Ep. 116 - Using Time Blocking to Avoid Mom Burnout and Tips to Launch a Consulting Business from Scratch with Katie Wussow
Katie Wussow is a business coach that helps creative entrepreneurs build profitable service-based businesses so they can make a living doing what they love.
She's also the host of The Game Changer podcast and a mama of two.
In this episode, Katie and I chatted about
Her journey leaving her management consulting job working with government contracts to launching her own business consulting and coaching company working with creative entrepreneurs
How she figured out how to price her services
The most important steps she took to launch her company and start making money (hint: it wasn't creating a pretty website or tons of social media content)
The importance of community and where she found her support
Everything to know about time blocking (what is it and how to structure it) plus what to do in the time blocks
Follow Katie at
Website: katiewussow.com
IG: @katiewussow
Podcast: The Game Changer
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Ep. 116 - Katie Wussow Transcript
[00:00:00] Katie: I think the thing that we all have to understand as moms and as human beings is that you don't have all the time in the world and you don't have no time. You have something in between. And time blocking is really about taking an honest look at your schedule and identifying how much time do I actually have.
And then helps you decide what you're going to do with the time that you have, intentionally ahead of time, before things start forcing themselves in to our schedule.
[00:00:27] Stephanie: Happy June mama's. I cannot believe it is almost summer break. Next week my first grader finishes school and in a couple of weeks, my preschooler will be done with her first year of preschool.
I love this episode with Katie Wussow because it really helps to put a framework around time blocking, boundaries and setting structure to your personal and work life.
As we move into summer, we tend to lose a lot of structure with the kids around. And so I think this topic is extremely important when framing, how we want our summer to look like. And even moving forward, when they go back to school, how to say yes, how to say no and how to really figure out what we want to do with our time.
In this episode, Katie offers some great tangible tools, tips, and tricks on how to really structure and frame your time as a busy mom to avoid becoming overwhelmed and burnt out. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Welcome to mommy's on a call your sacred space to laugh, learn, and feel like a real grownup human for a hot minute. I'm Stephanie Uchima Carney, a mom of three under six serial entrepreneur business strategists and donut connoisseur. Just trying to get through the day one cold cup of coffee at a time. I believe that with more intention, a positive mindset and self care, it is possible to thrive in motherhood, business, and life.
My mission is to uncover the daily rituals, life lessons, real life tactics, and favorite tools to inspire and empower you mommy, to get the most out of life every single unpredictable day. So grab your headphones, tell your kids you're on the potty and tune in weekly for some laughs knowledge bombs, and plenty of real talk with real moms and maybe a dad or two.
Welcome to the mommy pod.
Welcome back to mommy's on a call today. I'm excited to bring to you Katie Wussow. So she's a business coach that helps creative entrepreneurs build profitable service-based businesses so that they can make a living doing what they love. She's also the host of the game changer podcast, and mama of two. Welcome Katie.
[00:02:39] Katie: Thanks so much for having me
[00:02:40] Stephanie: lovely to have you. So to start off, I want to ask, what is your biggest mom win of the week?
[00:02:45] Katie: Oh, man, we actually we're investigating some like learning issues with my younger daughter right now. She's nine. And my mom, win was that, I proactively took her to the pediatrician to discuss the assessments that she took at school. And we're like working on a plan.
[00:03:05] Stephanie: Oh, good nice.
[00:03:07] Katie: Yeah, I know. It's always hard to get the, all the various appointments in, but we got it. We got it done. And we're working on a plan.
[00:03:14] Stephanie: Awesome. Well, I know you're really good at plans and figuring that out, which we'll talk about today, but also to give the audience a little bit of context, paint, a little picture of what your family structure looks like.
What are the roles you and your partner play and the ages of your children.
[00:03:29] Katie: Yeah. So I am married to my husband, Travis. We've been married for 14 years and we have two daughters. They are almost 11 and nine. So they're 20 months apart. They're very close in age and. I am. My husband works in a very traditional setting, kind of more of a, you know, nine to five, nine to six kind of setup.
And I am the flex parent. And so I know probably everybody on this call understands that terminology, but I am what we call in my family. Like the shock absorber when unusual things happen, I'm normally like the first person to respond, but I also I'm self-employed. I have my own business where I do business consulting and coaching for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
And I more or less accomplish that in a nine to three schedule while the kids are in school. And then, you know, during all of the school breaks, I, I come up with, with various, with various different ways to kind of keep things moving forward while also enjoying the freedom and the flexibility that I've been able to create by having my own business.
So I've had my own business for about five years now and, uh, it's been a really good setup for our family.
