4/4/24 What are the best productivity hacks for your personality?
What is the purpose of this podcast? To encourage people by sharing.
Live intro with hook - Hello my lovelies. Today is part 2 in the series about Productivity Hacks and Personality in which we give you great tips to help you to be more efficient, have more fun, get more done without hassle and create a home and work environment that works for you, no matter what your personality . We’re working through some principles I teach in the Productivity by Personality course and Whole Home Reset Program and, if anything in this podcast resonates be sure to share and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
For those who are new to the podcast, when I talk about personalities, communication and relationships, I use the DISC personality model of behavior and refer to people as D or Driven, I or Inspired, S or Supportive, and C or Cautious. You can find links to take your own Personality Assessment in the Show Notes.
So last week, we started working with this concept, and as I said, it got more in-depth than I had originally planned, so I decided to make this into a series. That means that since we started with the D personality last week and that’s as far as we made it, we’ll be starting with the I personality this week using the same 10 Productivity Hacks and how they apply to the I personality.
As a quick refresher, let’s go over the productivity hacks we outlined last week.
Productivity Hack #1 is to find the Sweet spot - for more insight on that, listen to one of the episodes listed in the show notes either from last week or the episode talking specifically about the sweet spot
Productivity Hack # 2 is the 2 minute tidy which can apply to personal or business.
Productivity Hack #3 is to use a Timer a secret weapon of productivity, especially on your worst days.
Productivity Hack #4 is to complete One load of laundry per day -This one baffles people, but stay tuned for the benefits.
Productivity Hack #5 is to use a Paper Calendar if you have a family - I know you don’t want to do this, but hear me out before you make your final decision.
Productivity Hack #6 is to have Weekly Meetings - Again, these work in business and personal situations for all personality types, and we’ll discuss why that is so.
Productivity Hack #7 Meal plan - Make space in your brain, business and life for better with this one.
Productivity Hack #8 Use your highest energy time well - One of my favorites and a game changer if you haven’t scheduled yourself around it.
Productivity Hack #9 Use your highest focus time well - Not the same as the one before it, and we’ll talk about that with each personality type.
Productivity Hack #10 Balance is an illusion - Most of us know this, but knowing it, how do we deal with it so we don’t feel unbalanced all the time?
That’s the quick run through of the productivity hacks and now we’re going to talk about how they apply to the Inspired personality type.
So, you there with the I personality, are you ready to figure out how and why each of these productivity hacks can work for you too?
The Sweet spot is so important for you because you sometimes struggle knowing where to start. I’m telling you that this absolutely revolutionized how I conduct my home and business life.
In my home, I know what my sweet spot is for my home and in each room.
In my business, I’ve found that as I learn more and succeed more in my business, the sweet spot transforms because my business and my knowledge base transforms. At this point, I basically run three businesses. I have my DISC personality business where I help online women entrepreneurs with families unleash their superpowers to live an amazing life based on their personality strengths. For the I personality, that means we make life easier and more fun for them in every way. My second business is this podcast, which supports the work I do in my coaching and consulting but is also an entity of its own with content creation and marketing.
Then there’s the business I run with my son that includes making videos for Amazon about products that I love and use, and that business is about to expand to include a YouTube channel, so what does this have to do with the sweet spot?
Honestly, everything because I have to know where to start every week, and for me, that’s imperative so I’m not stressing to keep up all the time. Of all the things I do, creating the podcast takes the most time right now, so I make sure I have the podcast flow as part of every day’s to-do list.
The DISC business requires the second most energy and focus because it requires me to reach out and connect with people on a regular basis.
Finally, there’s the Amazon business, and while I do spend a fair amount of time choosing what to make videos about, my son edits the videos and we work together on how to shoot them. Then I upload weekly and manage the backend of the business when I have CEO time on Fridays. That gets tricky on holiday weeks, so the sweet spot is even more important then.
