Welcome to episode 224 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork talks about some of the routines he has implemented to help him stay focused.

Last week on the podcast, Bjork talked about the importance of a post log and how you can create one for your own blog. To go back and listen to that episode, click here.

5 Routines 

Routines can help you establish habits in your work and personal lives, and in this episode, Bjork covers some of the routines that have been the most impactful in his life.

While you’re listening, we encourage you to take a look at your day to see where it might benefit from a routine. Maybe you can establish a new morning routine, or maybe you can find a way to make your inbox more manageable.

We hope this episode gets you excited about the wonderful world of routines!

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why it’s helpful to filter your emails
• How to label your emails
• Why Bjork likes morning routines
• How Bjork journals
• How to do a quarterly bank review
• When you should review Google Search Console
• Why it’s important to analyze the work you’re already doing
• How to process your inboxes
• How to evaluate your week

Listen to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast below or check it out on Google Play Music, or Spotify:

Resources:

• Shoeboxed
• Things
• Asana
• Trello
• The Five Minute Journal
• 124: How to Level Up Your Life with UJ Ramdas
• Google Search Console course
• 165: Getting Things Done with David Allen

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for interviews, be sure to email them to [email protected].

If you’d like to jump to the comments section, click here.

Transcript:

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This is a solo episode and it is where I, Bjork Ostrom, just share some thoughts sitting here talking into a microphone. And hopefully those thoughts, ideas, concepts, whatever they might be, have an impact on you and the work that you do. That is why we create this podcast. That is why we show up here every week because our hope, our desires to have an impact on you and the things that you are doing, whether that be in the specific space of growing, building and eventually creating a business out of a food or a recipe blog. We have hundreds and thousands of people who have different stories of doing that and having success in this really specific niche that we’ve decided to talk about, which is food blogging. But also, there’s a lot of you that listen who are from all different types of businesses.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re interested in digital businesses, probably things online, but there’s a lot of people that listen to this podcast who don’t have a specific … or aren’t in a specific niche of food or recipes, but they just want to see what other people are doing. They want to hear what other people are doing, and that’s what I’m going to be doing on today’s podcast. I’m going to be sharing about some of the routines that I have. And these might be some routines that you’ll be able to pick up and apply to your day to day or week to week or month to month. The great thing about routines is that once you put them into place, they run on their own. You’re not having to remember to do them every day because they are a routine. They’re something that continually show up on your calendar or in your task list, maybe use a certain to-do app.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to be talking about not only how I scheduled these routines and how they’re a part of my normal day, but also specifically what they are. What I’ve found is that some of the boring, methodical things that I do on a day to day or week to week or month to month basis are some of the most important things, and that’s why I schedule them and make time for them, even though there’s oftentimes some urgent thing that could happen. These non-urgent things as you layer them in, as they become a foundational part of how you operate, these non-urgent things that our routines can become really valuable over time.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s go ahead and jump in. There’s going to be five different routines that I’m going to be talking about here today and they’re not all in one category. These are just things that I thought of as I was thinking through, “Hey, what are some of the most important routines that I have as it relates to the businesses that we do that maybe other people could pick up as well?” So, we’re going to talk through each one of those and I’m also going to share how I schedule those so I don’t forget about them.

Bjork Ostrom: Number one, daily filtering of non-urgent emails and a monthly or weekly review. Now, those of you who have been doing this for a while or even those of you who haven’t know that email is a beast. It’s one of the primary ways that we communicate, but it’s also one of the primary ways that people market and pass along non-urgent information. What I’ve learned over the years is that in order to be truly productive, I need to approach email intentionally. I need to think really hard about how I handle email because if I don’t, I could just spend all day emailing. And a lot of you can probably relate to that.

Bjork Ostrom: So, one of the routines that I have developed is filtering non-urgent emails and then reviewing those on a weekly basis. Now for some of them, it ends up being monthly because they are extremely non-urgent. But for the most part, I try and do this on a weekly basis. And one of the things I’m going to be talking about here is another routine is this idea of a weekly review. And during the weekly review is oftentimes when I go and filter through or look through the filtered emails that I have.

