Welcome back to the buyer side chat, where we go inside the mindset of a buyer to help you grow and scale your product business profitably. So this conversation today is very near and dear to me because it is something that I have continuously struggled with since I left corporate. And that is, um, My schedule.

And I’ve been talking to a lot of clients about this recently, and it feels like something that I wanted to bring to the podcast. It’s something that I think truly impacts every single one of us. If you are in a product based business, whether you’re doing it full time or you’re doing it as a side hustle, You are not doing it because you’re a lazy human.

You’re doing it because you, first of all, are super passionate about the product that you’re creating or the store that you’re building. You are extremely passionate about it. You’re also not afraid of hard work. You probably enjoy hard work. If you’re like me, you’re kind of addicted to being busy and that’s something that I’m trying to unlearn, but a lot of us have a lot of those similar traits because we are driven women, successful women, and we set really big goals for ourselves that we want to achieve.

And so I think that this conversation is super important to have because. Not only is it something that I’ve been continuing to work on personally for years, but it is something that I work with my clients on. We’re talking about it a lot in the product scaling intensive, just how to build your business in a way that works for you.

[00:02:00] Really how to create a schedule that aligns with your life and your desires. It’s so easy to just get caught up in those like day to day. chaotic tasks that you lose sight of the big goals and strategies that you set for yourself at the beginning of the year. And there are things you can do where you are saying, okay, every quarter, I’m going to check in with myself and I’m going to make sure that I’m staying on track and re evaluating my goals and blah, blah, blah.

We can say that all that we want, but if we are not creating what we want, goals that align to what we truly, deeply want in our heart of hearts, then that doesn’t even matter. So here’s what often happens. And I’ve done this too. So like, I’m, I’m coming at you from a, this is what I’ve done. And here are some things that I recommend to address this or recognize it in yourself.

So it is really easy to create. for your business, especially if you get tastes of success and you see your business scaling. It is very easy to say, I did this much revenue last year. I, I know that I, minimum I can double it this year. Or I have, You know, X, Y, and Z thing happening in my business. And this is going to take me from here to here and here’s how I’m going to get there.

[00:03:00] And this is all the work that’s going to happen. And this is what I’m going to have to do to get there. And these are the people I’m gonna have to bring in to get there. And when you stop for a second and say, okay, yes, you can get there in your business. That is a hundred percent possible, but is it what you really want?

At what cost? Is that success? It’s really one of those things that if you are not careful, it can suddenly get out of control. So Ash McDonald is a fabulous mentor and she talks about this a lot and she has helped me kind of get through some mindset work around this as well. But if you are not very clear on what you want your life to look like.

[00:04:00] Then you’re building a business with no direction in regards to your own life and all of a sudden it can completely consume your life, right? So if you have a family, if you don’t have a family, if you just have friends that you want to spend time with, I don’t say, I don’t mean just have friends and I don’t say that lightly.

I’m just saying no matter what your life circumstances are, you have a life outside of your business and that takes priority. and your wellbeing and your mindset. All of that takes priority over your business. And so you want to be building a life around your business. You want to build your business to support your life.

We are not working in corporate retail. We’re not working in the corporate office anymore, or maybe you are, and you want to get out of there. You don’t want to get out of that corporate situation to this. To then just suddenly find yourself back working a corporate schedule, which hi, that is what I have done.

[00:05:00] That’s what I’ve been learning to undo. I feel this pressure to be working the same crazy hours I was working in corporate on my own business. And sometimes that is just detrimental and not necessary. So when you start to think about, okay, what is it that I want my life to look like? How do I want my business to operate and function around that?

That is when you can start to get the clarity on what are those next steps that you need to take. Do you need to have support in place to be able to help get you there? Do you even want to have a team? Sometimes people don’t want to have a team like deep in their heart of hearts. They have no desire to lead a team.

And so that is perfectly fine. But in order to hit that seven figure goal that you set for yourself, you’re probably not going to do it on yourself or on your own, I should say. You’re probably not going to do it on your own, right? It’s just not physically possible. And if it is physically possible, it would probably be at the expense of you enjoying your life.

[00:06:00] So it’s so important to sit down and really reflect on what you actually want and what it means to hit that success level that you have identified as being your goals in your business. And if this is something that you’re like, I have no problem with this. Like I set really realistic goals that align with my life.

