BudDIY Podcast – Episode 9 – 5 Ways to Stay Productive this Summer

It is easy to get organized, but it is hard to stay productive after getting organized.

In this episode of the podcast I talk about 5 ways to help you stay productive over the summer.

Let’s face it the DIY season is coming, and we have a lot projects to get done. It is important that we stay productive, and get things done. Join me in this episode where I share some ideas on how to do just that.

If you prefer to watch here it is on YouTube:

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the ninth episode of the Buddy podcast. I want to thank you for being here. Today we’re going to talk about five ways to stay productive this year. It’s a continuation of last week’s episode, where we talked about five things, or a few things that you can do to get ready for the new DIY season. Before that, if you’re listening on the website, please feel free to subscribe in any major podcasting application. We should be available if you just search for us. If you’re watching on YouTube, feel free to hit the subscribe button and that notification bell, so you know when new episodes are released. And if you’re listening anywhere, please visit the website at B-U-D-D-I-Y.net and subscribe to that newsletter, so that you can be updated when a new episode comes out, or new content that’s non-podcast related. So at that, let’s jump into things.

First I wanted to mention something. I’m going to change the segments a little bit. Before I had intro, which is what we just did, and then I’d go into the main topic, and then I would go into the final segment, which was a failure of mine. Well, I’ve been thinking and I’m not getting to tell you all about everything that I think about, and want to tell you about with that, so I’m going to tweak things. So I’m going to do the intro and then I’m going to do the next segment, which is going to be a few minutes on what I’ve done this last week. Projects or stuff that I’m thinking about. Like future projects that I might want to do, or something that has sparked my interest and I just want to share about, something interesting.

After that I want to jump into the main segment, which is going to be the longest segment of the episode. And then finally I’ll end like normal with the failure of the week. With that update out of the way, let’s just go into it, and I just want to tell you all this last week, it was kind of fun, good progress in finalizing the bench I’ve been working on, the weekend woodworker bench. It’s really nice. The only thing left is to actually apply the finish to it. I went and got that this weekend and either me or my wife are going to apply it sometime this week, or maybe even next weekend. And so yeah, I’m super excited. That’s project two that is done pretty much and I’m ready to move on to project three this week, which is a paper tray.

Some of you are probably like, “Oh yay, a paper tray. What’s so exciting about that?” Well, what’s exciting about it, it’s not necessarily the paper tray itself, which I’m actually looking forward to make, because I’m actually planning on using it as kind of a catch all bin for some of the random stuff that’s on my desk, and not necessarily papers. But it’s because I got to spend the weekend getting my table saw ready for what I call production use. My restored Delta Unisaw last year, I took a few months to do that and learned a ton. It was my first time ever doing a project like that, and it was a big project, but it was actually simpler than what I had thought it would. But yeah, but so I got that done.

One of the problems that I ran into was that it didn’t have a fence, it had the fence itself, but it didn’t have the railing system for the Biesemeyer Fence. And I was actually planning on making it from a site called VerySuperCool Tools. And then one day on the Facebook marketplace I found, or we found, my father-in-law found and confirmed with me that there was a Biesemeyer Fence for a Delta unit saw that someone was selling for $100. Interestingly enough, my in-laws were heading that direction to go up into Kansas to do some shopping over in Kansas and they were like 20 minutes off the highway from where that fence was going to be. And so it was like, “Wow.” So made all the arrangements and went and got it. And that’s what I got to install and set up this weekend was the new fence and I got to actually play with the table saw and actually get to cut wood in a real manner.

I got an INCRA miter gauge. I set that up. I did the zero like with the insert plate for where the blade would go, throat plate and yeah, I did some tests this weekend and it was great. It was great to actually finally use a tool that I spent months off and on restoring as I had time. So super excited. It was just kind of a giddy weekend in a sense because I put all that time and effort into the Unisaw and I get to use it. So, that was a lot of fun. Not to mention the shop is taking place. I’ve taken a 20 by 20 area in the shop and turning that strictly into a woodworking area so that I can do projects that I want in there. And the rest of the junk in the shop is not infiltrating that area.

So yeah, I am super excited about what the future holds and especially on this next project for the weekend woodworker course, because I finally get to use the table saw to actually make some stuff. So, super exciting. All right, so with that, that’s kind of just an update from me and let’s go ahead and jump into the main segment. And that would be five things that you can do to stay productive this year during the DIY season, or I guess really any year, but these are just generally five things that you can do.

