Simplicity and Flexibility, with Natalie Rodriguez – TPW266

Law school dean Natalie Rodriguez is very intentional about structuring her life for simplicity and flexibility to make space for what matters most to her.

Purposeful planning for simplicity and flexibility

This week, Natalie Rodriguez visited the Productive Woman Podcast! Natalie is a lawyer and a law school professor and Assistant Dean. She’s also a wife of 15 years, and mom to 2 children, living in southern California.

A typical day

Natalie’s typical days are Monday through Friday. She wakes up around 5:30, pours herself a cup of coffee, takes her medication, and reads her Bible.

Around 6:30, she gets ready for the day, fixing breakfast, packing lunches, and getting everyone out the door by 7:15.

After dropping off her kids, she either drives to work (she’s a professor and assistant dean at a southern California law school) or back home to work from home. She’s come to enjoy her hour-long commute because that’s when she listens to podcasts, audiobooks, and other reading material that’s relevant to her work. She uses an app that allows her to upload PDF articles which the app then reads aloud to her. This allows her to stay up-to-date on scholarly articles that she otherwise wouldn’t have time to read. If she’s not listening to podcasts, audiobooks, or articles, she uses the time to call friends and get caught up.

At the office, no two days are ever the same. A lot of her day is spent meeting with students and colleagues or creating curriculum and teaching material for her courses. Because of the nature of her work, it is hard to implement tactics that are popular in the productivity world, such as time-blocking or task batching.

The most challenging thing about her job is trying to fit in the work that she needs to get done while still making herself available to the people who need her–most notably, her students. One way she is working around this issue is to designate a work-from-home day that she reserves for getting her most important work done. This has been working quite well for her because she has very few distractions but she can still make herself available to those who need her through technology such as Zoom during times she has allocated for that purpose.

At the office, she has an open-door policy: if students see her in her office, they are allowed to come in. This policy aligns with her teaching philosophy, but it can make being productive a challenge. So having designated work-from-home days has allowed her to accomplish her important “deep” work while still being available to students.

After work, she picks up her children from school, has them do their homework, and fixes dinner. She uses a meal-planning app called Plan to Eat, which helps her with the dreaded “What’s for dinner” question every evening. After dinner, the family prepares for the next day, tidying-up, and hanging out and winding down for bed around 10 o’clock.

Natalie enjoys reading, so squeezing in some reading time is her ideal way to end her evening. She likes to read about topics ranging from cognitive learning theory and how the brain works to Christian living to productivity. Some productivity books that Natalie recommends are:

• Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear
• The One Thing by Gary Keller
• The Tyranny of the Urgent by Charles E. Hummel
• Do More Better by Tim Challies

Natalie tries not to work on weekends. She enjoys spending some extended time reading early Saturday mornings. The rest of her day depends on what is going on with her children’s extracurricular activities and family events. Sundays are reserved for church and rest.

Biggest productivity challenges

Natalie says she tends to be her own biggest challenge. She is a curious person and is constantly wanting to learn new things which causes her to take on more than she can manage and over-committing herself. For example, she took on teaching three courses which has been a lot of work. She also committed to a new teaching method where she records videos that students are required to watch ahead of class so they can practice applying those skills in class. It’s been a lot of extra work to learn new software and technology, and script, record, and edit the videos. She has a tendency to believe she can do more than there is actually time for in the day.

The other challenge is her tendency toward perfectionism. She has incredibly high standards for herself, a trait she admits she has to work on. Using the same example of learning to create the videos for her students, she can easily spend all her time researching and discovering best practices to make these videos and never actually get to producing the videos because she wants to make sure she does it right from the beginning.

Over the years, Natalie has learned to say, “This is good enough. It’ll get the job done.” But it is not easy for someone who is constantly telling herself, “I know I can do better.” She tries to overcome this challenge by giving herself deadlines because she has learned that unless she sets deadlines for herself that are ahead of the actual deadline, she will work up until the very last moment.

The system Natalie has in place today is not what she had when she first began her productivity journey. She emphasizes that systems are everything. You can have all the gadgets and latest tech, but without a trusted system to use them effectively, they would not do much for you. When she started law school, her children were 2 and 1. She was desperate to find the perfect tool that would help her stay on top of everything she needed to do: be a good student as well as the mom and wife she wanted to be. She listened to every podcast, read every book and blogpost, tried all the tools that were recommended, and implemented all the hacks and rules, but none of these things fixed her problem. Her problem was that she needed to get straight on what she wanted and what was important to her and let go of all the other stuff.

Now, Natalie’s system is all about simplifying where she can. At the end of the day, the way she chooses to order her days and the tools she uses is all about simplifying so she can have more space and time for the things she truly enjoys. She likes to think through her days and the things she engages in on a daily basis and considers if there is anything she can automate decisions so she doesn’t have to constantly spend time making choices that are not in areas particularly important. She has developed habits and routines that support the life she wants to live, rather than a life that is spent constantly looking for magical hours to appear

Natalie says her life has never been more full than it is today, but at the same time, she has never had a more gratifying life. If you focus on the tools of productivity rather than the reason why you need to be productive, you’ll still end up with a life bursting at the seams.

