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LeadershipMost Powerful Women

7 Productivity Tips Ivanka Trump Swears By

By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
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By
Valentina Zarya
Valentina Zarya
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May 2, 2017, 7:00 AM ET

To say Ivanka Trump wears many hats is an understatement. Right now, she’s an advisor to the president of the United States (who also happens to be her father). But even before taking on the White House role, she was a successful retail entrepreneur, an EVP at the Trump Organization, a wife, and a mother.

In her new book Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, which hit bookshelves Tuesday, Trump shares a few things that help her juggle her many responsibilities. Here are some of the first daughter’s organization tips:

1. Color-code your calendar

Trump writes about the way she color-codes her digital calendar “by business and topic—construction, acquisition, design.” That way, she writes in her book, when she clicks on it, she gets a “visual snapshot” of where she is spending most of her time.

2. Look for patterns in your inbox

One of the things Trump writes about doing regularly is reviewing her emails to look for patterns and note if there are better ways to communicate on certain topics. She writes: “If, for example, my construction team is sending me complex questions by email twenty times a day, it would be more efficient to set up a face-to-face touch-base meeting with them on a recurring basis to get them the answers they need efficiently.”

3. Try out different journaling tactics

Aside from her digital calendar, Trump keeps a Moleskine notebook in which she organizes her long- and short-term goals. She uses Stephen Covey’s four-quadrant time management grid to organize each week (each quadrant represents a certain level of urgency and importance), and Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal for the day-to-day. “I’ve built an entire system of symbols that denote how timely each item on my to-do list is,” she writes.

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4. Treat personal goals like you do professional ones

Trump is as rigorous in her personal life as she is in her professional one, making concrete goals to spend one-on-one time with her children and husband, Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner. “Right now, I play cars with [my older son] Joseph, on the floor, for twenty minutes each day. [My daughter] Arabella loves books, so I make a note to read at least two per day to her and plan ‘dates’ to the library.” She has an official “date night” with Kushner every other week.

5. Unplug (at least) once per week

From sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, Trump disconnects completely—”no e-mails, no TV, no phone calls, no Internet”—for the Jewish traditional Shabbat. She credits this time away from the world with enabling her “to go back to work, full steam, the following Monday—or more realistically, Saturday night.”

6. Set resolutions for your business

While running her eponymous brand, Trump writes, she got in the habit of using New Year’s Day to brainstorm a long list of high-level objectives for each of the different businesses that she oversaw. “I break it out by company and write down but structural, overarching goals that I was to accomplish by the end of the year,” she writes.

7. Practice meditation

Trump says that meditation is, for her, the best way to start the day. “Transcendental meditation is a practice I picked up several years ago and I couldn’t do half of what I do in a day without it,” she writes. “Twenty minutes is ideal for calming the mind, eliminating distractions, and boosting my productivity.”

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By Valentina Zarya
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