Latest / The Kelly Jedele Show / Building a Big Business Without Burning Down Your Life
Transcript
- Kelly Jedele: Hello and welcome to episode five. I am so excited. We have five episodes under our belt. How is that possible? Here we go. So today's topic is the calendar. The calendar doesn't lie. We're gonna talk about how to audit where your life is actually going and just be real with it. Be here one-on-one talking about your life and what's important to you and how we get there. Kelly intro: Hey, I'm Kelly Jedele and this is the Kelly Jedele Show. the lie we've been sold that you have to pick: the career or the kid, the big vision or the bedtime story. ⁓ calling it. That's not the deal. You can have both. I have built businesses for the last 16 years as a single mom. And you can do it without hustling yourself into the ground, but by choosing strategically every single day. Kelly: That's it for this week. If something in this episode hit, do me a favor. Send it to one woman in your life who needs to hear it. That's how this community grows, one honest conversation at a time. Follow the show, leave a review, and come find me on Instagram. I read everything. Remember, strong doesn't mean solo. I'll see you next week. Kelly intro: This show is for the woman who wants the business, the brand, the freedom, and the family. All of it. So grab your coffee, your kids' juice box, whatever you got in your hand. Let's get into it. Kelly Jedele: So, what if I told you that I could tell you exactly what matters most in your life without asking you a single question? Not by looking at your vision board in your office or reading your goals in your in your diary, not by listening to what you say, So, what if I told you that I could tell you exactly what matters most in your life without asking you a single question? Not by looking at your vision board in your office or reading your goals in your in your diary, not by listening to what you say, but just by looking at your calendar. Yep. Because that calendar it doesn't lie. And sometimes that's actually uncomfortable. So you tell me your health matters, but your calendar says you've canceled every workout for the last three weeks. You tell me your family is your top priority, but there isn't a single hour blocked for them all week. You tell me that you want to write the book, launch the podcast, build the business, take the vacation, learn Spanish, get healthy. But your calendar is full of meetings about other people's priorities. Today we're doing something that most entrepreneurs avoid. We're auditing the truth. So, most entrepreneurs aren't lazy. They're overloaded. They've got too much going on. And the problem isn't really effort. It's allocation of time. So have you ever ended a week exhausted, but you're unable to explain what you actually accomplished like on a Friday night? Like, what did I actually get done today? Have you ever looked up and wondered where the month went? I know me, that was May. Like May just poof, came and went. Holy cow, May, Sember. It was wild. And have you ever just said, I just don't have time? Whatever that thing that is driving you, you just don't have time to do. We don't have a time problem. We have an awareness problem. I want to spend more time with my kids, for example. So but really you've got 12-hour meetings, 10 hours of emails, eight hours of social media scrolling, that's probably generous, and zero scheduled family time. It's not because you're a bad parent also. Maybe because no one showed you how to really audit your time or really sat down and gave you some feedback about it. Some real tough love feedback. So I want you to listen to this episode, but maybe right afterwards, actually do this. Not think about it, not save it, but actually do it. Put some time down for you to actually look at your life and look what's going on. And I don't want you to just think about this. I want you to actually pull up last week's calendar, look at it, specifically look at the details. Not your ideal week, not this week. But last week, the reality of actually what happened. And I want you to categorize some things. So look at the different categories that you have, the little buckets that you've got. What was actual revenue generating work? Did you do anything with your family? Did you have health scheduled? Was was there personal growth time? Did you add in any personal personal like self-development time? How about admin work? Was that scheduled? Did that make the calendar last week? Social media, did you put any content out? Did you consume any content that was specific for what your goals are? Entertainment, did you do anything for fun? When's the last time you did something for fun? Hopefully you're actually scheduling that into your calendar to get that done as well. How much time do you spend commuting to whether that's a nine to five job or if that's commuting to activities or meetings or appointments? You know, there's a lot of commuting time, especially in Austin traffic. And then how much scrolling did you do? I know that's not on my calendar, but that happens a lot. So those things, assign the hours, like count them, actually count them. Like look back and see what happened last week. Not a few weeks ago, but actually last week. Just take it as a one little example of what's going on in your life. And not estimates. Actually like count the hours, do the data, do the map, just get down to the nitty-gritty for this. And if a stranger looked at your calendar, what would they think your priorities are? What would they see? What would they actually go, huh? She actually, you