74. Baking it Down - Work and Life... Balanced

1️⃣ Treat yourself like an employee.Remember back to that last job you had in retail -  🤔 when the clock hit quittin' time, you were outta there. You should have the same boundary with your "boss self" - when it's time to close up shop, do it. Tell your boss, "Hey, sorry! You only had me scheduled until 5 o'clock! I'm out. But see ya tomorrow." If employee-you didn't feel the need to work overtime, why are you doing it now? Remember - there will always be work to do - and even if you do all of it, there will still be more. Work will eat whatever you feed it. So put it on a "work-life" diet and only give it what you're willing and wanting to. 🤤 Stop feeding an insatiable beast.2️⃣ Protect your Fridays.Now this is a new one I've been trying out. No, it's not the whole "4-day work week," but instead an overage day - a day I allocate for any work that wasn't done the four working days prior. I don't schedule anything on Friday, but I reserve it for those inevitable tasks that have a nasty way of sneaking into an already packed schedule.  If you don't work a Monday - Friday schedule like I do, guess what! You can choose your weekends. If you do pick-ups on Saturday, make your weekends Sunday and Monday, then your overage day could be Monday. It's your schedule, boss, and you get to set it.3️⃣ Smart-ify your Work Schedule. I found these smart plugs on Amazon that work with Alexa and Google. Basically, any device you plug into these suddenly becomes "smart" meaning I can now control it from an app. I use these to help me stay on balance by:Having my office lights turn off at closing time.Having my bedroom lights turn on a bedtime. Schedule to turn my 3-D printer off after the print is finished.Turn my crock-pot on in the morning.Turn my pet's lights on and off depending on the day.These small hacks can help you stick to your work-life regimen of closing down at a certain time (trust me - working by computer light in the pitch dark makes you wanna run for the covers!). 4️⃣ Budget for a Solid Sleep Schedule. I'll take this one to my comforter-lined grave - get a good sleep schedule and stick to it. EIGHT HOURS - you read that right. Don't believe me? Snag the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (PhD). If you're operating at a sleep deficit, your mind is operating in a fog.  5️⃣ Batch Your Week.Reverse calendaring (thanks Jessica Gensel for that Facebook Live), weekend pre-planning, and batch baking can all save you work time leading to a better work-life balance. 

Om Podcasten

👋 Hey - Heather and Corrie here with the Baking it Down Podcast with Sugar Cookie Marketing (a group on Facebook full of sugar cookiers turned business owners). 🍪 We're here to help you rise with your reach, flood with new followers, bake up new ideas, and make that all-important dough (while makin' that dough - see the pun there?) 🤑. What’s it about? We’re a Facebook Group turned Podcast, Membership, Book Club, and Baking 101 that’s dedicated to assisting bakers in effectively marketing online to generate more sales and better manage their businesses. 🧠 With free Facebook Live classes, hundreds of resources, and thousands of like-minded bakers, there’s a lot to learn in "SCM" (aka Sugar Cookie Marketing). ️🎧 As an extension of our Facebook group, this podcast is here to let you learn by listening. 📈 We'll cover group topics, marketing trends, and more (leaving this wide open in case Corrie wants to start singing). 💸 We take the sweet art of selling online to the cottage bakery world with marketing methods that move products (and pastries).👂 So open up those glorious ear canals because we have a podcast! Just when you’ve thought you’ve “heard” it all with those marketing "miracle" twins (that's our last name - not a proclamation), we’ve got something just for you each week! 🥣 As a baker, you don't always have the luxury of two hands needed to scroll in Sugar Cookie Marketing Group or crack open a book in Sugar Cookie Bookies, but what you can do is listen (unless you're my kid asking “what’s for dinner” for the millionth time). 👐 Hands full of flour? No problem! 👍 18 dozen iced cookies due tomorrow? Let’s do this. The Baking it Down Podcast by Sugar Cookie Marketing is a weekly podcast geared toward helping you grow your bakery business - dropping (almost) every Tuesday. 📅 We choose a topic each week that's either something new and emerging in the world of social media or something that we saw in "The Group" that was a hot topic and we bake it down... I mean, "break" it down for you. 🗯️ What you can expect in the podcast is about an hour of chit-chat with the meat and potatoes right at the beginning of the episode. 🥔 That’s when we dive into the marketing topic of the week! 📞 Oh yeah, folks can call / text / email in with their questions too - a fun way to hear from other bakers out there. Our promises to you: 1️⃣ We always make it clean = no cursing. We understand that you are busy and could be around little ones while also trying to get your weekly dose of business growth so we make sure that each episode would make our grandma proud and keep it clean so you can listen while also living your life. 2️⃣ We always make it fun. There’s a lot of negativity in the world so we try and make the podcast an upbeat and fun learning experience for you. I mean, we try to make the Instagram updates and changes as happy as we can, but come on Instagram! Give it a rest! No more changes! 3️⃣ Other than that, we take a positive approach to marketing We are also *not* professional podcasters. I feel like we need to say this because, hey, sometimes we get giggles! We do our best to extend our marketing knowledge to you all free of charge each week at the cost of listening to our higher-than-normal pitched voices and the occasional giggle spree. 4️⃣ You can find the podcast on all the major platforms and you can typically expect a new episode each Tuesday afternoon (unless life happens). We invite everyone to listen. Either start from the beginning or work backward! The episodes don’t build off themselves so you won’t be confused hearing one before the other. You just might miss new Lives we mention but you can always catch the replay in the Sugar Cookie Marketing Group on Facebook!