3. Intentional Time Management
We need to plan for life because, whether we’re ready for it or not, it’s happening. As interior designers, we’re creatives at heart, so I know a lot of you might be cringing when I mention time management. But the truth is, if you want to be the CEO of your interior design business, intentional planning and time management are non-negotiable.
Today, I’m introducing you to one of the five steps that comprise the Out of Overwhelm Process I use with my clients: Intentional Planning. This is essential work for any interior designer because bringing in this intentionality really helps you get to the root of the issues you need to solve for in your business, like the overwhelm that we discussed last week.
Discover some practical approaches to making more effective use of your time, and how to start implementing them. I’m sharing all the other things that become clearer when you start planning and using your time intentionally, to get you out of overwhelm, people-pleasing, or anything else that needs addressing in your business.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m giving away gift cards to Jayson Home, one of my favorite home decor sources. All you have to do to become one of the five lucky listeners to win is follow, rate, and review this podcast.
Please leave your honest feedback, and click here to learn how to enter!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
How to see where you’re overcommitted, scattered in your actions, and cramming too much into your days.
The important difference between being productive versus being effective.
Why time management is about so much more than just having a time-blocked calendar.
How coaching around time management helps my clients uncover people-pleasing, limiting beliefs, and a lack of boundaries.
The 3 foundational pillars of intentional planning.
Why constraint, structure, and intentional planning are key to creating freedom in both your life and business.
How, despite what you may currently believe, time management gets to be doable, simple, and something you can actually embrace.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
Enter the podcast launch giveaway by leaving a rating and review! Click here to learn how to enter.
If you love what you’re learning on the show, I’d love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode three. This is the one where I’m sharing the three pillars of intentional time management.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designers, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so thrilled to be here with you today. We have a great topic to talk about. It's so appropriate for today because I have a child sick at home and we're talking all about intentional planning or intentional time management. And we need to plan for life to happen because life does happen, whether we're ready for it or not. And that's one of those days for me today, but I'm making this happen.
And I'm excited to talk to you because we're going to be talking about one of the five steps in the Out of Overwhelm process that I teach my clients. It is really essential to learn to intentionally manage your time if you want to be the CEO of your interior design business. And I know you might be cringing, all you creatives, when I say time management, but I want you to keep listening.
I love coaching on time, because it stirs the pot, if you will. It helps me really get to the root issues that we need to solve for in a client's business. Now, there's some really practical approaches to making effective use of your time. And when we start to implement those and dive into that work, we start to see what also needs to be addressed.
So it might be the people pleasing, or needing to establish a best fit client filter, or learning to say no and set expectations and so on. So time management is about so much more than a time blocked calendar, and that's why we start with the mindset, learn to plan intentionally and also coach on all those other things that come up when you look at how you're using and planning your time.
In the last episode we talked a lot about the mindset of overwhelm and the thoughts and feelings that are keeping you stuck and spinning day to day. Today we're going to look at the strategy behind getting yourself out of overwhelm through time management. You're going to learn the three foundational pillars of intentional planning and how you can start applying these tools today. I'm also going to share why time management gets to be simple, doable, and something you can actually embrace.
Before we do that, I want to share a win from my Out of Overwhelm community. This is a client who is coming back from maternity leave. This is her second child, and she shared an amazing win that I want to share with you today. It's, “I'm learning to honor my current capacity. I'm giving myself grace, procrastinating less, feeling less behind, and setting realistic goals. The daily planner from the program has been so useful for me again and again in retraining my brain that I'm in charge and I create the deadlines.”
So this is amazing, because we can combine the really practical tools of time management, or intentional planning as I like to call it, with the mindset. So if you want to get a taste of what that looks like, I want you to head over to desicreswell.com/planner and download the Interior Designers Get it Done Daily Planner. This will give you a little taste of what the planner that I use with my clients looks like. So definitely get that. And we'll also dive in now to our topic.
So when clients start working with me I often hear these common phrases, I'm always putting out fires. I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I need to get off this hamster wheel. Are you getting the idea? I'm guessing you can relate because you're probably over committed, over scheduled, scattered in your actions, and trying to cram too much into your day too. These are signs that you're not managing your time as effectively as you could be.
When you're just starting out with your business you can kind of get away with this because you might not have a full roster of clients, so you've got this wiggle room. But then you start to get busy. You're working with more clients and you're working on bigger projects. You're building or managing a team and you want to continue to market yourself to consistently sign those ideal clients and build out your business.
