Image by edgeplot via Flickr

So far, you have created a vision for family and business, and you’ve set some attainable goals. How are you going to get everything done and feel great at the end of the day? It will take a system. Or two. Or three.

When my week runs smoothly, it is typically the result of me creating a plan and following through with it. All events have made it into my calendar and I refer to it throughout the day. I have made a menu plan that works around our schedule, bought the groceries and have the recipes out and ready to use. I’ve made a list of goals and tasks for the week and have been diligent and focused in my work. I’ve built in some self-care activities to reconnect with myself and others.

What makes my plans work so well has everything to do with the systems I’ve put in place and the rhythm those systems have helped create in my life. “Failing to plan means planning to fail” happens to me, that’s for sure!

Step 4 is to determine what systems need to be put in place to help with planning, organization and efficiency for your home and business. The two part process includes assessing what systems you currently have in place, and then identifying any new systems that will help you thrive.

Assess current systems

You probably already have some systems that work very well for you, and there are possibly some that no longer serve you. Our business, our kids and even we grow and change, and making adjustments to the way we work and live help us be more deliberate and conscious as we go through each day.

Here are some questions you can ask to help you examine your current systems:

• Does your current way of living and working make it easy to meet your summer goals?
• Do you have all the tools and resources you need?
• What’s not working for you right now? Are you disorganized? Is your space cluttered? Have your kids outgrown clothes/toys/etc.?
• Do you have childcare options available for the times you need to work?
• Do you have a good time management system?
• Do you have an accountability partner to help keep you on task?
• Are there any systems that have worked for you in the past that you can brush off and start using again?

Determine what systems need to be put in place

So, you’ve looked at what’s working now and what systems would be good to start using again. Now it’s time to think about brand new systems that can help make your life easier this summer. This will take some planning, but it will make your days and weeks run smoothly. Here are some examples:

Systems for Business

1. Have a specified area in your home to work on your business, along with the tools and supplies to make working easy and even enjoyable.
2. Schedule your work hours and keep them.
3. Create jobs that your kids might help you with. I’ve had my kids help with collating papers and putting together files, shredding paper, data entry, and setting up my classroom.
4. Saved email templates to answer common questions.
5. Updated class dates, rates and FAQs on your website so you can refer people there for more information.
6. Pre-made sets of client folders, interview packets, and class confirmations to mail or send out.
7. An updated marketing plan that outlines the strategies and tactics you utilize to market your business.
8. A monthly marketing calendar to plan all marketing activities for the next 2-3 months.
9. Use a blog post planner to jot down post ideas, and a blog calendar to schedule them. I like the blog planner from Productive Flourishing, and the blog calendar from Blog Energizer (you’ll need to sign up to get free access to the site). Both are free!
10. A social marketing calendar to pre-plan your Tweets and Facebook posts. I use the above-mentioned blog planner and calendars to plan and schedule my social marketing posts too.
11. Use a free service like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to schedule your social marketing posts for days and weeks ahead. (You will still want to interact often with your audience in real time, but a scheduling tool can help keep you in front of your fans and followers).
12. Make a checklist of your administrative tasks and how often they need to be done. Add those tasks to your calendar. I LOVE the Planner Pad paper-based calendar to track and schedule my action items.
13. If you have a smart phone, what apps can you get to help improve your productivity? My favorite iPhone app for business is Trip Cubby to track my mileage.

Systems for Family Life

1. Make a family calendar that can be posted where everyone can see the schedule.
2. Have a plan for childcare for the hours you are working.
3. Take your list of activities you created and schedule them into your week. I like to plan activities in the morning to get us up and out of bed and making the most of our day. I’ll probably also wake up earlier than the kids to get a little work out of the way each day.
4. Have a list of chores for your kids to help around the house. It’s so much easier to direct them to the list than it is to nag at them to empty the dishwasher or scrub the toilet. It’ll also help keep your house tidy.
5. Plan play time, sleepovers and outings with friends.
6. Allow for lots of downtime. Boredom often leads the way to creativity, and it’s wonderful to see what kids come up with.
7. Have materials and instructions available for projects the kids can do on the fly.
8. Create limits for screen time. I’ve found too much screen time makes my kids irritable and hyperactive. It’s almost as if after a long period of sitting, their minds have to catch up with their bodies.
9. Sign the kids up for your library’s reading program. Barnes and Noble and other book stores also typically have a reading program with various incentives.
10. Create weekly menus and get the kids involved with the shopping and cooking.
11. If you have a smart phone, find some apps to help keep you organized. For iPhone I love PageOnce (to track banking and bills), GroceryIQ (grocery list creator that syncs with online account), SnapTell (price comparison for books), HeyTell (makes your phone into a walkie talkie), and AroundMe (to find stores, restaurants that are, well around you).

