How To Save 7+ Hours Every Single Week

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

What would you do with an extra 7 hours a week? Even though this sounds like a total dream, I’m here to tell you that it’s possible and it’s easier than you think to make it happen.

In this episode, we’re diving into the secrets of reclaiming your time and boosting your productivity to make those extra hours your reality with practical tips you can implement today.

Links Referenced in Episode:

▶ Learn more about the Systems Savvy Society

▶ Efficiency Self-Assessment Toolkit

▶ Episode 13: A Question Hack to Stop You From Overscheduling

▶ Episode 28: Tools to Automate Your Online Business: I Use These Daily

Connect with me:

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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

What would you do with an extra seven hours a week? Even though this sounds like a total dream, I’m here to tell you that it’s actually possible and it’s so much easier than you think to make it happen. So in this episode, we’re diving into the secrets of reclaiming your time and boosting your productivity to make these extra hours your reality with practical tips you can implement today.

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

Saving 7+ Hours a Week Is Possible

Hey, Hey, welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. Now at the beginning of this episode, I asked you a question, but I truly want you to take some time to think about what you would do if you had those extra seven hours a week. For some people that might look like spending more time with the family or doing some ad hoc activities.

Maybe you have some hobbies that you haven’t been able to do in a while because a life has lifed, and things have kept coming up and maybe those hobby plans have gotten canceled. Or maybe you just need some down time. Some time to relax. Some time to lay in bed and watch TV or whatever the case is.

This is going to look absolutely different for every single person listening to this podcast. And it’s going to be different week by week, even day by day.

Like, for example, for me today, literally right before hitting record on this episode, I was just on my daughter’s school. So she is doing summer camp over the summer.

And I know she really enjoys it when other friends have their birthdays at the school because they bring cupcakes, they bring balloons. They sing happy birthday. And obviously the kids feel special. And so every time that happened, she would always tell us, we asked her, how was your day? Oh, a friend’s birthday and cupcakes.

And so I was like, great. You know what it is, you like it, I’m going to do that for you too. And today was that day. So even though I know that one, she’s only in summer camp for very few hours in the day and two, my son’s here too, and we just got a waterslide so he really wants to go on the water side.

And so I was like, you know what, I’m going to end work early. That’s not how I planned my week. We were supposed to go yesterday, I’m recording this on a Wednesday or Thursday and we’re going to this on a Thursday, and we had planned to go on Wednesday, but rain came out of nowhere. And so that’s how I had planned it in my week.

And so I was like, you know what, we’ll do it on Thursday. I’ll end work early. We’ll pick up Adi from school and then we’ll go outside and play on the water slide. And that’s how things go. That is how I spent my extra hours this week.

And next week it’s going to change. It might be different. Sometimes I’m going to be in the middle of a launch. Sometimes I’m going to need to work a little bit more on those extra money-making tasks.

Other times my husband has some more free time from his work, so I spend more time with him. It looks different in different phases.

So I want you to take a moment to actually think about what would you do with these extra seven hours a week? Truly, if you truly have these extra seven hours, what would you do?

3 Ways to Save 7+ Hours a Week

There’s a couple of different ways we can make that happen for you. So hopefully you have some visions of what you would like to do. Maybe it’s not what you think you would spend it on, right? Because maybe you know that you’re already in this bad habit of just wasting these extra hours even if you get more productive and you get more hours.

Maybe you know you’re just going to waste it by staying distracted and scrolling on social media. And that’s fine. At least you’re aware of it and you can make changes to adjust and to improve on that. Okay. And so that’s kind of what we’re going to talk about in this episode, because I want to share a couple of different ways that you can start to save seven hours a week.

Track Your Tasks & Time

And the first way is by time tracking.

Time tracking is when you literally set a timer and you track how long it takes you to complete certain tasks. Now, in episode 13, I talk about this a little bit because time tracking actually helps you avoid over-scheduling yourself for the week, because it helps you understand how long tasks actually take you to complete versus how long you think they take you to complete.

You know exactly how long it’s going to take you to schedule a pin, to create a reel, to record X number of lessons for a course or whatever the case is. You’ll know exactly how long it’ll take you and you know how many hours in a week you have available to work on your business.

And then that makes it easier for you to schedule accordingly. And also when you do start to time track, you’ll notice, Time-wasting activities that you might not even realize that you’re doing or that you’re doing for that long.

