279: Designing Your Days to Be More Productive

Extraordinary is a choice. Take that in, soak it up because the hustle grind repeat mantra that society has been touting for decades. It add it all wrong. I’m Tanya Dalton. I’m a seven figure entrepreneur, best selling author, speaker, mom and rule breaker. I’m here to help you live to your fullest potential. That’s what this podcast is all about. The Intentional Advantage is doing live on our own terms define the status quo, and seeing ourselves outside of the tiny definitions society’s made for us. It’s intentionally choosing to step back away from the chaotic rush of your everydays. And choosing, choosing to see that it’s your world. And it’s filled with opportunities. Let’s challenge the bedrock beliefs that so many have wholeheartedly trusted, because we were told they were truths, let’s have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Let’s choose to be extraordinary.

Hello, hello, everyone. And welcome to the Intentional Advantage podcast. I’m your host, Tanya Dalton. This is episode 279. We’re having an incredible season talking about purposeful productivity. And today show we are just going to be taking it to the next level, because we are going to be talking about how to design your days to be more productive. Now let’s take a step back. Because if you haven’t been listening to the season, you’re like, Well hold on, I feel like I’m trying to be productive, and I’m wearing myself out. So throughout the season, we’ve talked a lot about this idea of those old productivity models, those are dead, we don’t want to talk about getting things done, we don’t want to talk about knocking things out, we want to want to talk about checking things off your list, or hustle, hustle, hustle. Being productive, isn’t about doing more, it’s doing what’s most important. And if we design our days to be more productive, meaning we’re designing our days, we’re doing more of what is important to us. That is when we have fulfillment, that’s when we find so much more meaning in our days, in our jobs in our in our businesses in our personal life. And that’s really the whole heart of what we talk about when we talk about purposeful productivity. So today, what I want to talk about is how do we customize your productivity system to really fit you, because I can’t just say to you, you need to do these three things every morning, and then you’re productive. Because the three things that I think make you productive might be different than the three things you really want, or might be different than the three things your best friend wants, or your mother in law wants or anyone else in this world, we want to create a system for you, that feels customized that fits your desires, your wants, what you feel is important. We want it to play to your strengths. And we want it to play to your weaknesses, we all have both. So we can’t pretend like we don’t I certainly have plenty of weaknesses. And if I’m not playing to my weaknesses, I’m fighting like a salmon swimming upstream. No wonder it’s exhausting. If you’re not willing to admit that you got things that you don’t do quite as well, when we create a productivity system that really fits you. That’s when life feels easier. That’s when life feels amazing. Because you do slip into bed at night and think, Ah, I did incredible things today. And that’s really at the heart of why I do what I do when I’m speaking on stage or talking with you here on this podcast or writing my books. I want you to feel amazing with what you do each and every day. So let’s talk about productivity systems. I think first of all, one of the things when I talk about productivity systems, people always say to me, ah, you know, I tried a productivity system, it didn’t work for me. And I’m like, yeah, no joke, because somebody gave you some like plug and play template. And we’re like, okay, here you go make that work. And you’re bending and twisting and contorting yourself to try to fit someone else’s system, we don’t want that I’m not going to here to give you a list of you have to do these five things every day, in order to check the box of doing enough. I want you to really do the things that you desire, I want you to feel that fulfillment that happens. And that happens when we create a productivity system for ourselves. And I’m going to give you that framework. So you can do it. And it’s super, super easy. Now I know I know that saying productivity system, it sounds complex. Sounds complicated, because it’s got that word system in there. But I promise you it’s not. It’s simply making a combination of the right productivity tactics. And you know, when I use that word right there, the right productivity tactics, what’s right for you, what fits you anytime that we talk about what’s right for you. It’s really about customizing things. So that fits you. But what we want is we want to create that structure for ourselves. And I think that’s one of the things that a lot of