Kate Henry [00:00:00]:

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. Hi everyone, it’s Dr. Kate Henry. And welcome back to Honing in for another solo episode. I’m someone who really loves the transition into a new year, but it can get hard to get excited about starting new habits in January when it’s really cold and it gets so dark early like it does here in Massachusetts. So when I’m setting new goals or new habits or reevaluating my practices, I try to be really soft with myself. Today I’m going to be talking to you about my reflections on three ways I use time management and teaching you how you can use them in your own lives, always with an intention to be soft with ourselves, to be curious, and to approach these things without judgment. As I sketched out my plan for the episode today, I realized how many different productivity tools and protocols really go into my own time management and scheduling I’m endeavoring today.

 

Kate Henry [00:01:23]:

I’ll make this promise now to focus on sharing just a small handful of them, but I know other ones will likely come up and if so, I’ll link to any additional resources or exercises I encourage you to try out in the show notes if you want to dive deeper. Today I’m going to be focusing on routines, rhythms and rituals. These three Rs and part of the fun for the episode today in teaching them to you was thinking about and checking in on my own routines, rhythms and rituals and how I do these both consciously and unconsciously. I want to start us out by talking about routines. When we say that we have a routine, we’re taking a particular action at a specific time or in a specific order. So you might think of a routine as a habit that you have or a procedure that you like to follow. My own routines are strongest in the morning and in the evening, so my opening routines for my day and my closing routines for my day have really become habits that I can reach for. My day generally starts at 7am when my alarm goes off and Friday our Chihuahua jumps into our bed for smooches and to climb all over us.

 

Kate Henry [00:02:51]:

She’s only seven pounds, so it’s an okay experience. It’s quite cute and easy to wake up with a dog who’s so excited at that point. Chris takes her downstairs to feed her and take her out. I brush my teeth, then I head downstairs. I feed the cats; I make my toaster waffles. Chris pours our coffee. We really have this downpat and I’ve been doing this for years. At 8am this is where things start to shift.

 

Kate Henry [00:03:19]:

And in 2025, I have tried to use this 8am Time for me to go upstairs to my home office and start my. I did this. I started this new habit and routine because I wanted to do more exercise and to do more meditation in the morning, which worked pretty well for the first month that I did it. And then it’s become a little bit more challenging to do it in the evenings. By 10pm, Chris and I usually shift, and we tidy up the kitchen, do the dishes, give the pets their night treats, take Friday outside, we head upstairs and I fill out my one line a day journal and I usually fall asleep before Chris does. I really like my morning routine because it means I’m not rushed to get to my desk for client calls. I actually will set my alarm two hours ahead of any morning client call that I have because I really want that two hours to have the buffer into it. But as I said before, I’m not actually using it in the way I intended.

 

Kate Henry [00:04:31]:

That 8 to 9am block usually is when I want to exercise or meditate. But I somehow find my way to my desk whenever I’m struggling with my productivity or something’s not really working the way I want it to, or it’s feeling crappy or yucky or aversive. I like to pause, I like to reflect, and I like to make some proactive plans to do this. I start with what’s not working so I can reverse engineer a different way into the issue. And when I reflected on what’s not working with the meditation and exercising in the morning, I realized my office is very cold. Our apartment that we live in is shaped like a capital L, and my office is the foot of that L. So three of the four rooms for this office, which is also where I exercise, just face the wilderness. They face the outside, there’s no insulation from other rooms around them, and as you might imagine, it gets pretty cold.

 

Kate Henry [00:05:37]:

I of course, want to be warm, so I usually will make a beeline for my desk, put on my blanket, turn on my space heater, and my computer’s already there, so why not open it up, chip away at tasks while I’m there? It’s just so easy to just open up my laptop and dive in. So the issues here are it’s cold. My yoga mat is on the hardwood floor, so it’s extra cold. And that’s where I like to meditate and exercise. It’s easy to get sucked into the laptop where it’s warmer and I can just get, you know, sucked into answering emails at 8am I know for me that routines are easier for me to follow when I already have a scheduled live meeting with other people. I’ve said this before many times, but I respond incredibly well to that Live accountability. But I don’t necessarily feel like I want to have an accountability buddy in the morning. For some reason, I do want that to still be kind of spacious, and I can have my pajamas on if I want.

 

Kate Henry [00:06:42]:

And it’s just, you know, sort of chill. So I’m thinking here, what could be a middle ground that I can experiment with and see how it goes. I think that I might try using a really cute visual habit tracker. And I think that I need to make the meditation and exercise choices very easy to choose. So if it’s already challenging for me to do something, I need to limit the decision making and just have a really clear list that I can do. Maybe something that’s only 10 minutes or, you know, something I can do wearing like two hoodies or something big fuzzy socks. I also think I could explore turning off my laptop at the end of the day and incorporating that into my closing routine, because this would create an additional stopping point for me in the morning before I just plop down and open my computer. I think that if I had to wait 30 seconds to 60 seconds for my computer to boot up and for the applications to open up, that might be long enough for me to check in and say, hey, I actually don’t want to do this.