What other systems do you use or want to create? Please share in the comments or on the Inspired Birth Pro page on Facebook.

Tomorrow we’ll wrap up this series and talk about breaking down your goals and creating the systems you want to implement.

These posts may also inspire you:

1. 5 Steps to Summer Sanity: Breaking It Down (Part 5)
2. 5 Steps to Summer Sanity: Goal Setting (Part 3)
3. Where Do You Fall Short and What To Do About It

Image via CrunchBase

What is Social Media about, anyway?

Three years ago, I decided to figure out what Facebook was all about. In the beginning I made an honest mistake – I accidentally sent a friend request to EVERYONE I had ever emailed from my Gmail account. Within a week I had over 100 friends!

I discovered high school classmates and business colleagues. I sent out friend requests to people I’d known and liked. Eventually I began getting friend requests from blog readers and other birth workers. Occasionally, I began getting friend requests from people who saw I was a friend of their friend, or I was on a forum they were a part of. Sometimes I’d reject a request, but most of the time I’d accept them all.

A few months after I joined Facebook, I came down with bronchitis which turned into pneumonia. I was bedridden off and on for about 3 months, so I decided it was time to decipher Twitter, since reading and clicking was about the only thing I could bring myself to do during that time.

Twitter became a numbers game for me. I followed everyone who had similar interests. I started using auto follow services. Back then, though, Twitter felt more like a party. I actually really connected and became friends with a few people who I’ve never met in real life.

Then the Honeymoon was over

As Twitter grew in popularity, the Twitter spam started. It became a stream of infomercials, where the information I really wanted was buried in a lot of noise. I had rated-x tweets come through, along with multi-level marketers, real estate agents and social media “gurus” sending me love. Shortly thereafter I stopped auto-following people and unfollowed anyone who sent spammy posts, negative posts, and those with whom I had no common interests.

Eventually, I set up posts to feed directly to Twitter from my blog and Facebook pages. My favorite “Follow” tool is Topify, which notifies me by email when someone follows me.  In the email, I see the person’s profile and a few of their most recent posts. The most useful benefit of Topify is that I can follow, block, report spam, or simply ignore that person, right from my email.

I also use Hootsuite and Tweetdeck to schedule tweets for the future and follow up on Mentions, Retweets and Replies. I rarely use Twitter itself to interact these days.

Revisiting Priorities

Lately, Facebook has been draining my energy in a big way. With the great way that Facebook has developed their business pages, as time has passed I’ve found myself desiring more simplicity with my personal Facebook feed.

Over the past year, I’ve greatly decreased the business and birth-related posts on my personal Facebook account, preferring to direct those through my business pages. I also began encouraging those interested in my business to “like” my pages rather than my personal profile.

Another concern about the blind acceptance of friends has to do with this very real concern about privacy. The increase in crimes related to social media has caught my eye and has me concerned. People can be anyone they want to be online.

Today, I decided to simplify my personal Facebook account by unfriending over half of my “friends”. My criteria:

• Do I personally know this person?
• Do I truly like this person?
• Does this person hold a special place in my heart?
• Does this person interact with me by commenting and liking my posts?
• Do I enjoy interacting with them by commenting and liking their posts?
• Does this person’s posts provide personal or professional value to me?
• Is this person a positive influence?
• Is this someone I would like to network with in the future?

Basically, I’ve chosen to be “friends” with, well, true friends and people I want to really keep in touch with.

