPress stuff With clients. Yeah, okay, so I've been doing coaching for WordPress business owners And I do a lot of client work still to this day And in all those coaching conversations one of the things that I've learned is that we're not alone We all face a set of common challenges now sometimes the details are different But the problems are the same and so it's it's often like you come into a meeting like this where you know you're around people that do what you do and You might think I'm the only one that has these struggles. I promise you you're not there are very few Unique issues. We're gonna talk about one of those issues today that we all share as a common challenge How many of this how many of you this resonates with you? This is me after WordCamp US I have found 287 ideas of things that I want to do and I have written all of them down and I will do all of them By the end of the year. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, okay, and then in November I'll find that page full of ideas Right. Oh, yeah, those were awesome ideas I had after WordCamp US and I will do all of them as soon as I finish this project and Then January comes around and I found that page of ideas again, right? Oh, these were such great ideas and I'm gonna do all of them, you know someday Does anybody else do that or is it just me? Yeah, okay, so this is the struggle that we face It's a common struggle and putting some terminology to it helps. It's the struggle between strategy and execution Strategy is the things that we do that are working on our business Whereas execution are the things we do working in our business. Let me explain that difference Strategy are the things you do that are growing your business building products Building systems and processes in your business doing the big picture things that are going to help to grow your agency Working in the business is actually answering client questions building websites managing websites And it's answering trouble tickets all those things we do just in the business doing the work of the business now What I've realized is strategy for most of us is hard Whereas execution is more natural Like we're good at doing the thing like we're good at doing the work That's why we started into this thing to begin with but for many of us the strategy piece is hard It doesn't come naturally. It's a skill that we have to learn So why is it so hard for us to keep strategy in focus when we're busy with all this work that our clients are asking us to do? I mean, it's a good problem to have right like it's good to have all this work That's coming in but why is it that it's so hard to keep this other important piece of our business to strategy? Why is it so hard to keep that in focus? That's what we're going to spend the next 30 minutes or so on today And here's an overview of where we're heading first We're going to unpack this problem a little bit more then we're going to develop a strategy To deal with this problem and I'm going to give you some suggestions for success all of which come from me making Mistakes doing this the wrong way over the years So hopefully if I can save you any of those same mistakes we can do that So to start off we need to really understand this problem and why it is that we struggle the way we do Why is it that it's so hard to keep strategy in focus? You know, what are you going to do with all the things you learned this weekend at work camp us? And all the ideas that you have what is going to happen when you get home? Are you going to have great ideas that never get implemented? The reason those things happen is because of this right here and it is the whirlwind The whirlwind is our is our biggest obstacle and it's the reason why strategy is so hard To continue to do on a regular basis So let's do a little bit of understanding and unpack this concept of whirlwind and see why it's so important for us to really I get a handle on this The whirlwind is the energy and attention that is needed to run our businesses The whirlwind is the 14 emails from clients that you find in your inbox when you hit the desk in the morning All with demands for things that need to be done by noon The whirlwind is the customer call that happens right as you were about to start working on your own website for a change That sounds familiar The whirlwind is that one-hour meeting with a client that turns into three and it takes up half your day You come to your desk in the morning with the best of intentions It's like it's finally going to be a day where I get to work on my stuff for a change And then it lasts like ten minutes because we made the mistake of opening our email And there's all the stuff sitting there that we have to do right I'll tell you I've spent hours and hours watching courses online sitting through webinars going to events like this reading books reading articles all full of excellent things great ideas that would genuinely help my business and Often I've never implemented any of them at all They made no practical impact in my world at all and it wasn't the author's fault It wasn't the presenter's fault. It wasn't the course instructor's fault. It's just because when I got back to the real world What's waiting there all the emails all the phone calls all the client demands And I would always push off my strategy work because there was more of More this client work to do or maybe just maybe I Found this new piece of technology that caught my interest and I went down a rabbit hole for a whole day Right and I lost a whole day unpacking the shiny new piece of technology I'm sure that doesn't happen to any of you, but that does happen to me And I just wasted a whole day doing something that really I mean it was fun, but it really didn't move the yardsticks for my business So here's the issue Strategy is important We agree on