Productivity Strategies for Sleep Consultants with Ronna Belinky
In this week’s episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast, we’re diving into a topic that so many entrepreneurs, parents, and busy people struggle with. How do you manage your time well, stay productive, and avoid burnout? I invited time management and productivity coach Ronna Belinky to join me because this is something that comes up again and again in our community.
Ronna specializes in helping people build simple, sustainable systems so they can manage their days with more intention and less stress. She focuses on awareness, habits, and clarity rather than trying to cram more into an already full schedule. Her approach is all about creating routines that support your life instead of adding pressure to it.
In our conversation, we talk about where to begin when everything feels important, how to create systems that actually work for you, and what it looks like to build your business in a way that feels steady and sustainable. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, distracted, or unsure how to prioritize, this episode will give you clarity and a practical path forward.
Links:
Website: Workflows by Ronna
Instagram: @workflowsbyronna
LinkedIn: Ronna Belinky
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Transcript:
Intro: Welcome to Becoming a Sleep Consultant! I’m your host Jayne Havens, a certified sleep consultant and founder of both Snooze Fest by Jayne Havens and Center for Pediatric Sleep Management.
On this podcast, I’ll be discussing the business side of sleep consulting. You’ll have an insider’s view on launching, growing, and even scaling a sleep consulting business. This is not a podcast about sleep training. This is a podcast about business building and entrepreneurship.
Today on the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast, we’re diving into a topic that every entrepreneur, parent, and busy person can relate to. How do we manage our time well and stay productive without burning out? I invited Ronna, a time management and productivity coach, to join me because this is something that comes up again and again and again in our community.
Ronna specializes in helping people build simple, sustainable systems so they can manage their day with more intention and less stress. What I love most about her approach is that she focuses on awareness, habits, and clarity, rather than trying to squeeze more into an already full day. Her work is all about creating routines that support your life instead of adding pressure to it.
In this conversation, we talk about where to begin when everything feels important, how to create systems that actually work for you, and what it looks like to build a business in a way that feels steady and sustainable. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, distracted, or unsure of how to prioritize, this episode will give you clarity and a practical path forward.
Jayne Havens: Ronna, welcome to the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. I’m so excited you’re here with me today.
Ronna Belinky: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Jayne Havens: Before we get started, tell everybody a little bit about you. Who are you and what do you do?
Ronna Belinky: Sure. So my name is Ronna Belinky. My business is called Workflows by Ronna. I’m a professional and personal productivity and time management expert. So I really help women clear the mental load and manage their time and to-dos in a very simple way, and I try to make planning simple. Because I think so many women think that it’s complicated and time consuming, but I really try to simplify it.
Jayne Havens: I love that. So for everybody listening, I connected with Ronna in a women’s sort of online networking community. I brought her into the CPSM community to teach everybody about time management and productivity. We had such a great conversation that I was like, “We got to do this. We got to take it one step further and talk about it on the podcast.” So that is why we’re here today. I want to sort of just jump in and ask you what your top productivity tips are. Like if you’re sort of starting from scratch and you could share three things to be helpful, what would they be?
Ronna Belinky: So the first thing would be — and if you leave this podcast and you just implement this one thing, it will be life-changing for you — maximize your energy. Think about the time that you have the most energy, and do your most difficult things during that time. It’s going to be different for everybody, right? I’m a morning person. You might not be. That’s fine. But really using your energy at strategic times is really important.
I would say another thing is: plan tomorrow today so that when you sit down at your desk in the morning, you know exactly what you’re doing. It might change. This is not rigidity. But really, you sit down at your desk, and there’s no decision fatigue. And I think so many of us suffer from that. So you sit down, and you know what you’re doing for the day. So you planned that the day before.
This might be surprising to you, but prioritizing rest and breaks, I think, is so important. I think we think we need to just hustle through and work through it. It’s really not sustainable, and it’s also not productive. So really making sure that you take breaks, whether they’re active or passive breaks, whatever works for you or a combination of both. But it really leads to more productivity.
