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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
If your nervous system is wired for, better stay busy, otherwise I'm not going to be loved, or I better stay busy, otherwise I'm not going to be safe, then it's going to be at odds with being able to prioritize what matters. Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host Kate Northrup and together we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of hunting. Let's go fill our cups.
Kate Northrup:So this question came in from my friend Ashley, and the question was, how do I structure my day, week, and month, and essentially, how do I structure my time to align with my priorities and my financial goals? And I love this question because time and money are so interrelated, and this is something I think about a lot. Because my first book was called Money, A Love Story, All About Money, And my second book was called Do Less, which is really about time and energy management. So this is something I have a system for. And my Do Less Planner is really based on this system, as is my program.
Kate Northrup:It's a self study program, Heal the Way You Work. So generally speaking, my number one thing that I do is I crowd things out. So what do I mean by that? Rather than figure out how to fit things in, I first put in the most important things so that everything else gets crowded out that doesn't matter. Because you know, everyone's heard of Eisenhower's matrix, the important urgent, and then the not important not urgent, And most people get stuck wasting their time in the category of the important urgent, but unfortunately also the non important urgent, especially because we are so often operating in fight or flight.
Kate Northrup:We are so often dysregulated in our workday and in our lives that we're just stressed and running from this thing to the next thing, or we're so overwhelmed that we can't think straight. And so we are dysregulated not only in our relationship with money, we're also dysregulated in relationship with time, and we're so conditioned to think that the busier we are, the more important we are, or the busier we are, the more we're going to get done, or the busier we are, the more worthy we are. And so productivity has become this holy grail, and a lot of it has to do with our nervous system patterning, quite frankly. Because if you have a nervous system that is wired for constant busyness, if you were raised by a mother who was always running around and couldn't sit down and put her feet up, if you were raised by a working mom, by parents who were really driven for achievement and productivity, and then if that was focused on you as a child of like, you need to get straight A's, you need to achieve in x y z, we're proud of you because of your achievements, we're proud of you because of how much you got done.
Kate Northrup:We're proud of you because of your degrees. All of that leaves a mark in your neural programming. So know that any time we're having a conversation around scheduling and priorities and financial goals, we're not only talking about time. We are also talking about our nervous system, and our subconscious and unconscious wiring in terms of what it tells us, and what it is creating, the behavior that it's creating, that's not always logical, and that's not always actually in alignment with what we consciously want. There's a difference between what we say we consciously want, and what our nervous system is wired for.
Kate Northrup:If your nervous system is wired for, I better stay busy, otherwise I'm not going to be loved, or I better stay busy, otherwise I'm not going to be safe, then it's going to be at odds with being able to prioritize what matters. Because the truth is for most of us, what actually moves the needle is not very many things. And when you get really good at scheduling in what really moves the needle, you end up with a lot more free time. And when you end up with more free time, and you have associated rest with threat, your unconscious, your subconscious will do anything it possibly can to prevent you from having white space in your calendar, because white space is a threat. I remember this very well.
Kate Northrup:When I was in my 20s, and I was an anxious little nervous Nelly, I would see white space on my calendar, and I would freak out. So I scheduled myself. Oftentimes I would have a breakfast date, a lunch date, a dinner date, I would have coffee dates in between, I would have calls scheduled up the wazoo, and I would have it so that I would never be alone. Because essentially, I was too afraid to be alone in the quiet, because it was so terrifying to be by myself. I essentially, you know, I just like had a lot of unfelt feelings, and it felt too scary.
Kate Northrup:So I wanted to preface this conversation with that. Because the truth is the mechanics of scheduling in alignment with your priorities and your financial goals is pretty straightforward. But healing our nervous system so that it feels safe to do less is something else. The good news is if you're following along with my money work with Relax Money or The Money Reset or the Embodied Wealth Method, any of the things I offer there, the nervous system healing work will work for your relationship with time as well because our scarcity programming shows up in relationship to our money, in relationship to our time, in relationship with relationships, in relationship to all sorts of things. So the nervous system healing work works across the board.
Kate Northrup:Okay, so how do I crowd things out? Number one is I have a few rules, policies, And so they are the following. Number one, I don't take appointments on Mondays. So Mondays are my appointment free day, and that is an easy way to always know that one day a week I'm going to have breathing room. I also do my best to have an appointment free day on the day before I travel, and on the day after I travel, because that way I have enough space for transition, for being with the kids, for unpacking, which to be honest, I'm completely terrible at, for just like reintegration, so for prep, and then reintegration.