Tools Natalie recommends

The hub of Natalie’s system is all her Apple devices. Her family’s calendar of choice is Google calendar. She and her husband have theirs synced so that they know what’s going on in each other’s lives. For work, she uses Outlook. To sync her personal and work calendar together, she uses Calendars 5. She uses Todoist for her digital task manager, an app called Due to set reminders for time-sensitive things that she does not want to miss, including remembering to call loved ones on their birthdays. If a birthday falls on a weekday, she sets the timer for when everyone will be in the car on the way to school so they can sing Happy Birthday together.

Natalie loves all her electronic and digital devices, but three years ago, she went back to using a paper planner, and it has changed things significantly for her. Everything goes into her digital calendar, but she uses her paper planner to help her keep important things top of mind. Her weekly spread divided into 30-minute increments, which helps her see commitments she’s already made and when she’s available to get work done. Being able to flip back and forth easily helps her to see the weight of what she’s already said yes to. This makes it easier for her to say no because she can clearly see that a potential new commitment simply can’t fit into her schedule. This is something she felt she had lost by using a digital calendar.

At first, Natalie purchased pretty planners on the market, but after a while, she felt that they didn’t work for her and started to create her own layouts for her paper planner and prints them off as needed. She uses the disc-bound method, which allows her to take paper in and out easily without adding another bulky item to carry around with her. She also color-codes to indicate various aspects of her life.

What happens on a day when everything gets away from you?

The last year or so, Natalie has had more of these days. Her younger brother passed away suddenly last year, and she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer two weeks after that. Treatment required surgery and radioactive treatment. She also faced other challenges throughout the year. But through all these challenges, Natalie has been stretched in ways where she didn’t realize she needed to grow. She’s learned to make plans, but also realized that it is important to hold those plans loosely and be flexible. She also learned to ask for and receive help as a true gift.

When the day looks nothing like what she had planned and has taken on a life of its own, Natalie has learned to let go of what she’s planned for the day, do the best that she can where she can, and then try again the next day. She also tries to figure out at the moment what is causing her to feel overwhelmed or off-track. Sometimes it’s because others have added to her day that she wasn’t expecting. When that happens, she simply takes out a piece of paper and writes down everything that’s in her mind, prioritizes the items, and starts tackling the first thing on her list. These are the easier days to fix.

The more challenging days are when the cause of overwhelm has nothing to do with anyone else, but rather it’s all in her own head and she simply cannot focus. Her go-to routine to remedy these kinds of days is to turn off all bright lights and work with only natural light, light a candle and turn on some low-volume classical music. All these elements combined have trained her brain to think that it is “go-time.” She sets a timer, usually for no more than 90-minutes, and when that timer goes off, no matter what, she needs to be finished. This practice gives her a surge of motivation, which then leads to better focus.

What’s on the horizon for Natalie?

Professionally, a colleague has asked her to collaborate on a torts case book with him, writing a chapter on cognitive learning theory, so she is working on that. She is also involved in a couple of research projects that have to do with evaluating the value and effectiveness of the bar exam. Finally, she is continuing to develop her skills with the online platform that she is using with her students.

Personally, Natalie is enjoying her kids, who have a very full year. She is just trying to enjoy her life and the people that are in her life. That means trying not to plan a whole lot, so she has room in her calendar for these moments.

Last thoughts on making a life that matters

Figure out what it is that you want, why you want it, and order your days according to that.

What do you think?

Do you have questions for Natalie or me or comments on any of the topics we discussed? Please share them in the comments section below this post or in The Productive Woman Community Facebook group, or send me an email.

Connect with Natalie

• Southwestern Law School Website

More about Natalie

As Assistant Dean of Academic Success and an Associate Professor of Academic Success and  Bar Preparation at Southwestern Law School, Natalie Rodriguez has primary responsibility for designing and implementing innovative academic support courses and designing and assisting with bar-exam preparation classes, workshops, and events.

Natalie has designed and taught a number of programs and courses to support students in achieving academic success, both in law school and on the bar exam. She is particularly passionate about helping students harness the power of cognitive learning theory to maximize the results from effective study habits.  She also believes that the most successful students are those who are able to make the connection between academic and professional competencies early on in their academic journey.  Her course design model, which uses a number of cognitive learning principles, has been used by other law schools seeking to create or enhance academic or bar support programs.

Before attending law school, Natalie’s background was in early education. She worked for several non-profit groups committed to supporting students from traditionally underrepresented groups experience the positive change a college education can make.  Many of these students went on to become first-generation college and graduate students. She continues to bring this passion for education as a form of change to legal education.    

Natalie and her husband recently celebrated their 15 year anniversary. The couple live in southern California with their two middle-school-aged children.

Resources and Links

Books

• Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear
• The One Thing by Gary Keller
• The Tyranny of the Urgent by Charles E. Hummel
• Do More Better by Tim Challies

Apps

• Zoom
• Todoist

Announcements & Reminders

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