142. Time Management: The First Domino of Success (CEO Summer School)
Could time management be the key to creating the business and life you want? If you feel like you’re always running out of time or struggling to get things done, this episode will give you a new perspective. In truth number three of CEO Summer School, I’m sharing why taking control of your time is the first step toward taking control of your future.
Managing your time isn’t about fitting more into your day or following a complicated system; it’s about making intentional choices that move you closer to your goals. When you’re in control of your time, you shape your future, reduce overwhelm, and create space for the things that matter most in both your business and personal life.
You’ll learn why time management gets a bad reputation and how a shift in perspective can help you see it as a tool for freedom rather than restriction. With a simple, sustainable approach to planning, you’ll build the foundation needed to grow your business and make more deliberate progress toward your vision.
Click here to enroll in CEO Summer School! You'll receive a dedicated email resource every other week to take what you’ve learned and apply it directly to your business.
If you've been thinking about working with me one-on-one, be sure to get on the private coaching waitlist! Click here to learn more about Design to Thrive and secure your spot to be the first to know when availability opens up.
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why time management is psychological, not just about strategies and systems.
How overcomplexity in planning is often just sneaky "procrasti-planning."
The reason structure creates freedom rather than restriction in your business.
What happens when you're not in charge of your time.
How effective time management becomes your creative and competitive advantage.
Why meeting yourself where you are beats waiting for the perfect system.
The connection between time management and every business result you want.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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140. Create Your Vision and Pursue it Boldly (CEO Summer School)
141. Running Toward vs Running From: The Mindset Behind Your Goals
Access the free Get It Done Daily Planner!
Enroll in CEO Summer School to receive a dedicated email resource every other week to take what you’ve learned and apply it directly to your business!
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 142. In this one, I'm sharing what I know for sure, truth number three in the CEO Summer School series. Today's truth is all about how you take control of and shape your future. This episode is about putting yourself in the driver's seat and creating a smoother, calmer, more effective path toward achieving success in and out of work. It's time to talk about time management. But this is not an episode on time blocking. What I'm doing is giving you the solid foundation you need that's required for any next level of growth.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are having an incredible summer. I can hardly believe that it's already into July. I mean, that's kind of crazy. But that's how summer seems to go. It goes fast. We've been having a lot of fun with listening to different music on our way to and from camps and around town. One of the things that's been kind of fun, it's been a little throwback for me, is my son's choir did Backstreet Boys, "I Want It That Way" at the end of the school concert. And so now we've been playing that in the car, and I'm reminiscing about standing in line for those tickets when my best friend at the time and I went and saw them in concert. So, that's kind of fun, right? Trends go around, come around. Music comes around, goes around.
Anyways, I hope you're having some fun ways to add new energy to your routines over the summer. And I'm excited to be back here today with a new installment of CEO Summer School.
As a reminder, if you want to participate in CEO Summer School, it's simple, it's free, and it's not too late to sign up. You can always go back and listen to those other episodes. You can just go to desicreswell.com/resources, and that is where you'll find the sign-up link, and you can opt in.
The episodes, if you're listening to this in the podcast feed, you know this, the episodes are in the regular feed, but enrolling is the only way to get the bonus prompts so that you can take what you're hearing and put it into action.
And if you're loving the series, I would so appreciate it if you shared it with a friend or left a rating and review. That really helps me get this into the hands of more designers, which is a huge goal of mine. So if you have already done that, thank you, and if you'd be so kind as to do it, I very much appreciate you.
Now, if we go back to truth number two, what we were talking about was deciding what you want to create by way of a business and life vision. That was setting the GPS, putting in the address, adjusting the coordinates. And now today's truth is what's going to help you get where you want to go. So you know where you want to go, and now it's time to get going. It's how you get in the driver's seat of the car and start traveling forward in the direction you want to go.
Today's truth, truth number three of what I know for sure about building a sustainable, profitable, and fulfilling business is that you have to take control of your time in order to take control of your future. What you do today is actively creating your tomorrow. So you want to choose what you're doing on purpose.
Often when clients work with me, the number one thing they say is that they finally feel in control. We can see this in what their day-to-day looks like in terms of their ending work at the time they want to end work so they can go pick up their kids or maybe it's hit up a yoga class. And they're also having a huge shift in how they feel at the end of the day. They feel complete, like what they did was enough, instead of always feeling behind and like they're chasing the to-do list.
That is amazing. And it really is the starting point of all future success and momentum. Because what comes from those basics of time management, making intentional decisions, prioritizing, and honoring commitments to yourself, what you're able to accomplish then in the long run, and how good those efforts feel, it starts to compound. It creates a snowball effect, and as you get better and better at those basic skills, you're able to do more and more of them, which just naturally creates a higher level of capacity within the same amount of time and effort.