that right strategy is important for our businesses strategy is important But the whirlwind the whirlwind is urgent Franklin Covey company said when urgency and importance clash Urgency wins every time and doesn't it? It does Urgency wins every time so what do we do? We have a choice to do strategy or urgent client work We're always inevitably it seems going to choose the client work And as as far as our own strategy and our own goals, we'll get to it when Never that's I mean that's honest right we'll get to it We tell ourselves though we get to it tomorrow. It'll be better next week It'll be better after I get through this big project. That's on our plate Right, it all it's we kicked the can down the road now. Here's the problem with that delaying strategy doesn't work Because the whirlwind Never goes away and this seems to be the lesson that we struggle to learn we say we're gonna work on this idea later We're gonna put these practices into into our world later after I finish this I'll get to it next week things will be better next month, but we forget this one very important fact and that is If we push this work off to next week guess what is also going to be present next week? The whirlwind right a matter of fact if it's not present next week If we don't have the whirlwind next week We're in trouble because the whirlwind is our business and if there's no business There's no need to do strategy for it right so the whirlwind never goes away and as a matter of fact the whirlwind isn't a bad thing It's just a fact of life of being in business The whirlwind is your work if there was no whirlwind you'd be in being a lot of trouble the whirlwind isn't bad It just is what it is. It's a fact of life So when we tell ourselves, I'll get to the strategy when things settle down. We're fooling ourselves. I Hope it's because if things settle down. We got a problem So we need to figure out how to get our strategy work done How to grow our business in the middle of acknowledging the fact that we're always going to be busy to some degree So this is the strategy that I call taming the whirlwind now that we've identified what we're up against We need to figure out a plan to deal with it and that plan needs to end up with this We need to figure out how am I going to accomplish my goals in the middle of the whirlwind If you're a business owner, we're gonna make Pardon me if you're a business owner, we're gonna make the assumption that you're a smart person I mean you don't get into business unless you have some degree of you know Intelligence and knowledge and even discipline to be in the position of having a business Your challenge is probably not accomplishing your goals per se It's accomplishing your goals with the reality of the whirlwind in the middle of your world now. We need a plan Because without a plan the whirlwind always wins. It just does When strategy and execution clash when urgency and importance clash Urgency wins every time and we've seen this happen in our world heavily. It's why we struggle. So here's the plan It's really simple when I put it up here. It's harder to execute But it's a simple plan that will help us get our goals moving forward even when we're busy It starts with a quarterly goal-setting meeting. Thank you very much Ryan. I appreciate that Get all choked up back talking in front of a word camp. It's awesome It's gonna start out with a quarterly goal-set session We're gonna come take we're gonna have a meeting with ourselves basically and we're gonna do goal-setting every quarter That's gonna be followed up by a weekly planning meeting I'm gonna have with myself every week and then a little bit of time every week that I'm gonna spend Executing on my goals now you can start with this very small just to get it gradually worked into your world But you can as you build momentum in this you're gonna find that it becomes easier and easier to find more time To execute strategy now if you want to do a little more of a deep dive into some of the foundational ideas For this get this book if you haven't seen this one yet. It's a great one the 12-week year by Brian Moran highly recommended Good foundational principles if you're a reader you like business books. This is one you should read So let's talk a little bit about quarterly goal-setting what that looks like What I recommend for everybody is that you spend at least two hours unplugged That means no screens. That means old-fashioned pen pencil and paper two hours Unplugged scheduled on your calendar as an appointment by the way I'm gonna have a QR code in a little bit That's gonna give you this whole deck as well as some goal worksheets and if you know You're welcome to screenshot the screen of course, but you can download the whole deck in just a minute So it's gonna start with this two-hour strategy session the first time or two Until you get used to doing this it might take you for so what I recommend to people is just schedule an afternoon Or schedule a morning whenever you work best to find some time to do what I'm gonna suggest Put it on your calendar as an appointment go some place where you personally Can most easily concentrate for some of us that means we need to be in a very quiet setting for others It means I got to be like in a coffee shop where there's stuff going on and that like really sparks my creativity Whatever however, you're wired and whatever works best for you Just go to that spot where you can focus and do some good work By yourself get a notebook and a pen or pencil if you have commitment issues and focus your thoughts Take time to let the whirlwind calm down in your brain Make a list of things you need to do and get it on paper now These are our two goals in that two-hour meeting. It's two hours Maybe four at the beginning or three, but two hours two tasks the two tasks in my