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062: Time 'management'
931 Plays2 years ago
About Christie Flora
Christie Flora is the owner of florandorder, she’s a Time Trainer and Goal Strategist and she’s the one overwhelmed professionals turn to when they want to ‘do life differently’. Christie’s strategies around time management, combined with her heart-centered and gentle approach keeps her clients on track to accomplishing their goals and seeing their calendars reflect their best life. Christie believes that focus, planning and inner stillness create efficiency and purpose-led action. This is the basis of her coaching programs and the content and resources she creates.
Getting your life admin under control isn’t just about time management but it's certainly an essential skill to hone if you want to streamline your approach.
We’re big fans of time boxing life admin tasks, where you set yourself a time limit, do what you can, and then stop. We’re also advocates for aligning your life admin with meaningful goals, scheduling tasks in a calendar and using to-do lists so you’re working on your priorities rather than red herrings. Making the most of your time is a quest for the ages, so in this episode, we talked to time management expert Christie Flora to expand our thinking about the dimensions of time management.
The highlights of our chat include:
- the way we live our lives is changing and we are changing time as we work more flexibly and remotely
- time management is not a one-size-fits-all solution and your approach needs to adapt over time based on the chapter of your life
- time management is actually about accommodating your energy and attention, recognising that you have different energy levels on different days and at different times of the day
- everyone has a unique relationship with and perception of time
- observing yourself when you are procrastinating or distracted to break down your habits and create new habits
- undertaking a time audit for two weeks: using a reminder on your phone or using a digital time tracker to help you diagnose your time management challenges
- how setting goals helps you manage your time with intention
- how our values can guide what we focus on and are the basis of our goals
- the difference between productivity (getting the right things done) and efficiency( getting things done with the least amount of effort)
- getting out of the “busyness” competition
- thinking of your calendar as your best friend and having a shared family calendar to manage family logistics
- to-do lists are a capture tool and if tasks will take longer than 10 minutes they should be included in your calendar
- scheduling an Hour of Power in your calendar for chunky life admin tasks
- scheduling planning time to review your calendar.
Flor & Order - Christie’s website
Episode 1 - Setting up a Shared Family Calendar
Episode 5 - Scheduling the Inevitable, the Inspirational and an Hour of Power
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips, and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money, and improve your household harmony. I'm Dina Rae Roberts, an Operations Manager who's always been a bit obsessed about how I spend my time, especially since my very first full-time job required me to track my job in six-minute increments.
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer who, in primary school, used to make colour-coded timetables for my afternings and weekends for fun.
Guest Introduction: Kristy Flora
00:00:35
Speaker
In this episode, we interview time management expert Kristy Flora. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. Before we dive in, we want to give a thanks to Haim, who emailed us to say, I've just listened to and read your Life Admin Hacks book.
00:00:50
Speaker
The first chapter nearly brought tears to my eyes with a sense of shared understanding about feeling overwhelmed by life admin. Well, we really love getting your feedback and knowing what we're sharing is useful. So don't hesitate to get in touch via our socials, email, or please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.
Aligning Life Admin with Goals
00:01:09
Speaker
Okay, so getting your life admin under control isn't just about time management, but it's certainly an essential skill to hone if you want to streamline your approach.
00:01:18
Speaker
We're big fans of time boxing life admin tasks where you set yourself a time limit, do what you can and then just stop. And we're also big advocates for aligning your life admin with meaningful goals, scheduling tasks in a calendar and needing to do lists. So you're working on your priorities rather than unnecessary red herrings.
00:01:38
Speaker
Making the most of your time is a quest for the ages, so we talked to an expert to expand our thinking about the dimensions of time management. So in this episode we talked to Kristy Flora who revealed that everyone has a unique relationship with and perception of time and that time management is actually more about accommodating your energy and attention and the need to plan for different energy levels on different days and at different times of the day. If you know you could use your time better, this episode's for you.
00:02:07
Speaker
Christy Flora is the owner of Floor & Order. She's a time trainer and goal strategist and she's the one overwhelmed professionals turn to when they want to do life differently. Christy's strategies around time management, combined with her heart-centred and gentle approach
00:02:25
Speaker
keeps her clients on track to accomplishing their goals and seeing their calendars reflect their best life. Kristy believes that focus, planning and inner stillness create efficiency and purpose-led action. This is the basis of her coaching programs and the content and resources she creates.
