Episode 6: Why Your To-Do List Is Keeping You From Being Productive: Goal Setting Series - Part 5
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What do you do after you’ve completed The Upgraded Goal Setting process?
Your journal is full of your big dreams, you’ve got your planner all filled out, and you are ready to start tackling those goals and checking them off your list!
But that’s not always how it works in real life, is it?
Today we are going to talk about how to stay on top of your goals throughout the year so you can make the meaningful progress you want to make.
When you are in your daily life, do you find you are running from task to task or meeting to meeting and by the end of the week you feel like you didn’t get anything done? That’s probably not true at all. You probably did get some great things done but you need a better way to organize and recognize them.
Find the full transcript and show notes at nicolecasespeaks.com/podcast/e06.
In this episode you’ll learn:
The importance of a weekly and monthly check-in
Why your to-do list is keeping you stressed and overwhelmed
Tactical productivity tips I use and share with my clients
The surprising things you may discover by creating a regular check-in practice
Full Transcript:
[00:01:05] Welcome back to the Upgraded Career podcast. I'm your host Nicole Case, and today we're talking about what to do once you have set your annual goals. So your journal is full of your. Big dreams. You've got your planner all filled out, and you are ready to start tackling those goals and just checking them off of your list.
[00:01:24] But think about what's happened in the past. If you're anything like me, I am definitely guilty of setting goals and never then checking back in on them or forgetting about them all together. , and I feel like this is very typical of corporate goals. I always found it funny that when we say we're going to manage performance based on our goals, we set and tie them to the larger corporate goals, but by the time the leaders set the corporate goals and then cascade them down, it can be well into Q2 or Q3 before we get to our own goals, and somehow we still forget about them until the end of the year at performance review time, and then we try to back into them.
[00:02:02] does this sound familiar to anyone? So today we're gonna talk about how to stay on top of your goals throughout the year so you can make the meaningful progress that you.
[00:02:12] and I have a confession to make. I am definitely not the person that you think I am. I'm a giant fraud, an imposter, if you will. I'm actually not an organized. Person. My toxic trait is buying all the planners and wall calendars and notebooks with the grand plan of getting my life together. And people don't often believe me when I tell them this because I've quote unquote, been successful in my life and career.
[00:02:36] I have my master's degree, I have a quote unquote. Good job, and I've excelled. I've moved up in the corporate ladder and not only was I respected at work, but people seemed to like me and I was dependable and people knew if you wanted something dumb, I would whip into action and show up. But what people didn't know was that behind the scenes I was a total mess.
[00:02:58] I would wait till the last minute to finish things. I would be up until 2:00 AM finishing a presentation that I knew about weeks ago, and I. I was, and I'm still incredibly hard on myself. I am for sure my own worst critic. Um, I had a friend of mine who used to talk about how she visioned herself as that, you know, as that duck, you know, kind of gliding gracefully across the water, but underneath she was secretly like paddling, like there was no end.
[00:03:27] Right. It's just so funny to, to be observing. You know, people in our lives and we think that they all, they've all got it together and really we're all just winging it. And I definitely saw this early in my career. I thought everyone else had it figured out and that they were quote unquote, professional, whatever that meant.
[00:03:47] and what I realized was as I was getting more and more exposure to more experienced leaders that no one has any of their shit figured out, seriously. Everyone is freaking winging it to some degree, at least are on some things or in some areas of their, of their lives.
[00:04:03] But I knew I wanted to succeed in my corporate career, so I naturally just figured out ways to keep myself organized, to not miss deadlines, and to show up the way that I wanted to, that in a way that felt really good for me. and as it relates to goals, I would either not write them down at all and forget about them, or I would write them down and then still forget about them, which is really funny considering an expertise of mine that I carved out for myself was performance and review programs when I was in corporate.
[00:04:32] My entire career I've been talking about and doing workshops on goal setting and measuring your success against those goals, but I was terrible at following my own advice, and I don't know if anyone else can. I can appreciate that or, or has felt that before in their lives. But over the years I've created so many different systems and processes that when I went full-time in my business, I really needed to upgrade the way I was setting goals and staying on track with them because now I don't have a boss or other business goals to help steer me even in.
