Cara Harvey 00:00:03 Welcome to the Purpose Driven Moms show here at A Purpose Driven Mom, we believe that it’s possible to manage your home, work on your personal goals, and grow and scale an online business. Most productivity tips out there tell you to hustle more and make you feel shame about not being motivated enough. And we’re here to dispel this myth. I’m Kara Harvey and I am on a mission to help work at home. Moms realize that they have the power to go after their dreams, take care of themselves, and manage their home without perfectionism, guilt, or having to sacrifice their sleep. If you’re ready to shift your thinking around productivity and get some practical tips to help you manage your mom life, toss your earbuds in while you fold the laundry. And let’s do this. All right. Hey friends, we are getting live in all the places, so let me make sure we’re good and live everywhere. All right? Hey, I am live here on Instagram. I’m also live here inside of our private free community.

Cara Harvey 00:00:59 If you’re not here, you can search purpose over mom and come over. And if you’re watching this later, it’s going to be on the podcast episode 431 so purpose driven rom com slash podcast 431 I want to answer a question that was actually asked inside of the Facebook group. So if you have questions while I’m watching live, go ahead, because we’re going to talk time blocking and theming today. All right. We got a question that was about time blocks. And it was specifically what themes do you have for your time block. So what I want to do today is just talk a little bit more about what time blocking actually is and how themes are going to make you more productive. I understand that the theming concept can be confusing to people, so I want to make sure that it’s super clear what I mean. When I’m talking time blocks, I’m talking small chunks of your time. I’m talking about 2 to 4 hours max, right? Those 2 to 4 hours that you are going to assign to your time.

Cara Harvey 00:01:47 So here’s how you’re going to time block out the rest of the year. We’re going to do a little crash course today. I want you to make a calendar for yourself for the rest of October into November and December. I want you to know that your time blocks will be different most days as we go into the holidays. A lot of people want their time blocks to be the same. They want them to look the same. They don’t want anything to change. But here’s the deal. They are. They’re going to change because your time blocks will be different with what you have going on in your schedule. So what you’re going to do, let’s look at this week. This is an actual quote, normal week for me where I have five full workdays and I like don’t know what to do with myself. I’m like, this is wild, right? So here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to look at your day and you’re going to ask yourself, where are my natural anchors? Natural anchors for me are things like eating meals, right.

Cara Harvey 00:02:30 Those always happen. Kids pick up and drop off. So I make my time blocks to start and stop around those. So here’s an example. My time block number one. That’s 6 a.m. that’s when I get up in the morning to 9 a.m.. 6 a.m. is when I get up, 9 a.m. is when I’ve dropped my kids off at school and I come home. Okay, that’s time. Block one. So it’s about three hours of time. Okay. That three hours is a real sweet spot for me. I find when you get to two hours, it’s too short. When you get to four hours, it’s a little bit too long, right? So that works. My second time block that goes from nine, I’ve dropped the kids off at school to 12. 12 is about when I take my lunch break, so it’s a great time block for me. It’s about three hours again. My next one goes from 12 to 3. I leave around 330 to pick up the kids from school, so I just make my time block end at three.

Cara Harvey 00:03:16 It doesn’t have to be perfect. It works for me, and I then have a time block that goes from 3 to 6. Three is when I go to get into pickup mode, pick them up at 330, we get home by four. Six is about when we leave for activities. My son plays football recurrently multiple times during the week. Daughter has cheer. We’re always at sports and they tend to start around six, so I think that’s a good time now. Some days our activities start later. It’s fine. So I say 3 to 6. Six is our natural anchor of activities. Then 6 to 9 six is anchor of activities. Nine is when my kids go to bed. And then I have a smaller block from 9 to 11. It’s two hours. Doesn’t make my rules will say in quotes, but it’s okay. Nine is when my kids go to bed, 11 is when I go to bed. So I want you to start with, let me make my time blocks. Let me make those anchors and start there, okay.

Cara Harvey 00:04:03 Once you’ve got them made, now what do you do with them? How do we pull the themes in? Here’s the thing that I think is important that you understand with time blocks. Time blocks are giving you urgency. I would like this thing done by the end of this block, but they give you flexibility. I can choose what to do inside of each block. So what you’re going to do is pick a theme. Now, theming is what really allows me to be productive because you’ll hear this concept of the big three. You’ve heard of it like pick your big three things for the week. That’s what you’re going to do. Those are the things that you’re going to get done. Well, the thing is, I can’t pick three priorities. I’m a busy mom. I run a business. I have a lot of things going on in my personal life. I have a lot of things going on in my family. I cannot pick three specific things to do. If I only worked on three things, like the big productivity gurus tell me if they only work on three things.

