I’m going to be totally honest with you right now – making a schedule for myself and my business is something that I have totally resisted in the past.
It’s one of those things where you know you need to do it, and logically you agree with it, but you’re just still not doing it. You keep saying that you’re going to do it, but you just never do it. You know what I mean? We all have those things in our life that we say we want to do, but we don’t actually take action toward it.
And that’s because a part of yourself doesn’t really want to do it. Part of yourself doesn’t really believe it’s going to work.
And the part of myself that resisted making a daily and weekly schedule for myself is the part that craves FREEDOM.
You can ask my mom. I have this thing where I just want to make my own decisions and I don’t want to be told what to do. I definitely was NOT a wild child like that might sound, but I’m very independent.
But like I’ve mentioned in other pep talks, and what it took me a really, really long time to figure out is that having no plan equals chaos. And chaos is the total opposite of freedom.
So I had to look at scheduling and planning in a totally different way. Because when I’m the one making the schedule and the plan, I still get to make all the decisions. I still get to be independent.
Scheduling and planning actually give me WAY more freedom than winging it and operating on autopilot – because I’ve done a favor for myself by taking an hour to make all the decisions for the week, scheduling them out, and then I just don’t have to think about it again!
So I want to share with you today what that process looks like for me at this point in my business – where I’m seeing success and where I’m still struggling.
First, I have this AWESOME planner called Plans N Things. You can get it from the designer, Christy Montague on her Etsy shop as a digital download, and then if you have access to a color printer, you can print it out double-sided and hole-punched for a 3-ring binder – or you can have your local office supply store do it for you, it won’t cost you that much and it’s totally worth it.
If she ever stops making it, I might cry.
So you need that planner and a pencil – not a pen because you’re going to be making adjustments as the week goes on.
At the beginning of each month, there’s a monthly calendar and then there’s a weekly calendar that has a column for each day – plus some extra space below each day for notes titled “all kinds of things to do.”
So the first thing that I do is I write in time blocks for each day when I plan to work.
So I make a block for 7am to 9am, ten to noon, one to three and 4 to six. And you’ll notice that I’ve got 3 one hour long breaks in there, which I’ll mention in a minute.
So I do that on each day.
And then I look at my Google calendar, and I pencil in all the appointments and meetings on my calendar.
And then what I do at the bottom of the planner there’s that all kinds of things to do section, I write in the different categories of stuff I do in my business. So for me, that’s list building, content, clients, email marketing, and administrative stuff.
And then under each section, I list out all the things in each category that I need to do that week. I also have already created a content calendar for the month, so I know what blog posts and emails I need to write this week to stay on track with my content schedule.
And then, I assign each task a time block, and I DOUBLE what I think it will take. So if I have a client project where I’m like, “Oh, that should only take an hour,” I’ll write down a 2 in a circle beside it. Because inevitably, something won’t work, I won’t be able to get logged in, I’ll run into a problem, and it’s just going to take longer than I think it will.
Then, I decide where in those time blocks that I’m going to do those projects. So if you listened to episode 57, you know that I do my own stuff on Mondays and mornings, and client stuff on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, and I didn’t mention this yet, but Fridays are also mine! They are my project days, so any video production, etc. happens on Fridays.
But I only have 4 two-hour blocks each day for 5 days, and some of them are already filled with appointments. So if I fill up that bottom section with more than 40 hours of stuff, then I need to decide what has to happen this week, and what can be moved to next week or the following week, and then I just erase it and write it on next week’s “all kinds of things to do” section.
Because what I used to do, is just make a big long to-do list on a piece of paper, look at it every day, pick the thing that was on fire, do it, and just keep working on the things that were on fire, and never get to the things that I wanted to do or needed to do. And it felt super stressful and crazy.
This way, I’m setting a realistic schedule for what I can possibly accomplish in a week, on any given day, and I’m not killing myself trying to get it all done and feeling like I’m always behind and that it’s just impossible!!
And it shows me what I need to delegate, because if I have a deadline and I can’t get it all done, that’s a clear sign I need to ask for help!!
And then those 3-hour long breaks? Those are mine. That’s when I walk my dog, take a break for lunch, work out, run errands. I can choose to work through them, but I’m really trying not to!
So I invite you to do this yourself. If you have a side hustle, pick those daily time blocks on your schedule and write them in. and then write down what’s on your to-do list, write down how long it will take (remember to double it) and then start transferring those projects into time blocks. As you get them done, cross them out. If you need to reschedule something, erase it and write it into next weeks column.
It takes about an hour a week to do this, and it’s totally worth it!
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