Kate Henry [00:00:08]:

Welcome to Honing in a podcast for creative thinkers where we’ll hone our skills, explore our passions, and nurture our dream projects into being. Hey. I feel that I can start again. I know that I am honing in. Honing in.

 

Kate Henry [00:00:56]:

Hi everyone. Welcome back to honing in. I’m Dr. Kate Henry and I’m so grateful that you take the time to listen to my interviews and to solo episodes like this where I get to do a deep dive into a tool or a framework that I think you might be able to use in your lives and that I’m genuinely curious about using in my life as well. Before I dive into today’s, you know, practical, applicable, helpful tool and framework for you, I want to share that I am accepting new productivity coaching clients right now because my expertise as a coach is helping people finish their projects. A couple of my clients are completing their dissertations this season and I’m so incredibly proud of them. Also, this means that I have some space opening up to work with new clients in June or July in the summer. I love working with creatives. I love working with folks who are completing manuscripts. So. So this might be grad students who are working on comprehensive exams or dissertations.

 

Kate Henry [00:01:59]:

This could be folks who are working on a book with a traditional press and have an editor and are just looking for support and accountability to hit the deadline. Also, I love working with and work with a lot of professors who are trying to balance teaching and research and service as they prepare for tenure. If you want to learn more and you’re curious about coaching, check out my website, the katehenry.com coaching. If you listened to my last solo episode about realistic goal setting, you know that I had a big keynote speech to give at the end of April. I’m happy to report that it went very well and as I suspected, it did take a lot of time to prep for. It took a lot of deep work sessions across multiple days over a few weeks to prepare and practice and feel as confident as I could getting up on that stage. It was a lot of work, and I do feel really proud of what I produced. But the real treat was when folks came up to me after the speech and they thanked me and they shared their stories about the topics I talked about with sustainable productivity and times in my life when my productivity was totally not sustainable.

 

Kate Henry [00:03:20]:

I also really loved the Q and A and offering personal suggestions to folks. That’s always really fun to share my research and help folks come up with personal tools. So I really liked that part of it as well. Also, as I suspected, I was super tired after hitting that big milestone that I worked really hard to hit. I needed intentional rest after that big month of prep. And so I decided to approach May as a bridge between completing that big project and starting any new ones I wanted to do in June. The keynote was really my big goal for the first half of the year, and I do want to set some new goals for the last part of the year. But it’s really important that these goals are realistic and accessible for me.

 

Kate Henry [00:04:11]:

I don’t want to just do something for the sake of doing something like, oh, I did a goal, now I need a new goal. What do I want to do? Like, let’s just fill that time up. I want to focus on projects and tasks that feel effective and feel supportive to the quality of my life. So to figure out what goal I wanted to do, I returned to a workshop that I ran in the past called how to effectively reach your goals this season. Very applicable for where I’m at right now. And in that workshop, I guide folks through setting actionable and achievable goals. And I decided I wanted to just do this workshop myself again and use it to help me set goals for this season of my life. Today I want to walk you through my process of answering the workshop prompts, and I’m also going to link to a video of that workshop and the slide deck in the show notes so you can complete them on your own time too.

 

Kate Henry [00:05:11]:

Enjoy. I love the concept of a season as a measurement of time because it feels both malleable and expansive and a season could literally be like a season outside. Right now I am in spring. Sometimes it feels like summer. We’re moving towards summer in the northern hemisphere. But also a season could be a semester, or maybe it is, you know, a time when your kids are on school holiday and so your season is really affected by the care work that you need to do. Jen Carrington, who was a guest on Honing in episode 18, she wrote this blog post in 2019 when I was, you know, getting into my work as productivity researcher and starting my business. And it blew my mind.