What this means is that when you learn to effectively manage your time, you are actively shaping your future into what you want it to be versus what's going to happen if you act on default. You're creating conditions for yourself that help you move closer to your goal. You're helping yourself make deliberate progress towards that vision we talked about in truth number two.
Time management is certainly not the flashiest topic, and I'll just acknowledge that here. But if you want to create the business and life that you truly desire, the one that you really want, you must take charge of your time. Because if you are not in charge, that means someone else is. And they probably don't have the same goals or the level of self-interest you have in your own well-being or what is meaningful to you.
I want you to think about a Jenga tower when it comes to what we're talking about today. All of those little wooden blocks that you stack up in the game, all those blocks could be different strategies, the team members you have in place, the accolades or press you've received or you're going after. If you don't have a time management block in your tower, everything topples over. And if it's not toppling over immediately, very little pressure pushing on one of those other little blocks or adding more blocks to the ever-building tower, it's going to crumble. It's going to come crashing down. You end up constantly having to pick up the pieces and rebuild, which is exhausting.
And as you scale the business, you don't have that solid foundation to stand on. And that's not to say if you're already at that scaled position and you have quite a large business that you can't come back and create that solid foundation. It's always available to you. It's never too late.
If you look at what the word "manage" means, it is to be in charge of. So time management is to be in charge of your time, and that starts with learning to be in charge of yourself. We can talk strategies around time blocking, which calendar system to use, which project management software, all of that is great. And we have to also always remember that time management is psychological. The strategies are quite simple, and we have to learn how to work with ourselves and with our brain in order to leverage those simple strategies and get the results we want.
So now you might be thinking, if time management is and can be simple, and it is the way to create the future you want, then why does it get such a bad rap? Why does it get such an eye roll or resistance from me or other designers I talk to?
It's usually one of two things. The first is that it has a reputation for being complicated and hard and cumbersome. The second could be that there's the belief that it is restrictive and that it cages you in. So let's address both of those.
The first objection to time management is that it's complicated or that you need a fancy system that you don't have, that you don't know how to set up, that you don't have the time to set up, whatever it is. I think one of the first things we have to remember is that typically our brains are seeking more complexity because for some reason they think that if the plan is more complex, it gives us essentially more hope that it's going to be the solution with the greatest impact. We think that if we have the most complex thing that we're implementing or the most complex system or time management approach, that somehow that's going to be better, that we're going to get better results from it.
I'd say that's not necessarily true, and I'd say that it's often not true. And while I don't think we go around saying, I want to find the most complex time management system I could possibly use, that's kind of what's just happening in the undercurrent. And often, overcomplexity in the realm of time management really is just a sneaky way of procrasti-planning, meaning you're using your planning to put off the real work that you need to do, or otherwise you're using the system to try to bend reality. Essentially, you're trying to avoid the fact that there are only so many hours in a day and that no matter how much you finagle your schedule, there might not be time available to do everything you want to do or that your brain tells you should do.
So if you've been resistant to managing your time in some capacity, take a look at are you making it overly complex or hanging your hat on an end-all be-all system that feels way out of reach instead of meeting yourself where you are. I actually have a really simple way you can get started with planning your day. It's called the Get It Done Daily Planner. And you can find that also at desicreswell.com/resources. You can find the planner there and the summer school sign-up.
I've been offering this free download for years now, and designers say that it's life-changing. It's also a simple PDF. It's not fancy, but it works when you use the tools I've provided, and they're simple questions, it's a simple layout, and it works.
I want you to think about this even if we're to take it in a direction totally outside the business. Let's say you want to be a better runner. You don't need a three-hundred-dollar pair of running shoes to get started running or to improve your running. It might be nice at some point and you want to invest, but you definitely don't need those shoes to get started. And what's going to make the most difference in how you run or if you run is just running.
So when it comes to time management, keep it simple and meet yourself where you are so you can start to gain the benefit of taking control of not just your day-to-day, but your future.
The second thing that I said most often is an objection to this truth is that time management is restrictive. If you're thinking time management is restrictive, you're probably approaching time management with the belief that its purpose is to squeeze every last drop out of you and out of your day, which sounds awful, and it would make sense that you wouldn't want to test it out.
