61. How to Create Time When You Have None
Picture yourself at 4 a.m., brain foggy, trying to squeeze in MBA coursework before a full day of corporate work. That was me in my early 30s, convinced I had no time. And somehow, even after graduating, that feeling never went away.
The truth is, we've been telling ourselves we don't have time long before kids entered the picture, and we keep finding evidence for that story every single day. In this episode, I'm sharing the exact planning system that transformed how I think about time. Whether you're juggling a corporate role, caring for little ones, or trying to build a business on the side, the real question isn't how to find more time. It's how to treat your own goals with the same priority you give to everything else you love.
Tune in this week to discover why that overwhelmed feeling isn't actually about time, plus 3 immediate mindset shifts that will change how you approach your week. I'll walk you through a simple 60-minute planning process that creates hours you didn't know existed, and show you how to start honoring your priorities like the CEO of your life that you already are.
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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why feeling like you have no time started long before motherhood and how we're wired to find evidence for this belief.
The CEO mindset shift that makes you treat your own priorities with the same importance as a meeting with your boss.
How 60 minutes of intentional weekly planning creates multiple hours of time and energy throughout your week.
Why scheduling everything eliminates decision fatigue and saves mental energy.
The power of asking "what would this look like if it were fun?" to transform draining tasks.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Okay, what if I told you that some of the most successful mom entrepreneurs that I know, myself included, felt exactly like you do right now? Overwhelmed, stretched thin, convinced there aren't enough hours in the day. What if I told you that the problem isn't that you don't have time? It's that you don't have systems to truly honor your priorities. Today, I'm talking about my simple system and a few easy mindset shifts that you can adopt that will have you feeling completely in control of your time.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.
Hi, mom friends. I'm on vacation this week in the Adirondacks. I remember being here a year ago and recording some of my very first episodes, and it fills me with so much joy that this podcast is still going and reaching moms who want change all over the world.
Like all things in life that aren't easy, it's been so worthwhile. And I hope that if you want tools to overcome life and business obstacles so that you can really give this business thing a go, that you'll subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss a beat. I release episodes each week on Wednesday with truly life-changing mindset shifts. Some that I've experienced personally and that my clients experience, and really simple tools for you to take meaningful action on your business goals.
And this episode is going to do just that because no matter where I'm at or what time of day it is, there's a common denominator with all of us moms, and it's the belief that we don't have enough time. If you've ever felt like there just aren't enough hours in the day to build a business, this episode is absolutely for you. I promise it will have you thinking about time completely differently and give you a simple shift that will allow you to create time for your business.
Here's what we're going to cover today that will help you create more time starting now, starting this week. We're going to talk about why the "I don't have time" feeling that we're all experiencing isn't really about time. We're also going to talk about the simple system that has helped myself, my clients, and everybody I teach it to find hours that they didn't know that they had. And trust me, it's not extra work. It's really a simple system that you're probably halfway already doing. We're also going to talk about three immediate shifts that you can make to start seeing time differently that will add hours into your week.
Because here's what I hear from every amazing mom in my community. I hear, "I just don't have time." And that feeling, I want you to know, is so valid. You do have a lot going on. And I want to show you how to work with your reality, not against it. Because yes, you have a lot going on. That feeling is valid, but that thought is not serving you.
Let me start with something that might surprise you. This feeling of not having enough time, it didn't start when we became moms. We felt like we had zero time even before kids came into the picture. I remember being in my early 30s, working full-time while pursuing my MBA. I felt so stretched that I would wake up at 4 a.m. for coursework because my brain was spent by the evening. And then I graduated that program. And you know what? I still felt like I didn't have enough time.
There's not a time in my life that I felt time was abundant. We are wired to believe we have no time, and we find evidence for that thought every single day. But here's what I want you to let sink in. You already have an incredible ability to create time when something is truly important. Think about it. Just like I created time for my coursework with my MBA, we also create time when our kids get sick. We somehow find time for doctor's visits that weren't in the calendar. When a family member really needs us, hours appear that we didn't even think existed.