Finding the best way to utilize Social Media

I really enjoy Facebook because it has put me in touch with long lost friends and allows me to peek into their lives. It’s a way I keep in touch with past clients who are dear to my heart, and it’s replaced email in many ways. It’s a great tool to stay connected with those I like and enjoy.

Facebook pages have been a powerful tool for my business. Small business owners and bloggers can certainly benefit from having a Facebook business page.

I’ve found that Twitter is like going to party. It’s a great way to socialize and meet new people, and join in on the conversation. It’s also a nice forum to participate in chats and live discussions. However, for me, Twitter is so busy that it doesn’t hold my attention for long.

It’s taken a while to really decide how to use Social Media. Going back to my personal values has helped me greatly in stepping back from the madness so I can use social media wisely rather than getting sucked in by it.

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Social Media Tools to Minimize the Time Suck: Tools to Connect (Part 1)
2. Social Media Tools to Minimize the Time Suck: Putting it All Together (Part 3)
3. Social Media Tools to Minimize the Time Suck: Tools to Find and Share Content (Part 2)

As much as I use my Outlook calendar and love my iPhone to track my appointments and important dates, there’s something about using a paper-based planner that just works well for me.

About a year ago, I found a great website called Productive Flourishing that’s run by Charlie Gilkey. He writes great articles about time management and getting organized, but what I really love is that he offers, for FREE, great printable planning calendars. And, he updates them each month. If you subscribe to his newsletter, you’ll be invited to visit his “secret lab”, where you have access to the month’s planners.

He generously makes the following available on his site, and you can follow this link to see some screen shots and get more direction on how to use them:

• Annual Strategic Planner, to do long-term planning and specify objectives for each month of the year.
• Quarterly Objective Planner, where you transfer your monthly objectives for the upcoming quarter and add goals to meet those objectives. There is also a section for each month to record your progress towards meeting those objectives.
• Monthly Action Planner, where you once again write in your objectives, and then for each week add the major tasks to help you meet those objectives.
• Weekly Action Planner, where there is space to add in scheduled appointments and break down the projects to do for the week. You can also specify the days you will work on each of these projects, as well as an area to mark off the number of tasks you completed, so you can track how productive you’ve been.
• Daily Action Planner, where you break down your projects even further by adding the tasks. There is space to add your events for the day, and a schedule to block off time to do your tasks (great for those who have adopted the 3/6/9 Time Management Strategy.

A useful tool that Charlie offers is a Productivity Heatmap, which helps you identify your rhythm of energy throughout a typical day in a visual way. I highly recommend you take time to do this, because it will help you really see the times of day that you are most and least productive. This can go far in helping you schedule activities and help you get more done during the times of day you have the most energy.

In addition, if you maintain a blog, you’ll find a great Blog Post Planner and Blog Post Calendar!

All pages print on 8.5 x 11″ sheets. I print them monthly, and on each page I’ll use a highlighter to mark the week and days of the month. I bought a fancy 3-ring binder and some index dividers, and I store the current month’s sheets in the binder. So easy!

You may feel it takes a lot of time just to plan what you’re going to do from day to day, but I think you will find that in the end, you’ll actually get more done. When you start from a big picture perspective and work your goals into smaller and more manageable tasks, you will feel infinitely more organized, more productive, and hopefully this will eventually translate to more abundance – in time and money!

These posts may also inspire you:

1. New Thoughts on Time Management Based on the Numbers 3, 6, and 9
2. Five Steps Summer Sanity: Your Systems (Part 4)
3. How to Keep Your Business Moving Forward

Image via Wikipedia

Do you find yourself responding to requests about your services or classes with the same information, again and again?

Do you send all new clients a welcome email with basic information or forms to complete?

Do you have a class series and send your students a follow-up email that’s basically the same from series to series?

Now the important question. Are you writing these emails from scratch every. Single. Time? If you are, consider creating email templates from those old emails so you can recycle them from here on out. Then when you need to send out responses or new emails, all you do is select your template, personalize it a little bit, and hit the send button!

Rather than recreate the wheel and write a post with detailed instructions for creating templates, I’m going to give you a few links with directions for creating email templates for both Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

Email templates for MS Outlook

What I like about creating email templates in Outlook is that you can also include attachments! Click here to get directions for creating a template.

