This is a special collaboration that I have been so excited to share with some of my favorite people in the entire world. And that is not an exaggeration. They save my life every Monday through Thursday. And I'm just so grateful for each and every one of them.  

Allie Elliott is our integrator and one of our certified CEO Teacher® coaches. Allie has been on the podcast a couple of times this year, and I am excited she was able to close it out with the rest of our amazing members of Team Kayse. Allie has been with Team Kayse for almost two years now.  And it's crazy how fast time flies. She helps systematize everything and keep everyone organized. Allie takes all of our amazing ideas and visions and turns them into a reality and makes them all pretty in our content management software, Asana. 

Tina Gabel is Team Kayse's community leader and you will find her inside of Facebook, the inbox, and on the website answering questions and keeping the conversation going. Tina is also a certified CEO Teacher® Coach, along with Allie and Jen and amazing help inside of the community. Tina shared some time management strategies and ways to help you stay focused and make the most out of your workweek. 

Jen Murphy is the integrator's assistant and resident graphic designer. Jen shared some organizational tips about how she manages time between the two very busy and detailed job descriptions, with all of the Asana tasks we have going each day.  

So there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. And I just want you to know that it hasn't always looked like this. I didn't think it would look like this when I first began. Even now it wouldn’t look like this. If we hadn’t taken an entire year of preparation to get to where we are today. And most of that is because Allie from Team Kayse has integrated all of the crazy ideas I come up with and the messiness that is business.  

So Team Kayse came together to share some quick tips and tricks that you can take with you when you're planning for the next year. And give you some of the top marketing trends that we see coming. Our word for the past year was Systematize. So we took everything that we had and we put in a really great system that helped us move quickly for the last year. And our word for next year is numbers. So we are really excited to kind of dig down deep in the data and see what's working, and what's not. So when we tell you, we have some trends that are coming up and just some tips and tricks, we're doing our research and we're not just telling you different shiny objects to chase. We want to make sure that you are focused and you're ready to go for the new year. 

We have just recently moved to a four-day workweek. Were we completely ready to move to a four-day workweek? I'm not sure where we were as prepared as we should have been. But we're like those people that like to figure it all out as we go.  So I think these time management strategies are going to be super important to manage your time effectively, no matter if you're in the classroom or if you're outside of the classroom. 

Teacher Time Management Strategies

Allie said it's been a great year to be able to kind of figure out what we need to do to best all work as a team and to get what we need to get done. It's been wonderful to be able to move to a four-day workweek and to have some more time. When we're working, we're all in, working really hard to get everything done.  And then when they’re not working for Team Kayse, they’re able to enjoy time with family. Here at Team Kayse, it is family first and family always. So it may not be feasible for you in your current season. But it's something to think about as you're moving forward. 

For Allie, one of the biggest time management tips is making time blocks of different tasks. Instead of saying, she’ll just kind of work through things one after the other, she comes up with either a 30 minute or one-hour block of time where she is focused on getting tasks assigned to people. The other members may come into our project management software. We use ASANA by the way, it's our bread and butter. We use it every single day and LOVE it. Asana really helps us stay organized. We plan all of our content each quarter, in kind of an overview. And fully plan everything out month by month. That way you could really take everything that you want to do and then break it up into specific tasks. 

So Allie goes into Asana for a whole hour and spends the time assigning tasks and creating different tasks for different team members. Team members may have 50 new tasks assigned to them for a whole quarter, and those can show up in a matter of minutes in their inbox. But it's really helpful when you can break up your time into specific chunks where you have one focus for that 30 minutes or that hour. Instead of trying to do all the things, be really focused on one thing and then mark it off for the month. 

Allie says you can either do that in a program like Asana or Monday.com, Click-Up, and Trello. There are so many different project management systems. You could also do this in your Google calendar if you're a solopreneur. And just trying to find time to execute what you want to get done in a month or a quarter, plug those things into your Google calendar and set it up like an event. That means that you're busy and you have to get it done during that time. 

I think that it's important to note too, where this all starts from. Allie mentioned the quarter calendar. We plan out each quarter about three months in advance, then we really plan out the whole year in advance. Allie talks about how she takes the ideas and then assigns those tasks to every single person on the team. But even before that, we take a look at everyone's schedule and their calendar and their activities. One of our core values here at Team Kayse is family first, family always. So Allie shared how we plan for life before we plan for work.

