From Chaos to Control: Mastering Your Time for a Balanced Life | Work Like A Mother Podcast, Ep 15
In this episode of "Work Like A Mother," Marina explores the topic of time management and shares her personal insights on how to master your time. She delves into the importance of prioritizing personal and family time over work and offers practical tips for restructuring your schedule. Marina emphasizes the value of slowing down to speed up and shares her unique approach to time auditing and calendar management. From time audits to setting priorities, Marina delves into key strategies for taking control of your schedule and creating harmony in your life. Tune in to discover how to take control of your time and achieve a fulfilling and successful life.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Miracle Morning for Real Estate Agents
Marina Tolentino
https://www.marinatolentino.com/
YT: @marinatolentino
Newsletter: https://marinatolentino.myflodesk.com/worklikeamother
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Transcript:
okay guys. We have officially made it to episode 15. Holy heck. What the? I don't even know. Like, pinch me. How did we get here so fast? I just want to take a moment before we roll into today's episode to really just share my gratitude and appreciation for everyone that has subscribed, that has followed the show, that listens every single week. I really hope that you are leaving the show inspired, leaving the show with encouragement and hopefully implementing some of this stuff into your life. Because everything that I'm sharing is something that I've lived through, worked through, had to figure out the hard way or paid for advice or classes or courses or coaching, whatever.
And now it's implemented into my everyday. And this stuff that I teach will change your life, no question. Guaranteed. And one of the biggest questions I'm asked, because I have a busy life, is, how do you do it all, Marina? How do you fit all this in? And now you're homeschooling? Like, are you not? They don't say, are you crazy? But I know that's what they're. And so I want to really dive into time management on this episode. And as I record this, this is a first. So I'm actually home in the office. It's spring break for us here, so I'm going to be recording a couple of episodes at home this week instead of in the studio with the lights and the camera, because that's part of entrepreneurship, too.
You get to decide how you want to do things, and it doesn't have to always be the same. And so this week is kind of a down week for me. I'm trying to do as minimal meetings as possible to be home with the kids and do fun things and not have to feel like I'm working the whole week that they're off. But as I go into this, again, just people are constantly asking me, how do you do it all? How do you do it all? So I get asked that question so much that I created a course that's on my website. It's called core values of your calendar that you can go check out. I created this. What I think it released January 2022. And this is when I was in the thick of real estate hustle culture.
Not like hustle culture myself, but other people. So I was mentoring people who felt like they had to just do more and more and more, all the time. All the time. Work late, stay up late, wake up early to do things, and nothing was enough. And so at that time, and even fast forward to today in 2024, it is very much still relevant, still an issue that we have to battle because so much of us being busy is overcompensating for us feeling like we're enough. And I'm not going to deep dive into that too much, but if you just take that one line, that our being busy all the time is overcompensating for our value of feeling enough. There's a lot you can dig into there, but let's just quickly go through, like, I kind of wanted to just go through some bullet points of this course. So a lot of you are probably feeling overwhelmed.
You're feeling overworked. You're living in a constant state of chaos, possibly you have a lot of anxiety. You might be like a worry wart and a what if queen. You never feel like you have enough time. You give yourself a lot of guilt and shame for not doing enough. And you have impostor syndrome, and you have a really, really hard time telling people no. If any of those symptoms identify with your current state of life, then this episode is for you, because it really does break down. You can slow the heck down and still do it all.
So one of the things that we just, like, why are we here? Right? Like, how did we get to here? What in culture has gone on in the past? And so that's something that Ashley and I talked about on the episode about work life balance. That was really good. And then also the episode with sue, the virtual assistant. If you put those two puzzle pieces together, it really does answer a lot of the background of how you got here today and what you need to implement. But what we really want, like, what most people don't even know what you want. You think you want this work life balance, but you can't even define what that is. What you really want is something called harmony. So the dictionary defines harmony is to have harmony in life means having the ability to handle life's different areas, like your career, health, relationships, and make them work for your progress.
So you're able to handle everything and make them work for your progress. Another thing I would add to this. What is it you really want? You probably really want peace. You want to be able to wind down at night, leave your phone in the other room, and feel like everything's humming along. And you're going to make a lot of money by doing what it is you do most. And the rest of your business operates for you. If you're still the owner, operator, wearer of all the hats in your business, something has to give, and you cannot grow. If you continue on that roadmap, but it's a hard pill to swallow for most entrepreneurs.