Cara Harvey 00:04:53 Nothing’s gonna really get done. Maybe those three things will get done. But what about all the other things I have to do? So I actually like to choose what’s called a micro three that is inside each of my time blocks. I’ll pick three things, but we have to assign our themes first. So when I’m looking at themes, I look at what time of day it is, what do I have going on and what do I want to focus on in that theme? Now, themes are not saying that just because this is my relationship theme. For example, maybe that’s one of the things this is my home theme, right? That that’s the only thing I’m doing. What themes are saying is that this is where this is going to live. How many times do you make a goal for yourself, I’m going to go work out right. I’m going to go work on my blog. I’m going to do some reading, whatever it is, but you don’t know where to put it. It’s because you don’t have an intentional themed plan.

Cara Harvey 00:05:42 So this way, themes are going to allow you to say, this is where my goal is going to go. So when stuff pops up, it’s not I’m not sure what to do. It’s not. Where does this fit? It’s. This is where this is going to fit. This is where I’m going to put it. I want to chat with you now and invite you to grab one of.

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Cara Harvey 00:06:52 I also think it’s important to note that when I’m choosing themes, it’s not the only thing I’m doing, it’s just my focal point. So let me give you an example. My theme for my 6 to 9 a.m. block is self-care. But Kara, don’t you have to get your kids ready for school? Yes. I’m not ignoring them. I’m not like, go to you. I’ll see you later. Mommy’s got to go meditate for three hours. It’s not what it looks like. It’s not reality. Instead, I ask myself, what self-care goals do I have that will fit into this block? Now I start my day with self-care.

Cara Harvey 00:07:21 I start my day actually slower, restful, I enjoy that. That’s like my restful time of day. I don’t have as much wind down, but I have a slow gear up. I love I love a slow morning, right? So I get up a few hours before I need to. Now this is where I fit my self-care goals again. The kids still eat the breakfast they need to get ready. We got to do my daughter’s hair. We got to get everything ready for school. But it’s where I’m saying those self-care goals. I’m going to put them in Now, when I’m choosing to put things in my theme, there’s a couple things I want you to think about that, that I also look. Time. How long is your time block? If my time block is like three hours, my plan is to try not to have more than a half to two thirds of that filled. So if, for example, I have a three hour time block and I have a one hour meeting and a one hour meeting, I don’t want to put anything else in that time block.

Cara Harvey 00:08:09 But, Cara, you still have an hour. I know, but what if that one hour meeting goes long? What if leaving that one hour meeting, I now have a list of three things I have to do from that meeting. Where is it going to go? So I always like to take that time that I’m predetermined 3 to 4 hours and never fill it more than half or two thirds with tasks. That’s number one. The second thing that I do is I choose three micro priority tasks inside each theme for my day. So if I’m saying self-care is my goal, I’m going to pick three up. Two doesn’t have to be up to three. No more than three is my recommendation. Small small tasks. This isn’t two hours of work. This is what can you do that fits that theme to move you forward in that goal? This way you can work on multiple things. As busy moms, we can’t just work on one thing, it just isn’t possible. We have to be doing multiple things to move the needle forward, but we don’t have to be doing them at the same intensity.

Cara Harvey 00:09:00 So for my self-care block, I might have a workout. I do a 20 to 30 minute workout every day. It’s micro. It fits in other things I do. I read for ten minutes. I do personal development reading. That’s also my self-care block. Do you know what else is in my self-care block? I shower and they get dressed. Now it’s like, what, almost 3:00 now? My makeup started to fade. If anyone has a really good stay long makeup, let me know. I apply once in the morning and whatever we get, foundation wise, we get. So drop me your recommendations. But I get dressed. I have I mean I have leggings on right now, but I straighten my hair. I feel a little bit more put together. That’s part of my self-care. Those are my only three micro tasks now. Those change, right? Those can change over the course of time depending on my goals. So if I threw in another self-care goal for November, I want to start meditating.