Your priorities are basically the thing that you need to remember as a business owner and teacher. Prioritize and schedule what needs to be a priority in your life.  We look at our team's birthdays. We look at spring break, different holidays for the whole year at a glance. Then we see the times that we need to be off work. Then we push more of our work into the season where we don't have as much going on that way we can work around the things that we want to be available for. We really value our time off and hold our boundaries really strong there. That way we can be all in when it is time to work. And the same thing goes with our launches and the different things that we do. We like to plan events for the year during times when there's nothing else going on that would distract us.  We don’t want to lose out on important memories and moments that we all want to share with our loved ones. 

I can attest to the fact that Allie is very focused on a task when she said she's going to be. We also have a software messaging system called Slack where we chat with each other. So we don't have to email each other, or we don't have to be inside of the actual project talking. We try to reserve Slack for just quick needs and super quick things that need attention immediately, but it does kind of take away your attention from a task. So we try to honor those specific time blocks for our team members. And we know that if we send them a Slack message, we don't expect them to respond immediately unless they are in a block of time where that is acceptable. So I think that managing and prioritizing your time is the best-case scenario when it comes to getting as much done in as little bit of time as possible.

Tina is our community manager and I'm always blown away at the support that she gives to our students inside of our communities as a coach. She not only coaches our students on a monthly basis but also in one-on-one coaching calls. And not only am I just blown away but also our students send so many messages about how they feel at home around her. I really don't know how she does it either. I don't even know how she begins to manage to keep up with the thousands of students that we have in our Facebook communities. Not to mention how on fire they are plus being a certified coach, plus being in the inbox, plus writing blog posts. 

For Tina, and she says it might sound like an obvious choice, you have to turn off your notifications. She says, not just on your phone, setting your phone aside, which is something that she does, but turning off your notifications on your apple watch, on your phone, on your laptop, on your desktop. Because when they start dinging at different areas of the office, inside the house, on your person, they become super distracting so turn them all off.  She also turns off notifications inside of the specific apps that she is using. She is Team Kayse’s Facebook community leader, and she has her own personal Facebook as well, plus her own personal Instagram. Tina says, there's nothing more distracting than having a personal notification come through that her daughter sent something while she is trying to answer questions for the community. Make sure that you're turning off all of those notifications inside the specific apps. 

Tina is three hours behind the rest of the team. And so her day may start a little earlier so she can be inside of Slack and Asana during the workday.  But it allows her to get up, get going, and really kind of designate a good three to four-hour chunk in the morning when her creativity is at its peak. Once Tina begins her self-designated work time slot, she batches her work.  She schedules it out. SO one day she will sit down and write all the captions needed. She writes all the captions for the next two-week period. 10 days to two weeks worth of content in one 3 hour block. The next time she is working, she works on all the images for the posts.  And then in her third-time block, she schedules everything by putting the captions with the images, scheduling it all out for a good two-week period at a time. Tina loves having all of the assigned tasks in Asana. It allows her to see the big picture of where we are headed as a Team. She loves this style of batching because then you're not distracted by trying to change the creative way that your brain is working from words to images and dates and back and forth. 

I think that's super important what she said about making sure your brain is kind of in that section or creative space. Tina does a lot of copy work for us, I mean, she is writing constantly for our Facebook posts, our blog and she's taking podcast episodes and she's translating them into other places where we can kind of release the content everywhere. So she's doing a lot of brainpower work that takes a lot of effort. And so channeling that into one specific section of time in your day is the most important.  Tina finds that the mornings work best for when it comes to being creative and writing!

The end of her day is when she spends the time to schedule everything out because the words come easier in the morning. One last time management tip she wanted to mention was to keep everything organized. When you're writing those captions and you're inside of your Google drive and you notice that something isn't labeled correctly or is out of place, Tina says, save the organizing for another time. You don't want to get distracted by going down the rabbit hole of organizing your Google drive, (which always needs to be done). You don't want to do that while you're trying to write captions, newsletters or, any of the copy that needs to be written. So she spends her mornings writing with a cup of coffee, headphones in, and uninterrupted time.

