How Successful Women Plan Their Weeks for Maximum Productivity

This week on Her First, we’re pulling back the curtain on how we actually manage our time as business owners, because let’s be real—if your schedule is running you, you’re already losing. We’re breaking down our exact weekly planning process, daily workflows, and the tools that keep us sane (shoutout to Google Workspace, Motion AI, and monday.com). We’re also tackling the sneaky productivity killers—context switching, never-ending to-do lists, and not protecting your energy. Whether you’re a founder, a creator, or just trying to get your life together, this episode is packed with strategies to help you take control of your time and make your schedule work for you, not against you.

Time Stamps:

01:58 Weekly Planning Process

02:50 Daily Routines and Flows

07:38 Eliminating Non-Priorities

12:01 Client Work and Brand Building

13:06 Daily Checklists and Weekend Projects

16:03 Context Switching and Deep Work

25:28 Using AI and Tools for Productivity

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Transcript

Episode 084: Productive Workflows

Michelle Pualani: [00:00:00] And I started to realize that I'm the one who's in control of my schedule.

I'm the one who gets to govern my own time and my energy is the most important thing that I get to. Defend in how I work and how I approach my relationships, and I started doing that and it just takes off a lot of the stress. Mostly people are completely accommodating.

Welcome back to the Her First podcast where we talk all about. What it takes to be a high achieving woman looking at a lot of personal brands and celebrities who demonstrate great qualities that you can use to reflect on your business,

your online presence and improve it over time. Today we're talking about how Joanna and I manage our productivity, our scheduling. We're gonna talk about weekly planning. We're gonna talk all about daily routines and flows, as well as give you some actionable [00:01:00] tools that help us manage our businesses, our brands, and how we also produce content in this digital space. 

So hello and welcome. I'm Michelle Pulani Houston, founder of To Be Honest Beverage Company, a non-alcoholic, functional spirit, alternative, and coach and digital mentor for online businesses looking to improve their brand messaging and their customer journey. 

Joanna Newton: I'm Joanna Newton. I'm the co-founder of Millennial Marketer and Agency that helps creators launch their own digital 

Michelle Pualani: So I've spent a lot of time in groups for coaching containers, masterminds, and groups surrounded by other digital entrepreneurs and business owners who have a lot of the same struggles when it comes to focus. Productivity, prioritization, scheduling and being able to juggle kind of the work life balance.

We have a lot of content from our early days on the Her First podcast where we talk about that balance between personal life and professional life, and it [00:02:00] does play into how we effectively approach the way in which we invest our time. But today we're gonna share with you our kind of like weekly planning process.

Our daily workflows and routines and how we're able to manage everything that we do. And when it seems like, gosh, how do you get that much stuff done, or how do you know what to prioritize? Or how do you even make time for working out or eating food when you're a solopreneur or business owner who works from home you have absolutely zero boundaries?

So we're gonna get into all of that today. What we're not gonna talk about is larger planning. So. Annual or quarterly, monthly, which we highly suggest you do. If you need some support and guidance in that category, go Back to our episode titled, goal Setting for 2025.

It's gonna take you through an actionable strategy, a step-by-step process of approaching more of a long-term vision and strategy. Today, it's all about the nitty gritty. It's all about how Joanna as a [00:03:00] seven figure business owner of an agency, managed her time and all about me and how as a startup company in the CPG space, we are effectively paying attention to what tasks and activities, making time for certain things and routinizing our day with systems and workflows that make things a bit more effective and efficient. 

Joanna Newton: as an entrepreneur, your time is so valuable. what you focus on, how you put revenue generating tax tasks first. so valuable how you focus on your mentality, your mindset, so valuable because you can show up. And get a big deal. That's gonna make a big difference for your revenue if you're doing the right things at the right time.

So I'm really excited to dig in today and share a little bit about my day, hear from you about what you do. I think with a lot of things we talk about. We're gonna share what works for us. We're gonna give you some tools and strategies and all of those [00:04:00] things, but at the end of the day, you have to structure your day in the way that works for you, and that's gonna help you be more productive. I am not an early riser, as an example. There are lots of business owners and entrepreneurs who, who swear by the 5:00 AM wake up routine, or I do more by 6:00 AM than people do their entire day. That doesn't work for me, and when I wake up earlier, I'm actually slower, less productive, get less done. So it's about you figuring out what works for you and I think us talking about what works for us is gonna help you think about what works for you.