The first thing is have a whiteboard in your, or a chalkboard, in your shop, in your work area that you can write down all the things that you need to get done. If you followed along in the last episode and you made a plan for this year of all the projects that you’d like to get done, then you should have a list that you can just throw onto the whiteboard. I actually got this idea from SC Creates on Instagram because that’s what he does. He has a list of projects. I mean those are generally products that he needs to make woodworking wise, but I like to extrapolate that to a larger area and put projects that need to get done around the house. This is actually really great to have it in your work area, big and in your face, because it’s not going to be on your phone, hidden away in some notes app or it’s not going to be on a piece of paper that moves around your shop that you never actually see.

It’s like boom right there in your face and it can kind of help you keep keeping motivated and moving along on your project. Also, sometimes you run into a project you’re like, “Oh I’m just kind of bored working on this. I don’t want to work on it anymore,” and you need something different. And so you can just jump to the next project or jump to a different one and work on that for a little bit until you get motivated again to get back to the other one. The number two thing just help to stay productive is schedule one weekend a month or one Saturday a month or one day a month every month that is your day to do tasks. As an example, my wife and I instituted this on the first Saturday of the month every month. We are taking the kids over to grandparent’s house and we are coming back and working the entire day, like a 12, 15 hour day just doing a lot of stuff and it’s been working out really well.

In the last one, we not only cleaned the shop, we cleaned our alcove in our house that we’re trying to convert into an extended livable space. We replaced the filter on our refrigerator water. We were placed to filter on the well water, which we hadn’t done that in like a year. We assembled a few things that needed to be assembled, burned a lot of boxes that needed to be burned, picked up a lot of trash that was like, “Hey, we might use this, we might not,” that kind of stuff. And we just went ahead and threw it in a trash bag and got those ready to throw in the trash when the trash man comes. And we just had a lot of straightening up. We’ve got a lot of stuff done and it was a super accomplished weekend.

We were dead tired the next day and sore from it, but we got an amazing amount of stuff done. So I highly recommend to stay productive, just plan that day. We made sure nothing else interfered with that day, and that was going to be our day, the first Saturday of the month to just get stuff gone. Totally recommend it after the success that we’ve had for two months now doing it.

The next one is fight the weather. This isn’t some weird thing. It’s just basically pay attention to the weather as it comes up. You know, you look at the weather, you see this weekend, hey, it’s going to be a hundred degrees outside. There’s not going to be a cloud in the sky and you’ve got to dig a 30 foot trench that’s two foot deep. You’re going to have a sucky time. So with that, you can fight against the weather by finding an awning to put up that you can move with you down the trench that you need to move. That’s going to save you a lot of headache with being in the sun, potentially literally from getting heat exhaustion and just make things easier for you, because you’re fighting back against the weather. You’re fighting back against the sun in this case.

The supply is for if it’s going to rain, if it’s hot, if it’s cold, if you need to block wind, just any type of thing that you might need to do. Putting on sunscreen, just various things that can allow you to fight back against the weather that’s being thrown at you. Because sometimes we just, we’re like, “Oh, we need to get this thing done,” and we just go do it. And then it might be again, putting in a 30 foot trench and it’s 90 degrees outside up to a hundred degrees and you work just two, three hours straight and you’ve overextended yourself. Because you’ve just been in the sun for that long and now you’re out for the rest of the day because you’re not feeling good.

Terrible time and you just lost half a day of productivity. Whereas if you had thought ahead a little bit and planned for it, then you could have been a lot better off. Definitely, definitely check the weather and think about ways to combat the different weather events that are going to happen. The fourth thing that I recommend is budgeting. This is not necessarily the funnest words in the English language, but it’s something that really helps. And what I mean by that is the projects that you have coming up when you’re a couple of weeks out or maybe even a month out, take the project that you planned on in the spring and February time and go ahead and break it down, all the materials that you need. You’ve probably spent more time thinking about those projects and figuring out what all you need. Double check your materials list and then go price everything. That way you have current prices, because with the trade deals with China right now, the cost of lumber has gone up.

And so some event could happen between the spring and the summer when you’re ready to do the work and prices fluctuate either up or down. Unfortunately they generally go up and they rarely go down, but that’s another issue. But you go ahead and take your list of materials, go to lowes.com or homedepot.com or menards.com or whatever store it is that you go to and insert everything in, put it in the cart. That way you have your total. From there you can kind of see the outlay of what you need. So you know if you have enough money or you need to save more or you need to maybe do a couple of projects to sell to raise a few more funds to be able to do that project. This helps prevent you from getting down to the day you need to work on the project and either don’t have the money or they don’t have the stuff in stock.

