304 Holly Worton ~ How To Prioritize When You Can’t Do It All

Today’s Guest

Listen To This Episode

    

What You’ll Learn

• How to organize your life with Google Calendar (or something similar)
• Why time blocking is so important
• How to figure out what your non-negotiable tasks/activities are
• How to organize your regular tasks and recurring events
• How to break bigger goals into specific tasks so you can time block them
• How to design your ideal week and see how that compares to reality
• Why it’s so important to leave open slots in your calendar
• What to do when you have a scheduling conflict
• How to decide what to do and which task/activity is the priority
• Questions to ask yourself so you can easily make decisions + know your priorities
• Examples of recent things I’ve had to rearrange and why, so you can see how I do this

Things I Discussed

• Survey
• Life categories: social/friends, family, fitness/outdoors/Nature, self care/me time, spiritual and personal growth, hobbies, career/business, health/wellbeing, creativity/self expression
• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondō
• Boomerang for Gmail

Questions to Ask Yourself

• What’s more important? Listen to your gut response
• How does this activity/task take you one step closer to achieving your top goals?
• Can you do one of the activities at another time/date? Later in the year?
• Can one of the activities be rearranged without overcomplicating things or inconveniencing someone else?
• Are other people involved? If so, that might make rearranging more difficult
• Do you have the time/money to do this right now, or can/should you rearrange it for a later date?
• Do you absolutely need to do this activity NOW (for example, because there’s a deadline), or can you do it at a later time/date?
• Do YOU absolutely need to do this task/activity yourself, or can you outsource it?
• Do you absolutely NEED to do this task/activity now, or is it just nice to do? Can you bump it to a later date/time in your calendar, or consider not doing it at all?
• Is there another date/time/location you can do this?
• Does this activity spark joy? If not, do you really need to do it? Can you get someone else to help or do it for you?
• Is the activity/task urgent + important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, not urgent + not important? (See quadrant)

Resources

• Wheel of Life
• List of values
• Important/Urgent quadrant (to the right)

Connect With Holly

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• Twitter
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn

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Related episodes

• 366 Joanna Hennon + Holly ~ Mid-life: Reevaluating Where You Are and Where You Want To Go
• 345 Holly Worton ~ Why We Could All Benefit From Saying YES More Often
• 338 Holly Worton ~ How to Achieve Your Goals + Overcome Obstacles, Step By Step
• 327 Holly Worton ~ How to Conduct Your Year-End Review
• 318 Holly Worton ~ How to Be Goal Driven & Still Allow Yourself Flexibility

Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 304. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about how to prioritise when you can’t do it all. Now, I am aware that I am a little bit privileged in terms of time management and prioritising things, mainly because I don’t have children. And I know that is a massive investment of time that most people have and I do not. So, I am going to try to take that into consideration in today’s episode, but I think I am just not clear on how much of a time investment that is, so I will try to make this useful for everyone and I think I will, because I am going to be giving you lots of things to consider when prioritising and choosing which tasks and activities to do and also questions to ask yourself. And I think those things are relevant no matter whether or not you have children however I recognise if you do have kids you will have much less leeway in terms of what to do and when.

So, how to prioritise when you can’t do it all? Why is this a topic? I think time management is something that is really, really, important. It is a topic that I love, it is a topic that I love talking about, it is a topic that I love handling in my life; and I really love having my time organised and I really like being mindful with what I choose to do, when I choose to do it, how I choose to do it, where I choose to put it in my calendar in terms of times, days, weeks, months, whatever. And, it is something that has become increasingly important with the launch of my recent book, If Trees Could Talk, Life Lessons From the Wisdom of the Woods because I had a lot to do with that book launch. I set myself a fairly ambitious deadline for it, for releasing the book; and I had a lot to do, not only in the days and weeks running up to the launch. But also the week of the launch, the week after launch, and I think I handled it really well, I am very happy with how I did it.  I was tired, and I have had to spend the last couple of weekends having really quiet lazy weekends at home, rather than going out for a walk or doing something, because I felt  like I needed some recovery time. But I don’t think, I don’t want to say I don’t think I was burnout; I think I was tired, I was doing a lot, but I think I handled it really well and I think that was because I was very clear in how I prioritised things.