Bjork Ostrom: What exactly does this look like? Well, the first thing to know is that this is an ongoing thing. It’s kind of like weeding a garden. Filtering your emails is similar to what it would be like when you weed a garden. You don’t just do it once and then forget about it. You’re having to constantly do it, and I’m doing this on a daily basis. So, any time I get an email in that I would consider non-urgent, but I still want to be aware of, I filter that. This is specifically for Gmail, but what filtering means is that you create certain parameters that will be applied to an email that comes in. And if that email checks all of those different boxes, it’ll get filtered into a certain label. Now and Gmail labels are similar to folders.

Bjork Ostrom: And essentially what that means is it doesn’t go in your inbox. The trick here is to know that the distracted brain will see an email come in and it will read it or respond to it or get distracted by it. And it can be a huge drag on productivity. So, the filters that I set up are for these basic labels. There’s a few different more but, or a few more, but these are the most important labels that I have.

Bjork Ostrom: Number one is receipts. It’s amazing, whether it be Amazon or products that I’m subscribed to or that we use within our business, how many times I get an email for different receipts. This actually ties into another thing that we do. Number three, the quarterly bank review, which I’m going to talk about a little bit, but this can also happen with receipts. But when a receipt comes in, I don’t want to see that right away. I probably know that I made that purchase and it’s just distracting to have to filter those or work through those in real time.

Bjork Ostrom: So, that’s one of the labels that I have. Another one is called learning. And learning is probably the most active label. There’s the most random information coming in there. And in the learning label, I’m putting all of the different emails that I want to be subscribed to, that I want to be aware of, but I don’t necessarily want to process through that in the middle of my day. An example would be Yoast WordPress plugins. Yoast has some really important SEO plugins and they’re important for what we do on Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro, WP Tasty, across the board for everything that we do.

Bjork Ostrom: So, I want to be aware of what’s happening. Another example is Google Search Console. I’m subscribed to the Google Search Console Blog updates. I don’t want to read through those on a random day when I’m just about to record a podcast like I’m doing now. So, I want to filter those, but I still want to make time to read those, but I want to opt-in to when I consume that content. All of those go into a label called learning.

Bjork Ostrom: The other one is called investments and that’s any investment type content. It’s kind of like learning, but it has to do with angel investing and any type of investment oriented content goes into that label, and then the Food Blogger Pro forum. I’m subscribed to the Food Blogger Pro forums, so I get a notification anytime somebody posts. But as you can imagine, that would be a lot of content that I’d have to go through in real time because the forum is very, very active. And when those emails come in, I don’t want to have to process those in real time.

Bjork Ostrom: So, I have those go into a label as well. Those are the most important labels that I have. Now, how does that work? Well, anytime that I get an email in that I know lands in one of those buckets, what I do is I, in Gmail, I say, “Filter messages like this.” And what that will do is it’ll start the process of me being able to build a filter. Now, a couple quick tips of things that you can do.

Bjork Ostrom: Number one, sometimes I will get emails from somebody that I’m interested in getting the updates, the notifications, or maybe it’s a newsletter subscription, but that person also would maybe email me just as a friend. An example would be Mark Daoust, who has an agency called Quiet Light Brokerage. It’s actually a brokerage, not an agency. But what they do is they buy and sell websites. That’s not something that we’re doing actively, but I’m always interested in that industry and following along. More than anything, just as somebody who wants to learn about how people are building websites that they eventually sell or acquiring websites and then building those after they acquire them.

Bjork Ostrom: So, I love to get those notifications and I’m super interested in what they’re doing. I’m also emailing with Mark just occasionally as a friend and we get together and he shares industry trends and what’s happening and changes that they’re making. And so he really has an interesting look into the world of online businesses, but I don’t want to filter messages from Mark that are actually messages to me, not newsletters.

Bjork Ostrom: So, what do I do? Well, a quick tip is that if that exists for you and you want to make sure that you don’t filter those out, what I do is I will filter any message that comes in from Mark’s email address, but I’ll make sure that it only gets filtered if it has the word unsubscribe in it. And I know that Mark’s not going to email me and say, “Hey, would you want to unsubscribe from this?” If it’s a personal email, but the notifications will have an unsubscribe in it. So, that’s a quick little tip, something that I use quite a bit as a filtering mechanism for any interactions that I have with somebody who has both in marketing email or notifications that come from blog posts, but also I’m emailing on a personal level.

