Improve Your Workflow Episode 04 with Michelle Ives

Well look, it's an interesting one for me because what I'm trying to achieve through FIRE, which is an acronym for Financial Independence, Retiring Early, is really about having greater control of my time and energy to do things that I love, without, I guess, having to think about the money piece that comes with them. So I'm basically trying to architect a life whereby money's kind of this really low touch part of the process.

This frees up a lot of my time naturally, but it also allows me to be more inventive. What happened when I started my business, being Wordy and Smith was that I realised that I could do a lot of that straightaway, but just with good optimisation. This goes for an actual tech stack across the board, but I think it's also personal productivity rituals. So my business on any given day has multiple digital avenues going in and out.

So the incoming pieces are things like leads and queries and requests and updates for where work is at, but the outgoing pieces are things like contracts and proposals and documents and invoices and then obviously activities that help me market my services. There's a lot of admin across the board there, so the main productivity ritual that I subscribe to is that I plan my week out really simply in advance every Sunday night so that every activity, like even going to the dry cleaners, is on there. I literally use notes on my phone and I just categorise it like, Monday, big dot point task, mid-level dot point task, small level dot point task. Tuesday and Wednesday's the same and this way nothing gets missed.

And then the second, is that I have this rule that one big, important thing must absolutely get done in the morning before lunchtime every day. So whether that's a big meeting or a big piece of work, I just know that mornings are better for me and I find that my clients and sometimes my team are actually clearer in the morning too, so it's like time hacking and I'm really strict about those things.