Little-Known Tips For Finding Flow & Getting Productive in Your Business

Do you ever feel like a 9-5, Monday to Friday schedule doesn’t feel like *quite* the best fit for you?

It’s important, specifically for women business owners, to look at how you schedule your days, weeks, & months to make sure that your schedule is totally aligned with you even if it’s not the norm.

Here’s why: Most of the rules of business were made by men when women weren’t part of many workplaces. Back in the day, unions and factories set Monday to Friday schedules for a consistent work environment and so people could have the weekends off, when religious holidays usually take place. Before much of the technology we use now was created, people had to use the daylight hours and didn’t have the opportunity to use the internet to work whenever and wherever suited them. 

Today, when the pandemic has brought much of the work that used to be done in offices into the home, we have to ask ourselves: what do I really want when it comes to my work schedule? Is 9-5 going to work for me or is it a bust?

Read on for my little-known tips for finding flow and getting productive in your business in a way that works for you.

1. Reassess what a week in your life looks like.
We’re primed from a young age to work Monday through Friday and take the weekend off because schools and most offices have been structured that way pretty much forever. Unfortunately, working from home means it’s pretty easy for work to sometimes leach into your free time. 

Over the past year of the pandemic, you may have found yourself working on a Saturday afternoon or prepping for work on a Sunday night. Still, depending on how you look at it, this could be a good thing because it challenges our assumptions about when we should work. Is there truly a reason to work Monday to Friday? Maybe not.

There’s nothing wrong with maintaining a traditional schedule. After you work from home for a few years, it’s freeing to know you don’t have to work on a Saturday. We’re often made to think people won’t respect our boundaries if we decide we’d rather work on a Saturday or Sunday instead of one of the workweek days. But if you’re finding that shorter hours, a couple hours of work on the weekends, or even longer work periods on fewer days of the week make you more productive, by all means make it happen! Which leads into my next point….

2. Realize you don’t have to work specific hours if you don’t want to. 

You’re the one in charge of your business and your life. At the end of the day, you have to do what works best for you and your circumstances, especially when the old rules of a traditional workday are outdated and don’t apply to everyone.

If you have children to take care of, another side hustle, or family commitments, 9-5 may be a strain on your schedule and may even make you feel like you’re trying to fit into an impossible box. Setting restricted office hours that are your protected time may be a good idea, but don’t be afraid to be more fluid with your schedule if that’s more your jam.

In today’s more service-based economy that isn’t necessarily focused on output, you might not have a specific number of hours you need to put in, but simply a list of tasks to take on. These tasks may take up a full 8-hour day, but you may also get everything done in two, five, or seven hours. When you work for yourself, you don’t have to punch in for eight to nine hours a day if you don’t want or need to.

3. Give yourself permission to work beyond the calendar.

When planning the months out, it’s easy for us to fall into thinking that a new month has to equal a new start. We’re so used to the Gregorian calendar that sometimes it’s so easy to forget there’s other ways to plan your months. 

Personally, I love planning around the lunar cycles. Ancient cultures would mark their months by the new moon, a powerful opportunity to reevaluate as well as set new intentions and goals for the month ahead. While the new moon is a great time for reflection, the full moon generally marks a height of productivity. 

I track what my productivity looks like throughout the month so I can figure out ideal times to launch, work, and reflect so I can tap into my intuition instead of listening to the old stories that we have to be productive all the time.

If you’re deeply struggling with productivity and feeling like old habits are boxing you in, it’s time to reevaluate what works for  you by evaluating your work week, hours, and planning structures to see if something serves you better.