5 ways to make time to start your business
Hi, I'm Alli.
I help passionate entrepreneurs, like you, create a strategic brand and website that stands out to your dream clients so you can run a successful business online.
My ultimate goal is to empower you with the tools you need to live your best life by doing the work your love.
One of the most common objections I hear budding entrepreneurs say when it comes to the reason why they haven’t launched their business yet is that they don’t have the time.
Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day? I know I do!
But you can’t connect with your dream clients (and you certainly can’t help them) if you’re putting off starting your business in the first place, right?
Let’s have a look at 5 tips for making time in your already very busy schedule so that you can reach your goal.
1. Get Calm and Clear
One of the first things you need to do when approaching a big project is to get calm and find real clarity in your mind.
My belief is that if you wake up and already feel behind and out of control, then your whole day is already derailed.
So, I’ve finally adopted the idea of having a morning routine to help center me every day so that I show up for my family and my business better than I would have otherwise.
It used to be straight to coffee and scrolling social media for me, but I found that even looking at social can totally derail my day. And so I stopped.
What I do now is drink a glass of water and use a daily journal prompt to write for just 2-3 minutes and then do a 5 min guided pose and meditation. This process is super grounding for me.
I use free daily 5 minute Prompts & Poses from my women’s empowerment coach, Petra MacDougall, who is phenomenal!
Now, whether or not you have a daily practice, another important way to gain clarity is to make sure your workspace is clear.
I don’t know about you, but if my desk is a mess, my brain is also a mess so I’ve got to make sure to keep it clear the best I can.
2. Know your best time of day
This may seem obvious, but it wasn’t always for me!
For a long time, I tried to do work in the evening hours after my kids were asleep and all was quiet even though I’m actually a morning person.
I finally realized that I wasn’t doing my best work at night. I was drained from the day and just trudging along trying to get it all done.
Once I realized how much more productive I am in the early hours of the day and started making better use of them, everything changed for me.
The key is to find the rhythm of what time of day you’re most productive.
So experiment and try keeping a journal of what times during the day you’re able to have long stretches of complete focus to see if there’s consistency.
3. Find time in your day
Sounds easy enough, right?!
I know it’s not though — if it were we wouldn’t be having this conversation!
You may still be working at that 9-5 job.
You may be so overwhelmed with client work which you think was a good thing, but it doesn’t allow you time to work ON your business, just IN it and never really getting ahead of it.
Then there’s making your family meals, laundry, housekeeping, yard work, and NOW for many of us, managing remote learning on top of it all.
So how do you squeeze more time out of your day?
First, have a look at what you discovered when looking at your best time of day.
If you’re most productive in the morning, try to get up 30 min to 1 hour earlier.
If you’re more of a night owl, take advantage of the quiet hour or two after your kids go to bed.
Here’s a big one…Avoid day-wasters. We’d ALL have extra time to gain if we’d just put down our phones.
Facebook, Instagram, surfing the internet, binging on Netflix.
This may be an eye-opening activity for you, but take a day and track how you’re spending your time to see if you can cut it back to a 1-hour block or maybe 2, 30 min blocks if you want to check into social media more often than once/day.
One of my Simple Start students realized that she was watching a tv series every night with her family that she didn’t even enjoy watching!
She knew that spending that time with her family was important, but that she didn’t NEED to spend the entire time watching with them. So she blocked that time off to slip away and knock out her daily task and by doing that was able to get her new membership planned, designed, developed, and promoted in just one month.
Now if you know THAT’S possible, cutting down on your time spent scrolling online or Netflix seems like a no-brainer, yes?
4. Dedicate yourself to your goal
If you have a specific outcome you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got to prioritize it. Make it your goal — one you just can’t shake. Make it your passion!
If launching your business is your end goal, then start there. Every single day envision your business launched to keep motivating you to complete the daily tasks to get you there.
To truly dedicate yourself to your goal you have to start at the finish line.
So set your launch date and stick to it. From there, schedule your daily tasks to get you there.
This leads me to my last tip, which is to…
5. Have a plan
If you’ve carved out the time to work, but don’t know where to start or what to do next when you sit down at your desk then you’ll be wasting time every day trying to figure it out and that’s not helpful in saving you time.
This is exactly why I created my Simple Business Launch Method that I’m teaching in my upcoming free workshop.
So if you’re ready to launch (or relaunch) your business, but find yourself short on time and not knowing the steps you need to take and how to get them done, grab your spot!
Are you more of a visual learner?
Here’s a video version of this post.
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