Jayne Havens: I really like your second suggestion about figuring out what you’re going to do maybe the day before. I actually did that. I just got back from a four-day vacation. I was in Mexico with my husband and two other couples. I really didn’t work so much while I was away. And of course, that meant I’m coming back home to real life with a massive to-do list, which could feel really overwhelming. And if I’m going to be really honest and transparent, it does. But one thing that I did—I did this last night—is I figured out what I was going to do before my calls started this morning.
My first call this morning was at 9:30. I dropped my kids off at 8. So I had from, like, 8:15 to 9:30 to be productive, which isn’t a huge block of time, but it’s not nothing either. I made a short list, and I got it done. So I actually felt like I did exactly that this morning. I could have just sort of let that hour and 15 minutes slip away. Like very easily, I could have done that. But I actually didn’t really have the luxury of doing that because the rest of my day is full. So I was like, if I didn’t use that hour and 15 minutes, I was getting nothing done.
Ronna Belinky: It’s so smart. And I bet the reason why you get a lot done too is because your to-do list was probably very realistic.
Jayne Havens: Yes.
Ronna Belinky: Like you probably didn’t make — you knew you had an hour and 15 minutes, and you didn’t put 20 things on your list.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, correct. I also did really simple tasks. I wanted to ease myself back into work. So, you know, I made sure that I posted the podcast for this week. I made sure that I sent out thank-you notes to my clients who had wrapped up with me while I was away. It was sort of like very easy, mindless tasks that were sort of like gateway back into real life, real work.
Ronna Belinky: Brilliant. And you set yourself up for success for the day. It’s such a small thing, but it’s really impactful.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, I think that’s a great tip. Why do you think people feel busy, but not productive?
Ronna Belinky: Honestly, I think people are spending too much time checking and answering email.
Jayne Havens: Okay.
Ronna Belinky: I think that they’re thinking that that’s important and that’s a priority when, really, the things that move the needle—like the deep work and things like that—are really the most important thing. And so, I don’t know. I think people are really spending too much time not doing important things. Email is a huge, huge thing. Now, there are certain things that are important that you respond to in a timely manner, but I think that people are prioritizing that over more important work.
Jayne Havens: I find myself getting into that cycle of email clearing all day long. I have three email inboxes. I have my personal email. I have my Snooze Fest email. I have my CPSM email. And stuff is coming in all day. The second I get a new email, it’s like my brain says, “You got to read this.” Then it takes me away from what I’m doing. So I’m trying to be mindful of that. I think it’s really good advice. I also think it takes work to get to a place where you don’t behave that way in your business.
Ronna Belinky: Absolutely. Honestly, I think you’re absolutely right. And it takes a lot of practice. It’s very simple, but it’s not easy. But you can get better at it. Because I used to react all the time to all my emails, and I don’t anymore because I know how unproductive it is in that context switch. I talked about it in my presentation for your community — that context switch takes you out of what you’re doing, and it takes you so long to get back into what you were doing originally. It’s just so unproductive. It is simple, but it is not easy. It takes practice, but you can do it. I mean, I did.
Jayne Havens: When you see someone feeling overwhelmed or stuck in their work—whether it’s with productivity, with sort of like getting through their day—where do you think they should start? What’s the starting point?
Ronna Belinky: Okay. So what I do with all of my one-on-one clients, where I start with them is get to know yourself better. So really, understand how you work and how you respond to things that are expected of you and really get to know yourself better. Know that productivity is not one-size-fits-all. Just because something worked for your friend, for your family member, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for you. So really understand yourself better so that you can set yourself up for success, so you feel successful and not like a failure. You feel productive.