So I just want to dive into how I would fix it today if we were to do a mentorship call. And you're like, Marina, this is how I'm feeling. Oh, my gosh. This is exactly what I tell you. I tell you first, you need to slow down to speed up. And what does that really mean? So one of the things I love to do is a time audit. You might have heard of this before, but it's literally starting the day. And you're going to bring a notebook around with you, or you're going to have like, a note in your phone and set an alarm from the moment you wake up to go off every 15 minutes or like a timer.
It's going to be annoying as heck. But let me tell you, you are going to write down every single activity that you do within those 15 minutes, every time that alarm goes off until you hit the pillow at night. So what does this do for us? It tells you how long you're spending making coffee and just sitting there. How long you're spending scrolling Instagram while you're brushing your teeth or pooping or whatever. Then it's going to tell you how many productive hours you're actually working in the day, how often you get interrupted or distracted. It's going to tell you how little you're taking care of yourself or how much your kids are taking of your time or whatever. It can't lie to you. It's the truth.
You need to literally write down. Okay, I did five minutes of email. Oh, and then I checked my phone text messages. That took ten minutes. Oh, and then I sent a voice message. Oh, shoot. That was 15 minutes. And I didn't do any work yet.
Then I scrolled Instagram. I was going to do a post, but it took me 45 minutes, so I gave up. And da da da. If you really look at this, this is so revealing, and I recommend it to anybody. And sometimes I'll even bring this back into my life. When I'm starting to get that tight shoulders, the tight feeling in your chest, you're getting overwhelmed again. I just have to slow down and be like, what have I even done today? And this is especially relevant today in my life. Moving in with my in laws again.
I'm living in boxes still. Guys, it is so stressful to not be able to find things. Like, my husband's lunchbox has been missing for two weeks and it's driving him freaking crazy. We know it's in the house, we cannot find it. I'm just feeling like I'm constantly walking in circles around this house to put stuff away. But then I'm cleaning all the time too. And before I know it, I haven't eaten lunch and I didn't get any work done. That is the state that I'm living in.
And so I just have to slow down and breathe a couple of deep breaths and be like, what have I actually done? And is it moving the needle in the direction that I want to go for this day? So do a time audit. First of all, I will send you a PDF that I have. I believe from this course that we'll link in the description below and really just get clear and honest with yourself. Like, that is the first prescription. Get clear and honest with yourself. What is it that's most important in your days and are you actually implementing them? So then once you have that big, big list of all the things you do in a day, now we got to reverse engineer it and go, what is actually most important? Do you really understand and know what that is? So the week two of this course that I put together, it gets really raw and really honest and I go through my pregnancy loss journey. For those who don't know, we had a stillbirth full term at 37 weeks in 2018 and it rocked our worlds. It was absolutely traumatic and horrifying, but we got through it.
And so I share that whole journey and experience in this course and how it really helped me totally 180 my priorities in life, to be honest. And if we think about what's most important, we usually put work on a pedestal and we think, I got to do this, I got to make money, I got to advance my career, I got to grow my business. And in reality, if you didn't have a family support system and you didn't have children, sure, maybe. But at the end of the day, it's the people that matter the most. So I love reading through this list. There's the five regrets of the dying. That's just so freaking good. And I got to remind myself too, sometimes.
So I'm going to read it out loud. Five regrets of the dying. Number one, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. Number two, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number three, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. Number four, I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. And number five, I wish that I had let myself be happier so if we take that list of five things and we apply it to your time today, are you making those changes? Are you living a life based on not other people's opinions? Are you living a life that isn't focused on work? Work? Are you actually enjoying the time that you've been blessed with? Are you actually expressing your true feelings to those who care to you? Are you actually staying in touch with your friends and prioritizing friend time? And are you actually letting yourself be happier and giving yourself permission to be happy without the moving target line? All of those things are so, so critical. So one of the things I like to ask, too, is to do a brain dump of your list of gratitude because you realize how much you have in your life right now.
And then the other exercise is to write your own obituary. And so one of the things that this is so powerful with is it's literally like saying, on this day, Marina Tolentino passed away with the loving home of her, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in y I. She has eight grandchildren, and da, da, da. And then you go through your career, whatever, but really it comes down to your personality and the impact that you've left after you pass away. And when you start to look from that perspective of, I'm going to be 96 years old, these are all the things I've accomplished in this life since 1988. The career stuff is not the priority. The priority in this obituary is how I made people feel and what positive change I left behind. And my positive change wasn't really through my business, to be honest.
