4 Best Time Management & Productivity Programs for Solos and Teams of Professionals

⏰ This article is part of a series on time management for professional service providers during February's National Time Management Month, established by the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO).

As we approach the end of February (often the most brutal month of the year in the northern hemisphere), I invite you to check in with yourself for a moment and ask a few simple questions:

• How are you feeling about where you’re spending your time? (Or about where your team is)
• How’s your energy? Your team’s energy?
• What about you and your team’s attention and focus?
  

As I mentioned in part one of this series on time management, effective time management is one of the most impactful ways to increase well-being and productivity in your business.

And if your answers to the questions I just posed sound anything like…

• It’s slippery and hard to capture. I’m not even sure if I’m spending enough time on the right things in my business, let alone my team.
• I feel scattered and stressed.
• It’s often hard to focus and feels overwhelming.
  

Or if you’re asking yourself: What IS this mythical thing called time management? Does it really exist? And, will I ever be able to do it in my service business?

Then you're in good company: more than 85% of top business coaches we surveyed spent less than half their time delivering paid coaching services!

For a summary of the survey results, see our infographic of findings paired with three key insights the study revealed.

I’m here to tell you this time management thing is not, in fact, mythical. It’s something that YOU HAVE CONTROL OVER.

How? Well, we know from experience that you have absolute control over two things in your business:

1. the tools you choose to use, and 
2. your mindset.
   

In part one of this series, we walked you through the three best time management tools for coaches, consultants, trainers and their teams. And today, we’re focusing on the more complex part.

But don’t fret! We’ve rounded up the four best time management programs for service professionals like yourself (and your team) that address the core issues of your time management woes as a professional: your mindset. 

So, let’s make like a mythical Selkie and dive in before any more time (feels) like it’s slipping away!

4 Most Unique Time management Programs for Professional Service Providers

Technology is never a silver bullet.

Offloading the more automatable time management tasks to a bot or software tool is a great place to get started. But, technology isn’t yet advanced enough to address the complexities of our human psyche. And this is where managing your (or your team’s) time can feel just as complicated.

But it doesn’t have to be if we’re willing to question our mindsets.

Where attention goes, energy flows.

What are the core issues of our time management woes as professionals? Approaching our psyche begins with looking at our mindset. Our beliefs drive our mindset and behaviors. And our behaviors end up defining us.

And mindsets, beliefs and behaviors are precisely where these four unique programs focus us. Let’s take a look at each one in more detail.

Becoming Focused and Indistractable by Nir Eyal on Mindvalley

“Indistractability,” a term coined by the program’s creator, Nir Eyal, in your work and relationships is the key to his self-hosted Indistractable Workshop and his program hosted by Mindvalley. Nir is an international author, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer and expert in habit formation. And his program focuses on the psyche, promising a “deep dive into your subconscious beliefs, daily habits and routines, and every dimension of your life that impacts your ability to focus and perform at your best,” shares Mindvalley. Nir has applied his “behavioral design” expertise as a founder of two companies and an investor in habit-forming tech products, including Canva, Anchor and Product Hunt.

What are the program’s primary focus areas?

Content is bite-sized so you can build a daily habit that feels achievable:

• Understanding your current subconscious beliefs, daily habits, routines
• Uncovering patterns and blindspots preventing change
• Managing internal/external triggers
• Preventing distractions using pacts with yourself
• Making time for traction (focusing your “attention and energy where they matter most”)
  

Understanding and overcoming distraction requires one thing above all others: education. We can apply all the productivity tricks in the world, but if we don’t get to the root cause of what’s causing our distraction, we’ll always find ourselves falling back into old patterns. — Nir Eyal

What kind of time investment is the program? 

Expect to invest 45-60 minutes daily in Nir’s self-hosted Indistractable Workshop content. The Workshop is a one-time fee with lifetime access.

The four-week Mindvalley-hosted program is broken down into tiny bites, so expect to invest just five to 15 minutes a day for 27 days. In total, you’ll be covering just 4 hours of content. Your access to the program lasts as long as you maintain a paid Mindvalley membership.

What types and formats of content does the program have?
Nir Eyal’s self-hosted workshop combined video lessons, recorded Q&A sessions and self-paced worksheets and self-assessments.

The 27-day Mindvalley hosted program is a hybrid virtual program that combines interactive video, virtual curriculum and live teaching.

Program cost:

Indistractability Workshop will cost you a one-time fee of $675. Or, for the 27-day program, pay the $99.00 monthly Mindvalley membership fee and cancel at any time.

