Morning Routines, Habit Stacking, and Getting My Life Organized with Jenelle Tremblett

#124: Jenelle shares how she's making some big changes and getting more structured with her daily habits and routines. Because of this, she's feeling so much more productive and has been able to set and achieve more of her goals.

Jenelle's Ebbs

• Feeling so rushed
• Feeling like everyone else is controlling her day and schedule
• Being busy but not productive
• Not achieving the goals she set for herself

Jenelle's Glows

• Having more control of her schedule and life
• Way more productivity 
• Not overwhelmed as much
• Accomplishing goals

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Jenelle Tremblett: Website | Instagram | TikTok

Podcast: Website | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok 

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the ebb and glow podcast. I'm your host, Janelle Tremlett. And I'm a firm believer that even when life doesn't go as planned, it is taking you exactly where you're meant to be on this podcast. I'm here to help you finally release control of what you think you want and begin to just trust in the ebbs and flows of life. Each week, I will show you how to build that positive mindset radiate with self confidence and cultivate an unshakeable resilience. Let me prove to you that even when life ebb. You will glow. hello everyone and welcome to episode 1 24 of the Ebb and Glow podcast. Today's episode is a solo one with me revolving all around my recent habit stacking how I've been structuring my day-to-day and my weekly schedule, and also a. How I've been setting goals lately. I mentioned this in a recent solo episode when I was planning my goals for the year, that one of the things I really wanted to work on was getting a lot more structured and strategic with my day-to-day life, the later half of last year. So in 2022, I really felt like everyone else was controlling my schedule and my, my day-to-day was being dictated by everyone else, and it led me feeling every single night that I was essent. Had no control over my schedule and no control over my life. And it leaves you going to bed every night kind of stressed high cortisol levels and not having a good grasp on anything that's going on in your life and in your business. for me, I didn't really like feeling that way anymore. so right now, at the time of this recording, it's March, 2023. And I can say I've made a lot of changes in the first little bit of this year so far, and a lot of those changes have been around my day-to-day habits, my day-to-day schedule, and becoming very structured and strict with my day to day. The reason why I wanted to make these shifts in my life is I always made goals for myself, but. At the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, I was feeling like I was falling short of achieving those goals. And I really had to take a hard look and say, why am I not achieving the things I'm setting out to achieve? And a lot of them was, I was. Planning a big goal and then not actually creating a plan on how to achieve that. And this is a skill that has taken a bit of time to develop, and I'm still developing it now as I record this episode. But even in the time I've really focused on making a plan and structuring out how to achieve a goal, I've seen a huge difference in the stuff that I'm accomplish. So I wanna share those tips and tricks today. One of the biggest changes I've done recently is I use a platform called Notion. And I've posted about this a little bit, um, recently, but honestly, it's like having, if you, if you were ever the type years ago that lived by your daily planner, like a paper version, I find Notion is exactly this for me. on notion. I have a board for my daily schedule slash weekly planner, so basically all the things I need to do each day. I have another board for real estate content where I create a content calendar knowing every single thing I'm posting every single day. I have another one for our podcast So I can look ahead at the month and say, do I even have any episodes planned for this month? Who do I need to interview? how many times do I need to reach out to people? I need to get these things in the calendar? Or if I'm thinking, okay, I'm going on a vacation in April and May, I need to get ahead of that schedule in order to get episodes pre-recorded and upload it ready to go while I'm away. I have another board for, um, just goals in general. So I outline my monthly goals. I sometimes put notes around like big dreams of mine or like any kind of thoughts or any like projects I wanna do in the future. And I also even have a board for meal planning. that one seems crazy to me. Like you would think that maybe a mother of three kids, that's what they kind of do. But for me it's like it was getting down to the point where it would come Sunday or Monday, and I'm like, wow, I have no groceries in the fridge. I need to go get groceries. So I would go and get a bunch of stuff, get the usual things, and then come home and have no