So the real question isn't how do I find more time? It's how do I treat my own goals with the same priority I give to everything else I love? So here's your first immediate shift. And I said I was going to give you three. I want you to start thinking of yourself like the CEO of your life. If you're early on in your business idea or building your business, it's normal to not feel like a CEO. But that's not really what I'm talking about. You are the CEO of your life. You are likely also the CEO of your family. Start treating yourself like one.
When I was in corporate, the company I worked for was about 4,000 people, and I think I was employee 400 and something. So I actually did know the CEO pretty well. And when he scheduled a call on my calendar, or if he was in a meeting I was going to be in, there was no way in hell I was missing that meeting. If you've spent any time in corporate, I know you can relate to that. So adopt the mindset that you are the CEO and your time and your priorities are just as important.
Now, let's talk about the importance of having a system. I recently started working with a mom who's managing a corporate role, caring for a toddler, and growing a business on the side. After learning my planning approach, one that actually helps give you time back, right, for all the things, she said to me, "Once you see this, you can't unsee it." And what she meant by that was now that she has a system for managing her time, she can't go back to life the way it was before. Her mind was truly blown by how much time and energy she got back just by having a simple system in place. And this is a very organized mom as far as humans go.
There's an entire system I teach every client that goes through my program, but I'm going to simplify some of the elements here so that you can implement these shifts and start seeing changes in your own life and calendar right now. The first step, I've talked about this before, you got to have planning time set aside.
I know that feels like more work. I know you're thinking, how can I possibly find 60 to 90 minutes to plan out my week, right? I don't even have time to eat lunch or schedule a doctor's appointment or exercise. But I promise you, everything that I teach in my program, everything that I teach clients is for the sole purpose of giving you back time and energy.
So I promise if you set aside 60 minutes of intentional planning time, it will create so much additional time and energy as your week goes on.
So this 60 minutes at the beginning of your week is a way so that you can intentionally map out your upcoming week. Okay? Not just the corporate meetings that we're all used to planning. I mean everything, right? Work stuff, life stuff, meals, business stuff, fun stuff, all the things that make life.
You want to do this each week for your calendar, and if you have a partner in the mix, it's incredibly helpful to do a planning session with them for all the things that impact them. I do my own sacred planning session and then my husband and I sit down together and talk about things like meal planning, pick up and drop off, big upcoming decisions. It's the things that are simple but are really hard to make time for with your partner.
And for my client, scheduling and coordinating meals, workouts, and drop off and pick up with her husband, honestly, saved her so much time and energy throughout the week. Every week, she comes to session and she talks about how she's so in control of her time, how she's saving so much energy, not having to make those decisions or have those conversations ad hoc in the middle of the week.
We don't realize it, but so much of our time and energy goes to those little decisions, waking up and having that conversation or trying to track down our partner, or text conversations to figure out what's for dinner. Those are just really small examples of ways that you can cut down on the amount of time and energy spent on trivial things throughout the week. These things, they do seem trivial, but they make a huge difference in our energy once the week begins when we don't have to figure them out as we go along.
The second step of this is that you schedule everything. Everything that you have to do, make sure that it goes on your calendar. I want you to schedule your priorities first, right? So before you add anything else, I want you to block off time for what matters most to you. You know, working on your business, those personal goals that keep getting put on the back burner, even that workout or coffee date, right? Treat these like non-negotiable appointments. These are those meetings with the big, important CEO. To be clear, that's you. You're the CEO.
But it's not just about scheduling priorities. Of course, I want you to schedule everything. So that long to-do list, all those random tasks living in your head, I no longer want them to live on a to-do list or in your head. I want them to live on your calendar. So take that pesky to-do list that keeps growing and schedule when you're going to do those things on your calendar. Maybe even scheduling 30 minutes to do 10 tasks, depending on the tasks, right? If it doesn't get scheduled, it doesn't get done. And if it doesn't get done, it continues to live in our head and we continue to lose energy and waste energy because we're thinking about it. We continue to forget what we're doing and not be able to concentrate, and a task takes us twice as long.
