Busyness Isn’t Productivity! Organize Your Life So You Get More Done in Less Time

Hey Friend!

Welcome to today’s blog post, where I am joined by my dear friend Chelsi Jo. Together, we’re diving into the concept of organization in your life and business. The truth bomb is that busyness is not the same as productivity, and that there has to be an easier, simpler, and more systemized way to get it all together. To go from overwhelmed to organized.

And so stick with me today as Chelsi and I dive into discussing solutions to busyness. She will take us through two foundational systems, four steps each, to get everything together so you can trade busyness and have much more time to:

• Focus on your business.
• Pour into your family.
• Do the things that you absolutely know you’re called to do.

I pray this blog is a blessing for you.

Go Deeper With Four Different Courses

If this blog resonates with you today, everything we discuss is inside the amazing courses my friends Chelsi Jo, Polly Payne, and I created.

• Systemize Your Life
• Systemize To Scale
• Dream Printing Workshop
• Print School

These are going to help you set up for success when it comes to making your business something that can produce income and impact in the future.

Chelsi’s in the House

I have such a treat for you today. One of my favorite humans on Earth, my beloved Chelsi Jo Moore, is sitting across from me. She is here to bless you with her incredible brain. It is something to behold, friends. When it comes to organizing and having detailed systems, it feels like a breath of fresh air in my business and life.

So much of that is attributed to Chelsi and the work she brings to the world. I can’t wait for you to hear from her today. We’re going to discuss all the goals related to truly eliminating busyness and getting organized in your life so you can have more time to work on your business and do the things that God is calling you to do. Get ready, and definitely get a notebook and pen because Chelsi is in the house.

Hey, girl, welcome.

About Chelsi Jo

Chelsi Jo: Hey, I’m so happy to be here, talking with all my incredible business mom friends who run online businesses like you and me. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Stef: It’s going to be so fun. Most everyone probably knows you. You’ve been on the show multiple times. You are my best friend. We are business besties and family friends. But in case they haven’t met you before, tell us who you are and what you do.

Chelsi Jo: Hi, I am Chelsi Jo. I am the founder and CEO of ChelsiJo.co. I have three signature systems. Actually, I have a lot of systems, but I have three signature systems that I sell to stay-at-home and work-from-home moms, as well as CEOs who are trying to run booming businesses and families at the same time. My systems help you go from overwhelmed busyness to organized, no matter where your journey is:

• Having a business
• Starting a business
• Wanting a business
• Running a home

And trying to juggle all of those things and do it well. I am a wife to a firefighter. We have two girls, one six and the other 11. I’ve been running this business for four years. I’m also the host of the Systemize Your Life podcast, which has been such a treat and journey.

I’m a former student of Stefanie Gass and did everything she ever told me to do. I ended up a whole lot better for it, and you will be too. I love CrossFit. I’m super crunchy, and I don’t like chemicals in my home or my food. So, yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

From Student to Friend

Stef: That’s actually how we became more than ‘coach and student.’ I started to message Chelsi. I need to get rid of my plastics, and I don’t know where to start. She was a great mentor to me, helped me detox my home, and educated me. We became friends through it. God is so good in how He works.

Friend, you have such an incredible gift for helping us get organized. I mean, not in a cute, tidy-up way. I mean the deep-rooted work about:

• Getting it together
• Getting focused
• Getting intentional

Just walking into a room and feeling in control again. It’s this really beautiful gift you have over your life. We’re going to dive into that today.

Productivity Is Not Busyness

Stef: Can we start with a conversation about what we think productivity is? And maybe these ideas about how we actually operate our lives, as so many of us working moms, women who work from home, or women who work and have a side hustle at the same time. What does this actually look like? What is this reality for us now, which then leads us from busyness to needing what you have to offer?

Chelsi Jo: Yeah, there’s so much to talk about here. This is literally my mission work. So let me see if I can be brief. I think we’ve come into this time and space in our era on Earth. Our current culture suggests that women are responsible for many things.