times people push against or fight against. They’re like, Oh, I tried it. It’s so stifling. It is stifling it productivity systems are absolutely stifling. If you’re following somebody else’s rules, I don’t want you to follow anybody else’s rules, I want you to create your own rules. When we do that, we create this beautiful scaffolding to our days to our weeks, that feels amazing, because we’re actually doing the work that matters, in our jobs, in our personal lives. On ourselves doing the work that really matters in our lives as a whole. I like to equate it to your skeleton, your skeleton is incredible, because that’s what holds your body up. If we didn’t have a skeleton, we couldn’t run, Skip, hop, jump, do the things that we want to do. Right, we wouldn’t be able to do the things that really we want to go out and do if we didn’t have that skeleton. That’s what a productivity system does. It creates that skeleton for you. Now your skeleton is strong, but it’s also flexible. Every time you hit your arm, you don’t break it, right, if you fall down, you don’t break your leg every single time. Same thing with our productivity systems, we want them to be flexible. We want to give you the grace so that you know life can actually happen because life can be messy at times. That’s when we want that flexibility built in. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. You know, last episode, we talked about this idea of how we get off track that we have these ideas of like I’m gonna get all these things done. And then somehow, we ended up falling into this trap of chasing down the minutia, the trivial many. In the last episode, we talked about Parkinson’s laws, little sister, the law of triviality, which talks about this idea that we’re oftentimes chasing down all the minutia, all the trivial things. And that happens, because we don’t have the structure. We don’t have the skeleton there. We don’t have that, that beautiful scaffolding to say, Oh, these are the things I’m working on. But I think the mistake a lot of people make is they say, Well, I’m just not focused. And it’s really easy to blame it on a weakness of ourselves right in ourselves. Because somehow too, if we don’t have focus, there’s something wrong with us. So first thing I want to do is let’s do away with the fact that if you have ever said to yourself, I just don’t have the focus, or I don’t have the ability to focus, I want you to do away with that. Because that’s a limiting belief. And I don’t think it’s true, not for the majority of people out there. I want you to think about it this way. I want you to think about when you go to the movies, or if you’re watching a movie, let’s talk about watching a movie on your couch. When you watch a movie on your couch, sometimes you have to get up in the middle of the movie and go to the bathroom, right? It happens. So you get it from the movie, you go to the bathroom? Do you have to come back and say to yourself, Okay, I gotta get back focused in I got to get back into this world. These are who the characters are this is this is what’s happening? Or do you just come back? And you’re like, oh, pick it right back up, where you left off? Are you able to lose yourself in a movie, a two hour movie that sometimes feels like, wow, that was really quick, even though it was two hours. If you have the ability to watch a movie, to cry at a movie, because you’re so immersed in the experience, you have the ability to focus, probably haven’t thought about it that way before, have you. Because a lot of times we think of focus as being sitting in front of our computer, getting things done, knocking things out, checking things off our list. And that’s not what focus is at all. Focus is just an ability, an ability to immerse yourself. And that’s what I want you to first of all do away with, you don’t have a lack of focus, don’t blame it on a lack of focus. Don’t, don’t blame it on a lack of willpower. Willpower is vastly, vastly overrated. It’s really about setting ourselves up so that we can do the work that matters. And that’s what a good productivity system does, is it allows us to get in that immersive state. It allows us to do the work that matters, it allows us to find that meaning that we’re looking for, and we fall trap, or we fall prey rather not we fall trap, we fall prey to that trap, that we have to do more. And that’s why we feel like we’re not focused, you know, something that we definitely talked about in the last episode as well, that idea of clutter in our lives. You know, clutter that we’re tripping over in our in our homes is the same thing as the clutter on our to do list. It’s the same thing with telling ourselves that we haven’t done enough. Every time we’re filling our calendar with things that don’t really matter. Work that is not truly important. That is clutter, and it’s no surprise you’re in a bad mood. Anything in excess is clutter, and that includes your calendar. Clutter puts me in a terrible mood.