So if it doesn't get scheduled, it doesn't get done. And that's also not because you don't care about whatever the thing is. It's just because life fills in the gaps.
So that's a basic system to implement. You just commit to 60 minutes of planning each week and it will save you hours. And then in that planning period, you're actually going to be critical about scheduling things in your calendar.
Now, of course, we go a little deeper in the program, and of course, there's troubleshooting and accountability, but just doing those two things, 60 minutes of pure planning and then actually scheduling the things on your calendar will absolutely be a game changer.
I also go into much more detail in episode 12, how to take control of your to-do list. But this process is so worth repeating because there absolutely is an optimal way to manage time so that you feel in control of your time, so that you are operating with confidence in your week, so that you get to the end of the week and don't feel exhausted. And all of that is ultimately not just about managing time, it's also about managing energy too, which I've mentioned a couple of times.
But that also leads me to a second immediate shift of the three that you can make. The better you manage your time and your mind, the more energy you will have. The client I talked about earlier who can't unsee the system that I taught her, she's amazed at how much additional energy she has because she's not constantly making decisions in the moment or wondering who's doing what with her daughter or what they need to rush to the grocery store to buy because they didn't plan out the meals and do grocery shopping earlier, right? Trust me, eliminating the decisions throughout the week will save you so much energy.
But also, it's worth thinking about what things give you energy in your week and trying to add that list of things to your calendar. So I work with a mom of four who gets so much energy when she's working with her clients, when she's in her what I call zone of genius, but she feels drained when she's working on her marketing plan with me. And the answer is not necessarily ignoring marketing. The answer is finding ways to make marketing fun.
So I want you to ask yourself, how can I bring more joy into the necessary but challenging parts of my goals or life? For her, it was leaning on Instagram and visual ways to represent her business and talking to people one-on-one, something that she loved. You know, if you hate social media, find other ways to market.
I love having my clients answer the question, what would this look like if it were fun? Or how can I make this fun? A great example, simple, cleaning dishes, doing laundry, obviously not fun at all. But when I'm listening to my favorite podcast or an audiobook, that task becomes so much more fun. I actually enjoy doing it. And sometimes it's about changing our thoughts about the tasks so that it gives us energy. Okay? If you hate marketing, let's figure out what you need to think to love marketing.
So here's the third shift that I promised. And it's a question that changed everything for me. Let's start thinking about time as a person. The question is, if time were a person in your life, how would you describe your relationship? Are you kind to each other? Do you feel supported? Most of us are pretty mean when it comes to time. We blame it, fight with it, never feel like there's enough of it.
But what if you started treating time like a good friend? Right? What if instead of saying, I don't have enough time, you started saying something like, I have enough time, I just need to get better at managing it?
The truth is we all get the same 24 hours. Some of us just have systems in place and mindsets in place that work better with our reality. So when you start treating yourself as the CEO and thinking about time as a friend in your life, something beautiful will absolutely shift. You start to honor your own time the same way you honor your children's needs. You create systems that bring calm instead of chaos. You operate from the belief that you do have time for what matters most, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In this new mode of thinking and operating, you will create sustainable rhythms for your goals and really start chipping away at that new business. You will start seeing progress, which will energize you. You also will have more energy at the end of the day and week, which means your presence with your family actually will increase because you're not carrying constant stress about endless task lists and these goals that you haven't made any progress on. You also will avoid burnout because you're working with intention rather than constantly feeling behind and being reactive.
All of that just comes from these three simple shifts of different ways you can think about time than you might be doing right now and implementing a very simple shift in your weekly schedule where you are actually planning out your week and scheduling things in your calendar.
