Working from home is hard.
It’s a blessing for a lot of us, but when you’ve got other family members also living and working from home and you can work at any time of the day… how do you differentiate work from home? How do you stay productive and not get sucked down the YouTube hole watching cat videos all day?
Our resident COO and productivity expert on the team, D’Laina, shared in our latest podcast episode what the biggest changes she has made in her life and in our business have been to keep us productive as YouTubers and business owners.
Here’s what she had to say.
- Time management is emotional. There is no such thing as time management because time is going to pass no matter what we do. We can’t physically create more time. Most of us just want control over the time that we do have. So, we need to think of our time management more as self management. Our time is precious, so a good place to start is to almost dream about what excites and motivates you. In a perfect world, how would you be spending your days? It’s important to make/manage time to do the things that give you life because where we see time management go down the drain is when that vision is lost and you just end up doing meaningless busy work. When you have a vision for your life and how you want to spend your time, it gives those menial tasks (that you’re less excited about) a purpose!
- Think about task significance. You’ve probably heard of the time management matrix before (i.e. sorting tasks into urgent/important, urgent but not important, not urgent, but important, not important and not urgent). It’s a great system that our team uses at Video Creators, but another question we try to ask each quarter as we create our quarterly objectives is… How long with this [thing I’m doing] matter? What can I do today that will make tomorrow better? What can I do today that will make the future better? So, instead of taking the time to write an email out to your entire list, it may be worth it to take that time teaching someone else how to write emails to your list because that will free up time for you to work on other tasks that excite you (or that just need to get done). It’s easy to get stuck in menial tasks when we’re not thinking big picture – so this helps us to plan and execute on what’s really important when we think through task significance in the long term.
- Set firm boundaries. How many things are you saying ‘yes’ to right now that you want to be saying ‘no’ to? Whenever you say ‘yes’ to something, you are saying ‘no’ to something else. We’re all human and we only have so much capacity between our professional and personal lives. When I first hired and was training my assistant, she quickly saw how many opportunities came in to our inbox whether it was events to speak at, collaborations, sponsorship inquiries, etc. I had to relay the advice to her that I was given myself. Say NO to distractions disguised as opportunities. There are great opportunities out there, but does it make sense for you to be a part of? Does it further you closer to your long term goals? Does it align with your values? If not, it’s okay to say no. You actually probably need to.
I don’t know that any of us will ever be “perfect” time or self managers, but a lot of these steps have really helped us as a business feel more productive and inspired to come to work each day when we know what we’re working towards.
I hope this helps you or your team as you’re moving forward with your business and your channel.
And if you still find yourself struggling, that’s what we’re here for!
Feel free to book a call with me or my team if we can help get your channel or business moving forward.
Thanks for reading!
Keep changing lives,
Tim