Transform Your Schedule with a Powerful Time Audit | Work Like A Mother Podcast, Episode 37

This week Marina explores the transformative power of conducting a time audit. As someone who understands the constant juggle between work, family, and personal aspirations, Marina shares practical steps to help you reclaim your time and focus on what truly matters. Drawing from her own experiences, she guides you through the process of evaluating how you spend your days, identifying time-wasters, and setting intentional boundaries. This episode is a must-listen for any busy mom or entrepreneur looking to take control of their schedule and create a more balanced life.

Marina Tolentino
https://www.marinatolentino.com/
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Transcript

0:00

I feel like we've all been in this moment where you're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling overworked, you're constantly living in chaos. You're very reactive, not proactive. If that is you, if you identified with any of those eight to nine things I just listed, I want you to save this episode, and I want you to pay attention and take notes, because I have been there. This is just our culture today, and there was a lot more structure and support in your life than we have today. Right? Time audit. What are the things you can delegate? Create the job post. It's time for another quickie episode. And today I'm recording from my hotel room in Washington, DC. I just flew in a couple hours ago, and I'm here for an AUSA, which is the association of the United States army. They have a chapter leadership training that they flew me over to, all expenses paid. So I'm here for a couple days, and I'm gonna stay a couple extra days to play in the Outer Banks with friends. But I wanted to talk specifically to a topic that has come up multiple times this past week, talking with other female entrepreneurs. So one of them that I talked to was just rebooting her business, like starting again. The other one is established, but she's going into her book launch era. And so there's a lot of overwhelm that comes with that. And so for anyone listening, I feel like we've all been in this moment. Wherever you're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling overworked, you're constantly living in chaos, you're very reactive, not proactive. Your anxiety is increasing if not making you have physical reactions to your anxiety. You never feel like you have enough time. You're becoming snappy and impatient. You're also covering yourself in guilt and shame because you're not doing it all good and you just feel like all these other people are doing it, but somehow you can't figure it out. So something must be wrong with you. No, but you also have imposter syndrome, and you have a really hard time telling people no in certain seasons. So if that is you, if you identified with any of those eight to nine things I just listed, I want you to save this episode, and I want you to pay attention and take notes because I have been there. I did this when, I mean, really, it was at its peak in 2021 when I was in year two of real estate, starting my real estate career. And it was the pandemic. I mean, like, people wanted to buy homes every single day. I would get a new client almost, it felt like. And they're willing to pay over asking and competitive offers. With 26 offers. Like, the second a home came on the market, you had to offer within 24 hours and, like, try to fit into showing and have a normal life. Like, it was crazy, but I figured out really quickly I cannot do it all. I had to accept that and know, like, there must be a better way. But in order for me to even get there, to figure out what is the better way, I had to see very clearly what was not working. So my goal for today is to do a really quick overview of how we got to where we are. Because there's nothing wrong with you, okay? This is just our culture today, and this is social media influencing you. And this just like hyper consumerism. I don't even know what to call it. Like, achiever culture that we're in today. And I want to buck that and tell you there is a way to do it all, but you just can't do it all at the same freaking time. Okay. Hey, ladies, real quick. If you are looking for a mentor, I just wanted to remind you that I offer mentorship to entrepreneurs. So if you're someone who has a never ending to do list and you're smiling out of control and feel like your business doesn't have a track plan, I want to work with you every single week for a month at a time. It's super simple, but I come from over ten years of experience doing this myself, and now I'm willing to give that information back to people. So I've mentored real estate agents, I've mentored wedding photographers, I've mentored other business owners, and they've come from a place of overwhelm, mostly. And they really just needed clarity and a couple of action steps to move the needle. And we've seen gigantom leaps and bounds in their business. Like, I can't even tell you. So if you're interested and you want to know what that looks like, I want you to go to marinatolentino.com and there's a calendly link there to do a 15 minutes discovery call with me. Just to see if we're a good. Vibe check to make sure we're on the same page. And I would love to work with you one on one to really boost your business to the next level. Let's dive back in. So let's kind of go into a little bit of the history of this. So we know before this, before pretty much the industrialization revolution in the middle of the 1950s, we lived a lot in communities, meaning multigenerational, meaning we had our core group of friends that stayed in the same town, went to the same church, shopped at the same stores. We knew our neighbors. And there was a lot more structure and support in your life than we have today. Right? Well, then we went to. Into industrialization. People went to factories. They started to individualize and nuclearize their families. And it was everyone for everyone's own. Like, no one was really taking care of any of. Of each other as much as they used to in the past. And so for the first time, we have seen each decade after decade after decade from the 1950s has been a failed experiment. Okay, so then we go into what else has happened? Pop culture, right? We know that western