quarterly planning session with myself are I'm gonna identify the issues that I need to deal with in my business And I'm gonna plan action items to start to deal with those things. It's simple, right two hours two tasks Identify the issues plan action items. Now. Here's what that looks like. I need to ask myself the hard question What are the changes that I need to make in my business? Now they're probably slimming around in your head right now if you're in business and you're doing WordPress stuff at Any level in any way you probably know of a handful of things that you ought to be doing right now That would improve your business you probably got that But if you stop and pull away and let the whirlwind die down in your head a little bit You'll realize that some more things start surfacing and the idea here is let's just get them all on paper Write them down and please please use paper and pencil or pen Writing them down there. There's some things like people with letters after the last game will tell you there's something about writing things down that helps Also, if you try to do this on a screen Guess what lives behind every screen? The whirlwind right and if you're like me in any way and you've got a screen where there are notifications I'm trying to focus and being that notification comes in or bloop little bubble pops in on my email I had I am compelled like Pavlov's dog to open that app and clear that notification. Am I right? Yeah, so just leave I try to leave my phone in the car and not even take my phone when I'm doing this sort of thing So what are the changes I need to make? And then I'm gonna rank those in a rough order of like what are the top two things That are gonna bring the most immediate impact to my business This is where I need to be brutally honest with myself And if this is a struggle and you have a team bring your maybe you know get a list down and then Bounce it off some people if you're really having trouble narrowing it down to two Get somebody that knows you and can call you on your BS to look at your list and help you realize What is really the most important thing that I need to be doing here? And here's the thing Pick the ones that bring immediate impact because whenever you're trying to start to develop a habit momentum helps Find the things that bring immediate impact because when you see those things happening in your business That's gonna give you momentum to carry forward with this strategy. It's really important to help to build those habits So the other thing I want to say before I advance the slides is these top two things that you identify in this meeting with yourself Two hours two things identify the top two things here The two things that you identify At least one of them is probably going to be something that you don't enjoy doing Because if you enjoy doing it you would have done it already Right, so it just be prepared that it's probably gonna be something that you don't enjoy and just that's okay It's something that's gonna bring immediate impact and we're gonna push through and we're gonna do this now I have a tool that can help with this There's the QR code if you want to zap that that'll give you the whole deck and at the end of the deck There are four printables Two of them are two two separate worksheets. There's a blank version of each one and there's an example That's filled in so you can see how this works for the sake of time today. Does anybody know when I'm done? Raquel, what time are we done here? Yeah, so for the sake of time today, I'm not gonna actually pull these sheets up on the screen But you the examples are there. They're really cool. They're playing. It's a smart goal Generator is what that's called and my contact information is there if you have questions just reach out to me I'll be here all weekend as well. So grab that those are two you don't have to use those It's literally its boxes on a piece of paper. Okay, there's nothing magic about this It is however helpful as a brainstorming canvas to get your goals articulated. Well all right, so quarterly planning session Two hours two goals identify my issues and pick my top two when I break my top two goals down I'm gonna break when I identify my top two goals. I'm gonna break those down into action items They're gonna take me roughly two to four hours to complete. That's a reason for that But that's part of this quarterly planning session. Okay. I've got my thing that I'm gonna do I'm gonna get I'm gonna finally move away from this one accounting platform that's holding me back And I'm gonna move into a different one where I can automate more and do things like that's just for example a goal Now, how am I gonna do that? I'm gonna break that down into tangible action items Each of which is gonna take two to four hours to complete. All right So that's the end of my quarterly planning session I'm gonna leave that planning time with myself with my two goals Looking down into action items that makes sense does not it's pretty easy to understand a little harder to execute But once you get used to it you get momentum. It starts to help All right, so the next part of the strategy is my weekly planning meeting with myself Generally, this takes me about a half an hour. It might take you a little longer And the first time you do this but about a half an hour every week now What do I do during this time? I'm going to figure out what in the world I'm doing this week and kind of get that all squared away But I'm going to find some time this week Where I can block a time on my calendar so nobody else can schedule it on my calendar with a reminder or two Or perhaps three where it's a two to four hour block Where I'm gonna execute on at least one of those action items that are part of my that identified during my quarterly goal planning This is the place Inevitably when