So here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to take inventory of where your time goes. No judgments. Just come with curiosity. I want you to notice where your time is going, notice what energizes you, what drains you. When I start working with clients, I give them one of my favorite planner systems called a Passion Planner, and in it, each day has a calendar that shows, you know, a line for every 30 minutes. And if you have one of those, don't necessarily fill it out before the day, right, which is my advice later, but fill it out during or after the day with exactly what you did all day so you know exactly every 30-minute block where your time was going, how you were spending your time.
You'll be amazed at how much time you spend scrolling on social media, watching TV, or one of my least favorite time sucks that my husband recently brought to my attention, transition time. So the time in between tasks that we waste by getting into another task.
Beyond taking inventory to actually, you know, see where your time is going, I want you to set aside that 60 minutes of planning. Look at your upcoming week. Figure out what all needs to get done and schedule everything onto your calendar. I also want to challenge you to schedule one thing that you haven't made time for and honor that time like it's a meeting with the CEO.
A couple of questions that I really want you to ask yourself: If I treated my goals with the same care I treat my family's needs, what would that look like? And another question: if I truly believed I had time for my business goals, when would I choose to work on it?
Remember, you already have an incredible ability to create time for what's important. I know you are doing it every day for your family, out of necessity. But your dreams and goals deserve that same thoughtful attention. The opportunity isn't about finding more time. It's about creating systems and sticking to them so that they help you see and use the time that's already there. They also help you honor your own priorities and goals. Okay, that's what this is all about. That's what's likely not happening right now if you aren't making progress in your business. One of the elements.
And when it comes to time, I want you to know it's a big, messy topic. I give my clients tools and mindset shifts, and we're all still a work in progress. So give yourself grace. I know time deters a lot of moms from feeling like they can start their own business. And if that's you, I want you to know that for so many of my clients, when they start spending time on projects that light them up, they get more energy for all the other things that don't light them up.
I like to say that it's not adding another thing to our plate because when it's something that lights you up, it makes your plate bigger. Just like the planning. The 60 minutes of planning is not adding something else to your plate. That planning will actually double your plate, the size of your plate. It will give you back so much time.
These systems will free you of so much of the overwhelm and stress and guilt that comes with moving through the week and constantly expending energy and working on things and feeling like we're not making any progress.
I know you have a lot going on and you want to create real change in your life and career so that you can show up as the best version of yourself, so that you can tap into your zone of genius and bring real value to the world, and be able to show up for your little ones in a way that corporate and a nine-to-five just doesn't allow you right now.
Please, please, please honor your priorities. Adopt these systems, see how they change things for you. Let me know if you're still struggling, if you have questions. My email is jenna@jenna.coach. Reach out at any time. I know you have a lot going on and I am here to support you. I'll see you next week, mama.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.
Hi, mom friends. I'm on vacation this week in the Adirondacks. I remember being here a year ago and recording some of my very first episodes, and it fills me with so much joy that this podcast is still going and reaching moms who want change all over the world.
Like all things in life that aren't easy, it's been so worthwhile. And I hope that if you want tools to overcome life and business obstacles so that you can really give this business thing a go, that you'll subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss a beat. I release episodes each week on Wednesday with truly life-changing mindset shifts. Some that I've experienced personally and that my clients experience, and really simple tools for you to take meaningful action on your business goals.
And this episode is going to do just that because no matter where I'm at or what time of day it is, there's a common denominator with all of us moms, and it's the belief that we don't have enough time. If you've ever felt like there just aren't enough hours in the day to build a business, this episode is absolutely for you. I promise it will have you thinking about time completely differently and give you a simple shift that will allow you to create time for your business.
Here's what we're going to cover today that will help you create more time starting now, starting this week. We're going to talk about why the "I don't have time" feeling that we're all experiencing isn't really about time. We're also going to talk about the simple system that has helped myself, my clients, and everybody I teach it to find hours that they didn't know that they had. And trust me, it's not extra work. It's really a simple system that you're probably halfway already doing. We're also going to talk about three immediate shifts that you can make to start seeing time differently that will add hours into your week.