The lineage that gave us the responsibility and even in our belief system, for most of us who are Christians, who want to spearhead what a home feels like:

• The actual spirit of the home
• The tone of the home
• What does it feel like?
• How we interact with our kids and spouses
• The cooking and cleaning

And just really providing a space for nurturing is something that we’ve carried for a really long time.

Busyness and So Many Responsibilities

Chelsi Jo: But on top of that, now, we’re also carrying this sometimes need and want to make money too. Doing all of that for a lot of people seems really impossible. I went through it myself. I struggled to figure out how to work outside the home as a sign language interpreter, which is what I had done before starting this business. With my Mom, I ran an event-based business. We did flowers and designs for weddings and boutique weddings.

I had a brand-new husband and a brand-new baby. There was shared parenting time with our oldest daughter and her biological dad. It was so much trying to figure out how to cook meals all week, and figuring out how not to spend two hours on Pinterest trying to decide what to put in a crockpot for one of those meals. Then make a grocery list and don’t go out to eat 45 times or be at the Chick-fil-A drive-through again. Let alone keep the toilets clean, and not see a ring of mold. Honestly, it just was so much.

Busyness Makes You Uncomfortable in Your Own Skin

Chelsi Jo: My brand-new marriage was crumbling. What I see happen so much is the constant chaos and women dealing with it in two ways. The first way is that they wear the badge, and they think it’s cute. They ignore that they don’t feel good in their own skin. They don’t like what they look or feel like anymore.

It’s physically painful because they’re overweight or underweight, wherever you’re at on that spectrum, because I was always on the underweight side. I know a lot of people are on the overweight side, but both of those things have a great impact on your health.

It affects how you interact with your children. It affects how you interact with your spouse. They know, and you know, that you’re not showing up for who you actually are supposed to be and who you want to be.

Busyness Causes You to Give Up on Your Dreams

Chelsi Jo: The other option is what I see women doing, as they just give up on their dreams altogether and pour 100% into their family. They pour 100% into everything, and then they end up having bitterness and resentment towards everything and everyone.

The end result is that we end up in a place where women fight fiercely and try to work their tails off all hours of the day, with no reward at the end of it. You go to bed at the end of the night and have no idea what you did. But guess what? I closed the rings on my watch today.

Stef: Don’t throw shade at the rings. I’m super here for them. I got a new ultra watch, you guys. I’m enjoying this, but okay, I digress.

Chelsi Jo: You know what I mean. When all we’re doing is trying to check boxes to prove that we accomplished something,g but inside we feel like nothing of value has ever taken place. That’s not productivity.

Stef: And then I don’t even know what I’ve done.

Chelsi Jo: No idea. Because guess what? You know you made 10,000 steps. But where? Because there’s still crap everywhere in your house. Your emails are still unanswered. You don’t even know what your kids wore to school today. Like, you don’t know. Somebody called and said, “Hey, we can’t find your kid. What did they wear to school today?” You don’t know. You saw him, but you didn’t see him.

With Busyness, You’re Just Putting Out Fires

Chelsi Jo: It’s like everything is moving around you so freaking fast and all you’re doing is putting out fires all day long. Because you’re trying to do all the things that I just said you’re trying to do. There’s nothing wrong with that. Those are honorable things. It’s the way that you’re choosing to go about it because you have not picked up the correct tool for the job.

Stef: One of the things that was the most painful for me was when I couldn’t remember a meaningful moment with my kids. I was trying to think what had happened today. And I couldn’t remember a moment when I looked into their eyes. I couldn’t think of a moment where we had a real conversation.

And even if we did, it wasn‘t enough to deeply root in my heart because busyness caused me to chase my own tail. I‘m so glad Chelsi came into my life because I’ve gone through every system that Chelsi offers. I‘ve implemented every single thing that she has.

Get Rid of Busyness and Be Truly Present in Your Life

Stef: Today, we’re going to talk about two ways that we can solve this problem because busyness is not productivity. You must organize your life if you want to:

• Make money in your business
• Have a healthy, fruitful marriage
• Have meaningful moments with your children

Meaningful moments that matter not just to you but also to them. You have time and space to be really and truly present. This is where it all begins. So, Chelsi, talk to us a bit about these two major systems and which one we start with.