I have conversations with people that maybe they heard this talk at a word camp one time and the next time I see I'm like, you know, I tried this and I had this trouble or if I'm coaching someone This is where the wheels fall off. Okay, you're like I had my quarterly planning session I made my action items, but I could never seem to get them done and my question is Did you have a weekly planning meeting because if you don't put it on the calendar? It's never gonna get done it. Do you just kick it down the road? That's how it works That's human nature Strategy versus execution, right? So every week 30 minutes for me. It's on Sunday evenings Usually Sunday night after the house kind of quiets down my kids are doing their thing. I look at my week I open the calendar. I plan everything and I you know I make sure I had that block of time Scheduled where nobody else can get to it and this is critical It has to happen before you start the week if you try to do this before the week after the week starts It very very rarely works So I encourage people and maybe this is something you do on a Friday afternoon to plan for the week ahead or for me It's a Sunday evening or maybe early Monday morning Like you're having your coffee before you get to your desk do it then but before you get to wherever it is that you work Make sure you have a plan because if you hit the desk on Monday morning without a plan the whirlwind always wins Always it's it's just inevitable So the other part of this planning is it's getting that time scheduled on the calendar with a reminder So nobody else can have that time It's also making sure all of the resources that I need to execute on that goal are put together So I don't want to spend the first 45 minutes of my two-hour execution time every week Trying to find where all the things are to make this You know do this work Part of my planning is making sure I've got all my links and all the stuff is in a folder in a desktop or whatever And just get it all together So as soon as I have my time to do goal execution I can just pop things open and start to work turn off the phone turn off the notifications Go on focus and silent and just do the work head down. Does that make sense? All right, we have to do this every week because without a plan the whirlwind always wins Now here's how this might look for those of you that are more visual This is a very simple way and I used for years. It's a little different now But for years, especially when I was a solo, this is how I plan my week now I know this is brilliant, but I had this great idea of I'm gonna break my day up into three parts Isn't that brilliant morning afternoon and evening? That's original right there is what that is But like if it's not simple it just doesn't work long-term in my world for what it maybe it's just a defect in me I don't know, but if it's not simple. It doesn't work long-term for me so I will look at my day in terms of three blocks and For me family is a priority family is all a well Unless there's certain circumstances, which I'll explain in a minute family typically gets one of these blocks a day And so my planning might look something like this So we're gonna give space to the whirlwind Like Monday Monday morning, you know the whirlwind grows over the weekend for whatever reason There's tickets and things that happen over the weekend and you know Monday is a whirlwind day So this week whatever week this is Monday morning and Monday afternoon I'm just been working on whirlwind stuff dealing with clients answering emails doing tickets Whatever that happens to be in the evening. It's family time right Tuesday in the morning whirlwind Not call that stuff out in the afternoon I'm gonna be head down in the cave working on a client project and it lives in that four-hour space Family night Wednesday morning same thing. Oh look Thursday morning This is a spent this happened a lot when my kids were little And so one of the great benefits of owning your own business as you get to be your own boss and set your own schedule Sets your own priorities You don't have somebody else doing that for you and for me It's like if my kids are having something at the school that morning and I want to be a part I'm gonna go do that right so in this sample week on Thursday morning say my daughter had some program at school I'm gonna go do that. I'm gonna hang out with her. I'm gonna have lunch and I'm gonna go home and get back to work Right, so Thursday morning. It's family time, but look that night. I'm gonna work Right like I move the family block up there, but then I'm gonna you know fix that by working later that night So whirlwind stuff when I get back to the office focused on project and on this week. I'm very ambitious I'm actually planning to four-hour blocks for strategy One Friday morning and one Friday afternoon I might get a bunch of stuff done some weeks that might be whirlwind in the morning or project in the morning strategy in the afternoon Or vice versa, but see how that works. It's simple You know, it's it's never actually gonna work out like this But this gives you a good framework to start to process how I'm gonna spend my time in different blocks And if you'll start the week with a plan like this It's really going to help because the whirlwind can be contained with good productivity habits You can contain the whirlwind if you're deliberate about your time So for example one of the first ways that people get off track on this is that if they have a time in the morning Set aside to work on a project What's the first thing we do when we hit our desk in the morning? Open mail and guess what it's all downhill from there. The whirlwind lives in your inbox, doesn't it? This is also a reason I'm not a fan of Productivity apps where the calendar in the inbox are in the same software app Because