4 Productivity Tips for a Crazy Productive 2021

There are three things I am pretty well known for.
1 – Being the tallest person in the room.
2 – Being able to make inappropriate jokes about anything.
3 – Being the planning queen.

I take my planning so seriously that I even created my own darn blog + biz planner (grab yours here now) because there wasn’t one that did what I wanted.

So over these next few weeks, as we are ramping up to eating all the turkey and planning all the things season, I wanted to share some of my favourite planning and productivity tips with you all (including my favourite short-cut for creating champagne content on a beer time-frame!)

Check out my favourite 4 quick things you can do right now, to set yourself up for a super productive 2021!Click To Tweet

Productivity Tip #1: Themes

I’ve had two blogs in my blogging life.

My first one, I started over ten years ago and at one point at Drop Dead Gorgeous Daily, we were doing five to six blog posts a day.

That was five to six pieces of unique content a day and we always had to come up with something new and fresh.

This is a problem, even when you’re not doing five or six pieces a day.

You spend all your time doing everything else and then it comes to content creation time and you’re  like, “Oh, um, what am I going to write about? Uh … uh … post it note. All right. I’ll write about how great post-it notes are.”

And you end up creating something that’s really mediocre and it doesn’t serve you or your audience and it’s a waste of everybody’s time.

Having monthly themes was one way we were able to stay fresh with our content and come up with so many ideas.

If you have a business that has promotions or launches or you’re selling or you have products that sell better at certain times or your product is seasonally based. Then having a monthly theme will really help your biz.

You’ll find that if you sit down, break that piece of paper into 12, and think about what is a theme?

What kind of topics should you be talking about in that month?

If you’ve got your launches mapped out as well, then you can plan your themes around those.

Tip number one is to go and create monthly themes for your content, and for your business.

It doesn’t just have to be about content, it can be about what you’re doing in that month.

I like to also have a bit of a regular flow, where we’re like, one month is setting up a launch, and then it’s running a launch and then it’s a break month and repeat that every quarter.

If you sit down, and you create this nice rhythm, it just makes it easy. You turn up at the start of January, and you go, “I know what I’m doing this month. I know what I’m talking about this month.”

Productivity Tip #2: Recycle

Next, I want you to go and find a piece of content and this doesn’t have to be blog posts, because I know not everyone here does blog posts, maybe you do videos, maybe you’ve done a really great Instagram post, or a really nice long form Facebook, or a Facebook Live.

Content comes in many forms. It could even be emails.

Go and find a piece of content that worked really well, that’s around that topic, for each of the months, so that’s 12 pieces of content, that you can re-use.

Then when it comes to that month, you can just update them, refresh them, and re-promote them, re-publish them.

You’ve saved yourself a heap of time, and you’ve got some proven content that you know works.

Productivity Tip #3: Ditch It

I want you to think about everything that you’re spending your time on, right now.

What marketing activities are you doing?

What kind of social media are you doing?

What kind of products are you making?

Just think about all of the stuff you do in your blog + biz and try and come up with one thing that’s not working.

One thing that, if you’re really honest with yourself, is not bringing you any kind of return on your time investment.

It’s not bringing you more prospective leads or clients or customers or sales.

It’s not making your life easier.

It’s not improving the quality of the product that you’re delivering. It’s not giving your customers a better service.

It’s not serving you, but you’ve probably just been doing it because you’ve always been doing it, or you’ve been told you should be doing it.

Find one of these things, and have a good hard look at it.

If it’s something that you’ve just started doing, and it’s only been going for a couple of weeks, don’t ditch that one, yet.

If it’s something that you can see you’re starting to get traction on, that’s okay.

But if it’s something you’re just doing for the sake of it, if it’s just a time suck and it’s not serving you, maybe let it go.

How often are you doing your blog posts? Or how often are you creating your content?

Maybe you’re doing a bit too much and it’s not actually giving you that return.

Maybe you are offering a product that people aren’t buying, but you’re still promoting it, and you’re still updating it.

Maybe you have a Facebook group that isn’t serving you. You’re in there, giving a lot of energy, and you’re not receiving any return on that investment.

It’s okay to be honest about these things.

It’s okay to say, “Hey, I tried something. It didn’t work.”

What’s not okay is to keep doing it anyway and to just be throwing that time and that money down the toilet, when you could be investing it back in things that do.

I want you to find one thing that’s not working, and just let it go.

It’s not a failure. There’s no such thing as failure.

It’s all learning.

So let it go!  Just make like Elsa.

Productivity Tip #4: Automate + Outsource

The lucky last thing I want you to do, and again this is all down to helping to save you some time, is to automate or outsource one thing.

I want you to think about it. What is the one thing that you are doing, that you shouldn’t be doing?

Or one thing that a computer could be doing.

Or that wonderful, lovely VA in Malaysia could be doing, for $6-7 an hour.

There is definitely one thing, a minimum of one thing, that you’re doing, that’s probably taking a couple of hours a week, that you could either automate or outsource and for a very, very low cost.

You can then spend that time either A, having a life, which is always a good thing;

Or B, actually spend that time doing the stuff that you know you should be doing.

Think about it. Find one thing you know you could automate or outsource, and I want you to do that, or make the plan to do it.

I want you to take these productivity tips and put at least one into action for the new year. Make next year your bitch (in the nicest way possible).

Do you have any productivity tips that work for you when you need to be super productive? Let us know below!