00:02:41
Speaker
Kristy, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I thought it would be, you know, time management is one of those topics that people are always talking about. There's a million books, there's a million sort of processes and principles out there and philosophies. Why are we all getting wrong about time management? Yeah,
Individualized Time Management Post-COVID
00:02:59
Speaker
you hit on a good point there. There's just so much material out there and then just so many more blog posts and everything is available online.
00:03:08
Speaker
And I think that's probably something that it's not that it's wrong, but I think people are just very overwhelmed by everything that there is out there that is saying that this is the way to do it. So if I was going to say that we're doing something wrong, it's that we're trying to find a recipe for that fits everyone or that works like this is, this is it. This is what's going to work. This is the way. Yeah.
00:03:34
Speaker
And I think we're at a really interesting fork in the road here where we've been doing things very much the same way for so, so many, so many decades. And now COVID, working from home and all of that, we're changing how we're doing things.
00:03:52
Speaker
So we're moving away from doing things very nine to five to actually in encompassing something in a lot in a much different way and something I've in my circles that I've really seen pop up a lot more. And I actually completed some training last year and this was menstrual cycle awareness. So helping women look at their how we move and use our time.
00:04:17
Speaker
against our menstrual cycle. So I'd say, yes, moving back to what the question about doing things wrong, I think it's just that we kind of swallowed it from an early age that this is how you do time. This is how you do your life. This is what a week looks like. And now we're changing that. Now we're really
00:04:37
Speaker
taking ownership of it and changing time. That's a really interesting point of this is what a week looks like because as you said, the last two years when people have started working remotely, the boundaries between work life and home life blurring.
00:04:51
Speaker
and having to think about time in a whole different way and not being able to just have the constraints of an office or a workplace make those definitions for you or create those containers and boxes for you. It is interesting to know things like your menstrual cycle or
00:05:08
Speaker
your chronotype you know if you're a morning person or in the evening person and have this self-awareness to start to draw onto because there's some approaches that also seem intuitively to be a right approach but as you said it's not a one-size-fits-all well this is what we're going to learn today that it's not a one-size-fits-all thing i'm really soon exploring this
00:05:30
Speaker
Yeah.
Managing Energy and Attention
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I noticed actually that on your website, you've got management in quotation marks. So I guess be interested in in sort of your why you've done that. And what's the difference between energy management, attention management, time management, and I think often those things are all conflated.
00:05:47
Speaker
I love that you guys picked that up. I had to go back to my website and check. I was like, oh, did I? I was like, oh, very interesting. I suppose, yeah, it's in quotation marks just because managing is very, I'm going to loop that back to like the masculine kind of way of looking at time, of looking at productivity that
00:06:07
Speaker
And that it is really manageable that, you know, once you get some skills down, once you get the technical stuff in place, it's going to be manageable. It's going to be OK. Whereas time is so fluid and it's always happening around us and it's just life, it's.
00:06:23
Speaker
It's hard to really contain it. So it's always something that you're having to change with and adapt to. I work with people in many different chapters of their life. Maybe they're starting a new job. Maybe they're getting married. Maybe they've had a baby. Maybe they're divorcing. Maybe they're moving house. Maybe COVID's hit.
00:06:43
Speaker
So it's all these different things that affect life. Yes, to manage time is I think one of those myths that it is something that you can kind of get in order and you can get it right.
00:06:57
Speaker
And it's very much a lifestyle. It's like PT and you're not going to go for one session and then be fit, then that's it. It's an ongoing process through our lives as we change. This is really thought provoking. So my next question was going to be, so if we're not managing time, what are we managing? Then I'm like, well, no, managing is actually the wrong word.