Good for you. Send me a DM because I want to hear your tricks. But you know, I think it’s something that I’m just constantly working on myself because I have really big goals and I have a really big vision for the business and sometimes I just get so caught up in where I’m going that I forget to live my life in the present moment.

Last summer, for those of you that have been around for a while, so summer of 2023 I had a summer bucket list and I shared that and I feel like it resonated with a lot of you guys because you were like writing me back that you were going to do the same thing. And that was really fun for me cause that helped me to stay accountable to it.

[00:07:00] But I blew through a lot of my list and I was really proud of myself, but I had to intentionally, Take a moment to say, I want to slow down this summer. So I spent last year leading up to summer. So May and June in particular, I like grinded it out. Is that a right word? I hustled in May and June. I hired two new team members.

Um, so I was getting them up and running, getting them on board. I was batching things like crazy. It was a really chaotic, Time period. It spilled over into July a little bit and I was annoyed by that, but I did it intentionally so that I could pull back on July and August. And that was good because it gave me a little bit of a break, but at the expense of like, I had no life in May and June, it was miserable.

[00:08:00] So that wasn’t the perfect plan. And it made me realize that it’s a bigger picture. It’s a Okay, let’s take a step back. How do I want my day to day life to really feel and look? And what does my, what is my ownership in how I’m building this business out? Now I have more people on my team that I’m responsible for making sure that they are set up for success and doing things that are working towards these big goals.

And are they working towards a goal that I really want for my business? Like have a hard look at that. First. And then it’s, okay, what do I want to be doing every week? Like I want to be doing certain things. And I often find myself doing the complete, not the complete opposite, but just things not even related to that because I have so much on my plate and I’m just like, what the heck?

[00:09:00] Like, this is, this is too much. And I find myself in this rat race every single week for some reason, but I have created that. So it’s like taking accountability for the situation you’re in, getting clear on where you want to be and taking a step back and then saying, okay, Let’s, let’s evaluate this because we have the full control.

If you created a mess, you can clean the mess. It’s your business. You can do what you want, which is cool, but also sometimes annoying because you just want someone to tell you what to do. Um, and that’s why coaches and mentors come in because they have an objective view and that’s why I have a mentor. It is extremely helpful to have outside eyes and perspectives on your business, but that’s a whole other point.

So. really thinking about what does it look like to hit that success? What do I want that to feel like? And maybe the goal isn’t necessarily what you want after all, or maybe it is, but you just realize that you need to tweak and adjust and bring somebody else on board or restructure. It’s just a really important conversation.

[00:10:00] I was talking to, um, a friend of mine recently, And she said that her son, I hope she is okay with me telling the story. I won’t give her name for privacy purposes, but she had said that, um, her, her son had said to her something to the effect of, you know, you’re on your phone a lot at night and I want more mom time and he’s little and she’s like, it crushed my heart to a million pieces because yeah, I do work all day in my studio and I then bring my work home and the second dinner is over.

I’m on my phone and I’m sourcing new suppliers and I’m doing things on Shopify and I’m doing this, that, and the other for my business. And I’m, I’m there present as a mom, but I’m not present as a mom. And she’s like, it was a huge wake up call. So she’s like, I immediately cleared my schedule, had some like one on one bonding time with him.

[00:11:00] And I felt amazing. I felt like a new woman after having that time. And it like brought her back to being centered and what was important to her. And so she’s like, you know, I’m trying to figure out how to balance out my work life versus my mom life to create more balance and to be happier and more fulfilled and to be there for my son.

And I think that that was just like a really good reminder that Outside people see this too. And so it’s important to check in if you have a spouse or a roommate or a parent or a sister that you’re super, super close with and checking in to see if they feel neglected at all. Neglected isn’t necessarily the right word, but you know how it is, like sometimes we just get so caught up in our business that we forget to pull our head up out of the water and prioritize what’s important to us.

So this is like my little PSA to do that for your own business. Now I want to talk about like more of a nitty gritty schedule perspective that has been working well for me. It has been tweaked and iterated. Month after month, I’m always revisiting this. So I’ll give that caveat, but I think that that’s okay and that’s good.

[00:12:00] We should always be re looking at things and adjusting and making things better and work better for us. But my weekly schedule has become super important. So what I started to do like two years ago, I was like, okay, I am acting like I’m still in corporate. This is not working. My days are turning into weeks where I’m just nonstop working and it feels chaotic.