Keep The Main -Thing The Main Thing, Even When Managing Your Time

Note to self, I got distracted for at least an hour today, reorganizing my Google drive. So I completely relate to what Tina said. And I was listening to a coach the other day that said that oftentimes when things get hard, we revert back to what we know and what feels good and what is easy. So if I'm creating new content, it is insanely hard for me to come up with things for longer than I like an hour and a half period.  And so when I get tired or frustrated, or my eyes are crossed, I go back to what is easy. I go back to what is simple. And I'm like, oh, let me organize my Google drive, which has no impact on the quality of our business or our company at all. 

Tina tells us that if you just sat down for a time block of, let's say an hour, and you focus on one thing, just the copy of your Facebook posts for the next two weeks, then you can get more done in less time. Because you are not jumping from place to place with your brain and your creative space. The clarity is there of what your message needs to be and what you really want to be saying. You're not thinking about the dates that need to be on the image itself or the photos you might use, and when it needs to be posted. You're just thinking about the messaging and getting that clear and out to the people. 

Jen is our integrator's assistant, which means that anything Allie needs help with, she is there to kind of save the day. And Jen blows my mind because she has also just taken on the role of in-house graphic designer, which is a huge job in itself. It's literally like a 40 hour a week job, but she somehow is culminating both of these things together and just doing an amazing job. Note to self, be more like Jen, because she never seems stressed. She always gets it done in record time. 

Jen says it helps that she is having so much fun! She tends to focus on one task and then only that one and shuts everything else off, similar to Allie and Tina. But when she gets to her desk in the morning, she will look at everything she needs to get done for the day and prioritize and group them into similar items. So kind of like batching but she puts a timeframe on each one so she can decide where it fits into her schedule.  If Jen knows we have a coaching call and she has two hours before that she doesn’t want to work on something that might take three hours. Because then she will have to stop her mind and go back and forth from creative space to coaching.

So very similar to how Tina was saying, being on with just one project at a time. Jen does the graphic design for us. But she says rather than just saying today is a day of images. She focuses only on the Facebook post images for Tina, instead of doing a slide deck and then graphic for the membership and then a Facebook post and then another slide deck. She groups them all together by type. And if she finds she is getting picky on one, because she feels like she is a perfectionist but she knows perfectionism is a form of procrastination. So if she finds herself getting nitpicky on something, she’ll take a step away for a second even to just go outside and get a breath of fresh air and then come back. That usually helps her realize it is fine and allows her to move on. 

Being able to take a step away, because she can just sit at the computer all day long and not get up while working. So reminding herself to get up for a second helps her stay more focused or else she finds she is just going in a circle over the same task. 

And that's something that I think we do a great job of communicating with each other.  We're going to talk about how we can even make it better for next year. But for example, Jen and I are working on a project together. I'm creating content for a course inside of our community, she's creating the slides and we've been communicating back and forth. And she was like, okay, well I've set aside this time to finish this task. And then I'll revisit this a little bit later this afternoon.  And it gave me time to say, okay, she's not waiting on me. Like she's not sitting there just like, okay, Kayse finished writing this content so I can get done. She went ahead and went to another project while I kind of stayed focused on the course creation. So being really clear with your communication, with all of the members or people that are working for you, or with you, or even if you're working for yourself be clear in your expectations. 

Time Management Tips For The Teachers Who Are Doing It All

Let's not forget that they all have their own brands and they all run their own businesses as well. And I was curious how they manage everything from their own business perspective. I know many teachers don't have a whole team that can help you.  Allie says she has actually done something a little bit different this past quarter. She has really let social media take a back seat. She has reprioritized what really needs to get done because yes she is working on her business when she’s not working for team Kayse. She loves doing both things, but they both are very similar in the sense that she is working at the computer for both of them.  It's similar work. She can’t sit at the computer for a full workday for Team Kayse and then just jump right back into her own business. And Allie knows we all want to prioritize other things as well. 

She has found that keeping the main thing, the main thing is the most important thing and really figuring out what needs to get done. Yes. Social media is fine. Yes. It feels good to get more people on your email list from a reel that you made or a Facebook post. But is that actually going to move the needle forward in her business?  She’s not quite sure. And what she found personally is, even though she loves Instagram, it's super fun. She loves the visual aspects of it. It actually doesn't bring her as many sales as some of the other things she does. So she’s really prioritized her top three, which are product creation and creating things for my business, content creation in the form of blogging, and then email list.  If she can do those three things, then that makes her feel good. 