 

Kate Henry [00:06:04]:

Honestly, it still blows my mind. It’s called eight seasons of business. I’ll link to it in the notes for you. Even if you’re not a business owner, I think that it’s just a really helpful way to think about how our energy shifts and the work that we do shifts and requires different things from us. Jen’s blog post covers eight seasons of business and this ranges from a season where you might have what she calls a flicker of a flame of an idea. But also it might be navigating burnout. It might be recalibrating after burnout and reconnecting with your business and then starting over with flames of ideas. Because I actually leaned in to rest throughout May.

 

Kate Henry [00:06:48]:

Bravo, Kate. That’s often hard for me to do, but because of that, I didn’t push myself into a season of burnout after I hit this big milestone and had worked really hard to get there. However, I know that piling projects onto my plate just because I feel like I should be doing something big now is a fast track for me to burn out. If I use Jen’s eight seasons as a framework, I feel like I’m in a little bit of a recalibration season, so I’m pausing and I’m considering what’s next. I know I’m still going to be doing my usual work, the coaching, the newsletter, this podcast, and doing business development tasks. But I want to pause and choose carefully instead of just diving into anything that looks or sounds or feels appealing to me. Once I do decide what projects I want to focus on, I want to be mindful of approaching them strategically so I can protect my time and energy. But of course, I still want to do an awesome job at them, so I want to be strategic about how I approach them and can be productive.

 

Kate Henry [00:07:56]:

If you’ve attended a workshop that I’ve ever offered on personalizing your productivity practice, you may have heard me get a little curious about the concept of efficiency. In theory, maximizing the amount we can get done and minimizing the effort we need to put in to get our work done does sound ideal. I really would like that for all of us. But as we know our approaches to our productivity are going to need to shift depending on where we’re at in our life and the level of support and the number of projects that we are working on at once. So I use this example of what efficiency would look like for a CEO who has an assistant and has a lot of control over their schedule compared to a stressed out, overworked creative person who has a day job that’s gonna look very different. I know those are kind of polls like polar opposites. Not necessarily polar opposites, but very different in terms of like what it would look and feel like to be efficient. But I like to use this just as a model to shift our perspective and thinking when we compare how efficient we are to other people and our colleagues and other people we see around us.

 

Kate Henry [00:09:10]:

This is why I like to consider what effectiveness is in my productivity compared to efficiency. And this workshop that I’m redoing and sharing with you is really focused on that effectiveness over efficiency. So as I share in the workshop, when we aim for effectiveness, we make a plan that acknowledges our individual needs around time and energy and focus. This means that we strategically chip away at our tasks with intention versus just racing to finish, which might cause overwhelm and burnout. So let’s get into these prompts. Let’s start with the first prompt, which is about establishing your context. I know this sounds a little vague, so let’s get a little bit more on the ground. What goals are you working on this season in the workshop? I invite you to choose just one for the purposes of that workshop.

 

Kate Henry [00:10:13]:

When I ran it before, we had limited amount of time so we couldn’t dive deep. But the world is your oyster. You could dive as deep as you want. And you could use the workshop for multiple goals if you have the time for it. I started when I was working on this by writing a list of all the projects and goals I’m already working on in my life, like making the podcast, the newsletter, coaching, spending time with friends, exercising, and I then identified four specific goals that I’d like to focus my attention on in the near future. I’m not yet defining like this when the season starts and ends. I’m just thinking about what are the goals I’m feeling drawn to. And I came up with four things.

 

Kate Henry [00:10:56]:

So for me, these are onboarding new coaching clients, working on my book, caring for my body as I’m navigating a chronic pain flare, and building a personal curriculum where I’m doing some research for fun. I’m not gonna dive too deep into that. So if your ears perked up, I mean, mine would definitely perk up. That’s why I’m literally doing a personal curriculum. Cause I think they’re freaking cool. But I shared a little bit about this in my newsletter at the end of April. So I’ll link to that. You can check it out. If you’re curious about my interest in that, you might notice that some of those goals I just listed overlap with what I’m already doing regularly.