So, if you have listened to this podcast before, you probably know that I use Google calendar to manage my life.  I am a very visual person, so, whether you use Google calendar, or another calendar, or a printed calendar, or a bullet journal, whatever thing that you use to manage your life and to manage your time, you need to have some tool, whether it is a digital tool, an analogue tool, whatever it is find what works for you. If you don’t have something already play around with different things. I really like Google calendar, or another online calendar, because it allows me to drag and drop things because my weeks never go the way I planned them. It also makes it easy to schedule recurring tasks and recurring time blocks and I find it really, really, easy to use. So, again, whether you are using Google calendar of something else you need some kind of tool to manage your time and organise the things that you do in your life. If you don’t, I don’t know how you are going to manage your life. I think this is are ally important thing because if you are setting goals, if you have got a vision for yourself, whether you are self-employed or not, I think it is really, really, important to be mindful with how we are spending our time.

So, even if you are not self-employed and you have got a job, and you know you go to your job every day from 9-5 and you commute, I think the times that are outside of your fixed schedule of work, you need to be mindful of how you spend that time, so that you can have the most fulfilling life. Because if you just fall into the habit of doing stuff it is really easy to fall into the trap of putting out fires and doing urgent stuff that is maybe not important and also not scheduling time for yourself and not scheduling time for self-care, or not scheduling time for the things that are really important for you, be that hobbies, or exercise, or whatever. So if you don’t have a system, get a system, and play around with stuff to see what works for you, because there is no one system or schedule that works for everyone.

What you are going to learn?

So, I realise that I have just launched straight into this episode without telling you what you are going to learn. So, before I go on {laughing} you know I really want to talk about this!, what are you going to learn today? I am going to talk about: how to organise your life using Google calendar or another system. How to figure out what your non-negotiable tasks or activities are. I am also going to talk about how to organise your regular tasks, and recurring events. How to break bigger events into specific tasks and activities so that you can time block them. How do design your ideal week and see how that compares to reality so that you can see if you need to make some shifts. What to do if you have a scheduling conflict, if you have got two things happening on the same time or date, how do you choose which one? How do you decide what to do and which task or activity is the priority? I also include questions to ask yourself so that you can easily make decisions and know what your priorities are. Finally, I am going to include some examples of recent things that I have had to rearrange, or I have decided to rearrange, and why so you can see how I do this and apply this to yourself.

Before I get into the main part of the podcast episode, I want to direct to you to my survey, if you go to http://HollyWorton.com/survey — I would love for you to answer a few questions so that I can make this podcast and other things that I create better for you. Just seven quick questions and none of them are obligatory, so you can choose to answer one, two, three, or all, and it should only take about five minutes at most, assuming you fill out all questions. So, that is http://HollyWorton.com/survey.

Now back to time-blocking, Google calendar, time management, because I love this stuff. So, first step is find a system, or take the system that you have already got and figure out what your non-negotiable(s) are and time-block those out.

So meals, now I do intermittent fasting, so I just eat one meal a day and my meal is dinner, but back when I ate three meals a day like a normal human being, I had breakfast and I had lunch blocked out in my calendar because I found, especially with lunch, that I would get really focussed on my work, and really focussed on what I was doing and I would forget to eat. Then time would go on and then I wasn’t focussed because my stomach was growling and I would be in the middle of another thing or about to come across a call, or a scheduled client session, where I didn’t have time to bump that and eat. So, blocking out meals is very important or a meal.

Kids if you have kids, you know what time you have to take them to school, pick them up from school, do other stuff with your kids, feed your kids. Block that out in your calendar and when you are blocking stuff out use different colours for different things, so I have different colours for work stuff, I have different colours for creative stuff, I have different colours for meals, I exercise, all that kind of stuff…self-care, morning routine, I have different colours for different things. And that helps me when I am planning my day: how much of the schedule is personal stuff, how much is work stuff, how much is creative stuff? And, it helps me to see my week at a glance, how I have planned things and how I need to adjust accordingly so that I have a balanced week in terms of getting my needs met with work, creativity, personal, that kind of stuff.