[00:04:36] Stephanie: So what did you do then in your pre mom life? So before, so I know if you started your business about five years ago, your kids were like around four-ish, they weren't exactly in school yet. So let's step back, even farther.
What did you do in your pre mom life to lead you to where you are right now?
[00:04:51] Katie: Yeah, so I started my career out of college in a consulting firm. And so I did management consulting in kind of a traditional consulting setup where, you know, I had clients, I would occasionally travel to those clients that worked full time and it was a great, I really actually enjoyed my work quite a bit.
I liked the people that I worked with. I liked the environment. I liked the work I was doing. So it was really good for me. And then after about five years of doing that, my older, my oldest daughter was born and I knew that that structure probably wasn't going to be the best fit. So I ended up continuing doing that work just as a contractor for the next five years.
So I w I worked more on a project basis, more on a contract basis where it would be more like 10 or 20 hours a week, but doing the same work that I had been doing,
[00:05:37] Stephanie: I actually want to ask you on that. So I was a management consultant back in the day, and I did the whole, like, I fly out on a Monday. I come back on a Thursday, I eat out my lifestyle was, it was fun, but it was definitely not the healthiest per se.
But I'm curious. Coming from a management consulting world. It's a very, not cutthroat, but you know, they expect certain hours, especially if you're billing by the hours. So to have kids and transition to kind of a part-time, how are you able to do that sort of contract work?
How are you able to transition or quote convince them? Because you know, the last few years have been rough on moms. A lot of moms have exited the workforce and maybe looking to go back on maybe a part-time or consulting type basis. How did you do that?
[00:06:20] Katie: I did definitely have to make the case. I will say I wasn't in, I was in like a smaller niche firm and so it wasn't quite as intense as maybe some of the bigger like McKinsey or BCG or any, some of those environments. And I was only traveling probably 20% of the time. So it wasn't as, it wasn't like an 80% travel arrangement. So there were, it was already, the firm was already. A fairly good lifestyle, right?
Even for somebody, without kids, but I didn't want to do that lifestyle with kids, but I did have to make the case. And so I made the case the first, the first selling point that I made to my old boss was I'm going to be get certified as a woman owned business enterprise, because we were doing a lot of government consulting.
And a lot of times when you're working with governments, you like, they want to see minority and women owned businesses on the contract. And so I said, Hey, I'm going to set my firm up. I'm going to be a woman owned business. And that means that whenever you sell work that I'm involved with, you get to claim that that was the first selling point.
And the other selling point was a market based selling point where I, I knew what they were charging for me, like for my time. And I knew that I could make, if I knew what they were charging for my time as an employee. And I knew that if I was I, if I, I could price my work as a contractor below that rate, but also make more money personally.
For my own time, if that makes sense.
[00:07:41] Stephanie: So let's talk about, I want to, like, I want to hear more because I think pricing is such a big issue. Once you do kind of go out on your own and you're like, yeah, I'm a consultant. How much do I charge? , so , you knew how much they were charging.
[00:07:53] Katie: I did because I was, I wrote all those proposals.
Like I did the financial models that we would put together to, to pitch the pricing to the client. I was very familiar with the economics of how the business worked. And so I knew at that time I was, at that time I was 27 and I knew they were charging 125 per hour to the client. But I didn't need to make, if I was charging, if I was just taking off that, wasn't the amount of money I was taking home, right.
That was accounting for the firm's profitability, the firm's overhead, all of that stuff. So I went in and I said, I'll charge you $75 an hour, which by the way is more than I was making in my salary. Because like I said, I'll charge $75 an hour, which means you only have to charge the client $85 an hour for my time, which means you can go and undercut all of our competitors when you're pitching. When you're pitching work.
So I was able to save the client money, which, which improved my boss's ability to sell, which was how he was compensated. Right. He's compensated based on, based on sales. And if you, we can chart again, working with governments, governments are price sensitive. So he was like, if we can charge less for the work everybody wins.
And so I definitely had to make the case of like, how is this going to be good for the company? And not just good, not just like, this is what I want to do, but like, how is this actually going to be strategic and advantageous for everybody and not just me being choosy.
[00:09:16] Stephanie: So did you make that transition? Like you went on maternity leave and then you worked for awhile and then propose this or did you take a break? How did that look?
[00:09:24] Katie: Yeah, I actually, I wish, I think if I had gone back. If I could go back and do it again, I probably would have handled it differently because I really just didn't have a really good vision.
And I didn't have a lot of models for what it would even look like to work with an infant. You know, this was 10, 11 years ago. Work was really different than, than it is now.
