#461 – What Gets Scheduled Gets Done

I’m Cherylanne Skolnicki, and this is Brilliant Balance, the show for those of us who still dare to want it all, who have big dreams and bold ambitions. I think we deserve to have a big, full life and the freedom to enjoy it. So let’s design our next chapter together for brilliance, not burnout. Each week, I’ll bring ideas, insight, and a fresh perspective to keep you growing into a life that feels as good as it looks. Brilliant Balance, your life, your way. Now let’s get started. Welcome back to the Brilliant Balance Show. Thanks for pressing play today. We’re gonna talk today about a subject that is really near and dear to my heart. It’s been like a refrain that I have said to clients and to myself for what feels like 100 years at this point. And that is the simple phrase, what gets scheduled gets done.

And I think, um, I have gone back and looked in the archives of the podcast to find the first time that I really talked about this subject, and it was episode seven of this show. And so what I thought would be fun to do today, uh, for two reasons, and I’ll tell you what both of them are, is to re-air that original episode seven with kind of this new introduction, um, just to anchor it at this moment in time. So here’s why. Uh, I am living through a really fun, uh, novel summer. Lots of things happening that are out of the ordinary. Um, I have a child who’s been living away from home for the first time this summer, who is actually moving again at the very end of August. I have my middle guy going off to college, uh, at the, near the end of August, and I have my youngest, my baby, with a brand new driver’s license, so we never see her.

So lots of things have changed in our household. And it also has been a summer where I have had a lot of travel, work travel, personal travel, small short trips broken up in different ways versus like one big family vacation. So as this episode airs, I am going to be elbow deep in moving my son into college. And as one way of taking care of myself and kind of practicing what I preach, I am gonna give myself a reprieve from content creation and allow this episode to reread. And the, it’s so timely because it really is demonstrating a principle that I believe so deeply and that what gets scheduled gets done sort of nestles into. Okay? So the bigger concept that this really relates to is like running your week your way. Staying in the driver’s seat of your own week in terms of your schedule and your time and where you’re investing that time.

And there’s lots of different tools and practices that I’ve taught people over the years about how to do that, right? How do you keep yourself in the driver’s seat of your own life really, but then in control of your own calendar? How do you make sure that the things that are making the cut on your calendar are the things that you really want there? How are you letting go of the things that you don’t? And a part of that, like one little piece of that system is this idea of scheduling the things you plan to do, not only knowing what you’re gonna do, but knowing when you’re going to do it. And so as I was looking out at the workflow that I was gonna have to take on throughout the month of August, this was a place where I already knew what was scheduled.

I already knew when these podcast episodes needed to be written, developed, recorded, um, you know, produced, all the kind of elements of the timeline. And I could see what was coming, which was, uh-oh, I’m gonna have this collision course with a really full week, both physically, like I’m gonna be in San Diego and, you know, we’re, we have our hands full of all the things we’re moving in and also emotionally, right? It’s gonna be a big week. Do I want to remove some kind of cognitive burden, emotional burden from the week? And reairing a podcast is absolutely a way for me to do that. So I like that this is like I’m demonstrating to you a technique by actually doing it, and then I’m gonna teach you how to do it. And this, again, small piece of the puzzle called what gets scheduled gets done is what we’re gonna focus on in today’s episode.

You’re gonna hear my thinking from almost nine years ago, right? How was I thinking about this concept? And I’ve re-listened to it, of course, and I would say it holds up, right? The examples that I’m gonna share will be when my kids were younger. Um, so I think what was top of mind for me was a slightly different collection of tasks. We talk about what I think I call the advanced class of, um, an integrated to-do list. And this is something you might have heard me talk about over the years if you’ve been around a while. And I think these two concepts of really being mindful of what makes it onto your calendar and also scheduling your to-do list items are really transformational for people who haven’t yet adopted these practices. So lots of good stuff is coming your way in this episode. And then if this piques your interest, I want you to think about joining me for the September masterclass Inside the Coaching Circle, because we are gonna go really deep on this idea of running your week your way, right?