Kate Northrup:So those are some of my rules. I also don't schedule anything usually past four p. M. I know that I like to have that last hour to take a walk, or go in the sauna, or go home early to be with the kids, so that last hour of the day, I tend to not schedule anything. I take a lunch break, like an actual lunch break, not eating at my desk, like an actual pause during the day, I'll either go outside, I sit at the table in our office with real silverware, often a real napkin, sometimes I light a candle, sometimes Mike and I have lunch together, sometimes we go down to the club level of our building and he grills and we eat outside, but like having a proper lunch break.
Kate Northrup:And then I love to batch things. So I have looked, I've done the work to look at my work life, and I know what are the 20% of things that get me 80% of the results. And honestly, as you refine things, I've been at this for fifteen years, so I have enough data at this point to really even be able to dial it in further, so there's not only the 20% that gets me 80% of the results, which for me is creating content and connecting with people. Those are my two. But now I can take those two things and dial them in even further.
Kate Northrup:So now I'm taking that original 20% and looking at, okay, what's the 80% of that 20%, and what's the 20 of that 20%? So what's the 20% of connecting with people, and the 20% of content creation that gets us 80% of the results in terms of connecting with people and content creation? So then I can look at, okay, well what kinds of podcast episodes, for example, do the best with our audience? What kinds of connections are the most important for me to pour into, right? It's not just like I'm not gonna have coffee just with whoever I'm going to really be paying attention to.
Kate Northrup:Does this connection make me feel alive? Is this person someone I really love spending time with? Is there an opportunity here for greater collaboration, right? I'm not going to just say yes to any kind of connection. Now I know that only certain kinds of connections make sense for me, and only certain kinds of content creation make sense for me.
Kate Northrup:Because there's the eightytwenty, but then there's the eightytwenty of your 20%. And then you could take it and dial it down even further. So now that I know my 20% that gives me 80% of the results, I also know that I want to make sure those things go in the calendar, and I like to batch them in the following ways. Number one is I batch my podcast. So currently we're batched like nine months in advance with certain types of content.
Kate Northrup:I've never been this prepared in my life for anything. It's amazing. It's almost like I've prepared myself for like a year off by accident. And that's the power of batching, because on these recording days I know that I'm in podcasting mode. I am in the mode of on camera, I do my makeup once, I do my hair once, I have the outfits in my office, and I just get it done, boom boom boom boom boom.
Kate Northrup:I have my videographer here, and we do a whole bunch of them, whether they're guests, whether they're solo episodes, whether they're some combination of those two, so that I'm not bopping back and forth where it's like, now I'm in a team meeting, now I'm writing a newsletter, episode. Now I'm making art with my daughter. Now I'm Because context switching wastes a ton of energy, and I love to just batch in a whole day. This is my whole focus, and then I'm done for months in advance. That can really, really help.
Kate Northrup:So I schedule out. I don't work on Mondays. I really don't take appointments until like ten a. M. In the morning.
Kate Northrup:I don't take appointments after four p. M. Then on any given day, I try to limit my number of any kind of meeting, any kind of Zoom to two, maybe three. If I'm on more than three Zooms in a day, my eyes start to cross, and I don't actually get enough time to make headway on my priorities. I know my priorities because I've done the eightytwenty analysis, I know what moves the needle in my business, every time we do a launch, we do a launch debrief, and we know like what brought in the most leads, which kind of leads converted the best, which of our affiliates made the most sales, like we have which kind of content brought in the most.
Kate Northrup:So we have all the data to be able to know, okay, this works, let's do more of that, because there is no need, and I learned this the hard way, I did an episode about it recently called something like Simplify to Amplify, or this, I don't remember what it was called, but it was about our journey to nearly 3,000,000 while increasing our profits. And I talked about in that episode, which was a talk I did at our Relax Money Live event, I talked about the years I spent being addicted to starting new things all the time. I had not built the somatic body, I hadn't built the nervous system capacity for the level of steadiness that we currently have in our business. I required a certain amount of stress and pressure to feel the kind of adrenaline that I needed to feel alive, and what felt safe to me was constantly reinventing the wheel and having a certain amount of busyness required. Now we do a lot of rinsing and repeating.