Because here's what I hear from every amazing mom in my community. I hear, "I just don't have time." And that feeling, I want you to know, is so valid. You do have a lot going on. And I want to show you how to work with your reality, not against it. Because yes, you have a lot going on. That feeling is valid, but that thought is not serving you.
Let me start with something that might surprise you. This feeling of not having enough time, it didn't start when we became moms. We felt like we had zero time even before kids came into the picture. I remember being in my early 30s, working full-time while pursuing my MBA. I felt so stretched that I would wake up at 4 a.m. for coursework because my brain was spent by the evening. And then I graduated that program. And you know what? I still felt like I didn't have enough time.
There's not a time in my life that I felt time was abundant. We are wired to believe we have no time, and we find evidence for that thought every single day. But here's what I want you to let sink in. You already have an incredible ability to create time when something is truly important. Think about it. Just like I created time for my coursework with my MBA, we also create time when our kids get sick. We somehow find time for doctor's visits that weren't in the calendar. When a family member really needs us, hours appear that we didn't even think existed.
So the real question isn't how do I find more time? It's how do I treat my own goals with the same priority I give to everything else I love? So here's your first immediate shift. And I said I was going to give you three. I want you to start thinking of yourself like the CEO of your life. If you're early on in your business idea or building your business, it's normal to not feel like a CEO. But that's not really what I'm talking about. You are the CEO of your life. You are likely also the CEO of your family. Start treating yourself like one.
When I was in corporate, the company I worked for was about 4,000 people, and I think I was employee 400 and something. So I actually did know the CEO pretty well. And when he scheduled a call on my calendar, or if he was in a meeting I was going to be in, there was no way in hell I was missing that meeting. If you've spent any time in corporate, I know you can relate to that. So adopt the mindset that you are the CEO and your time and your priorities are just as important.
Now, let's talk about the importance of having a system. I recently started working with a mom who's managing a corporate role, caring for a toddler, and growing a business on the side. After learning my planning approach, one that actually helps give you time back, right, for all the things, she said to me, "Once you see this, you can't unsee it." And what she meant by that was now that she has a system for managing her time, she can't go back to life the way it was before. Her mind was truly blown by how much time and energy she got back just by having a simple system in place. And this is a very organized mom as far as humans go.
There's an entire system I teach every client that goes through my program, but I'm going to simplify some of the elements here so that you can implement these shifts and start seeing changes in your own life and calendar right now. The first step, I've talked about this before, you got to have planning time set aside.
I know that feels like more work. I know you're thinking, how can I possibly find 60 to 90 minutes to plan out my week, right? I don't even have time to eat lunch or schedule a doctor's appointment or exercise. But I promise you, everything that I teach in my program, everything that I teach clients is for the sole purpose of giving you back time and energy.
So I promise if you set aside 60 minutes of intentional planning time, it will create so much additional time and energy as your week goes on.
So this 60 minutes at the beginning of your week is a way so that you can intentionally map out your upcoming week. Okay? Not just the corporate meetings that we're all used to planning. I mean everything, right? Work stuff, life stuff, meals, business stuff, fun stuff, all the things that make life.
You want to do this each week for your calendar, and if you have a partner in the mix, it's incredibly helpful to do a planning session with them for all the things that impact them. I do my own sacred planning session and then my husband and I sit down together and talk about things like meal planning, pick up and drop off, big upcoming decisions. It's the things that are simple but are really hard to make time for with your partner.
And for my client, scheduling and coordinating meals, workouts, and drop off and pick up with her husband, honestly, saved her so much time and energy throughout the week. Every week, she comes to session and she talks about how she's so in control of her time, how she's saving so much energy, not having to make those decisions or have those conversations ad hoc in the middle of the week.
