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In this Q&A, we talk about how to find time for business when you have a family.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Podcast 4 – How we started our online business while working full time and raising kids
- Download our 7 Day Calendar to help organize your time
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to Q&A with S &J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to today’s Q&A with S&J. Our question today is from Ben Adams. Ben writes:
“How do you balance all you do? I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-month old son. I want to create digital products but I struggle for time.”
Ben, we feel your pain. We have been there before. When we started our online businesses, our children were 3 and 18 months.
SHANE: A very difficult time. It was so hard.
JOCELYN: We totally understand where you’re coming from and our children are now 6 and almost 4, and it is very difficult to balance that time especially if you have a full-time job that you’re working every day and you feel like that your time is really limited with your children anyway because you don’t get home until late to see them, and then you have to try to balance this online business thing to. So it is very difficult.
SHANE: The biggest advice that we give to most people when they ask us this question is to be super deliberate with your priorities and that kind of sounds like pie in the sky stuff like, “Oh, manage your time” and all that but it really is true. You’ve got to understand what is the most important thing in your life so that you can work all of the other things around that.
What Jocelyn and I do and this is what we did when we first started out as well even when we were working full-time jobs, we would take our calendar and we would schedule hour by hour, 168 hours during the week. The first things we would always put in were our priorities, the things that meant the most to us.
If you’ve got the time that you need to spend with your children, if you’ve got the time you need to spend with your wife, you’ve got a full-time job that you have to be at, you have to put those on your calendar first. You have to schedule out deliberate time – whether it’s just an hour a day, two hours a day. Whatever it is you’re spending with your family, with your job, whatever you’re doing that you have to do, your priorities- you’ve got to put those on the calendar first.
Then what happens is all of those open spaces -even though they are limited – those times become the only time you have and you have to focus so much and work so quickly, you’ll get so much more work done and be more efficient during those short times and you’ll still meet all of your other responsibilities first.
Make sure that when you’re trying to do this online business thing, you’re trying to start something on the side that you’re not prioritizing time with your online business first. You want to make sure that you’re prioritizing the things that really matter in your calendar and the only way you can do that is to 100% write everything down. If you’re not planning for every hour during the week, then you’re going to have wasted time.
You’re going to start working on your online business. You’ll say, “I’m going to d this for an hour and then play with my kids” then you look up and it has been four hours and they have been in front of the TV for two hours. So make sure that you’re putting your priorities in your calendar first and then you’ll be able to get to the other things that you want to work on like your online business.
JOCELYN: You would be surprised really at how much time that you spend doing things that you think would just take a little bit of time – like it may be social media or it may be a television show that you really enjoy. When you start adding those hours up through the week, it’s really significant, and that’s what we found when we started working on our online business.
We just kind of laid it out on the line and so what is going to be the most important? Is it more important that we watch the show on television or is it more important that we work on our online business for that hour and maybe get ahead so that we could spend more time with our kids later?
We’re not going to lie to you and say that it’s easy or that you’re going to be able to do this in a week or two weeks, or whatever the case may be. It’s going to take a while and you have to figure out a balance that works for you. For us, it was to spend a little bit more time on the front end so that we could have more time later on.
SHANE: You have to be realistic with your time. A lot of times when people tell us, “I struggle for time.” Once you get past the priorities, we gave up TV, we gave up going to the movies, we gave up socializing with some of our friends for a time so that we could get ahead on our business, but when you say that you struggle for time, what you’re really saying is, “Your time is disorganized.” That’s not a knock on you. That’s a knock on just that general principle of you do have time. Your time is nothing but a list of priorities.
Everyone has the exact same amount of time. We have two small kids and we made it work. The point is that you have two small kids, you can make it work. Anybody with kids can make it work. Are you going to have to give up some things? Yes, you are and also, you’re going to have to set a realistic timetable for success. A lot of people out there on the internet that is promoting make money online stuff say “Do it quick in three or four months. Quit your job as soon as possible.”
That’s not true. It took us over a year to do it. It took us over two years to get to real financial stability to where we are now and you have to set yourself up to say, “You know what, I can’t work on this six hours a day every day until it’s done so I’m going to have to say here’s an hour a day every night from 9-10 and I’ll just get done what I can get done and work as efficiently as possible, give myself a chance for success down the road.”