So, another thing I consider to be non-negotiate is self-care because if we don’t take care of ourselves we are going to burn out. And you may or may not be sick of the oxygen mask analogy but if you don’t take care of yourself first, i.e. putting your oxygen mask on first before your kids or family members, you are not going to be able to help them. So, take care of yourself, whether that is half-an-hour of reading, a bath, a morning routine, meditation, mindfulness, whatever that is, figure out how often you want or need to do that and how often you can do that and how much time you can spend doing that and block that out into your calendar.  I have a very extensive morning routine every morning, which sometimes doesn’t happen, but usually every morning, and a great deal of that is self-care stuff, like my Druid ceremony, my Shamanic journeys, healing time, mindset work, that kind of thing and reading. So, block out the time that you can, and make sure that it is in your calendar. Now, sometimes I have to drag and drop that, sometimes other higher priority stuff happens, and I can’t do it, but it is in the calendar and it is in the calendar in a colour that indicates that it is personal time.

Next, add regular tasks and recurring events and again this is easiest if you are using an online calendar, because then you can create a recurring event you don’t have to add it manually ever time. So, exercise, looking at my calendar I have my kickboxing classes, both the group classes, and my private one-to-one class that I do, in my calendar every week. I also have other stuff that I may need to do that’s fitness related, so I have got my kickboxing grading coming up at the end of June, so that means that I need to do stuff to prepare for it. I need to run, I need to get into running shape again, I need to practice my line work, I need to do some kettle-bells to strengthen parts of my body that had previously been causing me problems with my hip, so I need to do some stuff to make sure that my running doesn’t mess up my hip. I need to practice other things that are part of the grading, so I have time blocked into my calendar because my grading is an important goal of mine and I want to make sure that I pass. So I block the stuff that I need to do to make that happen.

Other regular tasks and recurring, of course, as I mentioned earlier, stuff related to kids, stuff related to work. So, if you have a job, block that out in your calendar, not just the work itself but the time that it takes to get to work and to get home from work. If you work from home or are self-employed block out email stuff, block out creative stuff. I have got time every couple of weeks to record a podcast episode. I also block out stuff that I need to be home for like my cleaner. So we have a cleaner that comes once a week and cleans our home for two-and-a-half-hours; and I have that blocked in my calendar because one of us needs to be home, either my husband or me. So, I always have that blocked out in grey, because that’s not something that I am actively doing but it is something I need to keep in mind when I am planning other stuff. And I also block out other stuff relating to my husband in grey. It is kind of a light grey, it is just stuff that I need to be aware that he is doing, either because I need to be home for it, or he is away on holiday on his own and I need to make sure that I have that in my calendar in case I block some time away and I need to hire a cat sitter to take care of the cat, that kind of thing. So, I have a lot of stuff that is not necessarily my stuff, that is other people’s stuff that I put in a light grey, because I need to take it into consideration when I am planning my own stuff. So, think about stuff like that for you that you need to add.

Then, I have my goals. So know what your goals are in life so looking at personal goals, professional goals. So I have books that I write on a regular basis, I set a deadline for myself, I block out time in my calendar for writing, I block out time in my calendar for reviewing and editing, for launching, promoting, marketing, all the stuff that I need to do, to not only write my book, or create my thing, but get it out there into the world and market it. So break each goal down into a specific task, so like I said, kickboxing, every few months I have a grading and I have things that I need to make sure that I pass my grading and those things are: going to class, running, practising my line-work, doing my kettle-bells, all that stuff needs to be done to make sure that I achieve my goal which happens the last week in June. So break down your goals into specific tasks. It is very nebulous to say, “pass my next kickboxing grading”, what do I need to do to make that happen? “Publish my next book”, what do I need to do make that happen. Do I need to research? One of the books that I am going to be working on this year is a second edition of my very first walking book: Alone On The South Downs Wey. I am going to be walking the trail again, so that is the research part of it. Then I need to write, then I need to edit, then I need to do all of the things that are related to a book. So that is a very important part of getting my goals achieved. I need to do specific tasks.