Then a lot of trial and error, so be patient. When I work with my clients, we give a couple weeks in between sessions so that they can try things. Listen. A lot of things are not going to work. A lot of things are, but you’ve got to be patient and just try different things.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, and commit to figuring out a new way, right? Because if what you’re doing is not working for you, which I think is really an interesting metaphor for the work that we do as sleep consultants. Because this is exactly what we are saying to our clients, right? Like they’re coming to us and saying, “My baby is not sleeping,” or, “He’s up every hour in the middle of the night.”
What they’re doing, they think — everyone is trying to do what they think is best for their family, or for their baby or, whatever. But then you’re in this vicious cycle of it being the same every single night. I think it’s the same with productivity, right? We do the same thing every single day. Then every single day, we’re feeling, “Oh, I really wasn’t that productive.” So in order to see greater productivity, you have to make a change to the way that you’re working.
Ronna Belinky: Absolutely. Realize it’s not a quick fix, just like sleep training.
Jayne Havens: I’m going back in my mind to what you said about the email inbox. It feels really uncomfortable to sit with a full inbox all day long. Probably not as uncomfortable for you if this is something you’ve worked on. But for me, that would feel really uncomfortable. So I would need to work on it to get to a better place.
Ronna Belinky: Yeah, it felt very uncomfortable for me at first. Absolutely. Now I have a system, and I figured it out.
Jayne Havens: You mentioned you have a system. I want to talk about that. You often say that processes and systems need to come first, and the tools come second. What do you mean by that?
Ronna Belinky: Yeah, so it goes back to getting to know yourself better. I think a lot of people believe that a planner is going to solve everything for them. Again, comparing themselves to somebody else. They don’t take the time to think, “Okay. How do I work best? Do I need a system with dates? Do I rebel against deadlines?” I worked with a client. She did not like deadlines, so she picked a planner that didn’t have deadlines. We built a workflow for her with no deadlines, you know? So really get to know yourself better is really important.
Then figure out what the tool is going to be. Because if having a daily planner for you is not going to work for one reason or another, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. And so I really think that figure out the process in the system, then figure out the tool, if that makes sense. Like if you’re a paper person and you’re really trying to use a digital system because everybody told you, “Oh, everyone is digital,” well, then it’s not going to work.
Jayne Havens: That makes perfect sense. I’ve actually had a lot of coaches and strategists, and even people who have helped me create a new website — just like people who have supported me in my business use tools for keeping on track that I found to be so challenging to manage, like those ClickUps or the Asana — there are all these programs — Monday.
There are all these programs online that people use them in their businesses, and it works for them. And every time I’m sort of low-key forced to participate in their systems, I’m beside myself. I cannot do it. So I think what you say makes perfect sense. You have to figure out what systems and then what tools are going to work for you. Because what works for somebody else is not the right tool or system for you.
Ronna Belinky: Absolutely. Can I just say that I’m 100% with you? So I always struggle because I think, “Oh, I’m a productivity and time management expert. I should know how to use a project management software, like all the tools that you mentioned.” It doesn’t work for my brain. And you know what? It’s okay. I struggled at the beginning. I thought, “How can I call myself an expert?”
Well, that’s okay. I’m an expert in what I know and what my brain uses. And if you want to hire somebody to help you with that, oh my God, there are so many amazing people. That could work for you. But I kept on fighting against it. But that’s not to say that I might not try again, you know. Again, back to the trial and error, I might try again and say, “Oh, maybe it’ll work for me now.” But yeah, it’s a real thing. I’m with you.
Jayne Havens: I’m sure a lot of the people that you support are moms. They have jobs. They have side hustles or passion projects. They’re juggling a lot of different things, both like a workload and a mental load, which I think is so impossible. I mean, I’m doing it too. It’s really, really challenging. For people who are juggling in sort of every aspect of their life and growing a business, where should they start?
Ronna Belinky: Definitely focusing on reducing that mental load is really important. I believe that the answer to that is capturing — writing everything down. There’s this great time management expert. His name is David Allen, and he wrote this book called Getting Things Done. He said, in it, “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” Okay? So I believe in having one reliable system for — I have one for my personal life. That’s my Notebooks with Ronna Workshop, which I teach people. Then I also have one for my professional life.
