The Nightly Entrepreneur I 7 Ways to Manage Time for Your Business

If you work 40+ hours for the week, have a commute, kids, ball practice, Pilates class, dance recitals, home repairs, and the occasional date, you may wonder…

When do I have time to start or run a business?

This is a common barrier that stands in the way of achieving your dreams. This is easily the #1 reason why people don’t step out there, get out of the rat-race, and shake things up. Money is a barrier, sure, but lack of time is an easier excuse.

“I want to start an online cooking show and make my own book, I just don’t have the time…”

“I want to show my boss how it is really done and branch out on my own, but they keep me so busy at work, it’s hard to find the time…”

“I want to learn how to use social media to boost sales on my wife’s Etsy site but I don’t have the time to learn all of that…”

STOP

Here are 10 ways to get you going and get you moving on with your life. YOUR REAL LIFE. The one you’ve always dreamed, the one that makes you tick, the one YOU WILL REGRET if you don’t live it.

1. Take Small Steps: Baby steps seem daunting at first when it comes to learning a new social media platform, or discovering all the bureaucratic fun that lies between you and your dream. But if every day you did ONE THING, one task to help achieve your goals, you would have 365 tasks done in a year. It can be as simple as learning to make a meme, posting to Twitter, shooting a video, or filling out a form for a license. Even gathering all the forms and having them in one place is a task. It’s a win. Habits can be difficult to form, but once you put some small goals into place, the mini-victories you achieve will become addictive.
2. STOP BINGING: TV, streaming, Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, just…everything. We are constantly engrossed in a consumer driven madness that it often becomes hard to think. If you added up all of those hours you spend on screen or on the couch and applied them to your hopes and dreams, you would likely achieve your hopes and dreams. Everything in moderation. It may be hard to stop all of your guilty, cinematic pleasures at once, so make realistic goals. Achieve a win, complete a task, then treat yourself to one or two episodes. Imagine if you invoiced the ten clients that you were supposed to versus watching 5 episodes of Game of Thrones? The result would be that you get capital for your business in a timely manner, appear professional, and ARE a business owner. The result from watching is that you are entertained. Yay.
3. STOP Procrastinating: You roll around in your mind, consciously and subconsciously, an existence that is better for you and better for you family. It is there, somewhere, but you are not. You put it off, try again next week, or maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, life gets out of hand, things come up. DO IT NOW! We as humans build up tasks in our mind that we know we need to get done. Then, we make them harder, even unemployable as we ruminate on their need for completion. They become more difficult until we give up and give in. DO IT NOW! Try it out, go out on that limb, and complete just one step closer to your goal. You will feel accomplished and realize that whatever it was, it wasn’t as hard as you made it out to be. Then, do it again. The results and your satisfaction of completing something you said you were going to do will be intense. So intense, that you won’t want to stop.
4. Make Time for Your Family, Make Time for Business: People always say that, make time. What does it mean? Is there a machine? No. What people try to say when they utter the phrase make time for…is that you need to consciously plan your life. You need to be considerate of the needs of others and your needs. You need to find a way to eliminate superfluous time lost, and then use the new time wisely. For some, this means a calendar. For others, it means not taking that promotion so you can do something for yourself. There are no excuses. You can have a calendar with reminders in your pocket and really hone in on how and why you spend your time.
5. Include your family into your business model: That’s right, go back to the old days when farmers had kids who became employees. Sounds crazy, right? Not saying that you should have more kids to help film your promo videos, but you can certainly include the ones you have in whatever processes you have going. If you’re a teacher that wants to branch out and create online classes, let your kids film you, show them the ropes too. Have family brainstorming sessions that include upcoming products or promotions. Ask their opinion. Have your 8 year old son show you what Musical.ly is all about and start using it together. Take them on the job, show them what it means to really follow your heart. They will learn, you will learn too. The quality time you will spend together will far outweigh any other.
6. Read. Read. Read: “I don’t have time to read and learn new things.” So many people say this, it’s exhausting. Do you commute? Did you know that with Audible  you can read while you drive? You can listen to podcasts, like ours, or even just listen to how to videos on YouTube. Not any expert books in your field? Then, you should be the one to write the book on whatever it is you are passionate about. In order to do that, you will need to read other types of books that can get your juices flowing.
7. Create passive income streams along with your active business: Think creatively. If you can sell a course, a book, a t-shirt, and a mug along with your active business, you can make money while you sleep. WHILE YOU SLEEP. We are going to discuss passive income thoroughly in another post, but you need to open your mind to the possibilities. So much in our society is user-friendly and automated. Get in there and find ways to add products or services that are passive and let the customers come to you, even when you aren’t working on your business.

Of course, there are even more ways to find the time to work on your hopes and dreams. Always remember, when you cut corners, you are oftentimes going to owe that time somewhere else. You may just have to rehash some of your work. Spend time with family and include them on this wonderful journey of entrepreneurship.