The types of clients I work with are past that initial phase of starting things up and it's kind of like the snowball that starts to chase them down the hill, if you will. Your business becomes this runaway train. Lots of metaphors here, right? So you find yourself working nights and weekends just really trying to keep up, you start feeling resentful of the work and your clients. And even though you're working all the time, your profits really aren't reflecting the time that you're putting in working on things.
This becomes a major issue, and it's one that you have to address in order to create a sustainable, profitable business you're actually going to enjoy running. The solution is learning to effectively manage your time. Now, notice that I'm saying you need to be effective, not productive. Being productive and being effective are not the same thing.
You can be very productive and get a lot of things checked off your to-do list, but you might not actually be moving the needle on your projects, whether that is your client projects or the back end projects in your business that are going to actually create the business that you want. That's why it's so important to understand that productivity is not the same as effectiveness. So I want to be very clear about that.
The other thing I want to address now is that many of the designers I talk to want to learn to manage their time in theory, because they hear it's the thing to do. They hear it's really a good idea. But then there's also this underlying belief that managing your time is going to dampen your creativity or that you're just simply bad at it. As in you have no hope, you were not born with the time management gene, and you might as well not try.
So I think those are both common misconceptions. And time management really isn't about a perfectly time blocked calendar. Although some of my clients do love their color coded Google Calendar. I have clients who are on that end of the spectrum, and then I also have some who are much looser with how they do it, but the common thread is intentionality. And when you have intentionality, you create freedom.
What I like to call it is freedom within the framework. You have limits that actually support you and allow you to be more creative and allow you to be more expansive. So taking control of your schedule in your business is about planning intentionally. And intentional planning is step one of the five step process I teach in my group program Out Of Overwhelm. This intentional planning is what is going to create the freedom in both your life and business.
I want to talk about, again, what this means to plan intentionally. The definition of intentionality is to be deliberate or to do something on purpose. This isn't the same thing as planning perfectly or having things go exactly the way that you planned them to go because, like I said, life happens, business happens, things come up. So if the only way that you can be good at time management is if you plan your day to the minute and have everything go exactly as planned, this is not going to work out well.
What we're talking about is deciding in advance where you're headed, what you want to achieve and pointing yourself in that direction, rather than running on default or letting the outside world, or your clients, create a plan for you. This involves making conscious decisions as the business owner for the health and wealth of your business.
Today I'm going to walk you through three pillars that support intentional planning. These pillars can be applied to your business on a more global scale, but today I'm going to be talking about them in more of the context of daily or weekly intentional planning.
The first pillar to consider is constraint or limits. Now, if you're feeling resistant to this, hear me out. I want you to think about if I gave you a piece of paper or maybe a blank Google document and I said just write about whatever you want. For a lot of you that will probably put you in freeze mode. Am I right? But if I were to say write me a couple of sentences about what you see in your office, you have some very clear direction. This is an example of giving yourself constraint or limits.
When you limit the number of things you're working on at once, you're able to focus in and get started and start taking action. So when you are thinking that constraint or limits is going to box you in or be this cage you're putting yourself in, I want you to consider that you're totally wrong about that and that you're actually creating freedom and focus. You're developing the skill of knowing what is for now, what's for later, what's possibly for never, and what's important for you to focus on in the moment.
Constraint could also look a lot of different ways. It could be having a list of core vendors you source from before looking elsewhere. It could be having dedicated time slots for when you're in the office for creative work and when you schedule appointments out of the office. It could be grouping similar tasks together, like order tracking or communication to create flow for your non-creative work. And it could be leaning into one business back end project at a time, planning out your steps and not layering in anything else until it's complete.
Constraint can also mean the absence of context switching. Context switching is that ping pong from one thing to the next. You're emailing someone and then you're on CAD drawing, and then you're on your phone, and then you're checking Instagram. Context switching costs you hours and hours every single day. It is a huge expense of your time, energy, and attention and actual dollars that you are losing out on in your business.
When you practice constraint, this is where you can develop the skill of focus. And this is something I teach my clients to do because it's an actual skill, it's a muscle that you build up. And I'm sure I'll do an entire podcast on that at some point. But get started by only having the thing that you're working on out at that time or open on your computer. This is a great way to just simply get started with constraint.