plan on what to do with any of this food. So I found the theme of my life. For the later half of 2022 was essentially no plan. And if you're not making a plan, you're essentially planning to fail. And I mean, I saw that firsthand. And so I definitely want to continue this schedule of actually having a plan. Huge plug for notion. Um, I will say I didn't love it at first because you really do have to build out how you want things to look, and it's like essentially a, you're starting from scratch, an empty template. What I ended up doing is I found a girl on TikTok that actually makes notion templates, so I purchased one of hers, got started with that one, and then Edit it to make it make sense for me. And as I've been using it for a few months now, I find it a lot easier to use and I know how to kind of create my own boards and, make things work the way I want. I wanna tell you a little bit about my morning routine lately and how I've been randomly habit stacking to be able to get more done in a shorter amount of time. I shouldn't say I am the type of person, but I was the type of person that would just let simple things overwhelm me, like loading and unloading the dishwasher and I would find like, I don't have any time to even get this done. And I really had to question myself and really think. Loading and unloading a dishwasher takes two minutes, five max. But I was making it to become such a daunting task that in one to two days, my kitchen was overflowing mess. And I mean, if you're like me and you're the type that can't even get through a project or day without your house being cleaned, if my kitchen was a mess in the morning, imagine how I felt going into my. So one of the little things I've been doing, um, as a very specific example, is a thing called habit stacking. And what this means is doing a task or something that you need to get done while doing something else that you're always going to do. Now what I do every single morning is while my coffee is being made, I have an espresso machine. Not that this matters, but as I put the cup under the machine and hit click as that coffee is being dripped, I'm taking the time to load and unload the dishwasher. It shocked me. Swear to God, it shocked me like It was in this example of me doing this, that I realized how simple and how quick it is to unload and unload the dishwasher. For me, it's like I'm one person with a pretty small dishwasher in the time it takes for my coffee to come out of the machine and into the cup, that task is done. So now for me, it has become not such a daunting task. So instead of just standing there and watching the coffee drip, now I'm just getting something else. Another part of my morning routine that I have gotten back on track with is working out. I've always been a healthy person that loves exercising and loves being athletic, but I found in the last like few months, it was so hard to get back into a workout routine that I enjoyed. If I don't do the workout or whatever exercise it is, first thing in the morning, I swear to God it will not get done. And any time I've ever told myself, oh, don't worry. Just start work. we'll do the workout this evening. It has never, ever, ever gotten done, and I don't know why for so long. I kept trying to convince myself that I would do it. So one of my tips is know yourself. If you are the type like me that knows that that exercise routine has to get done in the morning, do it. But what I notice about myself is if I wanted to get up early enough to do the workout before I start at work, that had to start the night before I had to be getting in bed earlier. So there was a few months that I was not even getting into bed. Maybe by midnight. And that is so late for me. I'm not a morning person in terms of like, I'm still gonna hit snooze. I still need multiple alarms to get out of bed. But I know for me, I get the most work done in the mornings. I'm the most alert. So it was important to me to make a plan the night before in order to set myself up for success, to be able to do that workout in the morning. And like I said, the first thing that had to happen was me going to bed earlier. and I had to work that plan backwards too. If I wanted to be kind of winding down by like eight, nine o'clock, I couldn't be working up until 8, 9, 10, 11 o'clock. I had to be learning how to shut it down by say, 8:00 PM the latest, and working in a real estate business and building a career that you're kind of this one man show, it's tough to know when to shut it off. but I've been very strict with myself. if it's just a routine day, I do not need to be working past eight o'clock, so shutting it down at eight. Having a little bit of downtime maybe to do some reading or maybe just like do like a, a hobby, maybe do some painting, whatever, something that has nothing to do with work to be able to start winding down, to hopefully start getting in bed by 10, the latest, 10 30 in order to be okay for that six 30 alarm. So, like I said, what I wanna get across right now is if you have a goal