Steer Your Calendar “Ship” in a Different Direction

Taking the time to think about how to match your time and your energy can make all the difference in reaching your goals and achieving the results you seek for your life. What’s truly important should show up on your calendar. On the face of it, that seems SO obvious. 

But are you really doing that in reality?  How often do the things that are truly important TO YOU get procrastinated or pushed out completely? How often do you put together your to do list without prioritizing or without considering your available time and energy?  And then berate yourself for not “getting it all done”? Take a listen and learn how to steer your calendar “ship” in a different direction. 

Main points: 

• Make a chart of time, task, and thoughts for the major tasks in your life.
• Use the three main categories of priorities: self care, responsibilities, relationships to sort the tasks. 
• Use your available energy - not imaginary energy, when creating your calendar. 
• Make sure there's a balance over the course of a month.
• Consider what can be delegated, eliminated or modified. 
• Try to make these decisions with compassion for your future self. 

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Marie Forleo's Everything is Figureoutable 

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbitts, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome hi friends. this week on the podcast, we're going to be talking about your time, your task, and your thoughts. I'm the first to say for many years I would just notice all the things I was thinking about and write them down, put a couple extra in there so I could cross them off. the list was a brain dump. and it took place on whatever envelope I could find, whatever piece of paper was hanging out in my car Until I went to the life coach school hadn't ever taken the time to think about how to match my time and my energy so that I could create the results I want. Once you start to notice that you're in charge of what you think, what you feel, what you say yes and no to, it really is so empowering and it has helped me move forward in creating the dreams that are important to me. So then. How do we do it? These are all wonderful thoughts of noticing and deciding and taking small practice steps, but how do we actually make a plan that we follow? Many of us would love to do some of the things we're not doing right now. And Many of us would like to stop doing some of the things that we're doing on repeat that are just taking all of our energy away. So my suggestion to you, you can either go to Kelly Tibbetts life coach on Instagram. I'll have this image up for you to screenshot. You can join our program and I'll help you apply it. Or you can just take a piece of paper or your notes app right now and write these three words, time, task, and thoughts. And so if you're using something like a Google doc, time, task, and thoughts are going to go across the top. And then each row is going to hold a different thing that is important to you. Now, as humans, there's so many things that are important to us. We have ourselves, and again, I think you come first. I think I come first. I'm the best version of me when I really believe self care is not selfish. That I'm getting the rest I need, the healthy food I need, the exercise I need, the connection that I need, that I'm spending time doing things I enjoy, like reading and walking. And so I think you are important and should be the first priority of your life. Another priority is responsibilities, the things we've said yes to, whether it's for pay or not for pay, it might be work that you do, it might be some volunteering, and it's probably taking care of your home. Just a little side note, one way to know if your responsibilities are out of control is to check in with your car. I've heard so many different people talk about the fact that, um, our areas that we live in are kind of an expression of what's going on inside of us. And so if you make a decision to keep your car clean, and it's really hard to do it, it's hard to stay up with the vacuuming and the wiping down and the going through the car wash, you might be past capacity. And I just want to put that out there as one of the things I'm going to talk about. How is your car? And then the third thing we have ourselves, we have our responsibilities, and then we have our relationships. That's why we're here, to connect with one another. And so whether it's people that are in your family, your friends, your work relationships, just um, people that you want to give time to. All of those things are important, and they need to show up on your calendar. Now, nobody has enough time for every single thing, every single day, so it's good to kind of look at your calendar either in one week, two week, one month blocks and make sure there's a balance over the course of a month is a nice way to see if there's balance. Do you have relationship time, time for responsibilities that match your energy and time to take care of you? So again, across the top, the time, the task, and the thoughts. And then each row below is going to be how we make the plan for what's going into your calendar. So you've taken a moment, you've gone somewhere that you really like going, a coffee shop, sitting at your kitchen table with a cup of tea, whatever it is, and you've brainstormed, All the different things. I have to go to this event in two weeks. I need to buy new socks. I have a birthday card that needs to get mailed. I have a project for work. Everything that's in your brain. You want to take the time to notice and write it all down. Now we're going to pick one thing. Say the thing is, you need to write a report for your supervisor. It's something that keeps getting put off because there's no urgency to it, but your supervisor needs the report and you need to finish it. That would be the first line item, report. When are you going to write it? Write the report. So the time is two o'clock Tuesday. The task is write the report. And then the thoughts are, do you need any reminders? Oh, you've already started it. And you have a Google doc. Um, you were going to partner with somebody and they were going to edit it for you and add a piece to it. So what time are you doing it? What task are you doing? And what thoughts do you need to remember? If you can do this with the energy of compassion for your future self, imagine you two weeks from now and all these things that you've written down are taking place when you decided to do them. Would that feel good? Or would you feel exhausted and sick because you've done too many things? Try to make these decisions with love and compassion for your future self. So again, take out your notes app, take out a piece of paper, download, brainstorm, get it all out. What do you need to do? And some of it's going to be, I need to do it today. It's urgent. Some of it is I need to complete that task. It's almost done. And some of it's going to be, I don't want to forget that. I said, I would do this thing two months from now, four months from now. So every single task gets its own line. A time is dedicated Thursday at noon, Saturday morning by, you know, 1030. We want to be as clear and specific as possible with what time. Then we want to be very specific in the