168 - Theme Days — Work & Play

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Show Notes:

Have you ever heard of having theme days? It's this idea that you choose different themes to focus on for different days and it helps you batch things or just simply not switch back and forth mentally between tasks so much. I have found them very helpful and I wanted to share a few different ways to approach creating your own theme days throughout your week, or even breaking them down into theme hours, to maximize productivity and enjoyment—AKA maximizing your work and your play.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

I first heard about the idea of theme days for my friend, Emily P. Freeman on episode 73 of her podcast, The Next Right Thing podcast. She broke down how she had five days of work each week and how she devoted every day to a different theme, and she has different aspects of her business that she would focus on. So one day was her podcast day another was her book writing day. Another was focusing on the membership that she runs.

And when I first listened to this episode, I was still running Nancy Ray Photography full on. I was leading my team meetings, shooting weddings, had lots of photo shoots at night. It helped me implement this theme day idea for the three or four days a week that I was working at the time. And it was so helpful.

It helped me just compartmentalize my mind about my work. So I had an admin day where I answered a lot of emails, attended to any details or communication that needed my attention. And I had timeline calls and all the details in scheduling things that needed to happen running my business.

I also had a team focused day when I led my team meetings. I checked in with the team members or maybe worked on hiring another intern.

And then I had a content marketing day that focused more on writing Instagram posts, some blog posts and podcast content, and just any content that I needed for marketing.

And then, when I had shoots or weddings, we as a studio had an equipment prep day, which usually wasn't me, but my team was getting all the equipment ready for our busy weekends. And a lot of times we would have double or triple wedding weekends and we would have to rent equipment and lay it all out and charge all the batteries and format all the cards. And the whole day was really focused on prepping for shooting the weddings that we had that weekend.

Okay. So fast forward a few years here, I am leading a very different weekly life of work, but the principle still applies. And I hadn't thought about this for a while, but I knew I just wanted to revisit this idea of theme days and see if it could apply to my work. Now I don't have Nancy Ray Photography anymore. I don't have a team. I don't have these scheduled shoots. I have a very flexible, toned-down work schedule.

I have my podcast. I that's pretty much it. I have some online courses I sell. I have four little children. I homeschool three days a week. We have a busy life. And while work has kind of been turned down in my life and home life has turned up, I feel like theme days could still serve me.

And so I wanted to share this idea with you and also kind of just paint a picture of my life right now and how I'm applying theme days to my current life and work situation. Okay, I'm gonna just take a brief pause and ask a question that I promise is related:

Have you ever, all of a sudden had some free time and you just do not know how to spend it or what to do?

I feel like this is common with moms of young kids. I've talked to mom, friends, my sister, my sister-in-law. We all feel like sometimes when there's like, Hey, I'll take the baby. You can have a few hours. It's like, ah, okay, what, what do I do? I feel like a deer in a headlights because usually there's no free time for me because every second is devoted to caring for the kids.

And then when we get a few hours, it's like, we freeze. We don't know how to spend it because there's so much to do in so little time. So it's this overwhelming feeling we get. Theme days helps me with that. So I'm just the kind of person who needs a game plan to feel good about my time spent. And if you are more of a flow-y kind of person who just lets the wind take you wherever you go, or you love to not have a plan. I love that. And I bless you and often envy you because it's hard for me to not know what I'm gonna do with my time. I like to have a plan because it helps me feel better about my time.

Bottom line is I've taken time to create some new theme days with me in my work and my home, which just kind of helps me with that deer-in-the-headlights decision and just helps me feel better about my life in general.

So that's what I'm hoping for you today. I'm hoping as you listen to this, your wheels will start turning and you'll think about, “Okay, how could I apply this concept of theme days in my own life, in my work, in my home?” to just help you be proactive and have a plan with how you wanna spend your time.

Okay, so now that we're in the fall season and we've moved out of summer and school and preschool and the rhythm that comes with that are in full swing, I've realized I still need a plan AND I've realized it's okay for me to go off the plan.