And we all do this from time to time we have this tendency to overfill our plates. In our modern world, we feel like we constantly have to keep our day filled with work, that if we are not working, we’re not earning our value. We’re not We’re not living up to our potential, or whatever it is, you know, it’s really been interesting because I’ve been kind of doing this exploration on my own, just kind of deep diving into my own pacing of how I work and how I how I run through life, which has been at a much more hectic pace than I really want to operate. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the seasons of the year, you know, we have winter, followed by spring, and then summer and then fall. And I want you to think about this time of year when this episode goes live, we’re in winter, or pretty close to winter, it’s December. So I want you to think about how we all follow cycles. We are we are animals, we’re humans, we follow cycles, just like nature follows cycles, right? There’s cycles of the sun, there’s cycles of the moon, there’s cycles of the tides, there’s cycles of the seasons of the year. And we have those cycles, too. We’ve talked about ultradian rhythm before, but let’s look on a bigger, broader scale. Think about how the seasons work. Winter happens. And you know, previously, the leaves have fallen off the trees in the fall. And in winter, the world goes inside the trees, the plants, they go inside, and they they take the time to rest and regenerate so that when spring happens, they’re ready to but they’re ready to bloom and they’re ready for summer. And if we think about how for well, for millennia, for 1000s of 1000s of years, we as human race in the winter, we have done the same we have absolutely done the same. I want you to think about what do you think winter was like for Laura Ingalls, Laura Ingalls Wilder, right. In the winter, there was no electricity. There was no TV to watch late at night, there was no no lights to keep us up late at night. It got dark early. So people went to bed early, and they rested and they regenerated. And yes, there was still work to be done. I mean, let’s go back to talking about Laura Ingalls. Right, like there was still the cow’s milk and there was still, you know, had to get food on the table and those kinds of things and mending, but there was a lot of like, resting a lot of quiet work. And we would go and we would rest. And we’ve lost that. In our modern world, we no longer give ourselves a season of rest of going inside and just allowing our bodies allowing our brains allowing ourselves our souls to regenerate, to rest up and prepare for the spring and the summer and the fall. I think it’s fascinating. When you think about we are fighting nature, we are fighting our natural inclinations, the the way that our brain has been programmed for 1000s and 1000s, while 10s of 1000s of years, we’re pushing up against it because of our modern conveniences. We’re staying up way too late at night. We’re pushing ourselves to work long hours. I mean, in the winter, Pa Ingalls wasn’t, wasn’t out there doing any farming, he was doing other things because there was nothing to farm. They they did all the farming in the fall, and then they rested up the work stopped. And I’m not saying that our work has to completely stop. But maybe work needs to slow down a little bit. Maybe we need to pay more attention to our natural rhythms. I think that would be incredibly powerful. I had a really interesting conversation. I have one of my clients, who’s doing a strategic quarter with me. So we did a strategic planning session. And we’ve been working together for the past couple of months. Her name is Jessica Bryant, and she’s a pediatric sleep strategist. We’ve done incredible things together. And I feel like with talking with her, I’ve learned so much too about sleep. So you know, she and I were having this conversation about the way that we look at sleep is all wrong. We look at sleep as laziness, we look at rest as something that is slothful, or it’s like, oh, idle hands, right? There’s all this ideation, of, you know, if we’re not constantly moving and keeping ourselves busy, we’re not really earning our keep. And rest is so important. Jessica, she actually one of the things that we did together as I helped her launch her podcast, it’s a fabulous podcast, I’ll put a link to it in my show notes. It’s called Good Mornings. It’s with Jessica Bryant. But one of the things that she talks about is good sleep is such a strong foundation for strong children. And that’s why she focuses on kids. It creates these fulfilled families because they’re getting the sleep they need. And when your child starts to understand how to sleep, they’re able to conquer the world. They’re able to go out and move forward in the world and do incredible things. That’s powerful work. So isn’t that true for us? I want you to think about a time when you haven’t had enough sleep Are you really the best version of you the next day? No, I can tell you, I can tell you right now you’re not. You’re not the best wife, mother, friend, cousin, aunt, neighbor, we’re snappish we’re tired, we’re exhausted. It’s no surprise that we’ve lost some of that kindness in our world, some of that toleration that we need more of, in today’s world, we’re losing it because we are so damn tired. Because we’re not really creating systems that work for us that work for our bodies, we don’t feel like we do enough. And so we push and