Have you ever had one of those magical days where you check off your entire to-do list and wonder, “Why can’t every day be like this?”
As high achievers, these productivity unicorns feel random and impossible to replicate. But what if those days weren’t accidents at all?
What if your most productive moments follow a specific pattern—your own personal productivity blueprint—that you could tap into consistently?
Today, I’m revealing how to uncover this hidden formula so you can prioritize what truly matters and transform occasional productive bursts into your daily reality.
If you’ve been disappointed with your business progress in Q1 or want to make Q2 your breakthrough quarter, this episode offers the exact blueprint you need to stop spinning your wheels and start seeing consistent results.
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In this episode, we cover:
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- The surprising reason why productivity tricks that work for others often fail for high achievers like you
- The hidden obstacles sabotaging your productivity that you probably haven’t identified yet
- A powerful journaling exercise to uncover what actually makes you productive
- Why your environment might be secretly working against your productivity—and how to fix it
- The unexpected reason your subconscious might be resisting productivity (even when you consciously want it)
- How to turn your productive blueprint into consistent habits that require minimal willpower to maintain
What if next week could be your most productive week ever—not by accident, but by design?
Start by investigating one of your recent highly productive days using the blueprint questions I’m sharing in this episode.
Which element of your productive blueprint are you most excited to implement consistently?
Don’t leave your productivity to chance any longer—download my free Time Blocking 101 Guide by visiting @KirstyKnightCoaching on Instagram and clicking the link in my bio, or take the fast track to consistent productivity by joining my Productive Quarter program, where I’ll personally help you implement your blueprint and overcome any obstacles.
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Links & Mentioned Resources
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 lovelies,
How are we all doing? You’ll have to excuse my voice if it breaks or if I have a coughing fit – I had the most amazing time snowboarding with my family last week – albeit a fairly exhausting one – and I got infected somewhere along the travel route back – and now have an absolutely stinking cold and cough – which majorly sucks. For me and my little one – because she has it too. So I’ll do my best to keep it together and I’m sure my amazing podcast producer will make it fairly seamless if I don’t, but just in case you are wondering why I sound so bunged up, that is why.
Any how – I hope you have all had an amazing week. And that you are fit and healthy and having a great start to Q2 already. I always feel like if Q1 hasn’t quite gone to plan, Q2 is your second chance at rebooting your year. So this episode should be a helpful one for you if that is the case and you want to make sure Q2 is a more productive one.
Because today I’m talking to you about your productive blueprint.
So the productive blueprint is a concept I teach in one of my programs, The Productive Quarter – so this is one of my shorter sprint coaching programs, designed specifically to have you saying at the end of the quarter, “god damn that was a productive one” – rather than you starting each quarter with a big long list of what you “hope” to achieve, and then ending it wondering where the time went, feeling behind, not having moved the needle on many projects, and ultimately ending the year in much the same place as the previous year – because you simply didn’t get things moving each quarter.
And I teach this idea in there that not every single productivity trick or hack or time management strategy will work to help you stay productive. That’s why things you’ve tried in the past that have really helped someone else, haven’t really worked for you. But you will have some things that consistently work well for YOU. You will have your own secret sauce, if you like, to being productive. But you either aren’t fully aware of it, you are mistaken as to what it is, or you don’t use it consistently for some reason. Maybe there are obstacles to you using it consistently.
And figuring out what your productive blueprint is and how to get yourself to consistently use it – to keep you productive in your business each week, is the smartest thing you can do for your business – if you want different results to what you’ve currently got, and your lack of productivity is one of the reasons for it.
It’s also important for us to figure out what your productive blueprint is it’s because it turns those one off productive days when you feel great the way you feel like you’re laying your head on the pillow at night feeling satisfied when you can’t believe how much you got done to those from a one off surprising event feels completely random and out of your control and into a process a replicable repeatable Simple doable process that you can use every time
I want you to think of your productive state (instead of being a lovely surprise when it happens) as instead – a little bit like a recipe for a cake, where if you have the right ingredients and you put them together in the right quantities, you can guarantee a decent cake every time…
Your productive stints can be much the same – even when your life circumstances are less than ideal. I want you to have a set of strategies and tools and the mindset you can rely upon to still be able to get stuff done consistently.
Now the challenge that we face when it comes to creating a replicable process for being productive, is that most of us aren’t really aware of what things really work for us? We’re not aware of what the secret sauce is for us. We don’t actively acknowledge what works well for us. We literally don’t bother evaluating those days where things go well you just treat them as a nice pleasant surprise, like look at me. I did well today. And even if we are aware of what works we don’t necessarily think about why that is we don’t sell ourselves on us using it consistently. We don’t troubleshoot the obstacles that get in the way of it working every time and the obstacles to us using it every time so we don’t strategise for them and then One thing or we lose faith in the system that could help because we’re confused what actually makes them work
So inside the Productive Quarter, we figure out what your own productive blueprint actually might be so that we can go out and test it. And then we test it every single week and I coach you on what works and what doesn’t work and we figure out how to iterate the things that work really well for us and how to consistently use them. We overcome the obstacles to you consistently using them so that a productive week a productive day a productive quarter is not something that happens by chance. It’s something that happens by design.