[00:05:04] Most of my roles, I had total autonomy to lead in my area how I wanted, which was great, and which is probably why I enjoyed corporate life as much as I did when I was there. And that might be true for many of you as well, especially if you're in certain leadership roles and you've been hired because people trust your expertise and expect you to set the vision and goals for your teams.
[00:05:26] So this is something that you might, um, be relating to that. It's like, I don't have a boss telling me what it is that I should be doing, what I should be focused on. They just kind of say, here are the corporate goals. What is it that your function needs to do in order to support those? My number one strength in strengths finders is futuristic, and it's a great, it's a great.
[00:05:47] Strength to have when seeing all the possibilities and brainstorming and all the ideas, but it's not so great on the execution and evaluation side of things. So I got really good at showing up and winging things and still delivering in a, in a good way, but this way of operating throughout my career, this last minute, this beating myself up because I realized the quality of my work would've been better had I given myself more time.
[00:06:16] And just these overall feelings of not doing or being enough really took a toll on me. And I would go through these bouts of burnout and it, and was in this perpetual cycle of always feeling behind and just really had some major anxiety. And maybe this is you, maybe you're running from task, task or meeting to meeting.
[00:06:36] and by the end of the week you feel like you didn't get anything done, even though you're, it's probably not true at all. You probably did get some great things done, but you need a better way to organize and recognize it. Also, you know, other people are probably saying that, yeah, you're doing a great job.
[00:06:51] You've pro again, you've probably been really successful. You've probably continued to move up in your career, but again, on the inside you're like, yes, I'm doing that, but I'm just not doing it in a sustainable way. And there's gonna be a point where. , it's not gonna work for you anymore. This winging it or this just kind of frantic, chaotic sort of way you've been doing things, even it's been, even if it's been private kind of behind the scenes, I bet it's really taking a toll on you and it's, and it's really just time to upgrade that process.
[00:07:20] It's really time to upgrade that. And again, When I went full-time in my business, I thought, because now that I had all the time in the world, I didn't have a full-time job taking up, taking up my time, that all of this frantic, chaotic, last minute sort of stuff would disappear because again, I had all the time in the world now, and let me tell you, I was wrong.
[00:07:42] I was very wrong and. actually really threw me for a loop. And this is now something that I share with other small business owners and other people who are side hustling and things like that, that this idea of you having having enough time or not having enough time is completely not the issue. , it's not the issue.
[00:08:01] Have you ever heard of the, of Parkinson's law? It's the idea that the work will fill the time you allow for its completion, right? So if you. Sent, um, a task that needed to be done in a month from now. You would wait to get it done until the end of the month. If you, if the deadline was two weeks from now, you would get the same thing done in two weeks.
[00:08:24] So it was, again, really hard for me to transition from going. Full-time corporate world with at least some level of structure and expectations to absolutely nothing. So I had to figure this out, and what I found was that other people's planners and processes just weren't working for me. So what is it that I do?
[00:08:44] I created my own and I've re refined this process over the last three years, and now I sh share it with my clients and my speaking audiences, and that's what I'm going to share with you. . Now, what I want you to take away from this episode is not necessarily my process step by step, but I want you to think about some takeaways that you, that you think that might work for you and leave what you don't think that that would work for you.
[00:09:10] And that's totally fine. And that's this, and that's true for any part of this podcast, right? I want you to think, I want you to listen to this and take some things away that you think would work for you. Leave or disregard the things that that don't, that's, that's totally fine. So let's take a look at my regular reflection and planning process that I use to keep myself organized and on track to actually accomplish these goals.
[00:09:37] And what we're really talking about here is, is actually going back through that intention and goal setting process that we've been talking about over these last couple of episodes on a weekly and monthly basis. So if you go out to the show notes at Nicole, case speaks.com/podcast/oh six, or look at your goal setting workbook that you've already.