push and push, we keep the electricity on late at night, staying up far too late, getting up far too early, doing things that don’t really fulfill us, because we think that we have to. And that’s what I want us to shift. That’s why I want to talk about creating a productivity system, really doing less so that we can feel like we’ve achieved more, we have this idea that more is better. If I do more, if I get more things done, if I do more things, somehow that is better. And then we end up filling our day with mediocrity. And here’s the truth. mediocrity is stealing your joy. All those things that don’t really matter, all that clutter, all of that just extra, that doesn’t really contribute to who you are and what you desire. That is stealing your happiness. It’s making you crabby and irritable, it’s making you tired. Let’s stop looking at rest as a bad thing. Let’s stop looking at doing fewer things as being a bad thing. Because if those fewer things are bigger in the sense that they matter more, you’re actually making giant leaps forward, instead of chasing your tail, going crazy driving yourself in circles because we’re chasing down all the little things I want you to think about that mediocrity is stealing your joy? Do you have a lot of mediocrity on your list right now things that you think you’re supposed to do or have to do or should do all red flag words, you know, if you’ve listened to this podcast, for any stretch of time, should have to need to those are generally red flag words that we need to stop and ask ourselves, why are these on our list? Why is this here. So I want you to be thinking about that as we move into the second half of the show, where we’re going to talk about how to create this productivity system, because I want it to feel really customized for you. So let’s go ahead and dive into that right now. Because I want to give you a framework, a skeleton, we could say, I want to give you a framework, so that you can create a system. And it’s really, really easy. I’m gonna go through it pretty quickly here. But I can tell you, if you have The Joy of Missing Out my first book, I go much more in depth with it in chapter nine. If you don’t have The Joy of Missing Out, what are you doing, go and get it.

Joy missing out is available anywhere books are sold. Chapter Nine is about creating systems. And this is just one of the systems that we talked about in that chapter. So in The Joy of Missing Out in chapter nine, we talk about the five P’s, this is what’s going to create that beautiful scaffolding so that you can create your system. Let me tell you the five P’s and then we’ll dive into each one. All right, purge process, prioritize, protect, and propel. Alright, those are our five P’s. So let’s let’s dive into each one of those. Because when we have the five P’s, we’re really able to customize our days, we’re able to design our time, so it feels more meaningful. So it feels like we have extra time, quite frankly, Alright, first P is perch, we want to get the list out of our head, if you’re a person who’s just like, oh, I have all these things I need to do and they’re floating around in my head that is not serving you. Treating your head like a giant filing cabinet is just wearing you out and eating up precious brain space. We’ve talked in the past about how your brain has a limited number of calories is burning needless calories. So we want to purge we want to we want to get the ideas of what we want to accomplish out onto a piece of paper. I think it’s really important to really frame out what we want to accomplish for the week. So for me, I like to do my purge on Sunday for home and Monday for work. I very intentionally have those boundaries where they are separate on Sundays. I do it as a team. And I actually have a video that I’ll link to in the show notes. But I do this with my family because I want to get them where they are creating these habits for themselves where they know how to be productive for my kids, right? So on Sunday nights, I sit down I look at the master calendar, and then I plug in the appointments and the events that affect us as a family and I pop them into I actually use the weekly kickstart which is available from Inkwell Press. I’ll put a link to that also. But I put that into our weekly kickstart and then we meet together, my team, my kids, my husband and I and we talk about what we have going on what projects do you have what what tasks do you have going on? What’s what’s going on with your activities after school? What’s what’s going on with your projects at school? And we start to really map that out. I want my kids to have that ability to map out their days, right? So, so we do that. On Sundays. We post that in our family HQ, so everyone can access it. Everyone knows what’s going on. Everyone knows what’s going on with everybody else. So we’re able to support each other. Again, I have a video on this that I’ll link to in the show notes. But I also go more in depth with this in Jomo. So that’s the Purge is getting it out of your head. So I do that on Sundays for my family. That’s my team planning. And then on Mondays, I do it for work. So I do the same thing, separate sheet where I get all the things out, this is what I want to accomplish for this week. Which brings me to my second P, which is process first P was purge. second P is process, instead of during that time, where we’re purging or thinking about what we want to accomplish for the week, instead of