Would you like to know what’s the most important thing my business coach has taught me?
Around different stages of my business, I’ve been working with different amazing coaches. Recently, I’ve started working with Jess and Margi who are the co-owners of Interview Connections. Interview Connections is an agency that I’ve been working with where I’ve been fortunate enough to be one of the people that they coach.
The first thing that they asked me before we even started our coaching sessions was to share my Google Calendar with them so that they can see how my days were planned. I was initially wondering why they are so curious to know what’s in my calendar. But then, after I shared it with them, I realized all the mistakes that I have been making with how I was managing my time.
My calendar will have my usual important meetings and appointments scheduled but other than those, the rest of my calendar was empty. That was how my calendar was a few months ago. I’m sure some of you can relate to me.
And when my business coaches asked me what I do in these time slots between two meetings, I did not have an answer. I simply told them that I typically check emails and do all the urgent tasks on my plate for that day. I realized then that there was a disconnect between my big annual goals versus my monthly goals, as well as with my weekly tasks, and with everything that happens during my daily reality!
I was not as productive as I wanted to be because my days were filled with all the urgent tasks that others were giving me! In fact, I was busier making others’ priorities my life, and I was not giving importance to what I considered as my goals for the month and the year.
Now, unless these massive yearly goals are broken down into monthly targets, weekly focus, and daily tasks, your goals may never be achieved. It will just be a continuous mishmash between what you want to achieve at the end of the day versus what you do on a daily basis.
More importantly, it’s not enough if you just decide what you want to do today. You need to add your daily plans to your calendar. What gets scheduled gets done, what doesn’t get scheduled does not get done, obviously. Something will always come up and the To-Do List you’ve written down in your diary will just remain in your diary. At the end of the day or the end of the week, you will only feel unfulfilled because you weren’t able to put a tick next to that item in your Goals list. If you want to achieve that, you need to pick even the tiniest of tasks and add them to your calendar.
You know typically how long a particular task would take. Some would take you 30 minutes, some would take you 60 minutes, some would take you just 5 minutes, but whatever it is, try to schedule it either on the previous day or at least before you get your work started at the beginning of the day.
Once I’ve learned the importance of following a schedule from my business coaches, I started to calendarize everything in my life into my Google Calendar. Soon after, I could see the massive progress I was making in my business and also in all the other areas of my life.
I was so satisfied about what I learned from my coaches that I decided to apply what I’ve learned with what we do for our clients at Happy Self-Publishing.
When people work with our book coaches, the first thing our book coach would do is to check their calendar. Believe it or not, 99% of the time, our clients would not have book writing scheduled on their calendars! Now, we know this is not going to take you anywhere! If your writing doesn’t get scheduled on your calendar, that particular time that you have in mind to write your book will be given away to some other urgent task, which most probably is somebody else’s priority. You need to look at your current calendar and decide how you are going to carve out time for your book project.
Let me give you a couple of ways to do this. Some people like regularity. They like to work on their project every single day at a given time. If that sounds like you, please pick at least one hour every day, either early in the morning, or the middle of the day, or late at night, whichever works for you. So long as it is a distraction-free zone and you can focus on your writing. Decide the time and put it inside your Google Calendar and let the schedule repeat for at least the next 30 to 60 days.
Or the other way of approaching this is, giving a bigger chunk of time for your writing project. You may not want to write every day. That’s okay, too! So what you want to do is, maybe, write every 2 days a week or 3 days a week, but you want to give a bigger chunk of time such as 3 hours or 6 hours for each time you write. Within that time slot, you will obviously take those short breaks, but you will not take up anything else during that day. That’s how your writing day is going to look if you prefer to write during a certain day and for a certain amount of hours. And during your writing days, you’re not going to have any other team meetings and you’re not going to attend to any other priorities. That day is dedicated only to your book project.
There are many great ways to get a lot of things done within a short period, but none of these strategies will work unless you put it on your calendar. So go ahead, open your Google Calendar, and fix your schedule!
Let your priorities reflect on your calendar. And once you do this, you will start doing the same for all areas of your life. You will have a specific time for workout, you will have a specific time for spending with your family, and you will not just have this as a wish. You will do it because your calendar says so!
So there you have it! I hope you found this very useful. If you have any other strategies to be more productive as an author, feel free to share them in the comments or if you have any other questions I would love to answer all of them.
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And do not forget to join us in my next live Author Success Bootcamp happening in our private Facebook Group. Go ahead and give a request to www.happyselfpublishing.com/tribe! It will take you to our Facebook Group, where you can join and attend the boot camp for free.
Until the next!
Happy Authoring!