 

Kate Henry [00:11:35]:

But I want to elevate them to this level of a seasonal goal. And I’m telling myself in doing that that I want to make them a priority. The next question in the workshop is to identify what the timeline is for your current season. You might already have a deadline that you’re working with like, okay, I have to have this publication done and out by September so that it could be published by next September so I can go up for tenure. Or you might be thinking around the weather outside or again, what you’re going to do while your kids are on summer holiday. For me, I wanted to just think about June and July. It’s not the entirety of summer. It’s going to be nice out for many, many months here in Massachusetts, but I’d like to try things out and see how they feel.

 

Kate Henry [00:12:24]:

And I know that I want to spend time outside in the summer months. So two felt like a nice container for me. There is something cool about doing an experiment for a short amount of time. Like, okay, this is my experiment for a week or a month, but I really was kind of craving this spaciousness and needing to rush through it. So June and July feels like it gives me some buffer room. The last question for prompt one is how would you define or describe what an effective approach to your goal would look like this season? I had some fun reflecting on this and also some real talk for myself. I decided that an effective approach to my goals would allow me to do my regular self-care and my regular daily habits without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. And also effectiveness would look like what I can do without overworking myself.

 

Kate Henry [00:13:23]:

I made a list of how that would look and what I would want to feel, and I wrote down it’s not a race. Less is best and use strategy to support relaxation. So those are my creative ways that I feel like I want to measure effectiveness this season. Before we get into the goals themselves, I want to take a little detour to talk about making any goals we set more actionable and achievable. An actionable goal this is a goal that has explicit steps or chapters or milestones. And this means that you know which tasks you need to complete and the order you need to complete them in. Sometimes you need to do a little research in order to figure out the order or the actual steps to complete something. So for example, if you’re working on a writing project, maybe you want to look at models of that writing project that other folks have completed to get an idea of what sections you would literally need to write.

 

Kate Henry [00:14:28]:

Or maybe you’re endeavoring to do something new you’ve never done before, and you have a friend or a colleague or a mentor who you can talk to about and hear their experience with it to give you an idea of what would make something actionable. An achievable goal is a goal that you can accomplish given Your skills, timeline, access, and motivation. So this means that you can develop plans and you can appropriately allocate your personal resources of time and energy and focus. And today I’m kind of thinking of money as a personal resource as well. But this means that your plans that you set to complete this goal are thinking about your limited and precious personal resources and how you want to engage them. And I’ll walk you through my process for this today. The second prompt is focused on making your goals actionable by shifting from goals to steps to tasks. First, try to identify, if it feels appropriate, the steps or milestones or literal chapters that you need to complete to achieve your larger goal, and then choose one of those steps and break it down into specific small tasks.

 

Kate Henry [00:15:45]:

You might find that you can actually just jump right from having the goal to writing down the tasks. Or you might find that it’s something like if you’re writing a book, you are literally going to have different chapters or different sections, and you may want to write tasks under each one of those. This step is incredibly important. I encourage you to really take your time and slow down to do this one. It’s going to be really fruitful and it’s going to be a tangible, helpful thing you can take with you. I often see folks procrastinate and struggle to focus if they haven’t done this step, not just in the workshop, just literally in goal setting. So if you start a work session and you have written write my article on your to do list, you’re not going to be nearly as effective or efficient as if you’re working with a task list that says things like draft my thesis statement or outline points I want to cover or read a research article for one hour and take notes. That’s much more actionable of tasks for you to work on.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:54]:

And a helpful resource for breaking down tasks is this fun newsletter I wrote called Is your to do list clear enough? It’s all in the verbs, which I’ll link to in the show notes. And I think when we look at the verbs that we’re using, when we think about our work and what we’re doing, especially with writing, it can be really telling. Like, for example, if I’m working with a client and they say, I want to finish my lit review, I’m like, okay, wait, what does finish mean? Like, yes, I know you want to finish it, but do you literally still need to read? Do you need to write? How many paragraphs are we talking? What is the level of depth that you need to do? How quickly do you need to do this. So if especially you’re a writer, you might want to check that one out. I’m not going to bore you with every single step and every task and every subtask that I wrote down when I answered prompt two. But just as a reminder, before I do look at some of my tasks, my four key goals that I decided to focus in on are onboarding new clients, writing my book, caring for my body, and my personal curriculum. I noticed something interesting when I did start to break down these goals. I started to feel motivated to step away from this breaking down of the goals into tasks process and knock out some of the small subtasks on the list if they seemed like a quick or easy win.