Bjork Ostrom: If that is something that you feel like, if you feel like you’ve ever been overwhelmed by email and can’t process through all of your email, there’s a good chance that part of the reason that that’s happening is because a lot of the emails aren’t emails that you actually need to process through in real time. You could wait a month or sometimes I even wait two months to process through the learning folder, the learning label that I have in Gmail because that doesn’t need a quick response. It’s kind of like reading a book. It’s just a way for me to consume information and I don’t need to process that.

Bjork Ostrom: Another quick tip here is once you read through those emails and you’ve processed them, what I do is I remove them from the label. So, all email comes into my inbox. I’ve turned off, for Gmail, I’ve turned off all of the other automatic filtering that happens. If you use Gmail, you know that there’s those other buckets that email can land into like promotion or … I forgot what the other ones are because I have them turned off, but there’s these other buckets that they, Gmail automatically filters those. I’ve turned those off, so everything comes into my inbox. Then I’m manually picking, I’m saying, “I want these emails to go into these labels.” They skip my inbox so I don’t ever see them in my inbox. They just skip my inbox. They’re still viewed as unread, but they land in those labels.

Bjork Ostrom: Now, another quick tip is I only have my labels show up in Gmail if there is an unread message in them. So, I know that at the end of the week, let’s say that I go through and I process all of the receipts that I have, what I do is I will process the receipt, I forward any of the relevant receipts to Shoeboxed for each of the businesses we have. So, then Shoeboxed will store a digital copy of that receipt. And then what I do is I mark the message, I remove the label, so then it moves it out of the label and it technically within Gmail goes into all mail.

Bjork Ostrom: The system that I have, the funnel is everything into inbox and then on a daily basis, I’m filtering those into specific labels if they should be applied to a label. So, then they’ll skip the inbox in the future. And then once week or on some occasions, if it’s not as important, once a month, I’ll go through and I’ll process all of those different labels and try and get those to zero. So, it’s kind of like different versions of Inbox Zero.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m trying to get to Inbox Zero as much as possible in my actual inbox, but the trick is my actual inbox is as much as possible things that I actually need to process through in real time. And if they’re not, then they go in a label. And then once a week or once a month, I’ll get those labels to label zero. I’ll filter everything or I’ll go through and process through everything, remove them from the label. So, eventually everything just goes into all male and I am neat and tidy in my inbox. And also, I don’t miss any of those important things that I want to process through eventually but not in real time.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a lot, but I think there’s going to be some people who listen to this podcast who are like, “Oh my gosh, that’s something that I can apply.” Now, it doesn’t have to be exactly like that. You can use your own version, but I think there are a lot of people here that listen to the podcast who email is a big issue. And what you need to do is intentionally approach it and say, “How can I continually improve this and make it more approachable?” That was number one, daily filtering of non-urgent emails and then a weekly or monthly review.

Bjork Ostrom: Speaking of weekly or monthly review, one of the things that I do on a daily basis is a daily routine, a daily review. I look at the day ahead and that is something that actually shows up as a recurring item. I use a task manager called Things, but maybe you use Asana or something like Trello. But with Things, I have this show up as a daily reminder. So, it’s the first thing that I do when I’m building my day, I say, “Okay, my morning routine. What am I going to do with my morning routine?” And now, it’s not super intense. There’s not a lot to it, but it’s essentially a list of things that I do to start my day off. A few of the things that are on that that have been really helpful, number one, I just do a review of the calendar. So, I look ahead and what I try and do is every day, I try and look ahead at the week.