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't found the right word for it, which is kind of, I suppose that's just how we talk about it in society. Oh, and sorry, leaving back to your question about the energy and the attention management and time management. So it's really looking at those aspects that all come together that we're no longer looking at nine to five and like, I'm at my desk, I'm working nine to five and
00:07:41
Speaker
that's it and then I'm switching off. It's like, especially now in many jobs where people are having to use their brains in different capacities, are you more creative in the mornings or in the afternoon? Or when does that suit you best to be doing those bits of work? Time management is that consistent thing that we can kind of grab a hold on like, okay, 24 hours and the passing of a day. Whereas everyone's energy and attention
00:08:10
Speaker
fluctuates and it changes every day like depending on how good your sleep was, what you've got going on, maybe you've had a stressful day, maybe you've had a fight with someone. It's going to, yeah, detract from your energy and your attention. So it's having to manage those three things together in order to get done what you want to get done.
00:08:31
Speaker
That's kind of the difference between those three aspects that I help people with to look at the technical side of time and get those tools in place for your calendar and your to-do list and the like and prioritizing. But then looking at energy and like your sleep, your routines around that and
00:08:50
Speaker
how you're supporting yourself so that you can show up and be the best that you can be. And then attention, like looking at procrastination and how you handle interruptions and distractions and other habits that may be tripping you up. So it all comes together, really. Well, let's just do a deep dive there on the energy management side of things, because it's really interesting. It requires you to approach each day quite flexibly, really, depending on how you are.
00:09:17
Speaker
And I'm thinking back to the recent spate of really hot nights you've had here in Melbourne. And I just do not sleep when it's really hot. It doesn't matter if I have the aircon on, I just have a crappy sleep and I wake up and I'm not feeling alert. And I'll look at, you know, I might have timeboxed things in my calendar for the next day for things I want to do. And I'm like, I do not have, I'm not firing fast enough.
00:09:39
Speaker
to do that right now, maybe in the afternoon I'll come good. So I really have to think, okay, I need to reorganise my day and reset my expectations of what I should work on, at what time, because I'm just not, you know, I'm not showing up like that, which is annoying. Like, why can't we just be machines and just, you know, wake up and perform?
00:10:00
Speaker
I think that's what you're going to is that idea of having the routines and your environment set up so that you can be your best self. It can give yourself the best chance of being able to fire each day as required. I think it's interesting too, because often when we talk about time management as parents, we're not only managing our own time, but we're managing our kids' time. And I guess
00:10:22
Speaker
you know encouraging them to do things or taking them or asking them to do homework or asking them to help around the house or whatever we're doing and i think it's very easy to get frustrated with them and say you need to do it now because that's when it suits me and you also need to i guess be flexible with them and i'm you know my son's just started high school so this is very real for me right now.
00:10:43
Speaker
in terms of thinking about his energy levels when he gets home from school brand new school brand new environment he's got homework to do and i would desperately like him to just get on crack on and get it done so we don't have to have the conversation again but he's just you know he's his energy levels he's exhausted from all this social interaction and so i have to give him that space to kind of
00:11:03
Speaker
And I guess be recognized that his energy levels also mean that he needs to manage time in a way that works for him, not that works for me. And it's really interesting to push yourself or your son to do something at that time.
00:11:19
Speaker
that might end up taking him an hour and a half. Whereas when he's kind of fresh, had a cup of tea, maybe played some Nintendo or are they playing Nintendo these days? I don't know. Then they come back and maybe that homework only takes 30 minutes. So it's that, yeah, we may have thought, oh, we're going to tick this off earlier in the day.
00:11:39
Speaker
But we're actually wasting more time because it's going to take more time than when we were feeling a bit fresher and we get through it faster. So it's that real balance between all those three elements that helps us make the most of our days. And so the other third element you had there was attention management and talking with your clients through what's distracting them or when they procrastinate.
00:12:01
Speaker
Can you talk a bit further about that? How do you start diagnosing that in yourself or being alert to what's going on for you? It starts really with observing yourself. So I have a client who came to me because she was always late to things.
00:12:16
Speaker
We dived into that like, well, why? What's going on for you in that moment? What are you thinking about? What's kind of pulling you in different directions? And it kind of led us to her kind of diving into some deeper stuff, like that she was she was worried about what what she would look like when she arrived. And then she was also concerned about
00:12:38
Speaker
being too early and being alone. And so it was kind of all of those things came into it and that builds into a habit, a habit which protected her to be late on my side. So it was getting into all those aspects to break down a habit to then form a new one.