[00:09:46] Stephanie: Yeah. I didn't even have an iPhone when I was in consulting. I had a Blackberry and I think about that. Yeah. And , just the way work is now. You would leave home and you wouldn't even know anything going on.
[00:10:00] Katie: Oh, yeah. And, and like video chatting was like what they did at NASA. Like people didn't video chat, unless you were, you know, in the white house situation, like the situation room, it was not, it was high tech. And so I, I ended up just quitting my job completely.
I just didn't really know. I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know. I didn't have a plan. I didn't really have a sense of like, how could this even work? So I ended up resigning after my maternity leave was up after three months and then six months later I was sleeping. My daughter was sleeping. I sort of had my hands around being a mom a little bit better than I did.
That's when I was. I think I need to do something. I think I really want to do some work. I don't want to work full time, but like I do have, I do have some time that I could commit to continuing to grow in my career, continuing to use my skills, continuing to make a little bit of money. And you enjoy that.
I did, I did enjoy what I was doing and I really enjoyed the people. And so that's when I went to my boss and I was like, Hey, like, do you want some of my time? And he was like, yes, yes, I do.
[00:11:07] Stephanie: Nice. And so then from there, so technically you started your own company at that point?
[00:11:13] Katie: I did. I did. I was, I, that's not like the official business start date that I use when I'm talking about.
My origin story or what not, because at that point I was really just a freelancer, more of a freelancer than a business owner, but that's when I started, my LLC was back in 2012 when I did the freelance stuff for five years. And then when we had a second child and they are took, took about, I don't remember how long my maternity leave was three or six months, something like that, but kind of was, I kept freelancing during that time.
And then. In that time too, when I was freelancing is when, because. A contractor for my job. I had the flexibility to take on other projects and other work that I was interested in doing. And that's when I got my very first entrepreneur client, she was a friend of mine. She owned a catering business and she was just the kind of person that's like, she started a business because she was amazing.
She was learning the business stuff on the fly. And so she had a bunch of things that she really needed help with. She needed a sounding board and that was my, she was my first entrepreneurial client and I worked with her on and off for different things for probably two years. And. That was when the seed of my future business was really planted.
It was like, what if I could have a business where I only worked with entrepreneurs because I really enjoyed and
[00:12:34] Stephanie: specifically creative
[00:12:35] Katie: entrepreneurs, creatives. Exactly. Cause she was definitely a creative. Yeah. Compared to my government and clients that I was working with in my more traditional consulting job.
It was night and day in terms of energy, in terms of like the vibe in terms of the
[00:12:52] Stephanie: colorful in the creative industry.
[00:12:55] Katie: Yeah. Well, and, and just the personal, the. Nature and the personal impact of the work, when you can help somebody with their business, you affect every part of their life. Because if a small business owner is experiencing pain and stress and struggle in their business, it affects everything.
And so seeing that human aspect of the work was what really grabbed me.
[00:13:19] Stephanie: So then you started doing this, but you had two young kids. So what did that look like? Kind of behind the scenes? How did you make that work? Because. I feel like your stories. I mean, not similar. It has some similarities to like my background.
So I owned actually a wedding planning company for 10 years and then realize my expertise was really in business. And so I started instead of just doing my weddings, I started helping other kids. But it wasn't my passion. So that's why I backed away from business strategy and doing stuff like this and talking to amazing moms is like way more in line with what I love.
But I'm curious because when I started, you know, I only had one kid and then I had two and then I had three and then I just got overwhelmed. So you started it with young kids. What did that look like? How did you, you know, how did you manage your, your time behind the scenes?
[00:14:09] Katie: Yeah, it was, there was a, probably a whole year.
Where it felt like we're just doing this one month at a time. Like, what am I doing this month? When I started the business in the current form that it's in, I, uh, my older daughter was in kindergarten, so she did go to school during the day and that, but my younger daughter was four and she wasn't quite in school and we had just moved to DC.
And so we didn't w we were like too late. For the preschool signups and all of that. So she was home with me. And so we just, I just made it work with a few different, like time-blocking was big. Like I would wake up in the morning and kind of tell my daughter who was, she was four. She could, she could get, you know, things to an extent.
I said, this is what we're going to do for the do today. Work I'm, I'm going to work for maybe an hour or two, and then we're going to go to the park and then we're going to go, come back home and I'm going to. And you're going to kind of give her the, the overall structure of the day. So I just sent you that Sunday, like
[00:15:03] Stephanie: childcare, you didn't have a nanny or anyone that was consistent.
[00:15:08] Katie: Probably I did after a couple after like making it, cause we had just moved. We didn't know. There were a couple of months there where I just did have to make it work. And I sh I told myself, I was like, I'm in this crazy situation. We just moved, but we don't know anybody. We're still like trying to figure out unpacking and like figuring, figuring out who our doctors are.