I just feel better if I have a plan for my week kind of in place, because if I don't, I just feel really scattered. Like I'm just running the kids around all the time and I don't know, just kind of feel outta control.

Okay, so this is where theme days comes in here. What my theme days look like for me now—

Mondays are my Active days.

Tuesdays are my Homeschool/Dance days.

Wednesdays are my Work days (and I'll break that down for you in a minute).

Thursdays are my Homeschool/Music days and NNO (which I'll also tell you about in a minute).

Fridays are Family “Free” days.

Saturdays are our Sabbath days.

Sundays are Church and Weekly Prep days.

Okay, a little bit of background about my life before breaking these things down further. I teach my girls three days a week for homeschool because they are enrolled in a university model Christian school, which is awesome. They go in person to class Mondays and Wednesdays for two full school days, and then I homeschool Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Oftentimes we don't even have homeschool on Friday because I like to get it all done on Thursday if possible. Sometimes we'll have a little bit on Friday, but most of the time our school week looks like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

The boys on homeschool days go to preschool on those days because it has been quite challenging trying to homeschool two different little ladies and two different grades while having a three year old and a one year old at my feet.

So they do preschool Tuesday & Thursday, on the homeschool days, which means the boys are home with me on Mondays, and then my sweet mother-in-law takes the boys on Wednesday while the girls are in school. So Wednesday is my one work day where I have childcare and I can work on the podcast, and all kinds of things on Wednesdays.

Okay. So now that you kind of know where I'm at in my life, let me break down the theme days a little bit more. I'm still working these out a little bit if I can be honest, but I, what I found is just having very simple theme days is working for me right now because I need a lot of margin and flexibility in our schedules with little kids.

Mondays are active days. That simply means the boys are home and I have to be active. So, whether we go to the gym, whether we get outside and go for a walk or a run, whether I take them to a park, I have to get outside or get out of the house and do something because I found that if I do that first thing on a Monday, it just helps me set the tone for my week also because I've labeled it my active day. I like to go out and maybe run errands, or maybe I'll work on a project in the garage that's a little more labor intensive or I'll clean out some clothes. And it's more of my, I don't know, just active work in and around the house.

So Tuesdays are my homeschool dance days and that just simply means that I homeschool the girls and take them to dance. And I also do preschool drop off and pick up for the boys, but I just try to keep it in mind that this is a Dance day. We get outta the house in the middle of the day, and it's just a fun way to remind my girls to do something beautiful to, again, move their bodies and to have a good time.

Wednesdays are my work days. They're my “me” day. Like I said, my girls go to school that day, the boys go to Grammy's house. And so what I found was, again, deer-in-the-headlights feeling, I have one day a week, how in the world am I supposed to get all of this done in a day? And that's when I implemented my theme day idea to my one day a week, which at first I thought I am so brilliant for applying my theme day idea to my one day a week of work. And then I just realized Nancy, this is the exact same thing as time blocking, like I've been doing this for years. It was a realization!

Okay, breaking down theme days into theme hours is nothing new. It's simply blocking your time, which is something I've done for years and I've even taught about for years. So I just kind of laughed at myself for a second, but don't we need like a fresh take on things sometimes? So for some reason, just theme-ing my hours or calling them “theme hours” helped me kind of have a new perspective on even blocking my time. And so what I've done is I've blocked in two hours for content, which is podcast prep, recording, writing, blogging—whatever content I wanna be creating. Deep work. Two hours for lunch and outside time just to kind of think or listen to a podcast. And I honestly have to plan to eat or else I will get so consumed in what I'm doing. I'll forget. And then another two hours for communication. So emails, meeting with Sammy Jo, my podcast editor, whatever, any kind of communication that needs to take place, I'll do that. And that's it, that's it that those are my theme hours within my work day, because I don't have a ton of time on Wednesday. I have like about six hours, but that's how I divided up. And that is working well for now.

