How I Plan My Days & Weeks As an Author & Business Owner
Today, I'm sharing how I plan my days and my weeks to get more done in less time, to stay focused, and to make sure I'm always working on things that make an impact on the growth and revenue of my businesses. As an author and business owner, I manage two different brands' content, marketing, products, and more, so I've had to learn how to streamline my process. I hope this post helps you learn new ways to organize your days and weeks to get more done so you can have more time for your other priorities in life.
How we organize our days and our weeks can be so impactful on how much we get done in our productivity. If you're new here, I’m not just all about hustling and getting as much done as possible in a day. I care about productivity because I want more time back for my other priorities in life, like spending time with my husband and my loved ones, having free time to read and do my hobbies, and balance work in life.
So, if you also resonate with that, let's dive into how I organize my days and weeks in a way that really works for me and helps me get a lot done.
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Now, if you're new here, I'm Shelby Leigh. I'm a marketing mentor for creatives, and I'm also an author, so I balance two separate brands. There’s my author brand, where I write, publish, and market books (including different author events and signings). I also have my Marketing by Shelby brand, where I've helped over 8,000 creatives in my marketing programs and my membership, The Creative’s Content Club, to help them grow their confidence, clarity, and compounding momentum with marketing.
So, I balance a lot with multiple email lists and multiple social media platforms—I create content for both. I create courses and programs for Marketing by Shelby, and I write and publish books. Now let's dive into how I actually organize my day to start with, and then we'll talk about how I organize my week, which is going to be the bulk of this post.
Daily Organization
Firstly, I've experimented with a lot of different things. I've experimented with Pomodoro timers. I've experimented with the different times that I work, getting work done in the evenings, getting work done in the early mornings. It's so important to find times that work best for you.
I know that not all of us are doing this full-time, and that you might have other jobs or have kids to take care of. You have all these different priorities. Some of us are just fitting things in when we can, and that's okay. I understand that. So, I hope that you take away some tips that you can apply to your own schedule, even if you can't fit all of this in.
Something new that I've started just this year is a heavy morning. I used to think that I couldn't be productive in the mornings. I was so used to working after my jobs or after school when I was a full-time college student (and also working), so I was used to working weekends on my businesses and then working in the evenings as well.
Because my brain was used to that schedule, I really wanted to retrain my brain since I was doing this full-time. I wanted to be able to get work done during the day and then have my evenings to relax and do what I like to do. So, what I've been doing this year is deep focus sessions in the morning when I don't have as many distractions . . . and I've only just woken up.
I've allowed myself around an hour or so to have breakfast, get ready for the day, and do my three non-negotiables for the day. The very last thing I do each day is pick my three non-negotiables for the following day. These are three things that I need to get done that day that are either urgent or they're going to move the needle in my business.
This has really helped me focus on things that aren't moving the needle and also made me feel really productive, because I know that if I get these three things done, I've accomplished my list and I can be happy with my progress for the day. And then if I have the time, I'll do other things that are on my list.
So, I have my three non-negotiables in the morning, and I batch things together. I'm not a productivity expert or brain expert, but you might have heard of the concept of context switching, which is whenever you go from writing to talking to editing, you're switching context all the time in your mind, and you're not able to get deep into focus and deep into productivity by focusing on one thing at a time.
I focus on my most important projects first in the morning and do those focus sessions of getting similar things done in the morning. Then I have the rest of the day to do other things.
One thing I want to mention is that I have certain repetitive tasks that I do every single day. I check my email every single day and typically respond to emails. I also support the Creative’s Content Club from Tuesday to Thursday (but also usually Monday to Friday because I don't stick to that boundary very well cuz I love supporting them).
Weekly Organization
I designate one day for one part of my business—a big bucket that is comprised of smaller tasks but helps me stay focused on that one area. The reason is similar to my daily organization. I would switch back and forth between brands day by day and have meetings throughout the week every single day. It was really hard to stay focused on one thing and not do that context switching that I was talking about.
What I do now is—Monday through Friday—each day is dedicated to something different.
Monday
This is my marketing and content day. I am typically filming YouTube videos, filming content for social media, writing content for social media, and really doing anything related to content, filming, talking, all of those types of things. This is my day to dedicate to my marketing content, so I can batch create social media and schedule that out.
I can film multiple videos in a day, then I also can focus on any big projects that have to do with marketing or filming content. So, for example, I'm in the middle of a refresh of the Creative’s Content Club. By the time this video is live, that refresh will also be live. It is streamlined content and three different success paths to help you with marketing.