Cara Harvey 00:09:42 That’s actually a goal I have for myself. I want to start meditating. Maybe I’ll put it in the morning because I’m like, oh, where does this fit nicely in my self-care block? All right, I do this for all of my blocks every single week. So on Sunday when I sit down to theme, I look at every day all my goals first, and I look at my days and I say, what themes do I need? So I take all my goals and I combine them. I bash them into categories self-care, personal, home, family. And I say, how much time? How many blocks do I need? And I assign them. The other thing about block themed blocks is you can have more than one a week. I have one self-care block I do, it’s a 5 to 6 days a week. I never do seven Monday through Friday. I tend to do my self-care blocks. You can have one, you can have six. You can have as many as you need based on your goals.

Cara Harvey 00:10:28 Okay. The other thing that’s important, besides making sure that your stuff is is fitting in that block is also just make sure it’s micro. Make sure you’re putting things that are tiny in there. And also when you’re pre-planning your week, brain dump the things you have to get done, categorize them and ask yourself what’s missing? Now, the question I had gotten in the Facebook group was like, what are some ideas of other themes? So I want to kind of leave you with some ideas of themes you might potentially have if you’re unsure, but also use AI. You can go to ChatGPT and you can say, here’s a prompt. I have these following goals for the month of November. For example. What are five? Maybe you want five themes to start with. What are five themes that these would all fit into and categories? What are five categories and see what it says. Sometimes I think with themes we just can’t think of the word right. We’re like trying to think of what it’s called.

Cara Harvey 00:11:16 So these are some of the ones I always kind of recommend. I’m going to actually pull up a slide because I have I was just working on a session for our end of year planning that’s happening this Thursday, and I was like, wait, I have this here. Okay. Themes. You could have health growth. This could be learning or you could call it growth. I call it growth, but it could be anything personal. I want to be clear here. I consider personal goals and home goals two different things your personal goals have to do with you as a human and you as a person. My cleaning routines. Those are my home goals, my decluttering routines. Those are my home goals. I work with a lot of moms and I ask them their personal goals. I want to declutter. That’s great. Your body. What are you decluttering? If it has to do with your home, it’s a home goal. I want you to make a personal goal. Do you work on anything? Is it a hobby? We don’t allow ourselves to have fun and I feel like at 40 this year, I’m like reclaiming fun, reclaiming hobbies and things like that.

Cara Harvey 00:12:08 So go ahead and make yourself some personal that have nothing to do with your home goals. I just want to throw that in there. Spirituality, goals, finance goals, family. Now you can have family goals. You could also have relationship as a theme, right? Those could be two different things. I have a relationship with my friends and my family or they can overlap. Sometimes my family goals include things like a family game night or date night with my husband, but my relationship goals might be things like spending one on one time 15 minutes. It’s a goal I have this month with each of my family members, so see how they intertwined. There’s no black or white self-care fun. Sometimes I don’t put self-care as its own block, because I often feel like self-care is kind of like in everything. But you could. I want to pause real quickly and thank today’s sponsor, which is Thrive Remotely. This is a subscription box just for work at home moms that are constantly trying to juggle two worlds.

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Cara Harvey 00:13:51 I have a block starting November that will be my holiday block, and that will be once a week where I spend time on holiday things shopping, wrapping, planning, organizing, cleaning. Anything has to do with the holidays once a week. So see how it’s not every day, it’s just a block that I put in once a week, because I know that I need to work on my holiday stuff, and if I don’t pre assign where it’s going to go, it’s not going to happen. I also have goals based on activities I do, so I’m a Girl Scout leader. I have one most of the times. I work on it twice, two times a week where I do Girl Scout block, this is where I’m planning lessons, making materials, working on patches, doing administrative stuff. Girl Scouts probably takes me about 3 to 5 hours a week, so I like to split it into two blocks and I’ll make two per week on the weeks we have meetings. I only do one work block on Girl Scouts and one actually being at the meeting, so I do that.

Cara Harvey 00:14:40 I also volunteer at my daughter’s cheer gym. I’m on our service committee, I run, I run the service committee, I’m the lone Ranger on the service committee. It’s me. There’s no committee. So I run the service project at the gym. And so I. It’s not a huge lift. It’s not a lot of work. But if I don’t put the theme in, it’s not going to happen. So what I make sure that I do is once a week I have chair activities and I put them in there. You can have school, right? Maybe you have once a week where your theme in your week is school. When are you working on school paperwork for the kids I got, you know, all the paper comes home, it’s got to be filled out. And admin is another really good block. I like to think of myself as home CEO, right? I am my husband and I co-CEOs. We’re getting there, but I do most of it right. I do a lot of the mental load.

