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How I spend my days (you asked)
A profuse thank you to everyone who sent in questions last week. I asked, and you gave me months worth of ideas to draw on.
Thank you thank you thank you 🙏
You solved my newsletter problem by sending me thoughtful questions that made me think, “How have I not written about that yet?”
Even better, a lot of you wrote in to say how much you care, how you read every email, even the ones that go wildly off-topic. Email compliments are my love language and that made my day. A few people mentioned “AI slop” and referred to me as someone whose emails give them a touch of humanness. Yes, yes, yes! I recently watched a 3-minute conversation between Ye and Elon Musk on YouTube that I didn’t know was AI. I felt so betrayed when someone told me!
You like human-made things. You crave depth and realness more than ever, that much is clear.
A couple of people asked what my work days look like, which is an email I love to write, so that's what I'm doing today. One of my observations about my speakers on The Girlboss Apology Tour was, “Wow, these people are just regular humans.” They aren’t superhuman. They miss meetings, deliver things past the deadline, and take a weirdly long time to get the contract signed. Because those are normal, human things. So here’s a glimpse at my very normal, human week.
Monday
I have my kids Monday and Tuesday, so those are short workdays, just 9:15am-3:15pm.
The first thing I do is open my project management tool and it tells me what to do. A lot of people need to cultivate this habit. It keeps you from noodling on busywork that doesn’t matter, and adds momentum to your various projects. But for me, it’s a habit I want to ease up on. My goal is to have one day a week where I don't open Clickup, and let my creative heart direct me where it wills. There's a high-control human inside me who pretty much always knows exactly what I need to be working on at all times, and she's the boss 90% of the time. If I can give 10% back to my wild creative heart, that helps a lot with general job satisfaction.
Monday is a last-resort day for scheduling meetings, so I don’t normally have more than one or two meetings or interviews. Right now I’m meeting with a peer group of fellow facilitators every Monday for an hour, to support each other’s businesses. Sometimes I meet clients in my various programs, and those 30-minute calls are fun and friendly so they don’t tire me out.
Tuesday
Every Tuesday at 11am I meet with my team of four people, not including me. (You asked how I found them, I’ll save that for another email. I love my team so much right now!) Everyone is responsible for reporting on one project, a “project” being something we’re delivering or something we’re promoting. There are usually five on the go. Part of my Monday prep is gathering updates on the project I'm responsible for, which right now is The Girlboss Apology Tour. The team meeting is scheduled for an hour and we use all the allotted time. We celebrate wins at the end. That’s my favourite part.
Every other Tuesday I plan and facilitate a 30-minute call for Email Review Club, which is about 90 minutes of work total, thanks to the many years of call plans I have to draw on.
At 6pm I drop my kids at their dad’s house and go to an evening class about transformational retreat facilitation. I’m learning a new framework that I’m immediately applying to a 4-day retreat in Italy this April. Planning that event feels edgy. I’m building in ritual and song, and taking them on a deep transformational journey. Even just the planning is a tango with fear and self-doubt, which is exactly what participants will have to face too.
Wednesday
Wednesday starts at the gym where I do circuit training at 7am. I need to be “optimal Tarzan” because Wednesdays are big. I’m often facilitating a 2-hour call for one of the two masterminds that I run, Power and Wisdom Circle, or working on those programs in some way.
At 11am, I go to therapy, which is intentionally scheduled during working hours because of how much it impacts my leadership and ability to run my business. I’m in a very stable place in life right now, so I can often leave that call and go right back to work — that wasn’t the case during my divorce years, when I needed to cry on the couch for two hours after, or sometimes quit entirely to go do some ketamine and listen to my favourite album, Jesus is King.
I write my newsletter on Wednesday, in a Google doc. When everything’s running on time, Reina loads it into Kit on Thursday and Tracy approves and schedules it on Friday. That almost never happens, which is why we have Monday as buffer time. I don’t expect team members to work on weekends so we don’t count those days as buffer time.
Working late is pretty normal on Wednesdays, sometimes as late as 8pm. As long as the creative juices are flowing, I am at their service.
Thursday
One day often goes pear-shaped. Maybe I’m travelling for work or one of my kids is sick, maybe I’m skiing, maybe I had a bad sleep and my brain is offline. Let's call that day Thursday.
Friday
No Friday looks alike. I’m finishing all the tasks I didn’t get to during the week — often writing emails or landing pages. I tweaked this one daily for weeks!
By Friday I’m hungry for connection, so this is where I schedule podcast interviews and connection calls with my peers. I also host a 2-hour coworking call for my mastermind members, with a full half-hour reserved just for shooting the shit, talking about Conner Storrie’s butt or whatever, maybe having an impromptu hot seat. I love those calls.
I’m usually pooched by 3pm but very frequently keep working regardless. It’s always my goal to log off mid-afternoon.
It’s rare that I work weekends. I don’t understand how people do this. Where do they find that capacity? Aren’t they tired? How do they do quality work in that state? Maybe other people are wired differently. My teammate Sandra is so tough and has so much capacity for getting things done at weird times of the day/week. I admire her for that.
My boyfriend says I’m pretty tough too and I think he’s right about that. But I’m tough about different stuff. Maybe we all have to choose our tough, and choose our soft.
Thank you again for this question. I loved writing this email. For the first time in weeks, I’m submitting this on time and I wrote it without struggle. Tracy and Reina will want to say thanks too, I’m sure!
Keep sending ‘em in, we’re tracking them all.
With so much love,
Tarzan
Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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