Bjork Ostrom: Now, it might seem a little bit repetitive to look ahead at the week every day because you’re going to be continually reviewing these things that are coming up. But I found that to be really helpful so I’m not forgetting anything that’s coming up, and I have a little bit of a mental framework of how the week will unfold. Every day, I’m reviewing the calendar, not only for that day, which is really important, but also for the upcoming week. And as things need to change or tweak or adjust with my calendar, I can do that on that day. And maybe it involves emailing somebody and saying, “Hey, can we change this date? I saw that there’s a conflict.” Or just within my own calendar saying, “Oh, I know that I have this thing,” like a podcast recording, which I’m doing today, “ I need to make sure that I make time for that and when am I going to do that?” I’ll put that in my calendar and make sure that I hit that.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that I do is I review my actual tasks. So, in my calendar, those are things that I know I need to be at a certain place at a certain time and I know I need to do it then. I also have tasks that are happening. And those tasks can be done in between the time that I have for the actual scheduled items that day. An example would be responding to Food Blogger Pro forum threads. That can kind of fit in at a certain point. I don’t necessarily have to schedule it. I know that I need to make my scheduled things happen, whether it be this podcast recording or meeting with somebody, but I don’t necessarily have to make the Food Blogger Pro forum responses happen at a certain time.

Bjork Ostrom: So, I can put that as a task and that will show up. And I know that as I work through my day, the different tasks, I can go ahead and cross those off the list. I’m reviewing the day and then also building that day. And what does it mean to build the day? Well, I sort order the things that are most important. And one of the cool things about Things, which is, again, the app that I use to do this, is that you can put things in your day to-do lists, but then there’s also a way you can drop it into the evening. I also have things that I don’t need to do throughout the day, I just drop those into the evening area. And so I’m not looking at those or considered those, but I still need to do those today.

Bjork Ostrom: An example is I’ve been on this campaign to attempt to reduce the amount of hair that we have to deal with from our dog, Sage. So, I have this recurring routine that comes up in the evening where I say, “Brush Sage.” Because if I didn’t have that on there, I’d forget about it. And Sage is a shedding machine and we love her regardless. But it is one of the things we have to deal with, with Sage is all of that shedding. So, that’s on my list for this evening is to brush Sage. Now, it’s not something that I want to be thinking about while I’m at work. So, I just drop that into this evening and know that when I get back home, that’s one of the things that I need to hit.

Bjork Ostrom: And in reviewing the day I’ll organize and say, “Okay, what are the most important things, what am I going to start with? And then what are the things that aren’t as important or that can be done later?” And I’ll drop those into this evening. And so it’s kind of a sort ordered list of things that I need to hit sorted by what’s most important or what I need to do right away. And then at the bottom are the things that I can wait on or that I’m doing when I get home.

Bjork Ostrom: Every day, I actually am reviewing that as part of my daily routine. It’s a little bit of a task conception, but I have every morning a task that says, “Morning routine,” and it’s review the calendar, review the day. And then also one of the things that I try to be intentional about is spending some time journaling. And it’s not a lot and it’s just pretty quick. It’s actually just doing The Five Minute Journal. And for those of you who have listened to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast for a while, you know that we did an episode way back when, episode 124, and we talked to one of the founders of The Five Minute Journal, UJ. And he talks about some of the ways that you can be using The Five Minute Journal to increase your, or to be intentional about gratitude, and the ability for gratitude to have an impact in all different areas in your life and then also to reflect on your day at the end of the day.

Bjork Ostrom: So, that’s one of the things that I try and do. I’m not 100% with it, but it is something that I have as a recurring task that I try and hit often. That could be true for you. Maybe you have something that you want to make sure that you’re doing on a daily basis. You can create a little task that’s a recurring item. It’s a routine that you have and you say, “These are the things that I want to do every morning to start out.” Now, you could just remember that in your head. But what I found is it’s really helpful to have something where you can actually go in and say, “Every morning, here’s what I’m going to do. Check, check, check.” That’s going to help you build that routine. And after a while, it would become second nature. You won’t need to think about it. But sometimes we need that little framework to help us to move in the direction of establishing the habit.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s number two, the daily routine. Number one was filtering of non-urgent emails and doing a weekly or monthly review. It’s a great routine to get into. Number two, a daily routine of going through the things that are most important to you in the morning and you can also do that at night. So, you can have a morning and evening daily routine that you hit. Number three is the routine of a quarterly bank review. Now, some of you I know are going to think about this and you’re going to be like, “Oh, this is super boring,” and here’s what I have to say. It actually is. It is terribly boring. And it is not necessarily something that I look forward to.