actually like to spend time with your kids. You actually work out. You must really care about your food prep. That would be interesting. Most people discover three different things. And this is the hard truth. So you're ⁓ serving everyone, but not yourself. And so let's look at the calendar and how it is packed. None of this belongs to you. You're serving everyone else. And this is the like examples, like meetings, requests for your time, like people reach out, client emergencies. Those are things that weren't planned. When you get interrupted by a team member or a vendor or someone like that, I know for me, having people ask me for advice or emails or they call me or Instagram messages or text messages, it feels good. It feels good that people Want my advice and people want to know more things and talk to me and have my time. But does it support your goals? Does it support what you actually want to get done? Can you have those things happen in a different way in your life? Another discovery when we're auditing our time, you're working hard on things that don't really actually move the needle. They don't move things forward in your life. So founders have found that. Hours are spent in inboxes. You're actually like tweaking hours in your inbox in your hours of reacting. Like all of those things are not actually moving the needle forward. And you're almost spending no time selling, creating, strategizing. You're not making it work. You're not moving yourself forward towards your goals. We're almost halfway through 2026. Like, where are you with those goals that you made in January, right? Jen Gottlieb actually. Said that she has no meeting Mondays, and that's time when she can actually spend time creating content for her or writing speeches, taking time to actually dive deep into your work. So you actually need to like really safeguard time so you can go into and really dig into where you're at with whatever you're doing, whatever your job, your business, your career is. And I know for me, I need that creative space. I need that creative. creative, uninterrupted time. And that's not just two or three hours between meetings. That is a chunk of time that's like four or five hours where I can really like let my brain open up and really dive in and not expect myself to finish, wrap up, and be somewhere. That's very important. Another discovery when we're looking at our calendar and doing audits is your calendar doesn't match your values. Like think about that. This is when you say your health matters and your marriage matters, your kids matter, your friendship matters, but there's no evidence of those priorities on your calendar. It's not to be found. So your intentions live in your head. They don't actually have a space in your calendar. Your priorities live on your calendar. That's where you'll find them. And that's when you know that you're spending time doing what you want to do. I spent years in my business and didn't have a lot of time for friendships and dating. And now I add those into my calendar often, especially the friendships part. I'm I love making time for my friends. It it feeds my soul and it really adds. in so much spice and ⁓ just flavor to my life to to spend time with the people that I know and especially now that my parents are gone. Like my my sense of family and belonging Is is now including my friendships. So when I reach out to my friends, they're the ones that now hold the history to my life. They're the ones that are the ones that are watching my life happen and there are the people that go with me in life now without having my parents around. So it's very important to me to make time and really build on that. So let's actually think about redesigning our calendars. And so, what is one thing that we can definitely do? And I know this for sure, and you're not gonna like this, but it's delete. What can disappear completely from your calendar? What can you actually look at last week and say, I really didn't need to do that? What are there recurring meetings that you've just had on your calendar that just aren't working? For whatever reason, it doesn't mean they're bad. It means that maybe they're just not working right now in this season. Take a break, take a pause, move them forward. Low value commitments, maybe you're you committed to something that you do once a week, twice a month. And it's something that's not moving you towards your goals, it doesn't quite fit in right now. Volunteer obligations that you secretly resent, that sucks your energy right there for sure. Like find ways that you can give back to your life and community that br build your energy, that don't just suck you dry. Like that is not the way that we want to go when we're building a life that we love. And then endless status updates, like completely going through and like updating people on all of the things. Do we need to do that? Like there are certain times we need to do that, but is that something that needs to happen in your life? Not everything deserves a spot in your life forever. We do have seasons. And another way for us to audit and redesign our our calendars is to delegate. And we know this, we've heard it a million times. It's not, it's not what we have to do. Sometimes we have to set up SOPs, standard operating procedures, and we have to have different ways of giving people in our lives those opportunities to help us. So what are you still doing? Because you're good at it, not because you should be doing it. You know, like let it go. Are you scheduling? Are you are you doing your inbox stuff? Like sh you should have someone else look at your email. How