Five Steps to Managing Your Time and Energy

As we pivot into fall, let's focus on our time and energy management and break free from the patterns that lead to exhaustion and depletion, confusion and self neglect. 

The key to creating more balance, purpose, and joy in your life starts with a budget.

 Just like we budget our money, we need to budget our time & energy and  adjust to the changing seasons and demand of life.  

Main Points:

As life seasons change, so should your system. Here are the five key steps:

• Create Your Protocol. This is your time and energy budget. 
• Make a Plan. Use colors for different life areas and allocate blocks for each on your weekly calendar. 
• Choose one Priority. Focus on one priority per block of time.
• Practice with small, regular, doable action steps.
• Pivot regularly to check in and adjust your protocol as needed—weekly, monthly, and especially when life and/or seasons shifts.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program

Let's connect.

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Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:09

Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, 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.

Speaker: 0:30

Hey friends. Today we're gonna be talking about your time and your energy. It changed my life when I began to break down into small steps, the practices that I wanted to be making to create the life that I wanted to live. What you need to understand This needs to be tailored to you in order for you to use it. With every coaching tool, the first time you learn it, it's not going to be perfect and nothing's gone wrong. It might take three or four versions of your protocol to get closer to the actual amount of energy you have. Every time there's a seasonal change, whether it's birthday season, soccer season, the holiday season, spring, moving to summer, you'll need to pivot. Managing your energy is the key to break free from the patterns that are leading to exhaustion and depletion, confusion and self neglect. And when we are empty, there's nothing left for us to give. I know many of you find your way to me because you are heart centered. You are a mom, a teacher, an educator, a pastor, someone working in the nonprofit world, and you want to use your life to bless others. And the reality is, if you are exhausted, overwhelmed, depleted, there's nothing left to give. The steps are first, creating a protocol. That is making a budget for your time and energy, the way you would make a budget with your money. Next, you have the plan. And before you do this work, this is where many of us start. You get a fresh new calendar, you start writing dates on it. When you are writing a plan, what you are putting in your calendar with a time and a place that you want to do the action you've agreed to make sure that you're always deciding what goes into your calendar from a place of love for your current and future self. Next, choose one priority. Some people choose a priority a day. Some people choose three priorities a day, but a priority means one, and it means that you are gonna give your best energy to one thing at a time with small steps that move you in the direction. Those small steps are called practices. We do not want to have 14 practice steps that will be overwhelming. We want one to three. And we want to know when we will do them, and when we will not be doing them. So say your goal was to reorganize your kitchen. You might decide you're working on it Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which means on Tuesday when your human brain says you should go work on the kitchen, you know that you've already decided the answer is no. And then your practice step might be, take all the cups off of shelf two, wash the shelf, donate 50% of the cups. And put the rest back. That's how small the practice steps should be. And then finally, you want to review and tweak and make any adjustments needed. We encourage you to do this weekly, monthly, yearly and seasonally. It's the second and third time that you do this that you'll really start to see the incredible value of having a protocol. Today we're focusing on a protocol, a time and energy budget. The starting place is for you to notice the reality of how you are currently organizing your life. How do you know where you need to be, when you need to be there, when you need to leave, when you need to come home? Do you use a paper calendar? Do you put a bunch of sticky notes or small pieces of paper all over your house? Do you keep everything on a computer? The first step is to just notice where you are now. Notice your energy. Notice how many blocks a day you want to decide to name. I often say just start with three blocks a day. The block might be, um, before the kids leave for school, while the kids are at school and after school. And all we're doing with those blocks is saying, over the course of a week, do the blocks contain different? Goals, different areas of my life that are important to me. So some of the areas that you want to notice, are they showing up in your life? Are you, are you taking care of your soul, your mind, and your body? How about those relationships that are important to you? Are they getting the time and energy that you want to dedicate to them? How about the responsibilities, the things you've said yes to? Some are for pay, some are not for pay, but you're gonna need to consider each of those. Don't forget your home. That's one of the responsibilities. Do you notice what your dream is? What is the reason you were put here? Is there a book inside of you, a company you want to launch? Do you want to host groups of women to come over and get really good at doing art? Whatever it is, is that showing up in your calendar? And finally, where's the joy and the fun in your life that's making it a vibrant life? So there's a little photo at the bottom of this workshop that shows all the different colors for the different areas of life. Maybe red is you and your soul. Blue might be the work that you're doing for pay green may be responsibilities you have, like bringing a child to soccer. Practice different colors. Make it easier for you to notice at a glance. Are you staying with more of an aligned and harmonious life? Balance is imperfect, right? You cannot give every area of your life exactly the same percentage, but are