For those seasons when you feel like you’re going nowhere slowly.

Do you ever come to the end of the day or week and think to yourself — did I even do anything useful or productive? Or maybe you're in a season where you just feel a little bit stuck or you're unsure where you're heading. Maybe you feel guilty that you haven't made any progress towards your goals or the intentions you set out at the beginning of the year.

Well, I'm giving you permission to stop what you're doing right now and fine-tune the direction you're heading in. Otherwise, you might just find yourself so far off by the end of the year and I don't want that for you, friend. You ready?

"Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change."

– Jim Rohn

I get it, change is not the most ~fun~ word out there, especially not if you feel like you're in a rut that you can't get out of. So in this blog, I'm outlining 5 *easy* steps to get you going in a better direction. You can use these steps to readjust your entire life, or just one area of your life. I hope it's helpful.

Before we start — if you feel guilty for taking 4 hours or a whole weekend to reflect and build your vision, remember this — time spent intentionally thinking and planning is NOT unproductive time. It is just as valuable to figure out what's working and what's not and making a plan as it is to execute a plan and make the things happen. Stop condemning yourself.

01. Start with reflection

You can't go somewhere if you don't know where you are and where you've been.

Get a pen and paper, a nice quiet spot, and go through some of these questions. You can reflect on the last 6 months, the past year, or the last week. Do whatever is applicable to you right now.

• What went really well?

• What surprised me?

• What am I most proud of accomplishing?

• What challenged me?

• What was my favorite day, moment, experience?

• What were you doing? What was amazing about it? How did you feel?

• What did I discover about myself?

• What am I most grateful for?

• When did fear hold me back?

• What have I learned in the past year?

• What conclusions did I reach?

02. Build a big vision

What's your vision statement to guide you into this next season?

Here are some questions to help you in thinking ahead.

• What are you looking forward to?

• What do you want to do differently?

• What area of your life do you most want to develop?

• What do you want to accomplish?

• What needs to change in order for you to realistically achieve my goals?

(These questions are adapted from Susannah Conway's Unravel Your Year workbooks.)

03. How do you eat an elephant?

Let’s make that vision a reality!

Now you’re going to outline the goals to make your vision a reality. Remember to keep it simple. Complexity is part of the reason we get lost in the first place because we lose sight of moving forward.

You’ve probably heard this analogy before, but it really helps me to understand how this works. Let’s say you have a jar filled with rocks — is the jar full? Yes, it is. But now let’s throw in some pebbles — is the jar full now? Yes, it’s full. What if we add some sand to the jar?

If you try doing this in reverse by starting with the sand, you’re never going to be able to fit in all those big important rocks you wanted to.

Let’s make it practical! Imagine that your jars are your Big Goals, the rocks are your milestones (the “big targets” or the things you need to do in order to get to the goal), the pebbles are the projects (anything that has more than 2 tasks) that will bring you closer to those milestones, and the sand is your tasks, quick actions and to-dos.

Are you starting to see some light on your path?

04. Plan your ideal week

You have to design your calendar with purpose.

If you’re not going to tell your time where to go, it's going to make the decisions for you. So I would suggest you either use pen en paper and draw out a full week with time increments or use your Google Calendar to create “blocks” of time so that you can map out your ideal week.

1. Start with all the no negotiables (family time, relationships, workouts, learning, any obligations or commitments)

2. Now you'll start to see how many hours you have left for "client work"

3. Are you actively leaving time for hobbies & learning, and rest?

4. Remember to add buffer time/overflow work time. You need to work in margin for things out of your control and to make sure you leave yourself time for planning, thinking, dreaming, strategising, making decisions, etc.

If you have a hard time plotting out how much time you need for work, it might be helpful for you to use a time-tracker for a week or so to see how much time you are really spending on specific tasks. Rescue Time is super helpful for this as it tracks what you’re doing on your computer in the background and gives you a summary each week, I also use Toggl Track to track how long certain tasks take me, like designing an album, editing an engagement shoot, writing a blog, etc. So that I can plan those things better into my weekly schedule.

05. Review

This is probably the one step that will make all of this actually work. It’s great to plan things and figure things out for ourselves in our heads or to start a new routine or new habits, but if you don’t schedule time to check in with yourself, review whether what you’re doing is actually working for you or figure out where you are with all the beautiful goals you’ve set you’re not actually going to reach any of them.

Schedule a time at the end of every week where you review your work from the past week, see what you accomplished and see which tasks you weren’t able to get to. Take inventory of how you are tracking towards your goals, how your client projects are doing, and plan the next week.

Remember when planning your tasks for the week to make sure you schedule the tasks that are going to move the needle on your goals as well as all your client work and deadlines.

I also find it helpful to do a quick check-in at the end of each day. I do this in a type of daily journal where I also record things I’m grateful for that day, my highs & lows, and any areas where I need to improve and plan the next day. This might be total overkill for you, but it’s been a super helpful rhythm I’ve been building that helps keep my anxiety low especially when I have a lot of fo deadlines and my brain feels foggy.

If you keep seeing certain tasks not getting done, maybe you should consider breaking them down into even smaller, micro- or sub-tasks. Or you could evaluate how important that task really is, maybe you don’t need to do it yourself and you can delegate it to free up your internal RAM.

Important to note

Put your vision as well as your goals somewhere where you can see it every day. If it's important enough it needs to be visible.

I really hope this was helpful for you! Don’t be too hard on yourself when you feel stuck, just take a deep breath and think of one quick win thing you can do — maybe it’s just setting a timer for 10mins and replying to as many emails as you can and then taking a break instead of trying to get to Inbox Zero and then lose half of your day. You don’t have to compare your “accomplishments to anybody else’s. As long as you take small simple steps, you’re going to get to where you need to be.