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...