Some people like to mix those together, and that’s fine. But I truly believe write everything down and have a reliable system so that you’re not exhausted. Because I think so much of that exhaustion of juggling everything is because you’re trying to remember everything. It’s exhausting, okay? So having a reliable system where you capture everything and you know that you don’t have to think about it because it’s in a reliable system. And so I think that that’s really — I just think that it’s so important.
Jayne Havens: Yeah, I love that. Getting the ideas out of your brain into a list is so important. To give you an example of that, my nine year old takes a tennis lesson every Monday. For the past couple of weeks, I just never put it in my calendar. This is so silly, but I just never put it there. And every single Monday afternoon, Ivy is like, “Do we have tennis today? Are we going to tennis?”
Thankfully, she reminds me, right? But I’m like, “Ugh.” Like, “I didn’t pack you a water bottle. I don’t have your shorts in the car. Now we got to go home. I was planning on taking you out to dinner first. I’m not prepared.” But throughout the day, I might have thought about her water bottle or the dinner, but I didn’t have it in a place where it was just going to remind me. And so it didn’t happen.
It’s so frustrating because of course I know that she has tennis on Mondays. Of course, I know how that could work out the best if I was organized. But sometimes you’re just not, and then you’re beating yourself up. You don’t want to be thinking about packing a tennis bag when you’re trying to write a sleep plan. That just doesn’t work.
Ronna Belinky: Absolutely. And to your point, I think keeping a calendar — I have a paper system for all of my to-dos. All of my appointments, all of my meetings, all that is in my digital calendar on my phone. I think that that’s my reliable system for those kinds of things. I think that’s just as important as keeping your to-do list somewhere in a reliable place. Like having your — some people call it your one source of truth, you know. And so that’s so important. Absolutely. You’re less exhausted, and it’s less chaotic when you’re prepared.
Jayne Havens: Do you see a lot of burnout in your clients, where people’s brains are just fried from trying to stay organized? And if so, what are we doing about that?
Ronna Belinky: Yeah, so I will say that a lot of people feel burnout. It’s again back to — so after I work with clients, they say, “I didn’t realize how much I had in my head.” That’s personally and professionally. And so it’s a big problem. It’s also I think because people aren’t good at prioritizing things and realizing what’s the most important thing. How am I going to prioritize it? This is honestly the thing that I had the most trouble with, and I’ve gotten so much better at it. I think everybody thinks they need to do everything right away, and that just leads to burnout. It’s not sustainable.
Because if everything is important, nothing is important. I think his name is Patrick Lencioni; he wrote this business book. He said that and I thought, “Oh, That’s brilliant.” Because it’s just as important to realize what is not important as what is important, you know? And so I think that just leads to burnout.
Jayne Havens: One thing that I see — yeah, I fully agree that all of these thoughts and things swirling in our brain are exhausting. I also think that sometimes people spend — this is what I see at least with people who I’ve trained to work in the field of sleep consulting. It’s that people sometimes spend most of their time thinking about their businesses or worrying about their businesses and not actually taking any action in their businesses. Do you see that? And so there’s actually very little productivity happening. It’s just thinking and worrying.
Ronna Belinky: Yes, absolutely. I think part of that is planning for that time, like planning your thinking time, which people can call deep work. Planning that time and then planning your doing time. I think that you can actually plan that not in a rigid way. It doesn’t have to be very, very rigid. But I think that planning that time in — because I think that thinking time is important too. But the taking action is also important and so much scarier. It’s so much harder to do because it actually, oh, I might move the needle. It’s like kind of scary.
Because when you actually do things, you’re trying things. You might fail, you might not, which I think everybody should just look at it from a lens of curiosity. My friend, who is an ADHD coach, talks about that. Instead of a fear of failure, look at it through a sense of curiosity and being compassionate with yourself, you know?