Kate Northrup:So our most recent promotion, while it certainly required an intensity of presence, and an intensity of the number of people we were serving. It did not require an intensity of reinventing an offer, rewriting every single email, reinventing every single bonus, like having everything brand new. We pretty much knew we've done this before, this is our fifth time, so now we're in a mode of refinement. And that I really recommend is getting to a place where you're in a mode of refinement and you can have the data about what works at any given time, so that when you're looking at your priorities and you're looking at your financial goals, you can actually know, okay, this worked, this didn't work, I'm going to double down over here, I'm going to not do this over here, because I'm tracking the metrics and I'm tracking the data to know that was true. And in addition to tracking the actual data, I also recommend tracking your own life force energy, because if you're doing something and it's quote unquote working on paper, like bringing in traffic or bringing in customers, bringing in sales, that is wonderful, however, it is draining your life force.
Kate Northrup:So no amount of money or external visible results is ever going to be worth the cost of your depletion. So also be looking at, okay, what feels good to me? What is energizing to me? So I will not be on more than three Zoom calls a day because it depletes my life force no matter how many great opportunities there are. We just can't do all the things, and that is okay.
Kate Northrup:I have to know that I'm gonna have to say no more than I say yes, and I have no policies. If you want to see what my no policies are, they'll be below in the show notes, but you can also just do a quick Google Kate Northrop no policies, they're published right on my blog. So my no policies are guardrails because I am a very enthusiastic Enneagram seven. The Enneagram seven is in fact the enthusiast, and I want to say yes to everything. Nearly everything sounds exciting to me.
Kate Northrup:So it's hard for me to determine what is and is not good for me, because I can see possibilities everywhere. I'm also a manifesting generator. And so I just I have a lot of energy. I have a lot of energy to do a lot of things. So I created my no policies based on years of experience, having said yes to things that I ended up regretting.
Kate Northrup:That while I was doing them or after I was doing them, I thought, you know, in the end, that was more trouble than it was worth, or that was not fun, or that was really draining, or I felt annoyed before, during, or after it. So then I created my no policies. Those help me as guardrails to protect my time, and honestly, to protect myself from myself. Because left to my own devices, I still say yes to too many things. We have a couple of layers to help me from doing that.
Kate Northrup:Number one, every request of my time has to go through katenorthrup.com/requests. So when somebody asks me for a podcast interview, to do a summit, to do any kind of interview type things, they have to go to katenorthrup.com/requests. There are a series of questions that they need to fill out, and they give me and my team all the information we need in order to determine if it's a fit or not for our goals. That also really helps me, because once a week I go look at the spreadsheet of the requests all at the same time when I'm in the mindset of, okay, a yes to anything means a no to something else. So this request of my time better be a match for my priorities.
Kate Northrup:And so I think about, okay, if it's a podcast interview, do they have an audience that is full of my ideal customer? Because as much as I'd love to go talk to like a bunch of auto mechanics in Cincinnati, doesn't mean I couldn't help them, but they're not my ideal customer, right? It wouldn't make any sense for me. So I'm going to be a no for that versus something where it's like, oh, I have an audience in the room of 500 female entrepreneurs, then I'm like, great, all day long, let me go over there, those are my people. So that is very helpful to batch the requests, so I'm doing the accepting and denying all at once.
Kate Northrup:And then one more layer is I already have a series of things that I tell my team to say no to before it's even ended up on the spreadsheet. And so they just know that I'm always a no to a certain kind of thing, and then they just know they can say no on my behalf, and then because I'm just typing no in a spreadsheet or I'm typing pass, it actually really helps me to say no because I wish this weren't true about myself, but I still don't like saying no. And so if I was in personal communication with the person over email asking me, I would unfortunately be more likely to say yes, because there's still a part of me that wants to do something for them, and I love that part of me. She's sweet, but she needs to take a back seat. And so instead, I've set it up so I'm writing pass on a spreadsheet, and then my team member is doing the accepting or the declining on my behalf, and then she's also scheduling it.
Kate Northrup:The other thing that I do that's really helpful is I used to just do podcast interviews ad hoc, like the virtual ones. So it would be like, oh, now I have a podcast interview on Tuesday, and then I have another one on Thursday, and then also next Wednesday. And they were like kind of all over the place. So then I switched it to, okay, I'm only doing podcasts on Wednesday afternoons, but honestly I didn't even like that, so here's what I do now. I have two weeks a year where I do my best to get as many podcast interview requests that come in scheduled, all at the same time.