 

Kate Henry [00:07:49]:

And if I wanted to build onto that, maybe I could have a post it note or a specific sign that I put on my computer that reminds me to do the other things instead. If you’re curious about exploring your routines and you want an easier way into trying that out, I’d encourage you to do what I’ve just done, which is starting with looking at your opening and your closing routine for your days, because those are things that might have already become habits and there might be things that you like and you could use as models for a different time in your day. So I’ll include some resources in the show notes to help you learn a little bit more about opening and closing routines. The second of the three Rs is rhythm, and this is not something you might have thought about before. When it comes to time management, I like to think of rhythm, and this is actually the one that I like the most. I like to think of rhythm approaches to a day as having a natural flow of things. So there’s not a hard-set order and instead you get to select what you want to complete based on your personal resources of time or energy or focus. And when I reflected on why I like this more rhythm approach of having a to do list and selecting when I want to work on what, I came up with two reasons why this works really well for me.

 

Kate Henry [00:09:27]:

In order to understand these reasons, I’ll give you a little bit of context. So first, I work as a productivity coach. I work for myself. I also do writing and podcasting and this includes tasks like live meetings and live coaching calls. It includes typing up my client notes, email, lots of research that goes into my newsletters and my podcasts, the tech things like recording or troubleshooting and then things like developing workshops or developing other educational resources and all of the admin that goes into this. So as you listen to that list, you might have noticed that some of these things are one and done like meetings or coaching calls. But for the other things like the research and the writing and the developing of resources, I very rarely complete these research and writing and knowledge work tasks in one sitting due to their complexity and due to the behind-the-scenes process work that needs to go into them. So for example, when I’m writing a newsletter, you can trust that I have not sat down and written that newsletter in two to three hours and sent it to you instead.

 

Kate Henry [00:10:40]:

I’ve been picking away at it across multiple sessions for at least a week, sometimes two, sometimes more. I really like to space my research and my writing and my resource development over a longer period of time. I also really love gamification, which is when we create a challenge and try to achieve it, or when we make something into a game that we try to win, like endeavoring to complete a task in a specific amount of time. Time for me, when I have a meeting coming up, let’s say in the next 20 minutes, I might try to see how many emails I can answer leading up to that. That’s very satisfying for me. I also really like to use a Pomodoro timer as a way to set up a focused work session and a limited time block. So you might be thinking, wait, wait, wait, Kate, I thought that we’re talking about rhythms and now you’re talking about a routine. Here is the routine with the timer in the checklist.

 

Kate Henry [00:11:41]:

How does this work for Rhyth? And I hear you. First, I want to say people like to joke that time is all made up, right? I’m describing to you how routines and rhythms and rituals work for me, so I invite you to take what works and to hack this and to make it your own. And this is also a point where I could really kind of go off the tracks and start peppering you with all the tools in my toolbox when it comes to time management. But instead I promise I’ll be efficient and I’m going to limit us just to talk about time blocking and time boxing right now. If you want to learn more about allocating an appropriate amount of time to these different tasks on your to do list, I encourage you to check out some resources that I have on the Planning Fallacy and Parkinson’s Law, and I’ll link to those in the show notes. But let’s get back to these time management tools. Time blocking is when we block off a certain amount of time in our schedule to focus on our particular project or task. You have probably heard of time blocking and you probably are already doing it.

 

Kate Henry [00:12:48]:

For example, for me, I reserve Monday mornings for sending my weekly check in emails to my success and accountability coaching clients. I know I like to start the day like this, so I’m never going to schedule a call before 9am on Mondays. I because I like to have at least that hour from 8 to 9. This is a time when I will intentionally get to my desk and work earlier so that I have at least an hour to work through those emails. Time blocking works really well if you batch a particular task for a particular day or time of day. And I like when we use time blocking in this way because it can give us permission not to fiddle with that task during other times in the week because we know we’ve blocked off time to focus on it. Your time blocking might look like maybe you do write your newsletter on Sundays from 12 to 4 and that is the time block you reserve for it and then you work on it during that time. I don’t generally like to time block unless I’m on a hard deadline and I like to joke that too much time blocking makes me want to like hulk out.

 

Kate Henry [00:13:57]:

It makes me want to rage out. I really don’t like it. It makes me feel super constrained because I like to be able to choose a task based on what’s interesting to me and how I feel. And as I said before, I generally leave myself a big buffer to complete tasks because a lot of my knowledge work projects are things that I am chipping away at over days if not weeks. But when I am on a deadline and I don’t have much time and I need to get stuff done I will add time blocks to my schedule to say from 9 to 10 I do X, from 11 to 1 I do Y and things like that. That so even though time blocking kind of stresses me out and makes me feel constrained, I do like to time box. And I like the way that the Bullet Journal website differentiates these two. Time blocking is when you protect your time from others and time boxing is when you protect your time from yourself.

