The #1 Tip to Be Peacefully Productive - How to Use Hustle Sanely 5
Keep reading this post to learn:
⋒ What living a peacefully productive life means and looks like
⋒ What Hustle Sanely 5™ is and how it can make you peacefully productive every day
⋒ Ideas for how you can implement HS5 in your life
A peacefully productive life is an inclusive approach to productivity that helps you create a lifestyle that radiates peace & purpose no matter what season you’re in. A peacefully productive life is not having to choose between pursuing your dreams or taking care of your mental health. It is being clear on what your vision is for your life, knowing what your priorities are, and designing your days intentionally so that those priorities get your best time energy.
Living a peacefully productive life is about taking ownership and not letting life happen to you but creating an intentional life that supports you fully.
The framework that I created to help people live a peacefully productive life is called The 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely™.
The 5 keys are:
Get your mindset right.
Get clear on your vision.
Define your priorities.
Create your routines and schedule.
Implement Hustle Sanely 5™ every day.
So Hustle Sanely 5™ is part of The 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely™. It’s a list of 5 intentional habits — think of HS5 as your daily action steps for living a peacefully productive life.
Before I tell you what the 5 habits are, I want to make a few things clear – Hustle Sanely 5™ isn’t meant to cause you stress. It’s not another thing that you have to add to your to-do list but a tool to help you weave consistent daily routines into your life while giving you the space and flexibility to do different habits every day.
HS5 is a way to help you structure your day so that you’re not living in this go, go, go mode that leaves your head spinning at the end of the day and feeling like you don’t even know what just happened or how the day is over but you feel like you got nothing done even though you feel exhausted AF.
I was very deliberate in choosing the 5 habits to include in Hustle Sanely 5™. I’m going to walk you through each one and why I included it:
01. Complete Your Focus 3.
I used to be the queen of the long AF daily to-do list and let me tell you – it drove me mad. I would work myself to the bone every day trying to check everything off. But I never was able to get it all done so every day’s list just ran into the next day and I just felt like I was on this hamster wheel. As I attacked the long list each day, I would just randomly pick tasks that felt doable so I’d end up doing a bunch of tedious tasks every day but I wasn’t making real progress toward my goals because I was putting off the big action steps since it felt good in the moment to check off all the little stuff on the to-do list.
Having a Focus 3 each day helps me prioritize my tasks and know which ones I want to give my best time and energy to.
And truthfully, when I know what those 3 most important tasks are going into each day, I tend to knock them out earlier in the day, and then I have plenty of time and energy left to do those smaller tasks anyway.
It’s like that rocks-in-a-jar analogy that I’ve shared before – let’s say you have a bunch of small rocks and 3 large rocks and you’re trying to fit them all in a jar. If you start by filling the bottom of the jar with small rocks, you probably won’t have room to put all the big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in, you can pour the small rocks around the big rocks and everything ends up fitting.
Your Focus 3 tasks are the big rocks!
02. Move for 30 Minutes.
There is no denying the physical benefits of moving our body. And that’s amazing – love that for us, truly. But the real reason I included Move for 30 Minutes in HS5 is for the mental health aspect. There is so much research that points back to the benefits that movement has on our mental health. This study even says aerobic exercises, including jogging, swimming, cycling, walking, gardening, and dancing, have been proved to reduce anxiety and depression. These improvements in mood are proposed to be caused by exercise-induced, increase in blood circulation to the brain and by an influence on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and, thus, on the physiologic reactivity to stress.
A very jargon-y way to say that intentional movement makes us less stressed, which is amazing!
At the end of this blog, I’m giving you some examples ways you can walk out each HS5 habit but I want to say this now – your HS5 move for 30 absolutely does not have to be you going to a gym and throwing weights around if you hate doing that.
I didn’t call this habit “Exercise for 30 Minutes” on purpose – I chose the word “move” intentionally. Ride your bike, walk your dog and listen to a podcast, have a dance party with your kids, stretch in the morning and at night – just make it a priority to move your body with intention for 30 minutes a day.
03. Tidy for 15 Minutes.
Our inner environment (aka our mind) is heavily affected by our outer environment (aka our living spaces, office spaces, etc.) so it benefits you to keep your life tidy. If your living space is a mess, your mental space is probably going to be a mess, too. Messes are not conducive to peace and peace if kind of a big component of living a peacefully productive life, ya know?
Hear me out – I am not saying that your home needs to be spick and span and sparkling from top to bottom. I’m saying that you need to make it a priority to create a living environment that is functional for you and your family and that promotes peace. And that can look different for everyone! I’m not talking about your home being perfectly/aesthetically organized.
Maybe you care about having your spice labels all matching and I love that for you but that’s not the season of life I’m in right now as a mom of a newborn. For me, a tidy home right now is having our surfaces cleared and the floors cleared. Like nothing laying around that isn’t being used.
I’m all about creating routines that help me keep my home tidy so that I don’t feel like I’m constantly running around trying to manage my home.
One of the routines that helps me keep my home tidy without having to dedicate a ton of energy and mental space to it is my daily tidying for 15 minutes. You would be amazed at how much you can get done in your home in 15 purposeful minutes.
Doing a little bit each day keeps my home from getting chaotic and so I’m never having to spend hours on the weekend cleaning my house. It’s incredible. And this even still rings true with all the baby stuff that we have now, lol.
I did a podcast episode last February sharing my whole cleaning routine if you’re interested in all those juicy details!
I encourage you to spend some time deciding what a functional home looks like for you in this season and basing your daily tidy for 15 minutes on that!