The second pillar I want you to consider is decisions ahead of time. Decisions ahead of time means deciding in advance what you're doing. So that's deciding what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and approximately how much time you want to give yourself to complete the task. Why do we do this? This is going to set you up for success.
When we think about intentional planning, we want to consider the two different parts of the brain that can run the show. There's the primitive part of the brain that's really that in the moment, I could call it the toddler part of the brain. And then there's the prefrontal cortex.
So that primitive toddler part of the brain is like the little toddler who wants candy, or their iPad and they want it now, right? I think all of you with younger children, we've seen some tantrums, that's your primitive brain. It’s most concerned with expanding the least amount of effort and maximizing pleasure. This isn't a bad part, it's also the part of the brain that helps us avoid danger. But it's definitely not the part of your brain you want driving your day. This is going to leave you being reactive and avoiding the harder parts of your business.
The prefrontal cortex has your best interests in mind. I like to think of it as the wise adult that knows you shouldn't eat candy right before bed. This is the part of your brain you want to plan with. And when you make decisions ahead of time, you bring that prefrontal cortex on line. When you make decisions ahead of time it does two things, the first is that it lessens that internal drama. All those internal negotiations of should I, shouldn’t I? What should I do? Should I do this? Should I do that? Maybe I should do that. All those shiny pennies.
All of that is brought up by the primitive brain in the moment. There's always going to be things that come up in your day or in your business that are maybe unexpected, or something happens on a job site that you do need to be reactive to. But when you decide your focus and priorities for the day ahead of time, you're ensuring that you take action that aligns with your longer term goals, even when things come up.
So when things come up, you can always decide ahead of time when you'll address those more reactive tasks, or even decide to have a time each day set aside for those types of things.
The other thing that decisions ahead of time helps us do, is it shifts us into clarity and focus by helping us create the thought, “I know what to do.” What this might look like in practice could be deciding ahead of time what will make your week a success. What are you going to accomplish? And based on that what would be a priority you're going to hit each and every day of the week?
The Get it Done Daily Planner that I mentioned before is going to help you guide these decisions and will help you end the day feeling accomplished, knowing what you're doing, when you're doing it, how you're doing it. And it's also going to help you figure out what to delegate or defer and possibly even delete. So if you didn't download it already, definitely go to desicreswell.com/planner so you can start using these tools immediately.
So decide right now what your top priority for the day is. Write it down somewhere and put it somewhere where you can see it. And then remember, when you get new input, maybe a request from a client or contractor or you get a certain email that requires some action. Remember that if you're saying yes to another thing, you're saying no to what you've already decided was important for the day.
Yes, there are going to be things that come up that you do need to address more reactively. But I want you to be aware of the trade off and make a conscious decision. Think through your day. When can you get this thing done that you decided is a priority? What do you think might be an appropriate amount of time that would allow you to create that result?
Deciding approximately how much time you're going to give something is so important because it allows you to map out what you can realistically accomplish in a day. This is a huge challenge that I see my clients face, is that they're not planning for reality. They're planning for too much in a single day. And often, this is our brain’s sneaky way of doing things, but we think that because there's so much to do that we have to over schedule ourselves in order to fit it all in. But over scheduling actually ends up slowing you down.
If you think about the model, which I explained in the previous episode, which shows us how we're thinking, feeling, and then acting because of our thoughts. When you have the thought there's so much to do, that is what is driving the over scheduling. And when we over schedule, we end up having more negative self-talk, we're more scattered, and it actually creates the result of us doing less.
When you keep yourself focused on the decisions you make ahead of time, you get so much more done. Plus, you're going to actually enjoy the process of moving throughout the day. Then I want you to consider pillar number three. And that's simplicity and specificity. That is at the root of everything I teach. When you're working with the first two pillars, it's essential that you keep things simple and specific with your planning.
Simplicity. and specificity is really a workaround for your thoughts that tend to pop up when there's large vague items on your to do list. When your brain encounters something vague like, create Johnson concept, or create onboarding materials, it's really easy for the brain to throw up thoughts like, this is going to take a long time, or I don't know where to start. And then these types of thoughts generate the feeling of maybe resistance, dread, confusion, or even indecision.
So remember, emotions are the fuel for everything we do or don't do. Consider the action you're going to take from resistance. That's going to be an inaction. When you're feeling confused you might be spinning or mentally procrastinating. And when you have the thought, “I don't know where to start,” you don't even get started. So we don't want to be using those types of emotions as fuel for the action we want to take.