Now, I have found that it takes a few steps to open and use your template. So, I learned how to create a new toolbar to access the email templates easily with just a couple clicks. It takes a little more time to set up, but I really believe it’s worth the effort.

Email templates for Gmail

Gmail has great template feature too, called “canned responses”, and it’s very easy to set up. Unfortunately, you aren’t able to include attachments with the template, but adding an attachment after the fact is quick and easy.

I challenge you to spend some time today creating some email templates to save you time in the future. If you already use templates and want to share some additional tips, inspire us with your comments!

These posts may also inspire you:

1. 5 Tips for Getting on Top of Your Email
2. Simple Marketing Tip: Create an Email Signature with WiseStamp
3. Tuesday Time Management Tip: Print-Your-Own Planners

I have tried a lot of time management systems – the ol’ trusty Day Timer, one big list, prioritizing tasks in a list, scheduling tasks in blocks of time, doing what I feel like doing (probably the least productive of them all), a simple spiral notebook, fancy programs connected to Outlook, various iPhone apps, designating specific days to work on money-making projects, and having other days just for administrative tasks. Some strategies worked for a while, others not so much. Currently I’ve been enjoying working in blocks of time, but it hasn’t been in a very organized fasion.

Well, here’s what I’m going to try this week. And I think it could work, since I know that I get a lot done when I can focus on one topic/project/client for a long stretch of time, like 3-6 hours. It’s simple. And I like simple.

Have a look at this method of organizing your time based on the 3/6/9 Time Management Strategy, and let me know what you think!

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Tuesday Time Management Tip: Print-Your-Own Planners
2. What’s Working and Not Working For You?
3. Time Management Strategies for Work-Life Balance, Part I

1. Set goals. You don’t necessarily need to create a 10 page business plan with financial projections and detailed market research for your birth business. It does help, however, to create goals spanning out 6-12 months, and maybe as far out as 3-5 years. What is the ideal number of clients you will have each month? How much money do you want to be making in a year? And what steps do you need to take to get there?
2. Identify the important roles you play in real life. For example, I am a childbirth educator, birth doula, a business coach, a mother, a wife, and the shuttle bus driver for my kids between home and school and all their activities. Within each role, I have a number of responsibilities and need to make time for them all.
3. Create a schedule and start with the “big rocks” first. Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” has written and presented a demonstration he has big container with pebbles in it. He has an audience member try to put in several large rocks, and it’s impossible to fit them all in. He has another container of the same size with big rocks in it. When the audience member pours in the pebbles, they easily fill in all the cracks and all the rocks and pebbles fit. This is a metaphor for scheduling the “big rocks” first, or the activities that mean the most to you for the roles in your life. The rest of your responsibilities can then be fit in the spaces of your schedule.
4. Schedule in regular time for personal renewal. Self-care is critical for maintaining energy and emotional and physical health. Be sure to schedule time for yoga, lunch with a friend, or those music or art lessons you’ve been wanting to take on a regular basis. Define what your self-care “big rocks” are going to be so you can be sure to nurture yourself and the important relationships in your life. You will find that the time you invest in your self-care will give you huge returns in your energy level and business and household productivity.
5. Create structures in your life to support your family and your business. A structure is a system or routine that you follow to ensure certain areas in your life run more smoothly. This will help you to sustain your energy and create more time for the things you enjoy. An example is a structure for getting your house clean. Will you do it? Will your kids help? Will you hire a housekeeper? Another structure would be for your business and how you track your paperwork.  Will you keep paperwork in a binder or manila folder? What information will you include for each client, and where will it be stored? Will you print out several sets of paperwork at one time or on a per client basis? Yet another structure can be created so you can find care for the kids when you get called to a birth. Is there a list of people to call? Do you have backs packed and meals made while you’re at a birth? What does each child need if going to a friend or relative’s home?

The initial time investment that it takes to do these tasks may seem large, but by creating supportive structures, understanding your roles and responsibilities, scheduling time for self renewal, organizing your responsibilities by priority, and identifying goals to move towards, you will find that you are more focused and productive when you work, and your time outside of work is more rewarding and less stressful.

