A Week in the Life (Behind the Scenes with Steph Crowder)
Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast! Steph Crowder here, and I'm excited to tell you to buckle up for this episode. I'm sharing a week in the life of this mama entrepreneur with two kiddos at home. I work four hours a day, four days a week, and I'm often asked by my friends on Instagram and those of you in my inbox -- how is all of this working for me right now? How am I building a multiple six-figure business with limited time and kids underfoot?
It's definitely not easy, and it's kind of bananas, but there are some things that are working really well. The truth is, I've learned a lot about how to be highly efficient with my time. You might know that I developed a free resource called the 15 Minute Planner Method (which you can grab right here!) and I can definitely tell you that I'm using this method a lot more now than ever before!
Now I don't claim to have it all figured out. And let me tell you, most weeks around here the plan goes completely off the rails. But what I think is really important is not trying to create a plan where everything goes perfectly, but a plan that is flexible enough to bend with me when life inevitably gets kind of crazy and structured enough that I know what I'm working on every single day. I call this "guided flexibility," and in this episode you'll see how I recover when things go off the rails. This is a different format I'm excited to try, where I'll record updates almost every day to tell you what the plan was and how it went.
Here's a sneak peek of what's inside:
Sunday: getting ready for the week [04:25]
Monday: things go off the rails [26:06]
Tuesday: open, yet guided recovery [34:17]
Friday: mid-week check-in and wrap-up [44:28]
Sunday: Getting ready for the week
The first thing I like to do is plan for the week, which is best done on Sunday. Since the birth of my son, I have wandered away from planning my week, but I definitely find that when I am not proactively planning my week I just feel way too overwhelmed. There's a ton of things I could do, and I kind of end up chasing my tail… which leads to feeling like time is slipping away, which then starts to feel really stressful and unfocused.
In addition to planning out my business tasks, I also want to show up for my family and try to exercise most days of the week. So before I schedule my business tasks, I put down when during the week I'm going to go to the gym, and what my family will be having for dinner.
I recently started feeling like the evening shuffle with getting groceries, cooking dinner, doing dishes, and the whole bedtime routine is a lot of hustling that feels totally exhausting, and it just was not working for me. So I decided to try out this service, that I am now obsessed with, called Freshly. Freshly doesn't pay me to sponsor this podcast, but I absolutely love them -- it is a service that delivers meals ready to eat to my house. If you want to try Freshly, I have a $40 off promo code for you -- just go here and use that link. When you use the link, you and I both get $40 off!
I share that because the very first things I put on my weekly plan is what we're eating all week long, and I do that because I know that if I don't think about that beforehand, we're going to end up going through the drive thru and then feel really crappy about it.
The second thing I schedule is my workouts. I have been going consistently to a boot camp facility for two years now (and yes, all through my pregnancy) and I have watched my business absolutely blossom and explode as a result of being in such a good place mentally thanks to the movement, sweating, and exercise. So I really try to make sure I get that in, and it's not perfect. Three times a week is my minimum non-negotiable goal. Four is better, and five -- I'm a rockstar.
"Instead of scheduling every minute, which I personally feel sets me up to fail and feel crappy about myself, I have just picked a big action item for each day. It makes it so much easier for me to win the day. And right now I've got to feel like I'm winning, because it's way too easy to beat myself up with all of the different moving parts and pieces."
As far as my business planning goes, Monday I plan to be focusing mostly on an evergreen funnel for my signature program Crickets to Customers. I usually do a live launch for it, and in between launches I develop evergreen funnels so that it's possible for students to join the program and become one of my students at any time. I've done this before, but I need to rebuild it now because a lot has changed. So even though this is a big project with many sub-action items, I just wrote "evergreen" as kind of the theme for the day.
Tuesday will be a writing day. I'm going to be composing my Clarity Chronicle email (it's kind of my hottest and boldest most recent musings only available when you sign up for it, which you can do right here!) and writing out some Instagram posts.
Wednesday I've slated as a podcast day. I will be writing down some outlines for upcoming episodes, and I need to actually plan out a little bit further than where I am right now. I'm going to certainly plan out at least March, but might also plan out April and May. I like to write out my topics in 12 week snippets so that I can make sure I'm not repeating myself and offering enough variety on the show.
Thursday is a student day. Student fulfillment means Thursday is my big coaching day. I do office hours (which have been on fire lately!) and go into my group to coach people and make sure they have everything they need.
Finally, Friday will be kind of different this week, as I am getting together with some business friends locally for a masterminding weekend. So it will be kind of a flex day. I will probably develop some action items for Friday later, but for right now it's kind of open.
