28. Protect Your Time & Energy
Where are you losing time and energy in your business? It’s common for designers to believe they don’t have enough time, especially when it comes to the more visible tasks in your business like appointments, proposals, invoices, or client communication. However, hidden areas of your business consume your time and energy, and when you can fix them, everything else becomes more manageable.
There are hidden time and energy leaks everywhere so I’m showing you how to plug these leaks because I no longer want them to drain your precious resources. I’m also giving you an opportunity to get some live help from me on topics just like this one in the coming weeks.
Tune in this week to discover the hidden time and energy leaks you may never have noticed in your business. I’m sharing how to spot the leaks that are present in your interior design business, and showing you how to address them before you hit burnout.
If you want to know how to create focus on demand and prevent your time and energy from leaking, come join me for Coffee & Coaching on May 18th 2023 at 11am Central! Coffee & Coaching is totally free, so click here to sign up!
My brand new workshop, Freedom in the Framework, is taking place on May 9th and 11th 2023 over Zoom. This is a workshop all about time management and simple scheduling routines that will kick off enrollment for Out of Overwhelm, my signature six-month program designed to take you from overwhelmed and stressed to profitable, in control, and fulfilled! Enrollment for our summer round opens May 15th 2023 through to May 25th 2023, and Freedom in the Framework is the event that will get you started. If you want to learn how to manage your time as a creative in a way that feels both supportive and flexible, click here to get more details!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
The hidden time and energy leaks that most designers don’t notice are draining their resources.
What you can do to shift your mindset around your business's hidden time and energy leaks.
How switching between multiple tasks and projects is slowing you and your team down.
Why multitasking is a fallacy.
What second-guessing yourself looks like and how it’s consuming valuable resources in your business.
How to see the impact of these hidden time and energy leaks in your business and how to begin plugging those leaks.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
Leave me a rating and your honest feedback wherever you listen to your podcasts! Click here to learn how.
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
Follow me on Instagram!
Sign up to my Monday Mindset email list to get bite-sized insights on topics that you can use to set your week up for success!
If you loved today’s topic, let’s make sure you never miss an episode. Follow the show now wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven’t already, make the time to leave me a rating and review. As a special thank you for taking the time to share your feedback, I’ll send you a little mid-week pick-me-up in the mail, so simply screenshot your review and send me a message on Instagram!
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey, designer, you're listening to episode 28. This is the one where I’m talking about some of the hidden time and energy leaks in your interior design business.
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, designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are doing amazing. As spring is slowly starting to arrive here we've had some pretty exciting activity on our little lake that we live on. And we have a pair of bald eagles that live on the lake and they had a baby last year. And now the juvenile, who is around a year old, is in training with mom and dad.
So I was actually just looking out my office window checking to see if they're there. Sometimes I see them soaring above my desk area, which is so fun. And actually, I mean, I feel like I'm living in a real live nature show sometimes because they have been out with their little one which, I mean, is actually not that little considering it's an eagle. But they've been out and they've been training their young one.
And it's really interesting to see the difference over the weeks between the behaviors. And even just a couple of weeks ago the whole family was out in one of the yards that borders ours around the lake. And this giant baby, essentially, was so awkward and trying to move its wings. And I mean it can fly and everything, but it just looks really fluffy. The feathers on a juvenile bald eagle are not the same as the adult bald eagle.
So it's really fluffy and kind of awkward looking. And it's just been so fun. Our whole family has gotten really into it, watching the different migrating ducks that come through and different wildlife that we have. So I feel like it's like drop everything, you've got to go look. And my neighbor texted me this morning, she was like, “The loon is out.”
So anyways, that's been the excitement here for me. I hope you're all having a great week as you're listening to this. Today, we're going to talk about the hidden time and energy leaks in your business. And, of course, we're going to also talk about how to plug these leaks because I don't want it to be a drip, drip, drip for you anymore.
Often when I hear designers talk about how they don't have enough time, it's typically about the more tangible things. The visible things in your business. So the proposals and invoices are taking a long time. Or you're spending a lot of time driving around. Or appointments are taking too long or running late. Or maybe you've got a client who's really indecisive or requires a lot of back and forth communication.
Yes, these things can take up a lot of time and energy. And I definitely help my clients streamline their schedules and process for completing all of these with more ease, simplicity and less time. But today, what I want to talk about are the hidden time and energy leaks in your business. These are the things that are consuming your resources that are a lot harder to spot, if you even notice them in the first place.