For the Inspired personality, the 2 minute tidy is a game changer because the I personality struggles with time management. We often overestimate the amount of time it takes to do the smaller tasks and avoid them, and we underestimate the amount of time it takes to do a larger task and end up getting frustrated because we feel like we should be faster when, in reality, we just need to learn to understand our own flow and what it takes to do each thing we need to do. For longer tasks, we probably need to double the time and for shorter tasks we can take advantage of the 2 minute tidy to get us started. At home, here are a few things that you can do in 2 minutes - unload the dishwasher, unless it’s overloaded ( and I let all the plastic with water droplets air dry in a dish drainer, pick up the entryway/living room, pick out clothes for the next day, gather up laundry, do a quick wipe of the bathroom and/or toilet, and the list goes on. Understand that I’m not suggesting you do all of these by yourself if you have other people that live in your home. The two minute tidy in our house was a great tool to get everyone involved with household maintenance without too much of a fuss.
In business, a 2 minute tidy at the beginning and end of each day can keep the chaos monster away at work. That 2 minutes can also be used to plan the next day and look at the calendar to see what meetings you might have so you dress accordingly. Again, the I personality often struggles with where to start, so doing these wind down things at the end of each work day supercharges your ability to get the right work accomplished the next day. Again, I’ve tested this theory way too often and proven these principles work. Try it and see how your work day transforms too.
Productivity hack #3, The Timer is so useful for the Inspired person because, we’re the most likely personality to get distracted, even if we’re working on something we want to do, says the woman who finds herself shutting down Facebook on her desktop several times per day because she keeps popping over to look for, just a sec.
The beauty of the timer is that it gives us an idea of how much work we’re accomplishing in the timed allotment, but it also redirects us when we get distracted, and goodness knows we’re going to get distracted. We may have to look up a word or find a quote, and before you know it, we’re headed down a rabbit hole that has nothing to do with anything we’re working on. And while that can be frustrating when you realize you’ve gone down a rabbit hole for an hour or two or longer, when you set a timer for 15, 30 or 60 minutes, you get redirected and avoid harsh self-judgment later. That is definitely a win.
The timer for the Inspired person can become like a trusted friend that redirects you when you get off track and reminds you of your progress when you’re staying on track, and for almost all of us, it’s in the phone that never leaves your side, so it’s handy too. If you or a loved one is an I personality, please try this, and I promise, after a day or two, you will truly be blown away by what you can accomplish in less time than you think.
I’ve been using a timer for over 20 years, and some days I still amaze myself with what I can accomplish in 15 minutes. It’s so cool.
The One load per day productivity hack was one of the most powerful for me as an easily distracted Inspired personality, mostly because I did not believe for one moment that it would work.
When I originally heard about this, I was a young mom with a 2, 5 and 8 year old. The older two played sports year round, soccer, basketball, and baseball, and my husband had additional part time jobs as a volleyball referee and softball umpire, so I had more than my share of laundry for a family of five.
I always felt like I was behind on laundry, but I learned several things from this process. First was that we had more clothes than we needed, so I began to cull some of them. I definitely had bins of clothes so my oldest son could hand them down to his younger brothers, but the drawers only held what we needed, so I could easily put clothes away.
I learned that I only touched laundry for about 15 minutes because I timed it, and I quick dry a lot of my laundry to get the wrinkles out and then hang them to dry the rest of the way. I learned that kids can match socks even at ages 5 and 2, and that a load per day actually did mean if I took a weekend off, I could catch up in less time than I thought.
There were a couple of additional unexpected benefits that surprised me when I started my at home business. I started a load of laundry in the morning as soon as my husband was out of the shower, and it was finished by the time I got the youngest out the door for school. That signaled the end of personal time and the beginning of work time. For an Inspired person with ADHD, that made the transition from home focus to work focus much easier.
I would work until the kiddos started coming home, and my work hours were set.
In the summer, I switched things up because my children slept in and the house was quiet in the morning, so I did my business work early while the load of laundry ran. Then I would fold the laundry and leave the basket at the bottom of the stairs and continue working until my children woke up. That one hack made it so that I could be more spontaneous and do more with my children because I was no longer plagued by the laundry in my house, and I highly encourage you to try this too because it’s truly life changing, especially if you work at home.