Monday: Things go off the rails
I know when I plan my weeks that at least some of the things will always go off the rails, but I wasn't anticipating that it would happen as early as Monday! I found out that one of my closest friends was in the hospital with what looked like RSV (if you follow me on Instagram, you'll know that I was in the hospital for four nights with RSV when my son was only three weeks old). So I stopped what I was doing and went to bring coffee to my friend and just sit and be with them. As I'm sharing this, I feel a great sense of pride, because this is yet another example of why I love doing what I do and calling my own shots. Even though my work time is very limited, I simply feel that life is too short to say no to showing up for the people I love the most. I know that when people show up for me, it means the whole world.
That's what's so amazing about this idea of guided flexibility: when you get really good at adapting to the life stuff, it doesn't become as stressful to make changes.
I decided that I'm going to get a bit more ruthless with my time on Tuesday. I'm still going to do the writing for my Clarity Chronicle email, and Instagram posts. If I'm really honest with myself, I can get those done in 2 hours, which will leave me with 2 hours to play with. That's when I'm going to get started on the evergreen funnel. I decided on one core objective that I want to get done (this really helps with big projects!).
In the back of my mind, I know that if something else happens tomorrow and something else will have to go, I already know that Instagram will be the next thing that gets the boot. There are two things that I always know about the tasks I schedule out:
What my core objectives are for each of the things I'm tackling, and
The priority level of each, so I know what will need to go in case things go wrong.
Knowing those two things definitely helps my stress level for when things go wonky.
Tuesday: Open, yet guided recovery
I wanted to report that I got some great action items complete. The emails got written and scheduled, and I finished the first key deliverable of the evergreen funnel for Crickets to Customers.
I want to point out how important it was that I didn't break down action items for my funnel project and schedule them in rigidly. Instead, I just wrote "evergreen," so when things changed drastically on Monday I didn't get disappointed and didn't feel "behind." When I sat down to work on the funnel today, I asked myself, what is the one thing I can do inside of this project right now, that would generate the result I would be most proud of? And that's how I came away with the first benchmark.
So I checked off two big action items today. Could I have done more? I didn't get the Instagram posts done, but that's okay. I could always do more, but for me, it's really about creating action that ties directly to revenue, and being able to go home and say that I finished a benchmark instead of a bunch of random things where I can't really pinpoint how they will affect my business tomorrow.
By the way, I made it to the gym both on Monday and Tuesday, just at different times. It's a little annoying that it's a bit of a moving target, but the positive and important thing is that I got it done because it's so important to my mental and physical health, and I see differences in my business when I stay committed to that.
Tomorrow is Wednesday, so given that my week got shaken up a bit, I will spend some time in the morning circling the wagons and adjust the plan as needed. It will still be a flex writing day, where I can work on emails and podcast outlines. I am allowing my plan to give me guidance but not imprison me -- I am trusting myself to flex and flow.
Friday: Mid-week check-in and wrap up
As I've just shared, on Wednesday morning I wanted to look at my plan and ask the question: when I fast-forward to Friday, what am I going to feel best about being able to say that I accomplished?
"You can kind of reverse engineer quitting time at the end of your day, asking, what would make me most proud of when I go home today? What is one thing I can do inside of this project right now, that would generate the result that I would be most proud of?"
I spent some time writing my Clarity Chronicle emails. It's become my favorite way to engage with you because I get a lot of replies and I love reading every single one of them. It makes me feel like I'm not alone, and that the things that I'm experiencing are things that are resonating with you on your path.
The other thing I've been working on this week is my evergreen funnel project, and I'm proud to say that the first big milestone in that funnel is totally done and ready to go. What that means is that it's now possible to join my program at certain entry points inside of joining my email list. That's a really big deal because that means I'm able to welcome people who want to work with me right now, and they don't have to wait until the next time I do a huge launch. It also translates to potentially immediate revenue so ending my Friday knowing that I completed it is huge!
I also did my office hours and coached people currently going through my program's guided track. I love doing my office hours and walking people through the content, week by week. So I walked out of my Thursday feeling amazing about where my students are heading with creating their community anchors, which are free pieces of content to pull in their audience.
So did my week go exactly according to plan? Definitely not. But I still got some major things done that I didn't have in place when I started this podcast episode on Sunday. It started out very certain in terms of what I was going to work on, then it got real shaky, but I was able to pull things together mid-week and here I am on Friday feeling really proud of what I have created results-wise.
If you liked this episode, I'd love to know. Hit me up on Instagram @courageandclarity. You can reply to any of my emails, or just reach out directly to steph@courageandclarity.com.
Links & Resources
15 Minute Planner Method — Get it here for free!
Courage & Clarity episode about using the 15 Minute Planner Method: 4 Steps to Plan Your Week in 15 Minutes (And Get it Done This Time)
Interested in trying Freshly? — Use my link to get $40 off your order here!