The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

210 ⎸ My Secret to Managing Time & Prioritizing What Matters

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 210

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In this episode, I'm sharing one of my most game-changing strategies - my Sunday evening planning ritual. If you're feeling overwhelmed juggling kids, home life, and building your business, this 15-20 minute weekly practice will help you take back control of your time and align your week with what truly matters.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How to implement a Sunday planning ritual
  • The exact tools I use
  • How I organize my entire week in under 20 minutes
  • My secret methodology for finding 20 extra hours in your week when you're building a side hustle while working full-time

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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In today's episode I am going to walk you through planning your week and planning out Your calendar and the work that you do so that if you are feeling overwhelmed maybe you're trying to manage kids manage a home life a side hustle or a full blown business like I am I wanna talk about one of the things that has made a huge difference for me which is my Sunday evening planning ritual But before I dive into the how to I do wanna pause and take a moment To talk about something a little bit deeper If your kids are still young please soak it up I know it is easier said than done and pretty much anyone that you talk to who has older kids your parents your grandparents everyone says it goes by in a blink of an eye and it truly does I personally have a 20-year-old a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old so I have experienced All of the age ranges when it comes to kids and what they say actually is true it goes by so quickly So while I know you probably want to hustle and build your business And get to where you want to go because you're here you're listening to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast You're probably also an ambitious person and sometimes rituals like this are going to be very very helpful in helping you take a step back and reprioritize so that you don't get sucked into that hamster wheel of continuing to do more and more and more to reach your goals So I've been in this situation If you are feeling this if you have been here since I started this podcast What I'm gonna talk about today is not necessarily going to be new for you if you've listened from all the way from the beginning but I'm gonna be adding some refreshed takes on some of that content And if you haven't listened binge listened to the whole entire podcast like it's over 200 episodes by this point So I'm not expecting you to go back and listen to the beginning but some of those earlier episodes were so Like the content in them is timeless and they were such good episodes but I was just a baby podcaster so I kind of wanted to redo some of the older episodes with kind of what I've learned so far some of the things that I still still do in practice and wanted to share those with you today So let's dive in Okay so let's talk about the ritual And I call this Planning ritual A ritual because to me it feels special It is a part of my self-care It is part of making sure that I am prioritizing my work and my life according to my values Because even when we identify our values and we know what we want out of things sometimes we have to be reminded And this ritual helps me keep all of that Front of mind And for me it's a ritual Whatever you wanna call it you can call it that But the point is I want you to carve out time every week for me I do this on a Sunday usually or sometimes a Saturday It depends on what I have going on on the weekend But I'll take 15 to 20 minutes to map out my entire week so that I don't start the week feeling blindsided I have the goals that I want to accomplish I have my priorities outlined and I've written them down and looked at them and really thought about how I want to spend the week And also taken into account some of the obligations that I have whether it's work or family or whatever And then filling in from there So what it looks like in a nutshell is I open several tools I usually I've gotten to the point where now I'm not doing so much client work because I have a team But if you are doing a lot of client work I want you to open your project management system whatever that is And if you are like me and you also like to have a paper planner so At the very beginning I would open up these three tools I'll just go through it like this and I'll just kind of talk you through how I've changed things But I would open up Asana because that's my project management system It still is Today I would open up my passion planner and I have it right here This thing goes with me Everywhere Pretty much Wherever I take my laptop and my work I bring this with me I don't carry it in my purse or anything like that And as you can see in this video I have this awesome little pen holder that one of my team members made all of us because we all here at the Ambitious Bookkeeper and at my firm we all use a passion planner I've gotten my whole team hooked on it I pay for them all too Get a passion planner either every year if they use the annual one like I do or a passion planner also has a quarterly type planner And so someone a couple maybe a couple people on my team have opted for the quarterly planners They're more of a daily spread and so I pay for that It's office supplies This is helping my team be productive and reach their goals Therefore we're reaching the company goals as a whole So one of our team members