Day In & Day Out Time Management Strategies with Anna Dearmon Kornick
Having good time management does not mean your days have to follow a rigid, hour by hour schedule. How do I know? I sat down with Anna Dearmon Kornick from the It's About Time Podcast and asked her! She's a time management expert and today she's giving us a peek into how she structures her days. Listen in!
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Click here for the full episode transcript.
ANNA’S ROUTINES
As a time management coach, it may be surprising that Anna does not follow a rigid daily schedule. That doesn’t fit with her personality, and it doesn’t really fit with most people.
Anna is not a morning person, so she tries to keep mornings low key. Ideally, she would sit on her back porch enjoying a cup of coffee, but having small children makes those mornings less likely to happen.
The day begins with getting her children off to school and then beginning her own work day. Her days are structured around themes. Mondays are Marketing Mondays where she writes podcast episodes or does marketing for her business.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are focused on client work such as one-on-one or group coaching. Thursdays are a catch all day where she will do podcast interviews or coaching that had to be rescheduled.
Fridays are set aside for CEO activities such as looking at the numbers and finances. A perfect Friday will include a yoga class. This feels like a reward after a long work week, leaving Anna feeling recharged and replenished.
THEME DAYS
Theme days became part of Anna’s life after experiencing some pretty rough burnout and trying to figure out how to get back to spending time on what mattered most.
Theme days work well for those who love to have flexible structure. It provides some predictability, some consistency, and a rhythm, but they aren’t so rigid that you feel like you are a slave to your calendar.
As an example, Anna writes podcast episodes on Monday. She isn’t sure if it will be Monday morning or Monday afternoon, but it will happen on Monday.
PROCRASTINATION
We, as humans, love to procrastinate. Our brains love novelty and switching things up. That’s why, when we are in the middle of something, we want to go do something else, instead of finishing what we’re working on.
Theme days help with this because when you feel tempted to do this, you can tell yourself that now is not the time. You have time set aside for that other task later in the week.
USING A TIMER
A timer is one of Anna’s favorite time management tools for staying focused and on task. She doesn’t recommend timers on your phone, but physical timers, like a kitchen timer. Timers on your phone usually lead to being distracted by a notification or an app we are drawn to.
ANNA’S STRENGTHS
Anna feels she has a really good rhythm set with her girls in the morning. They wake up, tidy their bed, get dressed, fix their hair, and have breakfast. They use an Alexa timer to know when it’s time to put shoes on. The girls know the timer is coming, so they listen for it and when they hear it, they wrap up breakfast and put on their shoes.
As mentioned earlier, theme days work well for Anna. She not only incorporates them in her work, but in her home as well. For laundry, she does the girls’ clothes on Monday, adult clothes on Tuesday, and washes towels on Wednesday.
MAKING THINGS EASY
Anna stressed making things easy on yourself by giving an example of one of her coaching clients. The client wanted to include reading a personal development book in her morning routine.
After describing the physical movements of her routine, the different places she moved throughout the morning, it was discovered that if she kept the book next to the coffee maker she would be much more likely to read it.
Another client example is moving a toothbrush to the bathroom that was closest to the back door so that the client would more easily be able to brush her teeth before heading out in the morning, instead of going all the way across the house.
EXPERIMENTING
It is important to experiment and see what happens. Trying a new approach doesn’t have to be a commitment. Try it and see how it works. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. You can just try something else.
This also holds true for decluttering methods and time management. Just because a technique works for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you. That’s part of the reason there are so many ideas and methods out there. We all have different personalities. We have to experiment and take what works for us and leave the rest.
ANNA’S STRUGGLE
Anna’s big struggle is cleaning her shower. Other parts of the bathroom are no problem, but the shower is something she hates to clean, partly because it has a glass shower door and tile that looks like rocks that are hard to clean.
EMBRACING STRUGGLES
We all have struggles and we will all take a different approach to dealing with them to avoid fighting the same fight and feeling frustrated.
For some that may mean hiring out a task that we just don’t like or struggle with. It’s okay to hire someone just to clean the bathrooms if you’ve got a handle on cleaning everything else. The goal is to bring more peace for yourself.
LESS STRESS AND MORE PEACE
The one thing that brings Anna less stress and more peace is her virtual assistant. There are so many moving parts to Anna’s life right now and delegating the job of managing her calendar to someone else has really reduced her stress.
Even as a time management coach and having the background of managing a calendar for a member of Congress, at this point in her life, managing her own calendar is not the best use of her time.
Anna believes we, as women, need to rewire the belief that we have to do everything or else it doesn’t count. Outsourcing tasks doesn’t take away from you being the best version of yourself in your different roles. If anything, it enables you to show up even better.
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