 If you're struggling to get through all of your tasks in a day, especially if you work from home, this video is for you. We're talking about how to schedule your life and get organized when you're working from home. Hey, it's Leanne from leancolderwood.com. We're talking about scheduling when you're working from home, but a lot of the tips we're going to cover today also apply if you're working in a traditional work setting as well. So for my meeting partners out there, if you're working in a hotel or working for a destination, chances are somewhere along the way they've offered you perhaps an opportunity to take some work home with you or you can work from home a couple days a week. Some of you are actually probably working from home full time in the meetings industry. And there's a lot of challenges that come from working from home and you can learn about some of those challenges in my videos above here. So what we're talking about today is scheduling your life when you're working from home and making sure that everything gets done. So here's some quick tips and tricks that will help you schedule your life so that at the end of the day you do feel accomplished and you can head into the next day feeling refreshed and energized because you got everything off of your to-do list. Tip number one, live by your calendar. Whether your calendar is electronic and it's on your phone or your laptop, or if you're still working with a paper planner, which I think is fantastic. And we'll talk about those in a minute. Make sure you live by it. So if you're going to invest in either of these tools, make sure you use them and you live by them. You let them rule your day and not let the distractions and the other people in your world rule your day. That's exactly about paper planners. They have come a long way since they were just little calendars coiled on the sides. In fact, there's two that I recommend that are in my blog post on this topic, which I'll post below. But both Michael Hyatt and Kerry Green have planners that also include pages that help you plan and goal set and create a real strategy for your business. I recommend getting a planner that has a bit more goal setting in store versus just the calendar itself. So enough said about that. Tip number two, schedule high important tasks during your biological prime time. Now, you're probably wondering what is biological prime time? Well, Chris Bailey talks about it a lot in his work over at alifeofproductivity.com. And basically, your biological prime time is when you are at your most creative and most energized and your most alert and are able to really tackle those high strategic projects that require critical thinking. So if you look at your hours in the day from when you wake up to go to bed, there's some times in there one or two times where you just feel like you can tackle the world. That's probably your biological prime time. And so if you schedule your high important tasks during that time and leave the mundane tasks for times when you're not feeling as energized, then you're really going to see some great work happen. So make sure you schedule your high important tasks during your biological prime time. Conversely, tip number three, also schedule the gravel. So now you've got these important tasks plunked into your calendar. Now it's time to maybe put some calendar appointments for yourself to tackle the mundane tasks or what we call gravel. And that comes from The Five Choices book by Franklin Covey. And gravel is all of those emails and phone calls that have been coming in, things that don't require a lot of critical thinking, but you still got to get through them anyway to push projects forward. So let's batch all of those together and do it outside of your biological prime time. So a good example for me is between the hours of 1 and 2pm when I'm not feeling my most alert. That's when I actually tend to a ton of my emails and I go through them all. So I get rid of like 30, 40 emails at a time. Make sure that my meeting partners have the information they need. Projects are moving forward, but it didn't require a lot of critical thinking for me. Conversely, contract review for me is best done in the morning because that's when I'm feeling on top of things and I wouldn't miss details. Or rather, I wouldn't miss as many details. So let's schedule our gravel as well. Tip number four, schedule your exercise. Now you've got family, you've got friends, you've got work priorities. Exercise is probably the last thing on your list and it really shouldn't be. It should be a priority. So please make sure the exercise gets scheduled into your calendar and make sure you do it. Whether it's going to the gym and you have to register for a class time or you're going to go for a run in your neighborhood or you're going to commit to a league playing a sport every season. Schedule it in your calendar. Make it a priority. Your health should be your number one priority. So make sure you schedule and maintain your appointments with your health. Tip number five, group block your appointments. So if you have appointments outside of the house, be it with clients or other meeting partners or even friends and family, try to group block all of those together and save on the commute time back and forth, back and forth, back and forth to all of these places. Or maybe it's even going to run some errands when you're out doing your exercise so you don't have to run downtown again later on in the day and save yourself the commute time. So try to group block all your appointments together in a half day or whatever that looks like for you. This is also a great tip for when you're traveling and visiting clients as well to save some commute time. Tip number six, protect your work time. So now that we're working from home, perhaps we're not the traditional nine to five, but we still need to protect work time and get that done. So for me, it's really tough right now because it's the summer and I live in a tourist destination. And there's lots of people coming here for holidays. And I'm so happy to see my friends and family when they're coming to my house for holidays. But my house is also my workplace and I'm not on holidays. So I need to be very careful with protecting my work time when summer distractions arrive. But these can happen year round. Just make sure you protect your work time. Protect it fiercely if you want to get things done. Tip number seven, take your work with you. So a lot of us decided to work from home because of the flexibility it provided and that we could take time off when our friends and family visited, or we could run our kids around the plethora of activities that they have. I'm sorry, but I don't know about your kids, but my kids have something every day, every day. I take my work with me. So whether it's going to the hockey rink to drop them off for practice or going to the gymnasium and then the nearby coffee shop, I take my laptop with me. Now, if you can't take your laptop with you or you don't have a laptop, take an industry magazine. Take a notebook. Do something that helps push projects forward, helps keep you abreast of industry trends. Something you can take in the car with you when you're out running around with your kids to all of their various activities. And the final tip or rather piece of advice and you've probably garnered this from the last seven tips is forget about trying to create work-life balance and just focus on life. I think work-life balance is a myth. I think when people talk about work-life balance, they're talking about these separate personalities and they're combating for your time. When you work from home, work is life and life is work. And as soon as you start to accept that it's not combat of in nature, but it's more of a flow, you're going to get more done, especially at work. And that manifests itself differently for everybody. For myself, it does mean I go to work out in the middle of the day. But at the same token, I take my laptop to the beach. So there's trade-offs that we all have to ensure that we're getting all of our man hours in or work hours in, as well as finding time for ourselves to enjoy our lives. So I look at it as life and especially when you work from home, your work is your life and it's a big part of who you are. So I hope these tips helped. If you're thinking about working from home or your hotel or destination has maybe given you an opportunity to work a few days from home here and there, but you're not sure it's a good fit for your personality. I invite you to check out the tool, Work from Home Self-Evaluation Tool at liankulderwood.com. I'll have a link below here where you can click on, but if you go over to liankulderwood.com, click under Resources and look for the Work from Home Self-Evaluation Tool. That'll lead you through a series of questions to determine is working from home a good fit for you. So I hope you find value in that tool as well. Thanks for watching this video. Hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye for now.