 

Kate Henry [00:15:00]:

So when I’m using a timer and time boxing, I set a limit on how much time I can spend on something and the purpose there of creating that protection for yourself from yourself is limiting so you don’t overwork on the thing. I might need to reply to my emails before my next meeting. Or I might time box and say I’m going to write a crappy first draft in two hours. Which means if I need to get this done in two hours, I am not allowed to go down any research rabbit holes that are going to waste my time. I like to pair time boxing with gamification. So for example, how many words can I write in this amount of time? How many emails can I answer in this amount of time? If you’re curious about using a rhythm approach for your productivity, I encourage you to check out my Goldilocks Approach to Productivity method, which is something I developed when I was working on my dissertation in graduate school. This is an exercise that asks you or invites you to select a task from your to do list based on how much time, energy and focus you have during that work session. And the goal of the Goldilocks Approach to Productivity is so you will select a task that you can actually make some forward progress on during your specific time block, I guess that you have allocated for it.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:27]:

I’ll share some more instructions for this one in the show. Notes. And last but not least, and perhaps the most personally rewarding in my opinion is the ritual. A ritual is an action that you take in a ceremonial and a mindful way. I like the way that Brooke McAlary and Kelly Exeter described it in their podcast Let It Be. They said that ritual is something you’ll stand up for. I think that’s very beautiful. When I was reflecting for this episode, I was thinking about what my rituals were and which ones I might want.

 

Kate Henry [00:17:08]:

And my rituals feel more personal than productivity based. So for example, some of my personal rituals are I really like to give myself a manicure on the weekend. If you’ve ever seen my nails, they always look really good. That is something I’m very good at giving myself manicures and they could take anywhere between a half hour and two hours. It’s something I allocate time for because I like doing it. It’s really special self-care. I usually do it when I’m watching a fun show or listening to a fun podcast. Another one of my rituals is filling out my bullet journal on Friday afternoons, which is technically productivity, but it’s really colorful.

 

Kate Henry [00:17:53]:

It’s really fun. I like to go in and plan out my whole next week and set up each of the daily schedules for myself. By the time I get to Friday afternoon, I’m usually pretty spent mentally so filling in my bullet journal daily plans for the next week. It’s a good way for me to tie up the work week and sort of guess it’s a closing routine for my week. I also like to read novels and watch YouTube videos in the bath. Those are things I really like to pair together. And in the past a ritual I had is that I used to get tacos or go out to eat or get takeout every Wednesday with my friend Sarah when we lived in the same town. So we everyone always knew we had our Wednesday friend date night that we would get takeout together.

 

Kate Henry [00:18:43]:

It’s a really sweet one that we had. Some rituals that I’d like to put into place in 2025 include I want to get back into blocking off the last workday of the month to do my accounting and my reflection and my planning. That just feels really good as I started us off today saying that I really like that New Year, new Me vibe and I also feel this at the end of the month. Another ritual I’d like to do is schedule in some writing retreats at least once a quarter. Take some time and some days to work on my book and I want to experiment with blocking off Fridays to work on my book. Since graduate school I got really used to not teaching and not having a lot of work to do on Fridays, so that’s something that feels really good for me and I do want to isolate and protect that time to work on my book. I’d like to also personally develop more of an exercise habit, and I’m curious about ways I might make this feel more like a ritual than just a routine. How might I make doing my exercise feel more ceremonial and more intentional? And that’s something I’m sure I will report back on.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:58]:

I’ll close us out today with some questions that you can consider if you want to explore your routines, your rituals and your rhythms. Is there anything that you do during your week that you’d like to be more of a ritual? Why and how could you make it so? What do you feel you’re most present for? What do you feel you’re most disengaged for? What things do you feel like you will quote, unquote stand up for? Like McAlary and Exeter said about rituals, which of the activities do you do feel best when they’re untimed and why? Which of your tasks could do better with a time limit? Are there certain activities that you’d prefer to do alone or alongside others? And are there certain actions or activities that you want to pair together? And finally, because I’m a total nerd for words, what words do you associate with your ideal routines, rhythms and rituals? I feel like mine would be routines are like taking my vitamins, rhythms are spacious support with breathing room and rituals are nourishing in a way that I can make sure I’m filling up my own cup. Thanks so much for learning about routines, rhythms and rituals with me today. There’s going to be a lot of wonderful resources for you in the show notes, and I will see you again very soon. Thanks so much for joining me. You can learn more about honing in and my work as a productivity coach on my website, KateHenry.com Take Good Care.