And so it really starts to highlight some areas of improvement for you. So if you’re ever feeling like your day kind of just disappeared and you have no idea where time when or what you got done, then time-tracking is something that’s going to be super, super helpful for you.

And inside the Efficiency Self-Assessment Toolkit, I actually have an entire lesson on time tracking along with which tools you can use and how you can do this time tracking for yourself to help you get more efficient. This toolkit is also available inside the System Savvy Society.

So that is the first way. It’s a time track to help you start to see where you’re spending your time, because that is really step one.

Create Strategic Task Management Systems

Now, the next thing that you can do is to create strategic task management systems. So establishing a system is going to help you prioritize and manage the tasks more efficiently and more effortlessly.

It really helps you prevent overwhelm and ensures that you stay focused on what truly matters because you’ve already done the work. You’ve already done the work ahead of time by creating the system for yourself, instead of trying to figure out every single time what you need to do.

So every time you record a podcast episode, you’re writing, okay, what do I got to do for our podcast? So I got to record, I got to edit, got to do this, this, this, this. And every time you’re rewriting that list over and over and over again.

Whereas if you were just to create a system, then it would already be done and you can reuse that over and over and over again. And it’s really helpful to have these systems created inside of an actual project management tool. I personally love and use Trello because it is so visual. It’s so much easier in my opinion than some of the other tools.

And it’s amazing for keeping track of all of your tasks and defining those clear priorities by helping reduce your stress and helping you get more accomplished every single day. So that is the second thing that you do is really start to build out your strategic task management systems.

And this is actually what the Systems Savvy Society is all about. So if you need help with creating systems, if you have no idea where to start, you don’t even know what type of systems to create or how to create them, then I really do encourage you to join the System Savvy Society by heading to cheerstoproductivity.com/sss. And you can learn more by clicking the link in the show notes as well.

Automate Your Business

Now, the last thing that you can do is to automate your business. Automate as much as possible. And by automate, I mean, let the robots do the things for you.

So you can use tools and software to handle repetitive tasks automatically without you having to do anything. And you can automate certain parts of your business in so many different ways. In episode 28, I actually talk about the automation tools that I personally use in my business to automate certain things every single day without me having to do anything. So definitely check that episode out if you haven’t listened to it yet.

But automation really helps you free up more time for more important activities and reduces the human error, Like forgetting to do something because it’s just a tiny task that you don’t write down in your planner because you’ll remember to do it. But you might not.

I know I’m definitely the type of person that’ll leave my desk to go to my room, get to my room and be like, why did I come in here? Like, what was I supposed to do in my room? And then it takes me a minute to just be like, oh yeah. Okay. That’s what I was. And then sometimes I leave the room. I’m like, dang it. I can’t figure it out. And I leave the room and then I was like, oh, that’s right. And then I have to go back. Right.

Well, that’s time that I just wasted. In an online business situation, that thing could have probably, probably possibly been automated and just done for you. So now you don’t even have to think about it.

So some examples of some tasks that can be automated are your social media posts. You can use a social media tool to schedule some posts.

You can even automate certain tasks within your project management tool itself. I use so many automation rules inside of Trello. There’s so much that is automated within my Trello boards. If you, if you realize that you are repeating something, you’re constantly doing this thing over and over and over again, try to see if there’s a way to automate it.

Many times there is, and if there is, do the automation, and take some time in that moment to get that automation done, okay? Because this automation is going to be like, it’s almost going to be like having a personal assistant that never sleeps, that just takes care of all of those things for you without you even have to worry about it, without you having to constantly tell them or remind them to get it done.

Like, You set it up once and it’s almost like a set and forget it. They’re gonna they’re gonna go and take care of the tasks for you. So automation is the third way for you to really start to save hours in your week.

Episode Wrap-Up

All of these are things that we talk about inside of the System Savvy Society, So like I mentioned if you need help, you don’t know where to start, you want to start creating systems But you don’t even know how, you don’t even know what you need, Then the Systems Savvy Society is for you.

So definitely check out the link in the show notes and in the next episode I’m actually going to talk about task management systems a little bit further, So be sure to come back once the next episode is released and I’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for listening to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast with me Lucy Reyes. To view the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today’s episode, visit cheerstoproductivity.com/73. And before you go, make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you’re listening so you know once the next productive chat is released. Talk soon and cheers to productivity and success!