Productivity - Friend or Foe? 🤔

Hi friend 👋🏼,

Many of my friends ask me “do you ever sleep?” This isn’t just a humble brag, it is the truth from someone who over schedules, overcommits and says yes to basically everything. How do I do it all? I won’t lie it is a lot:

• 😫 Work a corporate usually more than 40 + hours a week job

• 🗺️ Travel to insane time zones for work and pleasure multiple times a month sometimes gone weeks at a time

• 🥰 Capital ‘P’ for professional volunteer:

  • I’m chair of two professional committees

  • I am on the BoD of my alma mater

  • I am on 4 leadership boards

• 👯🏻‍♀️I always make time in my schedule to spend time with family and friends

• ⏰If I want to go somewhere, see something or do something I make time.

Would an assistant probably make my life easier? Oh 1000%, but I am not in a place to have one yet (manifesting in action here). So what do I do? I get organized. One thing people ALWAYS say about me professionally or personally is how organized I am.

I want to make sure everyone knows, I know some of these things are not for everyone. I know that I am fortunate enough to have a well paying job, no dependent cost and live a different lifestyle. But hopefully something can help you out here.

Let’s start with how I do not go insane:

1. Schedule everything - google calendar is my spirit animal

📅 Have separate calendars for all of your frequent things, with their own individual colors. Some of mine are:

• Appointments

• Fun Things

• Travel (this color is my favorite since I see it so much)

• Global Glimpse

• MBA

• Birthdays

🎗️Set reminders for personal things: I set a reminder for birthdays 🎁 1 week prior along with the day of. This way I can get a gift in time, if that is necessary, or remember to send best wishes on the day of. 

2. Outsource things you don’t want to do and/or don’t have time to do. Things I outsource?

🍲 Meal prep - I am 100% honest about this. I do not cook. I do not enjoy it, I am not good at it. If I don’t want to starve I use meal prep services. Locally, in Cleveland, I am a big fan of Unrefined a female owned meal prep service. For things to have in the freezer that are great I love Daily Harvest.

🧹 Cleaning Service - Hear me out, cleaning a house let alone a 1-bedroom apartment is a lot. If you are OCD like me you want things to be super clean all the time, it is time consuming. So to gain 3-4 hours back a week I hire a service to clean my apartment. Bougie? Probably. But I work extremely hard so that I can choose to do these things.

3. Document, templatize and automate everything

Bills - 💰I automate everything to come out on the dates that work for me in my pay schedule

Yearly doctors appointments - 💉I have a running google doc with all the doctors I need to see yearly and the months I have to see them in. I then put a reminder in my calendar to schedule them 30 days out.

Goals - ✔️For Femme Force, for my MBA, for my job, for financial goals. I keep all of these things written out monthly in a google drive folder. This way it keeps me accountable and I can see my progress if I check off a goal.

Travel Documents - 🌎 Travel is my everything. If I have spare time, or am in a “creative” zone, for me, I create trip documents. That is basically me planning out an entire trip to a country from cities I want to visit, to the hotels I would stay at, museums to visit, where to eat and put it all in a document. Then one day when I am able to go I simply can input the dates and my trip is done.

Christmas card addresses - 🎅🏼 I update these every October (and you should know by now, I have a reminder in my calendar to do so). This keeps things up to date for my whole year and then I don’t have to constantly ask “what is your address”. I also make sure the addresses are in my phone contacts profile.

Repeating Tasks 

💑🏻 Dating apps - yes I have a daily reminder to check dating apps. Because with everything going on it gets put off and 5 days go by and I forget to respond to someone. Trying to maybe not be single for the rest of my life here.

📱Content batching - now that I am basically an influencer, I have a task set every Sunday to spend an hour content batching and scheduling my posts for Instagram and Linkedin. This make it so much easier during the week so I do not have to worry about it.

File and Scan

• 🗃️ I use dropbox for all of my documents. I file things during the year and then at the end of the year scan everything and place them into dropbox folders. This is great for tax purposes or incase you ever need to actually find that employment contract from 2015.

• 📷 I use google photos for all my photos. I put all my photos into google photos by the place and then into year folders. I have also started a long term (years project) of taking all the hard copy photos my parents have of my childhood and even the black and white ones from my grandparents childhood and scanning them so we will always have copies.

The thing about documenting, making lists and automating things is, once it is done you don’t have to do it again 💆🏼‍♀️. You are basically your own assistant making sure your life runs smoothly. This all might seem insane to some people. But this is how I do it all and not leave anything out. 

The biggest take away I learned from doing all this is that time, it is the great equalizer. I have the same amount of time in my day as Warren Buffet. And he can’t buy more hours or change the calendar. So it is how you maximize your time at  any stage of your life so that you can not only achieve more, but enjoy more.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series in 2 weeks!

Things I am loving right now:

As we embark on this journey together, I invite you to connect with us on Instagram @femmeforce_co to stay updated with our daily doses of inspiration and Femme Force updates.

P.S. If you ever have questions, suggestions, or just want to chat, please feel free to reply to this email 📧 I'd love to hear from you!