It wasn't how I made my income. It was through spending quality time with people that I enjoyed and raising my children and helping my family and loving my husband. Those were really the big things. Hold on. We're going to have to edit this, guys. Hold on. Okay. So to wrap this up, because I want to leave you with some tangible takeaways and how to restructure your time management for your day.
Now that you've gotten the basics right, we've laid the foundation. Personal and family time is priority over work. And you can still have a killer career, a great income, run multiple businesses, be a great wife or husband, and sleep at night. Okay, so the tangibles are we got to build some bumper lanes, right? So if we think of bumper lanes when you're bowling, if you just roll the ball and you hope for the best, you give it a really good throw, there's no guarantee that it's going to go down the middle, right? We have to put up those little kitty bumper lanes bounce us back and forth and we have some rules in place and some principles of how we manage our time to get the life that we want, right? So without them, we're rolling all over the place. And an empty calendar leaves your time up to chance. So if you're looking at the upcoming week, right, and it's empty, that is like red flag, sound the alarm. Like, you are going to have a really stressful week that's living by reactivity instead of proactivity. So we want to change that and instead plug in everything that's important in your life every single week before you plug in all the other requests that are going to come your way so that you have those boundaries and bumper lanes already in place.
Okay, so the way that I do this with my calendar is on a Sunday. I typically like to do this with coffee in the morning or when the kids are napping and having quiet time in the afternoon, I'll retreat to my bedroom or to the office, light a candle, and just kind of have like a who saw moment to be like, how do I want this week to go? What worked last week? What didn't work last week? And let's make some changes. So when you're staring at that blank calendar, the first thing you're going to do, and this is the way that I do my calendar, is personal time. Because I'm a mother and because I'm a busy, busy entrepreneur as well, I typically tend to put myself last on everything. If I leave it up to chance, I just get busy. I get into work mode and I get into helping and I'm cooking and cleaning and whatever. And then I crash at the end of the day feeling so exhausted and so fried and my cup has not been refilled at all. So if I put in my personal time first, it really does set that boundary lane that says, oh, this time block is for me to go read a magazine or go get a manicure or play the piano for a little bit or whatever.
And it doesn't mean that this needs to be like 6 hours a week of personal time, but you need to have at least one or two time blocks. That's just for you, whether by yourself or with a close friend or whatever, but it needs to be like your cup refilling time. I love the analogy of the vase, and if you're constantly pouring from a half empty vase, it just never gets refilled. But if you fill it up to the point that it's overflowing, then the vase has more than enough water and it's still keeping the flowers alive, et cetera, et cetera. Like, you see the analogy I have here? Okay, so first thing in your calendar is personal time. Put that in. Whatever that looks like. That could also be, yeah, I just think, like, alone time, too.
If you haven't taken yourself out to lunch by yourself or a movie by yourself, girl, it's grown up time, and we all need that. Okay, second thing, after you have those time blocks in is going to be your family time. So that's my preexisting appointments that I have, the doctor's appointments, the dentist, the eye exams, whatever. It's going to be the sports activities, it's going to be date nights. It's going to be family time. If we want to do a Friday night pizza and have that part of our family rhythm that needs to be in the calendar and time blocked from, like, 04:00 p.m.. On. And I'm not scheduling anything work related during that time.
Okay. That also includes daily routine. So if I've got school drop off, if I've got. What else do they do? Play dates, sleepovers, whatever. That's the second thing that goes in the calendar. And usually that family block actually takes up more time than I would have ever thought before I started doing this. Family time is a good, like, third of my calendar. So once you have those in, you really start to see and you can reflect.
Before we add work in, yet we're reflecting. Am I having enough quality time dedicated to them where I'm not having to multitask and it's just like fun time or like eye contact time. It's not screen time that's really important to me. Okay. Once you have that in, then it's going to be work. So obviously that's all of your recurring meetings. That's maybe your one off meetings, your client meetings. That's going to be your lead generation time or your marketing time.
That's also going to be some creative time. Guys. So often as entrepreneurs, we're just going on autopilot and we're like, onto the next thing. Onto the next thing. And again, we're living in reactivity. And then before we know it, the whole month has passed by, and we never actually got to that project that we said we were going to start, or we never actually wrapped up that other thing with a bow. And now we're starting three other projects. And so really leaving some margin and some time frames, even if it's 15 minutes before and after each call to decompress and finish the thing that you said you were going to do, it will move the needle.