[00:10:01] Downloaded and printed off. You'll see the visual framework of this process, which is a continuum. It doesn't just end. It's not a linear process. It circles back around on itself to the ponder, to that first ponder step, that first reflection step.
[00:10:18] So let's start back up at the top. I talked about reflecting back in episode two as the first step in the goal setting process. It's important to understand where we come from before we can figure out where we're going next.
[00:10:32] But it can be scary to do this because we might uncover things that we don't like, like the fact that we didn't accomplish last week like that we wanted, or we dropped the ball on something or you know, whatever happened in the last time period. You're looking back on again. Reflection isn't about reliving your worst moments or beating yourself out about it.
[00:10:51] It's just about, it's also about reflecting on the good things, and these exercises can be extremely helpful. When you're trying to prepare for your performance review, it can be so hard to remember everything that you did last year, and I promise you that your boss doesn't remember either. So this is a great way to keep track of all of those big wins regularly for when you are going after that promotion or even updating your resume.
[00:11:15] You can, if you're doing these reflections regularly, you can go back and look at those things. So at the end of each week and each month, I'm asking myself these questions. , where did I move the needle on my goals? How did I handle unplanned interruptions? Because there's gonna be unplanned interruptions, and that's okay cuz we're not going to remove those completely no matter, no matter how in control we are of our lives.
[00:11:44] Even as a, even as a business owner with no team and no boss or anything like that, just life happens. Things pop up. So how do I handle unplanned interruptions? What gave me energy? , what drained my energy? Where did I spend too much or too little time? What lessons did I learn? Who did I help? Where did I feel the most fulfilled?
[00:12:11] and what adjustments do I need to make for the next week or month. And then of course I also take a look at my finance financials and other metrics that I track. And again, as much as I actually really don't like looking at like number stuff, money stuff, metrics and stuff like that, I actually really don't enjoy that all that much.
[00:12:29] But it's always super eye-opening. And even in, let's say, the last few months of producing this podcast, There I definitely have thoughts of me being behind and all that started to creep in and I was starting to feel really overwhelmed with everything that I had to do. And when I did this exercise at the end of the month, I realized that I was actually just fine.
[00:12:51] I was actually had plenty of time and I was, I was right on track and it was okay. in our thoughts and our feelings while valid aren't always what is reality. So these exercises can really help ground you in reality in what is actually. Real and happening again, this is super helpful when preparing for your performance review, if you do it every week or at least every month, it won't be such a big effort when you get to that performance review time and you need to pull all of all of your accomplishments in your achievements together.
[00:13:27] And again, it's not just about the bad stuff or where did things go wrong or where did I drop the ball? If I've had a particularly good day, week, or month, I wanna dissect that as well. What was going on? What was I working on that that made things go go so well? Where was I working? Who was I working with?
[00:13:48] And, um, and I've, I've been finding over the last couple of months that I get really, really great creative work done when I'm outside of my home office and out at like a co-working shop, a co-working space or a coffee shop. So actually you can thank Found Coffee and Kitchen in Morrisville, North Carolina for this podcast because that is almost exclusively where I've been writing these episode.
[00:14:11] also look back on just how full or how spacious your calendar was. How much sleep did you get? How was your nutrition? Those are things that I track and I, I, I take a look at in last year, last. Last December, I hosted a mini leadership retreat at my house, and in the week leading up to it, I had a ton of work to do, ton of work to execute on to, you know, do this live event that I had never done before.
[00:14:40] And it went super, super well. I was so happy with how it turned out, and it got just raving reviews from the women that were there. And so when I was doing my reflection, reflection at that, , I recognize that I still prioritize my workouts, my nutrition, and my sleep that week. Even though I could have totally let those things go by the wayside during a busy week, which is typically my mo, typically I just convince myself that, oh, I'm too busy to, to do that.
[00:15:10] I need to stay up really late and work on. Whatever it is that I'm working on, cuz once again, I like to procrastinate. I typically am someone who waits till the last minute to do things, and so if I'm staying up late to get work done, then I can't get up early to go do my workouts and things like that.
