These days, people are expected to do it all – have a family, work at least one full-time job, have a social life, stay physically active, find time for self-care, and get 7–8 hours of sleep each night.
With all of that, it’s understandable that you might have a tough time finding more time in a day to focus on building your own business.
The good news is that busy people have figured out how to make time for their business before, and still do, so there’s bound to be a way for you to do it too.
Figure Out Your Priorities
To start with, you need to figure out what your priorities are.
If you don’t have your priorities in order, you aren’t going to give them the time and attention necessary to get where you want with them.
Your priorities should be reflective of what is truly most important to you. Consider what your values and goals are.
What needs to be done to achieve them? If one of your goals is to build your business, it needs to be higher on your priority list than things like browsing social media or indulging in streaming platforms.
Schedule Time
Just saying you’ll work on your business when you have time isn’t likely to work out the way you want it to. In today’s fast-paced, digital world, just having the time to do things isn’t something that is going to happen very often, if at all.
If building your business is truly a priority, you need to schedule time and set it aside to focus on your business. How much time you dedicate is up to you, but make sure it’s both regular and long enough that you’ll be able to make progress that you’ll feel good about.
You may find it necessary to get up earlier in the day to take advantage of quiet morning hours that are less likely to be taken over by other things that demand your attention.
Find a Partner
As much as you may want to do everything yourself, if you want to build and grow your business, you may not be able to.
It’s often incredibly challenging to achieve the level of success you want by going it alone. Consider finding a partner for your business.
Finding your ideal business partner may take some time, but having someone else you can share the load with can make building your business far easier.
Since you have someone else to share responsibilities with, you should theoretically have more time between the two of you to dedicate to your business’s growth. Keep in mind that bringing another person in means you have another person’s schedule to balance when it comes to finding time to work together.
That’s something you’ll want to vet for as you go through the process of finding a partner.
Outsource Certain Tasks
Finding a partner isn’t the only way to reduce your workload so you can focus what time you have on other aspects of your business.
You may be to outsource certain tasks or facets of your business to save yourself some time.
There are a lot of different things you can outsource, depending on your business. Customer service, shipping, marketing, and IT are just a few examples. You can get more time for your business by outsourcing your IT needs.
The same goes for other things you outsource. As a bonus, since you’re outsourcing specific business-related tasks, you can hand them off to people or groups who specialize in those things.
Theoretically, that should lead to superior results than if you tried to do everything yourself.
Automate Where Possible
On a similar note, you may be able to automate some aspects of your business.
As an example, if you’ve been taking the time to personally type out and send thank you emails to your customers after they make a purchase, that’s a lot of time being dedicated to that one task.
Instead of spending all those hours on that one thing, automate it so that you don’t have to do anything beyond clicking a button.
Automating your business where possible can free up some of the time you already dedicate to your business. This allows you to spend more time focusing on building and growing your business.
Make Better Use of the Time You Have
Given how busy you probably are, you have a limited window in which to accomplish your goals related to building your business.
Depending on your circumstances, finding ways to carve out more time in the day to dedicate to your business may not make much sense. If that’s the case (or even if it’s not), you must find ways to make better use of the time you have.
Tools like outsourcing, delegating, and automating can help, but they aren’t always going to be enough, especially if you struggle with staying focused and making wise use of your time.
Consider using strategies that help you stay focused so you can be more productive with the time you have.
Take Advantage of Downtime Throughout the Day
Speaking of making the best use of your time, there’s a good chance that there are pockets of downtime throughout the day, even if they are small, that you could use to build your business.
If you have a commute, breaks, or extra pockets of time between daily tasks, see if there are things you can do to build your business. You can listen to podcasts that cover business topics during your commute or fire off a few emails during short breaks throughout the day.
It may help if you create a list of tasks that you can do and organize them by how much time you think they’ll take to accomplish. That way, if you know you have a break at some point during the day, you can pull out that list and pick a task that will fit into that time frame.
Finding time to build your business can be tough, but it is possible.
It will require you to have discipline and a clear direction in mind regarding where you want to end up. You’ll probably need to take advantage of different resources so you don’t have to do everything yourself.
With that in mind, take a look at what you have going on in your life and figure out what you can change to give your business more time.
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