195: What Would YOU Do With an Extra 21.5 Hours Each Week? (I'm curious...)
Quick question for you: If someone handed you an extra 21.5 hours every week, what would you do with them?
That's like having every Friday AND half of Thursday back in your calendar. 😳
Would you...
Finally write that book you've been dreaming about?
Launch the course that's been sitting in your Google docs?
Pick up your kids from school every day?
Actually take a lunch break? (Revolutionary, I know!)
Maybe even... take a vacation? 🏖️
Here's the thing: You actually HAVE these hours. They're just... hiding.
In this week's Creator's MBA episode, I discovered something mind-blowing: the average digital entrepreneur is losing 21.5 hours every week to invisible time leaks. That's nearly three full workdays!
But here's the good news: these hours are totally recoverable.
My guest breaks down:
Where these hidden hours are going (it's not what you think!)
A brilliant "glass ball" strategy for instant clarity on priorities
The exact framework to reclaim your time, starting today
🎯 The best part? This isn't about working harder or longer. It's about getting those hours back so you can spend them on what actually matters to YOU.
I'd love to know - what would YOU do with an extra 21.5 hours in your week?
Here's to making time for what matters. 🥂
Mentioned in this episode:
The Time Mastery Guide: Super simple time-saving strategies for online business owners to unlock 10 extra hours per week.
Free with coupon code: MORETIME Grab it here.
Timestamps:
00:02:22 - Understanding the hidden cost of context switching and how it can take up to 20 minutes to refocus after each interruption
00:06:17 - The power of proactive planning: How to reverse engineer your week for better time management
00:11:52 - Essential business tools breakdown: Project management, cloud storage, design tools, and working tools
00:14:31 - The "glass ball" analogy: A simple but powerful way to prioritize tasks when everything feels urgent
00:17:18 - Where to find Melynda's free Time Mastery Guide to help you reclaim those lost hours
How to Reclaim 21.5 Hours in Your Week: A Productivity Game-Changer for Digital Entrepreneurs
As digital entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves drowning in tasks, jumping between multiple tools, and wondering where all our time went. If you've ever reached the end of your workday feeling like you were busy but didn't accomplish what truly mattered, you're not alone. Recent insights from productivity expert Melynda Weiland reveal a startling truth: entrepreneurs are losing approximately 21.5 hours per week to hidden time-wasters. That's more than half a typical workweek! Let's dive into how we can reclaim this precious time and transform our productivity.
The Hidden Cost of Context Switching: Your Biggest Time Thief
We've all been there - you're deep in work mode, creating content for your digital course when a notification pops up. You quickly check your email, respond to a message, and before you know it, you're down a rabbit hole of tasks that weren't on your original agenda. This phenomenon, which Weiland calls "bouncing," comes with a steeper price tag than you might realize. Every time you switch contexts, it can take up to 20 minutes to fully refocus on your original task.
Think about how many times per day you check your email, hop onto social media to post content (and end up scrolling), or get interrupted by notifications. Each of these small interruptions compounds into hours of lost productivity. The solution isn't about working harder - it's about working smarter through intentional focus and systematic approaches to your day.
The Power of Proactive Planning: Your Weekly Success Blueprint
Instead of diving into each day reactively, successful entrepreneurs need to embrace proactive planning. This means taking time at the beginning of your week (whether that's Sunday evening or Monday morning) to reverse engineer your time based on your upcoming commitments and priorities.
For instance, if you know you have a workshop to deliver on Thursday, don't just block out the workshop time. Consider all the components: slide preparation, tech setup, email communications, and post-workshop processing. By mapping these tasks backward from the event, you can allocate realistic time blocks and avoid the last-minute rush that often leads to stress and lower quality work.
Streamlining Your Tech Stack: The Four Essential Categories
One of the biggest productivity drains comes from having too many tools and platforms. Weiland recommends consolidating your tech stack into four essential categories:
Project Management Tool: Choose one comprehensive system to organize tasks, projects, and workflows. Weiland recommends Notion for its ability to integrate with Google Calendar and provide a unified view of tasks and schedules.
Cloud Storage System: Having a single, organized location for all your documents and assets prevents the time waste of searching through multiple platforms.
Design Tool: For most digital entrepreneurs, Canva serves this purpose well. The key is to implement a consistent naming system and folder structure to keep everything organized and easily searchable.
Working Tools: These include your essential business operations tools like email responders and scheduling systems. The goal is to minimize the number of platforms you're juggling.