The Paper Calendar hack was a difficult one for me to institute at my home for one big reason. It required me to keep it up, and tasks are not my favorite thing, but neither was being responsible for everything for everyone that was in my head. Please understand that when we started this, digital calendars, especially shared ones, were not in use for most people.
Having the paper calendar let me share the responsibility with my family rather than always being responsible for my family.
To this day, I take a few moments on Saturday or Sunday to plan out the next week and add it to my calendar so I can see at a glance where the snags might be and which days require more of my energy and focus than others.
And before you come at me about still being responsible for everything, let’s talk about weekly meetings.
Weekly Meetings were pretty easy for us in the beginning because our children were younger, and we made a point to have dinner together most evenings, especially Sundays.
We started that tradition because I read an article about National Merit Scholars that studied what set them apart from other students, and the one common denominator was that they sat down with their family to have dinner at least one night per week.
None of my children became National Merit Scholars, but they all are doing well and are pursuing dreams of their own, so I don’t regret our weekly meetings and family dinners at all.
The thing about being an I personality is that time slips through your fingers, and I will tell you that if you have a family, those kids grow up so quickly.
The best quote I ever heard about parenting is that the days are long, but the years fly by, and that was never more apparent than when I looked at my husband when our youngest graduated from college and said, We did it.
I felt the weight of those long days but also how quickly we got to the end of our 25+ year parenting journey to launch our children into the world as responsible adults, and having those weekly meetings helped me and my husband teach our boys how to be responsible for their own time and activities because if it wasn’t on the calendar, they had no one to blame but themselves.
It actually freed me to know what was going on without having to be responsible for everyone in the process, so yay for that!
This works in business, too, especially for the Inspired person that owns a business. If there is a main calendar that shows what is going on in everyone’s life, then everyone knows what they are responsible for, and the business runs more smoothly. In my case, it also lets my family members know when I have late afternoon meetings meaning they may be starting and/or cooking dinner.
With the paper calendar, the Inspired business owner can let go of so much mental load, which gives them freedom to focus more on their business.
The next productivity hack, the Meal plan, was a natural outgrowth of the weekly family meetings because we knew our children would be more likely to be willing participants if there was food involved. If they could pick the meal, all the better, so in the beginning we let our children take turns picking out the meal for the weekly meeting, and they could make requests for other meals as well.
As they got older and more active, we often included car picnics in the mix when I was picking up and dropping off at multiple practices per week.
Those steamed hot dogs and fruit plates weren’t the fanciest meals, but they are now cherished memories of quiet conversations and moments spent together in the midst of preteen and teen chaos.
Pre-packing lunches was my greatest sanity saver during the school days because my children all wanted different sandwiches in their lunches, and I detested making 3 different sandwiches every day.
Could I have only made one kind? Yep. Would my children have thrown away the ones they didn’t like? Absolutely, so it would have been a waste of time and money, and my children would have gone without food, so here was the solution.
Two of my children ate meat sandwiches, one liked turkey and one liked salami without condiments. We made 5 of each for the week and froze 4 of them. That way, they got the sandwich they wanted and only had to grab it out of the fridge or freezer.
Then I made peanut butter and jelly for the youngest, when that was still allowed, and everyone was happy, especially my non-morning loving children, so I call that a parenting win.
Breakfasts were always a frozen grab and go, whether sausage sandwiches or some kind of pastry. Again, I know it wasn’t the healthiest choice, but after elementary school, there was no getting those boys to the table for breakfast, so we did the best we could.
That’s why dinners always included vegetables, sometimes stealthily added, but that’s a conversation for another day. Instead, let’s move on and talk about
Using your highest energy and focus time well - which is so important for the Inspired personality because if you don’t, you can waste your entire day over and over again. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You look at the clock and suddenly it’s 4pm, and you wonder where in the heck the day went, and if it happens a few days in a row, you feel like you’re going backward in every single way, so what’s an easily distracted I personality to do?
One of the great lessons for me was realizing that if I left the house in the morning for anything longer than school dropoff, it was almost impossible to re-engage when I got home. Until I figured that out, I cannot tell you how many days I felt like a failure because I would leave for a meeting or a quick grocery run, and when I got back, I would just spin my wheels or end up on the couch feeling awful and watching mindless TV. Not a good look, and while you might think that has more to do with focus than energy, you’d be wrong.