made this cool little pen pouch and she sewed it And this is my passion planner So I will link below some sample Spreads I guess some downloads that Passion Planner has available for downloads so you can print them out and kind of practice or just kind of see what it's like to fill it in because they have different sized planners This one's the medium one the one that I use the very first time I got the passion planner I got this small one because it's like Small enough to fit in a purse but I don't have very small handwriting so it was really hard to scrunch everything in the spaces And so you can download their worksheets to see how big your handwriting is and what size would be good for you So I use the medium one and there is a I'll just pull up a previous week Because as I am recording this I actually haven't used my planner in like a week or two because I was on vacation So I left it at home That was like the only time I didn't take it with me But this is previous some previous weeks As you can see it's got a, um, a full week spread I use the Monday to Sunday version You can do a Sunday to Saturday version I start my work weeks on Mondays and so I prefer the Monday to Sunday one and I buy the dated one You can also buy an undated planner and write in the dates however you want So basically it has a weak spread It has a section for this week's focus Good things that happened It has A section at the top of each day For today's focus for me I usually mark which days I have my kids because I have them 50% of the time And I will usually write people's birthdays at the top If there's somebody's birthday I don't wanna forget to call them or whatever I also have all of this in my phone calendar which I'm gonna talk about in a moment Also there's like cool little quotes and some self-care challenges usually on each week Then there's a personal to-do list and A work to-do list and then there's a blank space It's called the space of infinite possibility and that's usually where I end up jotting down notes or ideas or whatever comes up throughout the week Sometimes this is the only paper I have in front of me when I'm on a meeting so I will write notes from a meeting on And yeah and then there's like ribbons to mark your place I always buy the tabs so that I can quickly flip between months And then there's also a month monthly calendar at every new month And some various things All these things are available on the Passion Planner website so I'm not gonna go too far into depth But in the back there's also some blank pages and some bulleted pages That you can use they also started putting in habit trackers at the beginning of the planner but one of my favorite features is actually The passion roadmap And this is what I do There's two sections in the book where you can do this at the beginning of the year and midyear and this is a really great way to just map out your goals And there's like lifetime goals three year goals one year goals and three month goals I love doing that exercise I love goal setting If you're listening to this podcast you probably do too So get yourself a passion planner All the links will be below this podcast So that's the first step I grab my passion planner I open it up to the new week and I will do this as we're talking So At the time that I'm recording this it's the end of July And I can't believe we're about to be in August but my kids are going back to school this week so I will open up that this upcoming week spread and I will open up like I said before when I was doing a lot of client work I would open up Asana There's not very many tasks for me in Asana anymore but I still check it every so often So it's a good idea to even if you're in a position like me where you have a team There might be a few tasks assigned to you Open it up make sure there's nothing pressing coming up And it's also a good time to check off all the tasks that you forgot to check off throughout the week And then if there's any other place that you keep a running list of goals or things that you wanna do like in your notes app or your reminders app Little things that pop up It's a good idea to open that up as well And then the other thing is I have a bunch of different calendars I have Google calendars I have apple calendars but they all sync to my phone So I always have my phone here during this exercise as well because I'll pull up my phone to see what appointments and everything I have for the week coming up So if I were doing this this week I would flip to like the weekly view If you flip your phone over to the side it'll show you like a weekly view of your week if you're on an iPhone And so I will look at what upcoming appointments I have and just start transferring stuff and writing it into my passion planner for any kids activities Appointments that we have any actual calls I have scheduled on my calendar and anything like that I also in each day there's time slots so I will actually write in the time slots that I plan to work out the time slots that I plan to eat lunch the time slots where I have to leave to pick up the kids or whatever that may be So that You can visually see where everything is at on your calendar and how much actual time you have left to work So this is when I start kind of looking at my calendar and analyzing okay I've got some stuff on my calendar that Like maybe one day for instance for me Thursday looks like a pretty full day That's also my kid's first day of school So if I were in a position where I that felt overwhelming for me I would be looking at that and being like I'm actually looking at it right now and saying okay given that I know this is my kid's first day of school is this realistic for me to be having a call?

