- Whether you're a woman in business like me
or you've just got 50 million things going on
in your work and life that are piling on,
it can be really tough out here for ambitious women like us.
Today I wanna share some ideas that I use in my life
that help me to not be so busy, but instead, productive.
Let's start with fast and easy.
All of these are fast and easy if you do them.
You may have heard them before, but you don't do them,
and therefore you're not saving the time that you could.
Starting with, choose the outfit you're gonna wear tomorrow
the night before.
You think you'll be in a better head space
during the time that is the rush of getting out of the house
and doing what you gotta do
with all the other things going on.
It's not the time to choose.
It's not the time for decision making at that moment.
Do it when you can picture your better self
waking up tomorrow
and being the most productive version possible.
Multitasking doesn't exist, but when it does,
it probably involves podcasts or audiobooks.
Listen to audiobooks if you don't have time to read.
While you're doing laundry, while you're commuting,
while you're cleaning, while you're cooking,
unless you're like me and you kinda lose track
of the directions on the recipe
if you're also listening to a great book.
But these types of tasks
that don't require a lot of thought process
are a great moment for you
to put some great value in your earbuds.
Put away what you are done using when you are done using it.
This seems so stupid but it saves so much time
later on when you've got a million things
on the dining room table that you could've just put away
at that moment, instead of having to spend a half an hour
clearing the dining room table.
Also, something I always do is when I'm leaving a room,
I look for something that is going to the room
that I am going to.
So if it's a cup and I'm going to the kitchen,
I'm gonna take that empty cup from my office
and I'm gonna take it to the kitchen.
It's gonna save even more tidy time later on.
Meal prep when you're already cooking in the kitchen.
So this is something that I'll do
when I'm making Sunday dinner.
I will, at the same time,
start making our little protein balls
that we like to eat throughout the week,
because I'm already dirtying dishes, I'm already down there,
and I'm already gonna be putting everything back
when I'm done using it, or throwing it in the dishwasher.
And while you're saving time in the kitchen,
let somebody else do the shopping for you.
I can't even remember the last time
I went to the grocery store.
I order all of my groceries on Saturday night
so that they get delivered to me by Sunday morning
and I can rearrange everything
and get stuff ready for the week.
That is with a grocery shopper,
but I also order even more food, meals that I can rely on,
throughout the week from Hello Fresh.
Thank you so much to Hello Fresh for sponsoring
this episode of Amy TV, because they're changing my life.
I don't know if you know this, but the average tip, tip?
Trip?
Trip.
(Amy laughs)
I don't know if you know this, but the average trip
to the grocery store takes 41 minutes.
Do you know how many phone calls I can fit
into that space of time?
By the way, grocery shopping and talking on the phone
does not work for me either, okay?
Too much thought process in too many places.
Why spend all that time at the grocery store?
And that's probably a quick trip.
If you're doing your weekly grocery shopping,
it's very easy to get distracted between what you need
and what looks really really good on those end caps.
I don't have time for that.
I know my personality, I will buy everything in sight,
especially if I'm shopping hungry.
I need to save that time, but I also need delicious meals
that don't take a lot of time for me to plan,
which is why I love opening up the Hello Fresh app
every single week, picking out the recipes
that we want for that next week,
and having those recipes fully shopped for
and all of the ingredients measured, delivered to my house.
All of the recipes take somewhere around 30 minutes to make
but if you wanna go super pro tip on this,
then you look for the recipes that are their quick and easy
and they take 20 minutes to get on the table.
You can easily eat delicious and healthy meals,
you can eat much more sustainably,
you're not wasting as many ingredients.
I know you know what the struggle is
when you bought those groceries
and never ended up eating them before they went bad.
That doesn't happen when you are making meals
with Hello Fresh.
And dang it, I just love having food delivered to my house,
'cause you know we've got all kinds
of other things we gotta do.
When you meal plan like this and you use Hello Fresh,
you can save up to 28% of what you would have spent
at the grocery store.
So saving money, saving time and eating well, so big.
If you wanna jump on this train with me and eat better
and save time, then head over to hellofresh.com,
use my code AMYLANDINO12.
Not only do you get 12 free meals to try out,
you will get free shipping as well.
That's AMYLANDINO12 for 12 free meals and free shipping.
Check it out and save time in your busy day.
You know, speaking of the word busy,
we've gotta talk about something very important here
if we're gonna continue to get more productive.
Busy is a word we're not gonna use anymore.
Busy is an excuse.
Busy is a cop out.
Let's be honest, the last time you said
you were busy to somebody,
or the last time you used it in a sentence,
it's because you wanted the conversation to end
and you wanted everybody out of your way
so that you could move on and do the things you always do.
But if we stopped using the word busy
and we started asking ourselves the real questions
about why we do what we do,
we might stop being so busy and be productive
and actually be doing the things that mean something to us
and are going to make all of the difference.
Ask yourself, next time you're doing something
that's making you so busy, "Why am I doing this?"
"Why am I spending all the time at the grocery store?"