Cara Harvey 00:15:21 We’re reading fair play, but I’ve Brodsky right now and the Purpose Driven Mom Club and it’s so amazing, but it’s highlighting a lot of these things. My husband is great. He handles things. But you know, we as mom are like the keeper of things sometimes. And so I need an admin block where I can sit and reconcile my bank account. I can fill out the things I can RSVP to the birthday parties, I can make the well visits right. You might also want to have a phone calls block where you just make all the phone calls. Like right now, one of my tasks this week is I need just text, not call text like seven people to set up coffee. Like I just want a coffee with my friends. It’s one of my goals for the end of the year. I want to meet up with my friends when I have coffee. I want to hear about their lives. I just want to like, be with them. So I need to set it up. So I set one time block a week where I make phone calls or texts, and that’s where I make appointments.

Cara Harvey 00:15:59 That’s where I set up things with friends. It’s really helpful. Okay. You can also have an errands block. That’s another really good theme. Or you could have a buffer block. So I like to also have buffer blocks where I don’t plan any themes. These are open themes. And why these are helpful is because what I’m actually doing is giving myself a gift of time that I wasn’t originally having, and then if I don’t need it, I can read my book and I can relax. If I do need it, it’s there for me. And then we have another concept we call thought catcher. And these are all the things that you need to get done that week that you didn’t plan for. These are the last minute things that need to get done. This essay. My oldest is a senior. This essay needs to be edited for school, right? Didn’t tell me. We need to get it edited. I need to find time for it. I need to run the errands. I need to go grab this thing.

Cara Harvey 00:16:43 I need all these things that can’t wait till next week. I like to put Wednesday a thought catcher block or anything that’s come up Monday through Wednesday. I can handle because there’s going to be tiny tasks that come up. There’s going to be stuff that didn’t get done, and then I put another buffer block on the weekends. And that kind of encompasses anything that came up Thursday through the weekend. So that way I’m like any of the fires that pop up, I’m not scrambling. Instead, I’m saying this is where they’re going to go now. When you create time blocks, you’re a step ahead because you’re giving yourself urgency. Because again, remember, the goal of time blocks is to say, I want this to be completed by the end of this time block, not the end of the day. So it like kind of pushes some urgency. But when you add the themes, it’s like the icing on the cake. It’s like, cool, I have the cake, but now I’ve got some good stuff that’s going to move me forward and make that cake a little faster, cause I want that icing, right? I know that this is where my goals go.

Cara Harvey 00:17:32 So I wanted to answer this question. It came up. You can search our Facebook group. It’s Purpose Driven Mom community. Come and join us. It’s for free. I’m starting to do weekly live videos like this one here, trying to also share them on Instagram. We’re also going to put this on the podcast and the YouTube channel. So for YouTube go search Purpose Driven Mom. This will be at a Purpose Driven Mom com slash podcast for 31. If you have more questions about topics like this, please let me know. Drop it in a comment. I would love to answer them. If you want my eyes on a specific situation. I love to do breakdowns for people. I love to help make schedules. I would love to do that for you, but I will only be doing that for people in the community because I can screen share. So if you’re in the Facebook community and you want help with the goal, please drop it. Let me help you out. And if you’re not, if you’re watching on IG, come on over.

Cara Harvey 00:18:11 I actually want to move this real quick. I want to see if there’s any IG questions that I missed that came up. Nope. Okay. Thank you for joining us today. Listen to the Purpose Driven Mom show when this comes out in a couple weeks. If you are watching this live, this IG, Facebook, go to a Purpose Driven romcom. End of year planning. We have a $27 workshop Thursday. We have session one from 10 to 1130. Session two then goes from 1 to 230. We’re going to plan out the end of the year. We’re going to do more of this. We’re going to get your brain settled and ready to have fun, to have enjoyment, but also get things done this end of the year. Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 00:18:45 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Purpose Driven Mom Show. If this episode served you in any way, we would really appreciate it if you headed over to wherever you listen to podcast, hit that five star and leave a review and a rating.

Speaker 2 00:18:57 That’s how more moms can find us and we can grow our community. If you had a tip or an make sure you come over and tag me at a Purpose Driven Mom on Instagram and share it with your friends. The best way for us to get this message out there of less hustle and less shame and more intentionality, is for you to share it with people you know need to hear it. Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.