Michelle Pualani: These are not practices and strategies. They're like, you have to do this. Exactly. The way we do this, just as Joanna is saying, is that it's meant to inspire, it's meant to lead. You don't have to give everything a try, but those things that kind of stand out to you, you can kind of feel out and say, okay, that kind of feels like it makes sense.

I'd like to give that a shot, and this is coming from my health [00:05:00] coaching background, but the more that you plan and structure your approach to. Your time, your energy, where you're putting your focus, the more successful you're going to be at accomplishing and reaching the goals that you set for yourself.

Just as Joanna said, your time is the most important investment of anything that you'll ever do, say, believe, create in this world. Not just from a business perspective, but from a personal perspective. Because if you think about it, your life is created by time. Your moment to moment, your second to second, minute to minute, hours, days, months, years, that is your life.

So when you are able to audit scrutinize, pay attention to the way in which you're investing your time, that will determine and dictate the life that you lead. So keeping that in mind, we're gonna talk first about how we approach [00:06:00] our weekly planning. again, if you want month, year, quarter, go back, listen to the goal setting for 2025.

You'll find a lot of great information there as far as when it comes to weeks, this is something that you think about in advance. So a lot of times the people that I speak to, the people that I've worked with, wake up. They look at a general to-do list. They've got a hundred items on it. They know that they're kind of maybe gonna work out at some point.

They have some food in mind of what they're going to eat. They don't know when they're going to eat it. They start by checking their emails. Maybe they get on social media, maybe they respond to some dms, and then they kind of just flounder about their day and they get to the end and think, That was great.

What did I accomplish? I have no idea. Did I effectively work towards any of my goals? I'm not quite sure, but let's just go to sleep, get up and do it again. And that's where a lot of that overwhelm, the stress, the frustration of business comes from, and that [00:07:00] feeling of. I don't know what's happening. Like I don't understand what I'm doing.

I'm gonna try this. I'm gonna try that tactic. I'm gonna listen to this person. I'm gonna sign up for this workshop. I'm gonna do this webinar. I'm gonna do half of this coaching program and then pivot and do something else. I. Is because you're lacking clear intention in your day, your tasks, your priorities, and what it is that you're focusing on.

And then we won't get into it today, but we talk a lot about boundary setting on this podcast, and it's oftentimes that your boundaries aren't in place. So you're allowing everything else, everyone else, and your circumstances to dictate your work. And that's where we're going wrong. roll it back. Let's talk about the week in terms of planning.

I'll share what I do. Joanna will share what she does. when I approach my week ahead of time, I actually start with elimination first. So a lot of times we book things out in advance, right? A month, two months, three months. Sometimes you have annual dates on your [00:08:00] calendar. Maybe you booked a consultation with someone sometime ago.

You set up, I do this a lot. You set up a call to look at the backend of a tech that you're thinking about taking on of a software platform, and you've booked it so far in advance that it just pops up on your calendar, but it might not be a huge priority. Your attention may have shifted. You might not need that thing anymore, or it might not meet the need that you think that it's going to.

So a lot of times an email can replace that call, that meeting that you have booked, or just kind of looking at it, seeing if you can cut the length of whatever it is that you're doing. Maybe you don't actually need an hour for that meeting, but you cut it down to 30 or 45 minutes. So what I'll do when I look at my week and I approach my week, I'll start with elimination.

Get rid of the things that don't really matter for me, prioritization, health is incredibly important, so I am in a consistent workout. Program. It's a functional fitness studio that I go to four to six [00:09:00] days a week. That's always in my calendar. First, I've signed up for the classes in advance so that they're on my schedule and I know that I am going to make those days and those times, and then I start to just map out the week.

Personally, I've started sitting down with my husband to talk about major events. Things that we're going to social activities as well as anything that's important from a business perspective. this past weekend we had a mocktail making mixology workshop, that was something that we talked about the week prior.

What do we need for it? How are we gonna prep for it? What is the timeframe I need to commute for it? How much time is that gonna take? Mapping that all out in our calendar then looking at meals, timing of all those things, and then fitting the work in between.

once we get to, when we're talking about tools, I'll share with you how I use motion at this time to allow AI to kind of structure and plan the week ahead. Otherwise, from a weekly perspective, I have certain days [00:10:00] dedicated to certain tasks and activities. I only take meetings Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the afternoons.