you finding harmony? Are there weeks where maybe you're leaning into the work responsibilities? But they're offset later by weeks where you're putting more time and energy into the responsibilities that are important to you. As you're creating this protocol, this time and energy budget, make sure that it's working for you. Are you giving your own life the attention that you want to are the different areas of your life? Showing up in a way that equals, um, a feeling of balance and alignment. It does not mean equal. Right. You cannot give every area of your life the exact same time and energy all the time. That's important to know as a mom, if you have a bunch of children, you cannot give them all the equal amount of time and energy, right? Sometimes you're gonna lean into one and sometimes the other. That doesn't mean there's less love, it's just the reality of life. And so if you choose three to five colors to represent the three to five life areas, as you begin to allocate time, which we call blocks, you'll begin to see some patterns. And so once you've allocated the time and the energy. That you want to allocate to the different areas of your life, you'll begin to create a template and your template should look something like that picture. There should be white space. It should not be full every moment of every day from six in the morning till midnight. Now, if that's the reality of where you are today, we must notice where we are. And then make the decision that we're moving in a different direction, and that might be, I'm not saying yes to any new things, so that as different projects and things that I've said yes, to come to an end white space will return to my life. Then. So a protocol begins with this idea, what do I want to do and what do I not want to? And so if you're watching this on the recording, take a moment to pause it here and brainstorm what you're noticing. What are your thoughts and what are your feelings about the things that you want to do, have to do, need to do? Just take a moment and notice, I'm noticing that I have to do five hours of work a day, but I'm noticing I don't want to do two of those things every single day without any judgment, without a need to find a solution. Just notice. Once you've given yourself some time to notice what you're thinking and feeling about the reality of what your life is today. Next, we want to take a different page of your journal and download all of your responsibilities. A responsibility is something you've said yes to. It might be work for pay. It might be volunteer work. It might be all the different parts of your home that you're responsible for. It might be the relationships where you've agreed to drive somebody somewhere. Whatever it is, take a moment and download all of your responsibilities. Don't forget. The things that make you, you, your soul care. So if you're somebody who's like, I need to go to the gym to be the best version of me, write that down. But you might notice, I need to go for a walk with a friend. That's how I take care of my body and it's not showing up in my current calendar. Just download it so that we can start to notice where we can put it into your protocol. Are there places and things that you want to be doing, people you want to see? Take that moment and write it all down. If you are finding your life to be past capacity, nothing's gone wrong. Just we haven't done this work yet, and so you're going to notice that you might need to start saying some nos in order to say yes to the important things like caring for yourself and putting time and energy into your dream. You are going to begin to notice that it is time to choose what you want to do and what you don't want to do, and in order to make those decisions, we're using what's called the Eisenhower Matrix. It's been said that President Eisenhower used this to decide what tasks he would do. And have you ever thought, thought of that before? How the president of the United States and a toddler both get 24 hours in a day? So we've all been given the same amount of time. We do have different energy and that is something that we can work on. But with the 24 hours, what are things you want to do? What are things you want to delegate? What things need to be scheduled in order to happen? And what things for this season do you need to let go of? And so if something is urgent and important. That means you need to do it and most likely you are doing it. So urgent and important might be you're driving along and your car tire hits something and runs out of air. You can't keep driving, so you will get the tire replaced. It's urgent and important, but what about when something is not urgent and important? I would think of like an oil change. You'll need to schedule it if you don't decide. To schedule, okay, I'm getting my oil change on Tuesday at three o'clock. It probably won't happen, and then you could actually destroy the whole engine. It's important. It's just not urgent. What about when something is not important, but it is urgent? It's urgent to somebody else, but it's not important. Um, those are harder decisions, but if possible, you want to delegate it. And then finally when something you realize is both not important and not urgent, it's important to eliminate it for now. And why are you doing it? Because we do so much of our life on repeat. And so just taking the time to notice, I would like to do the following things, and that means I'm going to have to say no to something. I'll have to eliminate something that I've been doing for a long time and. When you make those decisions, you can expect to feel uncomfortable. Our brain likes to do the same thing on repeat over and over again, but you can feel uncomfortable. It's a vibration in your body. And if you can close your eyes, put your hands on your heart deciding and just allow it, notice it, it's going to get a little bit bigger, but then it will be processed out. So that's the first step in a protocol is deciding that you have 100% of the energy you have. Where do you want to invest it? That's the good news. You and I have been given the authority to do the work of deciding the protocol.

Speaker 4: 11:10

Thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage 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 tits life coach, or visit my website kelly tibbits.com and look forward to connecting again soon.