Allie looks at her Google Google calendar for the week and says, okay, use this time for Team Kayse work, and then she’ll take a break and go make dinner.  Then she will come back to her business and do an hour of work and focus on a single task. So the same tools and things that Allie does for Team Kayse are what she uses as a business owner. She says as a full-time teacher or a mom and a business owner, whatever you do, be really honest with yourself and know what needs to get done versus what you want to get done.  And then carve that time out of your day and make it a priority.  

Tina agreed with Allie. She also had to take a step back from the social media aspect of her business because the vanity metrics weren't sending her business in the direction that it needed to go. So she really honed in on content creation, blogging, email, and actual content videos. And by kind of letting go of social media, it took the stress off of her having to show up every single day and always feeling like she was “on”. Tina just recently left the classroom full time.  But when she was in school she utilized the downtime that she did have. So for anybody who is a business owner, a mom in the middle of the season of life carting children to and from practices for baseball and soccer and football and all the things. Tina says turn those 30-minute blocks while waiting in the car into productive work times. She couldn't cook dinner while she was sitting, waiting for somebody at practice, but she could work on a resource or a blog post. So utilizing your time batching and producing content during those time blocks. 

I think that's super valuable too, for our listeners that have children, is that it's okay to sit in the car. Sometimes cars even have WIFI now. Tina and I know all about that and to work on stuff then, I mean, I'm always at practice too. So I think that that's really helpful. Tina kind of gave the mom aspect of it, but Jen is a traveler.  So she is always on the go and it's really fun to watch. So how does she manage both and still do the traveling that she wants to do as well? 

Jen says at the beginning of the month, she takes a look at everything she wants to get done in her own business. And then make a plan from there.  Similar to Allie and Tina Jen doesn’t focus a whole lot on social media anymore, but she still posts consistently. She just plans it all out and has it in a scheduling app. To Jen in this season of life, it's not as important to sit on Instagram posting, but she still wants stuff to be going out. So she’ll do that at the beginning of the month and plan out the entire month of content.  Jen says sometimes she forgets that it's even posting, but she makes time to go back in and connect with people. And she brings her computer everywhere she goes and uses her hotspot. 

She plans ahead when going somewhere. If she knows she has a three-hour drive and is not the one driving. She’ll plan to be on her hotspot during that drive and really focus on batching. So before that drive, she’ll know exactly what she’s working on in the car. That way she doesn’t just sit down and kind of scroll through a million different things. And then all of a sudden the car ride is over and she got nothing done.  So just making a plan of exactly what she’s working on is super helpful. 

She’ll also do that with the days of the week. On Monday, she’s really thinking of what new product she wants to create. And then Tuesday will be more of the copy for the product. And then Wednesday she goes in and really creates it with the graphic piece. And then Thursday, she’ll do the finishing touches. She fully breaks it down and assigns each day something to complete it. And she allows herself grace if she doesn't get to it because something came up in her life. Or if she wants to spend time with family she’s okay with that. 

Business Priorities And Upcoming Trends 

I love the marriage between all of us because I am nothing like what these ladies have told you by the way. So if you're reading this and you're like, I never break my day up and create the copy first and then make images. That's okay because I've never done those things either, but what's so beautiful is that these other women are phenomenal at doing that.  And so it makes all the messiness come together. I can just feed a lot of ideas into the pot and it all gets done. I have all the ideas, I just don't have any of the follow-through. So I think it's really important that if you're looking to expand your team, or if you're looking just to better yourself to think about, “What am I great at, and what am I really, really bad at?” And then try to utilize your strengths and your weaknesses to the best of your advantage. 

I want to shift gears a little bit and let's talk about the trends of 2022. I feel like everyone right now is sharing in the entrepreneurial space. All there's a lot going on in our world. So things have kind of just been flipped upside down and Facebook has changed its algorithm.  You know, you hear that all the time, but Apple has just released a new iOS update, which makes it where your stuff is a lot more private than it used to be. So getting people's information when it comes to paid traffic is a lot more difficult and there's just a buzz about everything. But when there is a challenge, I believe that there is a massive opportunity.  And I live for the underdogs that get to capitalize on these moments. So as people are stressing and sweating, this is the time for small business owners to take advantage of when things aren't going great for the paid big companies. You can jump on these trends faster than everyone. 