Kate Northrup:We do one in the run up to my Relax Money launch, so it also has a side benefit of creating the illusion that I'm everywhere, because I've had all these podcast requests, and then I record them all in this one week, and then I request that they be released in this two week period when we're promoting our free event every year, and then all of a sudden there's all these podcast episodes featuring me, and people are like, wow, you're everywhere, and I'm like, well not really, it just was a timing thing. And then I do a second week in the fall, and that way, again, context switching, I'm not trying to write my book, and then switching to a podcast interview, and then going back to answer emails from my team. I'm not all over the place. That week I'm just doing virtual podcast interviews, and I'm not scheduling anything else. And that also really helps.
Kate Northrup:The other thing we do is we do one big live launch a year. So I'm not doing promotions all the time. We do one big enrollment period a year, which means during the month of April I am all in on my signature program, enrolling as many people as are ready to be served, and then come May, I am all in on serving them for the thirteen weeks that I teach the live content. So I'm a sprinter. If you saw my thighs, you would see I am built for sprinting.
Kate Northrup:So we sprint for the enrollment in April, and then I deliver the program from May to August, and then I do one live coaching call a month until the end of that year long program. So that cadence for me really works because I know I can give it my all for a month, but when we used to launch this program two times a year, it was actually too much for my system, and it was too much for our team, and I couldn't give it my all in the way that I would have wanted to, and we just did our biggest enrollment ever. We absolutely, as a team, we left it all on the field or left it all on the dance floor, depending on your preferred metaphor. I think you know which preferred metaphor I would do. And that was really profound.
Kate Northrup:So coming back to kind of more structure here, blocking out times that I'm unavailable, and then batching things that I am available for has really helped me to protect my time. The biggest threat to your priorities and your financial goals is not you. It's people's requests of your time and you saying yes to things that are not the highest and best use of you. So we really have to get good at saying no. And I'm not the best at it, I'll be honest, but I'm getting better all the time.
Kate Northrup:And one tip I have for you is when a request comes in to make your default that it's a no. And then if your default is a no, you can play with saying no inside yourself, and then seeing if you're disappointed. I do that. Because if I say it's a no automatically, if I'm like, everything is a no automatically, then I'll know immediately if inside myself I'm like, aw, but I really want to do it, you know, I really want to do it. And I also know what moves the needle in my business because I have the historical data and I pay attention to it, and I also know what makes me come alive.
Kate Northrup:And the thing is, this is not about perfection, this is about evolution, so something I would have said yes to five years ago, I'm not gonna say yes to it now, right? But it didn't mean it was wrong then, it just means we evolve, our priorities shift. You know, I'm also a mom. My relationship with my kids is a priority. My relationship with my husband is a priority.
Kate Northrup:We do a date night every single week. My kids don't like it that we go out. I don't care. Right? Like, I'm every time they complain about date night, I'm just like, girls, my relationship with your father really matters.
Kate Northrup:I'm sorry you don't like it. I will see you in the morning. The end. And I don't mean to be, you know, I'm like, I miss you too when I go out, but our marriage is really important. And so there will be friction, there will be people who don't like what you decide, there will be people who are disappointed by your no, there will be people who are ruthless about trying to get you to change your mind, and you just have to have really good mother effing boundaries.
Kate Northrup:And my friend Terry Cole wrote a wonderful book called Boundary Boss, so if you struggle in this department, I would definitely recommend reading Boundary Boss. I also really love the book called Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu, which is another fantastic book about not needing to do it all, and setting boundaries in certain ways around your chosen life. I will also say that I have seasons for things. Know, those of you who've read, if you've read my book Do Less, if you ever worked with the Do Less Planner, or were part of the Origin membership or have taken my program Heal the Way You Work, you know I love to look at times seasonally and cyclically. So there are times like this big enrollment period we just did for Relax Money, there are seasons of go, go, go, go, go.
Kate Northrup:Like it was April was freaking intense. It was a lot. I would never be able to keep up that pace for the entire year, but I know I can go all in because it's seasonal. Over the summer, we do very little in our business, because it's summertime. I want to be with my kids.
Kate Northrup:They're not in school. I want to make memories. I want to go swimming in the lake. I want to go get ice cream in the middle of the day. You know, like I want to do those things.
Kate Northrup:I want to catch fireflies. And so not that I would be doing that in the middle of the work day anyway, but regardless, that's what matters to me. So summertime is really chill for us. I really go super light, really basically from Thanksgiving all the way through the beginning or the January is a very light time for us, because I also know I want my focus to be on making magic at the holidays. I want my focus to be on creating beauty and creating connection, and I also know in that wintertime energy, I don't feel like doing a lot.