I try not to book anything outside of that timeframe. Mondays are dedicated to ideation and research, Tuesdays to content creation, filming Wednesdays, et cetera, et cetera, and so on throughout the week so that each day has a certain dedication and a time block that is committed to a certain type of work.

And that allows me to concentrate and focus throughout the week and think through what are the top priorities? How am I going to move through my week in a really intentional way?

Joanna Newton: I love that you take the time to put the personal stuff on first. you're like, I'm gonna make sure those personal things are mapped out. I'm gonna make sure I have time for my meals, for my workouts. It's often really easy to say like, I'm gonna do those things everything else is done. And then what happens?

You don't do those things. You forget to eat, you don't have your workouts, [00:11:00] you don't do those things. And to be able to perform at your optimal level. nutrition has to be good. Your fitness has to be good. Like you're not gonna be able to show up and be your best self if those things aren't taken care of.

So I think that that is, is so important. I will talk a little bit about my week and just full disclosure, I'm at a point right now in my business where there just is not enough hours of the day to do everything I need to do, I will get to a point where I will figure out what the right hire is, that that's going to make things. Work perfectly, but I'm not there yet. that's okay. And I think that's something really important to realize is your schedule can be seasonal. I know I'm not gonna get everything I need done in a single day and I have to be okay with it, which means I have to stop at some point. be okay with everything that's not done. that's really helped me be [00:12:00] able to shut things off and move on to personal care tasks and things like that. It's okay, this isn't done. I'm gonna move on. So how I have my week structured. As I have three days during the week where my primary focus is client work and new client acquisition. three days a week I'm focused on doing my client tasks. Um, any of the work I'm doing for my clients, doing sales calls, following up with prospects, answering projects for my team where I really focus on the client work and. I have two days a week where my primary focus is on building my brand building the business side of things, whether that's a financial report one week or building a sales page for a new launch.

I'm focused on doing this stuff that needs to get my business to the next level. and so I focus my week on that. So as tasks come up that I know I have to do. I know what day I'm gonna do it. I look for my available spots and say, okay, [00:13:00] I'm gonna do that on Monday because it's a client task. Or I'm gonna work on scheduling those social posts on Tuesday because that's a, a brand building day. So I have that structure all like set up and ready to go. in that week and flow. the other thing that I do is every day of the week, I have a different morning checklist, and that morning checklist is actually not my most important tasks. It's the tasks that I know I will put off. I make myself do them first because I know if my client's having a launch, I will definitely have everything ready for their launch.

I know if I have to get that invoice out to someone, I'm gonna send that invoice. But the things that I struggle finishing or getting done that I say, I'll just do that tomorrow. I'll just do that tomorrow. I do it first thing, 'cause then it gets done For me, that's something like, I like to, every week look at my business finances, what transactions happened, what sales happened.

Did that invoice get paid? Did that invoice get paid? I just do it first thing on [00:14:00] Tuesday mornings so that I know it's done The tasks I know I'll put off, I have a, like a Monday checklist, a Tuesday checklist, a Wednesday checklist, a Thursday, a Friday checklist that encompasses those things.

They always take 30 minutes to do. It's like the silly things that, um, I struggle to, I put there. I. Uh, so I have days dedicated to things. I have a morning checklist, for each day of the week. And then I do actually like to do some work on the weekends. Um, I have a daughter, I have appointments. I have, so throughout the week I end up having a lot of personal things here and there.

so at the end of my week, I always look for. One really significant thing I could do and get done over the weekend, that would make a big impact. So for me, this weekend, I worked on a sales page. I said I didn't get to the sales page during the week. That's gonna be my one weekend project. I'm gonna carve out some time to work on that. If I'm trying to wrap up a client project that's really important, I might say, okay, I'm gonna go do [00:15:00] that audit on the weekend. I pick one super high impact project for my weekends, and that's my overall weekly structure. 

Michelle Pualani: definitely in full transparency, this isn't the same every single day. Every single week. Like things happen. We film this podcast in my time zone, 11 to one, sometimes later. So that covers. What would typically be my eating window, so I'll have snacks while we're recording the podcast. Of course, I'm on mute while Joanna's talking, but it's okay to have those things that also come up and know that things get pushed to the side.

Some days I don't feel like working and I don't follow my plan. And then that work moves to the weekend. So it's okay to have flexibility and know that things are gonna change in your schedule and be accommodating for that. So let go of some of the expectation that we usually carry on ourselves in terms of, oh, I should have done that. Oh, this could have been better. You know, we're always working to improve our systems. We're always working to be a [00:16:00] little bit better. 1% maybe, but it's okay if we backslide. It's okay if we slip up.

