7 questions to help you start leveraging your time, energy and happiness
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It all started with a post I shared on Instagram.
I created the post because I’d had enough. Not quite at the shutting it down and burning it all to the ground level, but done.
Done with a business that had me living days that didn’t feel at all aligned with the reason I started out in the first place. Done with making myself miserable over implementing the strategy, the plan, or following the latest 7 steps to business nirvana that would appear on my feed.
I’d created a business that looked absolutely nothing like what I wanted.
This realisation was prompted after I went through a huge life event. If you’ve been reading or listening to the podcast for a while, you’ll know I recently lost my beautiful Mum to aggressive metastatic breast cancer. I started my business a year after she was diagnosed, after my maternity leave for our second daughter, Evie, finished and I had to make a decision about what to do next.
I started my business ultimately so I could spend more time with my girls, my Mum and give myself some space during what I knew would be a really significant two years. I won’t go through everything that happened as a result, but if you do want to hear more of that side of my story, go back and read last week’s post which serves as a part one to this one.
And while I love certain parts of my business, there was a lot about my day to day that was starting to feel really compromised when it comes to the ‘why’ of why I started.
The opportunity and the disconnect for women in business
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of online businesses pop up and so many of these are female-led and female founded. We still have a loooong way to go when it comes to equality for women in business in terms of VC funding and investment, but ultimately, there are so many opportunities for women, who previously may not have had access to this level of flexibility, to create something and bring it to life. Without feeling like you are chained to somebody else, or you are chained to someone else's idea of what a working Mum *should* do in terms of how much you should be in the office and how much you should be with your kids. You can completely create the ideal business for your season and your wants - one that’s completely aligned to you.
The disconnect happens when we start trying to bring someone else’s business to life. When we start aligning our business with someone else’s dream, lifestyle, wants, needs. That’s when find ourselves on the Instagram Business Hamster Wheel. It can leave us feeling even more burnt out than we were in any 9-5. And it’s fucking exhausting.
Before I dive in further - I want to be clear. This isn’t about disempowerment, or staying in our boxes or giving up.
It’s actually the opposite.
You CAN have an empire. You CAN scale to the moon. You can make ANYTHING happen.
But without aligning that big thing you’re striving for with how you want your days to feel and how you want to spend your time, you’re going to continue feeling like a very tiny hamster running on a very large, unstable and insurmountable wheel.
Ultimately, you can always make more money - but time?
It’s the only thing we have that’s just gonna keep on spending itself, no matter what - and we can’t make more of it.
This is the reason I started The Productivity Project and the reason I moved into productivity coaching, because I wanted to share how the power of implementing a productivity strategy that is really aligned with you can help you regain control of your time - something that so many of us struggle with after we start a business.
Time (whether you buy it, or leverage it) is the ONE thing that will ultimately help you bring your goals to life (and live the days you want to live while you’re doing it).
Last week, I talked about reaching a bit of an I’m done moment, and I elaborated a bit more on the four signs I noticed that made me really ask myself if it was time for a reset. These included:
Finding myself in regular cycles of burst and burnout when it came to the work I was doing, and even in other areas of my life
My creativity took a huge nose dive, and I couldn’t seem to find flow or joy in many of the things I was doing - everything felt like a strategy
I was striving for some arbitrary income goal that I wasn’t even sure why I wanted
I just wasn’t loving it - plain and simple. And everyone around me could tell.
A behind the scenes view of what running a business looks like, two years in
I started as a virtual assistant in 2021 after my maternity leave with our second daughter, Evie was up. My Mum had also been dealing with a terminal diagnosis for stage 4 metastatic breast cancer over the last year, and that mixed with everything Covid threw up at us meant that I just didn’t want to go back to commuting four days a week, to a job that, while flexible and supportive, I didn’t really love doing anymore.
I now support a portfolio of 6 clients, all who have been long-term - I have supported some of them since I opened my business. I have my kids in childcare for four days a week because I just can’t balance work and looking after them when they are home. I know there are lots of different views and opinions around childcare and being able to run your business as a stay at home Mum, but for me, I just couldn’t be the mother I wanted to be around my children when I had a full client portfolio open alongside them at the same time.
