Sarah, welcome to another episode of uncomplicating business. My name is Sarah. I am a business coach. I'm the creator of selling for weirdos, and I am a teacher turned entrepreneur. And today we are going to talk about one of those things that I think nobody talks about when you turn into an entrepreneur. We all want, but somehow is not part of the conversation. 

What we're going to talk about today is how to create a workday that actually fits you. And the reason that I want to talk about this today is because it is one of those things that I end up talking with, coaching clients and networking connections and people all over the place with, because so many of us go from, you know, corporate or teaching in particular, to entrepreneur land. And I had a stop in corporate between teaching and entrepreneur land, and we get here in entrepreneur land, where we own our own schedules, and it's like, Huh? Now what? How do I do this? 

So today, what I want to do is share five questions, and these are the questions I find myself asking people all the time when we talk about the day that they have as an entrepreneur, and what they want, versus what they need, versus sort of what we expect a workday to be, because we all have sort of this, you know, 730 to three or nine to five or whatever. Have it be expectation? I mean, I started life with a bell schedule. So what I want to share today are the questions that I think through and that I help other people think through and coaching when we start to actually, intentionally create a work day that isn't maybe the typical work day, because nobody came into entrepreneur land to continue to be at nine to five or 730, to three, or whatever it is. We came for different, not for the same. We wanted the same. We just stayed where we were. So the first question is, both the simplest and the hardest. What do you need from your day?

Like, what do you need? For example, for me, I need the flexibility to sometimes have the day. Excuse me, start at different times. I need the day to be able to end at different times. For me, flexibility in my day is like the highest order need. That's the first thing. The second thing is, I need a little time in the morning, once my kids are gone, can they? You know, I still have school aged kids. So I have one that right now gets on the bus at 645 and I have another that gets on the bus at 830 so my day starts at 530 but nobody's out of here until 830 I need a little bit of time between 830 and, you know, like 930 a lot of the time where I don't have to talk to anybody. 

That is what I've learned as a business owner, that I need some quiet space to like read for a minute and have tea and write in my journal and get myself organized for the day before I dive into talking to other human beings, and a lot of them. Sometimes I have colleagues, I have clients, I have friends that jump right into the people part and need the quiet at the other end. I have colleagues and friends that jump into the people part, and they need to be able to go to the gym at lunch, or they need to be able to start the day with the workout once the kids are gone, or once at the start end of their day and they're happy to end at six o'clock, right? 

Like, I need to be done by 330 or four o'clock most days. So the question for you right out of the gate is, like, what do you actually need? What do you what has to be able, what has to be an ingredient? The second question is, is a weird one, but it's important. It's like, how do you think a work day is supposed to work? Like, what are your expectations? What are your assumptions? What are your shoulds? Like, I have a very deeply ingrained should that I should be at my desk at 830 when my kid gets on the bus. Like, the next thing I should do is come sit down at my desk and start work, because my day has begun. And I find that all the time, like I intentionally, will go sit in the other room and be like, No, I'm not going to my desk. Rule Breaker, and it is so like, juvenile and so important all at the same time. Time. It's fascinating. But you know my expectations? You know our expectations of what a work day is supposed to look like is like we sit down and we work and we work until we're done. 

But is that really what you want your day to look like? Do you want to sit down at your desk at 830 in the morning and get up eight hours later? I like, that's not what I want. I want to be able to, like, get up and go do other things, and if I need to go to the grocery store, I do, and if I want to go do laundry, I do. And if I want to go take a walk, I do. Because, you know, the person who is the boss that I'm reporting to is also me, and she is cool with it. I want to be able to do those things, but I have shoulds around. Like, should I am I allowed to leave my desk right now? Like, Good lord, what are the things like I have a client, for example, who her expectation is that all her work should fit into Monday through Friday, but what she really wants is to do less work during the week and do a little bit of work on Saturday and Sunday. 

And her life is flexible enough that she can sit at her desk for two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday, or even three and and not be doing it and do less things the other day. So she has a little more flexibility during the week. I don't want that that doesn't work in my day, but that's really what she loves. But she wants to be able to be done a little earlier during the week, during the week, so she she picks up that time that she, you know, has things she wants to accomplish on the weekend. I often sit down on a Sunday night and sort of organize myself for the week or spend a couple hours writing things that have been rattling around in my head. That's fine, but we have these expectations. 