Become Focused and Indistractable on Mindvalley yourself

Teach your team to be “indistractable” with Mindvalley for businesses

Time Genius by Marie Forleo

Time Genius is the latest online program offered by coaching and media entrepreneur Marie Forleo, of Marie TV and B-School fame. Another well-executed, fully interactive program by Team Forleo, Time Genius, focuses on the mental and emotional shifts necessary to make a change in our relationship with time. And in this audio podcast, Marie takes us behind the scenes of her creative process that ultimately led to Time Genius.

What are the program’s primary focus areas?

Content is kept light and easy so that you can focus on the actionable implementation of concepts, including:

• Priority-setting 
• Reducing distraction, procrastination and guilt
• Increasing creative output
• Focusing on joy and energy management
  

What’s one dream, experience, or project you would pursue if you had the time and energy to accomplish it? — Marie Forleo

What kind of time investment is the program? 

In this two-week program, expect to invest three hours a day in week one, with three 60-90 minute live group coaching sessions in week two. No time limit to complete the program! You’ll have lifetime access to the course materials, and an additional week covers any bonus content. Program bonuses come at an additional cost.

What types and formats of content does the program have?
Time Genius is a hybrid virtual program with five interactive video modules, transcript and PDF content combined with three live group coaching sessions with Marie Forleo, other time geniuses and interim support provided by Marie’s FAQ-style answer vault and mentor coaches.

Program cost:

$169.00 monthly

Join Time Genius’s waitlist for Winter 2023

Heal the Way You Work and Do Less Planning with Kate Northrup’s The Origin Company

One of the more interstellar takes on time and energy management, Kate Northrup’s Heal the Way You Work program (based on her book "Do Less") draws from nature’s cycles as a way of realigning our body’s circadian rhythms with the rhythms of our living planet. Kate takes on our culturally inherited belief that worth is equal to productivity. Instead, her book, program and planner support the mind-body-spiritual side of the professional, helping you to “create a personal and professional life that's based on presence, meaning, and joy.”

What are the program’s primary focus areas?

Content is flexible and can be broken up in any way that works for your life by focusing on:

• Learning seasonal and quarterly planning
• Using monthly cyclical mapping
• How the cosmos impact human energy cycles
• Removing friction in your day-to-day
• Focusing on sustainable, abundance-based and generative action modeled from nature 
  

Fit more of yourself into your days so you can have more by doing less. — Kate Northrup

What kind of time investment is the program? 

While the four-hour self-paced program and its associated physical planner are all about a more profound, more soulful way of managing our time, they aren’t based on the gregorian calendar or our human clock. So you can start or stop the program at any time in alignment with any larger planetary or cosmic cycle you wish to align more closely with.

What types and formats of content does the program have?
Kate’s program is a hybrid virtual program that combines podcast audio (accessible on the go) or a virtual video curriculum paired with exercises, cheat sheets and checklists. The program includes ten on-demand, digital lessons have bite-sized lessons with “support materials for you to operationalize the lesson in your business and life,” according to the program landing page. And there’s an email series and Facebook group for more communal support throughout the journey.

Program cost:

Pay the program total of $997.00 or break it down into two payments of $527.00.

Start to Heal the Way You Work

The Energy Blueprint by Ari Whitten

Want a body-first, performance-based health and wellness coaching take on time management? Ari Whitten’s Energy Blueprint program approaches time management through energy management or managing vital energy at the cellular level and across your body’s most essential systems. Ari’s podcast focuses on the scientific causes of fatigue and energy management.

What are the program’s primary focus areas?

Content is modularized and delivered weekly over 60 days to help you establish healthier habits and focuses on:

• The physiological and mental causes of fatigue
• Circadian rhythm and sleeping pattern optimization
• Enhancing energy using brain-based, neuroscientific methods
• How nutrition impacts your cellular energy
• Gut health and detoxification
  

Your energy ultimately reflects what kind of environment your mitochondria perceive themselves to be in! — Ari Whitten

What kind of time investment is the program? 

You’ll cover six modules in 60 days delivered weekly at your own pace.

What types and formats of content does the program have?
Ari’s eight-week in-depth training program is a hybrid virtual program that combines an online curriculum delivered via weekly emails and a Facebook group that allows access to asynchronous coaching and support.

Program cost:

Pay the program total of $497.00 or break it down into three payments of $197.00.

Learn the cellular-level Energy Blueprint

The Bottom Line

Our attention as service providers (and humans) is the first front in making friends with the ‘enemy’ of time. Where we put our attention — our beliefs and mindsets, our behaviors, and the tools we choose to use to support us in our process — can profoundly impact our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. And without our wellbeing, we have to ask ourselves: who are we really in service to anyhow?