And I might change that or tweak it as I continue to move forward this year. Also side note, not to complicate things, but I also have Instagram Tuesdays that I just kind of fit in to normal, you know, homeschool dance life days. And then I have my Marco Polo coaching on Fridays that I do. And I also do that alongside just kind of my everyday life in like the cracks of time that I can find those are work items dedicated to those other days. But those are not central themes to those days because my priority is home.

Thursday, like I said, back to homeschool day with the girls boys, good preschool and piano. So I had just have an emphasis on music. I really want our home to be full of music. They take piano. I like to play worship. I like to talk about music. We like to sing songs. I just try to focus on music on Thursdays. And then Thursday night is when I have NNO that is what my husband calls Nancy's Night Out. I got this idea from a friend and I have really enjoyed it. This is a new thing, so this has not been going on for very long, but every Thursday when Will gets home from work, I head out. I get a break from the kids. I can work if I want. I can eat by myself. I can meet a friend. I can take a walk. I can read a book, go to the gym, whatever I wanna do.

But after doing this a few times and not really having a game plan for or knowing how to best spend my NNO I decided to try theme nights to help me use this time in the best way possible. So here are my theme nights for NNO (again, still working this out, but I'm excited where this is headed):

Work, where I get into like beast mode and I just write a lot of content or get a project done.

Worship because I'm on the worship team at church. So one Thursday night a month I'm gonna be using NNO for worship practice. And I love that. It fills me up so much.

Renewal, which is when I just feel burnout from work, motherhood, just whatever. And I just need some alone time. So I can book myself a massage or go to the gym or eat a nice meal and journal and take a walk, whatever I need for me.

And lastly Friendship, that's the last theme night. And I can just get dinner with a friend or go for a walk with a friend or meet up with them.

And so it's been nice for me to just have those themes outlined so that I can say, this is a good use of my temp time. Any four of these things are good uses of my time. And then I don't feel panicky like, oh my goodness, there's so many things that I can be doing right now and I can't ever get it all done.

So Friday, moving on in my week, is just a free day. Usually we're done with homeschool. I like to go do something with the kids. Maybe we just have a home day because the kids are tired after all week, whatever it is. I just leave that open to do whatever we wanna do on Friday. And we almost always have pizza and a movie night on Friday as a family.

Saturday is Sabbath, which we really just try to not work, hang out as a family, not plan too much, but inevitably, some things are planned on Saturdays and that's fine too, but just it's a rest day.

And then Sundays, we go to church. We have our kind of chores, our family meeting on Sunday afternoon or evening, eat dinner, try to get in bed early for the start of the week.

Okay, last thoughts here. I promise I'm not a crazy person for theming everything in my life. I know this sounds just so extra, but it helps me bring peace to my life and prioritize the important stuff. It helps me decide what I'm focusing on ahead of time and not to spend a ton of time trying to choose between the 1 million things vying for my attention. And I do want to say again, they're set in place, but I don't follow them perfectly every week.

For example, this last weekend, we went to the beach. We flexed Thursday, we left Thursday night after homeschool. We were gone through Sunday. There wasn't an official Sabbath, although it did rain one day and we rested. Our family free day was just spent adventuring at the beach. And we did not have like our reset Sunday. We didn't go to church, we were driving home. So, you know, you flex from it, but that's what life is made of, right? You flex from the plan. And we're excited to just jump back into life today and get back to it.

So all of that to say, I hope this thought process encourages you to maybe think about what themes you could put in place for your own life and your own work.

Last thing I'm gonna mention—did you know that I recently created a checklist for your weekly planning? I did! And if you haven't downloaded it yet, you can! I share foundational things I plan into my week at the beginning of every week. And I share how to plan your work and your play into your week well, and here's a little spoiler: I encourage you to plan your play first.

So click the button below to sign up to download the one page plan to a better week.

download the checklist here!

I hope this encouraged you today to just think about how you can apply theme days to your life, to give you more clarity and more purpose in your days. Michael Hyatt said,