Whether you're working on a client project or something on your back end, break it down into mini results or tasks that you can complete in about 15 to 60 minute chunks. These mini results must be specific. So in the examples I gave before, you'll want to define specifically what part of the project you're going to work on when you make decisions ahead of time.
For the onboarding document example this might be research a graphic designer or email two designers to set up a consultation for the graphic design. Or it could be select five images for the visuals. Or write a welcome paragraph.
Notice how small and specific and simple those steps are. It's going to make it so much easier than if you see, “Create onboarding document.” It's always going to be about focusing on the next best step, that way you don't have to worry about everything you want to accomplish this year or even this week. It's just the next simple step, that's what you plan.
When you keep it simple and specific you can make consistent progress on anything. And I love this because not only are you just going to be taking more effective action, it allows my busy interior designers to create time and space to work on the things like marketing, their CEO tasks, understanding their financials, those bigger projects that you really need to have a handle on in your business, but often get lost in the day to day.
I want you to think about planning intentionally as one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your business. This is how you're going to stop running yourself ragged and feeling like you're working all the time and not making enough money. When you make decisions ahead of time, you can actually start and end your weeks knowing you have a plan so you can be off when you're off and on when you're on. Isn't that what we all want? I mean, come on, it's the best.
And then when you know how long things take, you're actually going to understand your true capacity. So you can plan for the number of projects you can comfortably handle at a time. And then that can inform the fees you need to set and your sales goals for selling product, and what that overall financial picture looks like for the year.
When you keep your to-dos simple and specific you're going to make consistent progress, and there is nothing more satisfying than that. So much better than worrying about being behind. And then when you're constrained or have those limits, you get the benefit of focus. You get to see your efforts to completion and feel that immense pride that comes with doing what you say you're going to do and following through.
I have so much more to share on this when it comes to taking control of your schedule and your business. So don't worry, we're going to be diving more into this as the podcast continues to unfold. In the meantime, let's go over those three pillars we talked about today.
The first one being constraints or limits, and that's narrowing your focus and being deliberate with what you do and don't take on. The second pillar is decisions ahead of time, deciding what you're doing, when you're doing it and for how long. And the third pillar is specificity and simplicity, breaking down those larger to-dos into concrete tasks, you can systematically complete.
Here's your homework for the week, pick just one thing you heard today on the podcast to focus in on for your next week. You do not have to implement all of these pillars in order to start seeing the impact. You're going to get so much more traction if you constrain your focus and decide ahead of time what specifically you're going to implement from this episode.
Now, do you see how I just snuck in the three pillars even in just deciding how you're going to do your takeaways? Yes, constrain, simplicity, decisions ahead of time, it's where it's at. All right, that's what I've got for you on this episode. I'm wishing you a beautiful week and I can't wait to talk to you in the next episode.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I'm going to be giving away gift cards to Jayson Home, one of my favorite home decor sources. I'm going to be giving away $50 gift cards to five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show.
Now, it doesn't have to be a five star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an amazing show that provides tons of value. Visit desicreswell.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I'll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you're ready to take what you've learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello, designers, welcome back to the podcast. I'm so thrilled to be here with you today. We have a great topic to talk about. It's so appropriate for today because I have a child sick at home and we're talking all about intentional planning or intentional time management. And we need to plan for life to happen because life does happen, whether we're ready for it or not. And that's one of those days for me today, but I'm making this happen.
And I'm excited to talk to you because we're going to be talking about one of the five steps in the Out of Overwhelm process that I teach my clients. It is really essential to learn to intentionally manage your time if you want to be the CEO of your interior design business. And I know you might be cringing, all you creatives, when I say time management, but I want you to keep listening.
I love coaching on time, because it stirs the pot, if you will. It helps me really get to the root issues that we need to solve for in a client's business. Now, there's some really practical approaches to making effective use of your time. And when we start to implement those and dive into that work, we start to see what also needs to be addressed.
So it might be the people pleasing, or needing to establish a best fit client filter, or learning to say no and set expectations and so on. So time management is about so much more than a time blocked calendar, and that's why we start with the mindset, learn to plan intentionally and also coach on all those other things that come up when you look at how you're using and planning your time.
In the last episode we talked a lot about the mindset of overwhelm and the thoughts and feelings that are keeping you stuck and spinning day to day. Today we're going to look at the strategy behind getting yourself out of overwhelm through time management. You're going to learn the three foundational pillars of intentional planning and how you can start applying these tools today. I'm also going to share why time management gets to be simple, doable, and something you can actually embrace.