Really having a week that works for you. And I’m gonna get into the other tools in that toolkit beyond just scheduling things that really help you stay in control or in having a strong sense of agency around what you say yes to and what you say no to, and how you organize that inside of the construct of a week. I have a, a, a lot to say about why a week is the perfect unit of time. Um, and we’re gonna talk about that in that class as well. So I hope that today kind of wets your appetite for that. And then I hope that you decide to join me for the actual class. I’m gonna check the date. That class is happening on September 9th. The link is in the show notes. Um, it’s open to anyone who’s a member of the coaching circle. So the link to join is there.

That is a no commitment membership. You can join or leave at any time. So really no risk. You can think of it as, um, buying your ticket to just that class, see how it goes, see what you think of that. And the coaching call that follows, which is really where a lot of the magic happens. We unpack what you’ve learned to, uh, what you’ve learned in the class and then gone and applied and you get a chance to ask questions and, and get some coaching from me about that. And it happens, you know, on a month to month basis. So you are welcome to come in and dip out at any time that it does not feel like it is serving your needs. All right, with that, we’re gonna get into today’s episode. And again, you’re gonna learn all about what gets scheduled, gets done.

I can tell you that what we are about to cover today is the single most effective thing that I do to keep my actions in line with my values and my priorities. And honestly, it’s deceptively simple, but it is, um, incredibly powerful, especially if you’re someone who struggles, um, with things just kind of falling off your radar. You know, like you have this idea that you, you’re going to do something, you mean to do it, and then it, it somehow you forgot that that was a decision you made. Um, you know, have you ever had that experience where you look back at how long it’s been maybe since you’ve done something that you do with regularity, like, um, getting your hair cut or visiting your sister or maybe going to the dentist? And you think to yourself, how on earth has it been that long since the last time I went?

It feels like it was just yesterday. You know, how did that happen? Where did the time go? Didn’t I just do it like five minutes ago? Or the other, um, person this will be really valuable for is maybe you’re somebody with an idea a minute. You know, you have an idea and you think, yes, this is gonna be great. And then two weeks later, you realize you’ve completely let that resolution or that, um, commitment slide. Well, if either of those make sense to you, then listen up because this definitely is designed for you today. So what I’m gonna share today is a system for getting things done. And it’s so simple. Really, it is so simple, but it’s so often overlooked. And what I’ve learned is that it’s not hard at all. It doesn’t require you to buy a single thing. Um, it really only requires you to have clarity about what it is that you value or what it is that you want to prioritize.

And some type of calendar, which could be iCal, you know, on a Mac, it could be Google Calendar, it could be a paper planner, um, a wall calendar, whatever system you use, but one central calendar system. And the essence of what we’re gonna talk about today is that it’s not enough to know what to do. You really need to know when you’re going to do it for it to be effective. Okay? So the problem we’re trying to solve here, again, is things falling off the radar. Things you mean to do, things you want to do. So the whole process starts, step one is getting crystal clear about what you want to get done. And I would encourage you to think about both work things, um, whatever work looks like for you, your actual job that you get paid to do, um, tasks involved in running your household, volunteer work, you know, the, the work that you have to get done, sort of the have to dos, and then also things you want to do.

The fun things, the things that make life, you know, interesting and delightful. I want you to think about, um, a list that would encompass both of those and get very clear about what the things are that you want to create time and space for. Let’s talk about a couple of examples. Um, one of the things that I schedule is date night. You know, having a regular time on the calendar so that it just doesn’t get away from me. You might schedule girls’ nights, uh, times with one group of girlfriends that you’re together with all the time, or maybe even different circles. You know, there could be a book club group or a Bible study group or, um, a group that you volunteer with or a group that you drink wine with, you know, whatever it is. Um, you might wanna schedule one-on-one time with each child.

This is one that a lot of women, um, who I coach adopt . You know, if we have multiple children, it’s really easy to do things as a family. We tend to veer in that direction. And what is sometimes really powerful is spending one-on-one time with each child, which is harder to do if we don’t have a plan for it, right? Another example of something you might wanna use the system for would be self-care or healthcare appointments. And I do separate those two. You know, going to the dentist is at the lowest level of self-care, right? It’s healthcare. It’s mandatory. So scheduling those annual appointments with your physicians, with the eye doctor, the two times with the dentist should probably make it into the system, as well as self-care. You know, maybe you’re somebody who really enjoys getting a pedicure regularly or a massage or, you know, a facial treatment.