task. Does the task involve, for instance, if you needed to go get some socks, is it simply sitting down and opening up your computer and ordering it online, or do you have to drive to a store? You want to be as clear as possible with the task. And then you want the thoughts and the reminders. Oh, I have a coupon for that. I want to make sure I use that. Or I said that I would have that report into my supervisor by Friday at three o'clock, but I want to remember that I have a meeting on Friday from 10 to two. So if I don't get it done Thursday, it's going to be very hard for me to do it on Friday. I've been using this system now for over a year. I developed it with one of my clients to help her really stay aligned with what she wanted to do and when she wanted to do it, and to help her remember all the things that our brain stores as information. When we can get the information storage onto paper, onto a Google doc, into a system that works for us, that frees up our mental energy to solve problems. And that's what my brain and your brain love to do. Solve problems. Solve problems. So now as you start filling this out at the beginning, you might have 30 different line items because you haven't done this before. What we want to do now is you could, if you're using a Google Doc, it's fantastic. You can make one more row and you can number it the way that you want to. So say you put down 10 things on this Google Doc. Now it's time to decide priorities. Priority means one, one thing at a time. And so even though you may have listed it, As it came out of your brain, you can now intentionally decide this is my priority one. And when I've given that the energy I've decided to give it, I'm going to do two, three, four, five, and then you can sort it easily. So you know what you're working on when you're working on it, what's the task you're working on and what thoughts and reminders do you need so that you don't forget it? It might be, I have a file in the file cabinet, and when I'm done this project, I want to file it there. It could be, here's the cell phone number of the person I'm going to have a conversation with. It might be, send the birthday card by Friday because their birthday is Tuesday. Whatever thoughts, if you can get them out of our brain and write them onto the paper or put them in the Google Doc, it changes everything. So let's just take a moment and do it. Hands on our heart if it's safe to do so. Eyes closed. Taking those breaths in. Holding for a moment and then a deep exhale. And doing that one or two times until our nervous system is starting to feel calmer. What are we noticing? Brain. What things are important that we don't want to forget now, once we have that list completed, I want you to just take a couple of minutes from a place of compassion and love for your future self of that list. Is there anything that can wait? Can you decide today? I'm going to think about you a month from now, two weeks from now, two days from now, and put that into the thoughts and reminders. Come back to this on Saturday. Is there anything you can delegate? If you are running the rate that most people I coach are running, you're often feeling tired, overwhelmed, exhausted. So probably not a lot of extra energy to add to your life right now. So is there anything you can delegate? And the hard part about delegating is in general, when we give somebody else something to do that we could do easily and with excellence, we can feel uncomfortable and it's okay to feel uncomfortable. It's okay to let somebody do something they're not excellent at with your support so they can Row in their ability to do it. It frees up your time and it may make their life even better to learn how to do something that's hard to do. So is there anything you can delegate? And is there anything you can drop or decide not for this season that could go into the thoughts, you know what, if I have enough energy, I'm gonna work on this in two weeks, but this might be the thing that doesn't happen in this season. And again, what happens when we make those decisions is we feel feelings like sadness, frustration, fear, right? What if I don't do this? What will happen? The majority of things in our life somehow work out. I love Marie Forleo's title of her book. Everything is figureoutable. Sometimes what's figureoutable is I have to do this this week. There's no other way this can happen, but sometimes it's, I can delegate it. Or, I'm just going to decide that that's not for this season. If you spend any time around me, you're going to hear me talk about TikTok all the time. I love TikTok. I love learning things and TikTok has made it in such a way that you feel like you're learning things even when you're not because there'll be like one thing a week that I learn and is useful and then I can spend way too much time on there. So. I've had to take some pauses now and then, but one of the things I saw recently is somebody who had a plastic container and they had, you know, plastic mums and plastic pumpkins. And their whole point was, you don't really have the energy for live flowers in the fall. Your life is too busy. Now that's not a hundred percent true now, but this would have been so helpful when my children were little. We did not have the time in the fall for me to keep up with fresh mums and pumpkins. And if I could have done that plastic thing for a couple years, it would have given me back the energy I needed for the important things, which were my children and their activities in the fall. So what are you noticing as I tell that little story? Is there anything you can decide to drop today? Not because it's not something that you would love to do, but simply because there is a limit to your time and your energy. So the steps again, take a few moments and notice what are all the things that you either have said yes to or feel like you should say yes to that are coming up. Write them all down, and then using some sort of document that serves you, decide the time, the place that you're going to do it. Clearly define the task. I'm going to go buy Halloween costumes is very different than I'm going to make Halloween costumes. Very different tasks. And then give yourself a space to think about all the thoughts and the reminders. Don't forget that you already bought the birthday card. It's over here. You just need a stamp and to mail it. Those kinds of things that our brain is constantly storing. really, truly can make us so tired. So let's decide that we don't want to be tired anymore. We want to live committed, energized, intentional, vibrant lives. And when we can use these tools, we're able to do that. So if this sounds like something you'd love some support with, that's what we do every day. every single week in my coaching program. This series is called manage your time and energy and everything that I teach is recorded and put into a platform so you can watch and listen as it works for you. I have workbooks with small activities you can do to grow in your understanding of my coaching tools. If you'd like to learn more, you can head over to Kelly TIBBITTS.COM or send me a message on Facebook or Instagram. Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbittts Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbitts. com. I look forward to connecting again soon.