What this looks like is you forget to plan for reality, you forget to take into account that you need to be in your planning. You need to give yourself breaks, you need to plan for the life that you have, or it's even something like in your planning, you're telling yourself something that you know is going to take two hours will only take thirty minutes because you want it to fit into a certain time frame. But then you just end up creating a condition where you're always behind, and that does feel awful. It feels restrictive and like you can't ever catch your breath.
So what I want you to remember here is that you're not in this business, or just on this planet, to get as much checked off the to-do list as humanly possible. Time management is a tool that gives you more freedom when you shift from believing that planning tools are meant to push you past your limits and make you superhuman versus they are there to support and assist you in getting what you want.
It's like a pair of scissors. You can use a pair of scissors to cut paper or you could poke an eye out. And it's the same with your calendar. So don't use planning against yourself. Remember what I said a couple of episodes ago, direction is more important than speed. Managing your time is making deliberate decisions about your direction. You can definitely use time management to influence your speed, but a strategy like time blocking isn't meant to put you in a perpetual state of racing the clock. It is that tool that is there to support you as the human running the business.
Structure is sustainable and it helps you create what you want. You create freedom within a framework for your days. That is what time management is, and then you work within your current capabilities, capacity, and business structure. When you approach time this way, not only can you create space in terms of hours in your day from efficiencies and being very clear on what you're doing and not doing, you also create so much mental space. This is really what leads to you being able to leave work at work. It's what allows you to shut off your brain from the business and go live your life.
And here's the other truth here, is that all business results that you want to create, more profit, up-leveling your clients, a supportive team, it all requires you to plan and use your time effectively. Time management is that solid foundation.
It's everything that the Jenga tower builds upon. It's revenue and productivity. Your time allocations are better and you're going to create more output in the same amount of time and more projects that you can fulfill. It's more billable time. It's more productive use of time. It's a way to increase the quality of the decisions you make and the actions you take so that you can really have space in your business as the leader to think through what's working and what's not. It's how you can start to look at the data in your business and make better decisions because you have space to do that. So you're not always reacting, you're proactive.
Time management gives you a huge creative advantage too, which becomes a competitive advantage. Because when you're clear about how you want to structure your days, you can give yourself time to be inspired, you can learn about new products. You can give yourself creative space to do your best client work. And that allows for higher levels of projects and photography that you end up wanting to use in your marketing and your PR. You just have more time to schedule those photoshoots that you need for all of that output. Time management is how you grow, it's how you scale. It's how you free up time to manage your employees, to work on implementing those strategic initiatives.
It's how you understand where your time and energy is going so that you can create systematic approaches for your project systems, for delegation, whatever it is. Time management is how you create calm sustainability in a thriving business.
The types of outcomes I'm sharing here and the results that you want in your business, the vision that you cast, these things don't happen accidentally. You have to build the skills of prioritization, focus, workflow coordination, leadership, anticipation of obstacles. All of these go into being a driving force behind the vision you're working towards. And it starts with time management.
So say it with me, friends. Truth number three is take control of your time to take control of your future.
That's what I have for you today. If you're signed up for CEO Summer School, make sure to check your inbox, and I have some fantastic prompts landed there for you. If you aren't signed up, reminder, it is not too late. You can just go to desicreswell.com/resources. That's where you can opt into CEO Summer School, and you can also get a free copy of the Get It Done Daily Planner.
I'm going to be back next week with an episode on time and energy leaks. It'll definitely be a good one. Make sure you're subscribed and following the show so you don't miss that. And until next Wednesday, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are having an incredible summer. I can hardly believe that it's already into July. I mean, that's kind of crazy. But that's how summer seems to go. It goes fast. We've been having a lot of fun with listening to different music on our way to and from camps and around town. One of the things that's been kind of fun, it's been a little throwback for me, is my son's choir did Backstreet Boys, "I Want It That Way" at the end of the school concert. And so now we've been playing that in the car, and I'm reminiscing about standing in line for those tickets when my best friend at the time and I went and saw them in concert. So, that's kind of fun, right? Trends go around, come around. Music comes around, goes around.
Anyways, I hope you're having some fun ways to add new energy to your routines over the summer. And I'm excited to be back here today with a new installment of CEO Summer School.
As a reminder, if you want to participate in CEO Summer School, it's simple, it's free, and it's not too late to sign up. You can always go back and listen to those other episodes. You can just go to desicreswell.com/resources, and that is where you'll find the sign-up link, and you can opt in.
The episodes, if you're listening to this in the podcast feed, you know this, the episodes are in the regular feed, but enrolling is the only way to get the bonus prompts so that you can take what you're hearing and put it into action.