Before we do that, I want to share a win from my Out of Overwhelm community. This is a client who is coming back from maternity leave. This is her second child, and she shared an amazing win that I want to share with you today. It's, “I'm learning to honor my current capacity. I'm giving myself grace, procrastinating less, feeling less behind, and setting realistic goals. The daily planner from the program has been so useful for me again and again in retraining my brain that I'm in charge and I create the deadlines.”
So this is amazing, because we can combine the really practical tools of time management, or intentional planning as I like to call it, with the mindset. So if you want to get a taste of what that looks like, I want you to head over to desicreswell.com/planner and download the Interior Designers Get it Done Daily Planner. This will give you a little taste of what the planner that I use with my clients looks like. So definitely get that. And we'll also dive in now to our topic.
So when clients start working with me I often hear these common phrases, I'm always putting out fires. I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I need to get off this hamster wheel. Are you getting the idea? I'm guessing you can relate because you're probably over committed, over scheduled, scattered in your actions, and trying to cram too much into your day too. These are signs that you're not managing your time as effectively as you could be.
When you're just starting out with your business you can kind of get away with this because you might not have a full roster of clients, so you've got this wiggle room. But then you start to get busy. You're working with more clients and you're working on bigger projects. You're building or managing a team and you want to continue to market yourself to consistently sign those ideal clients and build out your business.
The types of clients I work with are past that initial phase of starting things up and it's kind of like the snowball that starts to chase them down the hill, if you will. Your business becomes this runaway train. Lots of metaphors here, right? So you find yourself working nights and weekends just really trying to keep up, you start feeling resentful of the work and your clients. And even though you're working all the time, your profits really aren't reflecting the time that you're putting in working on things.
This becomes a major issue, and it's one that you have to address in order to create a sustainable, profitable business you're actually going to enjoy running. The solution is learning to effectively manage your time. Now, notice that I'm saying you need to be effective, not productive. Being productive and being effective are not the same thing.
You can be very productive and get a lot of things checked off your to-do list, but you might not actually be moving the needle on your projects, whether that is your client projects or the back end projects in your business that are going to actually create the business that you want. That's why it's so important to understand that productivity is not the same as effectiveness. So I want to be very clear about that.
The other thing I want to address now is that many of the designers I talk to want to learn to manage their time in theory, because they hear it's the thing to do. They hear it's really a good idea. But then there's also this underlying belief that managing your time is going to dampen your creativity or that you're just simply bad at it. As in you have no hope, you were not born with the time management gene, and you might as well not try.
So I think those are both common misconceptions. And time management really isn't about a perfectly time blocked calendar. Although some of my clients do love their color coded Google Calendar. I have clients who are on that end of the spectrum, and then I also have some who are much looser with how they do it, but the common thread is intentionality. And when you have intentionality, you create freedom.
What I like to call it is freedom within the framework. You have limits that actually support you and allow you to be more creative and allow you to be more expansive. So taking control of your schedule in your business is about planning intentionally. And intentional planning is step one of the five step process I teach in my group program Out Of Overwhelm. This intentional planning is what is going to create the freedom in both your life and business.
I want to talk about, again, what this means to plan intentionally. The definition of intentionality is to be deliberate or to do something on purpose. This isn't the same thing as planning perfectly or having things go exactly the way that you planned them to go because, like I said, life happens, business happens, things come up. So if the only way that you can be good at time management is if you plan your day to the minute and have everything go exactly as planned, this is not going to work out well.
What we're talking about is deciding in advance where you're headed, what you want to achieve and pointing yourself in that direction, rather than running on default or letting the outside world, or your clients, create a plan for you. This involves making conscious decisions as the business owner for the health and wealth of your business.
Today I'm going to walk you through three pillars that support intentional planning. These pillars can be applied to your business on a more global scale, but today I'm going to be talking about them in more of the context of daily or weekly intentional planning.
The first pillar to consider is constraint or limits. Now, if you're feeling resistant to this, hear me out. I want you to think about if I gave you a piece of paper or maybe a blank Google document and I said just write about whatever you want. For a lot of you that will probably put you in freeze mode. Am I right? But if I were to say write me a couple of sentences about what you see in your office, you have some very clear direction. This is an example of giving yourself constraint or limits.