[00:15:26] But I really prioritize that. That week. And so I realized that those elements were absolutely contributing to the success of that program and me staying calm throughout the week. Cuz once again, you know, kind of like that, that duck floating on top. But underneath I'm like, you know, Paddling my feet and, and swimming like crazy.
[00:15:49] So the fact that I was able to stay, really, stay really calm and collected throughout that week, that was a signal to me that whatever I was doing, I, it, it felt really good and I wanted to make sure I was able to recreate that. So now, now I try and remind myself when I have a big week and that keeping to my wellness routine.
[00:16:13] Is really time well spent, even if I feel like I should skip them. I like to.
[00:16:19] I like to do this exercise, this reflection exercise every week and every month, and it doesn't have to take too long, especially your weekly reviews. You can get a good review done in 10 to 15 minutes, so put a standing meeting with yourself on your calendar to do this. I was listening to Jenna Kutcher's podcast recently, and she had Marie Folio on.
[00:16:38] And Marie was saying about how she started doing her weekly review and planning sessions in the middle of the afternoons because so many people wait till the end of the day to do those types of. Reflecting and, and planning, but the truth is, you're tired, you're worn out from the day or the week, and you're just trying to shut it down and get out of there for the day or the weekend.
[00:16:58] So it makes sense to actually shift this to a little bit earlier in your day where you still have some energy and brain power to make some good decisions and, and again, be able to do some really great reflection. Sometimes I'll do a daily reflection and I, I was doing that for a, for a while there, but I found that for me it was just too frequent to try to dissect my day every single day.
[00:17:22] But if that works for you, do it, it might be helpful, especially if you're trying to get into the regular habit and routine of reflecting and planning. So I think that's probably. An example of, I was doing it really regularly. I was doing it every day for a long time, and I think it was just a good example of.
[00:17:41] That exercise got me to a place where the reflecting and the planning became a habit, and I just got really good at it. And so it served its purpose there, and now I find it's just it, it makes more sense for me to do it on a weekly and monthly basis instead of daily. Now, I will say there's, there's definitely times.
[00:18:04] maybe I feel like I'm not having a great day and I have to stop and pause and be like, okay, what's, what's going on here? Like, have I eaten? Have I dranken my water? Did I go to the gym? What's happening? Did, am I doing tasks that are just draining my energy? You know, whatever. Like sometimes I'll do that if, if I'm recognizing that I'm having a rough day or even a really great day.
[00:18:25] Um, but again, I don't do the, the daily reflect. , um, as frequently anymore, but again, if that works for you or you're just getting started with this, how at it, so now we're back at the preview or vision part of that goal setting framework. So here are some questions that I like to ask myself, kind of when I'm thinking about my future vision on that weekly or monthly basis.
[00:18:51] So I think about how do I wanna feel this week or how do I want this? Week or month to go, how do I wanna show up for that big meeting? Or how do I wanna show up during that really challenging conversation that I need to have with my boss or someone on my team, or something like that.
[00:19:10] So it's still important to do a little bit of a visioning session during this reflecting and planning part of your week or your month, just to, again, ground yourself on the direction that you want to head in. More of the short term, and again, this is way more focused on the, who's the person that you wanna become, who's the person that you wanna show up as during this week or this.
[00:19:34] Which brings me to the third part of this regular practice, which is planning. So now that you've done your reflection and your visioning, you can look forward to this next month or this next week and do some planning on the actual actions you need to take to support that vision. So for my planning, My weekly planning, I typically do this on Friday afternoons or sometimes Sunday nights, but no matter what, I must do this before Monday morning because when I don't set my weeks up before Monday morning, I notice I feel super anxious because I'm going into the week not knowing what I should be focused on, and I find that I'm just expending a lot more brain power feeling that way than to just take the time to plan on Fridays or Sundays or whatever day.
[00:20:20] Makes sense and how I do this is I just, I brain dump all the things that I need to be working on and then really prioritize what must get done. I get really clear on those three big things that I need to accomplish by the end of the week or the end of the month. And I admit I have not always been so ruthless in this as I probably needed to be on priorities.