There was a lot, there were a lot of personal things going on. And so I told myself, I am going to work for at least an hour every day on this business. And some days. Uh, one hour, one hour and one minute, you know, that I was able to devote to the business, but other days I was able to do more. And so I just kind of adopted a mindset of like, consistency is more important than intensity in this season.
I'm going to be consistent. And then, you know, after we got a little bit more settled, I was able to find there was another mom that I met through church who had a similar work setup, where she was, she was part-time flexible self-employed and she had, uh, she had an infant actually. So we found a shared kind of nanny share situation.
I think it was three days a week where the, the babysitter would watch. Jane who is four and then her baby, who was like one. And so that was how I kind of, that's how I finished out that school year. And then the next school year, she did end up going to pre-K. So I had the kids more or less on the same schedule, but for, you know, it was definitely a C like, what are we doing in this season?
Kind of thing? Like what, what is going to work for this season? And there were some seasons where I couldn't do it. Yeah. And I just have to accept that. And I think some of the, you know, especially as women, we do kind of tend to be all or nothing. Sometimes. Like if I can't work on this six hours a day, then I'm not going to do anything.
And I'm a type a person I'm like a high-achieving person. So that it's hard for me to not be able to do everything that I want to do. But I think that discipline. I'm going to do something every day. I may even not be able to do everything, but I can do something to work towards these goals every single day.
And I'm going to do that and I'm going to endure. I would, I would rather choose to be uncomfortable or. The fact that I'm working too little, then be uncomfortable with the fact that I'm not making any progress at all.
[00:17:27] Stephanie: I think that's just the mindset of accepting. Like, these are my circumstances. I have one hour.
So then I want to ask you, how did you then pick what you needed to work on in that time? And we'll talk a little bit about time blocking and stuff, but I think one of the big problems I see with both entrepreneurs and moms is that. Just like air, air, expanses space that it allows. And so if you give yourself, you say I'm going to work one hour a day.
So you have that one hour. How did you figure out what I was going to work on that day? Because I feel like we always go to just like, let's put out the fires or let's, you know, or you add off and it's like, oh, my hour's gone by, how did you actually make sure you stayed on track every day and you were taking one step forward.
[00:18:08] Katie: I think that for me, what was really important in that season was I was ex I knew exactly what was most important and what was most important to me in the first six months in my business was making money. Like I had to start making an income because we need, like, it was me making money was part of our budget.
It wasn't like, oh, this is what I want to do. And it's a fun, a fun project. And if I make money, that's a bonus. It was W we need money. We live in an expensive city. We have children, you know, my husband's working, but he worked for a nonprofit. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't really what we needed to, to pay our bills.
And so I was folk, I focused all of my energy in those early days. I did not build a website. I did not do anything on social media. I did not, I didn't do content. I didn't do any of that stuff. All I did was networking. Period. I reached out to, I made a list of like maybe 50 to a hundred people that were in my personal professional network and reached out to people individually. Saying this is what I'm doing. I'm starting a business. I want to work with entrepreneurs. Can you connect me with anybody that, you know, that might need this kind of support?
And I had a goal of, I started my business in January, by April. I wanted to have made $8,000 for my coaching business. And, you know, I think at the time I was really more thinking about it as consulting versus coaching.
And I was focused on only. What I needed to do to get clients in the door. And so I was able to, I made $8,000 in the first three or four months of my business. And then once I had revenue coming in the door, that's when I could say like, okay, now let's get a website together because I kind of have a sense of how it worked with clients.
And I have some clarity and I have some resources to devote to the website and then I got the web set up and then I was like, okay. It seems like there's a big opportunity on social media. Let me figure out how I can leverage. Social media to maybe get in front of, you know, I've been really successful networking and really successful with a relational approach to building a business.
What if I could translate that to social media? And then I started doing social media and then it was like, okay, I have all of these ideas about how I can be of service to entrepreneurs. What if I put those ideas into a blog?
And so I, then I sort of, I started layering in these other things and I think the mistake a lot of people make when they're starting a business, is they focus on that stuff first, before they focus on actually serving clients and making money because people think in order to really officially be a business. I have to have a website and I have to have a social media presence and I have to have content and that's not true. You don't have to have any of that stuff to start serving clients. And I highly recommend an approach that allows you to start making money first.
So then that you can have resources to devote to these other things.
[00:20:49] Stephanie: And it's not just money. Like one of my mentors always said get on the field of play because you're never going to understand your client. You're never going to understand what you also personally like and dislike what your client's actual problems are.