Teacher Time Management Tools

Jen was actually very interested when she found this gem. Instagram is creating automated DMs right now. So some people may already have it and some people don't. At first, Jen didn't like it because she really likes the authentic connections and relationships you can build on Instagram.  But then as she was reading the way some people are going to use automated DMs it was very interesting. There's a demand for better communication, for faster answers on specific things. If you are running your business by yourself, if you're doing a Facebook live or have a webinar, you can put in a specific word or keyword.  So then if someone messages you on IG and their message contains the keywords, the automated response will go out with the link that you have preset. 

I know that Facebook's had some features like that before, but it's weird how different platforms use things differently. People don't really message us on Facebook to the extent they do on Instagram. Tina can speak to that cause she does our Facebook messaging, and Jen is in our Instagram DMs a lot.  We get a lot of Instagram direct messages and that would be so helpful for just kind of like managing or if there's a link that we shared. I know that we shared a link this weekend. So manually we're sending out links. But if we could just change the automation, if we're going to share just one link for the weekend, I just think about how much time it would have saved Jen over the last few days. So that's a great thing to look at. 

It's fully rolling out in 2022. And right now there's Beta testing with it. We’re assuming it will be where your saved replies are on Instagram. So if you go to your account and then there's the spot under settings for your saved replies and you can type in a word. For instance, you can kind of do it right now without automation.  But if there is a link, you can insert the link and then put a keyword that you’ll type into your keyboard and that saved reply will come up and you can send that. So that's more of a manual process but it helps save time.

Tina says on Facebook, it's not really an upcoming trend, mainly because it's been a thing for a while on Facebook. But in 2022, they're talking about giving more ‘credit’ to Facebook lives. And this is a great way if you are a brand new CEO Teacher® business, and you're trying to grow your platform to be able to get in front of more people without spending the money on ads.  Go live inside of your creator studio, which is one of your business tools inside of Facebook, on your Facebook business page. Yes, you're stepping outside of your comfort zone in order to do that. But what scheduling lives and going live on Facebook allows is targeting an audience. So similar to what Jen was talking about, you can put in keywords for teacher entrepreneurs or TedTalks. And somebody searching on Facebook is shown your live video as upcoming or showing it to them live. Get your ideas out in front of a larger audience. Tina recommends going live about your opt-in, walking through your opt-in sharing about your niche, different ideas about your niche, and how you can help people. All of those are great ways to go live. And then re-purposing all of that content on your blog and YouTube videos and on Instagram in short little snippets. 

Consistency Is Key When Prioritizing Your Business

One of our students has seen a lot of success with that. And well she's consistent, which we always love and appreciate.  But Tara's goal is just really taking this to the next level. And she shows up on Facebook and her people show up with her. So it's really amazing to see how much her Facebook has grown in the last couple of months because of that. And I like to go live in our groups a lot and our groups are getting a lot of really cool features right now.  They're rolling out way more features for highly engaged groups, which is really cool because one of our groups did not have all these features and now it's starting to get it, which we're really happy about. We celebrated that last week actually!

One other thing that Facebook is rolling out that I just got access to is stars. Have you already seen this?  Facebook is now making it where you can get ‘paid’ to go live. So just as you would, if you were live on Tik ToK or Instagram. On those platforms, you could hit the hearts and the hearts go up on the screen. People can hit the new  stars and Facebook has agreed to pay you 1 cent per star. So this is a new thing that they're trying out in 2022. So I'm interested to see how this is going to affect people that want to stream on their service. I think maybe even moving people from YouTube to the Facebook/Meta world because they are changing the branding and kind of who they are and what they do.  So really interesting things happening in the Facebook/Meta universe.

Allie does more of the behind-the-scenes things, not as much of the social media world anymore. So she shared something that's a little bit nerdier, maybe not as fun, but it's something that we have done really well this year in our business.  We've learned how to do it. And we're actually in the process of creating content for our programs about this, but it is really getting clear on your systems and processes and especially your standard operating procedures, which is called S.O.P. 

