98. Cara Harvey: Productivity for Content Creators

You've most likely heard of the concept of batching (doing similar tasks together to free up time) and love the idea. But if you find it challenging to adopt the concept into your business, it might be because of the way that you work. For most content creators who come from corporate, teaching or other professions, what made them a "success" in those environments won't create the flexibility and freedom you seek as a business owner.

Enter my productivity obsessed guest today, Cara Harvey of A Purpose Driven Mom. In this episode we talk all things productivity for online entrepreneurs from making that mental shift in how we work, our take on hustle (which might surprise you), how to be intentional with your planning, content batching and overall time management to free you up for what matters most.

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Transcript

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Cara Harvey  0:00  
You need to know you. So I like I'm an enneagram 3. I like to grind. I enjoy that, like, that's fun for me. My husband, he's a 9. He would not like this at all. This is not how he, he does not operate like me, and so I think it's understanding and knowing who you are. I don't think any is better than the other but I think when you can identify who you are and how you like to work, you can build a business around that. I mean, that's why we do this, right? That's why we become entrepreneurs. You get to choose, even if you're somebody who's more like not type A and you want to be like go with the flow. You need a plan. You need a plan, and you need a plan that works for you. It doesn't have to be my plan, but you need to have some sort of plan because otherwise you're going to sit down to work and you're going to say what am I supposed to do? You're gonna waste more time trying to figure out what you're supposed to be doing than actually getting work done, and then you're gonna get frustrated and say this business doesn't work.

Heather Sager  0:56  
Well, hey, friend, welcome to another episode of the Heather Sager Show. It's me, Heather Sager and I'm honored to be your speaking coach here today in this episode. I've spent the last 15 years studying and building my communication skills to inspire and teach business owners and their teams from stages around the world. I've had the honor of speaking on more than a thousand stages on topics of leadership, premium brand positioning, sales, and of course communication. And now my focus is helping fellow online entrepreneurs become magnetic speakers, so they can make a bigger impact in the world, well growing their income. This show right here was designed to give you a dedicated space each and every week to grow your skills, and keep your big goals front and center. And if you liked today's episode, be sure to grab a screenshot and share it on Instagram and tag me @theheathersager so I can give you a shout-out and celebrate the work you're doing. All right, let's dive in, friend. It's gonna be a good one.

Well, hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Heather Sager show. I am super thrilled about today's guest, Cara Harvey. We met a year and a half ago at a live event and we've talked about doing this conversation for a few months, and so it's finally happening in here. Cara, welcome, welcome to the show.

Cara Harvey  2:16  
I'm so excited. I am actually a regular listener to your podcast, so this is super fun to be on the side.

Heather Sager  2:23  
It makes me so happy. Also, do you feel like sometimes when you create content online, whether it's like on a podcast or something else, it's hard to imagine actual real people listening to it. So like when people tell you they listen to you, like, I don't know, I fee like cringe a little bit of like, ah, that's exciting and oh, that's weird. I don't know.

Cara Harvey  2:41  
No, it's just like surreal thing because I had somebody actually at church, she came up to me and she's like 19 I think and she said, my mom listens to your podcast. I was at home and I heard your voice and I was like, that's really weird because especially when it's in real-life people. I never ever imagined them listening but they do.

Heather Sager  2:59  
That is funny that they were going on a random tangent to start with but I love it. But there is this like separation in my brain between real life and online business like it's almost like this is fictitious other reality. The other day, my sister texted me that she was listening to one of my interviews and I'm like, but why? 

Cara Harvey  3:19  
It's surreal. 

Heather Sager  3:20  
It is very surreal. And okay, so today we're talking about productivity, which we're going to go into a lot of different directions around this, but kind of anchoring down in that idea that the online space is kind of this like intangible fictitious world as I was just mentioning. It is kind of hard sometimes to determine how to spend our days and what to do and I see a lot of people struggle with it. But when and I first met, it was at a live event in LA in January of 2020, so right before the world shut down. I remember this. You and I were in a, it was like a mastermind hot seat session and you start talking about your business and what you do, and instantly I was like, I need to know her and be like total frenzies. So here we are, fast forward. Can you share a little bit about your business and what you do? Because I feel like other people are going to be like, yes, yes, sign me up. This is what I'm here for it. Let's talk about it. 