So, it is really important to break down these goals into specific tasks and block them into your calendar. This is also especially important, well, it is especially important for two reasons: if you have got an external deadline like this project is due by this date. Or, I don’t get to choose when my summer course grading is, it is set in the calendar for everyone that goes to my school. So that is an external deadline, so I need to plan in advance up to that date. It is also important if you are setting your own deadline, so with my recent book launch I set my own deadline for when I was going to launch the book. It was a fairly ambitious deadline which meant that I really had to push myself to achieve it, but I still needed to break my goal down into specific tasks and block them into my calendar. So, if you are setting your own deadlines, and you work back to time block, sometimes you see: oh I don’t have time to do all the things that you need to do to achieve my goal by the deadline. So, either you need to move stuff around or re-evaluate your deadline and maybe bump it into the future, x amount of weeks or months. I originally wanted to have my tree book done by December of last year, that was totally unreasonable. I needed until April of this year to do it, there was so much that happened between December and April that I couldn’t have done by December. So be reasonable with your goals and your deadlines, especially when you are making your own deadlines. And if you are working to an external deadline that someone else has set for you, be sure that you can do the stuff that you need to do to achieve that goal by that deadline.  So, say I had a ton of stuff going on and I couldn’t get the stuff: do my running, get ready for my kick boxing grading in the summer course, I could just skip the summer course and grade on the winter course. It happens twice a year so I need to choose: do I really want to do this now or do I have other stuff that is more important that I would have to push back? For me that is one of my really important things, it really helps me to push myself and to get better by doing the gradings every time they come around, so that’s been every six months for the advanced grades. So that’s been something that is really specific for me, but I am sure that will give you ideas for what kinds of things are similar in your life, do you have self-imposed deadlines or externally-imposed deadlines. So that wraps up breaking your goals into specific tasks: what do you actually need to do to achieve your goals?

Next, I think this is really important, to design your ideal week and see how that compares to reality. So several months ago I took a week in the future, a random week in Google calendar, and I just took that week and I thought: what do I want my week to look like?  And I actually blocked out a bunch of stuff in that one week that I ended up later deleting because it wasn’t reality, it was my ideal week. You could do this on paper, you could do this in your online ting. But map up your ideal week, how do you ideally want to spend your time? And if you are working for someone else you are going to have less flexibility than if you are working for yourself, but still, what does your ideal week look like? How much time do you want to be spending on social life, on hobbies, on your career or business? Or creativity, self-expression, health, well-being, fitness, self-care, spiritual and personal growth. How much time do you want to be devoting to each of these things in your ideal week, map that out. So, I mapped it out, I took a screen shot of it and then deleted all the time blocks because it wasn’t an actual week in my life and then I compared that to my reality, I compared that to a typical week, and I adjusted accordingly. So, where do you want to be spending more time, where could you spend less time? How can you adjust your current week to match your ideal week? That is really, really, important to know how you want to spend your time, because that will help you be mindful of how you spend this week and your upcoming weeks. So, how do you decide what to do and what is the priority? Start out by knowing what your top goals are in life, I have already mentioned this, so set goals if you don’t already, and know what your top goals are and prioritise your goals so you know which ones are important, write them down somewhere. Have them in a system, drag and drop them, renumber them, make sure you know what your most important goals are in life, and then know what’s important to you.

So, when I was mapping this out for the show notes, preparing bullet points for talking to this, I was looking at an old wheel of life thing from my old coaching days, and do you know what, I might include that in the show notes. So, wheel of life, there is a pie chart with different categories in life and in a typical life-coaching activity you would rank each of those areas on a scale of 1-10, so my social life, how good is it on a scale of 1-10, is it a 7? Is it an 8? What is it? Is it a 2? So you can see how you are doing in different areas of your life and where you might want to improve. I find it really useful, that is a really basic life coaching tool that I find really, really, useful. So, look at those areas you can either rank your life using the wheel of life or you can look at the categories and see what is important to you. So, I am going to read them out loud to you now: social life; friends; family; fitness; outdoors; nature; self-care or me time; spiritual or personal growth; hobbies; career; business; health; well-being; creativity; self-expression. Look at those different areas and I am going to put them in the show notes so you don’t have to go back and listen to them. Rank them from 1-10 to find out what is most important to you, because I am sure they are all important but not everything has equal importance, and you are going to need to know what is most important to you when you are planning out your time and deciding what are you priorities in life and time management.