Bjork Ostrom: So, what I do is I try and make it a little bit more interesting by doing something like getting my favorite cup of coffee and going somewhere different that’s kind of fun to hang out at. It kind of helps but not necessarily. But it’s a really important routine for me because what I’ve found is, especially over the years as there starts to be more expenses related to the businesses that we have, there can be a lot of little things that sneak in as recurring payments that you don’t actually need or that you did need at one point but you aren’t using anymore. So, what I do is I literally sit down at the computer, login, and I go line by line. I switch it, so I’m just looking at the expenses, but I go line by line. And I make sure that I understand, for the past three months, every single transaction that’s coming through for the business. And I think about it in two different ways, really.

Bjork Ostrom: One is do we need this? Is this something that we still need? And does it make sense to continue to pay for this? If not, I cancel it. And that’s an immediate win that you can have for your business because you’ve just increased the profitability of your business by canceling something you don’t need. Number two, this is something that we do probably more often. A lot of times, we actually do need the thing and we know that we will need that service or app or software or subscription. We know that we’ll need that on a continual, ongoing basis. It’s actually really valuable for us. In that case, what we’ll do is we’ll look to see, hey, if we’re paying for this on a monthly basis, is there a way that we can upgrade to yearly and potentially save? An example would be for a software service, Food Blogger Pro.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member and you say, “Hey, we know that we’re going to continue to use this,” you can upgrade from a monthly plan to a yearly plan and then you get two months free. So, if you say, “Hey, it makes sense for me to continue to be a member. I know that I want to do this moving forward,” you can upgrade and then have that savings. That’s true for a lot of different services and a lot of different apps. The incentive for the company is that they will charge you less on average per month if you pay for a longer subscription. A month to a year or a month to a quarter or whatever it might be.

Bjork Ostrom: Now, we almost always will start off a service monthly because we want to make sure that as we’re getting up and running, that this is something that we actually need. We’re interested in it, we’re going to use it moving forward. And then after four months, five months, six months, we know this is something that we’re going to use or this isn’t something that we’re going to use. And we can either then cancel it or if we like it, if we want to continue using it, then we can upgrade if they have that option for the discounted amount.

Bjork Ostrom: And sometimes it might not be displayed, but you can always reach out and ask. It doesn’t hurt to ask and say, “Hey, really love the service. We’d like to upgrade, but wondering if we could get a discount if we upgrade to that next level.” That is number three, the quarterly bank review. Not super exciting, but it is one of the ways that we have been able to with the least amount of work, save the most amount of money just by canceling or upgrading accounts or services that we have.

Bjork Ostrom: Number four, a monthly review of Google Search Console. Now, if you haven’t yet gone through the course on Google Search Console for Food Blogger Pro, please, please, please do that. We just got an email the other day from somebody who went through it, a Food Blogger Pro member and they said, “My mind is blown and in a good way,” they said, “by understanding all of the awesome stuff that’s available within Google Search Console.” So, make sure you have it set up at the bare minimum. But number two, make sure that you’re actually using it. And to do a monthly review of this is important because otherwise what can happen is you can set it off to the side. You can forget that it’s just running in the background and you might not be getting notifications. Now, if your account’s set up in a way where you get emails, great, but maybe you’ve unsubscribed in the past and you’re not getting those emails anymore.

Bjork Ostrom: So, we have a task for each of the businesses, for each of the sites that we have, where we go in and we do a monthly review of Google Search Console. Now, you don’t have to go super in-depth, but the things that you want to be looking for are any enhancements that you can make. And we’re not going to go deep into what these are and what these represent. But essentially, what you’re going to be looking for are warnings or errors in the enhancements area. And this would be Google telling you, “Hey, you’re trying to tell us something with your website,” the way that it’s structured or the data that you have, “but something is a little bit off with it.”