We don't realize it, but so much of our time and energy goes to those little decisions, waking up and having that conversation or trying to track down our partner, or text conversations to figure out what's for dinner. Those are just really small examples of ways that you can cut down on the amount of time and energy spent on trivial things throughout the week. These things, they do seem trivial, but they make a huge difference in our energy once the week begins when we don't have to figure them out as we go along.
The second step of this is that you schedule everything. Everything that you have to do, make sure that it goes on your calendar. I want you to schedule your priorities first, right? So before you add anything else, I want you to block off time for what matters most to you. You know, working on your business, those personal goals that keep getting put on the back burner, even that workout or coffee date, right? Treat these like non-negotiable appointments. These are those meetings with the big, important CEO. To be clear, that's you. You're the CEO.
But it's not just about scheduling priorities. Of course, I want you to schedule everything. So that long to-do list, all those random tasks living in your head, I no longer want them to live on a to-do list or in your head. I want them to live on your calendar. So take that pesky to-do list that keeps growing and schedule when you're going to do those things on your calendar. Maybe even scheduling 30 minutes to do 10 tasks, depending on the tasks, right? If it doesn't get scheduled, it doesn't get done. And if it doesn't get done, it continues to live in our head and we continue to lose energy and waste energy because we're thinking about it. We continue to forget what we're doing and not be able to concentrate, and a task takes us twice as long.
So if it doesn't get scheduled, it doesn't get done. And that's also not because you don't care about whatever the thing is. It's just because life fills in the gaps.
So that's a basic system to implement. You just commit to 60 minutes of planning each week and it will save you hours. And then in that planning period, you're actually going to be critical about scheduling things in your calendar.
Now, of course, we go a little deeper in the program, and of course, there's troubleshooting and accountability, but just doing those two things, 60 minutes of pure planning and then actually scheduling the things on your calendar will absolutely be a game changer.
I also go into much more detail in episode 12, how to take control of your to-do list. But this process is so worth repeating because there absolutely is an optimal way to manage time so that you feel in control of your time, so that you are operating with confidence in your week, so that you get to the end of the week and don't feel exhausted. And all of that is ultimately not just about managing time, it's also about managing energy too, which I've mentioned a couple of times.
But that also leads me to a second immediate shift of the three that you can make. The better you manage your time and your mind, the more energy you will have. The client I talked about earlier who can't unsee the system that I taught her, she's amazed at how much additional energy she has because she's not constantly making decisions in the moment or wondering who's doing what with her daughter or what they need to rush to the grocery store to buy because they didn't plan out the meals and do grocery shopping earlier, right? Trust me, eliminating the decisions throughout the week will save you so much energy.
But also, it's worth thinking about what things give you energy in your week and trying to add that list of things to your calendar. So I work with a mom of four who gets so much energy when she's working with her clients, when she's in her what I call zone of genius, but she feels drained when she's working on her marketing plan with me. And the answer is not necessarily ignoring marketing. The answer is finding ways to make marketing fun.
So I want you to ask yourself, how can I bring more joy into the necessary but challenging parts of my goals or life? For her, it was leaning on Instagram and visual ways to represent her business and talking to people one-on-one, something that she loved. You know, if you hate social media, find other ways to market.
I love having my clients answer the question, what would this look like if it were fun? Or how can I make this fun? A great example, simple, cleaning dishes, doing laundry, obviously not fun at all. But when I'm listening to my favorite podcast or an audiobook, that task becomes so much more fun. I actually enjoy doing it. And sometimes it's about changing our thoughts about the tasks so that it gives us energy. Okay? If you hate marketing, let's figure out what you need to think to love marketing.
So here's the third shift that I promised. And it's a question that changed everything for me. Let's start thinking about time as a person. The question is, if time were a person in your life, how would you describe your relationship? Are you kind to each other? Do you feel supported? Most of us are pretty mean when it comes to time. We blame it, fight with it, never feel like there's enough of it.
