It’s Monday morning. You sit down at your desk with your coffee and to-do list, ready to tackle the three precious hours you’ve carved out for your business while the kids are at school. But something feels off – despite having the same schedule, same goals, and same motivation as last week, today you can barely focus enough to answer emails.
This frustrating cycle between hyper-productivity and sluggish output isn’t random – it’s part of your natural productivity cycles that, once understood, can be strategically managed to transform your business results.
In this episode, I’m revealing why some days you can accomplish in one hour what might take five hours on others – and it has little to do with time management techniques or fancy productivity apps. I’ll share a simple but powerful framework for understanding your unique productivity patterns that will revolutionize how you approach your limited business hours, especially if you’re juggling entrepreneurship with family responsibilities.
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In this episode, we cover:
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- Why your productivity cycles are like a game of Snakes and Ladders (and how to win!)
- The shocking truth about how mood affects your business output (hint: it’s a 10X multiplier)
- How to identify your personal productivity triggers before they derail your workday
- Why traditional productivity hacks fail without this crucial missing ingredient
- A simple exercise to map your unique high and low productivity patterns
- The surprising way small mindset shifts can dramatically increase your business results
- How to create a customized “productivity rescue protocol” for your worst business days
- The real reason you can accomplish more in 1 focused hour than 5 distracted ones
What triggers have you identified that consistently knock you out of your high productivity state? I’d love to hear about your experience implementing this Snakes and Ladders approach! Take a screenshot while listening to this episode, share it on Instagram, and tag me @kirstyknightcoaching so I can celebrate your productivity wins and help troubleshoot your challenges.
For deeper support with optimizing your productivity cycles, check out The Productive Quarter Program, where I’ll walk you step-by-step through creating your personalized productivity protocol.
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Links & Mentioned Resources
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
Okay, lovelies, so today we are talking about the idea that as humans we fluctuate between periods of high levels of productivity and low levels of productivity.
We cycle between the two.
And so if we are building our businesses in just a few hours, particularly if we are raising little ones, and don’t have a ton of hours to put into them, we really want to make sure that we are as productive as we can be in the hours we’ve got. So we want to get into our highly productive state as many times as we possibly can, and we want to stay in it as long as we possibly can – because in that state, we are able to create 10x faster, we get 10 x more done – than when we are in our low productivity state.
Now one of the biggest determining factors of what makes those cycles highly productive or non-productive – is our mood. It is how good we feel. It is how good a headspace we are in. It is whether or not our mindset is a positive one or a negative one. It is down to the thoughts we are thinking and the emotions we are experiencing as we sit down to work on our business.
Typically, if we are thinking positive things and we feel excited, and positive, and encouraged, and inspired, and determined and motivated, we will get a decent amount of work done in our business – if we have an hour to work and we know what we need to get done.
If, on the other hand, we have some sh*tty thoughts floating around in our brain that is making us feel a bit meh, and negative, and defeated, and disappointed, and depressed, and apathetic and bored, we likely won’t churn out much if we get an hour – even if we know exactly what we could be doing in that hour.
And the quality of that work will also be questionable. Because it’s hard to write something decent and inspiring that compels your audience to want to know more about you, or your business, or your product or service, when you feel like it’s boring, or not interesting to you, or not important, or it doesn’t matter much anyway.
So knowing this, if we want to get as much done in our business as we possibly can in the hours that we have…
And we know that to do that, we need to get into our high productive state as often as possible and stay in it as long as possible…and out of the low productive state.
Then we have to become intimately aware of what our own highly productive state and our low productive state looks like and feels like.
We have to know when we are in a high productive state and something triggers us to start slipping into a low productive state.
We have to know how to intentionally climb out of a low productive state and back into a high productive state.
So the way I like to think about it is a bit like snakes and ladders if you’ve ever played that kiddies’ board game.
We tend to slide down to our low productive state (like when you land on a snake on the board and slide backwards) but we can climb back out using various strategies and tools – just like it’s a ladder we’ve got, or we can grab at a strategy or tool on the way down to slow us down – a bit like us grabbing a ladder as we slip down to climb back up to our highly productive state.
So to know what strategies and tools we need to have on hand – we have to first get clear on what each state looks like for us.
I.e what are we typically thinking and feeling and what are we doing, what results are we creating when we are in each state.
We also have to know what triggers us to slip down from a HPS to an LPS – what circumstances and what thoughts might trigger us – because sometimes it’s a thought.
And we have to know what personally helps each of us to get from a LPS to a HPS.
And then we can dive into the specifics of creating specific protocols if you like that we can heavily rely on – like a system.
So just as an example – to give you an idea of what you will write down – for me:
When I am in a HPS – I am thinking thoughts like – This is my calling. I love business. I love teaching. I love coaching. I’m good at it. I can help my clients. I know how to help my clients with xyz, these specific issues. I’ve been there. I understand what they need to do, how they need to think, what is going on.
I am thinking people want this. People are watching. People are interested.
I am feeling excited, and inspired, and motivated, and generous, and I’m in expert energy. I’m confident. And creative. And playful. And I’m not afraid of failing or getting it wrong. I’m just posting. And feeling good about my marketing.
I’m creating workshops, and making offers, I’m making posts. I’m not obssessing over numbers and whether or not people are engaging with my posts. I’m not scrolling. And so even if I’m not actively making sales – I am highly productive in the things I am doing that lead to sales.
That’s my HPS. What it looks like.
A circumstance or thought that triggers me to slip into a LPS – is if I only sell one place – or I don’t sell anything and I thought I would. So there is a mismatch of expectations. If I see a marketing post that describes exactly my problem and circumstances – like posting content on Instagram all the time – followers not growing…
That has me thinking – I’m missing something. I’m doing it wrong.
And then I start to spiral into thinking I don’t know what I’m doing. I start to feel doubt, and fear. I start freezing when I come to post, I sign up for more marketing courses that teach me things I already know but am not using or can’t figure out how to use them.
And I stop creating content, I stop selling. I retreat. I start scrolling. I go to bed earlier.
Now what helps to get me back out of that – is a client telling me this was so helpful – so I know my coaching is helpful. I start thinking ok I know what I am doing.
If someone tells me my email was good – I think oh people are reading. If I listen to a podcast from a mentor I love – that makes me feel good about me making progress.
If I remember that I have created sales in the past from my marketing. So it can’t be all wrong.
If I go for a walk and create a training – I feel more purposeful and productive. I feel good about what I am doing. If I create a post from that – it feels useful.
So I’m just mining for my awareness as to my current H and L PS, and what triggers them, what resets them, so that then I can create a plan.
I can have awareness of what to look out for – so I don’t start slipping. Or I don’t slip further.
So I want you to start to put together the same for you – just some general awareness of what your various productive states are – and then we can come up with a protocol to help you stay in a HPS longer – and out of a LPS where we can.
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