of getting up early, specifically, you have to start that plan the night before. And that's personally what's working for. A couple other things I've changed just randomly is, For me, laundry gets so built up so quickly that all of a sudden I'm like, holy crap, I haven't done laundry in three weeks. Like, this is insane. And then I. Have to spend like a full day doing it. So for me it's something as simple as picking one day of the week where I get everything done. So for me, this, I'm still trying to figure out this schedule, but I'm looking at it being Thursdays right now. So Thursdays trying to get all of my laundry done Thursday nights before going into the weekend. Washing my hair, doing my hair mask, doing a face mask, whitening my teeth, like doing all these things, doing a self tanning routine. Getting all of this done at once and knowing that it's coming up on Thursday. Again, it goes back to the habit stacking that, okay, it's the night before going into the weekend. Let's do all of my self-care stuff and girly things all in. One of the, things I've changed also recently that has kind of been the hardest, but is one of the things that have made the biggest impact on, uh, achieving goals and getting a lot more done is reducing the time. I do social things throughout the week. I'm such an extroverted person, and if someone's asking me to go for lunch, go for a drink, go for dinner, hang out, go for a walk. I love being around people, so I was often saying yes to everything. However, that led me to every single week of becoming Sunday, looking at the past week and questioning myself, what did I even accomplish this week? What did I do for me? How did I do anything that moved the needle this week? Whether in my personal life, my business relationships, anything, and I felt by the end of every week, I felt so unfulfilled person. that may come across really weird, but it's like I felt like I was giving so much to everyone else and saying yes to everything and not doing enough for myself. So for me, um, one of the changes I've made is reducing my social life to only two to three things a week. And what this entails is, so let's give an example of this week. a few of my girlfriends want to go out on. That's gonna be considered one social thing throughout this week. If I grab lunch or brunch with say, one person or some friends, that's considered the second social thing. And then if I'm up for it, I have room for a third. If I wanna keep it at just that, then that's fine. No more. It's taken some of my friends to definitely adjust to this. but I noticed a huge impact in myself in achieving what I want to achieve. So at the end of the week, I'm not questioning where the hell did all my time go this week, what I'm saying about the my friends adjusting to it. Sometimes when some of my friends ask me to hang out, I give them a couple options, maybe one to two weeks in advance, and they may say like, oh, I really wanna hang out with you tomorrow. And I'm like, well, I'm not a. And knowing that it's okay to say I'm not available, not because you're hanging out with someone else. Maybe your lack of availability is that you wanna sit at home by yourself and watch your shows, or maybe you'd rather do a workout that night, or maybe there's a project that you're working on and even though it's Friday night, you're really eager to get it done. That means you're still not available and it's okay to own that. And really put yourself first in terms of your schedule. The other huge benefit of that change in my life is being extremely picky and choosy with who I spend my time with. Knowing that there's only so many. Lack of a better word, spots to fill. In terms of my social schedule, I'm being very crystal clear about who I'm spending my time with. So I'm quicker to say no to things. more reluctant to reach out to people that maybe I don't really wanna hang out with and looking at my upcoming schedule and knowing, okay, I haven't really put much effort into that friendship. if I wanna go for brunch this upcoming weekend, let's ask them to go. I talked about this to a friend recently, one of the other changes I've made in my habits is really structuring My day-to-day life in terms of my business. So one of the biggest things I've done that I am absolutely so strict and structured on is that I do not answer any new client calls that I didn't have already planned. If I have someone reaching out through the dms or maybe just emailing me random, I do not answer anything unless we have a call scheduled. The reason for this is the biggest thing is that it allows me to be able to outline a section of my day that's strictly just for, say, new client calls. Now, if you're already a client of mine and we're doing showings, of course I'm gonna be available like whenever. But if you're a new client coming in and I don't know anything about you, what your criteria is or timeline, anything. I'm not just answering my phone randomly if I do answer my phone, cause I don't recognize the number, and they start