When you limit the number of things you're working on at once, you're able to focus in and get started and start taking action. So when you are thinking that constraint or limits is going to box you in or be this cage you're putting yourself in, I want you to consider that you're totally wrong about that and that you're actually creating freedom and focus. You're developing the skill of knowing what is for now, what's for later, what's possibly for never, and what's important for you to focus on in the moment.
Constraint could also look a lot of different ways. It could be having a list of core vendors you source from before looking elsewhere. It could be having dedicated time slots for when you're in the office for creative work and when you schedule appointments out of the office. It could be grouping similar tasks together, like order tracking or communication to create flow for your non-creative work. And it could be leaning into one business back end project at a time, planning out your steps and not layering in anything else until it's complete.
Constraint can also mean the absence of context switching. Context switching is that ping pong from one thing to the next. You're emailing someone and then you're on CAD drawing, and then you're on your phone, and then you're checking Instagram. Context switching costs you hours and hours every single day. It is a huge expense of your time, energy, and attention and actual dollars that you are losing out on in your business.
When you practice constraint, this is where you can develop the skill of focus. And this is something I teach my clients to do because it's an actual skill, it's a muscle that you build up. And I'm sure I'll do an entire podcast on that at some point. But get started by only having the thing that you're working on out at that time or open on your computer. This is a great way to just simply get started with constraint.
The second pillar I want you to consider is decisions ahead of time. Decisions ahead of time means deciding in advance what you're doing. So that's deciding what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and approximately how much time you want to give yourself to complete the task. Why do we do this? This is going to set you up for success.
When we think about intentional planning, we want to consider the two different parts of the brain that can run the show. There's the primitive part of the brain that's really that in the moment, I could call it the toddler part of the brain. And then there's the prefrontal cortex.
So that primitive toddler part of the brain is like the little toddler who wants candy, or their iPad and they want it now, right? I think all of you with younger children, we've seen some tantrums, that's your primitive brain. It’s most concerned with expanding the least amount of effort and maximizing pleasure. This isn't a bad part, it's also the part of the brain that helps us avoid danger. But it's definitely not the part of your brain you want driving your day. This is going to leave you being reactive and avoiding the harder parts of your business.
The prefrontal cortex has your best interests in mind. I like to think of it as the wise adult that knows you shouldn't eat candy right before bed. This is the part of your brain you want to plan with. And when you make decisions ahead of time, you bring that prefrontal cortex on line. When you make decisions ahead of time it does two things, the first is that it lessens that internal drama. All those internal negotiations of should I, shouldn’t I? What should I do? Should I do this? Should I do that? Maybe I should do that. All those shiny pennies.
All of that is brought up by the primitive brain in the moment. There's always going to be things that come up in your day or in your business that are maybe unexpected, or something happens on a job site that you do need to be reactive to. But when you decide your focus and priorities for the day ahead of time, you're ensuring that you take action that aligns with your longer term goals, even when things come up.
So when things come up, you can always decide ahead of time when you'll address those more reactive tasks, or even decide to have a time each day set aside for those types of things.
The other thing that decisions ahead of time helps us do, is it shifts us into clarity and focus by helping us create the thought, “I know what to do.” What this might look like in practice could be deciding ahead of time what will make your week a success. What are you going to accomplish? And based on that what would be a priority you're going to hit each and every day of the week?
The Get it Done Daily Planner that I mentioned before is going to help you guide these decisions and will help you end the day feeling accomplished, knowing what you're doing, when you're doing it, how you're doing it. And it's also going to help you figure out what to delegate or defer and possibly even delete. So if you didn't download it already, definitely go to desicreswell.com/planner so you can start using these tools immediately.
So decide right now what your top priority for the day is. Write it down somewhere and put it somewhere where you can see it. And then remember, when you get new input, maybe a request from a client or contractor or you get a certain email that requires some action. Remember that if you're saying yes to another thing, you're saying no to what you've already decided was important for the day.
Yes, there are going to be things that come up that you do need to address more reactively. But I want you to be aware of the trade off and make a conscious decision. Think through your day. When can you get this thing done that you decided is a priority? What do you think might be an appropriate amount of time that would allow you to create that result?
Deciding approximately how much time you're going to give something is so important because it allows you to map out what you can realistically accomplish in a day. This is a huge challenge that I see my clients face, is that they're not planning for reality. They're planning for too much in a single day. And often, this is our brain’s sneaky way of doing things, but we think that because there's so much to do that we have to over schedule ourselves in order to fit it all in. But over scheduling actually ends up slowing you down.