Cara Harvey  4:17  
Yeah, sure. I definitely one of those accidental entrepreneurs like this is not a seat I ever thought I would be sitting in I was a school teacher for eight years. I loved it and I burned out real fast. I was on track for administration and I was the principal of our summer school program, and I remember the day when the last day of summer school overlapped with the first day of regular school and I just cried in my car and I came home to my husband. I said I can't do this anymore. I'm tired. I'm burnt out and I had equated success with burnout. I thought if I hustled, if I stayed later, I would come in on Sundays to make copies like if I was the last one to leave the building. I thought I was the best teacher there and I can say this now you know. It's embarrassing that that was my mindset, but that was what I thought and I knew something had to change and my husband's like, cool. We got to make money. What are we going to do? And so I dabbled in network marketing because it was a hobby and I knew the bare minimum I needed. I left that year saying, alright, I'll see if I can make this network marketing thing work and I did that full time for two years, and on the outside, it looked great. It looked like it was working, six-figure business, 250 people on a team. I was successful but I was burned out and drowning because I was doing all the same things I did in teaching. I thought I had to hustle, I had to end every night at Inbox zero. I couldn't let anything go, I couldn't have anything left on my to-do list or I was going to fail, and I was clinging to this mentality. It wasn't until I was pregnant with my son and I have three kids. They're three, five, and 15. And I was pregnant with my son and I thought something's got to give because this is not sustainable, and people are asking me all the time, like, how do you do it? How do you do it? I felt like I was lying a little bit. I was like, I'm not sleeping and I'm trying to get it all done. It wasn't until then that I felt this tug to change things up and I felt this time to leave network marketing and do something differently because I knew that I had some tips with time management productivity that were working, there could be something different. And as a mom, I work with moms, particularly, it's just different. We have to look at our time differently. As mom's growing businesses, it is different. And I thought I think I can help. Right around that time, my husband, he was our sole, you know, primary breadwinner really. He lost his job and he was out of work for eight months, and these are the first eight months of my business. And so I grew my business left network marketing to had no more money coming in there and thought, what can I do with this productivity thing? It wasn't until I invested in a business coach really figured out what my secret sauce was that I realized that I could help moms figure out how to do what I did, which was actually ditch hustle which was learning how to create time in my schedule to grow a business, to fulfill my own passions and to help people while managing my family. And now what almost four years in, it's, you know, my full-time job. We've got a team. We just hired three coaches for the program which brings us up to eight people and I've surpassed all the goals that I thought writing a book right now, like things are kind of crazy and I don't work a million hours a week and I'm not burnt out and I'm actually really happy. And I did not think that it was possible to run a successful business and not be burned out drinking nine cups of I mean, I drink three, but I'm drinking nine cups of coffee a day and like, is having to do everything at this, you know, at the same time. It's been a real evolution and now I get to do this. I have my podcast, the Purpose Driven Mom show, and my membership, and I kind of just have a lot of fun with it. 

Heather Sager  7:32  
Okay, I love this. I think each of our journeys around how we move from whatever the old version of us, right, professionally into entrepreneurship. Each story is unique but also there's that through line that I hear so much with entrepreneurs that there was some kind of burnout in the environment we were in and that shift when you talk about hustle and that, specifically when you were talking about teaching and how being the last one in the building was a sign of like, oh, that's what it means to be great at that. That's what you're supposed to do. I think we all have our own versions of that. I think around like in corporate life, for those of us who have corporate backgrounds. Being available on email until 11 pm, being like the first one to respond in the morning. It's just like that, like the more you work that was like a badge of honor to move up the corporate ladder, and honestly, that is a hard way of working to shake in the online space. So let's talk about the transition for people who have, whether it's prior jobs in corporate or just an old way of being where it is about working all the time, moving into the entrepreneurial space which is totally the blank canvas and we don't know what to fill it up with so we just instantly start filling it up with activity. Can you talk about that transition and what you see happen most often with entrepreneurs?

Cara Harvey  8:51  
Yeah, I mean, that's what it is, right? We become our own boss and it's super cool but we don't know what to do with ourselves. So we're like, cool. I mean, 40 to 60 hours a week is normal, right? That's what we do. And then somewhere along the line, we realize, wait a minute, I left because I was going down this path so now I'm stuck here. I think that the transition is hard. I actually call it an identity crisis when you leave, at least for me when I left and was teaching for so long, and then all of a sudden I'm not I didn't know who I was anymore. I had to go through this evolution of figuring out what made me happy, how I wanted to spend my time, did I want to work hard? For me, I don't typically work on the weekends anymore. But sometimes I do because I want to and I had to be okay with this figuring out a piece of the business like do you want to work in the morning? Do you want to work in the evening? What are your hours? And I think there's also this mindset shift that has to start changing where it's if you're not working the hardest, then you don't want it bad enough. It's so embarrassing now that I know what I know But it was a social media post that came up in my memories today. And it was like one of those supposed to be motivational memes you know what I mean? Like, you know, if you want bad enough, you'll figure it out. If not, is just an excuse. I think that's exactly what it said. And I wanted to like slap Cara from four years ago in the face. I wanna be like, what are you doing? Because that pervasive hustle culture is the problem. I think that so often we feel like, if we're not pushing, If we're not grinding, if we're not performing, then there's something intrinsically wrong with us, and that's how we've been conditioned in corporate, in our other jobs and in entrepreneurship. But I think that, as you start to learn how to manage your time better, you will learn like, it's not that your willpower is bad, it's not that you're weak, it's not that you're not motivated, it's that you just need to create an intentional plan around your time, and that's the key. And we come from this shame-based culture of if you're not performing, you're not worthy, and we've got to work to shake that. And it's not something that happened overnight because I was still screwing these things in my business, like up until a year and a half ago and then something clicked in my head in particular, with working with moms, I realized, when I'm telling a mom like, you don't, you know, like, your willpower isn't there, you know, you have these excuses. It's so full of shame, right? And honestly, especially for moms, like so much of our why and our motivation is our kids. And if you're gonna tell somebody, they don't want it bad enough, you're really telling them like, their kids aren't important enough. I think that's a load of trash. I think it's garbage. And I think when we can start to compartmentalize a little bit, and say, like, this is who I am, and this is my business, and we take that shame piece out of it, then we're able to look at it black and white and say, great, this is my business, how do I want to structure time for my business? And if I don't get it all done, there's nothing wrong with me. I think it's a journey of having to find what makes you happy but also find what works for you and your schedule. I've got three kids and a lot of us learned during pandemic. I know your kids were home, mine are back at school now. But it's hard, it's not easy. I think that if we don't learn how to be flexible with ourselves and within our time management, then we're going to feel stuck in this like all or nothing mentality.

