I don't know about you, but even 18 months into doing YouTube, most things still take 3x longer than I originally plan for.
As a result, I'm often scrambling, which leads to lower quality work and endless stress.
So I ran an experiment for the entire month of February to see if I could fix it.
For 4 straight weeks (and still going in March) I've been following a new weekly schedule that keeps me locked in on the most important things.
It follows this notion of "making hours" vs "managing hours."
Gary Keller talks about this in his book The One Thing (yes, that book, again).
Basically, the problem with the modern workplace, and how we're accustomed to planning our days, is that meetings are often scattered throughout the day making it next to impossible to get lost in deep focused work.
Thinking back to my corporate days, this was oh so very true.
I'd get 30 minutes to work on building a presentation before getting interrupted by a high priority email or a DM from a coworker with a fire-drill or text from a boss or another boss...
And god forbid we ignore those interruptions for more than 30 minutes, somebody might think we've taken the day off... |
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And therein lies the problem.
Constant context switching, and never really getting into a flow state long enough to make meaningful progress on a difficult task, creates massive inefficiencies and quality issues.
I remember vividly, intentionally delaying working on deep focused stuff until AFTER my workday was over, because I'd finally be able to do work without the expectation of responding to notifications.
That sucked.
But the guidance from The One Thing was to simply carve out several hours first thing in your day and work deeply and uninterrupted until midday, then pivot to meetings and emails and DMs and other administrative tasks.
After 4 weeks of doing this, I can safely say the world is still intact and nobody got mad at me for not instantly replying and yes, 99.99% of my emails are ALL STILL rubbish and don't need my attention, so all this inbox and notification anxiety was really just something I was deriving from terrible time management habits.
Thanks Verizon!
Here's what changed:
Monday mornings I batch 3 weekly Skool posts and this newsletter in a single session. All done before most people start their day.
Tuesday and Wednesday mornings are script writing. 3 focused hours twice a week, and I'm writing more scripts in less time than ever.
And I now spend 1 focused hour each day clearing out email, replying to DMs, commenting on Skool and other random admin things that pop up. (later afternoon)
Before you know it, it's the end of the work day and I feel immensely productive because those first 3 hours let me get so much more done than darting around reacting to what came in overnight.
So here's my PSA for today:
Make in the morning, then Manage in the afternoon.
In other words:
- Create first. This is our highest leverage activity after all, and it should get the lion's share of our energy and attention.
- Manage later. Only after you've made meaningful progress creating.
And here's what I realized:
We actually CAN put off those admin tasks until later in the day, because they're honestly not as important or time sensitive as we make them out to be.
So for as long as your schedule will permit, carve out the "you-time", the real-genuine-get-shit-done-focused-deeply in the morning time.
No email, no texts, no notifications (phone on DND), no scrolling, NO 137 tabs open in your browser. (Yes that means you too Erinn 😘)
Just 1 tab for 1 task.
On and in case you're wondering, this is both literal advice and a metaphor too for those of you who don't work in web browser tabs like I do. 😉
That's it.
Try it for 1 week, see how much progress you can make.
This will be the highest leveraged hour of your day.
But I'd love to hear from you.
How are you scheduling your creator time? Is it just whenever you can fit it in, or are you looking to become more structured and intentional about your time?
Let me know 😀
Talk soon, Ty
P.S. If you're struggling to figure out what to create or how to structure your week around your channel, that's exactly what we work on inside the 6-Month Momentum Builder. You'll walk away with a system that fits your actual life. Book a call here.​
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