After I started my business, I found that my time quickly felt completely out of my control. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was working hard at all hours to try and service my clients, when on paper, I “should” have been able to do what I needed to do in the time I had allocated. I theoretically had capacity for the client portfolio that I had taken on in terms of my skillset and what I was delivering - so I just couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to regain control of my time, why I was working so much and why I felt things blowing out every single week. I felt like I wouldn’t be able to keep this up, but, while I was earning enough income for us to pay our bills and stay afloat, I was still not at my target revenue for the year. Despite working so hard.
And I started to resent what I was doing. Like, really resent it.
Something had to change
One day, I took a step back and really assessed how I was working through the day, what I was actually doing, what I was spending time on, and how I was bringing the things to life.
I started to pour over everything I could find online, podcasts, YouTube videos, socials, blogs, books, everything I could find on productivity and how I could really support myself and my brain in both leveraging my time and in optimising the hours I did have so that I was able to sustain a really fulfilling and profitable business.
And when I started implementing the tools and strategies and little hacks that I was learning, I started to see really big changes in the way I was able to operate day to day. Everything from the amount of time I had outside of work hours, to the amount I had to work to deliver the same amount of value to my clients. To be clear, I wasn’t comprimising on value, but I was no longer spending hours and hours delivering the work for them that I had promised.
And I started to share what I was doing with other people.
I started to do little productivity sessions with some of my clients and some of my clients' friends. I really started to feel like all the things that I was learning about were really benefiting other business owners like me.
I started my podcast, the podcast you're listening to right now, The Productivity Project. I started to blog and I started to create content on Instagram around helping solo business owners be more productive with the time that they had. I wanted to get away from the traditional productivity content out there and present something that could really work to support women juggling business and life.
So, I had these two areas of my business that I was working on. I had two young children. I was spending more and more time with my Mum as her condition deteriorated. And alongside that, I felt this sense of urgency to make the productivity side of my business happen faster. I desperately tried to put in the hours I thought I needed to create this big digital course to help more people, create content to grow my audience, create supporting digital products and lead magnets to grow my email list. I joined more memberships, downloaded more free resources, listened to podcast after podcast…
And I started to trying to grow and create a business that was somebody else’s. One where the volume of work and effort required to bring it to life was completely misaligned with the season of life I was in.
Instead of aligning my business with the season of life I was in, and the using my values as a guide and focussing on the present of where I was at, I became obsessed with what would happen next. Obsessed with creating the future, now. And aside from feeling completely unfulfilled personally, I didn’t stop to think ‘is this even what the people I want to help need?’ All I kept trying to do was create the thing that everyone told me I needed to create, instead of thinking about what was going to help the people I wanted to support the most in a way that fit with the season of life I was in.
Underneath everything, all I really wanted was to spend more time with my Mum at the time and spend more time with my family and my girls. And just have time. If you want to hear more about this listen to last week's episode, but that kind of brings us up to where I am up to now, which is hitting the reset button on my business and really coming back to what it is that I actually want out of it and why I started it in the first place, what I actually want my days to look like.
7 questions to help you leverage time, energy and happiness in your business
This will resonate with you if you are a solo business owner and you are sort of sitting around the two or three year mark. Maybe you have little bursts where you work and you think, okay, this is good, I've got it now.
And then you crash, left feeling like you're close to burnout.
Or perhaps you're just wondering why everything feels so hard? Perhaps you’re feeling like you are behind or you're not doing something right. Whatever it is, I want to share a process you can work through to help you get back to what it is that you want out of your business - and what you want out of your time.
What do I actually want to have time to do each day?
I’ll share my examples with you to give you some inspiration. Some examples from my list include: I want to have time to play with my kids in the morning before I drop them at preschool. I want to have time to be able to pick them up a little earlier. I want to have time to go for a walk or a run when I feel like it (which is never - HA). I want to have time to feel like I'm able to be creative in the work that I do through the day, that I'm not just rushing through everything and trying to deliver things really quickly. I want to have time to stay connected to the people I love, including my friends and my family. And I want to be really present when I'm doing these things. If you work for yourself, you might feel like you do have more time than you did in your corporate role, you have more flexibility. But when it comes to actually being present, it can be really, really difficult to do as a business owner - because you are always thinking of something else. You are always thinking of what else you could be doing. You are always thinking of the things on your to-do list and it can be really hard to be present in those things that you are making time for.
