I am participating in Joanne Hawker’s March Meet the Maker® on Instagram and the prompt for the day was planning. It got me thinking on how I plan my time. For years I tried many different planners: from online planners, traditional planners to a large wall planner. But no matter the planner, they key for me in being productive is checking the planner regularly and updating it. A planner won’t work if you don’t actively participate using it and implement the tasks at hand.
Building a business truly challenges me to properly manage my time. So in addition to writing down my tasks for the week, I decided to track some key daily habits that help me toward reaching my personal and professional goals.
Health:
Water: This sounds pretty basic but I realized I wanted to track how much water I drink daily. I feel so much better if I’m drinking water regularly throughout the day.
Cardio/walk: I usually hit this goal every day because our two pups require the exercise and the one drives me crazy if he doesn’t get his walk! I also combine this with walking on the treadmill on a high incline.
Weights/strength training: I can’t tell you how long I have had this as a goal. I would tackle this intermittently throughout the years but never was consistent. My husband and I finally just hired a trainer to achieve this goal as we both needed the accountability.
Professionally:
Education: In addition to online courses, I put business podcasts, YouTube and Skillshare in this category. I listen to podcasts while walking, doing dishes or other household chores. Skillshare is also the best for learning, there is so much information with a variety of topics on the platform. I pretty much hit this goal everyday including weekends. It’s the easiest professional task for me to hit because I find all of the content interesting and entertaining.
Art: Making art everyday. I usually can check off this task 5 times a week. I love making art and for me it doesn’t feel like a task or work.
Read: I recently started tracking my reading goals. I set a goal for how many books to read each year using the app GoodReads. I also find reading helps me wind down every night and is very relaxing.
Pitch/Marketing: I have consistently put my work on social media and on my website for the past 2 years but I have not been consistently pitching to art directors. This is probably the most important task and one that I have not been doing regularly. It’s my number one goal for this year. Writing it down here for all to see is another accountability hack. I also check in with an accountability group weekly and have shared this as my goal, but that’s another post.
Tell me your planning tips in the comments!
Building Community