I'm going to share some tips for how you can plug these leaks, and share some opportunities where you can get live help from me on these topics in the coming weeks. I have three live opportunities to work with me directly coming up all surrounding open enrollment for Out Of Overwhelm, which opens for enrollment on May 15th.
This is going to be the last time it's open for this year and I don't want you to miss out. I don't want you to miss out on some of these great learning opportunities and coaching opportunities. And I definitely don't want you to miss out on Out Of Overwhelm. So I'll be sharing a little bit more about those events coming up later on in this episode.
For now, though, I want to dive into what are some of these hidden time and energy leaks? The first one that I want to talk about is context switching. When I say context switching, what I mean is it's the process of stopping work in one area or on one project, and then doing something else. And then picking it back up after you've performed a different task or worked on a different project.
Your human brain is a lot like a computer, and when you're having multiple systems running at the same time, your brain gets overloaded. And switching between the programs when you've got too many open starts to slow your computer down, the exact same thing happens in your workday.
So if you are context switching or switching between multiple tasks or projects, you and your team members, if you have them, incur an overhead from this switching. Multitasking is a complete fallacy. It is not possible to be focused on more than one thing at a time. You might be rapidly switching back and forth between things, but you can only focus on one thing at a time.
In your day-to-day, context switching might look like you're working on a proposal and then you see an email come in so you start to respond to that. Or maybe you've been working on some drawings, and then you keep answering the phone every time it rings. Or maybe even you're making selections and then while you're making those selections, you realize you forgot to send a check in for some bill. And then you go to your desk to write the check and send that off.
As you move throughout your day, these little blips or context switches often are quite quick and they don't seem that consequential, but they are. Context switching has a huge impact on both the way that you experience your work day and the time that it takes you to get your work done.
A study from the University of California Irvine concluded that after only 20 minutes of repeated interruptions, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure. Okay? Talk about the energy leak there.
And then there's the time cost when you context switch, so do that ping pong between activities, it can take up to 25 minutes to fully resume your focus on a task after you've been interrupted, whether that has been from somebody else or you've interrupted yourself. These distractions from others and the ones that we bring upon ourselves actively break down our ability to focus.
The cost of context switching from a time and energy standpoint is huge. There are so many ways that you can solve for this and take back that energy and time, and we coach on all of it in Out Of Overwhelm. I want to give you one really easy tip though, one of the most accessible ways to get started with this is to simply just put your phone out of view for periods of time.
I love to just put my phone in a drawer when I'm ready to do some focused work. Just seeing your phone can bring up thoughts that trigger anxiety. And every time you see your phone, you have to decide if you're going to pick it up or not. So I say just make things easier on yourself, put it away, whether that's a drawer or another room during designated times.
In order to do this effectively and not grit and grind your way through this, you're going to have to shift your mindset and get it on board. First being that it's going to be okay if you don't answer for an hour. This is something that I always get pushback on when I suggest you put your phone away.
But I want you to think about it, when you're at an appointment with a client and another client or a contractor is calling you, you don't pick up and it's fine, usually, right? Or maybe you're at your kid’s doctor's appointment, and you can't pick up and it's typically fine. So start looking for evidence how you can create those gaps where you're not constantly engaged with the phone.
And the second thing that needs to happen is you're going to have to lessen the urge/reward cycle that we are so accustomed to, and often addicted to. With all those dopamine hits we've been trained to expect throughout the day with our electronics and entertainment, it becomes a pattern of checking and being in those distraction patterns that we need to break.
Another way you can do this is to learn to create the feeling of focus on demand. And I'm actually going to be teaching you how to do this with an upcoming event that I have scheduled for the Out Of Overwhelm enrollment period, called Coffee and Coaching.
I'm going to be teaching on how to create focus on demand and how to create an ROI on delegation. They're totally free. It's going to be a combination of teaching and coaching, and I'm going to be giving away some coffee gift cards just because I thought why not? That would be fun. So definitely sign up in the show notes. It's totally free and you are going to be able to work on this skill of reducing context switching that we're talking about today.
The second hidden time and energy leak that I want to explore is second guessing yourself. This could look like having four great options to show your client, but then you start to worry that it's not enough and you start to look for more and more. Or you start looking at one project management software, then another. Then you talk to someone else and they like this one. And never getting started or maybe even starting and stopping implementation and bouncing from one program to the next.