If you think about the model, which I explained in the previous episode, which shows us how we're thinking, feeling, and then acting because of our thoughts. When you have the thought there's so much to do, that is what is driving the over scheduling. And when we over schedule, we end up having more negative self-talk, we're more scattered, and it actually creates the result of us doing less.
When you keep yourself focused on the decisions you make ahead of time, you get so much more done. Plus, you're going to actually enjoy the process of moving throughout the day. Then I want you to consider pillar number three. And that's simplicity and specificity. That is at the root of everything I teach. When you're working with the first two pillars, it's essential that you keep things simple and specific with your planning.
Simplicity. and specificity is really a workaround for your thoughts that tend to pop up when there's large vague items on your to do list. When your brain encounters something vague like, create Johnson concept, or create onboarding materials, it's really easy for the brain to throw up thoughts like, this is going to take a long time, or I don't know where to start. And then these types of thoughts generate the feeling of maybe resistance, dread, confusion, or even indecision.
So remember, emotions are the fuel for everything we do or don't do. Consider the action you're going to take from resistance. That's going to be an inaction. When you're feeling confused you might be spinning or mentally procrastinating. And when you have the thought, “I don't know where to start,” you don't even get started. So we don't want to be using those types of emotions as fuel for the action we want to take.
Whether you're working on a client project or something on your back end, break it down into mini results or tasks that you can complete in about 15 to 60 minute chunks. These mini results must be specific. So in the examples I gave before, you'll want to define specifically what part of the project you're going to work on when you make decisions ahead of time.
For the onboarding document example this might be research a graphic designer or email two designers to set up a consultation for the graphic design. Or it could be select five images for the visuals. Or write a welcome paragraph.
Notice how small and specific and simple those steps are. It's going to make it so much easier than if you see, “Create onboarding document.” It's always going to be about focusing on the next best step, that way you don't have to worry about everything you want to accomplish this year or even this week. It's just the next simple step, that's what you plan.
When you keep it simple and specific you can make consistent progress on anything. And I love this because not only are you just going to be taking more effective action, it allows my busy interior designers to create time and space to work on the things like marketing, their CEO tasks, understanding their financials, those bigger projects that you really need to have a handle on in your business, but often get lost in the day to day.
I want you to think about planning intentionally as one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your business. This is how you're going to stop running yourself ragged and feeling like you're working all the time and not making enough money. When you make decisions ahead of time, you can actually start and end your weeks knowing you have a plan so you can be off when you're off and on when you're on. Isn't that what we all want? I mean, come on, it's the best.
And then when you know how long things take, you're actually going to understand your true capacity. So you can plan for the number of projects you can comfortably handle at a time. And then that can inform the fees you need to set and your sales goals for selling product, and what that overall financial picture looks like for the year.
When you keep your to-dos simple and specific you're going to make consistent progress, and there is nothing more satisfying than that. So much better than worrying about being behind. And then when you're constrained or have those limits, you get the benefit of focus. You get to see your efforts to completion and feel that immense pride that comes with doing what you say you're going to do and following through.
I have so much more to share on this when it comes to taking control of your schedule and your business. So don't worry, we're going to be diving more into this as the podcast continues to unfold. In the meantime, let's go over those three pillars we talked about today.
The first one being constraints or limits, and that's narrowing your focus and being deliberate with what you do and don't take on. The second pillar is decisions ahead of time, deciding what you're doing, when you're doing it and for how long. And the third pillar is specificity and simplicity, breaking down those larger to-dos into concrete tasks, you can systematically complete.
Here's your homework for the week, pick just one thing you heard today on the podcast to focus in on for your next week. You do not have to implement all of these pillars in order to start seeing the impact. You're going to get so much more traction if you constrain your focus and decide ahead of time what specifically you're going to implement from this episode.
Now, do you see how I just snuck in the three pillars even in just deciding how you're going to do your takeaways? Yes, constrain, simplicity, decisions ahead of time, it's where it's at. All right, that's what I've got for you on this episode. I'm wishing you a beautiful week and I can't wait to talk to you in the next episode.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I'm going to be giving away gift cards to Jayson Home, one of my favorite home decor sources. I'm going to be giving away $50 gift cards to five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show.
Now, it doesn't have to be a five star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an amazing show that provides tons of value. Visit desicreswell.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I'll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you're ready to take what you've learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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