5 Productivity Habits the Top 1% of Health Coaches Swear By

Michelle Leotta: Welcome to the Health Coach Power Community Podcast. I'm Michelle Leotta, ex-corporate girl turned certified health coach with over 15 years of experience growing a successful online practice. I started out with no idea what I was getting into and learned a lot of lessons along the way that have given me the freedom to do the work I love and raised two boys as a single mom. I created a health coach power community over a decade ago to make it easier for health coaches to build a career they love and make the world a better place.

Hello there, health coaches. If you ever feel like your days are packed, but somehow nothing important is getting done, and your business is constantly getting pushed to the back burner. Well, today I'm gonna break down five time management habits that I've seen in the most productive, the most profitable health coaches out there.

Including myself, and I'm gonna share how I use time blocking to stay on track without getting overwhelmed. This is like a roadmap to actually getting stuff done. Let's do it. I talk to hundreds. I probably talk to thousands of health coaches every year, and everyone seems to struggle with making good use of time, and I get this question all the time.

How should I structure my day? How should I structure my week? Let me tell you this. If you want to consistently sign clients, you wanna be building programs, you wanna be growing your business, this really is an essential skill for any entrepreneur. You don't have to be the smartest health coach. I'm not.

You don't have to be the most tech-savvy either. Again, I'm not. But you do need to manage your time in order to make stuff happen if you wanna move forward. Right. Makes sense. Hey, I'm Sharon. This is someone who's built a health coaching business while having babies, while moving up and down the East coast, umpteen different times, while getting divorced.

I've done all the things. My schedule's been all over the place in these years. So let's walk through those habits that set the top 1% apart, and then you can pick one or two to try this week. Yes. All right, let's get into it. The first habit that I want you to think about is planning your week before Monday morning hits.

Yeah. I will tell you, as your business grows, your calendar will need to be planned, not even just one week in advance, but often 2, 3, 4, or five weeks in advance because there's just that much going on. But to start, think about sitting down. Sunday night. That's usually when I'm thinking about, okay, what's coming up for the week?

Get yourself a cup of tea or a cup of something and sit down with your calendar. Or maybe on Friday, as you're winding down, you can start thinking about what's gonna be coming up on Monday. The idea is just give yourself a short period of time every week to look at what's coming next, like what are you gonna be working on?

What's the priority? Sometimes I look ahead and I'm like, oh, man, I didn't realize that my kids have off school. Like, there's a superintendent's day that snuck up on me or something. Do you guys have those superintendent's days? They just throw them in here and there, and suddenly my kids don't have school, so I'll be like, all right, there's no school on Tuesday.

That changes my plan. I'm probably gonna be driving them around that day and I'm gonna have a weird schedule. Successful coaches don't wait. Until the chaos hits. That's just an example of like getting ahead of what might surprise you the following week. So I like to go into the week knowing what's on deck, what matters, and this really doesn't take that long.

I think if you give yourself 15 minutes, that will be plenty, and those 15 minutes are gonna save you so much time over the course of the following week, 'cause you're gonna know exactly what you're gonna be doing. Now, the next habit, and this is one, it took me a long time to break this. I want you to stop relying on to-do lists, at least not to-do lists alone.

I love a good to-do list, right? There's something so satisfying about scratching something off the to-do list when it's done. I used to rely on pads of paper. They'd be all over my office, and maybe I'd have one down in the kitchen, have one in my car, or I'd have these paper to-do lists. They get long, they get messy.

You end up with too many of them. It's like a to-do list within a to-do list, and then that one's got this scratched out and it's duplicated over here, right? It's just a hot mess, and they're all floating around. The key, even if you just have one to-do list, the key is to turn your lists into something else, turn them into time blocks.

That way, your task, whatever it is that you wanna get done, it has a date and a time associated with it instead of like a hope and a prayer, which is what it's like when it's just written on a list. So I'm gonna give you an example from my own business. I usually email my mailing list every Tuesday. Not every single Tuesday, but most Tuesdays.

So anyway, in order for that to happen, I have a one-hour time block every single Monday that says email for tomorrow. That's it. And in that one hour, I know I have to sit down and have to write and schedule the email so that it goes out the following morning. And that just happens week in, week out. Now that's just one hour.

Other tasks they're gonna take much longer. So, like if I'm putting together a new workshop. And I did that recently. Um, I did that workshop about online courses, and that was brand new. I had never done it before, so I had about 10 hours blocked on my calendar just to create the slides. Not all at once, of course, but maybe I had a three-hour block here and a two-hour block there.

And that was like over the course of a couple of weeks. If that were on my to-do list, make slides for workshop, then that task would be given, you know, a line. It would be given the same weight as right Tuesday's email. But they're not the same, right? Like some tasks are bigger, some tasks take longer than others.

So I find that visually seeing those tasks as time blocks really helps my brain understand, like how much I have going on, so to time block. If you've never done it before, I really hope you'll give it a try. After listening to this episode, you gotta use a tool that works for you. This is another habit to pick up.

We're not going for the most complicated tool out there just because it looks fancy. In fact, I remember talking to my friend Andrea Beman years ago. Do you know Andrea? Anyway, I don't know if she still does this, but she told me that she had a paper planner and she said that she would scribble down in her paper planner, no more than three tasks on each page.
Like that's what she was gonna do each day. Just three things, because she knew, like realistically, on any given day, she was only going to accomplish three things. I love that. I mean, as health coaches, we have all this stuff to do for our business, of course.

And then I know my calendar also gets blocked for exercise every day and for my body work appointments, and I need time to cook dinner, right? So, I even block off time to shower, and I like having slow mornings because it's good for my adrenals. That's how I like to live. So, time blocking or being realistic with your time.