[00:20:46] I'm always thinking that I can get more done than I really have the capacity for, but the more and more I do this, I find I get better at it. So es especially if you're, if I'm working on a new action or it's a new project that I'm working on, um, so like, for example, this podcast, I've never done something like this before.
[00:21:05] And so when I've been planning out my month and my weeks leading up to the launch of this podcast, I didn't really know how long it was gonna take me to outline episodes. I didn't know how long it was gonna take me to edit or to create the social media content that goes along with it. I, I didn't know.
[00:21:24] But now that. . And of course what did I do? But I overstuffed myself, and I, and I thought that I could get things done faster than what I really did. Um, but now that I've done it now, cuz we're on what, episode six. Now that I've done it for several episodes, now I have a better understanding of how long it, it just, reality is how long it takes me to do these things, and I'm getting better and better at it.
[00:21:47] So, We have to just be comfortable with kind of just experimenting and just jumping in and taking these actions so that we can figure out, okay, how long does this take me? You know, is this something that I need to do first? Is this something I need to do after a specific thing? And again, the more and more you do this planning, the better you'll get at it.
[00:22:11] Whenever you are working on something new or doing a project or an action that you've not done before, you just have to kind of give yourself some grace and just recognize that, hey, this is my best guess, and we just kind of go from there. , but this leads me into the last part of the regular check-in, which is the process for me.
[00:22:30] This looks li like getting more nitty gritty with my schedule and plans so I can stay organized. Like I said, I'm not a naturally organized person, so by creating this habit and process, it really does help keep me on task. So the brain dumping list that I mentioned before that you would, that you would make while planning and prioritizing.
[00:22:50] This is like your to-do list, but we don't stop there. Working from a to-do list does not tell the whole story because then I literally block my calendar to work on these specific tasks. Otherwise, I end up bouncing around to this reprioritized list of things and then I feel like I haven't accomplished.
[00:23:12] because your to-do list is never ending. There will always be more work to do, but I find scheduling right in your calendar, like scheduling a meeting. On my calendar to do these types of tasks gives me a clearer picture of what's going on. Plus it keeps me from overs, stuffing myself, and I know this sounds obvious, but overstuffed, an overstuffed calendar will keep you from being as productive and effective as you want to be.
[00:23:39] So I try to schedule like types of tasks together as much as I can so I don't have to context switch as much throughout the. now there's gonna be some tasks that just needs to get done and that they aren't super strategic needle moving tasks like your expense report or other administrative type things.
[00:24:00] But I found that when I schedule those things in like a 30 or 60 minute time chunk, that I end up getting those things done quickly instead of dragging them out or piecemealing them throughout the. Previously, like when I was at corporate or even in my business, I would try to like create and send an invoice, you know, in between calls and that would just get it again, it would feel overwhelming.
[00:24:26] I would feel like I wasn't getting everything done. So, for example, before I was recording this podcast, I'm recording this podcast and another podcast episode in the afternoon. In my afternoon, but prior this morning, I sat down and I just did a bunch of admin stuff, like I had some spreadsheets that needed to be updated.
[00:24:47] I had some templates that I needed to update that I've created for myself that needed to be updated for 2023, and just different things like that. Not super interesting needle moving required sort of things. You know, I scheduled an hour on my calendar to do it, and I got it all done, and now I can move on and I don't have to feel like, oh, I've got, I've got some of those, I've got those template things, or I've got those spreadsheet things that need to be updated and I'm not dragging it out for the rest of the week.
[00:25:15] But then I had lunch, I took a break, and now I'm back in the afternoon and I am recording two podcast episodes back to back because then I'm in. Platforms I'm in, I'm in that zone. I'm in that, that frame of mind to be doing those things. And again, it just keeps me from having to stop and start and switch my brain in a, in a bunch of different ways.
[00:25:37] I'm even scheduling my workouts and things like running errands on my calendar as well, because all that takes up time. No matter what our jobs look like or what our businesses look like, our time is finite. So I like to get everything on there.