And you might realize like you went into this, you said like consulting, and now you switched to coaching. , what do these people actually need? And how can I serve them? And you might've been selling something completely different.
But I also want it to parallel that I love how you said you just started to network.
So you moved to DC. You knew no one. How did you find mom friends?
[00:21:19] Katie: Well, where we are really active in our church. So that was like kind of stop number one, where I made mom friends. And then I, in terms of, of, of mom friends that may also have like the same kind of career interests as me, I went to every event I could find.
And I actually. People that I'm friends with still today at networking events, not because, you know, and the reason I was able to do that is because I followed up with people after the people that I connected with people that I resonated with, I would follow up with them. Not, not necessarily fishing for work though.
I did get some work that way, but it was just like, Hey, you want to get coffee? And like, get to know each other. That was really besides my personal, the personal venues, where I was involved, you know, the school, the neighborhood that we live in our church, it was really. Networking, putting myself in situations where I could interact with people.
I also joined, Hey mama, this was a few years then I think you're also part of the second. This is how we met.
[00:22:17] Stephanie: Yeah, exactly.
[00:22:19] Katie: Yeah. Cause I actually, I met you initially at all. Yes. 150 years ago. It feels like I know because,
[00:22:26] Stephanie: well, I know which is next week, which likes, so yeah, we met at so many different ways.
Again, the world is small,
[00:22:32] Katie: but Hey, mama has been so awesome. I I've really enjoyed that. It didn't come in until later. I think I joined, I think I joined Hey mama in December of 2018. So this was a full two years after I started my business. Yeah,
[00:22:45] Stephanie: these communities, I mean, that applies to anything, find those communities in which you resonate with the other, you know, other moms, other business people, whatever that is like, if you're in a running club, you know, like find those people who you can have some common interest with.
I love that. Well, one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you is really time-blocking, um, it's something that I've always been passionate about because ever since I learned about like context switching and how, you know, your brain can't switch from one thing to the next. And so really having those structures in place, I think a lot of problems with moms is that we, you know, we always make excuses.
We always say we're busy. We have so many things going on. Our schedules. All over the place, even though it probably isn't, I will be the first to say, I am terrible at time management. My husband always says like, you'd never allow enough time for, you know, what you say you need to do.
Or when I have time, I don't know where it goes. It's like, oh, I don't know. I think I just browsed Instagram for like 45 minutes or I'm not really sure. I think. Filing my nail or, you know, you just don't know. So let's talk about time blocking and sort of your structure model around it and how we as moms can apply that to our lives because.
We don't necessarily need to just time block for our business, but we have these aspirations, you know, it's like, oh, I want to go to the gym or I want to do this, but I just don't have the time. My schedule is so busy. So how can we find these buckets of time and utilize them in a way that we can stay accountable to it?
[00:24:13] Katie: Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head when I think that moms in particular, other people too, probably, but moms in particular, we have the sense of like, I don't feel like I have any time, cause I always am busy. But also when I do have time, I don't feel like I use it well. And I think that's where a lot of people don't know what to do.
You don't have a, you don't have like a queue of like, this is what I'm going to do when I, when I have some extra time. And I think that it goes to, we,
I think the way that we think about time is it tends to be really flawed because we either think about our time in the sense that we have no. Like there's no time. I am fully booked. And then we put ourselves in a place where we just say no to everything because we're like, I have no time. No, the answer is no.
Or we think we have all the time in the world. Right. I have all the time in the world. So we say yes to everything. Everything is a yes. And I think that the biggest way that I see this happening with moms is particularly with school-aged kids.
It's when it's, when it's back to school. Like when it's back to school time, you feel like I am swimming in time. Like I'm absolutely swimming in time. I'm so free. I'm so available. And so I'm going to do everything and then you fill up your calendar unintentionally with a bunch of stuff. And then you're right back into the place where you have no time again.
And so I think the thing that we all have to understand as moms and as human beings is that you don't have all the time in the world and you don't have no time. You have something in between. And time blocking is really about taking an honest look at your schedule and identifying how much time do I actually have.
Because we all have pre-existing commitments of various kinds. Maybe it's a full-time job. Maybe it's a part-time job. Maybe it's certain volunteer commitments. It's, you know, things with the family, things with the kids, we all have certain things that are a given in our schedule. Some of us have more givens than others, but we all have things that are given and we all have time outside of that.
And so time blocking is really. Looking at your schedule, looking at your life, looking at your calendar and creating a structure that defines how much time you have, and then helps you decide what you're going to do with the time that you have, intentionally ahead of time, before things start forcing themselves in to our schedule.
