Building New Productivity Habits That Stick In 3 Powerful Steps
No course creator wants to feel they made their customer unhappy. And getting an email asking for a refund was not what I wanted to see right after Christmas, either.
Here’s what happened:
A customer had bought Theme Day Planning Method, gone through the entire course in a couple of hours (downloaded everything), and then asked for her money back.
The reason?
Theme Day Planning was nothing “new”.
I took a deep breath and realized I felt really bad for her.
Not because the course isn’t up to par (it is, with lots of happy students to attest to that)…but because I knew exactly how she felt.
She was searching for a magic bullet. A secret sauce. An easy way out of her problem.
And she was still searching outside herself instead of implementing what she’d already learned.
I’ve been there so many times. It’s frustrating, disheartening, and exhausting.
You spend money and time trying to find something that’s easy and quick; a plug-n-play solution to your income and marketing woes.
And why wouldn’t you? That’s what so much marketing out there promises.
But at some point, you have to realize if you keep having the same problem, and nothing external seems easy or “new” to fix it - then you should be looking at why YOU keep having the same problem.
I responded with 2 questions:
Why doesn’t she think theme days work for her?
Where is she struggling to implement what she’s already learned from me/others?
And I offered to apply her course investment towards a 1:1 coaching call with me so I could help her get completely unstuck and create a plan just for her.
Her answers revolved around this experience: She’d try to map out a weekly plan but then schedules and priorities would change or get thrown off and it “didn’t work”.
To extrapolate: She’d start with a plan, the plan would change for various life reasons, and she’d give up.
That’s when I realized I was missing a piece in helping others - you have to persevere long after you initially take action.
ESPECIALLY when you’re learning something new or trying to build new habits.
And as I went to bed that night, thinking about how common it is to feel like she does, the acronym came to me:
M.A.P.
Mindfulness
Action
Perseverance
This concept is so important, I recorded a brand new training video for our Theme Day Planning Method students and made the video available for free.
20 minutes that could change how you plan your week and your goals for good!
In this free video training you will learn:
Why traditional time blocking doesn’t work (and what to do instead).
The biggest reason you have so many half-done tasks and a million tabs open in your brain.
The missing piece that the productivity and planning experts don’t teach.
What to do when your day (or week) gets blown up and your perfectly color-coded plan gets thrown out the window.
Building productivity habits and skills
Productivity can be summarized as the skill of knowing what to focus on and when to get the most done in the least amount of time.
There are so many overlaying factors in “how to be more productive” which makes it a lifelong skill that constantly evolves and grows.
In my mind, there are several key factors in building the skill of being productive:
Knowing your energy levels throughout the day.
Knowing what your most important priorities/projects are.
Knowing how to eliminate as many distractions as possible.
These 3 factors are part of Step 1: Mindfulness
The more purposeful awareness you have around these 3 factors, the more they will weave seamlessly, and habitually, into every piece of planning and productivity you do.
Step 1: Mindfulness
Mindfulness is being able to be aware of your habits (good and bad), your preferences, and the ability to see outside yourself objectively.
It’s about being aware that you only have 20 hours a week to work on your business, so maybe signing up for that program that’s going to take 10 hours a week isn’t going to be a good fit.
It’s about knowing that you prefer to have all your meetings on one or two days of the week so you only have to put on makeup those days, and on the others, you can be comfy and barefaced.
Are you aware you’re scrolling Instagram instead of planning your marketing calendar? Or are you completely detached and 30 minutes go by without any awareness of what you’re doing?
Here are the most important questions to ask yourself when you are mindful of your planning and productivity:
When is your brain the most awake and creative (also called being in the flow)?
What are the scheduling limitations that you need to account for (i.e. school pickups, adequate sleep, standing meetings)?
What are the most important tasks (today, this week, this month) that will help you accomplish your goals and/or help build more consistent healthy habits?
What is the realistic amount of time you have to work productively on your business each week?
What are the tasks you love doing, and which ones do you need to let go of or delegate as quickly as possible?
What are the foreseeable roadblocks in your productivity and how can you adjust (i.e. getting sick, social media platform outage, etc)?
If you could only accomplish 1 thing today and this week, what does that need to be (this is the fallback for the inevitable roadblocks in #6)?
Step 2: Action
Step 2 is where most entrepreneurs love to be. The Action Step is where you bust out the highlighters, and shiny new planners, and download a Notion template or two.
You do some brain dumping of what needs to happen, set some goals, tell yourself your going to do that new habit every day, set some due dates…and then…
Life happens.
You realize you bit off more than you could chew, although you had the best of intentions.
This is when you see people post on social media for 2 weeks and then stop (hey, I’ve done that too).
This is why people joke about New Years’ Resolutions.
Those deep, DEEP neural pathways of old habits and ways of thinking/doing are not going to change because of your supreme color-coding skills or the latest planner stickers you bought.
Because as soon as that blog post took longer to write than you planned on, or you had an emergency client meeting that knocked creating Reels off your plan for the day, you’re going to want to throw in the towel and give up.
But that doesn’t mean you just stop.
The Action Step is about taking your best guess as to when is the most productive time to write that blog post, create those graphics, or schedule client calls and see if it works.
Knowledge is power - and knowing that a week's worth of social media posts will take you an hour if you do it when your brain is in peak productive mode, vs 2 hours if you’re trying to squeeze it in before bed and your brain is mush, is such valuable information.
It also feeds back into the Mindfulness Step. The more action you take, the more data you’ll have for being mindful.
And chances are, your first crack at building productivity and planning skills around your business won’t work perfectly.
This is why my frustrated customer didn’t feel like Theme Day Planning Method was anything “new”.
She’s tried something similar in the past and wasn’t able to dig deep to keep tweaking and trying.
Step 3: Perseverance
The fact is, building skills around any goal or habit you want to stick to is HARD. But what wasn’t new to this customer was her way of dealing with the inevitable curveballs of trying to be productive - by blaming someone else and giving up - instead of taking the pieces that would work for her and tweaking and testing and trying again.
I can’t think of a single week that ever turns out the way you plan on your digital or paper planner.
That’s why I call my method an IDEAL Work Week, and why I choose to group by themes instead of inflexible time blocks that make me feel behind and frantic.
Life evolves so quickly that I actually redo my own Ideal Work Week every single quarter because my obligations and goals can change that often.
Perseverance is how you take the best of everything you’ve learned, invested in, and tried - and create a beautifully unique set of skills and systems that work for YOU.
I have not stopped using a planner because the first one I tried 7 years ago wasn’t quite right for me.
I was mindful of what elements did work for me,
I took action and created my own way of planning that could evolve and be flexible,
And I use my skills and awareness to persevere when life and business (or my day) don’t go according to plan.
Nothing is truly new
When my customer said Theme Day Planning wasn’t “new”, I immediately went to my sales page and scoured the copy for anywhere it might have said that it was a new concept. It doesn’t.
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.”
What she was really saying was, “I’m frustrated because I keep getting the same answers to solve the problem I have.”
I love the Mark Twain quote above because the visual of a kaleidoscope is exactly how skill-building as an entrepreneur looks and feels. It’s a bunch of colorful pieces all mixed up that you can tweak and tweak until you find the pattern that speaks to you.
➡️Keep pulling pieces from your education, programs, and peers to add to your productivity kaleidoscope.
➡️Keep tweaking and taking action until you find a groove.
➡️Keep adjusting as you and your life inevitably change.
Conclusion
Building new productivity habits that stick is a process that takes time. Use these 3 powerful steps as a feedback loop to help you build those skills consistently.
Mindfulness
Action
Perseverance