00:12:58
Speaker
So it's looking at all those aspects that come together, that attention to who she was and observing who she was, allowed her to have more time in her day because she wasn't wasting time on the different aspects that were really making her fall over.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, so there's an attention of understanding where you're actually spending your time. And then there's the distractions. And I know there's, you know, people like near AR who've written books like Indestractable and talk about, well, there's a huge focus on technology and the distractions that can come from the tech that's around.
00:13:36
Speaker
time that talks about sort of some of the infinity pools that are out there in terms of social media where you can you know you can dive in for what you intend for five minutes and an hour and a half later you're like what just happened?
00:13:50
Speaker
Yes. And I think also attention, it's making sure that you're picking up the right task at a time that, you know, as you said, with your sleep. So say you have that, and I remember those hot nights as well, like having to rejig my day, having that flexibility of, okay, that's not happening today because I just don't have the attention to focus on it because the sleep's not there to support me. So yeah, rejigging your day that you, you can identify
00:14:16
Speaker
I don't have the attention span today for that. Let's try again tomorrow or okay. If it's not urgent and someone's, you know, down your, breathing down your neck for it, can it be moved to next week when it looks like it's going to be cooler? So taking into account how you're feeling and your attention that really helps with accomplishing what you need to do.
00:14:39
Speaker
So,
Identifying Time Management Challenges
00:14:40
Speaker
Kristy, where do you start when you're working with people? You know, they come into you, they might be overwhelmed, they might be feeling out of control in their life. Where do you start with them? Oh, good question. It really depends on the client. So everyone's different, everyone's got different reasons as to why they've reached out. But really, I start with the most painful point. So what's causing the most pain for them?
00:15:03
Speaker
Where is the biggest fire that we need to attend to? And for some people, it's like emails. It's task management system. It's just clearing the deck so they can actually have some clarity of mind. Yeah. And then looking at how we can build that into some habit building and some systems that they need going ahead. So I kind of look at it as putting out the fires and then building those foundations. And then we get into the nitty gritty of
00:15:29
Speaker
building that life that they see for themselves going forward where they want to be on top of things and feel accomplished at the end of the day fulfilled. That sounds like it would be such a great exercise to do. I guess for people who aren't so lucky as to be able to work with you personally, how can they do some of that self-diagnosis and become a bit more aware of their own time management challenges?
00:15:53
Speaker
Yeah. Well, firstly, do a brain dump. Just get everything out of your head. Everything that's concerning you and making you feel quite overwhelmed. That old piece of paper is just such a great tool. So empty it all out. And also start observing when you do your best work. Like in the mornings, say if you're
00:16:13
Speaker
a small business owner and doing a blog post. Are you better at writing in the mornings versus the afternoons or is it the afternoons are better for you? Just observe with kindness. It's always with kindness because I think we can often beat ourselves up for not doing things the right way or trying a system that we've heard a lot about or
00:16:35
Speaker
is quite popular at the moment, but it doesn't work for us. And so we can get quite hard on ourselves. So do everything with kindness and observe yourself. So what's working, what's not working, what's really aggravating you, what's not. And I think doing a time log, it sounds kind of a bit boring or a bit micromanaging, but
00:16:56
Speaker
If you can account for where your time is going, having that reality of where you're actually spending your time, it's really helpful for you to have that data to know, oh, this is where my time is going and I need to rein this part back or I need to amp this part up and spend a bit more time on my business or with my family or whatever it is to find a bit more balance. So start observing yourself with, yeah, when you prefer to do things as well.
00:17:25
Speaker
and be kind. And I'm just thinking, Laura Vanderkamp's talking about doing a time inventory. So what are practical tools people can use to do that? Because how do you actually know? Do you do it for a whole week? Are you getting an Excel spreadsheet out? Do you have like a little timer that dings every so often and you write down what you've been doing?
00:17:45
Speaker
How do you do a time log? Yeah, these are all great ideas. It'll work differently for other people. So there are templates available online that break it down into half hour slots. And so you just kind of every half hour using your phone, you can pop a reminder on a ding.