Allie says, think of you and your classroom, you have a standard operating procedure of your classroom. Even if you don't know that- you do! All of your routines and procedures and how you do different things, how you grade, how all those things are the same thing that you do every day, every week, every month. And you probably have your sub-binder or some sort of a document or place where you put all of those things for substitutes.  If you need to take a day off or you're sick. A substitute can come in and find exactly what they need. So your standard operating procedures are kind of like that sub-binder. As a solopreneur, you may think I don't really need to do that right now because it's just me. I know what I'm doing. But Allie wanted to just be really honest and say, she wishes she would've started her business with the standard operating procedures because not only does it help you get better with your time management. Because you're able to do the same thing, copy and paste versus recreating the wheel every single time.  But it also is super helpful when you start hiring out, whether that's a virtual assistant, a team member, or a loved one.  If you have a college kid coming home for Christmas break, you can say here, here's how to upload a product to TPT. If you have that standard operating procedure already done, then they can just take it and run with it.  

So for our standard operating procedures at Team Kayse, we always create a video recording. So we'll just screen record as we go through the procedure, the system, and the process. And then we also write out step-by-step instructions and we do this for every single part of our business. As Allie was looking at some trends for 2022, they were saying that that's going to become even more important.  So if that's an area that you haven't dabbled in yet, I would highly recommend doing it. You can keep them on your Google drive, or if you have management software like Asana, you can store them there. That's how we do it. 

It's amazing at the freedom it's given us as a team to be able to not have to stop and ask how do I do this?  Which seems so small, but doing that every single day is taking you away from completing tasks. Allie and I talk about if you're doing those daily tasks and to do’s and having to figure out how to do something else, everyone's having to stop what they're doing and it's slowing down progress so much. 

Allie says we have somewhere around 75% of the business recorded and written out as a process. As we've started hiring more people to join our team or getting new people on the team or working for us, we take that as an opportunity to get more SOPs created. We have a whole project in our system where we have tons and tons of videos that Allie has gone through and or I’ve done some and Tina's done some and we have them all organized together. So that way as we create and do new things it becomes part of our routine, and just gets added to the SOPs. And then it's really easy to go back and be like, okay, here's how to do this. If you don't remember, or when you do hire someone on new, you can say, here is your set of SOPs. I want to know your questions, but watch these first. And it's not as much, hand-holding every step of the way. 

Allie is an infinitely better communicator when it comes to creating step-by-step tutorials and videos.  So she does that and it's amazing as a new team member gets onboarded, just how simple and seamless it is. And it's been one of the best decisions that we've made. And I can't wait for next year when we start really tracking our numbers to the best of our abilities. Because it's going to be awesome. 

Prioritizing What's Important

I wanted to know what this has meant for their work week and what they get to do now when they’re not at work.

Team Kayse decided a few months ago to move to a four-day workweek. I'm just going to be real with y'all. I don't want you to think that it's all rainbows and butterflies all the time. There's a lot of stress that goes into launching a program, so during those times we may work more than the agreed upon 4 days. But for the most part, for the majority of our year, we're going to be in a four-day workweek. Monday through Thursday. Jen and I are in the same time zone, Allie is two hours behind us and Tina is three hours behind us. You may be thinking, Kayse how will that work when the team isn't even in the same time zone? We try to get here early. So I'm always at work by 7:45 ish and then I try to stay till about four. And then Tina is going to work a little bit later, because she's a few hours behind us, but we can always kind of message each other until about the 5:00 PM Eastern mark. And then we are intentional about staying off of our business platforms until the next day. That helps us prioritize business and family life in a much more intentional way.

Allie

Allie was super excited to move to the four-day workweek. She recently moved to Colorado and her brother and sister-in-law are out there and they have three little boys who are my nephews and very dear to her heart.  So she’s excited to be able to have more time to spend with them. And be able to do what she loves and explore and have a better sense of community. Also getting things done that usually would need to be done on the weekends, like grocery shopping. Stores and crowds are not Allie’s jam. So being able to go on a Friday morning when there are like 10 people in the store versus 200 on a Sunday is pretty awesome.  