JOCELYN: You have to remember, I quote this all the time. It’s a little thing that is on the wall at our gym. It says, “If it’s important to you, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.” That’s the truth. I actually have a picture of it and we’ll post it up on the notes of this Q&A session but it’s totally true and you just have to keep that in mind when you’re starting an online business or really anything in life. We actually did a long podcast on this and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It is called “How we started our Online Business while Working Full time and Raising Kids.” I think it will be really helpful for you.
SHANE: What episode was that?
JOCELYN: That is podcast four, FlippedLifestyle.com/podcast4.
SHANE: So that’s FlippedLifestyle.com/podcast4 and you can see exactly how we spelled everything out and started our online business with kids and full-time jobs.
JOCELYN: All right Ben we hope that was helpful for you and anyone else out there who is thinking about starting an online business but you have that big four letter word “TIME” standing in your way. The bottom line again is that we all have the same amount of hours in a week. We just have to figure out how we’re spending them.
SHANE: All right guys. That wraps up another Q&A with S&J, thank you guys for listening. We appreciate you all so much and until next time, we’ll catch you all on the flip side.
JOCELYN: See yah. Bye.
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If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Jason Lampel says
I don’t have kids but still find time management very challenging, so kudos to you for making this work WITH kids!
A few questions for you or other readers:
1) Say you have an hour allotted for something like writing a blog post, but once that hour is up, you aren’t quite finished. Do you let the writing spill into your next hour, or assign it to another time slot? This may sound trivial, but it happens to me ALL the time because it’s simply impossible to know exactly how much time certain tasks will take.
2) Same scenario (one hour devoted to blogging), but you finish the task on time and notice that you are still “in the zone” with writing. You know the feeling of creative flow, and you know it’s not something that can be summoned on demand, so do you scrap the next task in your schedule in favor of tapping the creative potential of your current state, or do you adhere to the discipline of your schedule in order to preserve your weekly goals?
In a perfect world, we would follow the latter, but since we are not machines who can turn their creativity on and off at will, this is something I battle with on a daily basis as well. And this issue extends beyond creativity- sometimes we are feeling organized (let’s do some file management!), sometimes we are feeling exploratory (maybe a good time to look for a new WordPress plugin), or social (make those phone calls you’ve been putting off because now you actually feel like talking to someone, haha). Does that make sense? If not, here it is in one sentence: would you consider compromising the rigid integrity of your pre-established schedule in favor of what you “feel” like doing? Assuming that is something actually and verifiably useful, of course. Watching cat videos on Facebook doesn’t count. 🙂 It’s challenging to determine whether or not what you feel like doing is actually useful, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that you can legitimately verify that it IS.
3) Same scenario (one hour for blogging): by some feat of human achievement, you finish your task in LESS than an hour. What now? Do you pick a different task, start on the next one scheduled, or just screw around until then?
4) I didn’t download your calendar as I’ve found Gmail’s to work incredibly well for me, but have you found any other third-party tools to help you stay on track? A few of mine:
– RescueTime: tracks pretty much all your computer activity and spits out nice graphs and reports. Also lets you add non-computer tasks in order to fill the gaps in your day.
– Trello: great application for organizing project workflows. There are other alternatives, but I’ve found Trello very user-friendly and it has a nice clean interface.
– Wunderlist: not a start-to-finish linear approach like Trello, but rather a basic way to maintain lists, sublists, and various other OCD-friendly task management goodies.
Thanks for the post, look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Shane Sams says
Thanks for the comment Jason. Our calendar is just a to do list, more a guideline. You can put it right into google calendar. We use the google calendar too, it is amazing!
Ben Adams says
Thanks guys for answering my question. Was so stoked to hear my question in this episode. I’m in the brainstorming stage with a few possible digital product ideas, and the advice you have given has been the fuel to push me forward into managing my time more wisely. I can’t thank you enough 🙂
Shane Sams says
You are welcome Ben! Thanks for your question. Keep us updated on your progress friend!