It's okay if we deal with those things on a daily basis. So when it comes to our daily routines and workflows. In terms of the workday and how I approach it, like I mentioned, I try to focus on buckets. So there's something called contact switching. If you're not familiar with it, it's going back and forth from thing to thing.

mentally it can take you, I don't know, it's like 12 to 20 minutes or something like that to attune your focus to the thing that you're doing. 

So even though as women we often feel like we can multitask, and although we have better brain function in order to think about more than one thing at once, context switching is a real thing. So your attention, your energy is gonna be drained by going from thing to thing, switching back and forth, instead of just choosing one thing and focusing the time, attention, and energy on that one thing.

So when it comes to prioritization, you wanna think about it in terms [00:17:00] of buckets and then also in terms of when you do your deep work. So I tend and try as much as possible to not take any meetings before 2:00 PM Now, that's not always the case because people are in different time zones and sometimes I have to accommodate.

Or change that or structure something a little bit differently. But ideally, my best meeting time is from two to 4:00 PM because it's actually when I have the least cognitive function. So I don't feel like I have to have as much mental capacity for meetings or calls or admin tasks as I do writing new content.

Filming ideation and brainstorming, all of those things that take just a little bit more work, a little bit more time. I have hours set aside that I can do those tasks and those activities first when I'm more optimized to do so. So from a daily perspective, Mondays and Fridays, I typically don't take any meetings, any calls at all, and those are all [00:18:00] geared towards more like deep work, intentional days.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That's my morning time and my focus, and then afternoons are more for admitted administrative tasks, answering emails, like doing those small little things that don't take as much mental capacity and that I feel like I can kind of just knock out. Back to back to back. And then sometimes I have to take a nap in the afternoon 'cause I get a little tired.

you know, scheduling on a daily basis in terms of prioritization, focusing on those buckets or your ability to batch, create, batch, do certain things that once you get into the context of that task or activity, you're on a roll, you've got the momentum, you don't wanna have to stop. Let's just say, for example, you're approaching your day, you're sitting down, you're writing copy for this new email flow, but then you get a notification from Instagram or for something and you get on there, and then that takes 10 minutes, then you realize that you actually have a call booked for 30 minutes with a client or with a prospective lead, and [00:19:00] then you go back to copywriting and then you, so just noticing that your time and attention is gonna be consistently divided If you don't allow yourself the ability to schedule more intentionally and group up tasks and activities so that it makes the most sense in terms of your attention, and then just managing your energy. So on a daily basis, again, from a scrutinizing perspective, sometimes I'll reschedule or change up meetings even if they're booked.

Just because it better accommodates my energy whether I'm feeling low or I'm really on a roll. I used to be worried about reaching out to people and being like, Hey, can we meet tomorrow instead? Or, Hey, can you use this booking link to rebook? And I started to realize that I'm the one who's in control of my schedule.

I'm the one who gets to govern my own time and my energy is the most important thing that I get to. Defend in how I work and how I approach my [00:20:00] relationships, and I started doing that and it just takes off a lot of the stress. Mostly people are completely accommodating. Obviously some things are a little bit more timely.

Say you do have clients say something is launching like, yes, maybe you have to take that and you don't get that control. But a lot of times you can be. In control of the situation. So allowing yourself to be able to also change on a daily basis and give yourself more time for the higher priority tasks that you're focused on. 

Joanna Newton: I think this idea of being available to everyone all of the time and never rescheduling and all of that, I think this is definitely like a big struggle for women. I think we're taught to be accommodating. We're taught to put other people first. Michelle, and the example you gave them.

If you have a client with a launch coming up and you need to be accommodating nine times out of 10, if you pre-plan. You don't need to because if you, if you're working on a launch with them and you know their launch is in two weeks and you say, Hey. We've gotta get this done by [00:21:00] this day and let's meet on this day to get everything organized you really can get ahead of it and still make it work in your schedule.

Now, occasionally you might make, exceptions, but even with me having my more strict like Monday, Wednesday, Friday, like client meeting days. I don't really have problems with, with, if someone's saying, oh, I wanna meet Tuesday, I say like, oh, my next available is Wednesday at this time. And then they go, okay.