 

Kate Henry [00:18:21]:

I really didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole, and I didn’t want to misuse my allocated planning session. So I had to be careful not to just like open up a new tab and do the task as soon as I wrote it down. For example, here’s some of the steps and tasks that I identified for my goal of caring for my body. First, I need to budget money to pay for my one-on-one exercise with my teacher and also for body work sessions. So massage and acupuncture. I also want to research exercises that I can do that’ll help me move through this back pain season. I need to buy new sneakers, and I need to actually go in and schedule the bodywork appointments. So some of these are quick.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:07]:

I already know what sneakers I want. I admit that I did open up the website for the local running shoe store and wanted to buy them, but I was like, no, no, Kate, you need to go to the local store and try them on and buy them. I can schedule bodywork in just a couple of emails back and forth to find a time or go onto the website and book. But I did not step away and do that. I just put it on the task list to do later. And budgeting, that is something that’s going to be more of a routine thing for me. I’m going to need to routinely, you know, move money from one checking account to a savings account. And then on the other side of that coin, I need to watch my spending on other things so I can prioritize body work right now when I need it a little more.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:51]:

In breaking these down, I noticed something interesting about the researching exercises, step or milestone or part of this goal, which is it’s a bottomless pit. It’s good, it’s important. I actually think it’s going to be really helpful for me to learn more about exercise and posture and how that could help my back pain. But it really is something that is. I could just spend weeks and weeks on. It could literally be the only goal I wanted to focus on for the next two months, and that would be appropriate. So it’s really gonna behoove me to pause and brainstorm what subtasks need to go under that umbrella and be very intentional around how I want to approach those so they don’t just balloon out and become this bottomless task that I never can actually complete. The last question in prompt two is to reflect on how many and which tasks you can reasonably and effectively complete this season.

 

Kate Henry [00:20:51]:

I love this question because, as I shared in that solo episode about realistic goal setting, it’s super easy to fall into cognitive biases where we are unrealistically optimistic about how much we can achieve in a set amount of time. So that’s the optimism bias and the planning fallacy, where we’re not being realistic in our goal setting process us and often for good reasons. We feel confident, we feel excited, we’re forgetting that, you know, we had struggled in the past with certain things. And yeah, we, we want to do a good job and we’re cheering ourselves on, but not always realistic. I went through my four goals, and I put a star by the tasks that felt doable in my season of June and July. And I felt good about this. Cool. I’m limiting the number of tasks that I’m gonna try to accomplish.

 

Kate Henry [00:21:42]:

And then I looked at all the little tasks that I had put stars on across my different four goals. This step was especially helpful because while it might feel totally doable to make a big leap forward in my professional goal, I need to also consider how much time and energy and effort I need to put into my creative and my personal goals that I’m working on. This means that I’m hoping to buy those new sneakers soon, but it’s actually okay if I don’t fully do that deep dive into the back pain exercise research. I’m even right now sort of prioritizing which tasks or steps I want to start with and which I want to do next. And while I do plan to make progress on my book proposal, I’m not going to plan to have a fully developed sample chapter yet. Not yet. Maybe it’s going to happen. That would be super-duper cool if it does.

 

Kate Henry [00:22:35]:

But. But if I’m aiming for an effective experience, that means I need to hit my criteria. So again, my criteria are progressing on my goals while still doing my regular self-care and my daily habits without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. Doesn’t that sound lovely? I want that for myself. I want that for all of you too. And my other criteria is not overworking myself, especially not for a goal. That’s just something I want to do instead of something that’s a must do. So for example, I really do want to do my personal curriculum task, but that’s potentially not as high of a priority for me right now than the stuff that I need to do for my physical pain management.