Bjork Ostrom: There’s either a big issue in air or something that’s a little bit off that you should probably look at and improve, which would be a warning. And you want to look through and make sure that as much as possible, you are fixing or understanding at the bare minimum what those errors are and why those warnings are coming up. Do that on a monthly basis. More than anything, you just want to make sure that there’s nothing drastic coming up, any big changes that happened that you didn’t notice.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that you want to be aware of, the other thing that you want to be checking in on is the area within Google Search Console called security and manual actions. And the only thing you need to do with this is just click manual actions, click security issues, and hopefully you have this green check mark and it says, “No issues detected.” But sometimes, there might be a very significant issue with your site and it might require you to dig a little bit deeper. Now, my hope is none of you ever have to deal with this. And we talk specifically in that course on Food Blogger Pro about what these are and why it’s important to understand these. But these are red alert, drop everything you’re doing and fix these issues if you ever have a manual action or security issue within Google Search Console.

Bjork Ostrom: Those are two quick things that you can check. And there’s lots of different areas when we talk about all of those in the course. So, if you are a Food Blogger Pro Member, make sure to check that out and you can add to your monthly review of GSC, as we call it, some of the other items that you might consider important like the coverage area or even just checking to make sure that your sitemap is still successfully being crawled.

Bjork Ostrom: Number five, we’re coming to the end and this is, I had mentioned this before, this is that weekly review. The weekly review for me is a time to step back and to do the work of analyzing the work that I’m doing. And this is, I think, a big issue with people who are information or knowledge or digital workers is that we are always just doing the work as opposed to taking little blocks of time. It doesn’t have to be long. It can be an hour or two hours to step back and think about the work that we are doing. There is an episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast where I talk with David Allen and he is the author of Getting Things Done. In that episode 165, foodbloggerpro.com/165, in that episode he talks about how important it is for us as information or knowledge workers, how important it is for us to not just always work, but to take time to think about the work that we’re doing and process the work that we’re doing and improve the methodology and the systems we have as it relates to the work that we’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: And for me, the routine of a weekly review is one of the ways that I do that. Now, a few different things that are involved in the weekly review for me, number one, it’s stepping back and actually processing my physical inbox. Believe it or not, we still get a decent amount of mail, and I’m not usually processing that in real time. So, I have a little inbox area, I’ll toss it in there. And then on Friday, usually I’ll try and slot it in on Friday, maybe a Friday afternoon, I’ll go through and I’ll process that physical inbox. Now, there’s a lot of really important things in there, so I want to make sure that I’m actually doing that on a daily basis, excuse me, on a weekly basis, that I’m going through and processing that. Because if I don’t, there might be bills or invoices or whatever it might be.

Bjork Ostrom: That would be one of the things that I do on a weekly review. Number two, I process my digital inbox. One of the things that’s happening throughout the week is every single day, there’s a ton of different things coming in. There’s tasks, there’s ideas, there’s different initiatives that are happening. All of these things are coming in and those are happening at the same time that I’m needing to do other things and needing to go through the things that are on my calendar or the things that are on my to-do list for that day.

Bjork Ostrom: So, what I do, and you can listen to episode 165, David Allen talks about this. What I do is I have this digital inbox. It’s kind of like the physical inbox, but it’s just for digital tasks and ideas and those things that are coming in. Wen those come in, I drop those into my inbox, but I need to take time to actually go through that and figure out what I’m going to do with those, whether I’m going to move on them right away, whether I’m going to consider them maybe at another time. I need to process that digital inbox.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s another thing that I do with my weekly reviews. I go through and I say, “Okay, let’s take a look at these different things that are in the inbox and what am I going to do with these? How am I going to move forward with them? Maybe, am I going to make the decision not to move forward with them? And if so, when do I want to be reminded of them?” Right now, I have 68 different things in my inbox, so I have to go through and I have to process those and I have to make sure that I understand what the next step is for that. That is one of the things that I do, another one of the things that I do in that weekly review.