The Glass Ball Theory: A Fresh Perspective on Prioritization
When everything feels urgent, how do you decide what truly needs your attention? Weiland shares a powerful analogy: not everything is a glass ball. When you're juggling multiple tasks, some are like plastic balls - they can be dropped without serious consequences. Others are like glass balls - they'll shatter if dropped, causing real damage to your business or client relationships.
This perspective shift helps you identify your true priorities. That workshop you need to deliver? That's a glass ball. The minor website updates that could wait until next week? Those are plastic balls. By categorizing your tasks this way, you can make better decisions about where to focus your limited time and energy.
Implementation Steps: Your Path to Reclaiming Your Time
Conduct a Context Switching Audit: For one day, track every time you switch tasks or get interrupted. This awareness is the first step to change.
Establish Planning Rituals: Set aside time each week for proactive planning. Look ahead at your commitments and map out your glass ball activities first.
Streamline Your Tools: Review your current tech stack and identify opportunities to consolidate. Remember, every additional tool adds complexity to your workflow.
Create Focus Blocks: Designate specific times for checking email and social media instead of allowing these activities to interrupt your day constantly.
By implementing these strategies, you can start reclaiming those lost hours and create a business that runs more efficiently and effectively. Remember, the goal isn't to work more hours - it's to make the hours you work count for more.
Want to dive deeper into these strategies? Melynda offers a free Time Mastery Guide that walks you through six different time-saving strategies you can implement in your business today. After all, imagine what you could accomplish with an extra 21.5 hours in your week!
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Transcript:
00:00:07 Dr. Destini Copp
Welcome to the Creator's MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destini Copp, and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desk constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today, and my special guest today is Melynda Weiland. Melynda is a productivity tech and system strategist who helps female entrepreneurs streamline their businesses and reclaim their time. And Melynda, this is one of my favorite topics. I love digging into all things related to productivity and all that good stuff. Melynda, before we get into all the questions I have for you, can you tell the audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?
00:01:12 Melynda Weiland
Okay, yes. As you said, I am a productivity tech and systems strategist, so I help people find more time in their business and their life and streamline their workflows and their businesses behind the scenes so that their work can be easier and more simplified and they can get more done and not be as overwhelmed.
00:01:37 Dr. Destini Copp
So, Melynda, when I was preparing for this interview, I went deep into, like, your website in your YouTube channel and all of that. And I noticed on one of your YouTube videos, you told us that entrepreneurs like, like me, kind of these solo entrepreneurs who may even have just a little small teams, but mostly we're doing it all by ourselves, that we are wasting around 21.5 hours per week. And I was thinking, oh, my goodness, is that me? So walk us through. What do you mean by that? And what are some of the ways that we are wasting time that would total up to almost half or actually more than half of our work week?
00:02:22 Melynda Weiland
Yeah, there is so much that plays into that that it's almost hard to calculate. And it could even be more time than that. It obviously could be less. But there's so many things that we do that we don't have awareness of. The main thing being context switching, or what I call bouncing, is a really big contributor to time waste. So if you are focusing on something and then you check your phone or if you're focusing on some social media and you go to Facebook, for example, to post something, but then you go down the rabbit hole every time you do something that isn't what you're focusing on, it can take up to 20 minutes to refocus to get back to what you're doing. So not only is it that time that you're taking to get back into what you're doing, you're doing it multiple times a day. And so that adds. So even if it's not 20 minutes, it takes you, you know, to get back into focus. Even if it's 10, 5, that adds up over each day. And then there's also things like distractions that come up, people coming in, dogs barking, having to restart things. So there's a lot of different things that play into having your time being taken away or sucked away without you even noticing it.
00:03:47 Dr. Destini Copp
So what I heard you say was social media is one. So we go to post something on social media, maybe on Facebook or Instagram, and then we start scrolling and kind of get sucked into all of that. What about email? Is that another kind of time suck or what was.
00:04:05 Melynda Weiland
Oh, yeah, there's so many time sucks. You know, creating content, doing blog posts, if you're creating a video, doing email, checking email multiple times a day. Sometimes you have to. Sometimes you need to check it for whatever reason you have going on with how your workflow is. But if you're checking it as a way to procrastinate or you constantly have that, oh, I'm waiting on that email, I'm waiting on that email. That's taking you away from what you could be focusing on. And so setting, with email as an example, setting times during the day to check your email. So checking in at first thing in the morning so you don't miss anything. Checking it in the middle of the day and then checking it toward the end but before, so you still have time to work on stuff. Having more of a systematic way of checking it is going to help you because if you're constantly going back to it, that's. That's causing distraction.
