Organize your Work Week to be productive w/ Google Calendar

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Do you find yourself overwhelmed and frustrated with the endless to-dos of running a business? Feel like there’s never enough time in the day to get everything done and that you’re constantly juggling too much? It doesn’t have to be this way.

When you organize your work week, you can become more efficient and productive while avoiding burnout. By focusing on the three major areas of your business, avoiding the nitty gritty details, and scheduling activities aligned with your energy levels, you can become the most efficient and productive version of yourself.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how I organize my work week so you can follow along and organize yours, too. We’ll discuss how to block time, the three areas of your business that you need to focus on, and how to schedule activities by aligning them with your energy levels.

If this sounds good to you, then let’s get started!

Video Transcription:

[00:00:00] Some people way overdo it when they’re getting started with getting their feet wet really was planning their work week, which is no surprise because most of us started kind of like being reactive, working our way, and we just reacted to it and we got it done and we just did the thing. And at some point, you’ll burn yourself out and you need to start planning.

Avoiding burnout

[00:00:23] You need to move from being reactive in your work weekend, getting things done to being proactive, because if you’re not, you are just going to burn yourself out. That’s where burnout is coming from because we started a business out of passion. We just did the thing, and if we don’t make the jump from being reactive to people coming to us and wanting things and needing things, to really planning and knowing what’s happening and having those time estimates, that’s where burnout is coming in because chances are, when you are being reactive, you are planning on needing less time for the task, then you actually need.

[00:01:05] Which then means you are going way overboard and planning way too much. So let me show you how you can get started easily and effortlessly with planning your work week. And surprisingly to you, we are not starting in ClickUp. ClickUp is coming in a couple of videos. Today, we are starting really with your Google Calendar. Back to basics.

[00:01:30] Simple. We don’t want to overwhelm anybody. We don’t wanna go all overboard with the planning and just cause even more burnout. Shall we? Cool. Let’s do it. Now as I already mentioned, don’t get too much into the nitty gritty. Start easy. Nice and simple. What are the areas of your business you really have to take care of?

The 3 areas in your business that you need to focus on

[00:01:51] The back of the house, which is the admin stuff, getting clients in the door, meaning the marketing and client getting efforts. The actual delivery, the tasks, the services, the offers you are giving to your clients, right? That’s the three main things. But we also want to make sure you are not burning yourself up, which means you should have a slot for catch up and recharge time, and you also should feed yourself.

Time blocking (to organize your work week)

[00:02:15] If you are an entrepreneur, chances are you like learning, you like doing new things. We wanna have a spot for that. Now that you have a rough idea of what we are looking for, let’s plan out a time blocking calendar for you. And if you don’t know what time blocking means, time blocking and it can get overboard.

[00:02:33] The one thing that I want you to take away from this video, we are not overdoing this. We are not going nitty gritty, so don’t think about the whole time blocking of, I only get to record videos there. No, we don’t wanna get too nitty gritty. I still want your creativity to come through in this time blocking and when you organize your work week.

[00:02:52] So wait, I’m not gonna force you to go on nitty gritty. What I do want, however, is for you to start planning your week and have chunks of time blocks where you focus on certain areas of your business because when you are starting to become proactive, when organizing your work week with rather than just being reactive, you are also gonna realize that often enough, we take so much time for our clients that we don’t work in our own business.

[00:03:23] So when you look right here at my Google Calendar, as you can see, we got some admin time. Monday mornings is often where a lot of things come in from the weekend. I wanna make sure I start the week productive, so we are starting off with some admin time taking care of things. Then we have a small block of marketing and client getting that could be email follow-up, that could be a couple of discovery calls.

[00:03:46] And then by the end of the day, we focus on client work. Now Tuesday, literally the holiday Tuesday is client calls for me, usually. Same on Wednesday, Thursday we come back again to not only just focus on clients, which we did the beginning of the week, we now focus on marketing and client getting. Again, Thursday is live show day.

[00:04:08] Thursday is video recording day, that kind of thing. Admin time. Then we got some product and program development. You want to evolve your business. So if you do not allocate a chunk of time that says Yvi, you now have the permission slip to not work on client work. It’s in your calendar.

[00:04:30] You block this out. You get to tell your clients, I am not available to you Thursday afternoon. We don’t have a boss that gives us that permission slip that says, hey, we need to get this proposal done. Hey, we wanna offer something new. You are the boss that gives you that permission slip. So chunk out a time block when you really organize your work week for program and product development so that you can evolve your business.

[00:04:57] And then Friday, a nice block for education and learning. And I mentioned this before, catch up and recharge. Got it? So, what we want to focus on here, I don’t want you to granularly make all the things that so many tell you when we talk about organizing your work week and time blocking. I don’t want you to go into the nitty gritty. Let that nitty gritty ADHD brain out the door.

[00:05:24] We are looking big picture here. We want to actually be able to follow this big picture. We just want those areas. Now, when you actually start working, and we will have a video coming up for you on that one, when you start assigning those tasks, we will use this as the backdrop of when we assign which tasks.

Focusing on your energy levels

[00:05:46] We will also focus on your energy level, which brings me to one of the things that I’m doing in this calendar, too, I have a secondary calendar in here that lays out my morning routine and my lunch routine. Now, breathe. Breathe. I am not saying you have to follow this by the book. Believe me, I have not worked out in a month because I was sick.

[00:06:10] I don’t want you to get to the, oh my God. But it says I’d have to work out. Yes, you should work out. This is your best case scenario. You are trying to train yourself to get into the habit of what you believe and want your best work weekday to be. There is no guilt here. I don’t shower every day, let’s be honest.

[00:06:35] Yes, I shower because I got a record video. What I want you to do is get to a point of data in your calendar that allows you to figure out how you as a person, your brain, your body, your productivity comes out of you the best. Believe me, creative brains, when they have structure, are more creative. That’s what we want to do with this.

[00:07:04] Now, while you are starting to test all of this out, and again, don’t go too granular, stay big picture. Have a notepad next to you or a whiteboard or whatever it is, and track your energy level. I figured out lunchtime workout does not work for me because I’m not gonna do any work in the afternoon if I went for a workout at lunchtime. I need to do this in the morning.

[00:07:28] When I workout in the morning, I’m like, yes, we can do this. This is our goal here, to figure out what works best for you? The nitty gritty and all the things come after this. This is your framework to really organize your week, have data points, and be able for your brain to stay in this line of, it is client work time.

[00:07:52] If it’s not a client work thing, you just note it down somewhere. We are not doing this task right now. We are just noting this down. We are focusing on getting client work done. Now, if you are still wondering how this time blocking really helps your brain to stay on target and be really efficient and productive in your work week, I got a video right here for you where I explain what happens in your brain and why we want to time block our work week to be most efficient and productive.