Daily Fill: Balancing your Schedule - 100th Episode anniversary

Summary: <br> Welcome to the Tuesday edition of the Daily Fill with our Owner and founder Richard Ducat! Every Tuesday Richard gives us a dose of motivation, guidance, life hacks, marketing tips, and more!<br> Today's quote: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." - Stephen Covey<br> <br> On today's episode, we are back with week 2 of the drumtrepreneur series! In this series, we focus on strengthening our guidance, focus, balance with challenges that will help hold you accountable for success! Week 2 is all about balancing important tasks that ensure success and how to avoid the unimportant ones.This is easily the most important part of this series and likely the hardest as I am only able to help you blueprint your layout... The decision of what is important vs. what isn't important is all on you!<br> <br> So now that we have spent the entire week decluttering our schedule and getting a hand on how to put things together we can now start deciding what matters most, how much time I can put towards it and when I want to do it.<br> As I said last week, the process starts at 9:30 PM every Sunday night when I break out my little black book filled with tasks, weekly notes, and scheduling. For a while, it was really hard to decide on what was the most important... Should I wake up and get leisure time in? Should I wake up and just start working? Should I create a morning routine? The obvious choice was the latter but it came with the attempt of making each of the three work in some way. Ultimately, as much as I would love to hit the alarm at 5 am and start the computer up for a power hour of tasking it's simply not possible. I need to prime myself for the day by doing a certain set of tasks that help me wake up. As I always note... HYDRATE! That is the staple to each day of the week for me. I have literally hardcoded this task into my circadian rhythm and made it a part of my daily humanly needs. I think it's important that we start our days doing things that make us feel good. I walk my dog, power through some of my favorite daily business podcasts, eat 81274218 pounds of Greek yogurt, text some homies, and of course, reflect on my day and build up my anticipations and narrow down my task list for a productive day. This entire process normally takes anywhere from 60-90 minutes and is essential to my daily functions. Keep in mind... I have a 3-year-old son who has school 2 times a week which forces me to create different morning rituals for different days. I am practically forced to arrange for his schedule and it works out for me but I can remember a time where I had to literally force myself to change things up. This isn't easy but I can assure you it's vital and a giant part of the successful week I constantly work towards.<br> So as I shift into my first set of tasks I always force myself to use a timer. I consider this somewhat of an Insurance on my stress and productivity levels. The fact that I force myself to follow 40-50 minute work sessions practically ensures that I will get my workloads knocked out which really helps me stay patient and relaxed through the storm. It also allows me to force myself to only allow myself a certain amount of work to do in a session. I can't begin to tell you how much more I get done in 40 minutes completing minor tasks rather than trying to cram whatever the hell I can into a 4-hour block. This also allows me to follow a strong schedule based on a guaranteed time slot system. It's basically winning all week when you get into this mode. To me, this is the key to clarity and insight towards what your next moves need to be. This also allows me to spend a ton of time with my Wife and Son playing drums, learning new things, cooking sweet meals, and building our family bonds.<br> So this is what I mean by balance and for most of us this is completely different as we all don't have kids, multiple businesses, and multiple employees to manage.