Work-Life balance as a remote consultant. My daily routine and productivity tips

Work Life Balance

So people ask me all the time how I run my business, how I manage to travel so much and how I work remotely and then what sort of tools do I use, what sort of workflows and processes do I have and I’ve been interviewed on podcasts and had a number of individuals ask me these questions as kind of separate items.

So this video attempts to answer in summary form some of the main points that I have in terms of running my business, traveling and running my life.

So this routine as I’ll call it has taken about five years to perfect and I appreciate it you know it’s set up for me and my business but there may be some ideas, some thoughts in here that you may be able to take, manipulate and apply to your own lives.

I’ll talk about the structure, I’ll talk about my day in terms of a typical day or a typical week and then some of the details behind it.

So in terms of a business I run a one-person global consultancy.

I help small and medium-sized enterprises with CRMs and their sales workflow.

I also help with project management and tools like Asana and then I also do business automation, some integration with AI and basically taking some of those workflows and processes within the business and automating them.

I also get to do some bigger projects and these are kind of generally digital transformation pieces with the likes of governments or the UN or large development agencies and they’re much bigger projects much more complex and generally take a bit longer and so I have this mix of you know kind of large scale projects and then smaller pieces that I do with small businesses.

I try not to work more than about four hours per day and when I say four hours per day I mean you know core work as in client work getting stuff done and those four hours really are focused on producing some tangible asset so reports, presentations, videos, something that is tangible at the end of that four-hour period rather than something like calls or just doing email which is kind of the essential stuff but has to be done doesn’t necessarily produce any tangible output.

There are some key principles that I like to stick with.

The first one being is that I really must manage my own time.

I’ve done the nine to five, I’ve done the corporate work, I’ve done the arriving in an office and putting your self on a seat and then being there for a specified period of time.

I’m not a fan of this particular type of work, I don’t think it’s geared towards producing tangible output.

I much much prefer to manage my own time, we think about our circadian rhythm and the fact that we are very productive in some periods of the day and less so in others and I am fairly insistent about managing my own time.

I also believe that quite a lot of time is wasted in terms of inefficiency.

I talk with people and so many people struggle with understanding where their focus should be, what they should be concentrating on and how they move the needle on their business or their goals in life and it’s not easy but I have spent quite a lot of time working out what the specifics are in terms of moving the needle forward and avoiding doing those things that are not specifically relevant to moving the needle or achieving your goals and I’ve also invested a lot of time in automating some of the repetitive parts of my business and some of the chores that I need to do in life.

I have set up my business in order to be able to work anywhere in the world.

I’ve been a remote worker since 2008, kind of before remote work was a thing in terms of people moving more towards remote work during the Covid period and beyond.

I have adjusted my business and what I do as well as the automation to kind of cover the remote working piece.

It has its benefits, it has its downsides but I seem to have managed it fairly well and I kind of like the travel and being able to work remotely across multiple time zones.

I try as much as possible to give as much information away as possible.

I spend quite a lot of time on calls with clients and prospects, some of whom just need to know the information.

It gives me good ideas for YouTube videos such as this and it allows me to write a few blog entries and resolve a few of some of the obvious questions and answers that people come up with.

It’s an idea process for me in terms of talking to people and helping them along but it also gives me kind of ideas of blogs and videos and so on and I think everybody really should help out wherever possible.

You don’t necessarily see the reward immediately but it does come back.

You know being nice to people, helping them out is a good thing and it does repay itself not necessarily in the first month week or so on but in the future people do appreciate that you’ve helped them.

I would say that my calendar is the most important tool in my toolbox.

I was hugely resistant to time blocking.

I didn’t really didn’t want an inanimate object telling me what I should be doing at a specific time of the day but I have built my routine and my time blocks into my calendar and they allow me flexibility within those time blocks to do specific types of work.

In the mornings for example I like to produce content, I have a more creative mind, in the afternoon I like to talk to clients and do some of the less creative work.

So my schedule kind of looks a little bit like this.

So I normally get up around 6 a.m. and so between 6 and 8 I will check my email, I will check Notion where I kind of keep all of my tasks and notes, I will have breakfast, I will have at least two cups of coffee, I really do need those two cups before I feel as though I’m sufficiently fueled to get on with the work.

I will write morning pages and I will get those initial tasks out of the way in that two-hour period so I fully understand what needs to be achieved during the day.

I will also check my email just to look for anything that is important or anything that will potentially impact the rest of the day.

I did used to do the 5 a.m. start but in honesty my workload now has been reduced sufficiently by automation that I don’t really need to get up that early anymore so getting up at 6 or 7 is perfectly fine for me given my workload.

I use Notion to management tasks and my projects, it also covers my habit tracker and is my second brain if you like so that really is the kind of guiding tool that I use throughout the day to concentrate on those specific areas within my day.

Between 8 and 12.30 I’ll spend the majority of the time producing content.

These would be writing blog posts, just writing in general, filming YouTube videos like this one for example, thinking about scripts and planning in content that I will normally post online somewhere.

I find myself more creative in the morning, it’s just the sort of person I am and I find that I won’t necessarily complete everything that I want to in that period.

It is a struggle for me to come up with ideas, this is my greatest hurdle but mornings I can generally start to produce outlines and pieces of work even though they may not necessarily be finished and then I continue across the week to get that content pulled together into something that I can record or write about or post.