These are things that could make it into this system. Um, even conversations with people that you don’t seem to cross paths with by accident. So somebody like your college roommate that, you know, you love to catch up with, but they’re not in your day-to-day life. So it requires a little bit more effort or intentionality. Those are all examples of the types of things that you might have on your master list. The fun things, right? So the work things that need to be done with regularity, um, can also go onto a list like this. And that’s step one of the process is getting clear about what you want to get done? What do you want to create space for? The second step of the process is where you put those things on your calendar at the desired frequency. So let’s say that you wanna do that girls night once a month.

This, the calendar, by putting it on the calendar, it serves as the reminder. You essentially book them as though they were already appointments. They’re sort of a placeholder. And then when you’re reviewing your calendar, you’ll see that reminder and it prompts you to actually, um, schedule it for real. So, you know, you might think of it as a ghost appointment or a placeholder appointment. Maybe you use a different color on your calendar so you don’t get confused, right? So you designate these. Um, mine says something like reminder date night, you know? And it, that, what that does is it reminds me that I, if I don’t have something scheduled already on about that timing, that I wanna move that into an actual plan. So we start looking for where there is a concert? What restaurant might we wanna go to? Um, you know, is there another activity that we might double purpose as date night?

And it’s close to the scheduled time so then we can just erase the reminder and move it to the actual appointment. Um, other things that fit like this would be, you know, getting a haircut. So you don’t end up in that situation where you wake up one day and look in the mirror and think, what happened? Right? Then you get your calendar out, and I know you’ve done this, I’ve done this. You look back at your calendar and you’re like, oh my God, it’s been four months. How did that happen? How did I forget to go? Um, and this is a system that helps you prevent those moments. So I’ll tell you, this is a true story. I have this standing date night scheduled with my husband. Sometimes we shift it around, you know, if there’s a, um, an event or a party or something that is close to our scheduled time, you know, we lock it in there.

But it was, we were running with regularity once I put the system in, maybe every three to four weeks. And one time I just forgot to extend this out as a repeating appointment. You know, I think I’d scheduled it as a recurring appointment and I went out for like six months or something. Um, and I forgot to extend it. And I’m gonna be honest, four months went by with no date night. Hey rock stars, if this podcast has been speaking to you, but real life keeps getting in the way of actually doing anything differently, The Coaching Circle is your next step. It’s my monthly membership. Live masterclasses on the core brilliant balance skills, coaching calls, practical tools, and a community of women who just get it. This is where Insight finally becomes action. Check it out at brilliant-balance.com/coachingcircle. I’ll see you inside. I swear. It’s, it was, it was my biggest reminder that the act of having these pre-booked on the calendar was really the system that was holding me accountable and creating kind of the, the safety net, the underpinnings underneath this.

Um, I have regular walking dates with one of my very best friends. And the way we work it is when we finish one walk, we schedule the next one. So, you know, sometimes we’re able to do this every week. Sometimes it’s every two weeks. Sometimes it stretches to three or four, but we never end a walk without scheduling the next one. So we never fall out of, out of rhythm, right? It really works perfectly for us in that system. Um, and I have calendar reminders set up for all kinds of things that I’ve, you know, given you as ideas here today. So think of that piece of the process as sort of the long term planning application, right? You’re working on an annual calendar. You’re looking out for, um, things you wanna do with regularity, maybe in perpetuity, you know, forever and ever you wanna be doing this thing and you can just book it with no end date on your calendar.

So that is a really, that’s the first application because I think that so many of the women I talk to tell me there’s things I just wanna get to, but I never seem to get to them. You know, I would love to do this thing, but I never seem to get it. So shifting it from something that’s a, a fuzzy idea that maybe someday it would be fun to do that to something that actually has, um, a time slot on your calendar is a very powerful shift from the general, you know, this fuzzy ephemeral kind of idea to the specific. It moves it into something that’s more of a practical reality. Now that’s a really cool application. And honestly, if you did nothing else, um, you would be amazed at how much better your life feels, what the rhythm starts to feel like with just that.