So I tried batching my time and being like very strict about, I’m going to do this at this time and this at this time and blah, blah, blah. And I was quickly like, Well, this process, this productivity hack that the experts say is total bullshit and does not work for a product business. Because I would have my schedule like on Sunday night, perfectly aligned for the week.

[00:13:00] And then I’d get a million Shopify orders, like shit hit the fan because I only had help coming in two days that week. And Oh my God, suddenly my whole schedule blew up and now I don’t know what I’m going to do anything. So like that didn’t work for me. Might work for you. I don’t know. But what I have personally found that works really well for me, I’m going to share here and you know, hopefully it inspires you to think about your schedule a little bit differently too.

But I basically have taken my schedule and I have themed it out essentially. Okay. So for example, I will have every Tuesday and Thursday be my call days where I am calling on calls with clients. And that for me in my world is coaching clients. And on Monday, Wednesdays, I meet with custom gifting clients for Boku.

So every day I have a two hour chunk of time. for calls. And it’s the same every day, but it just alternates whether it’s the Boku side or the coaching side. I have a chunk of time every afternoon for my inbox. And I have a chunk of time on Fridays that are for my email. Um, projects focused on my goals.

[00:14:00] So the whole first half of the day on Friday up until like 1 PM I am spending working on a big rock goal in my business, whether I’m strategizing it, whether I’m actually physically doing the work, whatever it may be, that’s what’s happening. Um, on Mondays I’ll work on content. So it’s very much bashed out by themes and that works really well for me.

So I feel like I didn’t go through that in a very organized manner. So hopefully that makes sense. But what I’m trying to get at is that if you take a look at your week by week schedule and you have some common themes of things in your business that you can Bulk together in a chunk of time. So every Monday morning you work on finance related things.

[00:15:00] So whether that’s bookkeeping, sales planning, whatever, you have a little chunk of time on Mondays to do something like that. And every Tuesday and Thursday mornings, you’re working on order fulfillment, or you are producing, you’re pouring candles or you are creating the product, whatever it is that you Have this you can consistently do.

Now let’s say you don’t have any orders during that time that you set aside on Tuesday and Thursday and you’re like, well, I don’t have any orders. What you then do with that time is you then work on something related to that. So Shopify, Productive, etc. Maybe you need to clean some things up there. Maybe you need to do some sales things to get more orders.

So it’s kind of themed out. Or if you need a break, you take a break and you just use that time because it’s already set aside for that. And you can just say, I’m going to take a break during this time because I want to. So thinking about some, things that Uh, themes that you can create in your schedule that happen every single week so that you don’t have to think about it.

[00:16:00] That’s the kind of the beauty of it. It starts to become ingrained. So I just know that Tuesdays are my coaching days. Wednesdays are my Boku days. Thursdays are coaching Friday or big rock projects. It’s like consistently that’s the theme and I don’t have to think about it. So I can just say something comes up on a Monday for coaching.

I’m going to put that on my to do list for the next day. Because today is not a coaching day for me. So I just move things around and allows me to not kind of spiral and stop what I’m doing and work on the next thing because I just say, I have dedicated time tomorrow to do that. So that’s what I’m going to do that.

And today I’m going to stay focused on this thing that has been super helpful for me. So creating a schedule that’s themed out works very well for me. And Do not have it back to back to back to back. So you want to leave room for overflow, for create creativity, for play, uh, for a boom in orders. So you have some room, some wiggle room there.

[00:17:00] So you’re not like constrained to this schedule, but that’s why this to me feels better than batching my time. So rigidly, the other thing is batching your like work. So, If you have, let’s say it’s email marketing that you’re working on, don’t drip that out across five days. If you can avoid it, try and do that type of work altogether.

Or if you’re doing inbox stuff like getting through your email list, which is like always hard, don’t drip that out and do it a million times throughout the day because that’s super distracting. So if you can do batch. type work together that makes things so much better. Even when it comes down to order fulfillment or organizing your office, things that have common commonality to them, try and do them at the same time because your brain will already be in that mode.

