Guest Expert Alexis Haselberger on Time Management, Productivity & More

Alexis Haselberger is a renowned time management and productivity coach that has taught over 25,000 people. She helps people increase productivity, decrease stress, and prioritize their time wisely. She has worked with many known businesses, such as Uber, Lyft, Workday, Upwork, and Capital One, as well as been featured on many platforms like ABC News, Fast Company, and Life Hacker.

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Here's an excerpt from our interview with Alexis Haselberger.

Minnie: Tell us something about you and your business model.

Alexis- I am a time management and productivity coach. And what that means for my business is that I operate in a few different verticals. So, I work with people one-on-one for coaching, I run group coaching programs, I do corporate training. So, I just finished up a workshop that I was doing for one of my clients about how to work from home productively, actually. 
And then, I also have online courses. And so, that’s where the 25,000 students come from. Yes, it seems like a lot. It is a lot, but those are all through my online courses. So, I really want to be able to help people wherever they are. So, whether that is working with me one-on-one, that’s great. If they’re coming to me through their company and we’re doing some trainings, that’s great. And if what works for them is an online course that’s low cost and they can go through at their own pace, then I’m so happy to help people in that way as well.

Minnie: What kind of specific courses you offer, like how many courses you have and for what kind of people?

Alexis- Right now, I have two online courses, and I’m working on a third. The first one is called Time Management Mastery: Do More, Stress Less. And this really is for anyone who has got a job and a life and too much on their plate. It doesn’t matter if you’re working at home or not working at home, certainly there are differences, but this course really addresses all of the things that come up productivity-wise. So, what are typical roadblocks around productivity in terms of distractions, in terms of focus, in terms of task management, and that sort of thing, keeping everything all organized and at the ready.
And then, I also have an online course that I created just at the very beginning of this pandemic called Frazzled to Focused: How to Regain Control, Connection, and Calm When Working from Home. And so, for your audience, and maybe it wasn’t the first time that they were working from home during the pandemic, it certainly wasn’t for me either. 

Minnie: What inspired you to start your business, and were you always doing it remotely, or did you have an office or a workshop? When did you start? Which year?

Alexis: I actually just started this business in the beginning of 2018. So, it’s only been about three years that I’ve been in business. But the reason that I started it was that I spent the first 15 years or so of my career in early-stage startups doing HR and business operations, basically all of the things in a small, growing company that aren’t sales and engineering. And what I found over that time, in Silicon Valley in the startup world was that people are just burning out left and right. People are working long hours. People are always at the office. And that was just never something that was okay with me. I didn’t want to do that.
And so, I started developing all sorts of strategies and techniques so that I was able to be really effective, but do it in under 40 hours a week, so that I wasn’t feeling like I had to work all of these crazy hours in order to make an impact. And so, after years of honing my own skills, people started coming to me for this sort of advice. I started to be the person who would streamline things and processes at the office. And I started to be someone that my bosses would say, hey, do you think you could put together a productivity workshop for the team, and things like that. 
I geek out and nerd out about all of these types of things, and once it became clear that other people had a need for that as well, it seemed like an obvious fit for me that I could teach this to other people.

Minnie: What will be your advice to a perpetual procrastinator?

Alexis: Yeah, of course. And what I’ve found is interesting is that often perfectionism and procrastination go hand in hand. Often, it’s like, when we want things to be really right, then we tend to procrastinate them because if we just procrastinate them, then we don’t have to worry about them being perfect. So, I find that if that’s you, if you’re someone who has some perfectionist tendencies, and that’s part of why you procrastinate, then I think getting really clear on, what does good enough look like, and what would be reasonable – try experimenting with sending something out before you feel like it’s 100% ready. And see what happens. Sometimes, you just have to experiment. 
But the real thing that I’ll say for all procrastinators is that one of the main reasons that we procrastinate is that we don’t have a super actionable, clear next step for what we’re doing. So, I think we’ve all had this experience before, where you have something on your task list and it’s a little bit amorphous. You’re not quite sure what to do or how to start. And it’s not due for a month or so. So, you just keep pushing it. You just keep procrastinating it. And you keep procrastinating it so long that now it’s due tomorrow, and you really have to do this thing. So, now you’re gonna do it. 
And what happens then is, we sit down to do it. We figure out what to do. We figure out what the first step is, we start doing it. And then, often we realize oh, it only took us 20 minutes to do this thing that we have been procrastinating for a month, that we’ve been worried about for a month.

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