Bjork Ostrom: Then I takes some time to ask myself three questions. I look back at the week and I ask myself, “What went well?” What are the things that it was like, “Hey, this was awesome. This was something that was really good that I should try and continue to do moving forward.”? And I jot down some notes about that. I also ask, “What could be improved?” Were there things that I did in the previous week that were subpar or didn’t quite feel right or things that I would just generally want to improve on as I move forward? And I reflect on that and make some notes on that. And then I look forward and I say, “What can I do for this upcoming week to make it great?” So, I look at the upcoming week, I say, “Okay, what are the things that are happening and how can I be intentional about making that week, the week coming up, really awesome?”

Bjork Ostrom: Now, there are times when I get to the end of a Friday and I’ve gone through everything that I need to do in that day, and this weekly review has to get pushed into the weekend or maybe I do it on a Saturday or a Sunday, but I really try and prioritize getting to this at least once a week and whether that’d be Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. What I found is that it’s kind of a restorative thing to do. It’s not task oriented. It’s not like I’m trying to accomplish something. It’s a time for me to take a deep breath to process and to look back while also looking forward.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s another really important routine that I have and that is the weekly review. Obviously, there’s a lot of routines that exist for all of us. There’s a lot of routines that exist for me, but those are five routines that I thought you might be able to apply in your day to day, week to week, or month to month. And hopefully these have an impact not only on how you feel about the work that you’re doing, but also the impact of the work that you’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: Just a quick review. Number one is the daily filtering of non-urgent emails and then a weekly or a monthly review of those. So, the things that are coming into your inbox are mission critical but you don’t miss the things that you still want to learn about or process. It’s just that you don’t see those coming in in real time. Number two, the daily routine and making sure that you prioritize those things that you want to start out with in your day and get into the habit of doing things like reviewing your calendar or even reviewing the upcoming day.

Bjork Ostrom: And if you are somebody who would do something like journaling, that would be a part of that as well. Number three, the quarterly bank review, making sure that you aren’t paying for things that you’re not using or for the things that you are using, that you upgrade those to the point where, or for the purpose of saving so you know that you use something, you know that you have a service that you like, you can upgrade that and save on that over time.

Bjork Ostrom: Number four, the monthly review of Google Search Console. If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member, make sure you go through that course because there is some really awesome stuff if you’re not familiar with it, that it’s kind of like this secret information that it feels like Google shouldn’t be giving you. But they do because they want you to understand a search better. I actually had a conversation with a friend in a totally different industry who’s trying to improve his site’s search engine optimization. It’s in the tech and IT world. It’s actually focused in on apps, phone apps and iPad apps and things of that nature. He didn’t know about Google Search Console and I told him about it and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is awesome. We’re super excited about this.” So, if you’re not familiar with it, make sure that you get familiar with it. And then build in that routine of checking in on it once a month at the very least.

Bjork Ostrom: And then number five, that weekly review. This is a time for you to step back, to not feel like you have to be super task oriented to process through each and every little task that you have and to be super productive. But instead, to spend time thinking about the work that you’re actually doing, to step back and do the work of critically analyzing and being present to your work. And for me, that looks like going through our physical inbox and my digital inbox, making sure that I understand when I’m going to move on those things and processing through those. And then also reflecting saying, “What went well? What could be improved? And how can this upcoming week be great?” Those five different items are items that you can, if you feel like it would be helpful for you, fold into your routines.

Bjork Ostrom: And we would love to hear from you. If you’re a Food Blogger Pro member, you can jump into the forums and share other routines that you have or in the show notes for this podcast. If you have any thoughts, you can drop some other routines that you have that have been important for you, and we would love to hear from you. This podcast is a great joy for us to do every week. We really appreciate you. And if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you can check out the membership by going to foodbloggerpro.com. We have thousands of people from all around the world who are learning how to start and grow and monetize their blogs. We love that community and we would love for you to be a part of it.

Bjork Ostrom: If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast, make sure that you do that in your favorite podcast app of choice. For me, I use the native podcast app on the iPhone. All you have to do is just search Food Blogger Pro and that will come up and you’ll be able to subscribe to that. But there’s lots of different options. Spotify is a great one and a lot of people use that as well. So, we appreciate you, we appreciate you subscribing, we appreciate you listening and we are excited to continue doing this. We’ll see here next week, same time, same bat-place. Until then, make it a great week. Thanks.