For a while I tried to exercise in the morning, thinking because it was my highest energy time that it was the best time to exercise. Turns out it wasn’t because I used up all that valuable energy, and I was pretty much useless the rest of the day. It not only zapped me of that precious energy, but also of the even more precious focus I needed to get work done around the house and in my business.
Now I’ve figured out that it’s helpful to get basic house tasks out of the way in the very early morning that don’t take too much energy like emptying the dishwasher and working around the house for 15 minutes tidying up and putting things away. Then I still have energy when I sit down to work and can give my focus and energy to the top tasks on my list for business.
After lunch when my energy is lower but my focus is still ok, I can work on more creative projects like making videos and social posts and attending meetings.
All of these things make each day flow better and help me run my businesses and my home more efficiently.
Oh, and the exercise thing? I actually find the most success when I finish work in the afternoon and make time to exercise before dinner. After dinner, my energy is super low, and relaxing is the only thing on my mind.
I know that system wouldn’t work for everyone, but when you’re an I personality with ADHD, you often do things differently than others, and as long as things get done, and you’re not hurting anyone, who cares? Let neurodivergent Inspired people succeed in ways that truly empower them. Please
On the Balance is an illusion front, when I finally decided to get serious about my businesses, I realized I had a problem. For a long time, I had been the person solely responsible for our home and meals. Adding a business or two meant that I didn’t have the bandwidth to do everything I’d always done, so things had to change.
Fortunately, I have an amazing husband who immediately asked what he could do to help me out, and for me, that was taking over the laundry.
At this point, we only have three of us here, so I rarely do laundry anymore, and I learned to let go and let my task loving husband do the laundry the way he wants which was a surprisingly difficult thing for me to do
Often when it comes to the tasks of home and business, the Inspired personality feels like they’re behind because those tasks don’t come naturally to the light hearted Inspired personality. They also typically don’t have the greatest grasp on how long a task actually takes them unless they time themselves, which is why I actually know that hands on time for a load of laundry is 15 minutes, but I’m constantly learning.
For example, I realized this week that while I’ve been thinking I’m lazy and slacking because I’m not getting my podcast done in a couple of days, I’ve actually underestimated the amount of time it takes me to take a podcast from idea to ready to record. Initially, I thought it was a couple of hours when truthfully, it’s more like 5-7. When I realized that, it was so much easier to be kind to myself about my workflow and not get caught up in feeling like I’m failing.
This is when the concept of good enough is so important. Your good enough may look different than others, but it’s so important to figure out what good enough means to you, and often for the I personality, you find that using your timer not only keeps you on track, but also shows you how long something takes for you to do so you don’t constantly feel like you’re falling behind.
Then, you focus the best you can on the task at hand knowing that when you walk away, even if the task isn’t finished, you’ve made progress, and that is indeed good enough.
So there you have it for the Inspired personality and productivity hacks that can help them do life and business better. If you are an I personality or know one that is struggling, book a free, 15 minute DISCovery call and we can get you on the track to better immediately. We might resolve your issue in that 15 minute conversation. We might schedule a more in depth strategy session, but I assure you that whatever we chat about, you’ll feel better about yourself and your life when we’re finished, and you’ll have some next steps to help you live better based on your personality rather than someone else’s plan that isn’t working for you. The challenge won’t be helping you, but actually ending the call at 15 minutes because you know how much fun we Inspired personalities have chatting with one another.
So, go to the Moving Toward Better homepage and sign up for your DISCovery call to start living better asap.
As always, if you like what you’ve heard, please share and subscribe.
Until next time, keep moving toward better, whatever that looks like for you.
Show Notes
When you’re an Inspired Personality Type, you typically struggle with tasks, so these productivity hacks are designed to help you get your tasks accomplished efficiently, so you can spend your time doing the fun things and having the best time you can in your life.
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Finding the Sweet Spot Episode - https://www.movingtowardbetter.com/podcasts/moving-toward-better/episodes/2148562147
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