We had so much fun recording the second season of our podcast. The topics below create a great foundation for building effective planning strategies, and each episode comes from a perspective of planning that combines personal responsibility with self-compassion, something we are very passionate about! Like all the content we put out, we believe these topics will help you to make intentional living an increasingly intuitive part of our life!
Time-blocking is a powerful productivity tool for maximizing the amount of time you have available, and for liberating your time to focus on what matters most. Yet over the years of talking to women who use our planner (and others who have a heart for intentional living), we’ve found that many of people are intimidated by the concept of time-blocking, don’t know how to make it work for them, or simply feel like it’s just too structured and stiff.
We totally get this! No one wants to feel pressure to make their intuitive daily rhythms “work” on paper before they’re “allowed” to move forward on them. No one wants to feel like there’s no flexibility for spontaneity, or to feel false-guilt when things don’t go “as planned.”
Thankfully, the way we approach time-blocking feels nothing like putting a straight-jacket on your day.
When you time-block, we encourage you to focus on just one thing:
When you make space to get realistic about your time, set up habits and rhythms to free up mental bandwidth, thoughtfully organize your tasks, apply prioritization and batching methods, and pad everything with ample margin—both your mental peace and your productivity will increase.
Although productivity and time-management resources seldom address this reality, different seasons of life significantly affect your productivity in different ways. It can be easy to get caught up into thinking we should be able to plan and execute tasks regardless of what is happening around us, but this simply isn’t the case. Your productivity is going to fluctuate based on the season you find yourself in, and that’s not a bad thing.
As we’ve studied our lives and others’, we’ve come to identify three seasons of our productive lives. Everyone goes through these seasons (and it’s possible to be in between seasons), but the key is to recognize each season early, and to understand and embrace the ways your current season will inevitably impact your productivity. In fact, knowing what season you’re in and having clarity about the types of goals and tasks you should be focusing on in that season, is a key component to a sustainable time-management strategy.
Effective yet flexible rhythms are one of the key building blocks in a sustainable and intentional lifestyle. But trying to copy a guru’s routine, whether for work or home life, quickly becomes overwhelming. There are dozens of “best practices” out there, so where do you start? How do you decide what you need in your personal rhythms?
In this episode of the podcast, you’ll get long look into how each of us approaches our morning and evening rhythms. Although we all have similar values—and we’re even in similar stages of life—each of our rhythms look different.
Here’s the thing about rhythms: they have to be crafted for your lifestyle, congruent with your season of life, and based on what you and your family value. I remember listening to a podcast years ago that said that “‘should‘ is not a sustainable why.” This idea holds true for rhythms. Feeling like you “should” get up before the kids, will not be a strong enough “why” when your alarm goes off at 6am. But if you begin to know in your core—because you’ve taken the time to reflect on your personal experience—that getting up before the kids sets you up for a better, more peaceful morning, this core knowing can easily become a very strong “why.”