This week, we’re talking about time management. I give the tips that helped me manage my time when I was working in my day job — and that I’m still using now to work on this podcast on the side.

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to season three, episode six of the Grow your side hustle podcast. This is your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente. And I’m here to provide short actionable episodes that will help you build your business. The grow your side hustle podcast is the podcast to help women grow the business of their dreams, whether they want to run it as a long-term side hustle or build it into their main business, so they can control their time with their families and control their money.

This week, we’re going to talk about time. One of the hardest things about growing a side hustle is finding the time to do everything that you need to do. Not only are you, you know, working your main job, you’re also usually cleaning, cooking, shopping, doing all of the family support tasks. And you also want to start this business. Starting the business can feel like more than a full-time job. So, it can feel like a lot.

One of the best ways that I found to make it all happen was to just figure out what you really do, how much time you really have available for everything, and figure out where you can cut things out, or get some more help. So one of the books that I really, really like about time management is 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam and 168 hours is how many hours there are in a week. And that sounds like a lot of hours, right? You know, you spend a certain number of those sleeping certain number of those at your main job. But the rest of the time, you can figure out how to use it. And how to fill those fill those hours.

One of the things she suggests that I think is really, really helpful is to just keep a log of what you’re doing, and how long it takes. You know, you can make it pretty easy with a little pocket-sized notebook. You don’t obviously have to track the time that you spend at work, you know, you can you know that your commute takes X number of minutes or hours, you know that your date workday is X number of hours. So you can just block that out. Figure out how much time you really would like to sleep and block that out. So just keep track of the things that you’re doing in the rest of that time.

Try not to have any judgments, just write it down as it’s happening. It’s like keeping a food log. You know, when you’re thinking about starting a healthy eating plan. You don’t want to start changing what you’re doing yet, you’re just trying to gather the information. So you know, if you spend this many hours cleaning this many hours cooking this many hours planning and shopping for food. Write that down. If you spend five hours a night watching TV, write that down.

Then once you’ve done that for a week or two, depending on how long it takes you to feel like you’ve really captured a good picture of what you’re doing, you can start rating those tasks. This is when you can start, you know, assigning value to them. And I would suggest reading them based on what you absolutely have to do. Obviously, you’re the one that has to go to your day job because you’re the one that they hired you have to do the work on your side business. Because this is your passion project and this is what you’re trying to build. But do you have to be the one that cleans and cooks all the time? Are there things that you’re doing you don’t even have to be doing or they could do less frequently.

So go through your list of what you what you do and rate them with, you know has to be done by you, could be done by someone else, could be done less often, and not even necessary. Then when you’re looking at the things that are not essential, like watching TV, reading books, gardening or you know, knitting or any other hobbies that you have, look at how much joy those bring you and how much those help refresh you after. You’ve worked hard and your job and your side business and taking care of your family. And see you know if any of those need to be cut down or expanded to fill your hours. Now I do watch a fair amount of TV. And I really enjoy it. I love consuming story in that way. And I love that, unless you know, it’s something that I’m watching, that needs subtitles, I usually keep the subtitles on because I can’t always hear what people say, on the TV. So it helps me to be able to see it as well. But if it’s, you know, in a foreign language and needs subtitles, or you know, if it’s in ASL, I’ve, you know, I’ve watched the show Switched at Birth a few times through. And there are times when you know, the characters are speaking in American Sign Language. And I do not know American Sign Language, so I need the subtitles for that. But if it’s not something like that, I can do a lot of things while I’m watching these shows. I can do some of the cleaning, that needs to be done. I can, I could do a hobby, if it were something like Knitting. Knitting is one of those things that I always think I’m going to learn. But I’ve not taken the time to do it. That’s why I keep using it as an example. So that’s not completely wasted time. For me, it also does help refresh me, after, you know, I’ve used my brain a lot, sometimes it’s nice to just turn it off and experience someone else’s words put to a picture.

So, you know, think about all of that, as you’re looking at the things that you’re doing and the things that you might want to stop doing pass off to someone else. And, you know, make some really, some decisions. And one of the things to think about is that you could choose to give up a hobby in the short term, so that you can devote more time to, to your business. Knowing that you’re going to get back to it after you know what a crunch time or whatever.

