Episode 335: Business habits from your personal life
In this episode, Fiona discusses the connection between personal habits and business habits. She also talks about how habits cultivated in personal lives can be adapted to improve business practices. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Discussion on habits
Examples of personal habits and their potential applicability to business
Encouragement to adopt effective personal habits
Reflection on using time management and organization hacks
The interconnectedness of personal life and business strategies
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 335 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today is a quick tip episode and that's where I share a tip, tool or tactic that you can implement immediately in your business. Before we get stuck in. I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that Marketing for Your Small Business course and coaching program is available. It starts in September. If you want to get on that, you can just go to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. It is a nine-week live coaching program. If you already have the Marketing for Your Small Business course, no matter when you bought it, you can just upgrade for a very small fee. Look out for your email, or if you've changed emails or anything else, just email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com and we can sort that out for you. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
I feel like I'm about to say today's episode is sponsored by, but it's not. Today's episode does come from a great conversation that I had recently with three clients, it was part of Business Book Club, and we were talking about habits, we were talking about James Clear's book, which many of you will know Atomic Habits. I know some people love it, some people hate it. We were just talking about habits in general and about business habits. It brought up something that I thought I would talk about today, but I wanted to just shout out Beth, Phoebe, and Penny. Penny runs Twopence Social, I know a lot of people may well know that. If you need your social stuff done, go and check out Twopence Social.
Phoebe is a beautiful contemporary jewellery designer out of the ACT here in Australia. Phoebe Porter is her name and also her company name. And then Beth Bieske is from the Navy Edit and More Time to Design. The software program helps interior designers have more time to design. But the four of us were talking about habits and I had asked what are the habits that you have been able to cultivate well? Whether that's a personal habit in your personal life or whether it is something in your business. We had this good discussion and open discussion about habits and how you can have this incredible sort of habit in your personal life and yet not have that necessarily in your business. It made me reflect on some of the things that I do regularly in my personal life that I think could be brought over into a business.
It just made me think about today's topic and think about whether are there things that you do in your personal life and maybe there's something in your business that you wish you could do more of or that you are not doing consistently. You could take the same setup as the personal habit that you have and bring it across to the business. For example, one of the things that I do, and from this conversation, Beth does like to the next level on steroids, like incredibly well. But one of the things that I do not do as well as Beth in my personal life is that I'm in charge of pretty much all the shopping and I do all, I would say 98% of the cooking. Sometimes that's super annoying, but I also enjoy cooking and preparing things and I love to bake and all sorts of things.
But one of the things that I'll do is before I go into the shops, like the supermarket, I will sit in my car, and this happens every single time before I do usually a weekly shop. I will sit in my car and I will get my notes app out on my phone, and I will spend a bit of time thinking about what we are eating that week. I'll literally put Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on a notes app. I will put in, if there are things that are happening that week, I know for instance there's one night of the week where we are just always rushed. The food has to be prepared the day before so we can just reheat it. there's stuff like that.
I just put in, we've got our usual breakfast and then lunches for the kids, and then the usual dinners or what the, what the dinners are going to be. Based on that, I then create a list above it, which is the shopping list. Sometimes I'll do this at home, but I've got it to a point where it's really quick, it doesn't take that long, but it also means that we are fully prepared for the week and I shouldn't need to go to the supermarket again unless I'm getting more vegetables or maybe some milk or something. I was thinking about that habit in this conversation. We were talking about habits like this, and then I was thinking in terms of marketing, what can happen is that so many times and people say this all the time, is that they haven't got ideas about what their marketing is, or they don't know what they're doing that week, or it's so ad hoc and maybe I just don't do anything for a couple of weeks and then I do something.
This is a very basic example of this. I'm not saying this is the perfect way to do it by any means. I teach how to set up your marketing plans and all of that else stuff. But I was thinking about that habit and thinking about if you were somebody who's reading this and you're like, “I'm stuck right now on what I actually do need to do for marketing,” you could take that same habit of like sitting in the car to take it across to your business and think about, okay, on a Sunday or a Monday or whenever it suits for your timeline, that you've got a little bit of extra time. I know people be laughing like, “When do I have that?” But this could take like 10 minutes. You could open up whatever app you use or maybe a Trello board or something else, and write out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Think about it in terms of an Instagram grid, Instagram reel, TikTok, whatever it is, and just start putting in the ideas. This is a very basic thing because you'll have this stuff mapped out a couple of months in advance, not just on the week. But the point here is not to say that's the best way to do your marketing but to say that there are habits that you have in your personal life that could easily be transformed into a business. Maybe using that as marketing is a bad example. Maybe you could take that same habit and be thinking about what are the top things that need to be achieved each day. You would have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. You might go, “Okay, on Wednesday I've got that big pitch that I'm doing.” On Tuesday or Monday, I need to have practiced that and I need to have like finalized it.
Or maybe on Thursday, you're getting a new stockist who's coming into your store and they're going to be going through X, Y, Z, and you want to actually have researched them and maybe gone through their line sheets and done things before that meeting on Thursday. You are just spending 10 minutes thinking about what is coming up this week? What is the number one thing that I need to get done each day so that I feel prepared? And as you start your week and go through it, you'll be like, “Okay, what was it today?” It's eight o'clock on Wednesday, let me look at my list. The number one thing I needed to get done today is X, Y, Z. There are so many ways to use things that work for you in your personal life, certain habits that you have to then think about.
Maybe each day you're thinking like you come into work and you have no idea what you're actually supposed to be doing, or you feel like you're behind the eight ball all the time, then it could be simple as me like me making the list for shopping every week to make a list and just literally go Monday. What's the most important thing that needs to get done on Monday and then Tuesday and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then looking at it again? In terms of the food and what we eat for dinner in our house, I will open that notes app up every day because I'm like, I've forgotten what I said we were going to have Thursday. I'll open it up usually in the morning, look at what we're having that night, check in the fridge that everything's there, and then prepare it if I need to prepare it or just know that it can be prepared after school pickup or whatever.
It might sound a little silly, but if you think about what stuff works for you, that it works for you in your personal life and that you've proven it, I've been doing that, like open up the notes app, make a list of what we're eating this week, then make the shopping list for years. That's how I shop. It's ingrained in me that this works. I know it works. It's almost like it's tricking your brain into going, this works here. If I transfer it to something else in my business, could it work like that also? It might be anything, maybe you've got shares and you're interested in looking at your shares every morning or going into comm sec or whatever the platform is that you use.
You do that. In your business, maybe you're not looking at your revenue trackers or your profit and loss statement or your cashflow projection very often. It's like, how can I take that habit that I really enjoy and transfer it to maybe something in your business that you haven't been getting the same attention? I hope that makes sense. I would love to know from your kind of the habits maybe in your personal life that you have taken into your business. Perhaps it is some sort of organization hack that you do in your personal life that you've been able to bring into the business. Maybe it is something else to do with the kind of time management that you seem to be able to finesse and do well in your personal life and you've been able to take those same time management tactics into your business life.
Often, our lives and our business are completely intertwined, and yet we maybe fail to do things in our business or delay or procrastinate on things when potentially we may be trying to use somebody else's habits or something from a book or something else that just doesn't work for us. And yet, if we think about the things that do work for us, the habits we have cultivated in our personal lives, could one of those be tweaked to come into your business? I hope that gives you some food for thought, and I would love to know what habits work well for you, whether in business or personal life, or both. That is it for today's episode. If you want to check this out in text format or you want to go to the links of some of those wonderful clients that I mentioned, you can find this over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/335. Thank you so much for reading, I'll see you next time. Bye.