 

Kate Henry [00:23:18]:

That last question in prompt two set us up well for prompt three where we’ll be checking in with our personal resources this season and we’re going to be making our goals more achievable. First question for prompt three is what is your current relationship with personal resources during this season when you consider your day-to-day experience and personal resources are things like time, energy, focus and also, I’m curious about physical and mental health as well. I like to include physical health, mental health, mood when we’re thinking about personal resources and these resources are what fuels our productivity because the way that we feel physically and mentally and emotionally is going to definitely affect our productivity, both our output and our experience of being productive of making that output. If we can approach our productivity practices with these resources in mind, not just time, not just energy, not just focus, but also physically how we feel, emotionally how we feel, then we can be more effective and hopefully have an experience that’s more sustainable. So my answers in thinking about what my personal resources are looking like this season is that I do have some time allocated. So I have co working sessions, three of them that I’m doing a week scheduled for just writing, writing my book. I do want to try to take the weekends off. I’m not always great about that, but that’s something I want to try to do this summer for my energy.

 

Kate Henry [00:24:58]:

I have been waking up earlier to do my exercise in the morning, which feels awesome, but it also means I’m sleepier earlier and I have a little bit of an afternoon slump. So I have to think about that for my energy for focus. I am feeling motivated right now to get things done sooner because I really don’t want to be working on things close to a deadline if I can avoid it. So am focusing, doing some deep work sessions and for physical, as I said, I’m going through this back pain flare. It’s really essential that I take breaks, more breaks than I’ve been taking. And also, I’m getting some cool new reading glasses soon. I’VE been having trouble reading things that are close to my face. So that is just the journey that I’m on right now.

 

Kate Henry [00:25:45]:

And I’m really hoping that getting reading glasses is going to increase my Give me a positive experience with the physical practice of being productive. The next question is how will this goal require you to use your personal resources during this season? So how are my resources, like the amount of them, the quality of them, the frequency of them, going to be needed for this goal? And for me, I took the time to think about this for all four of my goals. Maybe for you, you want to just think of one goal as you’re. You’re trying out this process or all of them. Go for it. That’s what I did. It was fun, but it took some time. So my answer to this is that I really need to prioritize breaks for stretching and resting both my body and resting my eyes.

 

Kate Henry [00:26:33]:

But I also do really need to have those deep work sessions so I can dive into them. And I’ll need to time block those so I can be really strategic about how I fit those in and how I take breaks. And then for the money stuff that I mentioned, if I want to allocate my budget, I’ll need to frequently check in and transfer money into my savings accounts, which is actually something that’s easy for me to do. And it’s a habit I’ve built up because I get a lot. I think I feel a lot of dopamine, like a nice dopamine response when I’m like, oh yeah, another hundred bucks for a massage right there. Like, it’s just really motivating for me. So I like that habit. The final prompt for the workshop is about noticing your patterns and being strategic about solutions.

 

Kate Henry [00:27:19]:

And if you’re into today’s episode, which it seems like you are because you’re like a half hour into it now, I recommend that you check out the previous solo episode about realistic goal setting, because I walk you through my Proactive Plans and Acute Actions framework in depth, and I mention it in share about it and guide folks through it in the workshop as well. But I’ll summarize it quickly here. A quick summary of Proactive Plans and Acute Actions is that we’re rooting our plans for the future in our actual lived experiences and patterns of behavior. So this is not an idealized or overly optimistic dream future where everything’s perfect and I work all day and I, you know, never have back pain. That’s not going to happen. At least not for me. Maybe it Will, that is my wish for you, that you always have a wonderful time with your work. After we do this reflection on previous experiences and we’re looking at similar goals, similar tasks that we’ve done before, the next step is to identify patterns and then to make proactive plans based on those patterns to set ourselves up for success based on our strengths or our things that we did that were really positive.