I need to have my calendar without being distracted by my email because again It may just maybe a personal defect in me, but if I've got a number on that inbox I can see I'm just drawn like I just like a magnet I'm drawn to open that up and start getting into it and then my brain is off somewhere else and I can't focus I just you know calls and emails for me twice a day I look at the email sometime mid-morning and then another time early to mid-afternoon And you can contain the whirlwind having habits like that All right, so this is our weekly execution time We're gonna we're gonna plan this on the calendar two to four hours The reason I say that and this is why by the way I suggested you break up that goal in the two to four hour action item So you could plan it this way Find that two to four hour block every week where you can execute on your goal now schedule the time Don't compromise it Maybe if it's a real like genuine emergency and they're really typically very few of those now The difficult part of this is not compromising the time Like say you've got your execution time planned on the calendar and it's let's just say it's gonna be a Thursday afternoon This week, and this is the time where I've got set aside for me. I'm gonna go to a coffee shop I'm gonna plan and work and do some things in my business and I have a client that calls Oh, hey, can you meet with me Tuesday at 1 3rd or Thursday at 1 30? This is where the battle happens am I gonna compromise my time that I've planned for strategy in my business and executing on that goal or am I gonna have this client call and Oftentimes it's not nearly as hard as we make it in our heads Sometimes though what I've learned is it's easier to do the client work that we know we can accomplish Then it is to do the strategy work. That's difficult It's and we tend to avoid that work So we take the client work We pat ourselves on the back for good customer service and we end up hurting our business in the long run So when that client calls, you know, gosh, I'm sorry. I already have a meeting scheduled Thursday afternoon Can we try Friday morning? I mean I have a meeting. It's with myself. It's on my calendar. It's honestly though It's the most important meeting I have that week You know for especially for those of us that are focused on good customer service It's really easy for us not to give our business the attention that it needs in lieu of saying I'm providing great customer service by always being available for my clients But guess what if you go out of business your customer service is going to stink How many rescue sites if you work in the WordPress space, how many rescue sites have you inherited because the developer poof disappeared. I Wonder why probably because they didn't build recurring revenue and they didn't do strategy work in their business And they got tired of all the hassle and they just went to work for somebody else and the client gets left holding the bag You do your clients a better job You your clients are better served if you have a healthy business and healthy business comes from regular strategy Okay, so we've had our quarterly goal planning session We have done our weekly planning and we've got our weekly execution time Set up here now. What do we do at the end of this? We just repeat the process Every quarter I go into the four hours and half a day whatever so for those of you that are visual I'm going to break it down like this sort of a little bit of a flow chart here I start out with my quarterly planning meeting to you know, two to four hours away. It's good if you can do an afternoon or a Whole morning. That's great I'm going to identify two goals And I'm going to break those goals into action items that are two to four hours a piece Right, so this is what I come away with for my quarterly planning session Every week I'm going to have that meeting with myself If an hour where I'm going to find two hours that week And I'm going to pull that first action item down here And I'm going to put it on my calendar and then I'm going to do the work and execute on that The next week I'm going to have a weekly meeting with myself I'm going to pull that next goal down there and I'm going to put it on my calendar With a reminder and blocked out and I'm going to execute on that goal And I just do that week after week after week after week until my goals are accomplished Does that make sense? It's not hard to understand The hard part is when you are challenged on whether or not you're going to compromise that execution time every week That's where the real battle is All right, so let me wrap it up with a couple of final suggestions again All these come from me making these mistakes or don't do what I do The first suggestion is this we got to prioritize You will always always always have more goals than you have time. You just will that's the way it is That's why it's critical that we are brutally honest with ourselves and we pick the two things They're going to make the most immediate impact in our business So if you've got a whole bunch of stuff and we're Camp US that you're learning pick the top two and choose those as your focus Put the rest on a sheet of paper or in some software app wherever it's going to live and keep them But you got to pick two if you try to do more than that you're going to have trouble I'm going to talk about that in just a minute We got to focus on those things that build the most immediate impact The reason we don't want to do more than two is this this is another study from Franklin Covey the productivity gurus They did some study in corporate America where they say they looked at teams and individuals and if that team or individual Had a certain number of goals in addition to the whirlwind of daily work Here's what they found if you have two to three goals and Still