I’d love to hear how these tips help you in your life. As always, feel free to add a comment or send me a note!

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Where Do You Fall Short and What To Do About It
2. Incorporating the Big Rocks Into Your Life
3. Time Management Strategies for Work-Life Balance, Part I

Image by adesigna via Flickr

Work-Life Balance. It’s what I encourage both my doula and coaching clients to strive for, but admittedly, I could use some help in that department myself. I love what I do and consider my work my passion. It’s difficult for me at times to create boundaries around my work when I lose myself in it.

However, after having experienced two bouts of illness over the last two months, my body has made it abundantly clear that it is time for me to really walk my talk.

For the home business owner, time management is critical for maintaining peace of mind and peace within your family. It’s important that you be as productive as possible in the time you set aside for work so you can enjoy life more when you’re away from it.

Here are two questions to think about:

Based on your goals and aspirations, how many hours would you like to work each week?

Take into account time needed in your office to work on administrative tasks, time taken for interviews, client visits, workshops and networking. How many births would you like to attend each month, and how much time aside from the birth will be required per client? You should also consider other responsibilities and obligations that you have, as well as the minimum amount of time you’d like to have with your family. Remember there are only 24 hours in a day, and a chunk of that is required for basic self-care like sleeping and eating.

What days of the week and what times of day will be best for you to engage in work activities?

I like to do as much as possible while my kids are at school. I do my best to limit evening activities to one per week, and weekend activities to twice per month. It doesn’t always happen this way, but it helps me to limit myself so I don’t commit to too many activities and overburden my family by being gone too often. What would be ideal for you?

When answering these questions, it really helps to consider your values regarding your self-care and your family. When you are clear about nurturing yourself and your family BEFORE you consider how much time you’ll dedicate to work, it’s easier to say “no” to people and things that call for your attention.

What kind of adjustments to your schedule to help you make the most of your working time?

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Time Management Strategies for Work-Life Balance, Part II
2. Where Do You Fall Short and What To Do About It
3. Incorporating the Big Rocks Into Your Life

If you have implemented a weekly schedule by putting your big rocks first, you have probably begun to look at your schedule a bit differently by scheduling what’s most important first, and allowing all your other to-dos to fall into place. Here are some questions to ask yourself about the items on your list that never seem to get done.

Write down your answers to the following questions. These can be for your personal or your business life.

1. What tasks on your list stay on your list, day after day, week after week, and never seem to get done? Why are they not getting done?
2. What tasks, when you think about them, drain your energy? Why do they drain your energy?
3. How much time do you spend thinking about doing the tasks that drain your energy or stay on your list each day?
4. What tasks take up a lot of your time that could easily be delegated to someone else in your household?
5. What obligations do you have that you would like to say “no” to? What would you rather do instead?
6. Do you waste time in an effort to avoid doing some of the tasks on your list?
7. What would you say your hourly business rate is?

Once you’ve answered the questions above, take a look at the results. What do you notice about your answers? Are there activities, responsibilities or obligations that you could 1) Delegate, 2) Eliminate, 3) Learn More, or 4) Outsource? Let’s consider these options more closely.

Delegate

If you have children, and some of the tasks on your list include chores around the house, consider delegating some or most of these chores. If you need help, check this list of age-appropriate chores to decide who can do what. There are many resources online that will help you develop systems to organize responsibilities for the family.

If you have older children, some of them may even be able to help with some of your business tasks. This is a great opportunity for them to learn about what you do and how you do it. You can certainly also ask your husband/partner take on more duties within the home in order to give you some relief.

Eliminate

If there are some responsibilities or activities you have that drain a lot of your energy, learn to say NO to them. The easiest way to decide whether to continue volunteer work or duties you have taken on is to check in with yourself and ask, “Does the bring me joy?” If it does, then doing it probably matters to you and is an activity that you value. If, on the other hand, you meet that obligation with dread, ask yourself if it is something you can eliminate from your life.