saying like, Hey, hey, like this is what I'm looking for. I kind of stop them right away and just say, Hey, I'm not available right now to have this conversation. what I'll do is I will text you my calendar link and you can book a call in so that I can be prepared for this call. What I've realized by doing this is people take you a lot more seriously. They have respect for your time and it allows you to set a boundary. You're able to be a lot more prepared for calls and for me, because I've set out a very structured one to two hour time slot for this type of call. Right after this podcast I'm gonna jump into that section of my day and just be on back-to-back calls with new clients for probably an hour, and it allows me to stay in that kind of mode of thinking because I'm batching all of that in one. So it's not like I'm taking a new client call, then I'm rushing out to go do a showing for a client, then I'm running back home to work on a project or edit a podcast or, you know, it's like you're not all over the place. Like it's very structured so that you have very specific times or maybe very specific days that you do these. for me, it's been working so well and it allows me especially in terms of business, to really recognize how serious is this person and how much should I prioritize this new client. The way I see it is if, you're blowing up my phone and wanna talk when the time is right for you, but yet you don't have two minutes of your time to fill out a form and book a call. Then you're not that serious, so that makes me not wanna prioritize you as a potential client. overall, this change in my schedule and my business has allowed me to take control back of my schedule. Really direct how my day-to-day works, and also allows potential new clients again, to really take me seriously and trust me as a. in terms of real estate as well. if you follow me on TikTok, you know, I've been growing my TikTok presence for real estate, uh, since last summer, and I've posted every single day since August 1st on TikTok. That's crazy. I like even, I mean, what is that? That's over 200 videos or more so far. I've had a few friends comment recently saying like, I don't know how you've run out of ideas or content to come up with. And I genuinely said like, no. Yeah, I haven't. Every week I come up with something new and for me it's, I'm thinking about this throughout the week. So if I come across a situation, maybe, um, a situation with a new client or something that happened that I'm like, Ooh, I wish other people. Like how this works or whatever, whatever example, I'll make a note, say in my notes phone, or even notion board for real estate. I'll make a note so that when the time comes each week to start creating that content, I already have the ideas there, so I'm not just like creating it on the fly. I'm putting that structure in my schedule once again. When I record content for real estate, especially for TikTok, what I do is I pick one afternoon to record it. No, it's not gonna be the same day every week. Like I try to keep it that way, but it's sometimes life still happens and like things come up. what that does for me is that I'm in that mode of thinking like the next hour and a half, it's just gonna be content creation, and I really only have to get ready once and I'm getting all of the content batched each week, and then I sit down and I edit it all, all at once so that I'm not waking up every morning stressed about what am I gonna post? What am I gonna post? I get all this. One day a week each week, and then every day I wake up, I just go and hit posts. It's already in the drafts ready to go. again, back to the theme, like this has added so much more joy to my day and so much more structure that I know that I'm not running around and wondering what's happening with no structure. You know what I mean? Like keep repeating myself. But it's just so important to me to have that day-to-day schedule. Now that I'm, I'm looking ahead at my schedule knowing what's gonna get. The one thing I've actually recently changed in terms of my, content creation for real estate. I post a lot of video tours of houses that I go to or like cool properties. And back in the fall what I would do is I would book like an afternoon one day a week and just get all the video tours done at once. And I found like that took up a big chunk of my week. So instead back to the same theme of habit stacking what I now do. if I have a showing, say at some building on King West with one of my clients, I'll double check before I go. If there's any other property that I think is cool in there that allows me to take a video, what I'll do is I'll book that place on top of the one I'm already going to, and then I'll go a little bit earlier before it's time for my client showing and I'll get the video recording Done already. What that does is it saves me so much more time. it's an extra 20 minutes on somewhere. I was already going anyway, so instead of just sitting in the lobby for 15 minutes waiting, I'm running up and getting another