"Why am I answering all these emails?"
"Why am I running all of these errands, do I have to?"
"Who's gonna do it if I don't?"
Or, "What do we actually have to have done
"that maybe we haven't realized?"
So we are going to retire this word.
Busy is not a word we are going to use anymore.
Busy ladies who have joined me, busy women, busy people.
I hear you, we busy,
but we've gotta stop talking about being busy,
because it's not resulting in getting somewhere
in a more efficient capacity.
Because here's the actual really sad news
that I have realized in my life,
it doesn't matter how much I optimize absolutely everything,
when we are productive, it is not the ability
to squeeze more stuff in to get done,
it is weeding more stuff out and spending more time
and more focus on the things that actually matter.
Okay, so now let's get into the really good stuff.
These are the boss lady time savers
that I have implemented in my career
that have saved me even more time in my work life.
By doing this, I guilt trip myself less
about how much work I could be doing in my off time,
and I also stay very focused throughout a work day
working on the things that make the biggest difference.
Shall we?
First, I have a very very specific way
of managing my emails.
One of the tools that I use is called SaneBox.
SaneBox allows me to start training my inbox
to get the shopping emails and also the spam
out of my face so that I can focus on the important emails
that come into my inbox.
It takes a little bit of time to train it
on the right emails, and you do need to check
your SaneBox every once and a while to make sure
that you don't miss anything really important,
but SaneBox helps me keep my inbox at zero
and make it much more feasible that I can keep up
with what's going on.
And I can also go back and still shop the sales
if I get some free time.
Another very very very very important strategy
in my email management system is setting the expectation
on the fact that I am not great at replying to my emails,
and there's a good reason,
I don't want to be and I don't need to be.
So I have an email auto responder that I actually set up
a year ago, and I was very hesitant to do it at first
because it's a very big deal.
Essentially, that every single person that sends me an email
gets this responder that says,
"I don't check email very often,
"so here are your different ways
"of engaging me to go forward.
"If you have an urgent request
"or you wanna just jump to scheduling me for an interview
"or working with me or hiring me to speak,
"you just need to immediately forward your email
"to my assistant",
and I leave my assistant's information there
and then they take it from there.
This handles about 85% of the emails that I get
because most people are reaching out to me
for work related issues, and it is no stranger to them
that I have an assistant and that we have systems in place,
and so I'm immediately getting them into that system.
The other thing it does for the other 15%
is it sets those expectations.
Those people who are not going to hear back from me
for probably a couple of days are now expecting
to not hear from me any sooner, or if I do,
then what a nice surprise.
(Amy laughs)
Those might be friends or family or colleagues
who are just sending me something
and they wanna hear back from me personally,
and that way, they know I'm not just hanging out
waiting for an email conversation to happen.
I don't do threads.
I can't, I can't.
It's hard enough, I am not a naturally great reader.
I'm a voracious reader, I'm not a naturally great reader,
so leaving me in charge of a threaded email
with lots of demands is a very bad idea.
This can feel really difficult,
especially for a woman in business, to be able to say,
"I don't check my emails
"so here's what you need to do going forward",
but quite frankly, we need to be better at talking like that
in most situations and this is just one way
we can flex that muscle without actually having to do it.
You literally write the email one time
and it goes out from that point forward.
Love you, the auto responder.
Another huge way that I save time is teaching my team
and giving my team real time feedback,
but not forcing them to join me in a meeting all the time
in order to do so.
I use a tool called Vidyard to record my screen.
So maybe if Kylie's working on a social media graphic,
or Leela is working on a project,
or Monica's running an errand for me,
but something about it is complicated and on the Internet
and I can show them better than I can tell them,
I use that tool to be able to record the process
for how they can do it going forward.
Now, I've taught it to them one time,
they can watch it on replay a million times
instead of asking me to repeat myself a million times,
and if they forget how to do it in the future,
they can look at that video in our archive.
I don't think enough people are doing this.
We think that we have to make the training process
of our team so complicated,
and yet we over-complicate it for the future,
because we're not doing it in an efficient capacity.
Record everything.
Build processes, write out the processes,
include links to videos on how to do the processes.
Get it together, save yourself beaucoup time.
I have to mention time batching
because I am the calendar blocking queen
and I believe in batching like tasks.
So if you're running errands, run them all together.
If you're filming a bunch of videos,
do them all at one time, don't waste the makeup.
Time batching.
And a couple things about slowing down,
you can get more time out of your life
when you get more sleep
and maybe even meditate a little bit.
If you think you don't have time for either,
it's usually those two things, the slow down of it all,
that makes you realize what is more important to you.
Being able to take a breath
and do everything tactfully and efficiently
and not just rushing to the next task.
To all the busy women out there,
here is to being productive instead of busy.
I hope this was helpful to you.
That's all for today, thank you so much for tuning in.
I appreciate it, as always.
Remember, subscribe for good vibes,
kiss the ones you love,
and go after the life you want.
Cheers.
Oh boy.
I have a hair in my mouth.
(Amy making mouth sounds)