[00:25:51] The other reason why I like to put things right on my calendar is because when meetings or other things pop up, I can just click and drag that block of time to a different spot so it doesn't get lost. It just shifts to a different spot. And how many times are you, or how much time are you wasting re rewriting a prioritized to-do list?
[00:26:13] The other reason why I like to put things on my calendar is because when meetings or just other things pop up, I can just click and drag that block of time to a different spot on my calendar so it doesn't get lost or anything like that. It just shifts to a different spot. And how much time are you spending rewriting prioritized to-do lists, right?
[00:26:31] This strategy will actually help you reduce that rewrite because all you have to do is just click and drag things around, or again, just move them to a different spot next. I was talking to a client a few months. About this strategy and she was telling me that it was just too hard for her to schedule things in this way because of the nature of her job.
[00:26:56] She was the VP of customer service and they were at the mercy of customer escalations and you know, it's just a very putting out fires kind of a role. But after she experimented with it a little bit, she found the ability to shift things around on her calendar, and she found that that was actually a little bit more flexible for her.
[00:27:16] um, just, she just had to just kind of be okay with the fact that, Hey, I'm gonna schedule my calendar for the week knowing that I'm probably gonna have to move some of this stuff around. But again, even it was still worth the time for her to schedule things because again, things didn't get lost. She was still focused on what needed to get done overall by the end of the week.
[00:27:34] And so again, that flexibility, having that flexibility on our calendar versus having it on a to-do list just felt a little bit. . Another thing we would talk about is that her boss would always pop into her office at least once a day to talk about something and it would be incredibly disruptive, especially after he had meetings with his own boss.
[00:27:57] And this was just his style. And again, and I'd asked her, I was like, well, don't you have, do you have like regular one-on-ones on your calendar? She's like, yes, we do, but it doesn't matter. Every time after this meeting with his boss, he ends up coming into my office. . And again, that was just his style. So in addition to having a conversation with him about how that was super disruptive for her, she also just started scheduling buffer time on her calendar in in anticipation of that interruption.
[00:28:21] And it was her way of being able to be product or proactive in a very reactive environment. So this is so important, scheduling that buffer. In your calendar just to say, listen, the something's gonna pop up. An emergency's gonna happen or something I didn't anticipate or disruption's gonna happen and this is just my block of time in my week or the few blocks of time in my week where I just have that allocated my time, my time is allocated.
[00:28:49] And I'll just shift other things around, um, in order to to accommodate. , and I know I'm gonna get comments from people saying that they like the feeling of physically crossing things off their to-do list, and I'm not taking that away from you. You can still certainly do that, you know, on your brain dump list.
[00:29:09] You can still cross things off whenever you complete them, that's fine. But I'd like to offer you something else. In addition, and I got this from a business coach I follow on Instagram and she, she taught me this, um, about a year ago, and I've just, I've been using it ever since and I absolutely love it.
[00:29:30] So I change every I, well, first of all, everything is color coded on my calendar to. But even if you don't color code, that's totally fine. Just pick a different color to change those working time blocks to once you complete. Those tasks. So I, so for example, like if I have a block that just says, you know, admin time or call the doctor, or whatever the, the, the, whatever I've named that time block, that working time block, I change the color to gray once I've completed that thing.
[00:30:08] So right now my kind of working time blocks are light blue and so, When I complete whatever that thing is that I have in that time block, I just, I change it to gray. So when I look back on my day and my week, I can see all the gray blocks, which signals to me everything that I've gotten done, which is just another way of like checking the box or scratching something off your to-do list.
[00:30:35] It feels really good. And now I even have an.
[00:30:40] and now I have a visual of all of the things that I've gotten done on my calendar.
[00:30:46] So there are some really interesting things that may come out of creating a regular practice like this one. You may end up realizing that the goal you are working on is just not the right goal, and that's okay because like I said, sometimes we just have to try something or get going with something for us to realize, Hey, you know what?
[00:31:04] This is actually not working for me. Or, you know, this goal was not actually that important to me anymore. And that's. , you may find that you are overs stuffing your calendar and you're not being realistic with how long things are taking you. And again, that might be okay at the beginning or at the beginning of a new project or a new action or task that you've just never done before because you're just figuring it out and that's okay.