have to do a whirlwind work you will execute with excellence two to three goals If you try to do four to ten goals You will execute with excellence one to two of those goals if you have more than ten first of all God help you And then also you will execute zero But I mean think about this it's like eating a pizza right if you want to eat a pizza You eat it one slice at a time if you try to take a bite all the way around that pizza until it's done It's going to take you forever and it's going to be nasty by the time we get to the end right it just We have we focus better. It's the law of diminishing returns So don't try to pick more than two goals generally and you'll execute those with excellence if you focus on them Now here's the downside of priorities, and this is a struggle for many of us You'll always have more goals than time. So that means that sometimes Good ideas have to be put on a shelf come back to them give them a place to live We don't want to forget about those But that great idea is not the thing that's going to bring the most immediate impact to my business So I have to be disciplined set those ideas aside and know that there'll be a place for that to live later Okay, second suggestion is this Separate your roles. This is especially critical if you are a solo If you have a small agency your team is very small you'll still have this happening Most of us that are founders solo small agency that sort of thing we wear two hats We have a CEO hat and we have an employee hat We have a CEO hat the one that makes a decision sets the course You know sets the priorities vision mission all those things and we have the employee part of us It actually does the work right even in small agency if you're the leader of a small agency You're still probably doing some of that work yourself So we have to separate our roles in one way or another the CEO makes the plan the employee Executes the plan and we have to keep those things separate and we have to give space in our world for both of those roles to live correctly That's why I suggest is the very practical outworking of this is Don't do CEO work at your employee desk This is such a simple thing, but if there's this magic that happens like if I'm doing planning and for my business I do not do it at the desk where I'm doing the work the client work. So I go somewhere else. I Mean you might actually make a hat. I don't know whatever works for you It's just it's a mindset change of getting outside of the employee type work going someplace else as the CEO I had a person I was coaching that did this sort of work at her kitchen table when she was the CEO Because she had a nice view and that's you know the way it was But just not in the same physical location you will be shocked at the headspace that opens up for you for me I always did it in a Starbucks around the corner from my house Last of all is actually third of all is consider a sprint week For those of us doing client work, especially if you're building websites a lot You know the work is like this right up and down up and down sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're not it's feast or famine That's normal So when the times are you know when we have less work and one of those dips We're we had one of those this summer where it was it slowed down for a little bit Maybe consider sprint work where you take for example in a week the whole morning I'm just gonna do a sprint and I'm gonna spend every morning of that week working on this thing for my business It's gonna make it better. So taking you know You could execute a whole goal or two in a week like this where I'm not even checking email until noon I'm not even gonna look at it right give the Afternoons have a place for the whirlwind to live but always leave room for the whirlwind But something like this could work too. You have to experiment and find that's what's gonna work best for you Now we're down to just 10 minutes. I'm gonna finish this up really quickly and we'll take questions The fourth suggestion is this one and it's maybe the most important one Taming the whirlwind is a discipline that takes time So give yourself a break we've been doing things probably for most of us the wrong way for a long time and Gk Chesterton or somebody this is one of those quotes you Google and everybody you know Abraham Lincoln said it maybe or Mark Twain Who knows it's there's truth here though anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first If it's worth doing it's worth doing badly at first if I do it badly this week no problem There's next week I'll get it better next week and we'll get better and better at this until we lock these habits into our business It takes time to undo old habits So give yourself a break, but keep working the strategy does that make sense? Look the whirlwind never goes away It's always going to be there and when urgency and importance clash urgency wins every time So we have to find a strategy to accomplish our goals in the middle of the whirlwind now Here's the piece I want to leave you with if you did this if you took this strategy away And you started having a quarterly time and a weekly planning time and weekly execution time How different would your business look in months from now in six months? How would your business change if you did this and? Consequently in six months, how would your life change if you did this how much stress would be removed? What could you focus on that really matters if you put these things into practice? See ultimately taming the whirlwind is about creating margin for what matters in life Because I started putting these principles into practice years ago when my oldest daughter who has a medical condition Needed me to take her to therapy once a week. I was able to say you know what Thursday mornings every week I can set this time aside and