Heather Sager  12:04  
Yes, I okay. So many thoughts are like popping through my brain as you're talking about this. Side note, this is what happens, right? When you hear somebody talk about their area of expertise, so they're throwing out these, for example, our minds are automatically just blowing up with ideas of how this relates to us, that happens to anybody listening to this show. That's how our brains work. I'm just I'm thinking about something that Cara and I were chatting about before we hit record. We were talking about this ridiculous 75 Hard challenge that I've been doing. We were joking about just like how, if you haven't been following along Instagram stories, go check out my highlights on Instagram stories around 75 Hard. One of the things that got me thinking about this, as you were talking Cara, is we think we need to hustle, this hustle culture is a really bad thing. And in my brain, it's funny, a lot of people talk about the term hustle. My definition of hustle is so different when I hear people describe it. It gets me thinking about the terms we use, we tie our own interpretations and meanings and definitions to those words. When we think about hustle, I think a lot of people think about, going all balls to the wall all the time. It's just like, I gotta fight harder on everything that I do. And when I think about hustle, I think about fighting for the right things and like spending my time on the right things that I think back to when I was like, I played soccer all through high school, like you scream the hustle to go after the ball like you scream, hustle, like pick it up when you're in the game but when you're on the sidelines or resting and like, of course, you're not hustling. I think about intentionally exerting effort for something that matters and relating this back to 75 Hard, I was sharing with you that one of the things that I love about it that I think most people miss the mark on is nobody defined for me what my workout program was. I had to figure out my own damn workout program and make adjustments. Some days I'm gonna go like full-on out in a really intense exercise, and the next day I might go, my body needs quiet and stretching. I might foam roll and do yoga, but I have to understand when to push and when to pull back and that's what makes a program or an overarching thing successful. Can you talk a little bit about this concept, what comes to mind for you? I think a lot of people instantly hear hustle and be like, that's terrible. It's terrible when you define hustle as you exert everything out all the time. It doesn't mean you don't have the drive and you're not putting your best foot forward, it means that you're intentional with what you put your effort into. So can you talk about that for a minute? 

Cara Harvey  14:34  
Yeah, I love that you said that because I think that it really comes down to these belief systems that are ingrained in us, right? So I had shared a story of what it felt like for me and how I had that negative connection with the word hustle and you didn't. I think that a lot of times I love being able to kind of take things and make them our own and I think that it can be very hard for us to do that because we hear the word and we go with it. So I think unpacking that is like the first step because if you're like, no, I don't think it's a bad thing. I don't think hard work is a bad thing. I call it seasonal intentionality. I think it's all around the wording that we use, that's with these limiting beliefs. In one of my life coach certifications, I heard this and it really stuck with me. In a lot of our limiting beliefs, they come from people, or moments or society or whatever that was, like well-intentioned but our brain perceived differently, right? So if for example, like things like, you know, you have to like if you had a coach in soccer that would always say, like, no pain, no gain, right? That's well-intentioned. They want you to work hard because then you'll get better, but get comfortable of receiving it. Yeah, but different people receive it differently based on their own experiences, and somebody could take that as burning out for the rest of their life. And so I think it's really key that we customize our productivity. I call it priority-based productivity. It is my entire approach because that's what it is. It's really about what's important to you. So an example of this would be I run a summit every single year. The one that we run in March is one of our biggest events. We had like 4300 people this year. It's a lot of work. So I know that January, February, and March, that's summit season. I told my husband it' summit season. Good luck on we're gonna eat out a lot like I'm not cleaning the house. My team knows it's like go time. We're okay with that, right? That seasonal intentionality because what we do in April and we plan it, and I think this is really key for entrepreneurs. I really love looking at the vision, so looking at like your next 12. I actually plan 2022 out right now which is bonkers but I'm working on this book, it's coming out in February. I have to. I have to look because I have to know when my periods of grind hard, when my periods of push are, and I have to build in periods of rest, and I used to never do this. Honestly, 2020 was a great year for my business. I kind of hate saying that sometimes. The moms were home and they need help with routines, and I was there but I was exhausted by the end of the year, Heather. I was just like working, working working. And so as I went into this year, I said, we've got to be intentional for my whole team now about rest because all of us are going to be burnt out from the summit. It's a great event but we're tired. We're working extra hours. So April, we took a light summer and or light month. We're doing this as we go into the summer. One of my team members who is like my right hand, runs on almost everything for me is having her third kid in July, so she's going on maternity in July and August. As a team, we sat together and we said, in order to make this work, can we batch everything in advance by the mid-June so that whatever she needs to do, like she schedules all my emails, right, so she's scheduling every promotional email I have for July and August now, so it's such a great feeling. I can pay her like I can give her maternity leave and pay her actual money while she's out because she already did all of her work, and so all of us have rallied behind that. Because we all, one of my team members has five kids, they're on a farm. They're homeschooling. she's like, it's summer, like, I really would like a light summer. I think that it's important when we're looking at these seasons of intentional push, or hustle, or grind or whatever you choose to call it with whatever connotation you like, that you plan for those and we know that they're happening, but then you also plan for rest. You also have periods of planning, you also have periods like for me, I'm writing the book this summer like that's what I'm doing during my time. I think at the beginning of my business, I was just like grind, grind, grind, grind, because I was throwing spaghetti at a wall. When I finally pause and realize that if I take this month, this month right now to just get as much batched in advance that in the summer, I can breathe, I can have fun with my kids, I can take some time off, I can write the book. It's so freeing. And I think as entrepreneurs, that's what you need to do. You need to look at your vision, plan for it, but be willing to be flexible and also be willing to have seasons of push, seasons of rest, and seasons of plan.