[00:31:30] And again, by doing this regular practice, you'll figure that out a lot faster and then you'll be able to.
[00:31:37] You're gonna figure out what you need in order to be both effective and satisfied and healthy, which means you might need to shift your routines around. And again, this is all just about experimenting with what works and what doesn't work for you in order for you to be able to show up in that vision that you have set for yourself.
[00:31:57] And so then what might might also happen again, you're gonna figure out what works and you might start to double down on that. So, Goal setting is not always about adding things, but it's realizing what's already working and continuing to do that or to do more of that thing.
[00:32:13] Our lives and our careers and our businesses all need to be simplified, I'm sure, in a lot of different ways. So doubling down on what's working is. Is likely a better strategy than trying to add in a bunch of extra stuff. So again, when you're doing these reflection, reflection sessions and planning sessions, what's already working and how can we continue to do to do those things?
[00:32:39] Or how can we amplify those things that we're already doing that we know already works?.
[00:32:43] You're gonna figure out how you need to pause, when you need to pause, and when you need to take a break. I definitely figured this out over the last few years. When I was like, oh, I'm an online business owner now I can do my work from anywhere, and I was doing work while I was at the beach.
[00:33:04] I was doing work on holidays because I was like, oh, I have the flexibility to be able to do that. Which yes, that's great. , but I also need several days in a row to just not do work, to not be thinking about work. And that's hard for me. Just in general. My brain is always going, so it's already difficult for me to turn it off.
[00:33:25] So I know I need specific times to stop and pause and take a break, and I. after my annual beach trip this past year where I did not a ton of hours, I did maybe, oh gosh, maybe six hours of work total the entire week we were there and over just, and actually just over the course of two days, like I kind of tried to stack it as much as I can on I, as much as I could onto, onto these two days, but I still felt like I didn't.
[00:33:55] A full break that I needed. So as soon as I got home from that trip, I like blocked all kinds of time Over Thanksgiving. I blocked all kinds of time when my sister was coming to visit because I just realized that I need several days in a row after a long sprint in order to rest and pause and take a break in order for me to come back and feel like I can be incredibly productive and effective in, in the work that I.
[00:34:23] You may dis discover that there's something new that you wanna work on. Again, maybe you've realized there was a certain goal that's just not right for you anymore. Or maybe you're just like, wow, this new thing is super cool and I really like doing it, and you need to figure out a way to work it into your new schedule.
[00:34:40] And finally, you're gonna realize that your confidence is going up. Action creates clarity, which creates confidence. Your confidence doesn't. Show up overnight without anything, you have to actually get moving into action for you to figure out, this is working, this is not working. Oh, I'm actually liking this thing, or I'm not liking this thing.
[00:35:04] And that creates your clarity. And whenever you're clear about the direction you're heading, how you need to do something, how, how you need to be effective, what works for you, that is when you start to feel incredibly confident in what you're.
[00:35:18] So that was regular reflecting and planning sessions to check in with yourself and also to keep track of your goals. Just like your goals, you aren't always going to be perfect with this practice. You'll be super on it some weeks and some weeks you won't, and that is okay.
[00:35:34] Remember, consistency does not equal perfection. These practices also don't have to take very long, maybe just five minutes a day, or 15 or 20 minutes per week or month. It's not supposed to feel like another thing on your to-do list, which reminds me, make sure you schedule these quick sessions on your calendar, like a meeting with yourself.
[00:35:55] Also this practice that I've been developing and refining over the last few years, and I'm always still experimenting with different things and tweaking for what's going on in my life at the time. So like everything on this podcast, take what's work, take what works for you, and leave what doesn't work.
[00:36:13] So I'd love to hear how your goal setting and reflection and planning sessions are going. Find me over on LinkedIn or Instagram at Nicole k Speaks and send me a dm. I'd love to hear from you. I'll be seeing you in the next episode. And remember, your career deserves an upgrade.