[00:26:28] Stephanie: Do you have a theme days or anything like that? I used to do that and I've gotten really lazy over the years, especially after having three kids and the pandemic, , it all went out the door, but I'm curious, , do you do anything like a theme day, like Mondays are for, catching up on things?
, for me, Thursdays right now are my podcast recording days. So I blocked that off for my in-office podcasting days, but then other days I'm like, I think I'm going to do kids' activities. I think I'm going to go to grocery store. Like I don't really have a structure. How do you kind of structure your week?
[00:26:57] Katie: I think that it is a misconception that time blocking has to mean it's a misconception that it has to mean every week looks the same. It doesn't. And it's also a misconception that time blocking has to mean themed days. But I do content on Mondays and I do client work on Tuesdays and I do podcast. Like it doesn't have to look like that.
And I think that's why a lot of people specifically entrepreneurs, they shy away from the entire concept of time blocking because they feel like I started my business because I want to be a little bit spontaneous and a little bit flexible with how I use my time. And if I have to commit to this rigid structure, I don't want to do that.
That, that feels like what I left my traditional job for is because I didn't like doing certain things on certain days, so it doesn't have to be that. And that's not how I operate either. I mean, generally speaking my framework for my work time. Which is separate from personal time, but for my work time, it's I do podcast stuff on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are when I can have meetings.
So meetings include client meetings and sales calls, and then Wednesdays are my, is a no meeting day where I just got to get to do it's flex time for me. That's when I try to have doctor's appointments. That's when I try to meet up with a friend for lunch, that's. Almost always work on Wednesdays, but if I have non-work stuff that I want to do or personal stuff that I want to do, I just want to take it, take a moment, take a chill day, then it's Wednesday.
So that's my time blocking is it's not super complicated and it's not very themed out and I'm not booked up with client calls every single day. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. I have lots of project time in there that I can get stuff done for my own business. So there's a ton of flexibility, even within the basic structure, but having the basic structure of like, I don't have meetings on Mondays or Wednesdays.
And then I have client meetings on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays helps me to make a lot of decisions that I need to make about what I can commit to and what I can't. Because if somebody asks me to do something on it on a Thursday, I I'm kinda like I can't do that on Thursday, but
[00:29:10] Stephanie: that also schedule personal time for yourself.
Anything like scheduling time to work out or do you put those also in your calendar?
[00:29:17] Katie: Good question. So a couple of things I don't recommend putting your time blocks on your calendar. Oh. Necessary. And you can, if you want to, it's not like a rule, but I don't necessarily recommend I don't.
I only put on my calendar things that are actually appointments. Right. So if I'm going to the gym, that's an appointment. So I'll put that on my calendar, but I don't have these. Blocks of time on my calendar that are like, this is the block where I'm doing client work, and this is the block because the point of time blocking is not to clutter up your calendar with a bunch of stuff.
The point is to know when can I commit to doing stuff. Right? And so normally when I have people do a time block schedule, it'll just be like maybe a hand drawn or a, you know, an Excel spreadsheet where they can. Kind of create some zones for themselves of this is when I'm doing what I'm and that's the framework or the structure that they use to guide what actually goes on to the actual calendar.
[00:30:18] Stephanie: I think that word zone, because it's more of just creating boundaries, you're just kind of creating boundaries instead of creating rigid schedules. And I think we think a lot about this as like, we don't have time because we look at our schedule and we get overwhelmed by the color coordinated, you know, calendar appointments we have.
So how do you then drop in like kid activities? Because this is where I start to get All over the place. It's like, you know, my son has karate, he has soccer, he has this. And my daughter has dance and then the third one's now starting gymnastics. And it's like, all of a sudden my schedule is out of whack.
Do you look at it? And you say, well, if we can't find, you know, kid activities on the use of days, or like, how do you manage your activities? What then your work schedule.
[00:31:00] Katie: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it kind of step one to time-blocking. Yeah. Especially if you're an entrepreneur and you have control of your schedule is you absolutely have to determine real office hours.
I am a very big proponent of like, decide what your office hours are. When am I working? And when am I not working? And here's the reason why is that when you don't determine office hours, you end up spending more hours of your day worried about working. Then you spend actually. I worked with a client. I have a client, a former client who is she self-employed entrepreneur.
She has three kids. She has all of these volunteer things that she does outside of work. And we were working together because she was like totally teetering on the edge of burn out. She was exhausted. She didn't enjoy her business anymore. And so one of the things we took, one of the first things we looked at is like, okay, tell me about your day.
Tell me about your actual day and what her actual day looked like was basically between eight 30 and five 30. She would ping pong back and forth between mom's stuff and work stuff back and forth and back and forth and back and forth all day long, like make dinner, do emails. And we're all familiar with this life of like ping-ponging between work and family.