saying, Okay, I’m gonna do this on Monday, this on Tuesday, that on Wednesday, right and mapping out the whole week, that oftentimes is why we feel like failures, because maybe Monday is super productive. Maybe you wake up and things are incredible. And you get the things done that you want to get done, and it feels incredible. But Tuesday you wake up with allergies, or you have a sick kid that crawls in your bed at three o’clock in the morning, or 1000 things can happen. But you wake up, and you’re like, oh, today, it’s just not as good. You don’t get as much accomplished on Tuesday. Well, what happens on Wednesday, you wake up on Wednesday, you’ve already mapped out all Wednesday’s activities, and you have to make up Tuesday’s activities. That’s, oh my gosh, you’re already behind the eight ball. No wonder you’re feeling overwhelmed before you even get out of bed. And then that just snowballs as we get into Thursday and Friday. So instead of really mapping that out, when you do the purge, I want you to process each day, treat every day as a gift every day is a new opportunity. It’s a fresh slate ahead of you start by thinking about how do I feel today? What do I think I can accomplish? And then I want you to start with the end in mind. I knew we’d be coming back to that right? We touched on this idea back in episode 275 When we talked about prioritizing, but how do you want to feel at the end of the day, I think about what emotion do I want to experience at the end of the day? Maybe I have a keynote coming up later that week. So I want to feel prepared. Or maybe you know, one of the kids has an activity after school. So I want to feel really present at the end of the day. How do I want to feel at the end of the day. And I start there because that gets me to my third P which is prioritize. So we’ve done purge process. Now we’re at prioritize, which honestly go back and listen to episode 275. Because I go really in depth with prioritizing. But I want you to prioritize stop making the to do list because the to do list is taking you everywhere, but where you want to go and instead make a priority list. So I prioritize, okay, if this is how I want to feel at the end of the day, this is what I figured out during my processing time. And that, by the way, this time that I take to map out what I want to accomplish for the day takes me no more than five minutes at the very most 10 At the very most. And it’s such an investment in my mental health and my emotional health. It makes me feel so good. Because I process each day treated as a blank slate. And then I prioritize based off of how I want to feel at the end of the day. What are the big priorities for today? What are the big things I need to accomplish? So I create my priority list. And that gets me to my fourth p, which is protect. And this pee is kind of like best friends with the last P they’re all friends, to be honest. But we want to protect what our priorities are. Doesn’t that make sense, we want to protect it. And the best way to protect those tasks is by filling your calendar first, our time is precious, it is true. So we don’t want others to steal away your time by jamming their way into your calendar or wasting your time with unproductive things. So you protect your calendar by filling it up, going ahead and blocking out your day and saying okay, from nine o’clock to 10 o’clock, I’m gonna do these things. And then from 10 to 1030, hey, I’m gonna take a break. And then from 1030 to 1115. I’m going to work on this priority. And then I’m going to do a meeting here, right. So really protect your day. One of the ways I protect my day is I very, very, very rarely have meetings in the morning. I don’t because the morning time for me, needs to be protected. That is, for me my most productive time. I love working in the morning. And I focus in on my priorities in the morning. And if I’m allowing others to come in have meetings, which a lot of times are not super productive. You and I can probably agree on that. That I’m losing the time to really focus on my priorities. And then what happens is, oh, I just didn’t have time to work on that. So make sure you’re protect doing what needs protecting, which is your priorities, let’s go ahead block in your day, what you want to accomplish. And I even talk about in that chapter of The Joy of Missing Out how I batch some of my tasks so that they work together. Because there are a lot of other little things that have to happen like checking email batching, that is, oh my gosh, when I learned how to do that, that was life changing. Honestly, it really was. So you want to protect your calendar. So we’ve done purge, we’ve done process, prioritize, we want to protect it, the last P is to propel. And I think this P is so important, it’s an end of the day activity that really gets you that velocity that gives you that momentum to push you forward. You’ve probably heard me say it before, but one of my favorite mantras or ways of living really follows Ernest Hemingway’s model of leaving water in the well. Ernest Hemingway would never leave his writing, without leaving himself notes without giving himself some threads to pick up on. So that when he came back the following day, he was up and running with his writing. And I think that’s incredibly important to do for ourselves as well. So I have a quick little five minute activity that I do each day, that helps propel me into tomorrow. So not only does it close out my day, and it creates