Or it could be revising an invoice multiple times. Or just even thinking about doing it over and over again because you're worried your client will push back. Sometimes with second guessing you're using up actual time doing something or the time is spent in avoiding doing something. And sometimes it's just a lot of time that you spend spinning in your head, which, frankly, is exhausting.
The way you're going to take back control of that time and energy is through the skill of making strong decisions. The decision/implementation cycle is something that I teach in Out Of Overwhelm, and it's really how you start to take quick effective action in your business, whether it's with time management, setting up systems or just working on a client project.
As you're learning to make strong decisions, I want you to just first start by noticing when you're second guessing yourself. I gave you some examples, but start to look at how it shows up for you. Then you need to decide to make a decision.
A decision is a line in the sand, it's where you take action and then can get data from that action. Then you evaluate with curiosity, which you've heard me talk about on the podcast before, so you have an understanding of what the impact of that decision was on your outcome. Learn from it, and then you can make a new decision or your next decision as necessary.
This is going to get you into action. The way you're going to know if you're doing or choosing the right thing is to just do it. No amount of second guessing is going to create a specific outcome for you. Our brains just like to pretend that it's useful to second guess and worry and stay in indecision because as humans, we crave certainty, even if it's not something we can actually have.
This can really take courage and requires you to develop the skill of self-confidence that I talked about in a previous episode. It's really a belief that you're going to figure out your next best step, and be nice to yourself in the process. Making strong decisions, seeing them through and evaluating with curiosity to figure out your next best step is so worthwhile. And honestly, practicing this in your business is going to impact every area of your life.
Let's talk about the third hidden area of leaky time and energy. And that is piecemeal planning. When I talk about piecemeal planning, I'm talking about planning on a daily basis and also on a more long-term basis, so quarterly, yearly in your business.
Sometimes piecemeal planning shows up for clients like making really long, never-ending to-do lists. Scratching things down on a bunch of different Post-its. Or maybe putting the ideas and notes in 10 different places. Or even just bouncing from one thing to the next from the moment you get into the office.
So you could even say piecemeal planning could be an attempt at planning, but there's lots of different pieces that are moving about, not in an organized fashion. And sometimes piecemeal planning is really the absence of planning. Winging it like this is so stressful and time consuming. I want to free you from this.
So often when I'm talking with designers who want to join Out Of Overwhelm, they are worried about the time commitment of planning in the program. And yes, planning does take a little bit of time. I always like to say around five to 15 minutes daily. It does not need to take long though. And it's going to save you hours and hours and hours of time, not to mention you are going to regain your sanity.
I really believe that there is no cost to planning in terms of the time, there is only what you gain. You do not want to be using all of your time and energy being in reactive mode. I know you don't. And that is why the solution to piecemeal planning is having a repeatable planning process, knowing how to use it for the way you want to work, scheduling your time in a really supportive way, and making decisions ahead of time to determine your daily priorities and create a plan to handle one thing at a time that you know you're going to follow through in.
My Out Of Overwhelm clients do this with a planner I've created specifically for the program to practice their newfound time management skills, which you can absolutely do if you decide to join us in this next round. But I also want you to get started right now. Just jot down one thing you're committed to doing today. Decide what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, and decide how long you want it to take.
This is intentional planning at its most simplest form. And you can take that and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and create incredible results for yourself. One of the ways to make this process even easier is to create a personalized time management framework. That way, you have a template for how you want to structure your week and balance client and business work.
The reason this works well is because of decisions ahead of time. Essentially, then your planning can become even more automated and you have less decisions to make, which frees up more time and more energy. If you're interested in hearing more about automated decision making, check out episode 22.
If you want to create your own personalized weekly template, I highly recommend that you join me for Freedom in the Framework. It is going to be next week, May 9th and 11th. It's going to be the first call all about teaching you how to create your framework and you creating it for yourself based on how you want to work.
Then the second call is going to be coaching and questions. So you're going to be able to bring anything that's coming up for you, any challenge you're having, or questions about how this applies to you specifically to that call. It's only $47 and also, you're going to have an opportunity to learn more about Out Of Overwhelm and if it's a fit for you. On that call you'll be able to get one of the limited spots before anyone else.
Let's do a quick recap. So the three hidden time and energy leaks we talked about today are context switching, second guessing and piecemeal planning. I really want you to take one of these, if you have to go re-listen to the episode, and start to practice plugging that leak this week.