Heather Sager  18:34  
Okay, I love I, love this so much. I'm so glad that we went this direction here because, okay, people hear like, Oh, I don't want to hustle and grind, so then the opposite is like what people post on Instagram. It's like I'm taking the afternoon off or look at me like doing nothing. And we're all thinking like, but when do you work because we know people have to work. So understanding that there are seasons, this is so, so beautiful. Let me just ask you a question of everything we've already talked about. This whole episode is off the cuff. Cara and I have no plan we're just talking through as things come up so here's what's coming up for me as you say that. I would imagine there's, I don't know, do you find like there are two different kinds of people like somebody who's so resistant to like, I never want to grind all the time, the idea of batching is just not for me. So what they want is like a constant stream of it's gonna sound weird, but as a constant stream of work like that's their cadence is they work on, let's get geeky, like a weekly cadence of content versus someone who's like, I want to have those intense seasons and then those rest seasons. Are those two different kinds of people? Are one better than the other? What have you seen?

Cara Harvey  19:43  
So this goes back to what I was saying before about learning your triggers, you need to know you. So I like I'm an enneagram3, I like to grind. I enjoy that like that's fun for me. My husband, he's a nine. He would not like this at all. This is not how he, he does not operate like me. I think it's understanding and knowing who you are. I don't think any is better than the other but I think when you can identify who you are and how you like to work, you can build a business around that. I mean, that's why we do this, right? That's why we become entrepreneurs, you get to choose. But I think you need to, I'm being bossy now. But one recommendation I would give is that you acknowledge it, and you accept it, and you don't use it as a crutch. For me to say like, I'm an enneagram 3 and I like to hustle, hustle hustle. This is how I burned out last year, right? That's how I did it because I was like, this is just how I'm driven. I've started to intentionally have to force myself to take time off and plan this way because I don't want to use it as a crutch that leads me to burn out just like someone who might want to move at this pace that's a little bit less intense, totally fine. But you also know that if you have a goal of making money and growing the business, you're going to have to push and be intentional, and so I think there's this beautiful place where you can marry both of that together, but it's all in acknowledging and understanding who you are and then creating a schedule around it. I think the common ground here is that you have to create some sort of plan for it. I think, you know, people will ask me all the time, like beginning business tips and stuff, but I will tell you, even if you're somebody who's more like not type A and you want to be like go with the flow, you need a plan. You need a plan, and you need a plan that works for you. It doesn't have to be my plan, but you need to have some sort of plan because otherwise you're gonna sit down to work and you're gonna say, what am I supposed to do, you're gonna waste more time trying to figure out what you're supposed to be doing than actually getting work done and then you're gonna get frustrated and say, this business doesn't work and, or you're gonna procrastinate, because we also find that, you know, procrastination and perfectionism like, they go hand in hand, you're like, oh, I can't do this the way I want. I'm just going to insert whatever you like to do like you like to make images. That's fun for you. I hate doing that. But so there are people who like that and that's how they procrastinate. Me, I play on Trello when I want to procrastinate, so we can go either way. So I think it's knowing who you are and how you're operated, loving that, embrace that, that's you and saying, I'm going to create a priority-based business around that, but also creating a plan that fits that because as you grow, you know, I know that your listeners come in, some are solopreneurs. Some have teams like, you need to find a team that complements that. And if you don't know your work style, if you don't know your workflow, you're going to set a team up to be really frustrated with you and it's going to set it up for just failure, honestly. So now while you're starting to grow, have fun with it, explore who you are and what you like, how you like to organize your business, and what works. So then when it's time to scale, like you're ready. I feel like last year, we called it the messy middle. I thank my team, I didn't have anyone in my team, Heather, nobody until January when I came back from that event is when I hired my first VA. We just hired the eighth person to work for us. This is bonkers and that last year was like, what are we doing? Thanks for playing along, like we just figured it out. But you have to be willing to figure out what works and what doesn't and acknowledge when it's not working and when you're getting in your own way.