But what if you started treating time like a good friend? Right? What if instead of saying, I don't have enough time, you started saying something like, I have enough time, I just need to get better at managing it?
The truth is we all get the same 24 hours. Some of us just have systems in place and mindsets in place that work better with our reality. So when you start treating yourself as the CEO and thinking about time as a friend in your life, something beautiful will absolutely shift. You start to honor your own time the same way you honor your children's needs. You create systems that bring calm instead of chaos. You operate from the belief that you do have time for what matters most, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In this new mode of thinking and operating, you will create sustainable rhythms for your goals and really start chipping away at that new business. You will start seeing progress, which will energize you. You also will have more energy at the end of the day and week, which means your presence with your family actually will increase because you're not carrying constant stress about endless task lists and these goals that you haven't made any progress on. You also will avoid burnout because you're working with intention rather than constantly feeling behind and being reactive.
All of that just comes from these three simple shifts of different ways you can think about time than you might be doing right now and implementing a very simple shift in your weekly schedule where you are actually planning out your week and scheduling things in your calendar.
So here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to take inventory of where your time goes. No judgments. Just come with curiosity. I want you to notice where your time is going, notice what energizes you, what drains you. When I start working with clients, I give them one of my favorite planner systems called a Passion Planner, and in it, each day has a calendar that shows, you know, a line for every 30 minutes. And if you have one of those, don't necessarily fill it out before the day, right, which is my advice later, but fill it out during or after the day with exactly what you did all day so you know exactly every 30-minute block where your time was going, how you were spending your time.
You'll be amazed at how much time you spend scrolling on social media, watching TV, or one of my least favorite time sucks that my husband recently brought to my attention, transition time. So the time in between tasks that we waste by getting into another task.
Beyond taking inventory to actually, you know, see where your time is going, I want you to set aside that 60 minutes of planning. Look at your upcoming week. Figure out what all needs to get done and schedule everything onto your calendar. I also want to challenge you to schedule one thing that you haven't made time for and honor that time like it's a meeting with the CEO.
A couple of questions that I really want you to ask yourself: If I treated my goals with the same care I treat my family's needs, what would that look like? And another question: if I truly believed I had time for my business goals, when would I choose to work on it?
Remember, you already have an incredible ability to create time for what's important. I know you are doing it every day for your family, out of necessity. But your dreams and goals deserve that same thoughtful attention. The opportunity isn't about finding more time. It's about creating systems and sticking to them so that they help you see and use the time that's already there. They also help you honor your own priorities and goals. Okay, that's what this is all about. That's what's likely not happening right now if you aren't making progress in your business. One of the elements.
And when it comes to time, I want you to know it's a big, messy topic. I give my clients tools and mindset shifts, and we're all still a work in progress. So give yourself grace. I know time deters a lot of moms from feeling like they can start their own business. And if that's you, I want you to know that for so many of my clients, when they start spending time on projects that light them up, they get more energy for all the other things that don't light them up.
I like to say that it's not adding another thing to our plate because when it's something that lights you up, it makes your plate bigger. Just like the planning. The 60 minutes of planning is not adding something else to your plate. That planning will actually double your plate, the size of your plate. It will give you back so much time.
These systems will free you of so much of the overwhelm and stress and guilt that comes with moving through the week and constantly expending energy and working on things and feeling like we're not making any progress.
I know you have a lot going on and you want to create real change in your life and career so that you can show up as the best version of yourself, so that you can tap into your zone of genius and bring real value to the world, and be able to show up for your little ones in a way that corporate and a nine-to-five just doesn't allow you right now.
Please, please, please honor your priorities. Adopt these systems, see how they change things for you. Let me know if you're still struggling, if you have questions. My email is jenna@jenna.coach. Reach out at any time. I know you have a lot going on and I am here to support you. I'll see you next week, mama.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
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