quick video, and having that part of my week already done. Content ready. The last topic I want to touch on is how goal-oriented I've become in the last couple of months. I've realized that it's so easy to set goals at the beginning of the year, but if you are not working backwards and making a plan on how to achieve those goals, what is even the point of making the. So I'll give you a prime example. I've had a few goals in my mind lately that all revolve around Latin American culture and learning Spanish. Some of those include, Going into my real estate career, thinking very long term, I would love to be in a position where I'm kind of flying back and forth from Toronto to maybe somewhere in central or Latin America, maybe somewhere in Europe, where I'm either living there half the time or working with clients who are looking to purchase there, or maybe working with clients in another country that are looking to purchase in Canada. I've realized the countries that I really want to live in and and make maybe a life there sometime is Spanish speaking countries. So I thought to myself, okay, if that's my goal, sure, that's great. But one of the barriers to achieving that goal is I need to understand Spanish and be able to talk, fluently. So if I want to achieve that goal, or I want that to be the reality of my life five years from now, perhaps 5, 7, 8, I don't know, years from now in my life, what can I do and work towards today to be already set up to achieving that goal and being able to jump on that opportunity when it comes? So the obvious thing is start learning Spanish, and so again, I'm in a theme of my life right now where it's all about stop playing small and really take yourself seriously if you want to achieve any of this. And so what I did right away is I signed up for Spanish lessons. so how that looks right now is I'm doing Zoom online with an actual tutor, uh, my tutor's from Venezuela. And yeah, so what I do is I do two days a week of a one hour tutoring session, and then I study in between. So I'm just starting this like this week. so this is a very new thing. But yeah, it made me realize, like, okay, instead of just talking about what you wanna achieve, let's start making a plan to actually do it. the platform that I used to sign up with was one that was recommended by a friend called Ley, and I'm enjoying it so far, so I'm really looking forward to, becoming a fluent Spanish speaker sometime maybe a year, a year and a half from now on the platform. Um, once you type in, like how many times a week you would like to do an online tutor session, plus how many hours per week do you expect to do some self-study? The, the algorithm kind of gives you an idea of like, at this time you'll probably be able to be fluent or at least conversationally speaking and for. Based on what I put in it said by January of next year, you'll be able to have like full on conversations. So in my head, that's my goal, and if that's the case by January of next year, I'll be so happy. and then also it's like thinking about like future travel plans. I, I wanna book another trip somewhere, like in a Spanish speaking country in December and January. So yeah, the ultimate goal is when I'm on that trip this upcoming, December and January, uh, if I can have conversations in Spanish, I will feel super proud of myself that I achieved. So in conclusion, this was a really quick solo episode, but I feel like it's coming with a lot of value to give you insight into some of my random habit stacking and daily routines. There's so much more I could jump into in terms of this, but I'm still in the thick of it of really structuring my day-to-day life in order to achieve the things I want to. If you're listening to this today and you're curious about anything I'm talking about or inspired by anything, don't hesitate to reach out and ask me more about it. I can absolutely share where I bought my notion template. I can share how I structured, how to set up the, uh, intro calls with clients. Um, anything just reach. And also if you're in Toronto or ever looking to move to Toronto and need help finding a new home, whether it's a rental, whether it's buying, or maybe you're looking to sell or lease your home, reach out. That's my full-time career and I absolutely love it and I would love to help you as well. Okay. That's it for today. Wherever you are listening to this, enjoy your day and have a fantastic week. Okay, bye. Did you know that I'm not only a podcast host, but in my full-time career, I met Toronto based real estate agent. If you are someone, you know, is a busy professional looking to get into the Toronto real estate market, I highly recommend reaching out to me. You can go directly to my website@wwwdotjenelletremblant.com. And you can click the let's talk button to book a call with me. I work with buyers, renters, and sellers in the downtown and east end areas. So don't hesitate to reach out to me and I would love to help you find your next home. And in the meantime, we'll see you here back next week.