about admin work? Cleaning. You got someone cleaning your house? You know, are you doing data entry? Are those things you you could definitely do? I know for me in my cleaning bucket that that I am the b biggest bottleneck for myself when it comes to big ticket items. Like I still hold on to payroll and I still hold on to buying the supplies because those are big ticket items, right? It's it's a a a big huge number every other week. And for supplies, it's every week. And so I had those taken care of before and now I need to revisit that and have them off my plate again. And that will free me up and s with so much time. Like all those little details. I don't need to be doing those. So We get those places in the we have those areas that we have check-ins for our people so that we can be more comfortable and make sure it's getting done and on your calendar and with clear expectations. So you you're delegating it with clear intentions. And sometimes we as entrepreneurs, when we don't delegate, we are the bottlenecks in our business. We're the ones that's slowing things down because we someone else could do it. f faster, better, with more focus, there's so many options. So a third way, a third way to reframe your your calendar and look at it differently is to design it differently. Now intentionally place your priorities going forward on the calendar first. Put yourself first. Like put that workout in. Put put the family dinner in. Put the the time for you to run your company, the CEO time, you know, the thinking time, that creative, that no meeting Monday. Like make that happen. Put it as a recurring thing in your calendar. And what about date night? Do you have, are you dating? Are you out on the apps? Do you have a partner? Do you have a spouse? Like is that something that a date every night, every week, every night, can you imagine? No, every week that you would you would go and just enjoy each other and you look forward to that time. And I know it's not sexy to have it on the calendar. I know that. But I tell you what, looking for having something on the calendar to look forward to is exactly what builds that anticipation in a relationship. And you know, maybe if you don't live together, it gives you an opportunity to see each other. It gives you, you know, that longing to miss each other and to reconnect. I mean, there's so much goodness in that. And I just desire that. So we're putting that on the calendar. And then reading, like reading time. Do you have time to read, to engage, engage your mind, whether that's for pleasure reading or whether that's, you know, learning more about your business or self-development? I love all of that. And creative work. You need to put your creative work on your calendar. And that's something that I'm gonna work on. I'm gonna redesign my calendar a little bit. that maybe shifts some things that so that I can have a day that doesn't have meetings. Right now I don't think I have a day that doesn't have meetings every day, like a recurring. So I need to work on that. And if it's important enough to talk about. It's important enough to schedule. So I want to make sure that things in my life that are important to me, I put first. Like I put my workouts in the morning so that they don't get squeezed out of the day. And I also like my friends, the time with my friends, I usually put that like two or three weeks out so that they have priority in my schedule. And I very rarely move those. So I will put them on my calendar and then I will keep them and I commit to them and I won't move them. So those are very important to me. And and I would like more reading time. Right now I'm only doing 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes a day. But right now it's a seas a busy season for me. So hopefully in the future that will come back and I'll have more time. But maybe if I put it on my calendar and had intentional time for it, I would actually do more of it. We shall see. We shall see. So here are some other questions that ⁓ I'd like to To add into the show notes for you to consider. And maybe I'll put them on the screen here also so that you can take a screenshot if you're watching the video. But these questions: what got the most hours last week when you're auditing? Was it intentional? Was your time intentional for those audit hours for those things? What received less time than it deserves? What am I saying matters that isn't scheduled? What needs to be delegated? What needs to be delegated to someone else? What needs to be deleted? And what needs to be protected? Adding in things into our life just makes us so much more effective and happier, content. And really saying no to things can be challenging for us, right? And yet it's so powerful. It really, really adds so much flavor and color to our lives when we say yes to the things that work for us and no to the things that don't. And as we work on that together, I think that life just gets better. It just gets better. So when this episode ends, don't listen to another podcast. Don't open Instagram or your email or your calendar. I want you to open up last week. Open up last week's calendar. And Actually audit the week. Like look at it. Circle one thing that you'll stop doing. Schedule one thing that matters. And that's it. Because your life doesn't change when your intentions change. Your life change changes when your calendar does. The calendar doesn't lie, but it does give you a chance to rewrite the story. And that's what's important. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to many more episodes with you, and have a great, great day. Goodbye.