At 9:00 AM a call at 10:

00 AM and a call at noon Oh and I have another call at like one 30 Well they all fall in between the hours of school so I'm okay with this but there is one call on here that I could potentially push out further It's a podcast interview so this is the work that I do when I sit down to do the my ritual is I actually Look at what's on my calendar and analyze things like am I gonna do I think I'm gonna have the energy for all of that that day? Do I think I'm gonna overdo it? Do I need to reschedule stuff? Or is there stuff on my calendar that I can just flat out cancel? I get really I get aggressive with guarding my time these days And so I look at each thing on my calendar with that level of scrutiny So I will go through that and then I will start writing in my calendar all of these things So I used to be kind of meticulous and I would have a color for all of my kids' appointments and activities A certain color for My personal stuff like working out or you know a sauna appointment or whatever And then a third color for anything Ambitious bookkeeping related and then a fourth color for anything Firm related or client related Nowadays I just use whatever pen I have handy because done is better than perfect So don't get all in your head about having to have a pretty planner just use what you have And honestly there's sometimes that I actually prefer to just use a pencil because things change And so I like to be able to erase things So I write in my Non-negotiables into my planner and that is like things that I'm carving out time for like working out kids activities things like that And family commitments And then I'm looking to see what else Is in my project management system that's coming due That actually is a non-negotiable It's a deadline that has to be hit and I'm putting that in there And then I'm looking to see all right what times do I actually have to work? And through this exercise is where I actually discovered that I was booking myself up for way too many things on my calendar And I rarely had enough time to actually do client work during the business day And so I was ending up doing things at night and on the weekends And if you have never done this exercise and you feel like you never have time to do the actual client work this might be part of why So I highly encourage you to do this exercise For a few weeks and let me know what you discover And so through this process is when I decided to always always block off a full day in the middle of the week for deep work And so for me that's Wednesday I also changed my Acuity calendar to only allow appointments on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then Fridays I also don't have available for appointments Because I tend to like my kids get outta school early on Fridays I don't like having appointments on Mondays 'cause it gives me anxiety And so I like to ease into the work week and reserve that day for my own personal appointments or maybe doing some project work or deep work or things that I want to get done I also have like my guitar lessons on Mondays usually Monday's my day Friday is usually I end up doing some work on Fridays I just don't take calls And I don't work all day because the kids get out early So that is how I came up with that schedule and it's worked out Nobody has complained about not being able to meet with me very often So the next thing that I do is after I look at everything that's on my you know in my project management system On my weekly calendar with appointments and all that kind of stuff I set my main focus and that's where that the beginning of the Passion Planner where you go through like a goal setting exercise This is where I set a main focus related to some of those bigger goals So for instance right now it's July It's the end of July We're about to go into a launch for the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops And so that's been my main focus for the past several weeks So any extra time that I get to do any extra work that's not client related or anything that's not urgent that's been my main focus is doing launch related stuff So sending emails to my affiliates and Writing emails and refreshing things for the program and things like that So that's where in the Passion Planner you can write your main focus up in this corner So for me it would be BBW which is our abbreviation for the Bookkeeping Biz Workshops And yeah so that's the main focus And then I in the work to do list down at the bottom and the personal to-do list area this is where I'm going to be writing the big things in that like we're in Asana that need to get done For instance if it's a payroll week I write down in the Work to-do list payroll and I usually put that on like the Wednesday that it's due as well up at the top of the planner Any big tasks or project related things that I need to focus on go in that to-do list? So the main focus for instance this week is the launch but there are some subtasks within that that I would Have written down but I've done already But like one of 'em is refresh the emails that go out So it would be like emails And then for this upcoming week one of those task lists is going to be refreshing the slides because I am redoing not redoing the content but I am refreshing the content We were condensing it into three days and making each workshop a little bit longer So I'm moving some of the content around and I need to carve out time to work on those slides probably