Ready to master imperfect action and learn how to turn a bad day around? If you’re an ambitious business owner who’s tired of feeling like you’ve ‘blown it’ when your morning goes off track, this episode reveals the secrets to optimizing time at any hour.
In this short but impactful episode, I’m challenging the conventional wisdom around morning routines and productivity, showing you exactly how to optimize your time, even when life throws curveballs your way.
- Why the “perfect morning routine” ideal might be secretly sabotaging your productivity
- How to turn an unproductive morning into a powerhouse afternoon, especially when you’re juggling business ownership with family life
- The parallel between “win the morning, win the day” thinking and yo-yo dieting mentality and how it might be affecting your business growth
- Why some of the most successful business moves can happen in the last 30 minutes of your day, and how to capitalize on these golden opportunities
If you’ve ever felt defeated by a morning gone wrong or struggled with the pressure of “perfect” productivity, this episode is your permission slip to rewrite those rules. Remember, your business success isn’t determined by how early you start your day, but by the intentional actions you take in the moments available to you.
Want more strategies for optimizing your time without the pressure of perfect routines? The Productive Quarter is your next step. In the meantime, connect with me on Instagram @kirstyknight where I share tips and advice for taking imperfect action in your business.
Links & Mentioned Resources
The Productive Quarter Sprint coaching
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning my lovelies, how are you today?
So there was something that I shared this week with the clients inside one of my containers – The Productive Quarter – to help them still move the needle in their business, even when their morning hasn’t gone to plan, or even when the beginning of their week hasn’t been that productive for them – and I thought I’d just do a super short episode to share it with you too.
Because it’s a mindset shift you can make in an instant – and it’s one that will have an immediate impact on your business if you do. And that is to remember that “an Unproductive Morning doesn’t have to turn into an Unproductive Day”.
“An Unproductive Start to the Week, doesn’t have to result in the end of the week being Unproductive too.”
Which sounds so obvious right?
Except there is this rhetoric in the Productivity space. That most Productivity Gurus are creating.
And that is that in order to have a productive day or week, you have to have had a perfectly organised, smooth and early morning.
Even if they don’t say this exactly – there are so many sayings, and concepts and ideas that demonstrate this is what the subtext is.
Ever heard the saying “win the morning, win the day”? That of course implies that if you did not win the morning, the rest of the day is naturally going to be a write off.
Or heard a bunch of successful entrepreneurs sharing about their Morning Routines? As though they are the key to them creating the success they have – and if you don’t have one – look out…
The “early bird catches the worm…”
The 5am club..
The Miracle Morning Routine…
Eat the frog…
Ever heard any of those?
They all promote this idea that in order to have the most productive day, to have the success you want in your business, you have to have had a productive start to the day.
And I’m not actually arguing that having a morning routine is a bad thing. Or that doing your most important task of the day first is a bad thing. Or that getting yourself in a decent head space before you start work is a bad thing. Or that working out isn’t a great way to get your brain switched on and fired up for the day.
I think they can be so helpful. I even teach some of the same principles.
But where it isn’t possible for you to have an hour first thing to read self-development materials, and visualise you achieving your goals, and solving your biggest problem and working out…
Or where you planned for that to happen, but life got in the way – and now it’s 12 o clock and you have only just sat down at your desk…
It isn’t helpful to think that those things are a requirement in order for the rest of the day to be a productive one for your business.
It isn’t helpful to think that you’ve blown it. And that the rest of the day or week might as well be written off. And you will just have to try to do better on Monday.
Because it isn’t true.
You can have the most productive afternoon – no matter what your morning looked like. You can have the most fantastic Thursday and Friday in your business, no matter how your Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday looked.
You can write such an epic email in the last 30 minutes of your day that you get 5 sign ups.
You can make one powerful connection with someone on a random Friday morning, who completely changes the trajectory of your business.
You can come up with a killer lead magnet in 20 minutes on a Thursday that 10x’s your return on your ad spend.
And you can easily miss creating all that magic, if you decided not to bother trying – simply because the morning didn’t go to plan.
This kind of thinking that is encouraged by sayings like “win the morning, win the day”, is kind of the equivalent of the yo-yo dieting mentality that a lot of people struggle with.
It’s like saying that if you slipped with your diet on the Tuesday and ate two cookies, then you might as well binge out for the rest of the week and then start again Monday.
It does not make sense, right?
Except you do this with your calendars and your days when you have this kind of all-or-nothing perfectionistic mentality around how your morning or week has gone.
And I find it’s worse if you’ve made a plan that has then not worked out. Than if you hadn’t planned at all.
You get to the place where you realise your morning or your week has gone off plan. Or you realise the time. Or you realise you’ve wasted some time.
And then in that moment, you give up.
You decide that it’s not worth trying. Or you decide it’s pointless planning. Or you decide you won’t be able to get anywhere with the time you have left.
And you let the unproductive morning or start to the week turn into an unproductive day or rest of the week.
It isn’t that it was inevitably going to be that way because the morning didn’t go well. Or the start of the week didn’t go well.
It is because you let it go that way. Because you are putting far too much emphasis on the morning going well. Or the plan going to plan.
If you release this idea, that the morning holds more power than the rest of the day. If you release the idea that once the plan is off track, it all goes to hell…
You will find that you can make up for lost time. You can create great results in your business, in the smallest pockets of time that are left.
You can still have a productive day EVEN WHEN your morning has been a late one.
You can still have a productive week EVEN WHEN you only had a few hours to work on your business.
WHEN you believe that to be true.
There is a difference between being busy and productive.
And if you don’t have time to be busy, you can just focus on being productive. On producing valuable things in your business. On producing results for your business.
You don’t have to have had the perfect day or week to still be productive in your business.
And this mini mindset shift is so important for you to make if you are a mum of little ones and a business owner, because unless you are one of the lucky ones who can wake up super early before the kids, without needing that extra sleep, and your brain functions beautifully at that time, OR you have someone else who gets the kids up and ready for school…you will not have the luxury of having the time in the morning to have that perfect morning routine. To workout. To do your strategic thinking, and visualising. To do your journaling. To work on your biggest business task.
And often your plan is not going to go to plan when they are involved. When they are ill. Or not sleeping. Or upset. Or late. Or have to be picked up from school or nursery early.
So instead of writing off the days where the morning has not gone to plan. Or where you haven’t had a minute to work on your business before noon. Or writing off the week where the start of it has not gone well…Or thinking at 2.30pm when you have just half an hour before you have to leave to pick up the kids – that there’s no point in trying to do something productive in that short amount of time.
You can think instead that you can totally make up for lost time. You can do something in your business that still moves it forward.
You can still think you are going to have the most productive end to the week. Just like my clients do.
That’s it for this week peeps.
Now if you are not in The Productive Quarter, and you aren’t currently being that productive in your business, which is impacting your revenue and the rate at which your business is growing, you can still join for this quarter.
You’ll get the Strategy, the Accountability and the Mindset Coaching you need to make sure that at the end of the quarter, you can look back and say “damn that was a productive one”. The clients inside are having a ball AND getting their needle-moving tasks done each week. What more could you want?
I’ll add the link to the shownotes for you.
And I’ll either see you in there, or I’ll be back here next time.
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