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Weekly Update October 10th
How to Prioritize and Optimize Your Life
Hey ,
This week my wife and I will be welcoming our 2nd kid into the world, and saying I'm excited is a vast understatement. Being a parent has made me a vastly better person and entrepreneur. It all comes down clearly understanding your goals and priorities in life, so you can execute them. Two years ago I wrote an article on how to optimize your life, and today I want to update that post with everything I've learned since.I hope this is timely for you, as so many people are re-evaluating their life / businesses during this time.
PS. If you were forwarded this newsletter, please
.
How to Optimize Your Life
The internet is full of articles about how to optimize your productivity, workflow, and workday, but to what end? Have a clear goal for the kind of life you want to live and start changing now to achieve it.
For some, a goal might be to spend as much time with family as possible, and for others, it may be to grow their business as fast as possible.
I first sat down to re-prioritize my life when my daughter was born. Previously, I focused on bringing my startup idea to life and the uphill battle of making the business work. I needed to make sure my little girl had the best life possible.
To accomplish this, I had to change my priorities to focus on the things that matter. Now with my son coming, I'm taking the time to reflect and re-evaluate again.
The process of optimizing extends beyond work. Let’s optimize our life.
Optimizing your life is a continuous process designed to harmonize all parts of you. For most people, life consists of some combination of the following areas:
There’s a lot you can accomplish in life, and it can be overwhelming trying to do it all. Happiness doesn’t come from doing everything, but from choosing a select few activities to focus on, and prioritizing those over everything else.Why limit yourself? When you focus, you can put more time and energy into actually accomplishing your goals, rather than leaving things unfulfilled.
The Prioritiziation Process
To prioritize your life, choose 2-4 of the above categories that are most important to you at this stage of your life. Any more than that and they won’t be priorities. You can still do any of the other activities. Just fit them in after you complete the others, and only when you have time.
Here’s what my priorities looked like over the last 3 stages of life:
When I was single, my top 2 Life Priorities were:
👨🏽💻Career- I was launching my first business Chopbox and putting all my time and energy into this. 🎉Friends- I had a great group of friends and we would hang out during the week and every weekend. 📖 Individual Time- I played video games and spend more time on my own.
After I met my wife, my top 3 Life Priorities were:
👫🏽 Family Time – I love spending every second possible with my wife. We both have high career aspirations, but always love coming home, cooking dinner, and reflecting on the day. 👨🏽💻Career – This time I was running my second business, TeaSquares. Focused on business growth at all costs.👨🏽🏫 Mentoring – I spent a ton of time mentoring students from my alma mater, and other rising business owners.
Now with two kids, my top 2 Life Priorities are:
👨👩👧👦 Family Time – Now expanded to include time with my wife, daughter, and son together. My wife and I both work from home and care for the kids full-time.👨🏽💻Career – Focused on running Foodbevy and Good Food Brands as sustainable and profitable businesses, while spending the majority of the day with my kids.
As you see, my top priorities changed at each stage. Life brings new challenges and opportunities and it’s necessary to shift what’s important to you at that time.
Optimizing Your Time
Now that I have my top priorities, it's time to optimize them. Each week I list out the most important things to do for each of my priorities and block off time on my calendar.For family time, I have 3 goals:
Teach my kids something new every day
Cook dinner for my family
Plan a fun activity every week
To accomplish these goals I block off my calendar for learning time, plan fun creative dinners, and research new activities around town to do each week. I also make sure that I am present with my daughter while she is awake and minimize phone use.
As some of these tasks happened during the weekday, they would obviously get in the way of a typical 9-5. Running my own business provides some flexibility. I only schedule 1 hour of calls per day, and spend evenings after bedtime catching up on work.
These are my career goals:
Build Foodbevy into the best online community for emerging food and beverage brands
Help people discover unique products on Good Food Brands
Help every founder with a natural product company grow from startup to scale.
To accomplish all of these, I have to say “no” to many opportunities that come in every single week. By staying focused on these limited goals, I can spend all my time and energy to reach them.
Trust me, staying focused is not easy, but being conscious and identifying your priorities will help you feel more accomplished.Now it’s your turn. Let me know what your top priorities are and how you plan to optimize your life.
Jordan Buckner
Foodbevy
THIS WEEK'S OPPORTUNITIES
- Most CPG founders are doing their bookkeeping WRONG. Talk with Alice at
if you're looking to create accurate financials for your business. She's offering a
special of $99/month for the 1st three months and $199/month thereafter for the Foodbevy Community.Hard Times Ahead Cal
- Join Sari Kimbell and other founders to talk through dealing with tough times in your business. It is in direct response to panicked emails from clients and members with rising costs of ingredients and more to come. She'll discuss strategy (when and how to raise prices) and some mindset tools to calm our system down so we can make clearheaded decisions.
- Learn how to support to retail launches by using digital demos to drive customers into targeted store to purchase.
- Aion provides flexible financing for food startups. Purchase inventory, invest in marketing, grow your team, and pay vendors – all while maintaining ownership of your business. Request an Introduction and save 10% on your interest rate.
- Sell your products on shoppable cooking live streams. Foodbevy members save $50, e-mail me for an intro.
NEW PODCAST EPISODE: 65. How to Increase Sales During Q4 and During a Recession, Alli Ball
We're entering Q4 and it's a wild time for CPG. Retail buyers are focused on holiday items and DTC will have its largest buying events of the year. On top of all this we're in a quasi-recession, affecting consumer demand in unknown ways.I sit down with my friend and retail expert Alli Ball to discuss both mindset shifts and tactics to increase sales during Q4. Listen to the episode and you'll walk away with valuable information on how to approach the last 3 months of the year.
DISCOUNTS
- NielsenIQ
Byzzer platform provides data for emerging CPG brands. You can
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- Mindful Goods
is an awesome Amazon expert that can quickly get you started or optimize your pages for strong ROI.
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- Maverick Lab
allows you to create individually personalized videos (with a customer's name)
- Chop
is a
that allows you to drive in-store trial, collect customer shopping data, and build customer profiles to further drive your business. Foodbevy members save 20% off. E-mail me for the discount.
- Stripe
is now providing $70,000 in fee-free processing for new and EXISTING customers.
The Accountrepreneur
is your go-to outsourced CPA and CFO firm for the food and beverage industry. Receive
- Airtable
can store information in a spreadsheet that's visually appealing and easy-to-use, but it's also powerful enough to act as a database that businesses can use for customer-relationship management (CRM), task management, project planning, and tracking inventory.
With your help we're building an amazing community of Food and Bev entrepreneurs helping each other!
Jordan
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