00:18:01
Speaker
So then every half hour, you're noting down what you're doing. You can also, if you have been using a calendar, you can look back on your planner and make note of that. Or yeah, just use your, you can use a digital calendar as well going forward, either your Outlook or Gmail.
00:18:17
Speaker
They have different category colors as well, which you can apply for different parts of your life. Yeah. Or, or if, if paper is the way to do it, then a notebook, it works as well. But, uh, I do think having a reminder on your phone is, is very useful as well. Just to, while, while that exercise is quite new, a week is good, but if you can do it for two weeks, that's even better. Two weeks.
00:18:41
Speaker
Should we do it one time? I kind of feel like I'm kind of curious. I feel like I'm pretty efficient, but I'm a researcher. A lot hasn't ever done some data. Yeah, and I think the one thing that I have used in the past, I guess supplement that is looking at the screen time on my phone, because I definitely know myself that that's where
00:19:01
Speaker
I can waste time. You know, using that has really brought that awareness to the, I guess, the when I might be distracted to pick up the phone.
Tracking Time Usage Effectively
00:19:10
Speaker
And so I guess, you know, just slipping in a bit of a hack. One of the things that really helped me change my behavior with social media was just setting up those screen time settings on my iPhone, which just reminded me after five minutes or 10 minutes. And even though it didn't stop me, it just gave me that reminder
00:19:26
Speaker
if you know you've now reached your screen time limit and it just creates that awareness like oh actually i don't want to do i don't want to be on facebook for more than 10 minutes a day or whatever it is and so i guess that comes back to you know thinking about being deliberate in terms of you know what you want to spend your time yeah
00:19:42
Speaker
That reminds me, there's quite a lot of online tools like toggle and time rescue that will monitor your time usage in the background. But I often think keep it simple because you don't want to be having to write down in your time log that you were setting up that to do your time log. So one of the things you talk about in terms of the way you help people is that you're a goal strategist. Why is goal so
00:20:09
Speaker
setting so important when it comes to feeling more control of our time and using it more intentionally. Yeah, I think intention is the key word there that it's the backbone to everything that what you're working towards. If we don't know where we're going, if we don't know our destination, then we're just kind of wasting time every day on things that kind of come our way because life is life is so full of things that you want to do, things from other people.
00:20:35
Speaker
and things you have to do as just like being a general person in the world. So without that focus of a goal, and these are, it can be as basic as I want to be a good friend, or you know, that's a goal in itself. So it doesn't have to be something huge like I want to make a million dollars this year or whatnot.
00:20:55
Speaker
So if we have goals for every aspect of our life, those big vision pitches that we have, then we have something to work towards that we can actually reflect with our calendar. We can look at our calendar and go, well, I'm not seeing any of my friends this week, so I need to change that next week. Or maybe I'm looking at it monthly. Maybe I look at it next month and go, well, I'm going to get some more friendship time in there. So it's a guidance system. It's helping us determine what we're spending our time on.
00:21:24
Speaker
and what we're wanting to accomplish. And I think so many people, I think it's such a useful thing to think about goals in so many areas of your life, particularly when you do manage to fritter away time and think about some of, I did fritter away quite a lot of last year at watching an enormous amount of television in those last lockdowns, because I felt like I'd grown weary of the goals. But I do think if you sort of sat down at the beginning of the month, you wouldn't think, oh, my goal is to get through five seasons of
00:21:52
Speaker
You're more girls this month and you wouldn't feel good about it. And so if you are a little bit more forward looking, you're much more likely to manage your time with intention rather than kind of just letting it happen to you. I will say on that point though, that that kind of comes back to. You're more girls is really good.
00:22:10
Speaker
The kindness aspect, definitely for myself, I can really relate to that during the lockdowns. I kind of tied it to my health and wellbeing goals. My brain needs a rest. I just need to escape to Paris and watch Emily in Paris. And so I tied it to that aspect. My body needs this. And that goes back to that energy attention and time management.
00:22:33
Speaker
Like maybe it wasn't the best use of my time, but it was definitely helpful for my energy, which then helps with my time this year because I'm recovered. So yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed those TV shows.