Heather Sager  23:02  
Yes. Okay, that's so good. All of that is going to be like a wonderful little soundbite for this episode, Thinking about in summation on that whole piece, knowing thyself and planning based on that. I think that's so, so important. I think it answers the rumbling, a lot of people are feeling right now in the online space where people are so assumptive of saying this is the best way to do X, Y, and Z. What we're saying here is, you have to figure out the best way for you which means you have to understand yourself how you work, how to acknowledge the messy piece. I love that you said that, like you acknowledge what wasn't working, I think that's just as beautiful. So once we are aware of certain things going, okay, I love this. I know myself, I know the kind of person I am. I want you to talk about planning. You mentioned that quite a few times. I think this is where a lot of people start, they like the idea of the plan is great but I feel like a lot of people probably myself included, find the planning as a procrastination tool and struggle going from plan to execution because the plan isn't always functional. It's pretty on paper, it's in a calendar but it doesn't actually make way into the real world. So can you talk about your approach to planning?

Cara Harvey  24:18  
Yeah, sure. If you're one of those people who have like a planner graveyard because you keep trying to buy the right one to make it work like this is gonna work for you because we want this one size fits all and it doesn't work. The other thing that you may notice, if you're using planning as a procrastination tool and you're trying to like make it perfect and then all of a sudden the week happens, especially as parents and like your kid could get sick or the dog needs something and then all of a sudden you're like, well, I gotta scrap the whole thing. We plan too tightly. So there's actually this beautiful piece in between planning too tightly and too loosely, that gives you the flexibility. And so there's a couple of things that I would recommend and you have to start with the end in mind and that's like, what do you actually have to get done? This is how I start with creating kind of a batch. Now, I like batching. I mentioned that we're batching ahead for the whole summer as much as possible but even if you just batch ahead for next week if you want to be more flexible, I really suggest it. When I was teaching, I would not leave the building like that's why I came back on Sundays because I was like, I want my whole week done, having photocopy made for that week. So then that week, I could work on the next week, it's so stressful if you're at like Wednesday at 11 pm like, oh, my God, I have a podcast episode that I've got to do for tomorrow and you're trying to record it. So even just saying, can you get ahead a little?

Heather Sager  25:28  
Quickly, just define batching for someone in case that's a new term?

Cara Harvey  25:32  
Yeah, sure. It's really simply the concept of putting things together. You can do it a few ways. I mix it up, some people do batching, like the first week of the month I work on everything for the podcast for the next month or something and I batch record all in one day. Some people do it by task. So maybe on Mondays, you work on every email you need to do, or on Tuesdays, you do all the images and this is just efficient. If you've ever tried to like make images for something, and you open up Canva, then all of a sudden, oh, I need to go to my stock photo site and download three video or three photos and then go back into Canva and then do it and then tomorrow do the same thing, you're just wasting time. But I think that a lot of people love the concept of batching. A lot of people want to batch but you cannot efficiently create a batch system if you don't do the planning in the beginning, if you don't do the vision setting, and if you don't create a content plan because you don't know actually where you're going. You're just sitting down like great, I'm gonna make all the images I need for next month. What do I need to do? Oh, look, here are some new images in my image library. Three hours later, your time is gone. I think that that's the missing piece. So if you're like, oh, I would really like to get ahead a little bit so I can figure out what works for me, I'm gonna suggest you go through all the categories of your business and you start with an absolute brain dump of every single step. People like, that's annoying, I don't want to do it. You can choose not to do it. But if you do it, you're going to set yourself up for absolute success because you're going to know everything in there. So if I was to do a blog post, for example, I would write everything down from SEO research to outlining, to drafting, to finding images, to affiliate links, every step. I actually encourage people to do this every step in the process, not just that you do if you have a team but that happens, because when you do this, I'm going to give you a tip in a sec while you're doing it but you're going to set up your SOPs for your future team. You're going to set it all up now so you don't have to worry about it later, so go ahead and brain dump. My suggestion is a timer. So put on a 15-minute timer, this is not something you're going to get done overnight. If you put on 15-minute timer every day for the next two weeks, like five days. I never recommend anyone do anything for seven days, by the way. People are always like, should I do it seven days to create a habit? I said no. When you set things out for seven days, you're setting yourself up for failure because nobody's really going to be perfect. So set yourself up for five days and if you do six or seven, like pat yourself on the back as a bonus. I think that gives you flexibility to be a human, to have life happen, and will it take longer to create a habit? Yeah, probably. But okay, you're going to create one instead of quitting because you think you're a failure but that was a tangent on that. But okay, break everything down. Write all the steps that you need to do for all of it. This will be like, holy crap, this is a lot of stuff that has to get done. But it will at least let you know what you have to get done. So if you're looking at, I do it on Trello. But say you do it on paper, it's in front of you. You can say hey, I have to do images for the podcast, for the blog, for Instagram. So then when you're ready to make your plan, you can say great on Mondays, I make all my images. Oh, look, I know I need images for these podcast episodes, these blog posts, you already have it planned out. So if you don't do this step, again, you're gonna do the stare into space waste time thing. By planning it all out, you'll be able to see what has to get done, and that's kind of like Step 1A in getting the batching set.