this beautiful ritual that I just enjoy. And I love because it highlights the big things in my day. And it gets me in a great mindset. For tomorrow, it allows me to close the door from work, and really step into my home life and give myself 100% into my personal life, which I think is so important. My friends, my family, they they deserve the 100% version of me, yours do too. So I do this five minute activity, and it propels me into the next day. Now, I don’t want to go too deep into the five minute activity, because to be honest with you, I have the best way for you to actually start implementing this, I actually have a challenge that takes five minutes a day, it’s a five day challenge, where we go through the five steps, it’s the five minutes to peak productivity model that I have used for years. And honestly, it’s responsible for doubling my productivity for helping me feel so much more empowered and excited about my days, and being prepared for the following day. So I have that in it’s a free challenge. You just go to Tanya dalton.com/take Five, and you can sign up for that it’s free. And it literally takes you five minutes a day. It’s a video for that’s just a couple of minutes long, and it gives you the activity for the day. And we build on it to create an amazing habit that will help you be more productive. So you can get to there from my homepage TanyaDalton.com, the take five challenges right there on the homepage, or you can go to Tanya dalton.com/take Five, that is the best way to truly start this whole process of creating a productivity system for yourself. The five P’s are really powerful purge process, prioritize, protect, and propel. So let’s get you going. Let’s give you a little bit of forward momentum. By doing that take five challenge, because once you get that going, it’s so much easier to take the next step, I think we we forget how just a little bit of momentum can make a world of difference. I want you to start to establish a really incredible habit that nurtures who you are and what you want, which is actually what we’re going to be talking about too. In our next episode, we’re going to be diving into habits and routines and rituals and really getting into how we can create these beautiful moments for ourselves that are simply habits. So it takes a lot of the thinking out of it. So that’s what we’ll be talking about. In our next episode. For today, though, I want you to get started with the five piece because I want you to create a system that really works for you. Go ahead, sign up for that take five challenge five minutes a day for five days, and you’ll be off and running. And that’ll get you started with those five P’s. To join that challenge. Just go to Tanya dalton.com/take Five, or just go to my homepage TanyaDalton.com. It’s available for you to sign up there. And again, it’s free, it’s super easy, and it’s designed to take a very minimal time to really help you feel so much better about your days. And if you’d like to go more in depth, the five Ps pick up your copy of Joy Of Missing Out chapter nine is a great place to dive back into it. And of course you know The Joy of Missing Out has that reader’s guide that goes with it that helps you dive into that even more and start applying it. Here’s what I want you to walk away from today’s episode knowing you have focus, it’s not focused that you need it’s not the lack of willpower that’s holding you back. It’s simply creating a system that truly fits you what you desire and what you want. And I’m hoping that today’s show has given you that foundation to get started with that and that’s why I wanted to do the take five challenge and I think it’s so important for us to live a life that feels meaningful. And that happens when we do work that matters when we focus in on what is truly important when we create that scaffolding for ourselves, and we create a system that is truly designed to benefit us to help us live our best life. That’s when we know we’ve got the Intentional Advantage. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Quick question, though, before you go, do you like prizes? When you leave a rating and review of the Intentional Advantage podcast, you’ll be entered to win my life changing course multiplying your time, simply leave the review, and then send me an email at Hello at TanyaDalton.com with a screenshot, I choose one winner at the end of every month. So go ahead do it right now, just a quick comment with what you loved about this episode or the show in general and a rating and send it our way not gonna lie by stars is my favorite. But I’d love to hear what you think of the show. And if that’s not enough of an incentive for you to win the multiplying your time course, I have to tell you reviews are the number one thing that supports this podcast and me, it’s the best way to spread the word and get business tips and strategies to all those other women out there who need it. So there you go. Two great reasons for you to go and leave a review right now. So go ahead and do it. Send that screenshot my way because I want to give you a free course. And thanks again for listening today. I’ll be back next Tuesday, and I’ll plan to see them

**This transcript is created by AI, so please excuse any typos, misspellings and grammar mistakes.

Tanya Dalton is a top woman motivational speaker whose keynotes on productivity resonate with female audiences with topics like balance, goal setting, prioritizing and time management.