04. Say Or Do One Kind Thing For Yourself
The purpose of this one is to remind you to pause and check in with yourself every day. To actually ask yourself, “What do I need to feel supported today?”
Here’s an example I shared on Instagram once:
I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by how many open loops I had for work one week. So instead of working out in the morning, I decided to do an admin power hour one day of that week so that I could close some of those open loops before my day got going and I bumped my workout to the afternoon because that’s what made me feel supported that day.
Your say or do one kind thing for yourself doesn’t have to be monumental – it’s just you making sure that you’re pausing, reflecting, and showing up for yourself in a supportive way.
05. Say or Do One Kind Thing For Someone Else
Part of hustling sanely is making sure you’re treating the important relationships in your life as the priority that you say they are. And that means consistently showing up for the people in your life in ways that remind them that they matter to you.
Pre-Hustle Sanely days, I 100% sacrificed my important relationships in the name of chasing after my goals.
Having this daily habit of saying or doing one kind thing for someone else reminds me to nurture and pour into the people who matter to me because honestly, isn’t that what life is all about?
So again, I just want to reiterate that HS5 wasn’t created to cause you stress or make your to-do list longer. If you struggle with feeling guilty for not “completing “ Hustle Sanely 5, I challenge you to reframe how you’re thinking about it.
The purpose of HS5 isn’t to complete a list of habits so you can check them off as “done” – it’s meant to help you be more intentional and present in your daily life – to be peacefully productive. Stop viewing it as something else to do and look at it as a tool to help you get the most important stuff done while prioritizing your mental health and relationships.
I encourage you to figure out how you can do the habits in a way that supports your current season then build your daily schedule to include them.
HS5 is less about the habits themselves and more about your posture and intention in doing them. They are there to support you and ground you throughout the day. To help you create intentional pockets of pausing and peace so that the days don’t speed by you, leaving you wondering what just happened at the end of the day.
Hustle Sanely 5™ is a guide, not something to box you in.
As a new mama, HS5 has been a lifesaver. I was especially grateful for it during the first 6 weeks postpartum because everything felt like a whirlwind and HS5 gave me a foundation to stand on every day. It was a concise list of habits that I could focus on to make sure that I was showing up for the important stuff – tasks, yes, but my mental health and relationships more importantly.
That’s my favorite thing about HS5 – you can use it to support you for literally ANY season of life!
I feel like it wouldn’t be the Hustle Sanely Podcast if I didn’t serve you up some concrete action steps soooo I thought it would be helpful if I gave you some tips/ideas for each of the Hustle Sanely 5™ habits!
Now, remember that these are just ideas to give you some inspiration and get your wheels turning – HS5 is meant to be a foundation that you build on – and you are in charge of what you build. You’re more familiar with your season and circumstances than I am so take what works and tweak what doesn’t to make it work for you!
+ COMPLETE YOUR FOCUS 3:
So I can’t really give you examples for this one because everyone’s Focus 3 tasks each day are going to be totally different depending on what you have going on in your life! But I can give you some advice for choosing your Focus 3 tasks each day:
~ I plan my Focus 3 tasks out at least one day in advance. So when I wake up, I know what my 3 top priorities are that day. When I am doing my weekly prep meeting and planning for the following week, I usually have my Focus 3 nailed down for Monday and Tuesday and then maybe 1-2 tasks for Wednesday-Friday. I like to leave a little room for margin because life happens. So I don’t try to plan out all 3 tasks for each day a whole week ahead of time, you know?
~ When trying to determine what your 3 most important tasks are each day, ask yourself the question: “What 3 things do I need to accomplish to feel like today was peacefully productive?” As in, what tasks would you be bummed about not having completed at the end of the day?
Okay, for the rest of the HS5 habits, I can give you more concrete examples:
+ MOVE FOR 30 MINUTES:
~ Walk your dog away from your house for 15 minutes and then back
~ Go to a workout class with a friend
~ Do a home workout that you find on YouTube
~ Put on some chill music and stretch for 15 minutes in the morning and then again at night
~ Work in your garden for 30 minutes
+ TIDY FOR 15 MINUTES:
~ Set a timer for 15 minutes and focus on doing as much as you can in one area of your house
~ Do a 15-minute whole house pick up before bed
~ Spend 15 minutes decluttering a space in your home
~ Spend 15 minutes decluttering a digital space like your desktop or your emails
+ SAY OR DO ONE KIND THING FOR YOURSELF:
~ Stop at your favorite coffee shop on the way to work
~ Go to sleep 30 minutes early
~ Look in the mirror and say an affirmation out loud
~ Read a book in the sunshine during your lunch break
~ Wear a matching PJ set for your evening routine
+ SAY OR DO ONE KIND THING FOR SOMEONE ELSE:
~ Call your mom on the way home from work to catch up
~ Spend 20 minutes after work playing outside with your kids
~ Text your best friend a funny meme to let them know you’re thinking of them
~ Bring a co-worker coffee
~ Ask your neighbor how you can be praying for them
Again, these idea lists are obviously not exhaustive – there are so many different directions you can go with HS5 every single day! Use it as a tool to help you show up intentionally for yourself, your goals, and the important people in your life!
And there you have it — a little refresher on what Hustle Sanely 5™ is and how it can support you in creating a peacefully productive life! I hope your biggest takeaway here is that HS5 isn’t meant to be something that stresses you out or becomes just another thing on your to-do list. HS5 is less about the actual habits and more about the intentions behind the habits!
Are you ready to create a peacefully productive schedule and routines for the year, quarter, month, week, and day to help you ditch overwhelm for good?
Use the code PPSSPRING23 to get $100 off the one-time payment option March 15-18
Loved this blog post? Tune into the full podcast episode below!