take you to your appointment and be there with you I can do that Like I can invest that time. I was able to give the margin that was needed. This is real stuff y'all Like this creates margin that can improve your life and the lives of others around you can help your family You can have time for hobbies. You can take a real vacation Spend time in reflection building strategy for your business doing processes. It's all about margin But you can't do that if the whirlwind is eating your lunch every day. Thanks everybody. My name is Nathan Ingram I'm a growth coach for WordPress business owners. There's the QR code once again. I think we have like five minutes for questions Thanks, Nathan. Do we have questions? Okay, I'm sure you probably answered this but I'm a little distracted So when you're doing going to you've got your two goals for the week that you're going to execute and you've got your blocks So you've got your family time your strategy time your project time in the whirlwind time Where in which block do you execute? So that's the strategy time. That is the strategy time. That's your strategy. Okay So you take the strategy time to execute plus You so that's not so you're doing your weekly planning outside of that strategy time. Yeah, that was not in the block Okay, that's okay. The visual of the boxes was your work week. Got it So the strategy and the weekly planning has to happen before the week begins. So for me, it's Sunday nights Okay, some people have coached have done it on Friday Afternoon last thing they do before they leave some people do it early Monday morning But you have to do it before the week starts or you'll never recover. Yeah Thank you anyone else Yes, I Just have a quick comment because when you were showing the chart about how to block things off. I've used for years It's called planner pad. I don't know if anyone's heard of it It's awesome because you do everything gets down into a funnel so you write all your goals at the top and then it has it day and then even has it by time so if You know because I'm a type of person. I can't have my schedule in an electronic calendar because you have too many windows open So I have it written then it's always there you can see it But I just want to say because how you have that chart sometimes it helps if you have a written calendar It's just kind of a comment. What is it called planner pad planner planner pad Pad yeah planner pad, right? Yeah. Yeah, thanks for that. Oh, and I do have a question. Sorry. So My issue is is like I'll plan everything out I usually like to do mine on a Friday because come the weekend then I'm like Oh, I have all these goals and then you forget what it was come Monday So I was like to plan everything on Friday, but then sometimes I can't get the motivation I block out the time and then I sit there even though I have things written down What would be your advice on how do you motivate to actually start that planning strategy? Yeah? Good question. Excellent question. Okay, so That's the part of this talk that I'm not giving at this conference. So there's some What I found happens a lot of times is that you're choosing the wrong time of the day to do that kind of work And so there's a lot of thought and research It's gone into what they're calling chronotypes now like you know when like some of us are better in the morning Some are better late evening and whatever and learning your there's a great book called when by Daniel pink that gets into all this But like for me if you try to do strategy work in the afternoon for me like my mind is just I'm checked out Like I'm zonked, but that's why I do it in the morning If I'm actually going to execute on goals, that's the golden time like 8 to 10 a.m. That's the best time of the day You can't even get an appointment on my calendar until 10 a.m. It's just that's my time where I do the best work So try if you have trouble like I can't get motivated shift it to a different time of the day and see if that helps One more question over here So I love the schedule that you showed and it's very like time block, but we're personally I just wanted to know from your perspective where do you find time for me time right to go to the gym to do the stuff outside of Your day-to-day because that's a tight calendar already. Yeah, sure So if you were to look at my calendar right now at 11 30 There's an appointment that says go walk and have lunch for an hour like that's that's every day every week I do that so that was a very simplified calendar up there right my my actual one is a little more complicated Which I'm happy to show you but yeah you it's That's a that's a more That's a more granular time blocking we could get into it's just it was a little beyond what I was talking about today Just in theory, but yeah, it's What I've discovered for me at least is if I don't have that on the calendar I just blow past it and go through it right so it's like it well now It was 9 30 because I live in central time right before I got up here reminded me to go have lunch and walk Which was not helpful at all Well, yeah, and it's well, it's also crit like the other part of this talk I get into this more but Like weekends for me my weekends are pretty blocked out as well like on Saturday That's when I'm focused on doing physical stuff around the house I want to like have some physical activity and But but Saturday night to Sunday night that is I don't do anything between Saturday night and Sunday night that isn't Recharging to me like wife giving energy, you know, I don't do anything I don't want to do during those times and then Sunday night I do my planning for the next week So in broad generalities, that's kind of how I fit all that stuff in Yeah, great question time for one more. I'll be around all weekend. So I'd love to chat with you Just come up and say hi