Heather Sager  28:46  
Okay, so let's let's unpack that for just a moment because for someone who hasn't been batching before, or if someone's listening, they're like, man, I'm not sure. One of the things you mentioned in there, that's a really important step is you have to understand what are the things in your business that have to get done, kind of from that higher level, right? Let's say, for example, you have a podcast or you have a blog, you have your social media accounts, you have like whatever it is, right? You have to brain dump one of those big things that you have and then what you're saying is you take that one thing and then say what are all the things that have to get done. And I'll have a little bonus tip, what are all the things that you're currently doing on that and that you would like to be doing on that because let's be honest, most entrepreneurs, they know they should be doing the like, look, for example, like, you know, maybe you want to do like a quote card or like an infographic or something, but you never have time to get to it, like write down all those things. And if you do that for each of those main, I don't know parts of your business, what you're saying is you're going to have a complete list of all of the tasks that you're either doing or you would like to be doing and then from there you can choose how you group those together to figure how to most effectively batch based off your business, correct? Yeah,

Cara Harvey  30:04  
Yeah, so there's a couple of things I want to add in there. So I like that you said that things you want to be doing because that's one of the steps that I teach when I teach the batching. The first step is getting it down and I actually recommend you get it down. And then I want you to write down an estimate of how long you think it takes you to do because often, we will either underestimate or overestimate how long something takes, and then we can easily procrastinate, because we're like, oh, because of the perfectionism. This is going to take me two hours to do when you only know it only takes 20 minutes or this will take so long and you don't block it out. The next step, though, is kind of this piece that'll pull it together and that's doing an inventory of your time, in actuality, because if I was just to say to you write down all the steps. You might be like Cara, I don't even know the steps, I'm just starting. That's okay. I start this way because I want you to write down what you think you're doing because I want you to see all the steps in between. I want you to use your brain and think about it first, and then write down how long you think it's going to take, and then for the next couple days or the next week even because some tasks we don't do every day. I want you to just write down what task you're doing and how long it actually is taking you because this will fill in the gaps of oh, I forgot about this step. We have that curse of knowledge, right, where we forget all the things we just do because we do them. You're going to learn all the steps that you missed in between, you're going to see how long something actually takes which is a key component before you group them together because if you do see something is going to take you 10 minutes here, 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there, like by the end of the week, you notice that you're doing something there, well, that makes sense to batch. Whereas if you see that it takes you two hours, two hours and two hours, you might not want to combine them all together, and so I think it's really about knowing the plan. Now I know for people who are like that's too structured for me like I don't want to do it. That's okay, just tell your phone like start timer, end timer, and just do it for a few days because this is going to give you some really good data to be able to decide what your days look like to craft a time but also, I love the vision piece. This is going to help set you up in the future because now if you when you're ready to hire, you know exactly about how long it should take someone to do a task, and you know all of the steps in between. And then a bonus tip on this is if you don't use loom, loom.com. Just loom yourself walking through the steps because you're going to see all of the tiny steps in between. You could like save those videos inside a doc and then when you're ready to delegate out because you don't need to be doing everything. You have it all together. And so yeah, this is a lot of frontend work to do to make a schedule, and some people are not going to do it because they're like, I don't want to sit and spend the time doing this. But if you look at I don't know, the next few weeks, and you say, do I have a five day period where I'm committed to just planning, like, it's just my planning week and I'm going to really focus on this for one week, and then you can take a step back for like two weeks and not even look at it again, and then come back to it and maybe you know, then you take that week and the next month and you say okay, now I'm going to do something with it. I think it's a better start than just throwing your hands in the air and saying I'm not naturally organized, I'm not good with my time, this is too overwhelming, I can't even do it. Again, this is intentional push, right? You look at your month, you say what are my five days that I can use for my intentional planning. And then you just do it once a month, by the end of the quarter, the next quarter, you'll be able to start this.