It also really helps to know your values and as I was putting my notes together I was thinking I really feel drawn to go back to these old kind of life-coaching blog posts that I wrote back in 2011, talking about values and priorities and I really want to revisit those and maybe do some podcast episodes on those, because I think it is really important stuff that a lot of people don’t think about when planning their lives or taking action and doing stuff. So, know what your values are, what is important to you? One of my most important values is freedom, freedom is really important to me, there have been times in my life where I felt a total lack of freedom, where I felt really stuck and frustrated and like I didn’t have many options in life and I was absolutely miserable. Do you know what, I will put a values list in the show notes, and you can figure out what your values are if you don’t know what they are. I think it is really, really important to know what your values are, it is also going to help you decide what are your priorities in life.

Next, when you are planning your schedule, leave open slots for breathing space. This is super, super, important. And I don’t always do that, so this is a do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do suggestion. So, leaving open slots for breathing space leaves you time and space to allow for changes, to allow for unexpected things and rest time. You can also block out rest time in your calendar, this is something that I have recently started doing, if I have a big event that I know will just leave me flat out exhausted afterwards, I block out time to recover in my calendar. So there is for example on an event that I usually help out with the planning and I attend every October, so leading up to this event in October is really, really, stressful, I have a lot of stuff I have to do, I have to make sure they are done by that really hard deadline and I need to organise the people involved, and go to the event which I love but it is also really energetically draining for me and I need to recover afterwards. So in previous years I have not been good at blocking out a day in my calendar for the day after this event, this year I have, because I know I am going to have to sleep in and just allow myself sleeping in time, I am going to have to give myself time and space to rest otherwise it is going to mess up the rest of my week and possibly the following week. I have found if I don’t give myself rest time after stuff like this then it messes up my productivity for the following days and week. So that is really, really, important for me. I am an introvert so I know that I have to manage my energy very well and very mindfully. So that’s really important.

So, what do you do if you have a scheduling conflict? Two things are happening on the same date or time and you don’t know how to choose, you don’t know what to do. Here are some questions to ask yourself, and I am going to include these questions in the show notes. So, first of all, how does this activity or task take you one step closer to achieving your top goals? Does it take you closer or is this just a thing that would be nice to do? It is a thing that is important in helping you achieve your goals? Next just ask your self: which activity is more important and listen to the response, you might have a very clear response from just that, even if it is not the response you may want, listen to your gut. Next, ask yourself, can you do one of these activities or tasks at another time or date, or could you do it in the year? So, I just today booked in an outdoor first aid course which is two days, it is eight hours a day for two days, and it is something that I did three years ago and it expires every three years so I need to do it this year even though I am not doing guided walks anymore I don’t want to let this expire, I want to have it up-to-date. It is important for me, it is important for people that I go outdoors with, whether or not I am guiding groups. So, it is important for me to do this year, so it is not something I can put off to another year, I want to make it as easy for myself as possible by doing it in my home town. So the school that I my outdoor first aid class with, they are based up in Manchester, but they do courses all over the country. But, they only do a course in my area a couple of times a year, so I think the dates were June or I think it is was November or something and it is outdoors first aid, I wouldn’t want to be outdoors in the cold, in the wet, trying to learn or refresh my memory on stuff. I want to be in the summer where it may rain or it may not rain but it is more likely to be good weather in June than it is in November. So, do it now in June or be cold in November and doing it next year was not an option for me. So, I wanted to have a Workcation weekend that weekend, but I ended up bumping the Workcation because I don’t have many options for this course, it is like do it now or spend a bunch of time doing research to see if another first aid school dos it in my town. I didn’t want to waste time so it was easier to decide as the Workcation can be done any weekend, so bump the Workcation and do the first aid in June when I can do it. Also, the Workcation was not as important because I am not clear on what my next book is, I have some ideas, but it is not urgent. So that can easily be bumped until later in the month so that is an example of how I dealt with that. I could have done it at a later different date, I could have done it later in the year but I didn’t want to because doing it in nice weather was more important to me than waiting until November.