Once you’ve rated all of your tasks, then go through the ones that don’t have to be done by you, but do need to be done. And see where you could delegate those. I like to use ClickList for my shopping sometimes. Sometimes, you know, I feel like it’s easier for me to just go through and you know, go to the store myself. And then if things that I want are not there, then I can be the one making the decision of what to substitute. I’ve also used Instacart in the past, and that I like because they can send you messages, like “they don’t have this thing. Here’s the shelf where that would be. What works for you?” So that that can be a good a good way if grocery shopping is something that you feel takes a lot of your time.

You could also ask you know your spouse, or partner or other family members that are in your household or near your household, to help out with things. Get your kids to help where they can where it makes sense. Where it’s not something, you’re just going to have to go back and do it again anyway.

And you might look at how your friends can help. If during the summer, childcare is an issue for you. Maybe you can swap with friends so that you can have some uninterrupted time all your kids can play together at the friend’s house and then another time when they need help you take the kids and have them all over at your house.

And finally, there are things that maybe you just need to hire out. You know, cleaning is one that comes up a lot. You could hire a cleaning person to do some of the deep cleaning tasks. You could hire someone to do yard work, if you find that yard work is something that you spend a lot of time on and that doesn’t bring you a lot of joy. And you know puttering around in the garden can be a really great way for some of us to think and process our thoughts and come up with ideas. You know, I’ve done a fair amount of my writing not sitting in front of the computer but while cleaning or taking a shower. I always have the best ideas in the shower right. And so if something is you useful to you and brings you joy, you know, you don’t need to hire help for it. You could, again, think about doing that in the short term to help you, you know, have time to focus. And know that it’s not going to be a long term, a long-term thing.

Finally, some of the things that you feel like you have to do, you do best, you can create some routines, that would make things easier. And one of the, you know, like cleaning is one of the things where a routine can really help you be efficient and get the things done that you want to get done without taking a ton of time. And one of the people that I think gives really good advice on that is clutter bug. And I will have a link to that, and to Laura Vanderkam’s book in the show notes. So it’s clutterbug.me. And her name is Cass. And she’s very fun. She has a podcast, and a quiz that helps you learn your clutter philosophy. And she’s, she’s got some great ideas of what it takes to create routines that actually work for you. Because I know, I’ve seen a ton of routines out there that I would never do, things would never work for me, I would just find it way too annoying. And it would make me feel really oppositional like, What do you mean, you’re telling me what to do? That’s not the way I want to do that. But she helps you create your own. She gives you some ideas and tools that help you create your own. So it is something that will work for you. And, you know, if you get some routines down, maybe those are things that you could start to delegate a little bit more.

So I think, you know, if you look at what time you really have, what you’re really spending that time on, you can make some decisions about how to use it more wisely. So that you don’t end up, you know, feeling tired all the time and burned out and thinking is this side business even really worth it. So, you know, time and energy for me kind of go hand in hand. Because a lot of times, it’s not that I don’t have time to do the things that need to be done, it’s that I just don’t have the energy to do them. And that’s where making routines, so I don’t have to think about how they need to be done is really helpful and figure out what needs to be done, what you can do to make things work a little bit more smoothly. You’ll really have the time and energy to build this business and get to the point where you want it to be.

So I hope this short discussion has helped you figure out what you need to do to feel like you have enough time to do the things you need to do.

I’d love to discuss this more with you in the Grow your side hustle community on Facebook, you can join that using the link in the show notes. Or just go to Facebook and search for grow your side hustle community, and it should come right up for you. It’s a free group you just need to answer a few questions and agree to a few things to be part of it. You can also sign up for the email list so you can get notifications of new things you can access and get access to the Grow your side hustle Resource Library, which has some of the tools I’ve created to help you achieve what you want with your side hustle. And finally, if you’ve liked today’s episode, please share it with someone that you think might enjoy it to click the button to subscribe in your podcast app and leave a review because that is the key to helping more people find us.

Alright, talk to you next time. Hope to see you in that Facebook group.