Jayne Havens: I mean, I always say: I think that the most successful people in business are trying more things and also failing more often, right?
Ronna Belinky: Yes.
Jayne Havens: There’s some quote — I don’t know if it’s like Wayne Gretzky, or Michael Jordan, or something. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” right? You have to try over and over and over and over again. There’s the, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Then there’s another one that’s like, “I’ve missed more shots than most people ever take.” Something like that, right?
Ronna Belinky: Yes.
Jayne Havens: People who are really, really good at what they do have actually failed more because they’ve tried more.
Ronna Belinky: Absolutely. It’s so funny that you say that because I was just talking to my husband about this. When I first launched my business, I was scared of this. I didn’t try a lot of new things. So I think that you can get better at this, okay?
So if you’re listening to this right now and you’re not good at this, know that you can get better. I did. I think a of it is confidence, you know? And so yeah, I experiment a lot. And if this doesn’t work, you know what? I’m going to try it one more time. And if doesn’t work, okay, I’m going to pivot. But you have to be willing to try. Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. It’s so important.
Jayne Havens: I also think that sometimes you can try things over and over and over again. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not working. It’s just that it’s not working yet, right? Sometimes you have to, you know — I think about sleep consultants getting onto a discovery call. The first time they’ve ever spoken with a tired mom whose baby is up every 45 minutes, they might totally botch that call. They don’t know what to say. They don’t know how to run the call. They don’t know how to exude confidence and instill a level of—I don’t know—calm, but also authority. They get off the call and they’re like, “Oh, that was terrible.” We’ve all done that.
Ronna Belinky: 100%.
Jayne Havens: But the more you have the conversations, the more comfortable you become with your language, the more comfortable you become with your confidence. It doesn’t mean that these calls don’t work. It just means you haven’t figured out how to have a call yet, right? And so sometimes you just have to do something 50 times or 150 times before it starts working for you.
Ronna Belinky: I think that is some of the best advice that you could ever give a person who is starting their own business. It is. You are spot on. It is so important.
Jayne Havens: Then back to the point that you raised that you learned from your friend who’s the ADHD coach, sometimes when you’re speaking to somebody, it doesn’t work. Like, they don’t hire you. That is discovery. There is curiosity to be had there, right? Because did they not hire you because you didn’t exude any sort of confidence or authority, or did they not hire you because they’re really not ready to work on it? Did they not hire you because they can’t afford to work with you?
Figuring out the why behind a “failure” I think is really valuable. Because if you’re spending all day talking to people who are in no financial position to hire a sleep consultant, that’s really information. That’s information that you need to know, right?
Ronna Belinky: It changes everything.
Jayne Havens: It changes everything. And if you’re spending all day talking to moms who are miserable and exhausted, but also are not at all interested in making any changes, that’s also really important information for you to gather, right? And so I agree. There has to be a level of curiosity. You have to figure out why what you’re doing is not working for you so that you can either connect with somebody who’s more in line with your ideal client, you can learn to communicate in ways that are more effective, that instill a higher level of confidence. These are all learning lessons.
Ronna Belinky: Absolutely.
Jayne Havens: What would you say is the biggest time waster? What are people doing that is just the biggest time suck of all time?
Ronna Belinky: I think not looking at social media intentionally, you know? Not saying, okay, I’m only going to go on for this amount of time. It’s so easy to get sucked in. I mean, it’s so easy. So I think that’s a big thing. I think you can be on social media. But if you’re more intentional about it, that would be huge. And then again, email. I think it’s such a time suck.
Jayne Havens: I actually want to dig in a little bit to the social media piece because I think that’s really important. I have a lot of sleep consultants say to me that they want to use Instagram to grow their businesses. Fair. That’s one way to do it. But what are you doing all day on Instagram?
Are you mindlessly scrolling? Are you creating content? Are you engaging with other people’s content? I am a firm believer — I think you and I talked about this privately after you gave a presentation to the CPSM community. I’m a firm believer that you can actually grow your business on Instagram without ever actually posting content to Instagram.