If you address just one of these leaks alone, you're going to reclaim weeks of time throughout the year. And it's also going to allow you to accomplish what you want in your business without burning out physically or mentally. You can use all of that time and energy you take back to do something new with your business or enjoy the life that you have outside of design.
Plugging these leaks isn't so that you can then cram more into all those extra hours that you're working that you don't want to be working. It’s so you can work less, still hit your business goals, serve your clients at a high level and create space for more of what you want personally and professionally.
That's what I have for you today. In the next episode I'm going to be sharing my very first client interview. I can't wait for you to hear from one of my Out Of Overwhelm clients firsthand. And until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week. I'll talk to you in the next episode.
I’m going to make the bold assumption that you enjoyed today’s topic. Let’s make sure you never miss an episode; follow the show now wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you haven’t already, I would really appreciate it if you’d make the time to leave me a rating and review. This is how I know what you’re loving so I can share more of it.
And it’s also how you can help others find The Interior Design Business CEO. As a thank you for leaving a rating and review, I want to send you a little midweek pick-me-up in the mail. Simply screenshot your review and send me a message on Instagram, @DesiCreswell. I’ll talk to you next week.
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, designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are doing amazing. As spring is slowly starting to arrive here we've had some pretty exciting activity on our little lake that we live on. And we have a pair of bald eagles that live on the lake and they had a baby last year. And now the juvenile, who is around a year old, is in training with mom and dad.
So I was actually just looking out my office window checking to see if they're there. Sometimes I see them soaring above my desk area, which is so fun. And actually, I mean, I feel like I'm living in a real live nature show sometimes because they have been out with their little one which, I mean, is actually not that little considering it's an eagle. But they've been out and they've been training their young one.
And it's really interesting to see the difference over the weeks between the behaviors. And even just a couple of weeks ago the whole family was out in one of the yards that borders ours around the lake. And this giant baby, essentially, was so awkward and trying to move its wings. And I mean it can fly and everything, but it just looks really fluffy. The feathers on a juvenile bald eagle are not the same as the adult bald eagle.
So it's really fluffy and kind of awkward looking. And it's just been so fun. Our whole family has gotten really into it, watching the different migrating ducks that come through and different wildlife that we have. So I feel like it's like drop everything, you've got to go look. And my neighbor texted me this morning, she was like, “The loon is out.”
So anyways, that's been the excitement here for me. I hope you're all having a great week as you're listening to this. Today, we're going to talk about the hidden time and energy leaks in your business. And, of course, we're going to also talk about how to plug these leaks because I don't want it to be a drip, drip, drip for you anymore.
Often when I hear designers talk about how they don't have enough time, it's typically about the more tangible things. The visible things in your business. So the proposals and invoices are taking a long time. Or you're spending a lot of time driving around. Or appointments are taking too long or running late. Or maybe you've got a client who's really indecisive or requires a lot of back and forth communication.
Yes, these things can take up a lot of time and energy. And I definitely help my clients streamline their schedules and process for completing all of these with more ease, simplicity and less time. But today, what I want to talk about are the hidden time and energy leaks in your business. These are the things that are consuming your resources that are a lot harder to spot, if you even notice them in the first place.
I'm going to share some tips for how you can plug these leaks, and share some opportunities where you can get live help from me on these topics in the coming weeks. I have three live opportunities to work with me directly coming up all surrounding open enrollment for Out Of Overwhelm, which opens for enrollment on May 15th.
This is going to be the last time it's open for this year and I don't want you to miss out. I don't want you to miss out on some of these great learning opportunities and coaching opportunities. And I definitely don't want you to miss out on Out Of Overwhelm. So I'll be sharing a little bit more about those events coming up later on in this episode.
For now, though, I want to dive into what are some of these hidden time and energy leaks? The first one that I want to talk about is context switching. When I say context switching, what I mean is it's the process of stopping work in one area or on one project, and then doing something else. And then picking it back up after you've performed a different task or worked on a different project.
Your human brain is a lot like a computer, and when you're having multiple systems running at the same time, your brain gets overloaded. And switching between the programs when you've got too many open starts to slow your computer down, the exact same thing happens in your workday.
So if you are context switching or switching between multiple tasks or projects, you and your team members, if you have them, incur an overhead from this switching. Multitasking is a complete fallacy. It is not possible to be focused on more than one thing at a time. You might be rapidly switching back and forth between things, but you can only focus on one thing at a time.