And this is something that I think I'm really good at is when I'm in work mode, I am monotasking for the most part. If I'm in the office, the door is closed. I can get so much done in 30 to 45 minutes. That's pretty much the most of my daily admin time, to be honest. That's when I get all my video edits reviewed and all of that. Check email, and I'm done. And then everything else gets delegated after I've seen what I need to see on the computer. And I don't have to be on the computer for the rest of the day in this phase of my career.
So I'm really only spending an hour or so on the computer each day. And then I go about my life. Now, another thing with work that I just want to add on to here, there is a time to monotask, and there's a time to multitask. So knowing your skill sets and when you should apply each of those. For example, I am doing a commute now. I am living on the far west side of Oahu, which means it's 45 minutes to the gym. And after I pick up preschool in the afternoon, sometimes it's an hour and a half coming home. So if I'm doing that, why not multitask safely? Of course.
So if I'm driving, that is when I get so much correspondence done with people, whether I'm calling them on the phone, I'm texting them with voice to text, or I'm leaving audio messages. And I get so much done in the morning and so much done coming home. And if I get all that correspondence done, then I'm filling my brain with a podcast or an audiobook so that I am habit stacking that drive. So that's an extra two to 3 hours a day of me being productive in the car in addition to that 1 hour computer time. Okay, so that's the big stuff on work. Then you might have some pockets left. And the goal with this exercise, at least the first couple of weeks that you do this, is that you have no blank spaces in your calendar at all. Meaning from the moment you wake up at five or 06:00 a.m.
All the way until you go to bed at nine or 10:00 p.m. Every single block should be filled. There should be no white spaces. And I like to color code these. And you can do that however you like. But whatever's left that needs to be the morning routine, the nighttime routine. That needs to be the friend time, the church time, and the wiggle room for spontaneous activities. So I know I wanted to make this episode short, but it already feels like it's running a little long.
Those four categories, personal, family, work, and miscellaneous, should fill your entire calendar so that you're going into the week already, having checked all the boxes that you need to be a good person and a sane person and be able to sleep and enjoy yourself and slow down because, you know, it's already been plugged in somewhere in the week. So if those priorities are in, if all that gym time is in there in advance, then when someone calls you and says, hey, can I have a meeting at 06:00 p.m. On a Wednesday? I look at the calendar and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's opened. Or actually, unfortunately, I got an appointment air quote, which means it's family time. And obviously there are certain blocks we can maneuver a little bit, but we're not bending over backwards for clients. Is my point that you book appointments for work around your personal and family schedule, not the other way around. And I can tell you from real life advice, and I know you guys know this, too, that is truer than true can be when it comes to feeling like you're in control of your schedule and being able to tell someone, not now, later. Okay, so we're not having to reject everyone and be evil and like, no, I don't have any time for anybody.
But running it through a filter is, is this really urgent and is this really a priority to move the needle that I need to move right now in my business, in life? Or can it wait later? Or can we respectfully tell them, unfortunately, I'm not available, but you know, who is so and so across town would be great for this. So that's really just so critical. And I really hope you guys start to implement this and experiment with it. And what's the co great about this is it's one week at a time, and you can keep refining it as you go through weeks, whether, like, this time blocked worked, this one didn't. But this is literally how I run my life. I live and dive in my calendar with Google calendar. My assistant does all my scheduling for me for the most part, and anytime I have a change, I don't even touch it. I just literally slacker.
And I say, hey, can you schedule XYZ? Or, hey, can you change this time? You guys having a va is night and day difference in quality of life. So to leave you off on this episode, I have three books that I really recommend that has to do with time management and getting super, super clear. So it's the miracle morning. And if you're a real estate agent, there's a miracle morning for real estate agents version. That's really good. And again, it just talks about prioritizing your time and some examples of this. The other one is free to focus. That's a really good book.
And the last one is procrastinate on purpose by Rory Baden. So all three of those, add them to your Amazon list. We will link them below as well. But just I think when you get the encouragement to take time into your own hands, that is freedom. And the more successful, I shouldn't say the more successful, the further I get in life, the older and wiser I get. I realize that time is way more of a currency than dollars. And so if I can just keep racking up time on my hands where I'm not having to work and I'm actually spending time doing things I enjoy, which is just living life and spending time with my family, me, that is my version of wealthy and successful in this season. So I hope that was really good for you guys.
I mean, you might want to listen to it twice or three times and just keep implementing every single Sunday, have that little calendar date with yourself and see how it changes your life. Like, this is the next level and I'm so excited for you. Okay, guys, I will see you next week. Bye.
