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In today’s episode we’ll explore how creating structure and placing boundaries around our time and our money can lead to greater freedom. I’m sharing 5 super practical ways that you can begin to implement this today so that you can get back two of your most valuable resources – time and money! Let’s dive right in!

Let’s start with the concept itself. When we think of boundaries, it might feel restrictive or limiting at first, but in reality, it’s the opposite and here’s why – structure is essentially a framework that allows us to operate more freely within those boundaries.

By having defined limits around our actions, we actually get more control over our time and finances, which ultimately gives us more freedom.

There are SO many ways we can see this play out in life. For example, if you hired an interior designer to style your home, in order for them to do their job in the best possible way you would need to create boundaries for them – like this is my budget, these are examples of what I like, this is what I don’t like, this is the look and feel I want to create – all of that is a boundary.

When a builder is building something they work from a highly detailed blueprint, that way they don’t stray from the actual outcome they are wanting to achieve.

If we’re baking a cake, we follow a recipe (unless you’re like me and you like to wing it a bit when it comes to baking), that’s a boundary, a limitation. We follow the recipe because we want the outcome of the cake. If we stray from those boundaries we’re going to end up with something that may not taste very good. Believe me I know!

Think about speed limits which are boundaries that help us stay safe on the roads. And while all of these boundaries can be crossed or broken, the end result is usually not what we actually want. These boundaries are a lot like a roadmap to get what we want.

Structure in Time Management

Now, let’s talk about time management. It might not be the sexiest subject on the surface but honestly putting structure and boundaries into our work week makes us way more efficient. And being more efficient, gives us our time back. Then we have a choice, do we want to ‘spend’ that time working on the business, note I said on the business not in the business; or with our family or friends. Having more time is the ultimate freedom if you ask me, who the heck doesn’t want that!

How we put more structure into our time is really about time blocking and scheduling. Now I want to say that hiring and outsourcing is one thing that helps us get our time back. I outsource my editing and I’m all for that but I’m talking about creating structure around the tasks that we decide we are going to do.

Time batching and time blocking has been a game-changer for me! All it means is that we dedicate specific blocks of time to different tasks and schedule it in our calendars – scheduling it is key here! A few examples are that I like to do my discovery calls late afternoon a few days a week because I personally have more mental power very early in the morning when my brain is fresh so I like to work on more challenging tasks earlier in the day and way less challenging things later in the day. 

On Tuesdays I do my bookkeeping, yes I still do my own bookkeeping. I use Xero and it only takes me around 15 minutes per week. If I didn’t create structure around this task and schedule it in my calendar, I’d either forget about it or keep putting it off until I had a crazy amount of transactions to reconcile which would take hours to do and feel far more tedious.

Or take this podcast for example. I decided I’m going to prepare and record 3 months worth of episodes at once. That means I time blocked and scheduled enough time in my calendar to brainstorm, write and record 12 episodes, over a few days I might add. That way I’m in podcast mode only and not giving my mental energy away to other distractions. It takes time to get back into flow once we’ve been distracted. I’m being more efficient with both my time and my mental energy which keeps me focussed on the outcome I want, which is 12 podcast episodes in the bank!

Money Management

Now we get to the fun part, money management, yep I said it, money management is fun! Spending is also fun, don’t get me wrong, we should absolutely enjoy our lives and our money but more on that a bit later.

Structure around both our business and personal finances is essential if we want to become excellent managers of our money and create the wealth and the life that we really want.

Firstly, setting boundaries with money is so important. All this means having clear financial goals and limits. 

How can we score a goal in a soccer game if there are no goal posts? The game would be chaos. By having goal posts we know where to aim and have a higher chance of scoring.

By the same token, how can we hit our financial target if we don’t know what the target is? 

When it comes to our business finances, if we have a target of generating a certain amount of income in a year, then we need some boundaries in place to help us attain that goal. For instance, deciding in advance how much you’ll spend on equipment each year can prevent impulse buys that strain your budget. That’s a boundary my friend and if we don’t have them we’ll spend without restraint and then wonder where our money went. 

For a long time in my photography business and in my personal finances I felt so stressed and overwhelmed trying to manage the cash flow. As photographers and in many other industries too we have the deposits and balances coming in and we need to account for future expenses, the day to day running expenses and also the cost of doing business like the travel, accommodation, the second photographers, etc.

I was doing this on the fly without any structure and I also had very few boundaries around money. If I wanted something I bought it and that was that. I wasted alot of money that way on things I didn’t need or even really want. At times I got myself into sticky situations and had to rely on a credit card to get through until that next balance came in. But once I introduced a framework and a structure to how I manage my cash flow, oh my it was a game changer!

I cannot emphasise this enough. Putting structure and boundaries around my finances has given me back time because it takes me way less time to manage my money now, and it’s way more fun when I do sit down to look at the numbers. It’s also given me back my sanity, it’s freed up more mental energy for being creative, it’s given me back more calm and clarity, and helps me save and invest for my future goals. 

Practical Tips and Strategies

Let’s get into some practical tips and strategies that you can start doing right now to set up structure around your time and money.

1: Decide on your priorities

Every night, I list my top three priorities for the next day and tackle them first. This way, I’m staying focussed on what’s important to me and what’s going to move the needle in my business even if the day gets hectic and a multitude of distractions come up. I’ve already made progress on my most important tasks before 9am. I use Trello to do this but you could use anything, a pen and paper will do just fine, just get those priorities down and commit to them.

2: Routines

Having daily, weekly, and monthly routines creates a rhythm that keeps things running smoothly. For example, my weekly bookkeeping routine or this could be your social media marketing or editing routines – this can save you so much time spent on decision-making or on distractions and streamline the entire process. Which brings me to…

3: Time block and schedule your week

This could be setting aside specific chunks of time for different tasks or batching work throughout your day and week. If you’re anything like me, if it’s not in my calendar it means I haven’t yet fully committed to it so it’s probably not going to get done.

4: Set up workflow systems

Start by listing out in detail the exact steps that you take in your process – from the moment you receive an enquiry to when you complete the job. Include steps that you take after you’ve delivered the photo gallery like creating the blog post, sharing on social media, sending an anniversary discount to purchase prints before their online gallery expires, or an anniversary social media post, whatever the case may be for you. Then, you want to make sure that every step is reflected in your CRM workflow.

This will free up so much time and mental energy for you. If you’re not using a CRM tool like Studio Ninja, HoneyBook or Dubsado then you’re probably creating a whole lot more work for yourself. These CRM’S can help you keep track of client communications, contracts, and invoices all in one place, making it way easier to stay organized and professional.

5: Track your money

My friends, what gets measured gets managed. I’ll say that again for the people in the back – what gets measured gets managed.

Having some kind of structure or system that allows you to track and review your income and spending will show you:

For example, having a cap or in other words setting a boundary around how much you can spend on non-essential items each month can prevent you from dipping into savings or going into debt. I’m talking about both business and personal finances here because how we do one is how we do the other.

Having a structured plan for managing cash flow is key to the long-term financial health of our business and to building our personal wealth. Because our business fuels our personal finances.