So you’re not [00:18:00] losing productivity by. task switching, which I think that you have like a 30 percent drop in productivity every time you switch tasks. So if you can stay in that same kind of mindset and zone when you’re doing certain tasks or certain types of projects, then You’ll be more productive by kind of sticking with that, which goes back to theming out your days so that your brain is just in that mindset already.

For me, I found when I was switching back and forth between Boku mode and coaching mode, I would just get so drained and exhausted by the end of the day. Even within Boku, there are certain things that are just totally different from another, which you experience this as well. There is like the strategy side and the business planning side and the financials.

[00:19:00] And then there’s on the total flip side assorting and the physical product. And then there’s talking to customers, all these different things use different parts of your brain. And if you are just doing all of them, all the time at the same time, you’re not going to be as productive. And I’m not trying to say we need to be the most productive and do all the things, but we do want to be productive with the time that we have, which leads me to my last point, which is giving yourself time.

If you have too much time, what happens is you fill that time up. So if you have eight hours on your calendar free and you’re just like, this is a free for all day. I have the whole day available. I’m going to spend the whole day working on my next season’s collection. I’m going to be designing today.

Okay, cool. If you gave yourself four hours to do that same work, you probably could. Now, maybe you, maybe this isn’t the best example because you might be like, that is not how my creative process works, Kristen. Okay. I hear you. But sometimes when you give yourself more time to do something that doesn’t actually take that much time, you will take that much time because you know you have it and you will like leisurely.

[00:20:00] Use the time up when instead if it really only would take you four hours to do it and you gave yourself four hours And you gave yourself a hard deadline. You’re probably gonna be able to get it done in four hours and Suddenly you have four free hours to live your life. Do something fun go Enjoy it celebrate the fact that you got it done or if you’re like I want to keep cranking out work, then you can do something else in that time point being Give yourself less time.

There is so much research around that idea of like time stretching and not putting boundaries around our time. And what this all really ties back to is boundaries, having boundaries for yourself and not allowing your business to take over your life. And suddenly your business is controlling you. And it’s this monster and you’re like, go back in your cage.

[00:21:00] I want to live my life. So that boundary around. Nope, this is what I want this to look like, and I’m going to control that. The boundary that you set for yourself on your day to day, your time. It is the most precious resource that we don’t get back. So if you put some boundaries around that, you’ll have more respect for your time and you will start to just train your subconscious mind to do the thing in the time that you have set.

And you’ll be way more productive. productive during that time so that you can rest and relax and use your free time in a way that fills your cup and allows you to live your life and spend time with your loved ones and do all the things that we’re meant to do as human beings. Cause we’re not meant to work every day, all day, which can easily happen if we don’t have boundaries set for ourselves.

[00:22:00] So thank you for coming to my Ted talk today. I wanted to share this because we’ve been talking about this in the product scaling intensive. And it’s just really important to me to have this open and honest conversation with you. That first of all, if you’ve been feeling like your business has been controlling you, you’re totally normal.

That is I think what happens to a lot of us and I wanted to just be open about the fact that it’s something that I’m continuously working on because I do like working and sometimes I like working a little too much and I have to remind myself to enjoy my life or my life’s going to pass me by. I need to have boundaries around my time.

So if this sounds like something you need a little support with, it is also something we’re working on inside the Product Scaling Intensive. We have, I don’t know, a, a four month roadmap that I put together for everyone inside the group. And. We have that broken down by different projects and how they’re going to be built out into your schedule and when you’re going to do it.

[00:23:00] And I’m checking in and saying, Hey, did you get that done? How’s that going? But sometimes you just need that accountability and to just train yourself to stay in this time constraint of when things can happen and also be realistic about how much can really happen in a certain time. And so because I’ve done so much work on this for myself, I really love helping other people with this because it truly is something that is a continual work in progress and is important to have somebody sometimes outside perspective saying, Thank you.

You said this one thing, but then you also said this other thing and they don’t really go together. So let’s talk about it. So if this sounds like something that’s interesting to you, I will put a link to the product scaling intensive wait list in the show notes. I’m not sure when it’s going to launch again, but when it does, I’d love for you to be on that and get first dibs because the spots will be limited again whenever it runs in the future.

Okay, so if you found this episode helpful, I would be so honored if you would share this episode with a friend in the product business that just could use this little reminder of the schedule and how to [00:24:00] build out a business that actually is supporting their lives. So share this with a friend, leave a review.

I’m so forever grateful for you