What do you want your business to give you from a work fulfillment perspective?
Do you want the ability to be able to take a day off whenever you want? Do you want the ability to be able to not have to answer your client's calls all the time? Do you want to have the capacity to be really creative in your work? Do you want to feel like you get the opportunity to connect with people and share with people? Think about what you have to do, to do the do and what you can reclaim.
What do you actually need to generate from your business from an income perspective?
When we start our businesses, we see this realm of possibility that's available. And while it is amazing to have inspirational businesses and inspirational brands around us and see other women and other business owners creating these amazing businesses that earn them loads and loads of cash, it can be really tempting to get caught up in thinking that that is what you need or want to actually sustain the lifestyle that you have or that you desire. It can put a lot of pressure on you that wasn't necessarily there before you started thinking about your income in this way.
This is completely separate from striving to increase your income and charging what you're worth. I'm talking about what happens when we get really caught up in the seven figure scaling and the hustle, and the 10K months and the 20K months and the 300K months - and feeling like your income is failing if it is not at that level. It's really important to come back to what you actually need to generate from your business to sustain the lifestyle that you want.
If you do not need a million dollars a year, if you are able to give yourself the lifestyle that you want on a lot less than that, then why not make that the target? Why not realign what you are doing to take some of the pressure and the weight off and align yourself with an income that really supports your lifestyle?
How would you rate your energy on a scale from one to 10?
When I talk about energy, I don't mean physical energy. If you’re reading this post as a mum, you are probably exhausted physically. I’m usually operating on some form of sleep deprivation, whether it’s self-inflicted because I just wanted a little bit of time at the end of the day to watch some Netflix, or whether it's because my kids have woken up in the middle of the night. Physical energy is difficult depending on the season of life you're in.
I'm talking about rating your mental energy on a scale of one to 10. Mental energy is definitely something that you can support using strategies to help make it a little easier, help make the load easier on your brain, help boost your mental energy and give you more mental energy in reserve. It's really important as a business owner to be aware of where you are sitting from a mental energy perspective, because some of the things that can drain our mental energy include aligning with values or operating in a way that isn't really about what we're about.
What drains your energy bucket and what replenishes it?
This is something that you can notice and observe over a day or a week, or even a month if you want a longer insight. What are the things that drain your energy bucket and what are the things that replenish your energy bucket?
If you want a framework to do this, you can download my productivity energy audit workbook. It just gives you a framework to complete throughout the day, correlating what you are doing through any given day with a feeling and an energy score. Once you have a really clear idea of where you are at from an energy perspective, this is something that you can leverage. You can absolutely leverage time to a point, but time is fixed. Your energy is something that you can leverage and optimise - to help you no matter how much (or little) time you have. For example, when you do sit down and you need to write something or deliver a piece of work for a client - if you know how to leverage your mental energy, this will help you infinitely.
How can you bring your goals for your business to life in a way that is in line with the values you set for yourself when you started?
You might be thinking - but I absolutely want to create this thing, or build this brand, or scale to the moon, or earn a gazillion dollars. Your business can be whatever you want it to be, but when you really drill down to what you want day to day, what you want out of your life, are your actions around the goals and plans for your business really aligned with that? Or are you trying to mould your business into somebody else's version of what a business should look like?
When I asked myself this question, I found that what I was doing to bring my business to life wasn't really aligned with how I wanted to operate, and more importantly it wasn’t really serving the people I wanted to help.
I want to help people who really feel like they just don’t have any spare time or brain space to devote to sitting through any more masterclasses or modules or strategies or checklists on the next thing they can fix or implement or try.
I want to help those people in a way that feels really connected and really supportive.
And as part of the last few weeks of reflection, I’ve been playing around a little bit with what that looks like and I’m going to share a little sneak peek in week’s podcast episode.
So if you’re craving that taking your business back to basics, regain control of your time, create space and time freedom again in your brain and your business energy - I’ll be sharing what I’m working on with you via my weekly newsletter, girl, productive. You can subscribe here.
And I promise, it’ll be a little bit different.