families are the weird ones. We are super infatuated with shiny entrepreneurship and making a million dollars and influencing. And it's just consumerism in America is a big, big push to that. And in order to have the grass that's greener on the other side, you have to keep making money. You have to keep building bigger businesses, right? This is what society is telling us. What else has happened? Let's talk about technology. This is a huge one. I'm a millennial, so I grew up with a computer in my home, one of the very first ones in the early nineties. My brother was ten years older, and I remember he had the big old box. And it wasn't until I was in high school I got my first cell phone, but I remember they were out. It was an Okia phone, right? I got Facebook the junior year of high school. We made a fake university email address so that we get it. We had MySpace, all that kind of stuff. Well, what has happened since then? So many things. And I really think, like, people will say Gen Z has been the first ones to live with technology, but I think we are, to be honest. So if we think about the history of it in 1917. So we're going back over 100 years. The major tech innovation in 1917 was the toggle light switch. That was, like, groundbreaking for people to flip a switch to turn the light on. Okay, what is today? Well, today is major tech changes. And I mean, month by month, we're seeing changes, and we're constantly having to pivot, learn a new app, download a new program. Like canva is changing all the time. And all these things have AI now, right? And so there's, like, gene editing technology. What did I just send somebody? There's a company in Europe that's creating a portal to, like, other worlds which sounds so stranger things and spacey, but, like, it's just insanity. I don't even know. We have synthetic biology, right? We have materials science. We have space exploration, robotics. Like, if you guys haven't looked up what Tesla is doing with their robotics, like, they're planning to have a home robot in a lot of people's homes in the next five to ten years. Meaning you would have a personal assistant robot that does all your laundry, does your dishes, they clean your house for you, and it would be on a monthly payment plan for, like, $200 or less a month. Imagine, like, that is very real and happening in the next ten years. It's already in production. You can go watch YouTube videos on it. There is a robot that has emotional facial recognition, so she can read our emotions on our face, and she actually expresses emotion on hers. And it's so real, it's so bizarre. But everything we saw is, like, tech Sci-Fi movies. Growing up is very much happening in the 2020s. Okay, so this has been a huge change for us. Not only just, like, trying to adapt, like, on the knowledge side of it, but, like, physically. Like, our brains don't know how to adapt to all the advances. And this is the fastest technology ever in history, all happening during our lifetime. Okay, so then the other thing that's been changing is values, right? I. So home used to be a place of sanctuary. It used to be like, I'm coming home. It feels good to be here. I want to spend time at home. Well, now everybody's on their screens, and they all want to escape home. It's like the complete opposite. People are striving to get away from home. So we consume until we consume each other. That is it. So family is no longer sacred, and so that's why we're having this internal struggle as moms, to be, like, I'm supposed to achieve, but I'm also supposed to be a good mom. And how the hell do I do this? Because there's very few examples of people doing it well. Right? So going back to your current pain right now, you're feeling all these things like, you probably knew the why on this in the back of your head, but I think, for me, hearing these things just kind of totally shifted my perspective, especially when you back data behind it. There's a book that I love. It's called take back your family by Jefferson Bethke. I'll link it below in the show notes, but I guarantee you, if you listen to that, it will rock your world and make you reevaluate. How you spend your time. It's just when you see again, the research on it of like, this is not going anywhere good. This is like a failed experiment, yet we're signing up every single year going like, yep, I guess I'll go do it again. Right? Which, that is the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and over. That doesn't work right? Hey, I'm sorry to interrupt, and I. Hope you're enjoying this episode of the work like a mother podcast. Real quick. I just want to remind you guys, if you are worried about missing an. Episode, you don't have to worry anymore. Because we are creating a weekly email that's going to go out automatically every single time there's a brand new episode. And this email is going to have everything you need to know about this week's featured guests. It's going to have all of the links and the resources that we're going to talk about in this episode so you don't have to go around and fumble through the show notes. But it's me served in your inbox every single week. So if you guys want that access, be sure, sure to click below one time in the show notes today. Sign up for that email and then you'll never have to worry about it in the future. And bonus, if you really love this, we'd love it if you share this with a friend, give us a review on whatever platform you're listening to, and we'll continue to bring new episodes and new information that's going to help you level up your life every single week. So anyways, fast forward. What is something you can do today with this little short episode? What is something you can day do today? It's something called a time audit. And I think, again, I think you guys have heard of something called a time audit, but maybe you've never actually done one or you've kind of done it half ass and you haven't taken it seriously. But why this is so important is because we have the same 24 hours in a day as Oprah, the same 24 hours in a day as Beyonce. Right? We love to compare people like that who seem like they're doing so many things well, what we also don't see is the team behind those people. Beyonce ain't doing it all. I can guarantee you that. You know, I would put all my life savings on that. She is not