00:05:03 Dr. Destini Copp
Okay, so I have a productivity expert in front of me. Thank you. I'm thinking about, like my work day, right, in everything that I wanted to get done today. So I use the Google Tax app, if you would. I kind of put, you know, everything in there, and I estimate, you know, how long I think something's going to take. And a lot of times it takes a lot longer than I anticipate. But, like, one of the tasks that I had for myself today, I did a workshop in one of my memberships. So I had to, like, do the slides and get prepared for that and a couple other things that I had to process it and load it into the membership, send out the emails to the members reminding them of the workshop, you know, letting them know when it had been processed. Then I recorded another podcast interview. So those are the kind of things that I had on my task list when we have, you know, all of that stuff, tasks, whatever, that we need to get done in a day. What would you recommend or what is the most efficient way to kind of go through those tasks and kind of knock them off of our to do list?
00:06:17 Melynda Weiland
Okay, so there's two things. There's the one thing which is what you're asking the direct on the day. How do you get those things done? And I would like to add a first thing, and that would be to plan beforehand. So like you said, you think it, you know how long it takes, but then it usually takes longer. So starting back on Sunday or Monday or whenever you mentally get into your next week is when you start thinking about that day of workshop or that day of recording or that day of being with clients so that you can kind of reverse engineer your time. Because, say, for example, all of the stuff that you needed to do for your workshop, it was going to take probably the exact amount of time that you had. And knowing that it might probably take longer, looking at it at the beginning of the week is going to help you maybe do it some the night before. You know, maybe you work on it for 30 minutes while you're watching TV, or maybe you put another little bit of time sometime before that. So the component of actually looking ahead and being more active rather than reactive is going to help with that. And then the actual day of kind of, it still ties in with that. When I do what I call a weekly review, I know the things that I have to do, and I take top tasks from those things. And so your overall week is going to have your main tasks, and then your day, you have those two or three really big ones and putting the little tiny things in order that you need to do and actually visually looking at the time that you have is going to help you. So even if you have whatever calendar you use, whether it's writing or digital, if you use Google Calendar and literally putting each task in there is going to visually allow you to see if it's going to fit. So those would be a couple of things that I would say.
00:08:26 Dr. Destini Copp
I love that and I love kind of scheduling the task and the activity on the calendar. I somewhat do that, but not the very specific ones. I kind of just block it off and say, you know, here's the, here's the, you know, block of time, if you would, that I'm going to be there.
00:08:44 Melynda Weiland
So I love that.
00:08:45 Dr. Destini Copp
Brings me, you know, to my next question, because I'm. I'm sure you have some favorites here. So can you give sneak peek into some of the systems or tools that you recommend for productivity, efficiency. Really anything that we as FEMA online business owners could use to be, you know, to not. To not be wasting those 21 hours plus a week.
00:09:09 Melynda Weiland
Yeah, yeah. So I have one that's my favorite. I'll get into that in a second. But the four main things that I would say, without saying any specific names or any specific platforms would be to have a project management tool. So that would be something that would actually take care of, organize all of your things, such as tasks, projects, links, all of that kind of backend stuff. Having a cloud system to put documents, all of your assets on, having something to design with, so something like Canva and then having your actual working tools, so email responders, scheduling. So those are the four categories of things that you, you will, I don't even want to say should, that you will use or will need as an online business owner. And then so to just have that as a, you know, broken down into four simplifies it. And then simplifying it even more, making it to where there's one for each thing. So one project management tool. And I use Notion. I've gone through Trello, Asana and Notion, and right now I use Notion. And it's amazing. And I'll tell you a tip that actually goes into what we were talking about a minute ago with that. I use Notion, Google Drive, Canva and FG Funnels. And so minimizing the amount of working tools that you have, streamlining that down as much as possible is going to save you time. Because if you've got, you know, Acuity and Squarespace and Dubsado and all of these programs you're using, you're context switching, you're going back and forth, you're trying to remember what's where. And then you also have to use other tools like Zapier to integrate things sometimes. And so having it narrowed down to trying to get one per category is going to make it really streamlined and save you time with that. And going back to that tip, when I use Notion, it's the first tool that I've used and it does not mean that it's the only one, because I'm sure that there's, there's many. But it's the first tool that I have found where you can integrate your Google Calendar and you can integrate your task list directly onto your calendar and it syncs it either place. So you can look at your Google Calendar and actually see your tasks lined up into your calendar rather than having to type them in or just use a simple, you know, task list and having it go on there. So that's my favorite part about Notion is the task syncing with the calendar.