So at 12.30 and lunchtime I’m very fortunate that I can go swimming most days.

I have an open-air pool that’s very close by, it’s just a short walk for me so I will swim, do a couple of laps, maybe listen to some music and then I will have lunch and after that I will try and do 15 minutes of meditation wherever possible.

If I’ve exercised particularly hard I do have a tendency to perhaps not offer a few seconds during the meditation but I do find that kind of middle of the day does allow you to do the reset for the next piece of work that I will call my core work.

So from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. this is my core work, this is my sort of four-hour work day.

I will do client work, will work on client projects, I will take calls with clients, I will do prospecting, all of the things that really are focused on output for clients, producing proposals and generally focused work in terms of completing the projects or planning for calls or sessions with clients.

Sometimes I will extend this core work to maybe 10 p.m. in the evening because I’m a global business and my clients are spread across the globe.

I do have a lot of clients in the US and given my Indo China time zone right now I do find myself working in the evenings with some of the mid and west coast US clients and I just have to work it that way and it’s fine I’m very lucky in the fact that I get to choose who I work with.

I really love my clients and I love working with them and I’m very specific about who I choose to work with and so it’s not really an issue for me to get on a call at 10 p.m. at night to talk to a client that I really enjoy working with.

I also have the general rule that I will be in bed by 11 p.m. to get sufficient sleep in order to kind of get up early the following day.

I’m fully aware of the value of sleep and how it has a massive impact on our productivity and the way that we feel and our ability to get stuff done, particularly if we don’t get enough sleep so I’m very keen on getting a really good night’s sleep.

So this is my general routine from a Monday to Thursday.

On a Friday I don’t take client calls but I will pick up anything that I’ve been able unable to fit in on Monday to Thursday and I will also plan in my activities and tasks for the following week and so I will do my weekly review on a Friday afternoon and then plan in tasks and projects for the following week.

I don’t work at weekends and I think like most people I spend as much time as possible with my partner.

We socialise, do exercise, go swimming and you know the kind of general stuff that most people do at the weekends so I’m no different.

So in terms of the some of the tools that I use I use focus modes on all of my Apple devices and this removes distractions, turns off notifications and is synchronised to my calendar so the blocks of work that I’ve highlighted they synchronise with the focus modes on my Apple devices and so I just don’t get distracted in terms of the work that I’m doing and generally as a ruler I will turn off all notifications and really not keen on notifications on any devices as they are just a distraction so big big user of focus mode.

I will quite often use a Pomodoro timer, I use the session app and I also use a kitchen timer, dependent on where I am in terms of just kind of telling myself that I need to focus on a specific piece of work.

I think like most people I struggle to get started but once I’m started getting things done are relatively straightforward and I find that just using the Pomodoro timer to get started and get focused is quite a good way to kind of keep yourself going to get the tasks completed in its entirety.

I track my time on an hourly basis so again I use Notion I’ll just make a note of what I’ve completed in the previous hour just to keep a track of you know what days I’m productive, what times I’m productive and what I happen to be doing and I’m no kind of perfect productivity guru you know there are times when I just slip into watching YouTube videos and get completely distracted but it’s good to have that tracked so that you know we can make potential changes to the way that we work in order to cater for our ability to concentrate at certain times of the day.

So in terms of flexibility this is my normal schedule as far as normal goes but as I mentioned you know I’m a global business and I like to travel a lot I can’t always stick to this so for example in April-May I took a long trip to Japan for over a month and of course you have to be flexible in terms of moving then your working hours to cater for getting client work done as well as doing the travel and enjoyment as part of a trip like that.

I did wind down the amount of work and push some of it until I returned but again flexibility is the thing I don’t always stick to this routine it very much depends on where I’m traveling.

In the summer for example I do reduce my number of working days for the six-week period that we’re generally in Europe but I still do client work because projects you know will continue and clients need stuff done it’s just a matter of fitting it in around some of the personal commitments that I’ve made.

In terms of location normally I work from home but occasionally I do go to a co-working space just to get out the house and to see other people.

One of the downsides of working remotely and particularly working on your own is you do lose that human interaction it’s quite nice to sit in a coffee shop and bump into some of your fellow remote workers in a co-working space for example just to kind of get that social interaction which I think is really is missing from remote work in general I can see why some people would like to do the hybrid work and go back to the office to ensure they do have that human and team interaction.

So as I mentioned I am a global one-person business and it does mean working across multiple time zones I’m here in Indochina time right now but I can end up working with West Coast clients which means working well into the evening and you just need to be flexible in terms of you know fitting in the hours but ensuring that it has sufficient rest in between you do tend to lose productivity.

I found around the four-hour period is about as much focused core work as you can do so flexibility is key and there you have it this is how I kind of manage my business my life involve all of that travel it probably isn’t for everyone but it kind of works for me there is a lot more detail behind this particularly around tools and settings and how I communicate with clients and specifics to my calendar and tools and notifications and so on but I think it kind of gives the general overview and covers the majority of questions that most people ask me about how I work what sort of tools do I use and how do I get things done in terms of my unusual consultancy role.

There will be details that I have missed so please feel free to add them in the comments below and I will endeavor to answer them or potentially produce another video if there’s some detail that’s missing.