Chelsi Jo: Before I answer that question, I get hit in the face all the time with major resistance from every single person. I’ve had people slander me. This is not possible. It’s not possible to balance everything. It’s not possible, and I’m like, whatever. I’m doing it!

Stef: I’m doing it too.

Chelsi Jo: And I’m not lying to myself. No, I’m not. I do all the things that I want to do. Are they at the capacity that my little heart so badly desires? No. I’m not sitting on the floor playing with Legos and crafting sensory bins, doing all the Pinterest mom things. No, people, I’m really not.

Stop Busyness Little by Little

Chelsi: But guess what? We do eat whole, clean food. I have made changes in every area of my life to some degree, taking me in the direction I want to go. Every day, we continue to systematize, little by little. In my business, I show up hard and have a great impact because:

• I know what I’m doing because Stefanie helped me get to that point.
• I have my tasks.
• I have a task management system.

Now that my business has grown, I have a full-blown operating system.

Eliminate Busyness Starts With a Foundation

Chelsi: But the foundation of that is this business task management system that helps me know exactly what to do and when to do it. So, I can get in and out of that work block, not mess around, make an impact, create income, and then get back to the rest of my responsibilities.

Nothing about that is false. Everything about it can be a reality. I’ve seen it happen for so many people. I believe these signature systems are absolutely a requirement if they want to run a business from home, work from home, and show up in all the ways.

The two foundational pieces that you must start with are these two systems that we’re going to dive into. The first is a home management system. There are four pieces that I want to share with you right now. Then I’ll tell you what the second system is after we get done going through this one.

The First System Is Home Management

Stef: Perfect. So now the question is, why would we start with home?

Chelsi Jo: That’s my heart. So many are different in this. I’ve learned that there are two different ways people come at this. For me, my default is home management. That’s why I created the home management system first. And that’s why I make my students do it first.

Because it doesn’t matter how successful your business is. If your home is in shambles, it’s not really going to be as successful as you want it to be. I know there has never been anyone who’s like, “Yeah, my business is amazing, but I don’t have a relationship with my kids or my husband, and I haven’t had a date in forever.” We don’t really need to go into it any deeper than to say that the real foundation, I believe, of a godly woman is to make sure that they’re stewarding their:

• Marriage
• Home
• Family

They’re stewarding these things before they give all of their talents and their first fruits to everything else. But that’s where we need to put it first. This can be so overwhelming and time-consuming that we feel like there’s no time left. That’s why we start, practically speaking, with the home management system. Because I’m about to free up somewhere between 10 to 20 hours of your life so that you can do this business by having a home management system in place.

Stef: Incredible! Alright, take us through the steps, Friend.

First: Manage Your Time Well

Chelsi Jo: First and foremost, you need to manage your time well, and it should be flexible. When you come in and learn my home management system, the way that I teach it. The first thing we tackle is how you manage your time. I have a very literal color-coded, copy-and-paste template.

Let me help you create a framework for your life with five major time blocks, some routine tasks, and other things that we’ll build on as you develop a home management system. We’ve had over a thousand people go through this. Whether or not you’re:

• Working 9 to 5
• A stay-at-home mom
• A homeschooling Mom
• A work-from-home mom
• You run a major business
• You do nothing
• You’re a husband
• You’re a work-from-home dad

I don’t care who you are or what you do. It’s worked for every single person. This time management piece is an absolute game-changer.

Even My Husband Is on Board With This

Chelsi Jo: After about six years of managing my time this way, my husband, Blaine, is finally practicing it independently on his own. Listen, I don’t care if your husband has never touched a Google Calendar and knows nothing of it. That’s no excuse. Blaine didn’t either. I did all of this and bamboozled my whole family. They had no idea it was coming, and I smacked them with it, and now they love it.

This is just how our family runs. So, the first is time management. Let’s get your time under control and make sure it’s flexible, so you’re not putting out fires all day long. You’ll actually embrace the curveballs and know what to do with them. You will be able to accomplish a lot throughout the day, more than you probably ever have in your life.