And then they pick it. Like it's really not, that hard. we feel like we have to accommodate, to make their schedule work. When actually, when you think about it, your time is the thing that's valuable and. Uh, even in my own experience, people value it more when you give them less of it.

when you give them fewer options, they will make it work for you. I met with someone who I didn't realize we were in a different time zone and she booked a call with me at like 7:00 AM her time, and she normally takes meetings late. And when we picked it I was like, oh my gosh, it's so early. Like. could have found another time.

And she was like, Nope, it's you. You're important. I [00:22:00] needed you. So I woke up early. again, not saying we never accommodate, you can put out into the world that your time is valuable and people have to work within your schedule in a way that actually makes you more valuable and helps you make more money.

Right. And that's kind of the goal here, right? in terms of my daily structure. I, you know, shared earlier. I have a different checklist for every morning that I focus on, and then I do always like to get something done before I dig into my email. I. I too many emails and I have too many notifications, and if I put my emails and notifications is the first thing I do in the day, I would never get through them.

And that's just the reality. Again, this is something that like I will hire for someday and it's a now problem. So I just respond as soon as I can and sometimes that takes some time and I'm just okay with that right now. so I always try to get an actual tangible thing done, get my daily checklist, get a tangible thing done before I even look my emails. and that has really helped [00:23:00] me. The other thing I do with my daily planning is I really plan when I'm gonna do something, as soon as I know I have to do it. I'm not waking up being like, what am I gonna do today? my schedule is already there for me. I know what my top priorities are, and I find that if I decide when I'm gonna do it As soon as I know I have to do it, it's so much easier and I'm not using my brain energy to decide the priority. So as an example, one of the things that I do are website audits. So I'll audit someone's website or a funnel or something like that. That's something that I can't do in 15 minutes that I need a good chunk of time for. So when I'm on a kickoff call, talking to someone about that project and making sure they have their onboarding items done and talking about them, the process. I decide when I'm gonna do their audit on that call and put it on my calendar. So I'll say, look at my calendar. I'll be like, okay, cool. I could do that audit on [00:24:00] Monday.

I put it in my calendar as a meeting for however much time I think it's gonna take, and then I schedule the follow up call, which would be their next step to review the audit for like. The next client day that I have. on that call, I know, okay, I'm gonna do that audit on Wednesday and I'm gonna meet with them on Friday at one o'clock to review the audit. Now I'm not sitting around thinking, when the heck am I gonna do that audit? Am I gonna get it done in time for that meeting? Am I not? Am I this, am I that? I'm not doing that because. Once I knew I had to do it, I pre-planned when it was gonna happen. Now do sometimes I not finish in that two hour block?

No. And I have to find another 30 minutes Somewhere else. Maybe that's the case. But I've done 90% of the work by deciding when I'm gonna do it blocking off that time. And I've, I've had to be okay with, if that means I don't have any discovery calls to book new clients that week. That's okay because I have to take care of [00:25:00] this existing client, I have to pre-plan what I'm gonna do when, so that way I'm not constantly thinking, well, what am I gonna do tomorrow? What's my priority tomorrow? Because I've actually already decided.

Michelle Pualani: And that's having a system in place, right? No matter what your protocol is, what are the steps that you take when you address the same or similar actions within your business? You have leads, you have prospects, you book calls with them. What follows that call? And just having a system in place, even a simple 1, 2, 3 step, can be incredibly helpful.

For me. We need to do a podcast episode about, this actually is how we use AI tools in our business on a daily basis in order to be successful. And so now we're gonna get into some of the tools that we use, One of which is an AI tool that I've recently started using that has been incredible.

But let's go ahead and start with Google. Google is a tool that we use in our business every single day from [00:26:00] Gmail to drive. Now they have Gemini to calendar. I live by my Google calendar, which is now synced up with Motion, which is the AI tool. I'll tell you a little bit more about in a moment, but Google.

Has so many features and things that you can use for your business, and it's virtually free. Obviously, if you have a domain name, which we do for our businesses, there's a little bit of a cost. I can't remember if it's six or $12 a month, but it is so low in terms of what it gives you being able to even schedule out emails.

So for this podcast, for example, we sometimes book guests. We need to send out emails to those guests. We need to have them on a prep call. We need to follow up when the podcast is live to let them know that it's happened. A lot of times I will schedule out those emails in advance, so say we're not interviewing them for three weeks to four weeks.