Just by watching other people’s content, following them, engaging with their content, sending them a message to connect, then meeting them on Zoom — to me, that is way more productive than spending two hours making a reel with all sorts of, you know, you snap your fingers and your clothes are different colors, whatever. I think that that is not a good use of time, whereas you could spend the same two hours actually talking to people on social media. That would be so much more productive.
Ronna Belinky: Yes, we spoke about that, and I cannot get it out of my head. It was so helpful for me. I can’t even tell you. And listen, I post a couple times a week. I’m like in launch season right now for my workshops that are coming up, so I’m posting a little bit more. I really only try to post two times a week, but I spend the first part of my time on Instagram engaging with other people.
Amazing things happen. I mean, for instance — let me just give you an example. Somebody from your community who watched the recording—this is an amazing story—they watched the recording. She followed me on Instagram. I DM all my new followers, okay? That’s also another great engagement thing that does not take long. I say, “Thank you so much for following me. How did you find me?”
She said, “I saw the recording that Jayne posted, and I’m thinking about doing your workshop.” I responded. I said, “Oh, great.” And so we had this little conversation. She signed up for the workshop. She said, “One of the reasons why I signed up was because of your customer service and because you engaged with me. You took the time.” It’s amazing. Not hard. Very, very simple.
Jayne Havens: That makes me so happy to hear, and I’m so glad that I was able to say that to you. I mean, I’m sure, look, you’re a very engaging person. I know you were doing that. You were doing that before I said so. That wasn’t something I told you to do. You were doing that anyway.
But I think, also, if I gave you even an ounce of permission to just back off from the content creation a little bit and just focus on having conversations with people and providing that amazing customer service that you were already doing—but to lean in more heavily to that instead of worrying about what am I going to post to my stories today—I think that that will always take you further. Always.
Ronna Belinky: Yes, and I’m going to add one more thing. A lot of people talk about repurposing content. And so I try to listen to that and say, “Oh my gosh. I can repurpose this.” Just because somebody saw it a year ago, it doesn’t mean they even remember anything. So I try to do that too.
So I think it’s like a balance. Because I do want people to see what I’m doing, but I want to have that balance, and I don’t want to spend all of my time doing that. Because I make the most impact when I’m in person, when I’m either presenting to a group like yours, or I’m on a podcast, or I’m in person presenting to a group. That’s how people get to know me. It’s hard to understand what I do. People don’t really get it. But if I’m able to explain it, you can see my personality, and it’s less intimidating, it’s so huge. Part of that is the engagement.
Jayne Havens: The more you can get out and get in front of people, share your magic, share your wisdom, share your expertise, people will be — I think that’s magnetic. Tell everybody where they can learn more from you if they would like to?
Ronna Belinky: Sure. So I’ve got a website. It’s workflowsbyronna.com. It’s got all of my workshops that are coming up in December and January. It has some free content, some free downloads on there, if you want to check that out. I’m also on Instagram and Facebook, both at Workflows by Ronna. I’m also on LinkedIn under my name, Ronna Belinky.
Jayne Havens: Ronna, it was so great having this conversation with you today. I’m so glad that you sort of entered my stratosphere. I feel like I’ve picked up a couple of quick little nuggets. Every single time I’ve listened to you speak, I’ve had a takeaway. Like, “Okay, I’m going to do this now.” We just must keep in touch. I think everybody is going to really love this content, so thank you.
Ronna Belinky: Thank you so much for having me. I feel the same way about you and what I’ve gotten from you, so thank you so much for having me on your podcast.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Becoming a Sleep Consultant Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s episode, it would mean so much to me if you would rate, review, and subscribe. When you rate, review, and subscribe, this helps the podcast reach a greater audience. I am so grateful for your support.
If you would like to learn more about how you can become a certified sleep consultant, head over to my Facebook Group, Becoming a Sleep Consultant or to my website thecpsm.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you will tune in for the next episode