Next, can one of the activities be arranged without over complicating things or inconveniencing someone else?

So if someone else is involved in this activity, I try not to rearrange because I don’t like messing around with other people’s schedules so that is a priority for me. I will rearrange with other people if the other thing is som important and I can’t do it at any other time. I am really, really, mindful of not messing around with other people if I don’t have to. So if other people are involved I am probably not going to move that task. So, can one of the activities be arranged without over-complicating things? I recently rearranged another Workcation to see some friends, so we have these friends that are friends from years ago, way back in Argentina and they live very near us now. Not very near us, but nearish us and we only see them maybe three times a year and we haven’t seen them since Christmas so I would really like to see them. And seeing them involves an hour’s drive there, an hour’s drive back, an extended lunch, or dinner, so it is kind of a full’s day activity and it is on the weekend because that’s when we can see them or they can see us. So it was like: do I do this Workcation now, do I do it later? When can I see them? And I went through my calendar and I looked at all the weekend days that I could see them and there were only a couple of weekends in the next three months that I could see them and so I thought: bump the Workcation and see them when I can and that was my priority because it is hard to arrange things sometimes with other people so sometimes I will bump something else of mine to prioritise something that involves another human being because it is just easier for me to be flexible with stuff like a Workcation that I don’t, I can do it whenever.

Next question: do you have the time or money to do this right now? Or should you arrange it for a later date?

So look at your budget, something like an outdoor first aid class is not cheap. It was just under 150 pounds, so does that fit into my budget this month or should I bump it to a later date when I can fit it more easily into my budget? That goes for any kind of thing that costs money. A Workcation is an expense because I am going outside of my house and staying at a hotel. So think about your budget and do you have the money to do this right now? And the same goes for time, do you have the time to do this thing right now? Or could you arrange for it at a later date? I am constantly shifting things in my calendar to a later date to make sure that I am not over stressed with my activities. Next question: do you Absoultely need to do this activity now for example, because there is a deadline, or could you do it later time or date? So, going back to my first aid thing, my first aid certificate expires in September because that’s when I did it three years ago, so ideally, I would like to do it before September but I could have done it in November because again I am not guiding people on walks at this time so I don’t really have the obligation of keeping my first aid up-to-date, it is more like nice-to-have.

Next,do you absolutely need to this task or activity yourself or can you outsource it? So, years ago we outsourced our housecleaning, or housekeeping, because both of us hate doing it, I kept putting it off until the house was just disgusting and I was embarrassed to have anyone over, it probably wasn’t as bad as you might be envisioning {laughing} I have high standards for cleanliness based on how I was raised, my parents are very, very, very, clean so I have high expectations for my own house’s cleanliness. And it is had to keep the house clean, we don’t have kids but we do have two cats, and we both work from home. So our house probably gets untidy and a bit more dirty than the average person who works outside of the house five days a week. So, anyway, we have outsourced to a cleaner, we have done that for a few years now because I just don’t want to invest my time in that, she is very efficient, she cleans the house in two-and-a-half hours, we have a very small house, it would probably take me a lot longer to do that and worse, I would probably just put it off and put it off and put it off and never do it, because that’s how it used to be before we had our cleaner. The house was nasty. So, can you outsource it? If you can afford to outsource it do it! The cleaning we absolutely can fit it into our budget and I would rather skimp on other things if I needed to and have a cleaner because it is very important for me to not clean my house because I really, really, don’t like it. So do it.

Do you absolutely need to to this task or activity now, or is it just nice to do? So like with the first aid, it is nice to do I don’t need to do it. With my kickboxing grading, it is nice to do, but I don’t need to do it, but moving through eh grades in my kickboxing is really important to me, because my kickboxing is important to me, I love the belt system, it really keeps me, it gives me something to strive towards and it makes me practice the stuff I need to practice to get better. If I didn’t have that kind of exam once in a while I would probably be a lot more lax about improving so it is important for me to do but it is not a need to do it is a nice to do. So can you bump it to a later date or time in your calendar? I could bump my grading to the winter course or summer course but it fits into my calendar in the summer and I have managed to arrange the rest of my schedule around that. Is there another time, date, location that you could do this? Again, going back to my outdoor first aid, I could have done the course somewhere else but it would have involved travelling and it would have taken more time out of my schedule whereas it is the town that I live in and I can just drive up there in the morning and drive back in the evening. I don’t need to book a hotel and it is very, very, easy.

