Sometimes life can feel a little too much like math. Which is not cool, because math is annoying. If you are a busy person, you know what I’m talking about. Figuring out your online side hustle schedule can feel a just like those dumb word problems from algebra. Except in this situation, you aren’t trying to find when two passing trains will meet. You’re simply trying to find when you will finally run into some free time.
The formula is pretty simple. You add up all the things you have to do every day. Showering, commuting to work, your day job, cooking dinner, sleeping, your Instagram hour. All of those things are equal to X.
Then you subtract that from the 24 hours in a day. In short, it looks like this….
24hrs – X = WHHHYYYY??
Odds are that you’ve done some version of this and you know that you have to decrease the junk that fills your day so that you can have more time to do what you want. We don’t want you to cut out sleeping or showering so we’ve put together a few tips to help give you more time and keep you fresh.
Wake Up Earlier
Yeah. This is almost as bad as math, but hear me out. There are two main reasons why waking up early is so great.
In the morning, your brain is not exhausted.
When you try to work your side hustle at the end of the day, it’s hard to get started. By the time nine o’clock comes around, you’ve already been to a few meetings. You’ve spent too long sitting in traffic. You’ve cooked and cleaned. The last thing you want to do is sit down and do brand research. You want to have a glass of wine, watch Netflix, and browse #contentmarketing on Instagram. That’s not research. But when you are tired, it feels close enough. It’s not.
In the morning, you won’t have distractions.
Think about it. Everyone is asleep. That means the emails haven’t started coming in. Nobody is expecting anything from you, yet. It’s just you, your coffee and your freshly recharged brain.
Waking up early gives you time without distraction and a fresh brain. Double win!
Take Charge of Your Technology
We’ve all seen those banal articles where supposedly smart people commiserate about how distracted we are and how terrible it is. We don’t have that mentality. Technology is great as long as you are in charge, not your phone. So, TAKE CHARGE.
Make your technology work FOR you, not prevent you from working.
Turn off your push notifications. All of them. Dedicate some time to turning off your technology completely. Get it out of your site and don’t let it tempt you. Don’t let it tell you what to do.
If you’ve taken our first piece of advice seriously, then combine your early morning online side hustle routine with your technology free time to get even more focussed! Triple win!
Learn to say “NO”
Being an adult is all about learning to say no. First, you have to learn how to say no to yourself. That’s called self-discipline – and it’s important to your health. You’ll need that when you want to sleep late or check your Instafeed while your working. But, saying no to others is also important.
So much of our social lives can feel like they are being propelled by unreasonable expectations and obligations.
Don’t let yourself fall victim to this. You don’t have to go to every party that your friends have for their kids. Those parties are lame anyway. It’s just a bunch of parents pretending they are on diets and kids with sticky fingers. Gross.
Some of us need to realize that the only way we’ll have the time to pursue our own goals is to say no to some things. THAT’S OKAY. You aren’t ghosting on anyone. You aren’t letting anyone down. Your friends will still be there. Just let them know you are focusing on getting your online side hustle up and running. They’ll understand and if they don’t understand then they aren’t friends. They are just using you to bring their kid’s presents.
Plan for your online side hustle
The other day, I thought it would be fun to act like an adult and cook food at home. I cut up all the veggies before realizing I was missing an ingredient. So, I go to the store. I grab my jalapeno and got stuck in traffic on the way home. What was supposed to take 30 minutes to cook turned into a two-hour affair. My plans for that night were shot. If I had thought ahead, I would have either grabbed jalapenos much earlier or just ordered tacos from the truck down the street.
The point is that disorganization steals our free time. Spend one hour a week to plan out what your week should look like. Plan your meals, plan your work time, plan your social activities, plan your “white space”, plan everything. I know it doesn’t sound very romantic, but you won’t care about that when you are finally able to quit your day job.