Hey, ladies, welcome back to the Ashlee Jaine show. You are in the right place if you are looking for mindset and motivational tips to help inspire you to glow up and show up as the very best version of yourself. I am your host and guide Ashlee Jaine, and today we are tackling the beast that is productivity. Now I want to share some of my top tips to help you be productive in twenty twenty two. I know we all have things that we are working towards. We all have things that we want to accomplish, and these tips that I'm sharing with you have helped me not only have one successful business, but also start another business and also be an elected official on our city council in the city that I live in and be first and foremost, a present wife and mother to my husband and children. So I implement these tips. I swear by them they are like a religion to me to help me tackle and stay on top of everything that I have going on in the day to day, week to week, month to month, and yes, even year to year. So the very first tip that I want to share with you is when it comes to productivity, you really have to figure out what your priorities are, what are your goals, what are those large things that you're actually working towards? Otherwise, you're going to fail to have a sense of direction and you're never going to feel like you're accomplishing anything, and it'll probably feel like a hamster in a wheel type of cycle.

So make sure that you have those large goals, those large things that you're working towards, whether it is in your personal or your professional life, it could be anything from fitness goals to maybe you're looking to get a promotion at work, or maybe you just want to spend some more time with your family and your husband, whatever it may be, get that large goal identified. And then once you have it identified, the most important thing that you can do when it comes to goal setting, by the way, is this step right here, which is breaking it down into actions. These can be daily actions. These can be semi daily actions. These can be weekly actions. Doesn't matter. Just break it down into small bites so you know exactly what it is going to take to help you achieve that goal. And once you have done this, it makes accomplishing anything so much easier. You feel like a weight has been lifted because you don't have this gigantic goal that you're working towards anymore. It's actually broken down for you and bite size pieces so that you feel like in your day to day life, you can actually do those things to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish.

It is so amazing. So if you haven't already been incorporating breaking down your large goals and a small goals, I would highly, highly recommend it. It is just going to not only help give you those bite size and manageable actions that you know you can do, but it's also just really going to help you get a sense of clarity and a sense of direction so you know exactly what you're working towards and how to work towards that goal. Now, the second step on being super productive in twenty twenty two is to schedule your work week or your week out, and then you also want to go back every night or every morning and make sure that you preplan your day. This always reminds me of the saying if you fail to plan, you plan to fail because again, you need that clarity, you need that direction, you need to know exactly what you have going on and when, which is our next step. But I really want to hone in on that. I want you to know how important it is, how critical it is to have just a broad overview of what your week looks like. And then either at night or very early in the morning, you can kind of fine comb through the things that you have going on and really get a more magnified sense of hour to hour and just kind of like everything that you have for that specific day.

All right. So with that said, the third step that I'm going to share with you and this is one that I've talked about and this is actually why I'm even doing this podcast is because I mentioned this in my previous podcast. Quite a few episodes, actually, but I am such a huge fan of time blocking. So as you're fine combing your daily details and really just getting a good, solid sense on a very small scale of what you have going on for that day or the following day, you need to give yourself some time blocks. And what I mean by this is little. Early blocking out time for certain tasks. Now, obviously, everybody has different flexibility when it comes to time and things like that, you may have obligations that you're required to do like, for example, work between 9:00 to 5:00 , where you can't really focus on doing any of the other things that you're trying to accomplish. So make sure that you're mindful of that and also prioritize what you are doing. I would highly encourage you to do whatever is most critical and helping you reach your goals and make shit happen in 2020 to do that as the best productive time of your day. Maybe that means you have to wake up an hour earlier, two hours early to get that job done or get that test done.

Or maybe you are most productive right after you've had your morning coffee. And so that's when you sit down and you do X, Y or Z. That is absolutely key and critical for you achieving your goals and for you being productive. So definitely identify the time in your day when you are the most productive, that you are sharp, that you are mentally present and awake and sharp and ready to do or tackle whatever the task at hand may be. So prioritize that. And then maybe that's something that you don't like to do, by the way. Sometimes the hardest things that we have to do, the most critical things, the things that actually move the needle are things that we don't necessarily want to do. But you still need to do it first to guarantee it gets done and then follow that up with easier things or things that you enjoy doing and things that are kind of just like maybe moving the needle a little bit, but not necessarily doing like a full 180 or anything like that. So definitely be strategic with how you time block and prioritize what you do. And when you do it and when you time block, you really need to protect the time that you've dedicated to that task. If you time block for, let's say you want to do sixty five sit-ups, I have no idea where I just pulled that out of a hat right there, but let's say you want to do sixty five sit-ups and this is going to help you achieve your personal fitness goal.

So you wake up every morning and you time lock that time in your schedule right after you wake up for those sixty five sit-ups. That means you are not going to say yes, you are not going to let anything else infiltrate on that time block. You're not going to say, Oh, well, this morning, I'm going to meet my friend for coffee so I can't do my sixty five sit-ups. That's not how it works. Everything else fits in between those time blocks or outside of those time blocks. Don't jeopardize your time blocks that you have dedicated to helping you achieve whatever it is that you're trying to achieve in life. And since we're already talking about it, the fourth step is eliminating distractions and staying focused. Ladies, I know we live in such a distracted world. Believe me, I fall victim to it all the time. I do a lot of work on social media and it is so easy for me to just start scrolling rather than getting back to what I was supposed to be doing. And sometimes, honestly, if I'm being honest, I even forget what I was supposed to be doing.

I'll literally be on TicTok and next thing I know 30 minutes has went by and I forgot what I even set out to do. As embarrassing as that is, I am guilty of it all the same, but really try to bring awareness to it and be cognitive of your distractions, whether it is via technology or maybe people around you. Maybe you have somebody who's disruptive in the office or at home, or maybe you just let your dogs out too many times a day like me because you're looking for those little mental breaks throughout your day. But whatever it is, just make sure that you eliminate those distractions. You can almost actually even plan for them in your schedule, which is great if you know you have consistent distractions. Or maybe you just even want to give yourself like 30 minutes of social media time. Schedule it while you're on your lunch break, or schedule it at a time where you don't need all of that mental capacity to be as productive as possible. That's just another little tip right there, but definitely make sure that you eliminate them as much as possible. And when you catch yourself being distracted, just bring awareness to it. And the more you do that, the easier it will be for you to correct that habit or that thought within a shorter amount of time of being distracted.

Ok, so now for the last tip that I'm going to share with you, and this one is so important and that is creating habits and routine around all of these tips that I've shared with you. We are nothing if we are. Not consistent. I mean that with every fiber of my being, because I have learned that throughout trying to grow multiple businesses, you absolutely have to be consistent in order to achieve any sort of success or see any sort of results in your business or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish here. So once you have nailed down these steps that I'm here with you, make sure that you're not just implementing it for next week or the following week, but make sure that you're actually creating a habit and a routine around it for all of the weeks, all of the months and hopefully all of the years to come. And I promised once you start doing it, by the way, I don't know if you're aware of this, but once you create a habit, once you have really narrowed down or kind of trained your brain on that habit, it takes up less mental space to accomplish it, which means you can almost kind of do it on autopilot and it do