Other things that I had to book around or rearrange, I just realised about a month ago that in order to get my black belt which doesn’t come up until next year I need to do some kind of competition and I haven’t done that for a variety of reasons, mostly because I am not interested in competing, but now it is a need-to-do and it is nothing that I need to do before the summer course next year, which is going to be June or July. There are a number of ways I can do this, there are lots of competitions, the easiest way to sign up for a competition is in one of the events that my school plans with the other sister schools in the area. I originally thought I couldn’t do that, because I had things in the calendar for all of the three dates in the year that they have these events, but I was just looking in my calendar this year and I thought: you know what? The last date in November, I could do. There is this workshop that I have been wanting to do, I have been wanting to do for a while, it coincides as the same date as this competition, what should I do? And I thought you know what, that workshop is something that is offered every year at least once or twice a year, I don’t need to do it now,I don’t need to do it this year, but I do need to do a kickboxing competition before June or July of next year. So why not get that out of the way, bump this workshop until next year, and plan to do the kickboxing thing in November. So, that was another example of how I rearranged one thing that I didn’t really need to do to do something that I do need to do by a certain date. Yes, I could wait until next year to do some kind of competition, but I don’t want to do just a general competition with other people that are used to competing all the time because I don’t want to get injured and the competes tend to be very focussed and intense. More intense than I am {laughing} so I want to do my first competition in a fairly safe environment.

What’s next? So I am on my plant-spirit-initiation this year and that is one weekend every month for nine months this year and that is a non-negotiable be cause there are nine months, nine weekends, to this apprenticeship and there have been other things that I have had to rearrange based on those weekends which are for me non-negotiable because I have invested in this program and this is what I wanted to do so other things have had to take a lower priority based on the nine non-negotiable weekends for this apprenticeship. Another thing, there was another event that I had I my calendar for July, a friend of mine will be coming to the country and I really want to meet up with her that weekend, do I want to see my friend who I only see in real life a couple of times a year or do I want to do this thing that isn’t that important. I have just decided to cancel the other thing and meet up with my friend and so now that is another thing that I have to book in my calendar but that is another thing that I have just decided today.

So, I go through my calendar on a regular basis and I just kind of look at what the upcoming weeks look like, what do the weekends look like? I make sure I am not over-scheduling myself because I really don’t like being over-booked, I don’t like being busy. I really need to have weekends like the last couple of weekends in my schedule where I did nothing but sit around at home and go on a very light walk and go on a run and just kind of chill. I need those times in my calendar, otherwise I go a little crazy and I get really burnt out. So, go through your calendar on a regular basis and make sure you are not over-booking yourself.

Next question to ask yourself: does this activity spark joy? If you don’t know what I am talking about read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I think that’s the book. If you heard of it, that is the question that Marie Kondo tells you to ask yourself when decluttering stuff. But it is a really good question to ask: does this activity or this task spark joy? If it doesn’t do you really need to do it? Can you get someone to help you with it, or do it for you? Examples: housekeeping, I do not like cleaning my house, I already said I hire someone, and it has made my life so much happier. Bookkeeping for my business, I hated it, oh God I hated it so much, I hired a bookkeeper last year, someone recommended to me by my accountant, she works with my accountant so that’s great, they liaise they do their stuff and if they have any questions they ask me. But yeah, I outsource it, I hated bookkeeping. So if you really dislike something see if you can get help or you can outsource it to someone else.