That’s another issue. So yeah, so I recommend budgeting and kind of just keeping an eye out for the next project or the next couple of projects that you’re going to do and make sure you have everything available that you need to get and you have the money to get it. It just reduces stress and helps you just roll into the next project with fewer speed bumps. The final thing that I want to talk to you about in the five things is taking a break. Sometimes you just need to take a break. This is definitely true. This is a two segment type thing.

One is you need to take a break when you’re working. Sometimes we can get into it and we’re just working straight and we don’t stop because we don’t think about it. I know there’s times, for work as a software developer I’ll just be going and going and going and since it’s not necessarily a physical thing, I’ll work for three hours straight and all of a sudden I’m like, “Ah, finally done with that thing and I mean now it’s one o’clock in the afternoon and I have to go to the bathroom really bad. I’m super thirsty and I just lost track of time. I don’t know what happened to.”

Well the same thing can happen when I’m in the shop working too is I just, I’m in it and I don’t pay attention to what time it is and I get to the end and I’m sore, I’m not feeling good, I’m hot, sweaty, shirt’s drenched and it stinks. And a couple of times it’s knocked me out for the rest of the day. So set times, take breaks regularly and if you’re working with someone, it’s an opportunity to just chit chat with them. Go in and get something to drink, chit chat, have a good time with it. I mean, that’s what we’re here to do is have fun and get stuff done. Because if you don’t take breaks, sometimes you can knock yourself out for the rest of the day and not be able to get anything else done.

The other side of this. The second part of the take a break is actually take breaks, take physical breaks where you’re not doing anything. Set aside a Saturday here and there and be like, “The only thing I’m doing today is I’m going to sit on my couch and I’m going to sit with my family and we’re going to watch movies and do absolutely nothing.” And you get the opportunity to reset your brain, reset your body, and just rest. Sometimes that’s what we need. I know when I go on vacation, my body’s like, “Yay, we don’t have to work very hard right now.” And then I will sleep a lot and it freaks me out, because I normally only sleep seven, eight hours a night every night of the week, even on weekends. And so when I go on vacation, I’ll sleep like 10 hours at night and then I’ll take a three or four hour nap and I’m just sleeping tons.

And it’s because the body is resetting and resting and getting energized. And then when I get back from vacation now I’m ready to go and I just have amazing amounts of energy. So definitely take time to rest your body and your mind. So that we’re ready for the final segment of the episode and that’s a failure. I kind of wasn’t sure what to talk about today. So I just want to talk about something that’s kind of been thinking about lately. In doing this, I’m hitting the point where it’s like, “Is this all worth it?” That kind of thing when you start a new venture and you’re into it a couple of months. You’re still motivated to do it. You still really enjoy doing it, but you start wondering, “Is it worth it?” Actually as an entrepreneur you hit that a lot.

But one of the things that I want to talk about is my last business venture failed. There were some successes in it, but ultimately it failed because I’m not doing it full time and providing for my family full time, which is what the eventual goal was. And there could be a lot of reasons, but one of them I think is, I didn’t work hard enough. I look at the work that I do at work and I work really hard at work. I’m really diligent. Same thing with things around the house. I’m kind of diligent with that when I actually start on them. But for some reason when I would sit down to actually work on the side business, after a couple of years, I just, I would, my mind would wander when I sat down to do work.

I’d always get the video done that I needed to do because I was doing programming videos. But extra stuff, my mind would be like, “Do I really need to do that? Do I really have time to do that? What about this? What about that? What about the?” And I would just get distracted and stuff like that. And so my wife says I was working diligently, and I was working hard, but I don’t feel like I was working hard enough. I know I slacked off a little in customer support and social engagement, which are two very important things. I slacked off in some of the content creation areas that I was trying to work in and I didn’t really get those done. So with this business I’m trying to go a different route and I am trying to work hard. And I’m trying to work the hardest I’ve ever worked and I want to see if I give it my all for at least a year, can I make the gains that I think I need to make?

And so yeah. So if you’re out there and you’re working on a project or you’re working on something and you feel like maybe you haven’t worked hard enough or you’re not working hard enough, you’re not alone in that feeling and you might just be working hard enough. That’s how I feel. I feel like I’m not working hard enough, but I know I am. At this time I know I am and I’m going to keep at it and I want you to keep at it too. So with that, I want to thank you for listening to this episode. It’s a little bit of a different format. Please let me know what you think about it. Feel free to visit the website and leave a comment on today’s episode. I thank you for your time and I thank you for your ears and I ask that you have a blessed day. Talk to you later.