Heather Sager  33:19  
Okay, I think this works really well, especially for people who have their own like that they work by themselves, they don't have a team yet. I think this is one of the, I feel like I had a home-court advantage coming into entrepreneurship that I managed a team for 10 years. I was used to having a team I was used to delegating. Quite frankly, I was used to being in a leadership position and not having to do a lot of the stuff myself. I had worked out already how to delegate and how to stay at the high level, so switching gears to doing like the grunt work myself, I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna do this, like, I'm not gonna be able to scale. So I knew right away, I was going to hire a VA right out of the gate. I skip the steps that you're talking about here around, like writing down all the dream things, and just went straight to the I'm going to do this task right now and I'm going to turn on loom and record it while I'm figuring it out. And then this was a secret, I'm going to give you all a little pro tip here. When you record a loom video or something, whether it's for yourself or for someone later, you want to give people reasoning for why you're doing something. For example, if I'm showing someone how to like I'm in buzzsprout, my podcast thing, and I'm showing them how to go through and update a certain part of buzzsprout. I'm going to say okay, so next what I'm gonna do is x, y and z and then I explain why I'm doing it the way I'm doing because what you want to do in delegation, like with process is you want to give people context so that you can empower them to troubleshoot if things come up. What if the buzzsprout interface changes? What if I don't know something like did just change because Apple podcast has changed. You want to give people more than just the like, insert this fill in the blank. You want to give them a little bit of context to empower people. Otherwise, what's gonna happen if something breaks, when you do delegate them, they're just going to come back to me like it doesn't work and we want to delegate tasks but we also want to delegate some thinking and troubleshooting. So I love loom, I did that. I actually just sent those looms to my virtual assistant, Doreethy, when she started and she created all the processes for it. She's like, let me find the loopholes. She created the standard operating procedures and she owned it from there. But for me, it just took one longer session to sit down for the first time and do it and then pass it off. That was probably the best thing that I did. I haven't thinking about this podcast. Once you and I are done, I won't touch this again, like my team handles it because I don't want to.

Cara Harvey  35:40  
It's so freeing, and I'm glad you said that because I think the talking it out process is really important whether you are ready to hire now or later because you can go back and you can see all the pieces that you missed, like you rewatch me like, oh, right, I did talk it out, and that's one of the things we do is we take the looms and then we give them to the person who uses their job and their job is then to take it and write it out based on how they hear it so that we can find the holes in the business. You want people to find the holes. I told my team, like, tell me where you find the holes because I might be the bottleneck and I don't even know it. I think like that's obviously like a higher level when you're ready to hire anything, but I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it from the start. The first time you're like, I'm gonna write my email for my podcast. It'll take you a little bit longer to talk the process out but now you have it done. You don't worry about it and you have gone ahead and thought about the process because I think if I'm doing podcasts, you know, so we just repurpose our show notes, right? But if I'm talking about I'm like, oh, I have to have Air Table open while I'm doing this and then all of a sudden, it clicks in my head, oh, wait, I notice I have air table open for this but I also have air table open later in the day when I do this or when I do this, hey, I could potentially batch anytime I have air table open together, and you don't notice it until you start to talk it out because you just do it because we're just conditioned to just do instead of actually think through the process.

Heather Sager  36:52  
Yeah, that disruption of noticing what we're doing and when we're doing it. I think like you mentioned earlier doing the time audit for yourself. I think that's something that a lot of people are scared to do because they don't want to know where they're spending the time. Great example, y'all. We look at our settings on our phone to be like how much time are we spend on our phone and we're embarrassed. So we never want to look at it again or admit to anyone how many hours a day we're spending on our phones. I think as entrepreneurs, we do the same thing with our web browsers or whatever else we're spending our time on. But here's the thing, it's happening anyways, we can't be an ostrich and have our head in the sand. If we want to be able to work less and be more effective with the time we have so that we can do other things like y'all remember hobbies, I would love to have hobbies. I have my list, I want to learn Spanish again. I want to learn piano again. I say again because I learned those things when I was a kid. But I want to have time to those things and not feel guilty for taking classes around learning Spanish in the afternoon. I want my life to allow for that which means I need to be far more efficient with my work time. These things all get me excited.

Cara Harvey  38:02  
Yeah, I love it. And I will say if you're doing a time inventory, I literally just write it down on the bottom of my sheet, I just write down my common ones, Voxer, Instagram, Facebook, email, and I just do tally marks on those because I was wanting to be curious, like, hey, how am I doing this more than I should be doing during the day? I think if you want to uplevel and grow and scale your business, as a CEO, everyone listening as a CEO, whether you have a team or not. You need to start thinking and looking at the data but we can't shy away from it because it will never get us to where you want to go because we don't know what you don't track, you can't change.

Heather Sager  38:36  
So let's talk about real quick. Can we geek out on that time management piece? You mentioned that like a little tracker thing that you do to help people. if somebody listened to this and going okay, I do want to do the time tracking piece. What specifically should they do for the next week to track their time? It doesn't have to be accurately. Get one of those crazy software's on your computer and log in every three minutes of where you're at. What's the simplistic way that somebody can do that?