00:22:46
Speaker
And where do values come into this as well? Because setting goals is one thing. How do values impact this too? Values guide us as to what we're focusing on. So they're the basis of that goal setting. So as I mentioned about friendship, so what's the value behind that? It's about being connected and it's about supporting others. I'll say that's a value of mine. So it leads to my goal of being a good friend and having those connections in my life. Yeah.
00:23:15
Speaker
I've got a link in the show notes. I'll link to some resources where people can explore their values because for a lot of people, you know, they haven't, they haven't had the time or there hasn't been that sort of the situation in their life where they've really had to question their values. But it is something that once you tap into them and become aware of them, you realize how much they influence your decisions every day, either consciously or subconsciously. Well, having that awareness would be very helpful.
00:23:41
Speaker
It sounds really cheesy, but I actually, we did like a family mission statement a couple of years ago where they, you know, we talked about different words in our family and wrote it down and as much it is, is quite cheesy. It is kind of useful to then help you think about, you know, things like where do we want to go on holiday and how do we want to spend our time? What's important to us?
00:23:59
Speaker
highly recommend considering it or at least having the discussion with your kids around the dinner table can be really helpful for them to also understand why you make the decisions that you do in terms of things beyond just time. I love that time. I love that. I don't think it's cheesy.
00:24:16
Speaker
Just getting back a bit more to sort of true, like, pure time management stuff. We'd love to hear what your take is on the difference between productivity and efficiency. Oh, very nice. All right. I wrote this down because I wanted to know that it's all right. So for me, productivity, it's about getting the right things done. So it's how much you're accomplishing and if that's kind of leveling up to what you're setting out to do.
Productivity vs. Efficiency
00:24:41
Speaker
And efficiency is getting things done with the least amount of effort. So you're not
00:24:45
Speaker
wasting time and energy and attention. You're doing it streamlined in a way that supports you and allows you to accomplish what you want to accomplish. How's that? Amazing. Yeah. And again, it puts the focus on how important it is to have goals because you're only productive if you're accomplishing something with an intent to get somewhere.
00:25:07
Speaker
So yeah, you know, when you think about this with life admin, one of the things that people talk about often is that they don't feel like they have enough time to do it or they're spending too much time on it. And I think you have some of those goals to understand, okay, why is it, what is compelling you to spend the time doing it? Or, you know, where is it taking you to do, decide to do comparison shopping for your electricity and your mobile and your car insurance?
00:25:32
Speaker
having to be able to ladder up to some goals around that helps you make decisions about how much time you're going to spend on it and why you're really doing it. Yeah. And it also can help you really make the decision to change. Cause I think often, you know, I hear a lot about people talking in one of my pet feeds at the moment is people saying that they don't have time. They're so busy and yet they go to the supermarket four times a week because they haven't done a meal plan. And I'm like, okay, if you want more time,
00:25:57
Speaker
You need to really set aside. If you want more time to do this, then here is a tactic to actually achieve that for yourself and it can help anchor some of those changes for you. So true. The whole conversation around busyness and the use of busyness, that's one of my... Is pet peeve too strong? I'm not sure.
00:26:15
Speaker
But it's getting into the busyness competition. It's just very, we need to get out of that.
00:26:31
Speaker
Think of your calendar as your best friend. That's what I think of it as. If you haven't already, fall in love with your calendar. It's just, it's amazing. And it's your own personal assistant. So there's a really great relationship you can have there with your calendar.
00:26:49
Speaker
I
Practical Use of Calendars and To-Do Lists
00:26:49
Speaker
know I've changed a lot of people's perception on their calendar with that, just how much you can rely on it and how much it does support you with accomplishing what you want in life. But on a technical side of that, I would say so calendars, it's obviously for appointments and things that you've got booked in, but it's for items on your to-do list that are going to take longer than 10 minutes.
00:27:12
Speaker
If it's going to take longer than 10 minutes, book in a time with yourself to do it. So anchor that against a time to get it done. Because if it's not scheduled, it's not likely to get done. So then that leaves the to do list is for those quick items that are, you know, aren't going to take too long. And we're also able to use that for batching. So like,
00:27:32
Speaker
if we have some phone calls and things like that. So a to-do list is to look at it more like a capture tool, like things that you're when you're on the go. During the day, I have a to-do list pad next to me with like, oh, these are my little items for the day. And as things come up, come to mind to add them to that list. And then I'll move them if they're bigger than 10 minutes, I'll move that into my calendar at the end of the day, just so that they have the time that they deserve.