Second: Automate Your Tasks

Chelsi Jo: The second part of the home management system is automating your tasks. So when we look at your to-dos, everything that you’re writing down on your to-do list is very unnecessary. All of it should be automated.

95% of it can be automated. Five percent of it will actually need to go on a to-do list, but I can literally take all your to-dos and automate them, so you never have to think about them again. They’ll fit into about eight buckets and eight categories that I give to you, and you repeat them. You put them on your calendar and do them every single week.

They stay there. They’re static. For example, maybe it can’t happen on Tuesday. We have a family fun activity. We have our meal planning and meal prepping. There are a lot of different things that we put in there, and we put them on the calendar. But sometimes on Tuesdays, I can’t do that because Blaine is working. He’s a firefighter on shift, so we can’t do that thing that we said we were going to do.

So we have to move it. We simply move it. I always have those things automated every week, and now my family’s to-do list has only three or four things on it each week. I set aside time to tackle those things. That time is called “To-Do,” and I tackle those few random things I set aside in that hour or two. I also give a bunch of them to other people. I have other people do things because I’ve automated it. It’s really easy to outsource.

Third: Manage Your Home

Chelsi Jo: The third step is to consistently manage your home. As in, how do we keep this bad boy clean and tidy? So a lot of people come to this point, and you may be like, “I don’t know how to keep up with any of it because I have too much stuff.”

When you start learning how to consistently manage your home, you might hit the quick pause button on implementing your home management system. I can take you through my escape method and help you clear your clutter, so you can live a mess-free life. That’s probably worth every dime you’ll ever spend on getting your house decluttered. Stef’s gone through this whole process.

It Worked for Stef

Stef: I did, and I was just going to embarrass myself so that no one feels bad. I felt like I was pretty good, and I ended up getting rid of over 60 trash bags.

• Some were donations
• Some went to people who needed things
• Some were trash

There are 60 bags of things, Friends, in my life! I now try to do this once a year. Thank goodness it’s much less cluttered. It’s also helped me reframe my mind about whether I actually need this thing. It’s helped me be a different type of consumer. I 100% attest to step three in a million ways.

Chelsi Jo: Escaping clutter is a huge part of having a consistent home. Once we get the clutter under control, and maybe yours already is, we go through this in my community twice a year. We have an escape challenge, which is really fun for our students to do together as a community and declutter actively. But then we just talk about how you automate within your life. How do you build into your time blocks when you’re going to turn around and tidy your space?

So, when you get to the end of the day, and all you want to do is sit down, and all you can think about is sitting down because you’re exhausted, you sit down in a clean house, not in a house where you see where everyone has been all day long. Furthermore, we will discuss setting up your cleaning schedule in a simple rotation by dividing your house into zones. There’s a consistent home management piece of that.

Fourth: Get Support From Your Family

Chelsi Jo: The fourth part is my favorite part. I tried so many times not to include this in my full-blown home management system, but it’s absolutely a requirement. It’s getting support from your family in a very simple way. We actually take you through this week by week.

So we get through each of these steps in one week, so that you can learn them, and then we support you in implementing them. This part is really for you to be able to say, “Now I have an actual thing that I’m doing. I have a system. Now I need to communicate it and understand how to get the buy-in from everyone else around me.”

So many women are like, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. My husband has always wanted me to be this woman. He’s super excited.” Then other people are like, “Absolutely not. I can’t get my husband or my kids involved. How are you doing this?”

I provide literal language cues and guided support on how to help you craft a leadership style that not only sets you up but also encourages others to participate in this home management system with you.

It Can Bring Your Family Together

Stef: I’ll share that before using this home management system, I was doing all the laundry for my entire household on my own for many years. It’s me, my husband, and my two boys. We also live in the country, with lots of mud and dust. I was relentlessly frustrated.

After getting Chelsi’s coaching through that one simple conversation, it really made a big impact on me, resulting in Thursday’s family laundry night. Now we play music, and it’s a whole lot of fun. Everybody does all their laundry once a week. It’s been a bonding experience that I thought was impossible. I couldn’t even bring myself because I just thought it was a woman’s place, because of the way that I was raised. It’s amazing.