Sometimes I have the expectation that I like, can't be allowed to work on the weekends because weekends are not work. And then I find that I want to go do some work, and I'm like, oh, but I'm not allowed to do that. Oh, my goodness, that's bunkers. It's really important to sit down and sort of dig out what you think is supposed to be happening, so that you know what your assumptions are. Because then you can go like, Oh, is this an assumption I want or I need? You know, Am I cool with this one? Because if you're not, then let it go, if you're cool with the idea, but I have a couple, and I have another client who, like, wants all the work to fit in Monday through Friday, and she would rather like keel over than work on a Saturday, which is great. 

So she keeps her weekend sacred, and that's fine. Everybody's got a different version, but for her, that's an intentional decision. She does not Saturday with people, and that's okay. Question three, how standard will it be? And I have standard in quotes, because here's the thing, in entrepreneur land, we get choices. If you want your calendar and your schedule and your availability to be different every day, that is okay. If you want to work half day on Monday, not at all on Tuesday, all day, Wednesday, all day, Friday and all day, Saturday. Great. If you want to work four hours, two hours, six hours, eight hours, seven hours, awesome. If you want it to sit down every week on Sunday and decide what your week is going to look like fantastic if you want it to be the same all the time. Also fine. If you want the very predictable hours, great. I do better with sort of regularity. 

But then again, I still have children, so like yesterday, I did nothing like I did not do a ton of work. I did my client meetings, but all of the like in the business work on the business work, I didn't do anything yesterday because I just didn't. It wasn't a day that had that, and that's okay. But I think it is important to sort of recognize what kind of tolerance and need for regularity. You may or may not have like I really do. My husband makes fun of me a little bit because I could legitimately eat the same three meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for I eat the rest of my life like I have no need for diversity there. I could have somebody pick out my clothes every day be perfectly happy. I don't need to do any of that. I don't need a whole lot of different I like regular. I think a lot of teachers are like that. That's why we're drawn to it. Maybe there's some repetitive and if it's and some predictability and some other things. But also, like, I have plenty of friends and clients that are like no no when every day and the schedule is sort of different and new and interesting. It keeps me engaged. Like, great. Let that be the way it works.

 But what we aren't, what we often don't, do is allow it to be okay, that every day is different, right? We don't think it's we try to. It into this box that is a predict, predictable container in a schedule that is not meant to be predictably contained. And then we're like, Oh, my God, it's not working. Cool. You put it in a box that didn't fit in. It's like trying to put shoes in a ring box like they don't fit right? It's like, I saw a video on Tiktok the other day of a like 100 pound Newfoundland puppy trying to get into a baby carrier, and it did not fit, and he was like beside himself, so he was trying to sit in the baby seat. 

Well, of course, he doesn't fit. That's not the size the babies are. So you know, when we are trying to cram ourselves into a box that doesn't fit, the schedule starts to feel really bad, and that's a sign that the workday that you have in your head, or the expectations that you have for your workday are not fitting the actual things you want to accomplish, the way you want to accomplish them. And that's okay. It just means that you need to change.

Question number four, and this one, friends, this is the humdinger. Is, how long do you actually need to do what enters because I will tell you this, there is a never chance that I need eight whole hours to do the things I need to do in a day. In my business, I do not need to be at my desk for eight hours in a row. Not ever. That is not the kind of business I run. It is not the kind of business I want. And I know very few people that need that depends on your business. 

If you're like making something, if you have a product based business, and it requires your physical touch, maybe, maybe you're in your creation space, and you're doing that for, you know, X hours, but generally speaking, you know, the requirements of my day outside of client calls and group coaching meetings and whatever, the things I need to accomplish in Any given day probably take less than two hours. So if I don't have any calls that day, what I really only need at my desk is two hours. And what happens when I have too much time is I don't do the things that matter because I have too much time, and I start to, like, wander around and get, get doubt, like too much time is a problem, actually. 

So what I what this is about, is like, what are the things that matter? How long do they take? How long are you sitting at your desk? And how do those two things compare? Because if you are sitting at your desk for far longer than you need to be. What you're doing is creating space for your brain to spin out on stuff. You're creating space for doubt and space for all kinds of things that you aren't helping you get more things done. Honestly, more time at our desks is often a productivity killer, not a productivity helper. 

We feel like if we're here more we'll get more done, but we won't. We actually need smaller blocks of time. I more times than I can count on my fingers. Have had clients create shorter days than longer days because they get more accomplished when they have a time cap. I am the same way. What is the question kind of buried underneath here is, what is the smallest amount of time in any given day that you need to accomplish what matters? And it could be that you decide that on a day to day basis. It could be that you look at your calendar for today and you think like, this is a four hour day. You could look at your calendar for tomorrow and be like, this is a six hour day. 