In your day-to-day, context switching might look like you're working on a proposal and then you see an email come in so you start to respond to that. Or maybe you've been working on some drawings, and then you keep answering the phone every time it rings. Or maybe even you're making selections and then while you're making those selections, you realize you forgot to send a check in for some bill. And then you go to your desk to write the check and send that off.
As you move throughout your day, these little blips or context switches often are quite quick and they don't seem that consequential, but they are. Context switching has a huge impact on both the way that you experience your work day and the time that it takes you to get your work done.
A study from the University of California Irvine concluded that after only 20 minutes of repeated interruptions, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure. Okay? Talk about the energy leak there.
And then there's the time cost when you context switch, so do that ping pong between activities, it can take up to 25 minutes to fully resume your focus on a task after you've been interrupted, whether that has been from somebody else or you've interrupted yourself. These distractions from others and the ones that we bring upon ourselves actively break down our ability to focus.
The cost of context switching from a time and energy standpoint is huge. There are so many ways that you can solve for this and take back that energy and time, and we coach on all of it in Out Of Overwhelm. I want to give you one really easy tip though, one of the most accessible ways to get started with this is to simply just put your phone out of view for periods of time.
I love to just put my phone in a drawer when I'm ready to do some focused work. Just seeing your phone can bring up thoughts that trigger anxiety. And every time you see your phone, you have to decide if you're going to pick it up or not. So I say just make things easier on yourself, put it away, whether that's a drawer or another room during designated times.
In order to do this effectively and not grit and grind your way through this, you're going to have to shift your mindset and get it on board. First being that it's going to be okay if you don't answer for an hour. This is something that I always get pushback on when I suggest you put your phone away.
But I want you to think about it, when you're at an appointment with a client and another client or a contractor is calling you, you don't pick up and it's fine, usually, right? Or maybe you're at your kid’s doctor's appointment, and you can't pick up and it's typically fine. So start looking for evidence how you can create those gaps where you're not constantly engaged with the phone.
And the second thing that needs to happen is you're going to have to lessen the urge/reward cycle that we are so accustomed to, and often addicted to. With all those dopamine hits we've been trained to expect throughout the day with our electronics and entertainment, it becomes a pattern of checking and being in those distraction patterns that we need to break.
Another way you can do this is to learn to create the feeling of focus on demand. And I'm actually going to be teaching you how to do this with an upcoming event that I have scheduled for the Out Of Overwhelm enrollment period, called Coffee and Coaching.
I'm going to be teaching on how to create focus on demand and how to create an ROI on delegation. They're totally free. It's going to be a combination of teaching and coaching, and I'm going to be giving away some coffee gift cards just because I thought why not? That would be fun. So definitely sign up in the show notes. It's totally free and you are going to be able to work on this skill of reducing context switching that we're talking about today.
The second hidden time and energy leak that I want to explore is second guessing yourself. This could look like having four great options to show your client, but then you start to worry that it's not enough and you start to look for more and more. Or you start looking at one project management software, then another. Then you talk to someone else and they like this one. And never getting started or maybe even starting and stopping implementation and bouncing from one program to the next.
Or it could be revising an invoice multiple times. Or just even thinking about doing it over and over again because you're worried your client will push back. Sometimes with second guessing you're using up actual time doing something or the time is spent in avoiding doing something. And sometimes it's just a lot of time that you spend spinning in your head, which, frankly, is exhausting.
The way you're going to take back control of that time and energy is through the skill of making strong decisions. The decision/implementation cycle is something that I teach in Out Of Overwhelm, and it's really how you start to take quick effective action in your business, whether it's with time management, setting up systems or just working on a client project.
As you're learning to make strong decisions, I want you to just first start by noticing when you're second guessing yourself. I gave you some examples, but start to look at how it shows up for you. Then you need to decide to make a decision.
A decision is a line in the sand, it's where you take action and then can get data from that action. Then you evaluate with curiosity, which you've heard me talk about on the podcast before, so you have an understanding of what the impact of that decision was on your outcome. Learn from it, and then you can make a new decision or your next decision as necessary.
This is going to get you into action. The way you're going to know if you're doing or choosing the right thing is to just do it. No amount of second guessing is going to create a specific outcome for you. Our brains just like to pretend that it's useful to second guess and worry and stay in indecision because as humans, we crave certainty, even if it's not something we can actually have.