Chelsi’s Home Management Program to conquer busyness

Stef: You guys, all four of these incredible steps are inside Chelsi’s home management program, Systemize Your Life. Not to mention the bonus of being in her community. Chelsi just mentioned that it comes with two escape challenges. You get her. She’s an amazing coach who helps you implement these tasks and components of time management, as well as all the templates that come with it.

Chelsi Jo: Yeah, you’ll get my budgeting system. You also get all kinds of systems that Blaine and I use in our marriage, which are major bonuses. There’s live coaching on Zoom with my student success coach, who probably knows my method better than I do. She’s so killer. Everyone loves her. There’s so much dedicated support. We have coaching sessions that take place twice a day in the Facebook community. We actually ask for pictures to see your work.

We’re super supportive because what I know for sure is that setting up a home management system feels like a lot of work. We want to make it as simple as possible, and I want this to be the way that you run your home indefinitely. I want you to understand how systems work so that you can look at life through a systematic lens.

The Second System Is Business Task Management Over Busyness

Chelsi Jo: Let’s shift now to the second system, which is business task management. When you go through Systemize Your Life, we’ll help you understand what your work blocks are and where to put them. I’m also going to help you do some simple math for a power hour once a day.

That’s five hours a week in the mornings and then a two-hour block throughout the rest of the week, every single day. You have just created 15 hours for your side hustle that you’ve been trying to fit into the cracks of your day through your cell phone, thinking that you were getting work done.

And you don’t understand why your business isn’t growing or isn’t taking off. First of all, Systemize Your Life is going to help you craft those blocks. These questions will now make sense.

• What do you actually do when you sit down to that work block that you’ve created?
• How do you keep yourself from just scrolling Instagram?
• How do you keep yourself from saying, I need to create posts?
• How do you keep yourself from falling victim to meaningless task-crunching when you sit down for a work block?

Step 1: Flush Out Every Single Task

Chelsi Jo: You have a task management system. That’s what you have. This has four parts that I will take you through in four weeks. That’s a beautiful thing about being a student of mine because it’s very systematic. It’s cool because you’ll get the rhythm of it. You’re going to understand what this feels like.

So the first thing that we’re going to do is sit down, and I’m going to have you flesh out every single task. You’re going to automate what you think are daily tasks, but I’m going to teach you how to make those tasks daily, weekly, and monthly, so you know exactly what to do every single day. We’re going to give you one little daily card. Stefanie is giving you an “Amen” over there.

Friends, This Is Life-Changing

Stef: Guys, this is truly life-changing. Life changing. If I could take a second and tell you how I felt in my business before implementing all of Chelsi’s business-related systems. I was confused and running from about 37 different tasks that I thought were operating systems.

They were basically glorified task cards, and they were all over the place. They were a mess. Nothing was put in the proper time frame. So, I’d work on something that didn’t need to be worked on yet, and then I’d run out of time to work on the thing that needed to be worked on.

I sat down to work, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. So I would pick whatever random task was first on the list. It was completely chaoti,c and it really kept me chaotic:

• In my business
• In my mind
• I felt confused

That’s the word that I would say. I often felt confused about my business. To be able to say and attest to doing the work to get it all out of your brain and into this beautiful task management system. It frees up the obsessive wheel of thinking and decision fatigue that I would have to go through around what I should be working on and what I should be doing. That’s completely gone. Even here in Step one, getting your automated dailies out of your brain and into a place where you know what you’re supposed to do.

Chelsi Jo: Because here’s the thing. I didn’t have a lot of time, and I needed to replace my income. What actually happened was that I wanted to be home because I was being forced to breastfeed at work, and it wasn’t working.

I Had to Go All In

Chelsi Jo: So I did want to be home for that reason, but then the pandemic came. As a sign language interpreter, you need two people in the same room to need an interpreter. One has to be deaf, one has to be hearing, and then you have the interpreter. No one was in the same room anymore. They were doing it all online. It was a catastrophe, and I hated it.

My hours went from 20 to 25 hours a week, which I needed, to maybe two hours a week. And that was without the government stipends. I don’t know what we would have done without them. That’s where we were in our lives.