Next, I am sure you have seen the quadrant, the important/urgent quadrant, if you haven’t I will link to that in the show notes but ask yourself: is the activity or task urgent and important; urgent but not important; important but not urgent; not urgent and not important. Block it out into one of those quadrants and see, again I am very visual and that might help you see how different  tasks compared to each other. Obviously if it is urgent and important that is the stuff that you need to be doing first and if it is not urgent/not important, that’s the least important stuff but that can be a really good visual.

Finally, one thing that I am not as good at as I would like is implementing a one-touch email system. I have this week found a system that I think going to fix this for me forever {laughing}. I think this is something that is going to help me with prioritising, and I think it might help you with prioritising so that’s why I am sharing it here. So, I use a tool for boomerang for Gmail, I think it is a Chrome plug-in, and it helps you boomerang your email and what you do is it helps you send an email at a later date, it helps you boomerang an email and come back at a later date and that is one of the main ways that I use it. So with my new one-touch email system, the question I have asked myself and I have got it on a note, so I remember to do it, so it says “email, deal with it now, or boomerang for another day”. So, what I do I go through my inbox from start to finish, from most recent to oldest, you could do it the other way round, whatever. I absolutely have to do something with it when I see it. I know I have X-amount of time for dealing with emails related tasks every day, so let’s say this afternoon I have got an hour. So what can I do in an hour? Go through the list one-by-one: this email X; am I going to do it now? Am I going to respond to it now? Or do I need more time? Or is it a low-priority email; if it is a low priority and I don’t have the time, boom, boomerang it tomorrow; move to the next one. So, I feel like this, I have worked with Boomerang for a long time and I feel like it has been really helpful with prioritising so that is why I am sharing it with you. So, again, I know I have a certain amount of time to respond to my emails what I will often do, I will go through my inbox and boomerang all the emails that I know are low priority, I boomerang them for tomorrow or a later date, or when I know I have time to deal with them. Also, another way I deal with tasks is if I notice I have been boomerang a particular email or task, over and over and over and it has been leaving my inbox and coming back for a long time, or several times, that is a key to me that it is really low priority, because if I haven’t done it by now and life has gone on, I will outsource it or delete it and I delete it because it is so low priority it doesn’t matter. So, outsourcing your emails and learning how to prioritise your emails might help you with prioritising other aspects of your life, that is why I am sharing that with you. I am also aware of how long this episode is, so I want to wrap it up. I hope you have found this interesting and useful. I am going to be going through and adding a lot of resources to the show notes, so I am going to be adding that list of questions, I am going to be adding the wheel of life, the list of values, the quadrant, and I hope this stuff will help you prioritise your life and be more mindful about how you spend your time because we can’t do it all. So, make sure that you do the most important things, make sure that you do the things that will make your life more joyful and fulfilling because if we are not mindful and manage our time and manage our lives it is so easy to get into a rut of doing the same crap all the time. It is so easy to let the things that are most joyful slip because we think maybe they are not as important as the urgent stuff. I really think this is an important part of living a joyful life; of being happy in life. Happiness I don’t think happens by accident, I think we need to know what makes us happy and organise our life accordingly. Doing the things that we want to do, doing the things that we love, doing the things that bring us joy. Those things don’t happen unless we make them happen.

So that’s all for now. Next week, I think, will be an episode with Joanna Hennon. If not, it might be an episode with Cara Wilde, I don’t know I need to reorganise and look at my schedule because I have got another episode coming up with Cara which will be recording next week, which I am super excited about! So I would love for you to join me on Patrreon, if you get value from this podcast, please head over to Patreon andsSupport me there to make sure that I can prioritise this podcast in my week! If you head over to http://Patrreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there. Membership starts at $1 a month and you get exclusive access to stuff that I don’t share anywhere else including a monthly Q and A And done-for-you mindset and energy work. So please drop me a line and let me know what you thought about this week’s episode, you can email me at: [email protected] and get in touch or on social networks, also on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you can find me there and let me know what you thought and what you would like me to talk about in the future. I love getting suggestions for topics from listeners, those are my favourite ones to do, and let me know what you want me to talk about. And thank you so much for listening if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe if you haven’t already, I am on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, all over the place! It will make it much easier for you to get me in your podcasting app so you can listen to me every week.

Remember to visit http://HollyWorton.com/304 for the show notes on this episode.