Allie’s walk with the Lord is really important to her and in her personal development. So that is a really important part of her abundance mindset. Knowing that she is serving the Lord and doing what He is calling her to do. Also just being more intentional, that's been her word for 2021, intentional in allocating time for her business. She’s been able to do that more with the four-day workweek. So it's all kind of worked together. She’s really excited to kind of have it all balanced out and to be able to do what she loves at work, do what she loves with her business, with her family, with community, with traveling, and with adventure. It just makes it feel like a more balanced sense of life. Which is not necessarily what we know as teachers in the classroom. The 4 day work week has been such a blessing and Allie is really looking forward to what that brings us In the new year.

All of the ladies on Team Kayse are former educators that have left the classroom to be full-time employees here. So this is a big deal.  So they're not just random people off the streets. They are students of our programs and they are all educators. So they've been where you've been, they know exactly what you've gone through and it's really cool that we all have that in common. 

Tina

Tina says she realized a long time ago that self-care looks very different for everybody and it was always a huge struggle for her to relax during a break from school. Even on a weekend, sometimes, because she was always thinking about the things that she needed to be doing. Feeling the guilt of not having enough time with family, not doing enough for her students, not doing ALL THE THINGS. She learned over the years to embrace her Enneagram 1, Type A self-imposed overachiever status and work with her strengths instead of against them. The 4 day work week has allowed Friday mornings to be a slower morning for her. Spending time setting up her planner for the following week. Because actually being organized and knowing what's to come helps her turn off her brain so she can relax and be intentional about her relaxing time. 

Tina also has a brand new six-month-old, 60-pound puppy. So she spends mornings on Fridays, hiking, checking cattle where she lives, walking down by the river, traveling, looking for new places to hang out with her puppy. And then when her family is home she is able to spend intentional time with them in the evenings and not be so worried about all the things that she should be doing. Her abundance mindset comes in the way of finding those golden nuggets throughout the week, throughout the day, and taking all of the opportunities that have come her way. And even if they're a struggle or a challenge, turning them into the question of what teachable moment can she take from the challenge? How can she work better, be more organized, and not fight the universe quite as much as she was doing before, because she needed everything planned? Having an abundance mindset that it's all gonna work out. And even though it might feel like a challenging season right now looking past it and figure out what is the learning opportunity at this moment. 

What I love about Tina is that she sends messages to me randomly about things like if I were in the classroom today, here's what I would be doing. But instead, I get to do XYZ. And I thought, man, that's really cool to see what her life used to look like and to see kind of what it looks like now. We're not knocking education. We love it so much (Tina was a classroom teacher for 25 years), but the 4 day work week has given us all a lot more freedom. 

Jen

Jen is very grateful for the opportunity to have a four-day workweek. It has allowed time for stuff that she never even knew she wanted, which is great. Having extra time to spend with family, she has three nephews and one baby is on the way. Being able to find time to spend with them, they are about an hour away. So usually it turns into like a half-day trip at least. But Jen found when she was in the classroom, similar to Tina, you feel guilty that you don't have the time. Because you are also trying to balance your own business that you're building. So just being able to even have one day off on the weekend to herself, to do whatever she wants has been key. Jen tries to spend two days working on her business, but it's not always on Friday that she takes off. So just having the flexibility and the freedom to choose which day, and kind of go around her calendar and her family's calendar. For Jen, having the opportunity to travel has been such a blessing. Just having Saturday, Sunday was not really enough time to travel and relax. She can leave now on a Thursday night to get somewhere and then have all day, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 

Jen meditates every day and practices gratitude. Having the time to do that and not feel rushed, especially in the morning, has been great. She found that when she was in the classroom, she’d be running out in the morning to get to the classroom and not have time for intentional mindset work. She's currently near the ocean.  So I love when she has her meditation and time. Sometimes she'll share about that on Instagram and I live for it. And I love that they are all taking a lot more time for themselves. And I honestly think that we get more done in four days than we did in five. And I've always thought that that was really crazy, but it's forced us to be super organized and super effective and super-efficient. The first couple of weeks, we might have all been treading lightly trying to figure it out, but we're getting in our groove and it feels really good. 

If you're looking for more teacher time management tips and strategies, check out our planning series here. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with all of the CEO Teacher® life to-do’s, even with these amazing teacher time management tips, I’d love to give you some personalized support. Simply take the CEO Teacher Type quiz, and you’ll be on the road to using your strengths to become the CEO Teacher® of your dreams!