This can really take courage and requires you to develop the skill of self-confidence that I talked about in a previous episode. It's really a belief that you're going to figure out your next best step, and be nice to yourself in the process. Making strong decisions, seeing them through and evaluating with curiosity to figure out your next best step is so worthwhile. And honestly, practicing this in your business is going to impact every area of your life.
Let's talk about the third hidden area of leaky time and energy. And that is piecemeal planning. When I talk about piecemeal planning, I'm talking about planning on a daily basis and also on a more long-term basis, so quarterly, yearly in your business.
Sometimes piecemeal planning shows up for clients like making really long, never-ending to-do lists. Scratching things down on a bunch of different Post-its. Or maybe putting the ideas and notes in 10 different places. Or even just bouncing from one thing to the next from the moment you get into the office.
So you could even say piecemeal planning could be an attempt at planning, but there's lots of different pieces that are moving about, not in an organized fashion. And sometimes piecemeal planning is really the absence of planning. Winging it like this is so stressful and time consuming. I want to free you from this.
So often when I'm talking with designers who want to join Out Of Overwhelm, they are worried about the time commitment of planning in the program. And yes, planning does take a little bit of time. I always like to say around five to 15 minutes daily. It does not need to take long though. And it's going to save you hours and hours and hours of time, not to mention you are going to regain your sanity.
I really believe that there is no cost to planning in terms of the time, there is only what you gain. You do not want to be using all of your time and energy being in reactive mode. I know you don't. And that is why the solution to piecemeal planning is having a repeatable planning process, knowing how to use it for the way you want to work, scheduling your time in a really supportive way, and making decisions ahead of time to determine your daily priorities and create a plan to handle one thing at a time that you know you're going to follow through in.
My Out Of Overwhelm clients do this with a planner I've created specifically for the program to practice their newfound time management skills, which you can absolutely do if you decide to join us in this next round. But I also want you to get started right now. Just jot down one thing you're committed to doing today. Decide what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, and decide how long you want it to take.
This is intentional planning at its most simplest form. And you can take that and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and create incredible results for yourself. One of the ways to make this process even easier is to create a personalized time management framework. That way, you have a template for how you want to structure your week and balance client and business work.
The reason this works well is because of decisions ahead of time. Essentially, then your planning can become even more automated and you have less decisions to make, which frees up more time and more energy. If you're interested in hearing more about automated decision making, check out episode 22.
If you want to create your own personalized weekly template, I highly recommend that you join me for Freedom in the Framework. It is going to be next week, May 9th and 11th. It's going to be the first call all about teaching you how to create your framework and you creating it for yourself based on how you want to work.
Then the second call is going to be coaching and questions. So you're going to be able to bring anything that's coming up for you, any challenge you're having, or questions about how this applies to you specifically to that call. It's only $47 and also, you're going to have an opportunity to learn more about Out Of Overwhelm and if it's a fit for you. On that call you'll be able to get one of the limited spots before anyone else.
Let's do a quick recap. So the three hidden time and energy leaks we talked about today are context switching, second guessing and piecemeal planning. I really want you to take one of these, if you have to go re-listen to the episode, and start to practice plugging that leak this week.
If you address just one of these leaks alone, you're going to reclaim weeks of time throughout the year. And it's also going to allow you to accomplish what you want in your business without burning out physically or mentally. You can use all of that time and energy you take back to do something new with your business or enjoy the life that you have outside of design.
Plugging these leaks isn't so that you can then cram more into all those extra hours that you're working that you don't want to be working. It’s so you can work less, still hit your business goals, serve your clients at a high level and create space for more of what you want personally and professionally.
That's what I have for you today. In the next episode I'm going to be sharing my very first client interview. I can't wait for you to hear from one of my Out Of Overwhelm clients firsthand. And until then, I'm wishing you a beautiful week. I'll talk to you in the next episode.
I’m going to make the bold assumption that you enjoyed today’s topic. Let’s make sure you never miss an episode; follow the show now wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you haven’t already, I would really appreciate it if you’d make the time to leave me a rating and review. This is how I know what you’re loving so I can share more of it.
And it’s also how you can help others find The Interior Design Business CEO. As a thank you for leaving a rating and review, I want to send you a little midweek pick-me-up in the mail. Simply screenshot your review and send me a message on Instagram, @DesiCreswell. I’ll talk to you next week.
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.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.