00:11:52 Dr. Destini Copp
Okay. So it does your project management plus kind of all the tasks and the calendar and it does it all at once.
00:12:00 Melynda Weiland
Yes, yeah, yeah. And project management, I mean that can be, it can hold all of your offers and services, projects you're working on, tasks, client work, volunteer work, content, all of that kind of stuff can go in, you know, an all in one project management system like that.
00:12:21 Dr. Destini Copp
So that's interesting. I mean, I'm familiar with Notion. I've used it a little bit here and there, but not to the extent that you are, you know, describing there for sure. And I know that a lot of people who are listening here use Canva and I feel like my Canva account is a complete mess and we have, you know, I have a team in there too and I don't feel like we're utilizing it to the best of our ability as a team. So that's something that we have on our, have on our kind of schedule, if you would, to master in 2025. So do you have any tips for people who are using Canva and how do they keep it organized?
00:12:59 Melynda Weiland
Oh, yeah, I, I've actually considered creating a little mini course on organizing Canvas. So it's funny that you brought that up. I work in Canva almost every day. It's kind of, that's my procrastination nation is living in Canva. I, I love, I love everything about it. I love designing and so I guess my, my, if I had to say one piece of advice, it would be to have a naming system of sorts. And it could be just as simple as you deciding right now. Anything that you work on has letters or numbers attached to it. So if you have a program or you know, like a guide that I have that's called the Time Mastery Guide tmg. So anything that I create has that in front of it. So even if you don't file it, you can search TMG and it'll bring it up. So if you're, you know, if you're not going to file things or you don't want to spend time on creating files, even if you just name whatever it is that you're working on, having some sort of acronym for it or some sort of number that automatically says that that's what it is, you'll be able to find it without hassle. And so just making sure to name things and then also having a Folder system is going to streamline things and help you as well.
00:14:20 Dr. Destini Copp
I like that. And we have implemented a folder system, so I'm hoping that that's going to help us going forward there. Melynda, any last minute tips for the audience?
00:14:31 Melynda Weiland
Well, I have a lot, but to keep my mill well. So one thing, and I was thinking about this. So this is my favorite analogy, and it came from a friend of mine, and ever since I heard it, I use it all the time. And it's to help with when everything's a priority, when you're overwhelmed, when you feel like you don't have time to do all the things. The statement is not everything is a glass ball. And so if you think of yourself as juggling all of the things that you have to do, not all of those balls that you're juggling are glass. Not all of them are going to break if you don't do them. And so thinking about your tasks, whether it's today or this week or you're just in complete disaster overwhelm with, you know, all of the things kind of thinking about, okay, all of these things I have to do, are they really glass? And you know, for you, today it was that workshop. That workshop was your glass ball. And you know, maybe you have some links that you need to fix on a landing page because you know that people are going to go to it after that workshop and you know, they're going to click on it tomorrow and they need to know but that doing the workshop was glass. And so if you think about that, you can kind of prioritize what really needs to get done and when the other ones can get done. So that's my favorite analogy of trying to sort through all of the mess and stress and narrowing it down to what you really need to get done. And that's if, you know, if you don't have anything in place and you're trying to figure it out, that can be really, really helpful. I love that.
00:16:16 Dr. Destini Copp
And I gotta. I gotta remember that. What's my last ball for the day?
00:16:20 Melynda Weiland
Yeah. Yeah. Cause if you think about it, if you drop a plastic ball, it's not gonna break, right? Like your Christmas ornaments or your holiday tree ornaments. If you break the not or you drop the non breakable ones, they don't crash. But if you drop the fancy ones from that were, you know, given from your mother and they crash, then you don't want that to happen. So that's the important one.
00:16:43 Dr. Destini Copp
So, Melynda, can you let folks know where they can find you? And I believe you have a free gift for them also.
00:16:51 Melynda Weiland
Yes. So my my social is at Orderly Entrepreneur and my website is theorderlyentrepreneur.com and the freebie that I have is the Time Mastery Guide. And it is both a guide and a work that walks you through six different time saving strategies that you can use to help close that gap of all of that time that we talked about at the beginning.
00:17:18 Dr. Destini Copp
Yeah, that 21.5 hours. So I definitely want to close that gap for sure. So. But Melynda, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all of your wonderful knowledge with us.
00:17:30 Melynda Weiland
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
00:17:35 Dr. Destini Copp
Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.