00:28:00
Speaker
the next few days or the next week. So that's kind of calendars for those bigger items and to really give those tasks that you have the time and effort that they deserve and your to-do list is on the move, on the go and smaller items that you can tick off.
00:28:17
Speaker
We talk about in the book, 10-minute time killers that are hours of power and suggest that people have two lists. So as you suggest, all those sort of things that take about 10 minutes or less, pop in a to-do list so you can have them with you at any time and add to them at any time. And then schedule that hour of power when you've got those chunkier life admin tasks where you have to sit down and analyze or research or consult.
00:28:43
Speaker
block a recurring meeting with yourself each week so you can have that time dedicated to it. And because a lot of people otherwise will carry those chunkier tasks in their head, this is just having a separate hour of power to do this so that you can just brain dump it, at least not trying to remember it.
00:29:03
Speaker
and then consult it during the little hour of power. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. So you're giving it the time that it deserves rather than like it's on a scrap of paper and you're just like, oh, I need to do that huge thing. But. And I would say that they're probably the strongest feedback that we've been receiving on the book in terms of people helping them manage the mental load has been having a shared family calendar so that all of your family events are accessible by everyone in a single place.
00:29:32
Speaker
And I must admit, my daughters just started working part time. So this is like as another layer of complexity. And I've just said to her, if you want to get a shift, you have to find in the calendar that I can drive you and pick you up. I don't want to have the conversation with you. You can pop it in. So I think those sorts of things can just make a huge shift in terms of both admin load and managing your time better.
00:29:53
Speaker
That's a fantastic suggestion. I think that could have really helped my parents when I was doing part-time work and needed them to pick me up. So, Kristy, what, you know, there's all these books and podcasts and newsletters out there. I mean, we started at the start of our chat talking about how it can be overwhelming to digest a lot of it. But are there things that you do recommend people check out that you found useful in your resources or
00:30:20
Speaker
Oh, definitely your guys' podcast. They're already here. Thank you for coming, Listers. Okay. That one's done. Do your list. What else? So I suggest that to my clients anyway. And, oh, there's so many great books out there. I love, yeah, The Atomic Habits by James Clear, Productivity Project by Chris Bailey, Do Less by Kate Northrup, and In the Flow by, I'm going to say her name wrong, Alicia
00:30:51
Speaker
and that's around the menstrual cycle awareness, which is just incredible. It really depends on what the issue is. There's just so much stuff out there that people can get into. Thank you. We'll put links to those in the show notes. So
Personal Strategies by Kristy Flora
00:31:06
Speaker
before we finish up today, we'd love to get a little sneak peek into how you manage your own life admin and I guess what time management tricks you use to make your life admin run seamlessly.
00:31:16
Speaker
Okay. Well, yes, I love my calendar. I look at it all the time throughout completely, maybe every half hour through the day. I'm in there. I'm amending it as things change and as my energy fluctuates, as my attention fluctuates. Am I using my notes, my OneNote program as a way of keeping track of my longer term goals?
00:31:40
Speaker
So they really interact, maintaining those long-term ideas and then moving them into my calendar when they need to.
00:31:47
Speaker
Similar to your hour of power, I often have that life admin section in my calendar, in my life, that to have that time to put aside, to think about things that are demanded of us as humans and regularly planning. So that's something that I do start of the week, end of the week, having planning sessions to look ahead at what's coming up, what's changed, what needs to be moved around.
00:32:13
Speaker
Thanks so much for sharing your experience and ideas with us today. It's been such a pleasure to go deep on this topic that's top of mind for everybody along this mission. Yes. Well, thank you so much for having me. So where can our listeners find you if they want to hear more? On my website, www.floorandorder.com.
00:32:32
Speaker
blog every week and I love blogging on the topic and drawing on my clients' experiences and exploring these topics a lot more and I love to go philosophical about time so that's all there. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeandminlifehacks.com and if you're a fan
00:32:56
Speaker
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00:33:08
Speaker
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