Schedule blocking. Those apps that stop you from opening tabs. Advanced email organization. The pomodoro method (helpful yes, but also extremely fun to say). If you’re an entrepreneur who seamlessly manages to get everything done without feeling overwhelmed, distracted, or out of balance, call us and tell us everything! For the rest of us, it takes some tactics to find the best way to crush our to-do lists while maintaining healthy, happy lives. Some productivity tips have completely changed our games, so we’re excited to share those with you in hopes that they may do the same for you. But before we dive in, we’d like to point out the essential, underlying theme in all of these tips: good ol’ boundaries. 

Whatever method helps you accomplish what you need to do for work, know that what you’re essentially doing is protecting your time and mental space. It took us some time, some help (shoutout to our business/life coach Justine Duran!), and some practice to implement strategies that help us be the most efficient and super boss versions of us, but we’re on a roll! Setting boundaries in your work, whether you’re an entrepreneur or working from home (or both!), is the superlative method for taking care of yourself while taking care of business, because we truly believe you can’t have the latter without the former. Alright, let’s do this!

Prep for the week. Let’s start out with Monday. Before diving into the week with your head to the ground, start off by looking at your calendar and getting an overall view of what’s ahead. Need to prep for meetings? Have any assignments due? Plan out, in whatever way works for you, when you’ll do what’s necessary to have the smoothest work week possible. This helps minimize any feelings of “when I am going to get to that!” by taking even just 15 minutes to say “I’ll do this at X time.” Easy, now you know when you’ll get it done! Our favorite part of this exercise? Planning when we’re going to do creative work, and protecting that time with all our might. Even if it doesn’t result in more answered emails (a questionable meter of accomplishment anyway, if you ask us), creative time is what makes our brains function and thrive in order to do everything else. Creative time is our fuel, so yes, it absolutely gets at least an hour today. We would totally include a photo of what our calendar looks like, but we don’t want to stress you out with how busy our lives are!

Set the stage for what people can expect. Whether it’s with colleagues or clients, it’s important to let those you work with know how often and when they can look forward to hearing from you. Do you utilize your email footer? It’s the perfect space to say how you do things, automatically, with every email. We let people know when they can expect to hear a response: we check email once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, so we’ll respond accordingly. Boom! Your clients have been communicated to, your boundaries have been maintained, and with a quick automation, you’ve set up what people can reasonably anticipate. 

Schedule your emails! Gone are the days of sending emails at 10 pm—it’s time to say hello to scheduled emails. We’re not suggesting you work at strange hours, but if part of your most successful schedule involves getting work done after the kids have gone to bed, or you find the calmest before sunrise – we get it! You you are working off hours, you can set your responses to a time that feels respectful, and let’s be real, makes you seem on top of your game at 8 am on a Monday! 

Be your own cheerleader. Are you starting to wonder if this is a productivity tip blog or a self-care blog? To be honest, it’s both, because they go hand in hand. So in order to have the juice to get through your to-do list, pat yourself on the back. Again. And again. Working from home, being an entrepreneur, being an adult in a wild world, we don’t always get the extra push of support that we actually need. But there’s always one person around to provide it: ourselves. So don’t skimp on the self-love: you need it, we all do we. Here, we’ll start you off: none of this is easy, you rule, keep up the good work! 

Skip saying sorry, start saying no. Free up your typing time by getting straight to what you need to say, and start saying what you mean. So many of us apologize for a delayed response, but a lot of the time it starts the email off on the wrong foot. Everyone takes a long time to respond sometimes, it’s just how it is! If you do want some sort of intro, “Thanks for your patience” can be a good alternative. And speaking of typing time, do you know what takes less time to say than “yes?” “No!” Once we stopped committing to things that didn’t actually jive with our work, we felt so empowered, which is such an energizing place to work from. 

We’d love to hear what your productivity tips are and if any of these work for you! Remember that even if you work alone, you’re not alone in figuring out how to achieve the fabled idea of balance—we’re all in this together!