How to Give Yourself the Gift of Productivity

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

Balancing personal life and business during holidays can be a challenge, but get ready to make this holiday season your most productive yet.

In this episode, I’m sharing how to maintain the perfect blend of work and festive fun without feeling overwhelmed. You’ll learn the system that’ll free up your time, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.

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Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Episode Intro

Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’ll learn strategies to boost your productivity so you can scale your online business and impact lives sooner. It’s your time to shine, so let’s get started!

Hey y’all, welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. Whew, we’re right here in the holiday season. I definitely pre-recorded this episode ahead of time because the holidays are such a busy period for me as well. I don’t want to say chaotic because I love Christmas. I love spending time with family, planning games, baking cookies, and making family memories. So it’s not a bad thing—it’s a good kind of busy.

However, during this time, it’s really easy to neglect our businesses while focusing on these festive activities. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s perfectly fine to focus on the things that truly light you up this holiday season. But I also know that many of you can’t fully let go of the wheel, believing that your business won’t run smoothly without your constant attention. So, you definitely still want to set yourself up for success in the background and maintain your productivity during the holiday season because, let’s face it, you probably have less time to work on your business.

This means you need to be more productive than ever. Productivity also means resting, and I have a whole episode dedicated to ensuring you’re getting enough rest because yes, rest is productive too.

Why Productivity Matters During the Holidays

During the holiday season, many of us experience added stress and more tasks on our plates. Our to-do lists seem longer than ever, both for personal life and business. If you’re spending more time away from your business, your to-do list is likely growing because you’re adding tasks without being able to cross them off as quickly as you’d like.

It’s crucial to maintain an imperfect balance. I don’t like to say “balance” because it’s often not perfect, but some sort of imperfect balance where some days you’re taken over by personal life and other days by your business. That’s okay because the holidays are about enjoying time with family and friends. However, you might still want to stay on top of business tasks without feeling overwhelmed or facing a massive backlog when you return after the holidays.

Setting Up Systems for Efficiency

So, what can you do about it? You can become more efficient and productive by setting up systems. Having a solid system in place helps you do more in less time and truly frees up space for some holiday fun. But not just any system—today, we’re focusing on specific systems called task flows.

Task flows are step-by-step processes that help you break down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. They’re great for busy seasons because they help you prioritize and stay organized. Task flows save time by automating smaller, tedious tasks that create mental clutter and make it easy to delegate certain tasks to team members, if you have one. This way, not everything falls on you.

This concept is the premise of my newest course, Tesla Magic, which will be available for presale in January. Stay tuned for that! But for now, let’s dive into an example of a holiday task flow.

Examples of Holiday Task Flows

Personal Life: Holiday Shopping Task Flow:

Research Gifts: Identify what gifts you need.
Make a List: List the people you need to buy gifts for.
Set a Budget: Determine an overall budget or a budget per person.
Order Online or Shop In-Store: Decide where to purchase each gift, such as online, Walmart, Target, etc.
Check Off Items: As you buy gifts, check them off your list.

I’ve created several Christmas-related Trello boards on my phone, including an “Elf on the Shelf” board with ideas and a Christmas shopping board where I list gifts for different people throughout the year. As I purchase them, I check them off the list. Setting up systems like these can make holiday shopping much less stressful.

Business Life: End-of-Year Wrap-Up Task Flow

Review Finances: Assess your financials, ideally monthly, but at least at the end of the year.
Set Goals for Next Year: Outline your objectives for the upcoming year.
Optimize Systems: Look at your current systems and identify areas for improvement.
Evaluate Performance: Analyze what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved in various parts of your business.

Breaking down these larger tasks into smaller steps makes them more manageable and less overwhelming.

Gifting Yourself Productivity

Implementing systems like task flows—or even simple checklists—helps you manage both your personal and business to-do lists effectively, even during the busiest time of the year. If you can set these up ahead of time, that’s even better. But if you’re feeling like you have a lot going on—planning Christmas dinner, hosting New Year’s celebrations—creating task flows can save you time and energy. It also provides peace of mind, knowing you have a clear visual list of tasks involved in completing bigger projects.

This approach allows you to give yourself the gift of time, freeing up your schedule to enjoy what truly matters during the holidays. Whether it’s cozying up with family, making Elf on the Shelf memories, baking cookies, tackling holiday shopping, or simply enjoying some much-needed downtime, productivity systems can help you achieve it all.

Looking Ahead to 2025

Give yourself the gift of productivity and let’s work together to make 2025 your most efficient and joyful year yet. If you feel like you don’t want to do this alone and need help, stay tuned for more details on Tesla Magic, coming soon in a few weeks. Until then, here are some tips to get you started:

Create a checklist of what needs to be done today.
Break down tasks into manageable steps.
Implement task flows to organize both personal and business tasks.

Let’s move forward and make the new year easier and more organized than ever before.

If you’re not on my email list, be sure to grab the free private podcast where I’m sharing the blueprint on how to have a highly efficient online business. You can find the link in the show notes.

Until then, if you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas! If you celebrate other holidays, Happy Holidays! I’ll be back soon with another episode.

Thank you so much for listening to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast with me, Lucy Reyes. To view the full transcript and all the links mentioned in today’s episode, visit cheerstoproductivity.com/podcast.

Before you go, make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening so you’ll know once the next productive chat is released. Talk soon, and cheers to your productivity and success!