But when we broke it down, we realized she was only working. Actually sitting down and doing work probably four hours a day, but she was spending eight hours a day, stressing about work. And so what we did for her is we said, okay, we're going to do some office hours here and your office hours. You're going to have four hours a day of work of office hours.
And we're going to put, but we, I think were for her, we ended up putting one block in the morning and one block in the afternoon. That was her work time because that's how she wanted to do it. Right. And that's, that was going to work well for her rhythm. And so what that meant was she got to say for the rest of the day, like I get to focus on what I'm doing right now.
I don't have to worry about what I'm not doing. I get to focus on what I am doing. And so having defined office hours is very, very important so that you can feel permission to not be working when you're not working. Right. And so circling back to the kid activities, the kid activity question, right? We, when we're setting our office hours, we have to account for kid activities are one of those givens that, you know, we don't necessarily get to decide when, when soccer practices we don't necessarily get to decide, well, you know, when we need a carpool to the track meet or whatever.
So we need to factor in, if you have to go pick up your kid at four and take them, take them to soccer games. Your office hours are until 3 45. And maybe you can also do a work block. Like you can pull your laptop out at the soccer field if you feel like doing it, but it's not, it's not part of the structure, right.
It's extra. It's, you know, sometimes I pull my laptop out at night because I want to, you know, do a quick social media post or because I want to do some, some emails real quick, because that's what I want to do, but it's not because I am expecting myself to do that. It's because it's not on my time blocking.
It's just, I feel like doing that and that moment.
[00:34:09] Stephanie: That's so true., It's it's a bonus. It's like, oh, I had bonus time. , it was, it's almost an extra versus , these are my designated times. And I think what happens is though, like say that woman, she had four hours of time. We also set expectations for ourselves where we can accomplish all these things in four hours.
And we can't. And so how do we start to think about. What is a realistic time? Like, how do you, so now she has four hours a day, but she has this laundry list of things that she wants to accomplish. How can we structure that?
[00:34:38] Katie: Yeah, I think that this is a really common problem. I, it's a common complaint that I hear that people don't.
I'm really bad at I'm really bad at predicting. How long is it? How long things are gonna take and the reason you're not very good at predicting how long things are going to take is because is that you're not accustomed to seeing your time as finite. Like, I think that what, how we operate most of the time is in this very optimistic frame of mind.
Like I work really hard and I work fast and I can knock this out really quick and I have all the time in the world and you don't. And so the first step to getting good at predicting how long things are going to take is actually viewing your time as the finite resource that it is, you know, Gretchen Rubin in her book better than before.
She talks about the concept of viewing our time. Like we, what, like we think about space and I like to think about space in the closet because I think it resonates with a lot of moms. Like if your closet is totally. Over overflowing with your clothes and your shoes and your accessories and your stuff.
And you come home with five bags of stuff from target. You don't get to just throw all that stuff in the closet. You have to pull things out and say, do I really need this? Right. We have to view our time in the same way where we see it as like, I do not have all the time in the world and it takes some practice.
Right. It takes some practice. And when I was working with that one particular client, that was the next thing we had to talk about is like, okay, what are you putting on your to-do list? And is what you're putting on your to-do list, really realistic, given the constraints of your schedule and what of the things that you are wanting to work on.
Are we going to need to maybe schedule for another time
[00:36:28] Stephanie: On that note, I think you also had mentioned once it's actually tracking the time that you're doing currently. So, and I'm just thinking about how, like I always say, oh, I'm just going to run into target really fast. Like thinking it takes 30 minutes maximum.
And then all of a sudden two hours later, I'm like, oh my God, it's picked up. But like, I mean, target aside, but even work stuff like, oh, I'm going to answer, you know, it only takes me a couple minutes to answer emails, but like actually really tracking how long it takes you to do tasks in a week. I like that because I've never done that before to actually see the data.
[00:36:58] Katie: Yeah. Yeah. I think it can be really useful. Especially if you've never done it before. And I think one of the things I take for granted coming into entrepreneurship is I was a consultant and I had a time sheet. And so I had to get pretty good at predicting how long I was going to take to do stuff, because it was factored into everything that we did in the business.
So I brought that skill in and if you've never done that before it, I think it's really useful to see how am I actually spending my time. And some of those things, aren't things that you can't change. Like you can't change how long it takes you to drive to your kids' school. You can't change how long it takes you to make dinner and clean up dinner, do that.
You can't change something, but there's a lot of stuff you have control over and say like, if I'm spending an hour a day creating content and posting on social media, but that's maybe not the most strategic way for me to be using five hours of my week. How can I shift? And maybe shift that time into some more strategic things so that I can, I can, I can fit my most essential activities into this time that I have.