And if you're loving the series, I would so appreciate it if you shared it with a friend or left a rating and review. That really helps me get this into the hands of more designers, which is a huge goal of mine. So if you have already done that, thank you, and if you'd be so kind as to do it, I very much appreciate you.
Now, if we go back to truth number two, what we were talking about was deciding what you want to create by way of a business and life vision. That was setting the GPS, putting in the address, adjusting the coordinates. And now today's truth is what's going to help you get where you want to go. So you know where you want to go, and now it's time to get going. It's how you get in the driver's seat of the car and start traveling forward in the direction you want to go.
Today's truth, truth number three of what I know for sure about building a sustainable, profitable, and fulfilling business is that you have to take control of your time in order to take control of your future. What you do today is actively creating your tomorrow. So you want to choose what you're doing on purpose.
Often when clients work with me, the number one thing they say is that they finally feel in control. We can see this in what their day-to-day looks like in terms of their ending work at the time they want to end work so they can go pick up their kids or maybe it's hit up a yoga class. And they're also having a huge shift in how they feel at the end of the day. They feel complete, like what they did was enough, instead of always feeling behind and like they're chasing the to-do list.
That is amazing. And it really is the starting point of all future success and momentum. Because what comes from those basics of time management, making intentional decisions, prioritizing, and honoring commitments to yourself, what you're able to accomplish then in the long run, and how good those efforts feel, it starts to compound. It creates a snowball effect, and as you get better and better at those basic skills, you're able to do more and more of them, which just naturally creates a higher level of capacity within the same amount of time and effort.
What this means is that when you learn to effectively manage your time, you are actively shaping your future into what you want it to be versus what's going to happen if you act on default. You're creating conditions for yourself that help you move closer to your goal. You're helping yourself make deliberate progress towards that vision we talked about in truth number two.
Time management is certainly not the flashiest topic, and I'll just acknowledge that here. But if you want to create the business and life that you truly desire, the one that you really want, you must take charge of your time. Because if you are not in charge, that means someone else is. And they probably don't have the same goals or the level of self-interest you have in your own well-being or what is meaningful to you.
I want you to think about a Jenga tower when it comes to what we're talking about today. All of those little wooden blocks that you stack up in the game, all those blocks could be different strategies, the team members you have in place, the accolades or press you've received or you're going after. If you don't have a time management block in your tower, everything topples over. And if it's not toppling over immediately, very little pressure pushing on one of those other little blocks or adding more blocks to the ever-building tower, it's going to crumble. It's going to come crashing down. You end up constantly having to pick up the pieces and rebuild, which is exhausting.
And as you scale the business, you don't have that solid foundation to stand on. And that's not to say if you're already at that scaled position and you have quite a large business that you can't come back and create that solid foundation. It's always available to you. It's never too late.
If you look at what the word "manage" means, it is to be in charge of. So time management is to be in charge of your time, and that starts with learning to be in charge of yourself. We can talk strategies around time blocking, which calendar system to use, which project management software, all of that is great. And we have to also always remember that time management is psychological. The strategies are quite simple, and we have to learn how to work with ourselves and with our brain in order to leverage those simple strategies and get the results we want.
So now you might be thinking, if time management is and can be simple, and it is the way to create the future you want, then why does it get such a bad rap? Why does it get such an eye roll or resistance from me or other designers I talk to?
It's usually one of two things. The first is that it has a reputation for being complicated and hard and cumbersome. The second could be that there's the belief that it is restrictive and that it cages you in. So let's address both of those.
The first objection to time management is that it's complicated or that you need a fancy system that you don't have, that you don't know how to set up, that you don't have the time to set up, whatever it is. I think one of the first things we have to remember is that typically our brains are seeking more complexity because for some reason they think that if the plan is more complex, it gives us essentially more hope that it's going to be the solution with the greatest impact. We think that if we have the most complex thing that we're implementing or the most complex system or time management approach, that somehow that's going to be better, that we're going to get better results from it.
I'd say that's not necessarily true, and I'd say that it's often not true. And while I don't think we go around saying, I want to find the most complex time management system I could possibly use, that's kind of what's just happening in the undercurrent. And often, overcomplexity in the realm of time management really is just a sneaky way of procrasti-planning, meaning you're using your planning to put off the real work that you need to do, or otherwise you're using the system to try to bend reality. Essentially, you're trying to avoid the fact that there are only so many hours in a day and that no matter how much you finagle your schedule, there might not be time available to do everything you want to do or that your brain tells you should do.
So if you've been resistant to managing your time in some capacity, take a look at are you making it overly complex or hanging your hat on an end-all be-all system that feels way out of reach instead of meeting yourself where you are. I actually have a really simple way you can get started with planning your day. It's called the Get It Done Daily Planner. And you can find that also at desicreswell.com/resources. You can find the planner there and the summer school sign-up.