So I knew that I had to go all in in a very short amount of time in my work block, and I needed it to matter. I knew exactly what Stefanie had told me about podcasting. The strategy and actual tasks, and not being confused about what to do.

I Needed That Time to Really Matter

Chelsi Jo: I wanted to just be so stinking consistent, and I needed that time to really matter. I didn’t have time to scroll Instagram. There was no time to do that. And so, to help myself, I use my systematic brain, which just does what it does, and it creates these things.

Because I was trying to sell Systemize Your Life, I was over here on the back end systemizing the poop out of my business, and come to find four years later; it’s what everyone wants to know how to do too. So we’re doing that now, too, right? So, Step one is getting in there and automating all those tasks. You know exactly what to do every day, every week, every month.

Step 2: Organize the Extras

Chelsi: Step two is organizing any extra client or event work—those extra things. You need to provide something to someone, and you don’t want to drop the ball. You’re working together with someone or providing a service for someone. You’re showing up to your first coaching call.

What are all the things that you need to do? What are all of those steps in that process that you’re going to do again and again? Why are you recreating the wheel? We get this super organized. We get it flushed out so you never have to think about it.

Step 3: Automate Your Marketing Content

Chelsi: The 3rd step is the humdinger here. This is whenever you automate your marketing content. This means you now know exactly when, why, and what you’re posting on every platform, whether it’s short-form or long-form content. If it’s a:

• Blog
• Podcast
• YouTube
• Social Media

If you’re on that platform, you know when you’re posting, what you’re posting, and why you’re posting it. You plug it in and duplicate it every month. You tweak a few things and make it fit whatever you’re selling, whatever you’re talking about, and you never think about it again.

No more trying to be like, “Oh, I need to record my kids doing this because it looks like really great content, and I haven‘t posted today, and I’m super stressed.” I never do that. That’s not a thing. For me, showing up on social is such a joy and a treat. I look forward to sharing.

But if I don’t, who cares? The podcast, too. I’ve only missed one podcast episode in four years. I’ve produced two podcast episodes every single week for four years, and I’ve only missed one. I am super freaking proud of that because I’ve been able to systemize it.

A few times, I’ve thought, “Okay, I have to do this right now, and it hasn’t felt super inspired.” There have been a handful of times. However, I have over 400 podcast episodes, and I feel great creating that content every single time because of this step in my task management system.

Step 4: Get Your Projects Organized

Chelsi: So the last part of having a business task management system is getting your projects organized. Knowing which projects you need to do to reach your goals and getting them built into your week and month so that you’re actually making headway on them is absolutely vital for you to grow.

Stef: This is just incredible. I mean, imagine taking eight weeks. Eight weeks is nothing to learn these eight foundational steps to getting super organized in your life and business. Imagine the time, the peace in your mind, the intentionality you would feel if you really made this a priority.

What a beautiful act of self-love to give this to yourself and say, I am worth saying yes to this system. Chelsi’s got so many incredible bonuses in both of these, with all of the support.

Chelsi’s Systems Will Bless You

Stef: Every system Chelsi mentioned today is included. I can’t tell you how much they’ve impacted me and how much they’ll truly bless you. What else do you want to leave with Chelsi? Let them know where they can find and connect with you. You have an amazing podcast, and there are some fun things to check out as well.

Use Systems That Produce the Results You Want

Chelsi Jo: Secondly, whether you’re a type “A” personality or not, you will fall to the level of your systems. You cannot produce more than the systems that you have in place. You have systems, routines, and rhythms happening every single day in your life.

They’re just not working for you the way that you want them to. So it’s time to change what systems you’re using to systems that produce the outcome that you want, instead of falling down to the level of whatever poor systems you’ve put in place by:

• Lack of intention
• Lack of education
• Lack of knowledge and application

Which is what we’re here to do. So, if you want to learn more about a systemized life, come over and check me out on any podcast streaming platform at Systemize Your Life. You can also visit my website to access all our free resources and learn more about me and the incredible signature systems I offer.

I pray this blesses you!

APPLE PODCAST | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

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