You can look at your calendar for Monday and be like, this is a two hour day. And then when that two hours is done, you can look around and be like, is there another hour worth of stuff I want to do, or do I want to go? Do not work things do I want to go for a walk? Do are there things at the house or with my kids or with my family that I need to do? What are the things that I want to accomplish outside of here? What are the things I'm avoiding doing? Or do I want to do you paint? Do you garden? Do you craft? Do you work out? Do you whatever? Do you want to go do all those other things that you would rather do? Because you can love your business, but you can also have other things. So what is the smallest amount of time that you need? And then how do you extricate yourself? 

Because that's the real trick, isn't it making yourself get up and leave? I actually leave my office, like I close my computer. I'm just very symbolic. And I leave my office. Sometimes I have to, like, straight up, leave the house, but most of the time now, and I'm, you know, quite a long time into both working from home and running my own business at this point, like I. I've been running a business since 2016 so I am much practiced at close the computer, turn off the lights, walk away, it's done. Does that mean that I'm not emailing myself when I have a good idea? 

No, when I have an idea, I email it to myself, but I'm I'm walking away and going to do the other things I would rather do. That is going to happen today too. Like I looked at my calendar for today, I have, you know, some work. In the morning, I'm recording this. I have a connection call with someone new here. In a little bit, I'm going to upload this and do all the things with it. At noon, I'm going to walk away. I have a call it one, I have a call at two, and then I'm done and I'm out. That's it. That's my day. So what? What does it look like for you? Here's the last question. This one is really important, and it is the one we don't do. How often do you need quiet breaks in your day or days away, and I should say days away, because we all need quiet breaks in the day and days away. And how do you schedule them in ahead? 

Because here's the thing, if we don't schedule them in ahead, they disappear, right? But I am famous for, what if you ever see my calendar? What is blocked off in my calendar are days called no people days, and what they are are days where I don't talk to other people. They're literally that there are no clients, there are no connects, there's no networking, there's no nothing besides Sarah and Sarah's thoughts and Sarah's things that Sara wants to accomplish. And a lot of times it's a three hour day instead of a six hour day, right? So I have no people days, they work slower I accomplish, like side projects and things that I just haven't had the brain space for, and they are at least twice a month in my calendar, if not more. The other thing I do is schedule half days, and I build my calendar like, no one can talk to me before 11 o'clock on a Monday, like, that's just built into my calendar. No one can talk to me after two o'clock on a Friday. That's built into my calendar, right? 

What are the spaces that you need? I have a couple of I have on Wednesdays. I have a block carved out in the middle of the day because I just need it on Wednesdays. What are the other spaces you can hold? What are the times where you need, like, three days in a row away? And I know for most entrepreneurs and business people, that seems insane, but it really matters. Like I have a client who, this year, over the summer, took an actual vacation, like she went away for seven days and didn't do any work and didn't touch her email, and that was the first time she had been more than a day without doing work in her business in almost two years, and she came back a new person, but it and she looked at me afterwards, and she was like, that should have happened sooner. I would have gotten a lot more done if I had done that sooner.

 Yes, we had talked about it, and she just wasn't ready, and that's okay, but at the same time, those breaks really make a difference. So what are the spaces you need that you can plug in ahead of time? I At the first of the month, go in and plug in days away in the next, like month out. So  october 1, I'll go in and put in the days away in November. On November 1, I'll go in and put in the ways days away in December. I do that really far ahead, because that way, when I go to Schedule clients, or I schedule meetings that are a little further out, like I still have the space. 

So these are the things that you can do and think about to create a workday that actually works for you. Because that's the whole point of the work day when you own your own business, it's having a day that fits you instead of looks like everybody else's day. Because if you wanted your day to look like everybody else's day, you would have stayed wherever you were, but you want to do it your way, and so these are questions that you can ask yourself to get in that direction. If you have a minute and you want to rate or share this podcast, we would love that. That would be a huge help. If you you can just do it on whatever platform you listen to. If you have any feedback, please feel free to reach out and send it. 

You can find me through my website or LinkedIn or Facebook. If you are not in the Facebook group, it is called uncomplicating business for teachers, helpers and givers, just like this podcast. If this podcast is for you, the group is definitely for you. Come in, come play with us, come meet some people. I am a big connector, so I will introduce you around. And if you are ready for coaching, or you want to come into selling for weirdos, all of those things you can find on my. Website, which is torpeycoaching.com, and I will see you in two weeks.