I've been offering this free download for years now, and designers say that it's life-changing. It's also a simple PDF. It's not fancy, but it works when you use the tools I've provided, and they're simple questions, it's a simple layout, and it works.
I want you to think about this even if we're to take it in a direction totally outside the business. Let's say you want to be a better runner. You don't need a three-hundred-dollar pair of running shoes to get started running or to improve your running. It might be nice at some point and you want to invest, but you definitely don't need those shoes to get started. And what's going to make the most difference in how you run or if you run is just running.
So when it comes to time management, keep it simple and meet yourself where you are so you can start to gain the benefit of taking control of not just your day-to-day, but your future.
The second thing that I said most often is an objection to this truth is that time management is restrictive. If you're thinking time management is restrictive, you're probably approaching time management with the belief that its purpose is to squeeze every last drop out of you and out of your day, which sounds awful, and it would make sense that you wouldn't want to test it out.
What this looks like is you forget to plan for reality, you forget to take into account that you need to be in your planning. You need to give yourself breaks, you need to plan for the life that you have, or it's even something like in your planning, you're telling yourself something that you know is going to take two hours will only take thirty minutes because you want it to fit into a certain time frame. But then you just end up creating a condition where you're always behind, and that does feel awful. It feels restrictive and like you can't ever catch your breath.
So what I want you to remember here is that you're not in this business, or just on this planet, to get as much checked off the to-do list as humanly possible. Time management is a tool that gives you more freedom when you shift from believing that planning tools are meant to push you past your limits and make you superhuman versus they are there to support and assist you in getting what you want.
It's like a pair of scissors. You can use a pair of scissors to cut paper or you could poke an eye out. And it's the same with your calendar. So don't use planning against yourself. Remember what I said a couple of episodes ago, direction is more important than speed. Managing your time is making deliberate decisions about your direction. You can definitely use time management to influence your speed, but a strategy like time blocking isn't meant to put you in a perpetual state of racing the clock. It is that tool that is there to support you as the human running the business.
Structure is sustainable and it helps you create what you want. You create freedom within a framework for your days. That is what time management is, and then you work within your current capabilities, capacity, and business structure. When you approach time this way, not only can you create space in terms of hours in your day from efficiencies and being very clear on what you're doing and not doing, you also create so much mental space. This is really what leads to you being able to leave work at work. It's what allows you to shut off your brain from the business and go live your life.
And here's the other truth here, is that all business results that you want to create, more profit, up-leveling your clients, a supportive team, it all requires you to plan and use your time effectively. Time management is that solid foundation.
It's everything that the Jenga tower builds upon. It's revenue and productivity. Your time allocations are better and you're going to create more output in the same amount of time and more projects that you can fulfill. It's more billable time. It's more productive use of time. It's a way to increase the quality of the decisions you make and the actions you take so that you can really have space in your business as the leader to think through what's working and what's not. It's how you can start to look at the data in your business and make better decisions because you have space to do that. So you're not always reacting, you're proactive.
Time management gives you a huge creative advantage too, which becomes a competitive advantage. Because when you're clear about how you want to structure your days, you can give yourself time to be inspired, you can learn about new products. You can give yourself creative space to do your best client work. And that allows for higher levels of projects and photography that you end up wanting to use in your marketing and your PR. You just have more time to schedule those photoshoots that you need for all of that output. Time management is how you grow, it's how you scale. It's how you free up time to manage your employees, to work on implementing those strategic initiatives.
It's how you understand where your time and energy is going so that you can create systematic approaches for your project systems, for delegation, whatever it is. Time management is how you create calm sustainability in a thriving business.
The types of outcomes I'm sharing here and the results that you want in your business, the vision that you cast, these things don't happen accidentally. You have to build the skills of prioritization, focus, workflow coordination, leadership, anticipation of obstacles. All of these go into being a driving force behind the vision you're working towards. And it starts with time management.
So say it with me, friends. Truth number three is take control of your time to take control of your future.
That's what I have for you today. If you're signed up for CEO Summer School, make sure to check your inbox, and I have some fantastic prompts landed there for you. If you aren't signed up, reminder, it is not too late. You can just go to desicreswell.com/resources. That's where you can opt into CEO Summer School, and you can also get a free copy of the Get It Done Daily Planner.
I'm going to be back next week with an episode on time and energy leaks. It'll definitely be a good one. Make sure you're subscribed and following the show so you don't miss that. And until next Wednesday, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
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