doing it all. And so the only way you get to the point where you can do more things, and every time you add on more stuff, there is a cost to that, right. You can't just like keep adding and expect it to fit. It's going to eventually fall off and something's going to get dropped. So in order to have a team, you have to first know where is your time currently going and how much can you delegate out and your cost of that. Right. So how much is it costing you to keep doing what you're doing all by yourself? That's a big wake up plan. When you start to see how much time you're wasting and it's costing you not just financially, but also with your family and your quality of life. There is like an intangible cost to that. And then secondly, how much would it literally cost you to hire out the things that you don't need to do, letting go of the control of things and just saying, hey, there's probably about, I would guarantee 25% to 50% of your work workload air quotes. Busy time is actually something very junior level that a virtual assistant or in person assistant could handle off of your plate. Okay, so let's roll into what is a time audit. It's literally going to be a full week and maybe even up to two weeks if you have a very variable schedule of you writing down every single thing that you do for the entire day, for those week to two weeks. And I can hear you rolling your eyes now. Like, I can see it. It's gonna be freaking annoying. Okay, but here's a little hack that I've learned, is that you can set a timer to go off every 15 minutes, which is also annoying, but just bear with it. This is like the slow down. Before you speed up, it's gonna remind you to write down what you're doing, keep a note in your phone if that's easier for you, or literally carry around a notebook. But 15 minutes is enough time to be like, what did I just do? What was I doing before? And you might even catch yourself being distracted more often than you think and being off task. So it might actually help you be more productive during the time audit. But you're going to write down every single thing that you're doing from the moment you wake up to the moment you shut eye. Everything, all the housework, all the getting ready for school stuff. How much are you actually spending in work mode? Like working on your business out of the day? It's probably not as many as you think it is. So once you get through that, and I really, really, really challenge you to get a full week. If you can't do a full week, at least do 48 hours, because even 48 hours is going to be an eye opener for you. Then you're going to go back and you're going to take a highlighter and start highlighting anything that a basic, like computer skilled person can handle that doesn't require you. Okay, so you're going to start to highlight, highlight, highlight. Then once you have that highlighted thing, you literally dump all that into chat GPT and you say create a job posting for me. Based on these tasks, maybe you add in there a couple of requirements that you'd want them to have. Bam, bada bing, bada boom. Upload that baby. To indeed start your person off at $15 an hour for the first month. You can increase it after that based on their skill and experience level. Right now, just full transparency. I'm paying my assistant about dollar 25 an hour and I would love to increase that if we can increase our top line revenue. And there's always room to grow. Right? But just knowing that, like doing those three steps, time audit, what are the things you can delegate? Create the job post. It doesn't have to be rocket science and it doesn't have to take you hours and hours and floundering around not trying to figure this out. Okay, so then once you've hired the person, which is going to be a 60 to 90 day onboarding process training, is it a vibe? Are we feeling it? Are we working good together? Then you're going to start to see the needle move with, oh my gosh, I have all this time on my hand. Oh my gosh, what do I do now? You can choose. You have freedom to choose. You have like this free margin in your life. You can choose, do I need to keep working or can I spend more intentional time with my family or can. I actually have a hobby? Can I start my garden that I've been wanting to do? Can I play piano? This is something that I've been doing a lot more this summer is spending about an hour to 2 hours a week playing the piano and practicing my skills. I'm not the best player, but I love to learn and I love to plunk around and I can read music. You know, it just feels good. My garden is a big priority, but I'm gonna be honest. I let it slip this year and it's nagging me in the back of my head that I gotta get back in the dirt. It's coming soon enough, but it's also been hot as hell, so that'll be coming. But just like you guys margin, if you don't have positive margin in your life and you're booking your calls back to back to back to back, and then you're coming up for air after 4 hours. No wonder you are overwhelmed, right? Like anybody would be. So I just want you guys to put these into place. What I'm going to do for you guys in the show notes, I'll give you a time audit template that'll be super easy if you want to print it out and do it that way. Or you could just look at it on the computer and then duplicate it in your notebook that you're going to have whatever is easier. But just step by step and a reminder, you can feel this immediate freedom within a week of doing this. Okay? So I want to empower you. I want to encourage you. Take your time back, go get that book, take back your family, and no, more like, we have to be countercultural. And the more that I do this podcast, the more that I realize, like, how countercultural my evolution of doing business has been. And I just want to scream it from the rooftops. There is a better way. So from one moment to another, I hope this helps. I would love it if you just share this with one girlfriend who's also very, very busy. Like, you're always thinking, like, man, she just needs a break. Send it to her. Even a stay at home mom could benefit from this. You know, text her the link, let her know, hey, I listened to this thought of you and just see if it gives her a little boost for the day, you know? All right, guys, I will hear from you and then I will be back on Monday for another episode.