I don't want you to think it's about cramming as much as possible into your day. Sometimes it feels like that, but really it's about giving time and space to all of your priorities, which of course you can only really do if you sit down and you take those 15 minutes and you plan out your week. Now I'm not like Andrea.

I gave up paper planners probably a decade ago or longer, I swear, by my Google calendar. In fact, I have five or six different calendars within that one Google Calendar. Like once we're planning my podcast, once we're planning the emails that I'm sending, once to plan the various promotions and projects going on in my business.

And then the main one. That's where I put my daily tasks, and those are my time blocks, which, oh my goodness, you can start color coding. And I like to do that. My personal time is in yellow. If I have to be on video, I put that in red. 'cause you know, I gotta remember to do my hair. And sometimes if I'm working on a big project, that project is gonna get its own color too.

And then you have these blocks sitting in your calendar. They can all get moved around. It's a little bit like playing Tetris if you wanna see all of this in action. By the way, I recorded a little video of exactly how I use my Google calendar and do my time blocking. I thought that would be helpful, like especially if you haven't done it before or if you're just kind of curious about what goes on behind the scenes here.

So if you wanna check out that video, it's just a couple minutes long. Text me, go to HealthCoachPower.com/text. Text the word CALENDAR, just that single word, and it's going to trigger the system to automatically send you my Google time blocking video. So again, you just go to HealthCoachPower.com/text, and from there, text me the word calendar.

And you know what? That's really all that I use. It's free Google Calendar. You can use other tools that have all these fancy AI tools that have come out recently. One is called Motion, if you wanna check that out. There was another one that I tried, and now it escapes me. I can't think of the name right now.

But basically, all of these different AI tools that would put those blocks on my calendar for me. I hated them. Like, I just hated having a little robot stealing up my calendar with tasks. Every time I thought I cleared my afternoon, boom, more tasks would fill up that space right in front of my eyes. And I was like, Ugh.

Getting anxiety over it. So, for now at least, I'm keeping it a fairly manual process. The goal here it's not to geek out over software. Just use whatever tool is easiest for you. And you know what? Maybe you're like, Andrea, maybe it's gonna be a paper planner for now. Now, on the same topic of time blocking, I know you're gonna think after this episode that I'm just like the time blocking nerd of all nerds.

And I think I am, but with good reason, right? Everyone's always like, Michelle, how do you do it all? This is how the habit that you wanna cultivate around time blocking is not strictly following your time-blocked calendar to the T every single day. Now, my project manager would be really, really, really happy if I did, but I'm not a robot.

You're not a robot. Things happen, life happens. So just know some days, of course. You need to go slower. That thing is just not gonna happen. And here's what I found to be really interesting, like time blocking. It doesn't have to be about forcing yourself to do these 20 things that you've crammed into your day.

Like I said, there's times when it just doesn't happen. There are weeks that I barely follow the calendar that I planned at all, but. There's something so important about just going through that exercise of planning, like it makes all the difference because over time you start to learn, like in general, what can I reasonably accomplish?

How long does that type of task take? What's taking me way too long? Where am I spending way too much time, and it's not helping my business grow, or it's not aligned with my values and what I really wanna be doing in the world? Sometimes it's simple. Sometimes my time blocks just have to get moved, you know, down into the next week.

But sometimes I just get deleted because I'm like, I don't wanna do this. I have made the decision, and I am the CEO around here, and you are the CEO of your business. Most likely, I don't wanna do this project. After all, boom, it's gone. Sometimes I think I can do this an easier way, and so what was going to take me all afternoon is gone.

And that's when I like to go get a pedicure. That's when I don't like those AI tools. Filling it up with the next three tasks. The goal is, I guess it's to have a plan that you can adjust. It is flexible, and like I was getting at a minute ago, the most important part is just the act of planning in the first place.

Just going through that habit every week, I find that's what really matters 'cause that's what's gonna help you the most, even if you don't follow the plan. Isn't that amazing? You would think, well, what's the point of making a plan if you're not gonna follow it? But it just does something to your brain.

You just get smarter about how to actually make the best use of your time. It's kind of like, I don't know, like if you organized your kitchen and you bought groceries, you put them all away. You're gonna be better able to cook, even if you don't end up following a recipe. And then the last habit that I wanna talk about is kind of zooming out.

Taking a more macro look at what you're doing with your time, because if you're only thinking one week at a time, you're gonna stay busy. You're gonna fill up your calendar. It's pretty easy to do that, and you may even stay organized, but you might not find that your business is moving forward. So the most productive coaches I know, and by productive, I don't mean busy.

I mean, actually growing, actually increasing their bottom line, actually building their mailing list, right? This is something I had to learn for sure. You need to have a larger plan. Like I said, you kind of zoom out so you're not just looking at a one-week anymore. What's the larger plan? Like, what's the larger goal?

Because that's going to define how you spend your time each week. It's like to manage your time day by day, you gotta know what you're working towards in the long term. What are all those days? What are all those weeks leading up to? And that's a slightly bigger strategy. That's where most health coaches really fall down.

We're always just thinking, what am I doing tomorrow? What am I doing next week? Maybe? What am I doing two weeks for now, but think bigger, like months at a time? And I can help you with this. My free 90-day blueprint is designed to help you get more clients in 90 days. It's that overarching plan to guide your weekly and daily to-dos. Or not to-dos 'cause we're getting rid of to-dos, right? We're time blocks your weekly and daily time blocks, and you can grab that 90-day blueprint for free. It's at HealthCoachPower.com/blueprint. So there you have it. Those are the five habits of what I consider the top 1% of health coaches who aren't just busy.

They're productive and profitable. They're getting it done, they're making it happen, and they're doing it without working 24/7. So pick one of these habits to try this week. Maybe stack the next, the following week. If you upgrade how you use your time, you are gonna notice a big, big difference. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next time.

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