 

Kate Henry [00:28:35]:

Experience with those patterns. Patterns and also to make plans to mitigate potential negative experiences or navigate them if they’re unavoidable. So that’s the proactive plan’s part. The acute actions come in when we consider those unavoidable challenges, and we predetermine a list of actions we can reach for in the moment if we do run into an obstacle. I like this framework because it’s not moralizing the obstacles we encounter or shaming us for struggling with something if we encounter it. For example, if you struggle with setting and holding boundaries around your availability, or you tend to overwork and not take days off, or if you sometimes overlap your deadlines and it means you have really long work days, then not only are you in great company because these are my literal own patterns that I identified, but also you can proactively plan to navigate these challenges. So for me, something I wrote down that I can do is I can go into my online scheduler and block off days so no one can book a meeting with me that day. And then even further, I can add a line to my email signature that tells everyone I’m not going to be available for a certain date or range of dates, which adds added accountability for me to actually take that time off because other folks will know and can hold me accountable to it.

 

Kate Henry [00:30:04]:

So this framework is very cool because instead of berating ourselves, we’re strategizing ahead of time to set ourselves up for success based in what we expect will be our patterns of behavior we might repeat or might need to experience again. All right, let’s do this final prompt. What obstacles or challenges commonly prevent you from having effective productivity sessions with this goal or similar goals? And if you feel stuck, look back at your definition of effectiveness. What plans can you make or actions can you take now to find success? This is a great place to talk about aversive tasks, which are tasks that we’re likely to avoid because they’re unpalatable or they’re challenging or they’re vague. I’ll link to a post I wrote about aversive tasks if you want to dive deeper. But basically, aversive tasks are the things we’re going to procrastinate on for a myriad of reasons, the aversive tasks that I think I will run into include. So for my book, I might feel unclear about the steps that I need to take to write this book. So I’m going to definitely keep breaking those tasks down and setting micro goals for myself because that is a way to increase the clarity of me knowing what I need to do in order to accomplish a task.

 

Kate Henry [00:31:38]:

I’ve been doing this recently for the book and it’s going very well. So I’m stoked and I hope that it continues to go really well. I’m. I’m really thriving with these micro goals. For work. Nothing is feeling particularly aversive, which is awesome, you know, to be many years into my business and it’s feeling smooth. I actually feel super stoked to do the things that I normally do, like the writing, the podcasting, the coaching. Obviously, I’d like a couple more clients.

 

Kate Henry [00:32:08]:

That’s part of my goal to onboard new clients. But as I’m doing the work stuff, I want to make sure that I stagger my schedule in my work sessions because I have certain deadlines, I need to hit so that my assistant who supports me in doing things can hit her deadlines as well. So that’s something I will be thinking about is not falling into that pattern I have with having overlapping deadlines that can cause backup or bottlenecking. I think that for my other personal goals, caring for my body and my this fun personal curriculum study I want to do, the obstacle I might encounter is feeling fatigued. And when I feel fatigued reaching for something that’s much passive instead of actually doing the things I want to do. So it’s so much easier to just scroll for my scroll on my phone than to have to like make a decision to do a task and then follow through. To make both the physical and creative goals super accessible for me, I need to have clear protocols to follow. So clear protocols.

 

Kate Henry [00:33:15]:

This is literally what you’re going to do for exercise. Step one, two, three. And I also need to take breaks so I might make use of my Pomodoro timer app. I definitely like to use Pomodoro timers for my work sessions. I admit sometimes I’m not so great as actually taking the breaks. I encourage folks to do it. I really should walk my talks maybe right now. Maybe I’ll hack that 100 Pomodoros in one month tracker that I use sometimes and say I’ll do 100 breaks in one month.