I don't necessarily wanna hop on a prep call now. But I'll email them the week beforehand. [00:27:00] In Google, you can schedule out that email or send it when it makes sense, so you have to follow up with a client. You don't have a traditional CRM tool in which that's automated, and so simply in Google you had a call, you're following up in a month, schedule it out.

Everything in Google Calendar, from events to tasks, activities that you're doing. That to me is so incredibly important to just have one set place, even if it's not a digital calendar, if you use a paper calendar, it's putting everything in one place so that you can really track it. Google Drive, of course, from a productivity and efficiency standpoint can really be helpful and supportive of your overall systems and workflows.

I do just a lot of document excel management there that help with the scheduling, that help with the planning, mapping out in tables, you know, kind of like what a workflow looks like, can be very effective. And then motion. So Motion is an AI scheduling [00:28:00] tool that I implemented recently That has been huge for me.

I tend to have a little bit of an A DHD work process and lack consistency in how I approach my days, my weeks, and my business as a whole. And Motion has really been able to shift that for me. So there's just a few features I'll share with you that have been really helpful, Having a tool that allows you to send a booking link to someone instead of that back and forth, Hey, this day, Hey, that time, no, that doesn't work. Send your booking link. Make them book into your schedule, have that event automatically created with the zoom link conferenced in and block it out on your calendar as busy.

You can even put buffering time on either side. Using something like that is so incredibly helpful. If you have consistent meetings, whether that's administration or interviews of potential contractors, anything that you have to schedule calls with. Having booking links can really be helpful in your workflow, your productivity, and your [00:29:00] efficiency.

Then AI essentially plans out the tasks that I have to do throughout the week. So like Joanna mentioned, she knows what she's gonna do when she wakes up in the day. So instead of just having a list of 10 things and you say like, oh, okay, maybe I'll do number seven or number six. I can set the priority, value, high, low, medium.

I can set the deadline, I can set the amount of time that it takes, and this is super cool, is the type of work that I'm gonna be doing. So remember I mentioned those buckets or those timeframes of. What you're doing. If I have deep work and it's content creation, then I can change that to content creation in terms of the work window, and it'll schedule it into that timeframe.

If it's a low administrative task, like responding to emails, updating a website thing, just like general tasks. It won't schedule it into my deep work time. It'll put it into the afternoon low administrative task time, and so I have been totally nerding out on this recently and it has helped my [00:30:00] productivity and my ability to focus.

To like an exponential degree. It has been so incredibly helpful. And then just one more tool that's been really helpful for me from a focus perspective is a platform called Del. And it's technically designed for neurodivergent brains, but it's soundscapes that allow you different levels of focus or like different intentions of what you're doing.

And then it allows you to block apps. So I already have do not disturb on my phone. At all times. My husband questioned this the other day. Technically, he can get through, so he's the only one who's able to get through text message or call, but I have do not disturb turned on at all times, not just during my work hours.

I don't ever like to be affected by notifications coming inbound. Now, if you have team members and like Slack channels and people who need answers right away, it might be different for you. But I'm in a space where I don't need or have that. And I don't think I'll create a life in which I wanna have that, or a business model in [00:31:00] which I wanna have that in place in the future, but that's just a choice.

And so allowing myself not to get distracted by notifications has been incredibly helpful in terms of my focus to stop the context switching and allow me just to put on my noise canceling headphones and dive into the work that needs to get done.

Joanna Newton: I've thought about using motion, but I'm really scared if I put in like. All of my meetings and all the things that I have to do and did all of the things, it would be like, warning, warning, you need two of you. I'm just like, I don't see how this would work. but again, one day I, I will get more help. I think that what, what's really key to me as you were talking through your use of motion is you understand. When you do the best type of work, right, like you have an understanding of your workflow, how you're going to work best, I think sometimes people grab those AI tools or a project management tool or any tool and they think this is gonna solve my problem. if you [00:32:00] don't understand you and when you work best you gave motion a strategy to follow. then motion is doing the thinking work and telling you how to follow your strategy. And that's absolutely fantastic. And doing that work to understand on the backend, like when you do the best work or what you need to do is super, super important with using any of these tools. I also am a big, Google Workspace person, Google Drive, Google Calendar schedule, sending emails, all of those things. But again, knowing the strategy. Then the tool, what's the strategy and then how does that tool support it? The other big thing, I feel like I talk about this on the podcast all of the time is monday.com.

monday.com is my favorite, favorite project management tool. I have, um, shared project management boards with my clients. If there's a project that we're working on long term where they know their tasks, I know my tasks. We have a [00:33:00] client board that we focus on for all of our client projects that I use with my team, so everybody knows what they need to do, when the due date is, what the next steps are, what all of the things are. monday.com puts me in a situation where I. We are able to what we do at a high level as a team we have two scheduled one hour calls a week, and we normally don't use the whole hour and we're building. I think six funnels this week. But because we have a system and we have a project management tool to do it, everybody knows what they, what they need to do, when they need to do it.