Kate Northrup:I feel like resting. So I do look at my calendar that way in terms of what are the seasons in our business where I'm gonna be in go mode, and then what are the seasons in my business where I'm gonna be more in rest mode or more harvest mode or more in a culmination phase. So I have these four phases, I call it the upward cycle of success, and the four phases kind of in work are emergence, which is when you're getting a project going, you're planning, you're initiating, it's like springtime energy, it's like the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle, and it's like the waxing moon. Then there's visibility, and this is for any project or any season in your business. So visibility is when you are in sort of high summer energy.
Kate Northrup:It is the same as the full moon. It's the same as ovulation. It is really when you are out there, like being visible. So when we were in the launch for Relax Money, we were in visibility mode, right. We had 45,000 people taking this workshop.
Kate Northrup:We had 160 affiliates. I was on a million podcasts. It was just like a very high visibility time. And then after visibility, there's culmination. So right now in our company, we're in a culmination time.
Kate Northrup:We're dotting I's, we're crossing T's, we're caring for our members, we're making sure they have everything we need, we're tying up all these loose ends after the launch, we're looking at our metrics and our launch debrief, and all of those things. So that's more of a culmination phase, and that's like Autumn energy, waning moon energy, and the luteal phase. And then there's the fertile void, and the fertile void is like the wintertime, it's like the dark of the moon, it's the menstrual phase of your menstrual cycle. Anyway, so the winter energy is more of the pause. Now in terms of business, we obviously, we take time off during the year.
Kate Northrup:We'll take several weeks off during the summer. We take a couple weeks off over the holidays. We always take spring break off with the kids. So there's times we take real time off, however, in an overall company structure, because we have an online business, it's technically open 20 fourseven, right? Like we can be making sales all day every day.
Kate Northrup:We can be serving people all day every day, right, because people are taking our programs, they're listening to replays, they're doing their thing. And so we don't go full stop ever in terms of the digital nature of our company, but a winter season or a fertile void season for us is when it's just kind of like business as usual, and we're just coasting. So we're putting out the podcast every week, we're putting out my weekly notes of plenty, We are doing business as usual. We're not really ramping up for anything. We're not ramping down.
Kate Northrup:It's more of just a coasting energy. So what's so critical is to build in those four phases. It doesn't mean that the timing of it is going to be that like actual springtime will be all emergence energy, actual summertime. That's not what I mean, please don't take it so literally. What I mean is when you know that you're going to have a full on season in your business, schedule accordingly to then have some off time, and have these ebbs and flows so that you're considering all four of the different kinds of energy signatures that are required to fulfill the act of creation in your business.
Kate Northrup:And then finally I will say that Mike and I do annual planning, we use Jesse Itzler's big ass calendar, I love his calendar, he's married to Sarah Blakely, and it allows you to see your entire year all at once, and Mike and I plan using that. We do an annual planning getaway, we also plan separately for our company, so we know kind of what promotions are gonna be happening at any given time, but for the annual planning for our family and for our personal life, what really helps is to put in the boulders ahead of time, like weddings, school vacations, big family holidays, big family birthdays. We put those things in first, and then we build our business schedule around it. Ultimately, we built a business so that we could be as present with our family as possible. We are living in the sweetest years.
Kate Northrup:Our littlest is seven. Our big girl is gonna be 10 in September. I am so, so aware that it is not going to be long before they don't want to spend as much time with us. And I'm going to feel sad about that, even though it will mean more freedom. And so I'm so aware that like this is it.
Kate Northrup:This is our season of parenthood that is the sweetest, and it is waning in certain ways, and so I don't want to miss it. And so I built, like I started my business in my 20s for this. So having those big rocks or those boulders put in our calendar so that we can plan our business around our personal life, not the other way around, makes an absolute huge difference, and it also means we don't miss any of the moments that we did this whole thing for in the first place. Hopefully that helps you out with your concepts of planning and productivity and healing your relationship with time. I'm so glad you asked this question, Ashley.
Kate Northrup:Enjoy and let me know how it goes putting it into action. If you're ready to revolutionize the way you work as an ambitious human, you have to get my book, Do Less, A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Ambitious Women. This book is my love letter to recovering overachievers, and it is an evidence based journey to shifting the way you relate to time and energy so you can experience better results with less stress, less overwhelm, and avoid burnout. You can go ahead and get your copy over at katenorthrop.com/book.