By the way, if you haven't checked it out, it's marketingbyshelby.com/club, and I would love to see you inside.
I have been filming new lessons for that every single morning, so my non-negotiables have been getting three lessons done per morning, and I am able to sit there and have my lessons in front of me and record. It's also my filming day for YouTube. I recorded those 3 lessons and then hopped right into recording YouTube videos. I'm super warmed up at that point because I've already been talking for a couple hours. And once I was done with that, it was only 10:00 a.m.
Tuesday
That is my offer day, my product work. There's always something to work on with this. Whether that is creating something new—like I've been doing for The Creative’s Content Club—optimizing products that I've already created, tweaking sales pages, optimizing my Facebook ads that go to my products, or optimizing my websites.
This could also mean working on my new books and sitting down and writing for a couple hours to make progress on one of those projects or revising my book description and improving that. So, when it comes to my offer day, I'm able to sit down and really think about how I can improve the experience for my customers. How can I improve my products, or can I make a new product? Is there something that I've been wanting to work on? This helps me stay focused since I know that I have a day dedicated to this.
Wednesday and Thursday
These are a little bit more loose in terms of what I focus on because, typically, these are meeting days, approval days, and some client work. Wednesdays and Thursdays (mostly the latter) are also live stream days.
I go live twice a month in The Creative’s Content Club and give feedback on everyone's marketing content that month. And I do a live Q&A every month to help people get aligned and get clarity on their marketing challenges and questions.
I also have meetings with my own team. So, I have a few different employees that I meet with weekly, bi-weekly, some monthly, and we strategize, answer questions, and get aligned on those days. These are also usually my feedback & administrative type days, so I will give feedback to my video editor who edits my videos, usually on Wednesdays. I'll also give feedback to my designer, who helps create the amazing social media templates in The Creative’s Content Club. Um templates for all of you.
Friday
Friday is my dedicated day for personal development and my author brand. Now, I will say as a caveat that things do come up. For example, with this big Creative’s Content Club upgrade project that I've been working on, my Friday mornings have been dedicated to that, and then I've used the afternoon for the personal development and author brand side.
This day is when I set aside some time for thinking. Sounds silly, but I genuinely did not set aside time for thinking for years in my business. And it does wonders when you have an hour of time on your calendar, you have your phone away, you have your email away, and you actually just sit there and you think, you strategize.
You think about what can I be doing better? Where are there opportunities? What has been hidden in the back of my mind that hasn't been pulled forward because I'm constantly distracted? It's so helpful. So, I do that on Fridays, and I help strategize and plan for myself for the coming week.
I also focus on personal development. This could be watching YouTube videos that I've been wanting to watch that will help me in a certain area, or listening to a podcast. This could be getting up-to-date marketing research. I’m always looking at the latest trends, the latest data on social media, email, podcasting to help my community and to help myself as well.
It could mean going to the library and writing and working on my next book, updating my author website, or researching book signings or events that I could use to boost my authority as an author. All of those things are dedicated to Fridays.
End of Week Wrap-Up
And then at the end of the week, I set aside time to plan out my next week. I cross off my to-do list, make sure my calendar is updated, look at what meetings are coming the following week, and I lay out my to-do list of non-negotiables for that next week so that when I start again on Monday morning, I’m ready to go.
Now, I would be lying to you if I said I never worked on the weekends, but it's something that I have improved drastically upon. I do this full-time now, so I recognize that I have more time now in my schedule to do these things that I want to do, but there are times on the weekends where I genuinely miss working and I want to work. And so, I do.
And there are times where I need a serious reset, and I don’t touch my computer either day and it's great. So on the weekends, I mostly do step away and I do my hobbies. I hang out with my friends. I do workout classes. I try new restaurants. I go hiking or do something outside if the weather is nice enough.
And I love being able to step away and reset so I can come back Monday morning on my marketing day and start the process over. I thought, being self-employed, that I would love the fact that I can do something different all the time. And I do genuinely love that. But I’ve also found that being able to organize my week in categories like this has drastically improved my productivity because I know that if I forget to do something one day, I have a dedicated day for each bucket of my business that's really important to me. So, I know that I won't forget or feel like I need to constantly switch back and forth between things that I'm working on.
I hope you found this post helpful! Thank you so much for reading. Also, don’t forget to check out my latest marketing freebies created for you at: https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/freebie
I will see you in the next one!