But there is sort of an advanced ninja trek here that I want to share with you that is about moving this same concept from the long term into the short term, into your day to day planning, your week by week planning. So here’s how it works. Most of us have a to-do list, right? I work with a lot of women on bringing order to their life. And virtually all of them, when we get started, have some kind of a to-do list. Um, sometimes lots of to-do lists in lots of different places, right? So we have post-it notes and, and, um, yellow legal pads and we have the notes on our phone in the notes section. And then we have something we scribble down next to the computer. Lots and lots of lists of things that we want to get done. But what most people don’t have is they don’t have any sense of when they are going to do it.

Right? So it becomes sort of this running to-do list that we’ll get to someday or that we know we need to get to, but it doesn’t have, um, a time at which we know we are going to do it. So what you wanna do for this advanced application here in the short term is you want to turn your to-do list into a schedule. This is what makes it work in your daily life. So you’re gonna shift from an open to-do list model to an actual chronology of the work that you’ll do on any given day. And in order to do that, you have to pay some attention to how long it will take to do it. And you have to pay particular attention to leaving some breathing room in your day. Okay? This is really everything. Setting the cadence for what a day looks like.

So to get, help you kind of wrap your head around this, let’s look at the weekend as an example. You know, lots of people start Saturday morning with kind of a list of things that need to get done that weekend. Groceries need to get bought, laundry, maybe you have to return things to Target. Um, maybe you wanna stop into that little boutique in town to order, you know, buy a gift for your sister. Maybe the kids have games. There’s a basketball game here and a swimming meet there. Um, maybe you need to make brownies for a party at school. So all these things sort of go on to this big list of things that need to get done. And then you step back from it and you think, whew, you know, that was a lot of work. And then you pour a cup of coffee and then your husband comes down and you get into a conversation.

And then somebody calls and you’re in another conversation and then your child needs something. And before you know it, half the day is gone. The list, you haven’t gotten anything crossed off the list. And the time is starting to get compressed. So imagine that instead of just making this running list, what you did was you set up kind of a loose schedule for Saturday and Sunday. And you really thought through in sequence when each of those tasks were going to get done with some attention paid to how long it was likely to take. Well, I’ll tell you what would happen over time if you would start to, one, get better at estimating how long these things take. And two, you would see the efficiencies of what could be connected to what. Right? If you’re going to be out returning things to Target, maybe that’s a good time to also stop in and buy the gift for your sister.

If you’re going to be making brownies, maybe you can put the laundry in. And while it’s in the laundry cycle, you can actually get the brownies made. While the brownies are baking, you can fold the laundry, right? You start to see those synergies of how the day is going to unfold. And what’s really powerful about that is it gives you this mental picture of your day before you live it. So then when you go through the day, when things aren’t shaping up that way, you have kind of this instinctive desire to bring it back in line with the picture that you’d set in your mind, right? And it’s not something you really have to even think about consciously. When you start making that list, you just create this picture, right? When it becomes a schedule, you can imagine yourself sort of walking through that day.

And I’ll tell you, when I start a day, whether it’s the weekend or the weekday, I really know exactly what work I’m gonna get done and in what order. And that includes meetings that are on the books, um, and then spaces that I have intentionally protected to work on projects. You know, maybe something like recording this podcast. This is something that had a particular time in my day. I knew I had to have my notes together before the day started so that I could sit down and just be prepared to deliver it in the time slot that I’d allocated. And what that does, what having that plan does is it really reduces procrastination. And it greatly improves your productivity because you know when you’re starting to fall off track. You know what you’d set out to accomplish that day. And if you’re not on pace, you can take some corrective action, right?

You can move something to a different day or you can try to do something in a shorter amount of time, right, to catch up. But ultimately you know where your target is for the day because you’re not just working from that running to-do list. So combined, these two things are, they sort of pack a one, two punch, right? You have this long term plan of how you really want, you know, think about your year to unfold. The cadence with which you want to do some activities. And then you have a short term plan of how you want the day to unfold. And, you know, if I just kind of see around the corners for you, let’s say you decided to try this system out. One of the things that the women I work with often report is they learn that they’re not particularly good at estimating how long something is gonna take.