like a full day The next thing that I do is sometimes I do this earlier on actually before I even write everything in But I will look back at the previous week in that like little work to do section and last week I was on vacation so there's nothing there But down in the work to do list from a previous week I have two things that aren't checked off but I actually did But if they had not been done they wouldn't be checked off And what I would do is do like I learned this a long time when I was learning how to do like bullet journaling or I think that's what it was called where if you carry over a task you just put an arrow to the right meaning like I didn't do it this week but I'm gonna do it next week And then you put it on the new list So That's usually what I do I carry over anything that didn't get done from the previous week that still needs to be done or I look at that last week and say okay do I actually still need to do that? If not I'm just gonna cross it off So that's the next thing that I do And the last thing pretty much that I do is another We kind of already went over this but just a reality check on your schedule Look at how much time you actually have versus how much time you actually want to work And this is the thing that's going to keep you from overloading your weeks and over committing to things this whole process is what keeps me realistic and grounded and following my goals and my priorities Yes we have to continuously reprioritize as business owners My eyes probably like yours if you're ambitious are often much bigger than your actual capacity Especially if you have kids at home And then one other thing that I want to touch on is the idea of and you get this whole like bonus training inside of my program when you join It's how to get 20 extra Hours in your week But the short version of that is this is the methodology that I used when I was studying for the CPA exam in order to add up 20 hours a week in studying while I was working full time and I had a kid at home So not this planning part that we're talking about but what I'm about to say right now is If you work a full-time job and you're like okay Serena like this is great You are able to like plan out exactly how you want your days to go and like you get to decide how much time you have left and all that good stuff Yes that's something to look forward to when you go full-time in your business But if you're not there yet and you are starting this as a side hustle right now and you're wondering like when the heck am I actually gonna have time to build a business so that I can leave my job the truth of the matter is you are going to have to make a sacrifice Just like when I was studying for the CPA exam I had to make sacrifices I did not have a social life Like very rarely did I ever agree to go do anything socially because what I did was I woke up an hour earlier than normal every single weekday and got in an hour worth of studying before my daughter got up and was getting ready for school And then I studied for an hour on my lunch break at work every day So there's two extra hours each day that if you really want to do this and make this happen you can add into your day And then the other thing that I did is I studied for two hours every evening And so if you have a full-time job After your kids go to bed if you don't have kids great This will be a lot easier for you after work you spend two more hours doing something that is going to drive you toward starting this business or gaining clients or working on client work if you have clients already then I also would carve out several hours on each weekend day So yes you are going to have to make a sacrifice somewhere And it's worth it if you really want to build a business where you can replace your corporate income So that's the methodology that I used for studying for the CPA exam I ended up adding 20 extra hours to my week not like technically but in this process two hours or an hour each morning An hour at lunch So that's two hours a day for five days That's 10 hours a week and then two hours every evening That's another 10 hours that doesn't even include weekends So if you have some days where it's little less then you can make up for it by working for a few hours on the weekends to get where you want to go in your business All that being said this is not something that I am perfect at and I don't expect you to be perfect at it It's a constant like I said like there's weeks in here where I have nothing on the calendar I don't do this religiously every week but when I do I notice the difference I'm much more prepared for the week coming up I've adjusted my schedule to really align with my priorities and my goals and it makes me feel way more in control of my time and where things are headed So if you Try your own Sunday or Saturday or whatever day you decide to do this on ritual or if you already have a similar system in place I want you to hop on over to Instagram and share it with me I'm at Ambitious Bookkeeper I'd love to see how you make this process your own and how quickly it propels you towards your goals and aligns you with your values So until next week Take a deep breath plan with intention and I want you to give yourself permission to create space for the moments that we just can't get back So plan your weeks accordingly and work it around your priorities your family your values and I'll talk to you next week

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