And so then I can enjoy a lot of, you know, uh, enjoyable things outside of work
[00:38:06] Stephanie: on that note. What are some of the things that you do for yourself daily? That's just for you, like, it could be anything wellness related or what is something that you do for you?
[00:38:14] Katie: Yeah, so I, when my kid, when my daughter was maybe one, my oldest daughter, I had.
That it really, really works well for me to get up early before what time before the kids. So I get up at 5 45, which is not like. It's early, but it's not like, I'm not like one of these crazy four 30 in the morning. People like 5 45. It's very doable.
[00:38:36] Stephanie: You mean like Robin Sharma's like 5:00 AM club. I can barely get up at six 30.
So yeah,
[00:38:42] Katie: I just, it doesn't work well for my body. I can't go to bed early enough to consistently get my, my kids are older. Like go to bed at nine. I'm not going to go to bed at nine with my kids. Right. And so yes, 5 45 is what works well for me, I think this is a very personal question, but. I get up before my kids and I drink my coffee in silence and I, you know, have a spiritual practice that I do in the morning where I pray and I read my Bible and like have time with God and that's my time.
And then my daughter gets up at 6, 6 30 and I get, get her off to school. And then my other daughter gets up at seven 30 and get her off to school because they're separate schools. And then I do, I am, I am an exerciser. I like to work out. I actually don't like to work out, but I like kind of the overall impact of working out on my life and on my mental health.
And so I do that. I aim for three days a week. Those are the things I do for myself. I also, I'm a huge fan of like downtime. I, I don't work at night. I am not a burn, the burn, the midnight oil person. So like after dinner is over and after we're kind of done with our evening routine, I chill. Like I watch TV.
I read, I chat with my husband. I'll go meet up with a friend. I really see that evening time as, as definitely time with the family. But there's also a lot of freedom there for me to just do things that I enjoy. So that's what I do,
[00:40:02] Stephanie: I love that you start your morning with a spiritual practice, because I think having a spiritual practice as also like the kickstart of your day is a really grounding thing.
And I think. I tend to put aside our spiritual practices, but it's really something that is actually at the core of, I feel like mom's sanity and a spiritual could be anything, whether or not you're religious, whether or not it's a meditation, whether or not it's just going outside in nature. Something to ground yourself in the morning is beautiful.
So to wrap things up, I wanted to ask, what do you think is your mom's superpower that you gained once you became a mom that makes you better at either business or life.
[00:40:39] Katie: Ooh. That's, that's interesting to think about, uh, how I've changed since becoming a mom. I think that that one thing that I tended to be pretty decent at before I had kids, that was, I think, enhanced after I had kids, which just my ability to sort of read the subtext of a situation, right.
Like kind of be in a meeting and be like, I can tell that person, like what we said, just didn't land well with. Yeah, mom-tuition, I think is, you know, I think it was like a woman tuition before kids. And now there's something about having children where you are, you have to be really tuned in to other people.
Right. You have to be really tuned into like my kids not eating really well. I wonder what's going on. Or she seems to be in a bad mood or like maybe she didn't sleep well, or is she feeling like you kind of have. Read your kids because they're too little to know what they need. And that translates to other people and my friendships and my marriage, and definitely my clients too.
Like, it matters to me that I can read how they are emotionally responding to a situation. That's definitely been enhanced. I mean, I think other people are awesome at it too. So I don't know if it's a superpower unique to me, but it's definitely an ability that I think has been strengthened by being a mom.
[00:42:03] Stephanie: No, it could be your superpower. And where can we find you online?
[00:42:07] Katie: I am on Instagram at Katie Wiseau, just my first name, last name, and then my. It's called the game changer. It's a business strategy podcast for creative entrepreneurs. If you're building a service-based business, it would be a great place to go and get some, some good resources.
And then you can sign up for my email list at katiewussow.com. There's a up right there on the homepage,
[00:42:28] Stephanie: and she also has the most beautiful website that I am obsessed with. All of your colors and everything. So beautiful. So thank you so much. Have a great vision for your brand. So thank you so much, Katie, for joining today.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
[00:42:45] Katie: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
[00:42:46] Stephanie: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of mommy's on a call. Your support means the absolute world. To me. You can find the show notes for this episode and other goodies over at mommy's on a call.com. And if you enjoyed this episode or have gotten value from the podcast, So grateful if you could head on over to apple podcasts and leave a rating and review so that we can reach and empower more moms all over the world together.
Thank you so much again, mommy pod, and I will see you here next time.