And my advice is always the same. I’ll give you the same advice today. You know, don’t let that frustrate you. This is a new skill. Um, and if you get frustrated by the fact that you thought it was gonna take an hour and it took two and a half, you’ll just shut down, right? You’ll abandon the system before you ever get good at it. The better way is to say, wow, I, that took two and a half hours and I thought it was only gonna take one. What can I learn from that for the next time I need to do a similar task? Um, ultimately what gets revealed with this is that we’ve been trying to cram way more things into a day than is probably realistic. And so learning, you know, the, the first thing that happens when you confront that is you resist it.

You feel like, well, I have to fit more into the day. And in good time, you might be able to do that by becoming more efficient. But the first realization is really that big push to something we’ve talked about in an earlier podcast, and that’s curation. You know, this is a big, um, sort of spotlight shining on the way you’re living your life, suggesting that maybe the answer is not, you know, cramming a thousand more things in more efficiently. Maybe the answer is having a more careful curation of what you’re trying to create space for. Being more realistic in other words with what you really can get done. So I want to recap, you know, the things we’ve talked about today. The first piece is you, you need to have one centralized calendar for this to work. If you have a calendar at work and a calendar at home and a calendar on the wall and a calendar for the kids, you’re gonna struggle.

Okay? So one centralized calendar that pulls your life into one place is the first piece. And then you need a long-term strategy, right? The long-term strategy is what is that list of things that you want to do regularly? And get those on the calendar essentially as reminders, right, with a specific frequency so that you can be very intentional about making them happen. You’re gonna be amazed at how great you feel when you actually get your hair cut and highlighted every two months like you said you were gonna do, right? Or when you really did get to the end of the year and everyone in your family hit their dentist and doctor’s appointments right on schedule. This system is what’s gonna help you do that. And then the next piece, once you’ve kind of laid that in, you wanna apply the same principle to the short term, right?

You wanna take that running to-do list and turn it into a schedule. And that means you wanna block that specific time in the day for each thing on the list so that you’re, you’re sort of moving through the day with visibility to how it’s gonna unfold. So here’s the cool thing. If you can make this shift, your life is going to fall in line with your priorities, right? You’ll be intentionally scheduling the most important things first and letting the small things fall in around them where they really belong. It’s going to bring, um, your intentions in line with your actions, in other words. And that’s really where we tend to feel deep satisfaction. When we say, “This is what I’m going to do. This is the commitment I’m making to myself. This is the priority I’m declaring.” And then we actually do it.

There’s deep satisfaction in that. So I’m excited to hear from you what your experiences are with this when you implement it. Okay? But I wanna warn you. There’s one big risk to becoming super productive using this strategy. And that is that you will 100% want to cram even more into your week. And I’m gonna encourage you not to do that because in the next episode, I wanna talk about the very real risks of trying to do it all. Okay? Um, it is, I believe, a cultural epidemic, especially for high achieving women. This is our badge of honor. It’s the holy grail. She who gets the most done wins, right? Or so we’re told. Um, and so I wanna dig into that together next week and really challenge the belief that getting more done is the answer. Um, so we’re gonna talk about that. And so before you fall into that trap, I want you to just protect yourself from trying to cram even more into your week using this system.

Okay? And that’s it for today. You know, this is, this is something that you can take right away and implement into the way today unfolds or tomorrow unfolds in your life. And you can spend a little bit of reflective time thinking about what tasks that you want to allocate into the upcoming months. So thanks for listening. Um, and especially thanks for implementing. I’m, I’m, I love hearing these stories about the things you’re trying based on what you’ve heard in the podcast. So make sure you’re subscribed so you get next week’s episode. Um, and if you’re enjoying the show, the best way to tell me that is to take 10 seconds to rate it and leave a review. Um, we have a ton of those already and I’m, I love reading every single one of them. In fact, we might start reading a few of them in these episodes.

So to do that, you just go to the show homepage. You scroll down a little bit beyond all the episodes that are listed, and you’ll see an area where you can just click the number of stars that you wanna use to rate the show and to leave a few comments about what you’ve thought. And I would really look forward to reading them. So till next time, go be brilliant.