So we're able to use that strategy, use that system, use monday.com, our project management tool to track all of that. So I can go in and see where any project is Right now, without having to send a dm. Ask someone. 'cause one thing as a manager, and I think this is super important, I know this isn't what the episode's about, but I have my schedule to think about.

But I also have my team schedule to think about, I want systems that reduce their contact, contact switching. [00:34:00] I want systems that reduce their need to find all of the documents that they need to do a project. I wanna make them fast and efficient. As well, so that they're not stressed so that they get their work done and our clients are happy.

So everything we're talking about for us as an individual, as you scale and have team members extends to them, if you are erratic and all over the place and disorganized and just throwing shit all over the place for people to do, they will get stressed and overwhelmed and quit. And you don't want that in an agency.

I will tell you, I have an amazing team. I have an absolutely amazing team agency. Turnover is real. Most people don't stay working at an agency for very long. They get burned out and they leave. I have three people who have been with me since the beginning it's been like over two years. And I think it's because, we create systems that work. I stay out of their hair. I let them do their job because they know what to do, [00:35:00] and then they can come to me when there's an issue and I'll help them. Right? My goal is to not burn them out and create systems that do that. 

Michelle Pualani: And tools will only be leveraged to the point that you are investing the time and energy to make them successful. I was chatting with someone the other day and they're gonna cancel this membership because it wasn't really worth it. And I was like, oh, well did you put the, the model into place in terms of running ads?

And they were like, no. And I was like, you know that it's not gonna be effective if you don't actually do the thing. That you're setting out to do, right? when you're talking systems, when you're talking tech, when you're talking software, learn the ins and outs of that tool in order to help you, and it's only gonna be as good as what you usually put into it.

thinking through what's the intention, what's the focus, how am I going to leverage this to the best of my abilities? And not tech stacking too much. I mean from, even from a business perspective we talk about Kajabi in terms of being an all-in-one platform, approaching your other systems in the same.

[00:36:00] Thought process. In the same vein, not trying to have this email provider and this course developer, and this funnel page and this payment processing and all of these things from all these different places, productivity and efficiency is about simplification. So it's not about how many tools or apps can you download in order to make yourself more effective.

It's about how can you invest in one or two systems. Practices that are actually gonna work for you. And it might take some trial and error, it might take a little bit of experimentation, but you have so much access at your fingertips in terms of ai, in terms of software tech, even old school systems. If you wanna go the paper and pen route, 'cause that works for some people.

Sticky note systems, whatever that looks like for you. Trial experiment. Slash it if it doesn't work, but just thinking through. What do you want your life to be? And we'll kind of close on this note, is that you are a business owner. You are an entrepreneur, and the reason that [00:37:00] you got into this was to create freedom for yourself.

And when you don't plan, when you don't schedule, when you allow those external circumstances to dictate how you're investing your time. How you're investing your energy and your focus. You do not have that freedom. So thinking through what is the life that you want to create for yourself? When am I the most productive?

What do I want my mornings to look like? What do I want my days to look like? How do I wanna structure my weeks, and how do I wanna approach them? Take some time to sit back, reflect on that, and then move forward with some intention and some purpose. Knowing that, again, you're not gonna get it right. We have an episode on Clifton strengths and my top five are predominantly strategic thinking, so I love to plan. It's the execution that can be challenging. So finding a system that really supported the execution of my work has been huge, and it's taken me a long time to get here. But the more that you think about it, the more that you bring awareness to it, the more that you [00:38:00] audit your process, the better and more efficient, more productive you are going to see yourself being while still having the freedom to implement.

All of the personal care and time that you want in the business that you're building. That's all we have for you today. Go ahead and hit subscribe. We have a Facebook community we'd love to invite you into in which you're able to promote your business, what you're doing, and reach out for support and how we can help you 

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Thank you so much and we'll see you in the next one.