Learn More

Are there tasks that you do that, if you took some time to learn how to do it well you would easily do it yourself? Do you want to learn how to use Quickbooks or create your own website? Do you want to learn more business skills, or become a better cook? Would a session or two with a professional organizer or some time with FlyLady help you to create better systems to clean and organize your home? How much time and money could you save in the long run to invest in yourself this way?

Outsource

If you don’t have anyone to delegate tasks to, you can’t eliminate it from your list, or you don’t have an interest in learning more about a topic, see what you can outsource. If you came up with an hourly rate for your time, say $50/hour, contemplate this. If you hired someone for $20/hour to do some of your work, that would free up your time to do more moneymaking activities that would enable you to pay for the outsourced service.  This could include hiring a cleaning service for your home, a bookkeeper, virtual assistant, even a mother’s helper or babysitter. You can outsource website and logo design. If you want a blog for your business but don’t like to write, you can even hire someone to write for your blog.

If money is an issue, get creative. Find ways to barter services, see if providers are willing to offer you their services in exchange for referrals, or find college kids who are willing to give you their services in exchange for experience.

The whole point of this exercise is to demonstrate to you that YOU do not have to do it all. Many times, women who run small businesses out of their homes take on all the responsibilities of child rearing and housekeeping in addition to growing their businesses. You must be able to schedule in time for self-care and your relationships. Again, you only have 24 hours in a day. See what you can delegate, eliminate, learn or outsource, and see how much more time you have. It just won’t be the time you save not having to do these tasks, but the time you save in not having to fret and stress and worry about these tasks any longer.

Please contact me with questions or comments. For the next week, we’ll be looking at various ways to market your business and plan your marketing tasks.

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Time Management Strategies for Work-Life Balance, Part II
2. 5 Ways to Maximize Your Time Working At Home
3. Time Management Strategies for Work-Life Balance, Part I

1. Schedule a block of time in your calendar each day to check your email, preferably not first thing in the morning or the time of day when you’re feeling most productive. If you get sidetracked you’ll risk losing motivation to do the other things on your list.
2. Keep your business and your personal email accounts separate. My business email goes to Outlook. My personal mail goes to a Gmail account that I can access on my phone when I’m out. It’s perfect because I can check my personal mail when I’m waiting in line to pick up the kids or at the post office. I send all newsletters and Yahoo Group emails to Gmail as well.
3. Maintain only a few folders in your email account. I have my Inbox, my archived mail, and one for newsletters. All the newsletters I receive are filtered automatically to the newsletter folder so I can read them at my leisure. All other mail goes to my inbox, where I read, take action, delete and archive my messages daily. I try to keep my inbox as close to empty as possible.
4. If you can’t take action on an email right away, turn it into a task, then delete or archive it. I just picked up this tip and I think this will help me immensely get the rest of my email in my inbox cleaned up. The ones sitting in there now are essentially my to do items. Brilliant.
5. Unsubscribe from anything that isn’t really important. This goes for all your Yahoo Groups’ messages, ads from companies and newsletters you never read. It’s amazing how much email you can cut out of your life by doing this.

What other tips do you have to share?

Until tomorrow, get busy and clean up your email account! You’ll be glad you did!

These posts may also inspire you:

1. Simple Marketing Tip: Create an Email Signature with WiseStamp
2. Ask Inspired Birth Pro: Is it Worth Doing Email Newsletters? It Depends.
3. 10 Tips for Taming That Paper

The Big Rocks

Stephen Covey’s “Big Rocks” story is pretty famous. He does an exercise in his presentations where he fills a clear container with big rocks, and then pours in pebbles and sand, which fills up all the spaces. When he tries to do the same thing with those same three materials but starts first with the sand and pebbles, the big rocks cannot fit.

This metaphor represents our time and what we choose to do with it. For those of us who go to work since that’s what we have to do, then fill the rest of our day with little emergencies, errands, housework, and random things on our to-do lists, we often find that we don’t have time to do other activities that really matter, like hobbies we once enjoyed, more time with loved ones, really being present with our children, exercising or meditating, or just doing nothing. Our lives tend to move faster and faster and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Kind of like sand in an hourglass…

So What Are Your Big Rocks?