So that program is still open to join now for Q2 if you want – which will be particularly relevant for you if you thought the first two weeks were going to be different and massively productive and they haven’t been – don’t waste any more weeks of this quarter before you join – I’ll pop the link in the shownotes.
If you are not in a position to join this round, for whatever reason, I’m going to go through in this episode some of the questions I ask my clients at the start of The Productive Quarter – to get them thinking about what their productive blueprint could be – so they are able to put together a skeleton frame of what might work, that they can go out and test it, and so I encourage you to go through the questions, answer them as best as you can, and then have a go at doing the same.
So here goes. So the first thing I want you to do is to think about the last time where you felt like God I was really productive then, the last time you remember having a productive stint in your business or a productive day or a productive morning or a productive week
What do you think was the reason that you were productive then?
What worked to make you productive? Tools, strategies, minder, thinking, feeling
Now if you can’t remember a time where you were incredibly productive, then think about what you know generally that makes you more productive…
And if you are struggling with this, then think of what gets in the way of you being productive? What sabotages your productivity? What stops you from being productive?
Because these will be a clue to the things that you specifically could use to get you more productive.
What are your current unproductive habits? Let’s list them out.
Then I want you to consider – Why do the things that work to support our greater productivity, work?
Because if you can find the real reason behind them working for you, and you can see the logic clearly, there is a higher likelihood that you will remember that thing works for you, and make more of an effort to use that thing more often.
The next thing I do want you to consider though is – Do they always work? Or do the things that sabotage your productivity ALWAYS sabotage your productivity. I.e. if you think interruptions stop you from getting work done, is there any situation you can remember where even though you had interruptions you were still amazingly able to produce a decent amount of work?
Because if that is the case – then I want you to answer what the real reason was behind your productivity. What the real reason was behind you not being able to be productive? Because usually it’s not the strategy that works, it’s that you have the mindset to make it work. Or it wasn’t that the strategy didn’t work. You stopped working the strategy.
Now, if you’ve found something that works every time; I want you to think about why don’t you use it every time? Without judgement.
Is there a reason you don’t want to be productive?
And that might sound strange but if you’ve been on the path to burnout before, from overworking, or you’ve actually burned out before, of course your subconscious might be trying to protect you from doing too much of what might make you repeat that
Or if you already feel like you don’t have enough time to fit in more clients, and you think if you are productive with your strategy, you won’t be able to fit them in, and don’t trust that you’ll be able to say no, your brain will be trying to protect you
Or if you are already feeling like your business takes you away from your family, if you haven’t consciously strategised for how you will solve for this so your work-life balance isn’t made worse by you getting more done, then subconsciously you will be resisting anything that could be making you more productive
This is something you need to get help on if you want to turn this around.
Or maybe you 100% don’t have these issues but the strategies and tools and mindset that work to help you be productive aren’t that easy to implement every time.
If that’s the case I want you to think about what obstacle is there to you using it?
Is it that you forget you made a plan? Is it that you don’t enjoy planning? Is it that you think you don’t have time to plan? If planning is the thing that works for you.
Is it that you are only bold enough to say no to some people’s requests and not others, if saying no works for you to help you stay focused?
Think about why you don’t consistently use the things you know work well for you,
And then once you’ve found the obstacle –
What is our strategy to overcoming the obstacles? So that you have your blueprint to be more productive, and also a blueprint of how to execute on that blueprint. How to make that blueprint happen.
Ok so the last few questions to answer –
What other things might we want to try that we think will make us more productive?
That we want to test out and then maybe add to our blueprint. Our blueprint can be a continuously ever evolving thing. Because some things work in different seasons.
And then the last thing I want you to think about and try to answer is
How can try to make the things that we know work, habits for ourselves? How can we make them so small and easy and effortless to do that we consistently do them? How do we lower the barrier to entry?
And if we are trying to implement them as habits, we also want to consider – how can we set our environment up to help support us with executing on that blueprint consistently? How can we create an environment that supports us in becoming more productive? One that is more likely to help us build more productive habits?
Because the research shows that your environment has a massive impact on the formation of your habits – both good and bad – and so if we look at our own behaviours when it comes to our productivity as productive habits or unproductive habits – we can start to potentially see how our environment is shaping that. And do something about it to make the change we want to see.
And one thing to explore here as you are thinking about how you could make a change – is what purpose your unproductive habits are serving? Because if you think of your unproductive habits or your unproductive behaviours as a way to meet a need of yours – they are either helping you escape from an emotion or they are bringing you towards one. If we want to change these – we have to either change the need, or fulfil it some other way. So think about how could you meet that purpose some other way?
These will all give you a really good awareness of what you are in control of, what you are doing and not doing that sets you up for a productive day or an unproductive one – and will give you a clue as to what to do differently – and how. And potentially what needs a bit of deeper coaching work to shift, to be able to make those changes.
So go through these exercises – and then if you need more support to execute on your blueprint, or troubleshoot what is really going on underneath if it’s not working – join The Productive Quarter the next chance you get.
That’s it for this week my lovelies. Good luck with figuring out your productive blueprint – and I’ll see you next time.
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