 

Kate Henry [00:33:45]:

That would Be a nice little goal. And I could print that out and literally have that on my desk so I could color in a little cute little tomato or flower or something when I take a break. Okay, so that’s something I could try to have this protocol to make it more accessible for my creative studies. I both need to have things that are easy to reach for. Again, limiting decision making. But I also need to give myself the time to reach for it. So my half-read copy of the Creative Habit is by my bed. But recently, by the time I get to bed at night, I just wanna go to bed.

 

Kate Henry [00:34:21]:

I’m too tired to read. And so this fun personal curriculum, when I get to bed, I’m like, ew, no, get it away. Is this a punishment? Do I have to read this super fun book? I’m tired, I wanna go to bed. So something that could help me for this, that I wrote down is that I could tell my spouse, Chris, like, hey, tonight I’m gonna take a bath and I’m gonna read for an hour. And in saying that out loud, there’s also some accountability. So Chris me accountable. It’ll be like, hey, weren’t you gonna take a bath? And it also helps me to not feel FOMO if I’m like stepping away when we’re doing something fun together in the evening. The final prompt of all these prompts is to make a list of actions you can take if you run into an obstacle later.

 

Kate Henry [00:35:07]:

This is the acute actions part of the framework. I kind of got into this, like if this then that I really loved Intro to Logic in college. I took that literally, I think my last semester of college with all the college freshmen. And who knows, if I had taken Intro to Logic my first semester, if I would have become a philosopher. So anyways, if I want to write on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday during my work, my co working blocks, I need to focus on client work in other time blocks so that I can fully be present for the writing. But then I need to fully be present for the other work in other times too. If I want to learn more for this creative curriculum that I’m doing, I have to have less screen time. I have to trade out that time for some creative time.

 

Kate Henry [00:36:00]:

Something I can do for this is I have this little brick app that lots of folks are into that blocks everything except for certain apps that you tell it that it can block. So getting into using that can help. And if I want to do my exercises again, I need clear protocols. I need clear steps to limit decision making in doing this reflection I also realized, oh, I need to not eat right before I exercise. Sometimes I’m like, ooh, I have a little break. I can do exercise at 11. But, like, 11 is when I want to have my second breakfast or early lunch. And if I do that, I’m not going to want to, like, roll around on the floor and stretch or move around.

 

Kate Henry [00:36:41]:

And then the last thing I noticed here is that if I’m going to exercise, I need to have something to listen to. And I really, if I waste time, like, scrolling for up to 30 minutes now, 30 is a dramatic thing, but even 20 minutes is way too much to try to figure out which freaking podcast I want to listen to while I exercise. Like, that is just such a waste of my time. And if I just had a list of the things I could easily reach for, I’ve been learning this could be called, like, a personal algorithm in my creative, personal curriculum. I learned that. But if I could have things to limit decision making, it’s going to really make it easier for me to make the choice to say yes. All right, let’s close this up. Thank you for listening to this thus far.

 

Kate Henry [00:37:28]:

I was reflecting on if I were to add anything to this workshop now, what would it be? And I think that I would invite folks and invite myself to envision these effective plans for their season, for these goals as an experiment. So this is an approach where there’s something we can try for a limited amount of time, and we can notice how it goes. We can reflect throughout and make any changes that we need to make. I know that some of your goals literally do have a hard deadline and you need to hit them. So you might not have the luxury of just experimenting and seeing what you. You like and what feels good. But I also think that that can be a nice way to, you know, approach things so that we are, again, not moralizing our productivity. For me, I’m setting up a goal for June and July because I don’t want to feel rushed.

 

Kate Henry [00:38:24]:

I don’t want to finish everything in one month. And I’m hoping to do a check in halfway through and to actually schedule reminders, maybe weekly reminders in my calendar to pop up and help me, you know, reflect again and make any changes that I need to make. I hope that you will check out the workshop, and I hope that you enjoyed listening to me share a bit of my process. I know I really enjoyed this reflection, and I feel so set up to have an effective June and July. Good luck, everyone. Enjoy your goals.

 

Kate Henry [00:39:33]:

You can learn more about honing in and my work as a productivity coach on my website, katehenry.com.