Cara Harvey  38:58  
Sure. Okay, grab a piece of paper, grab the notepad on your phone. I like paper because when we're done,  I would recommend highlighting it but I just want you to write down an estimate like how long it takes, your phone is great. Start your timer with whatever electronic device you have in your home and start a timer when you start things. Get over the fact that it has to be perfect. Actually, I'm having somebody, I have a new course. It came out like a mini-course on time blocking and I had a message in my Voxer was like, but I'm missing minutes here. I'm like, stop, I don't care about where your minutes are missing like you're nitpicking. This is not about perfection. It's about intention. And so just write down, how long when you start something, and approximately like when you end things because you'll inevitably forget, write down what it is. And I would say three to five days is probably golden for that and I would try to do it over a variety of days. That is the most simple way to do it. But when you're done, grab some color-coded highlighters and start to highlight and categorize things. Whoa, this is stuff and this is where you get into batching, stuff if I did for the podcast, stuff I did for the blog, stuff I did for social media, right? This way you actually know, or it could be, these are all the images I made. It just depends on how you want to do it. You have total flexibility but when you write it down, you can do that. I'm also going to suggest for the three to five day time blocking. Give yourself a little incentive because this is a task. It is a job that you're gonna have to do that you're probably not going to do. Pick something now that you want to treat yourself to when you finish. What is that thing, that book you've been eyeing or that you know, extra Starbucks trip, you want to take and treat yourself for doing this because a lot of people aren't going to do this? And if you want to actually stand out in your business, you're going to do things other people don't want to do. Give yourself an incentive to get there. Enlist in your accountability buddies, you know, message your friends. I want to do this together and then put a 15-minute timer down on day four, to just go through and look at it and analyze and be a detective about it. There is nothing in this that is going to say that you're a bad entrepreneur or you're a good entrepreneur. Get rid of thinking, oh my gosh, I wasted all my time here, oh goodness, this took me so much longer. Let's say this is data. We're literally just going to look at the data so you can scale your business because the stuff that takes you a really long time. Great, that's great stuff to outsource, the stuff that you really enjoy, that stuff to keep on your plate. There's nothing wrong with you. This is the first step in creating a plan that is customized for you and how you work.

Heather Sager  41:22  
Yes. Okay, I love this. I think of the old adage that they talk a lot about leadership. You can't manage what you don't measure.  I think before we start applying all these different, like productivity hacks, or we start exploring all these different suggestions that people post on social media, we have to know where we sit based also with what you talked about today, which is your style and how you want to work, and then putting in your priorities. And oh my gosh, this is so good. Carra, I could talk to you all day on these things but for the sake of being productive, we only had a certain amount of time blocked. I am curious. I always find you know, sometimes people teach something but then they have some guilty habits on their own. Do you find yourself as a Type A organized person in your personal life as well as in the professional life? 

Cara Harvey  42:07  
For everything but keeping my house clean. 

Heather Sager  42:10  
Okay. 

Cara Harvey  42:11  
I tell my husband a lot. I'm like, listen, I'm really good at some things. Cleaning, it ain't my thing. Yeah, I'm not my thing at all. I can't keep up with a cleaning routine. I can't keep up with the schedule. I'm like, I teach routines. Why is this so hard? It's my Achilles heel. So yeah, I mean, I think it's important to acknowledge. Nobody has it together in all areas. 

Heather Sager  42:31  
Yeah. I'm always curious, like things I think about I'm like, are you the kind of person that has your inbox clear or like 79,000 messages?

Cara Harvey  42:42  
Yeah, that's I will say emails, we got it together. My text messages, on the other hand, this though I have an excuse for because I want to pay attention to you when you text me, right? So I don't touch a text message until I can actually answer it or I will lose it and I will forget. So I at this moment have 12 text messages that I know I need to get to. But this happened, my sister got married a couple of years ago and she text me something she needed me to do. And I was like, no, no, I'm not touching it because I'm gonna forget it. And she called me like three hours later, didn't you see my text? I was like I did. But if I touched it, I was gonna forget it. So again, there's a method to the madness.

Heather Sager  43:14  
I view this exact same thing. I thought I was crazy on that. I always have those there. But I'm like, it reminds me to come back to it. I'm back to it later. Okay. So the thing with productivity is like, you got to figure out your own systems. But to do that, you got to know yourself, and you have to build a plan based off of that. And I love what we talked about today, I think we gave people just like a taste around what to start thinking about. Because I don't know, I'm a firm believer that at the end of the day, you got to find your own system that works for you. So I love that we gave people kind of a sprinkling of that today. Where can people learn more about you and what you do? You mentioned your time management mini-course, like where can people go connecting, figure out some more of that stuff?

Cara Harvey  43:53  
Yeah, sure. Coming out with me over on Instagram, that's my favorite. I'm @apurposedrivenmom. And then I have the podcast, which is a purpose driven mom show, which helps moms and moms entrepreneurs manage their time. And then I have a free workshop on how to find time to manage your goals. That's at purposedrivenmom. com/goals and then all the other stuff is kind of linked over there.

Heather Sager  44:12  
Okay, perfect. We'll link to all of that in the show notes. Before we leave Cara, is there anything that you wish people would know or really embody when it comes to this pursuit of being all the things as a mom and an entrepreneur?

Cara Harvey  44:25  
Yeah, sure. I mean, you can't do it all. And so I think accepting the season that you're in, whatever that looks like could be the season for the month, the quarter, or the week or the day. And then going all-in with that will help you ditch your mom guilt and allow you to be more productive in the areas that matter at the moment.

Heather Sager  44:42  
Amen to that. Okay, I love it. Thanks so much for being here, Cara. Hey, if you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to share it with another mom and entrepreneur friend because I think this is a conversation that we can't just have one time. We have to constantly have it and finding a network of others that you can talk to speak these things out with, I think would be really, really helpful so be sure to share today's episode on Instagram. You can tag Cara and I and we will see you on the next episode.