Look at what you’ve done over the last six days:

1. What did your answers reveal to you in your day of Reflection? Compare what went really well with what didn’t go so well. Doing more of what works and changing what doesn’t work so well are examples of big rocks.
2. What are your values? Do you feel that you are living them right now, or do you have some work to do? Doing an activity that represents or ignites a value is a big rock.
3. How are the different areas in your life looking? Are they heavily leaning in a couple of categories, or do you feel really good with your overall life? Activities which encourage positive growth in one of your important areas of life is a big rock.
4. Are most of your fundamental needs being met, allowing you to be operating from your Fire Within most of the time? If not, what do you want to change? The goals that resulted from this visioning exercise should offer you a framework of what you want to change to be living a more fulfilling life by the end of 2009. That which fuels your Fire Within is a big rock.
5. In yesterday’s exercise, you took an even closer look to see what systems in your life are working and not working. The implementation of new systems and structures to make your life run smoother is a big rock.

How do I tell the difference between a big rock and a pebble or sand?

In any moment in time, check in with yourself and ask yourself how you feel. If you feel really good about what you’re doing and it adds meaning, love, abundance, compassion, happiness, joy and other good feelings in your life (and also in others’ lives), chances are you’re doing a big rock activity.

What about the pebbles and sand?

The reality of life is that we cannot only be doing big rock activities. If you pile up a bunch of big rocks in a container, you’ll see empty space in between them. That’s where the pebbles and sand is supposed to go. It’s made up of our responsibilities and obligations, busy work that is just part of our every day experiences. It’s not necessarily good or bad, but it is there. It’s been shown, though, that people who more consciously choose to spend most of their time focusing on the big rocks experience more satisfaction and joy in their lives and don’t feel so overwhelmed by all the little stuff. They are grounded by doing more of what is important to them, that it balances the rest of what life presents them.

So how can you live a life with more big rocks in it?

1. Decide on a handful of big rock activities you want to work on this week, say 4-7.
2. Fill in your calendar for the week with your activities and appointments that you’re already committed to. Include your normal workday, the times you’re schooling your kids or driving them to and from activities, and other events that you have planned.
3. Next, take each of your big rock activities and place each one in your schedule. Try to do them early enough in the day as you can, or at the very least, schedule each one in a time slot when you won’t be rushed or tempted to cancel it because of a fire that needs to be put out.
4. Each day, include at least 15-30 minutes of self-care time, an activity that nurtures your soul. This is a requirement!
5. Make a laundry list of items that need to be done during the week. It’s helpful for some people to break them out either by type of activity (phone calls, check emails, pay bills, etc.) or by the length of time it takes to do the activity. Add more to the list if you must, but know that some may get pushed to the following week.
6. Either the night before or in the morning before your day starts, take a look at the upcoming day. See what items you have on your laundry list and determine which ones you have time for. Don’t attempt to fill in each time slot. This will help you account for fires that need to be put out or items on your list that take longer than you anticipated. Set an intention for the day that you have all you need to be successful, and all that you need to accomplish what you’ve planned is available to you.
7. At the end of each day, celebrate what you’ve done throughout the day, big and small. If you got nothing done on your list, still find something to celebrate and resolve to have a better day tomorrow.

Seems like a lot, doesn’t it, to live a conscious, deliberate life? You need to put forth a different kind of energy to create a life you really want to live. You can no longer let life happen to you. You need to continually remind yourself what you really want, and why you want it. That’s done by writing out or drawing what’s important to you and keeping it forefront in your mind at all times. It takes living life more in appreciation than by complaining and seeing only what’s wrong. It take stopping in moment that you’re mad or upset, and doing any little thing you can do to feel better in the moment.

It takes time, but it does get easier to do. Life feels easier and you find yourself attracting more of what you want to you. More clients, more business, more collaboration. In the case of a life as a birth professional, we may even start to see more positive outcomes in birth, more acceptance of the work we do, as well as more of a demand for what we do.

Just by planning a life with more big rocks in it? It can happen. Start today.

These posts may also inspire you:

1. 5 Ways to Maximize Your Time Working At Home
2. Where Do You Fall Short and What To Do About It
3. What Will It Take To Feel The Fire Within?