Do you feel like you never get time to work on your side hustle no matter how much you try?
If yes, you’re not alone…
Most entrepreneurs juggling between a 9 to 5 job and a side hustle always find it challenging to find time to work on their side business.
However, if you know how to manage your time effectively, you can find adequate time to work on your startup without affecting your job performance.
This post will teach you how to effectively manage your time when starting your side hustle.
You’ll discover powerful tips you can implement today to help you balance your full-time job and side hustle without losing your mind.
7 Tips On How To Manage Time For Side Hustle:
As we have just hinted above, the secret to finding sufficient time to work on your side hustle involves knowing how to manage your time effectively.
Here are the key TIPS you can implement today to help with time management:
#1. Have A Clear Picture Of Your Current Schedule
One of the steps to managing your time effectively when you’re running a business on the side is evaluating your current schedule.
Here, you’d want to conduct a time audit to get a clear picture of how you usually spend your days.
You may consider keeping a detailed time diary for a week—write everything you do and how long each activity takes.
This gives you a clear picture of how you spend your days.
You can also use time-tracking tools such as RescueTime or Toggl to help you log your activities.
After gathering a week’s worth of data on how you spend your days, you’ll then need to go through it and spot any patterns and time-wasting activities.
These are simply all tasks that consume your time but don’t contribute anything significant to your business idea.
For instance, you may be spending too much time daily scrolling through your social media or streaming/watching the TV.
Next, you’ll need to eliminate or reduce these time-wasting activities.
For instance, you can limit social media time and how much TV you watch daily.
Finally, allocate all the additional time you have reclaimed from these time-wasting activities to your side hustle.
#2. Set Clear Goals For Your Side Hustle
You’ll also need to come up with clear and SMART goals for your side hustle to help you manage your time correctly.
If you don’t have a list of goals you want to accomplish with your side hustle in place, you can easily get sidetracked or overwhelmed.
When setting your goals, consider what you wish to achieve with your new startup in the short term and long term.
For instance, you can set short-term goals you want to accomplish in a week, e.g. designing a logo for your business.
As for the long-term goals, you’d consider bigger goals you want to reach in months or even years.
A perfect example is launching your business website in 3 months.
Having clear goals for your side hustle not only gives you direction but also keeps you motivated and fully focused on what truly matters.
#3. Know Which Tasks To Prioritize
Another helpful tip for managing your time as an entrepreneur is prioritizing tasks.
This way, you can first handle more urgent and important tasks likely to significantly impact your new business.
A good way to do this is using the Eisenhower Matrix:
This time management tool helps categorize your tasks based on their urgency and importance so you can handle those (the urgent and important tasks) first.
Personal TIP: When launching my websites, I used to spend hours trying to make different tweaks to my website while I should have been creating content.
However, once I started prioritizing content creation over website tweaking, I witnessed real progress.
#4. Take Advantage of Technology
Who doesn’t use technology in today’s world?
If you want to find enough time for your side gig, you should also consider leveraging technology in your life.
There are countless tools and apps out there designed to help boost your productivity and keep you organized.
Some of the most popular time management apps include:
Todoist
Trello
RescueTime
Timely
Timecamp
Google Calendar
Tools like Trello and Todoist help you keep track of your To-dos while time trackers like TimeRescue show you where your time goes so you can identify which areas need improvement.
Some of these tools and apps are completely FREE, so you’ve got no excuse for not using them to streamline your schedules.
What’s more, you can make use of time management techniques such as Pomodoro time to help you stay focused when working on your side business.
This tool essentially advocates for taking a short break every 25 minutes to help you stay focused and remain productive.
#5. Do You Have A Flexible Schedule?
Creating a well-structured, flexible (adaptable) schedule is another hack for effectively managing time for your side business.
With a well-planned schedule, you’ll stay focused and organized.
Even better, a flexible schedule enables you to easily adapt to unexpected events that may occur in your life as well as ensure you maintain a healthy work-life balance.
To create a flexible schedule, you should start by blocking out time for your day job, personal commitment, and specific side hustle tasks.
This trick helps ensure you allocate dedicated time to each important area of your life.
For instance, you can allocate specific time blocks to work on your side gig, e.g. in the early mornings, evenings, or weekends.
And you can set aside hours that are fully dedicated to your full-time hustle.
Here are additional tips to keep in mind when creating a flexible schedule:
Use a weekly planner to help you visualize your entire week and see where you can fit in your side hustle activities without disrupting your main job and personal life.
Prioritize tasks within your time blocks to ensure you focus on the most important and urgent task first
Add regular, short breaks to your schedule to help you prevent burnout and maintain productivity.
Add 15 to 30-minute buffer times between your tasks to account for any delays or unexpected tasks that may swing your way
#6. Learn To Say No
NO! No is a complete answer. It requires no defense or explanation.
Unfortunately, many people don’t seem to understand this.
It’s human nature to want to please fellow humans and not want to hurt their feelings.
But think about it this way;
What if you started saying no to requests and things that do not align with your business?
What if you turned down that happy hour invitation and chose to work on your dream business instead?
You’d definitely have saved enough time to work on your dream business!
We strongly advise you to start seeing NO as a powerful tool for managing time when chasing your business dreams.
However, you don’t need to become a No person to everything.
You can start by saying at least one activity every week. And you’ll be surprised what a huge difference this will make!
Personal TIP: Whenever I receive invites/requests, I usually turn them down by first thanking the person for the invite and then explaining to them that I’m focusing on my new project. Believe me; this works all the time!
One thing I've come to learn is that people can be quite understanding, especially when they know you’re working on something important in your life.
#7. Don’t Forget To Take Care of Yourself
Sometimes you can get so immersed in chasing your dreams that you forget to take care of yourself.
But the bitter truth is that you’re no good to your side hustle if you feel exhausted or are simply unwell.
As such, we advise you to incorporate self-care into your busy routine to help you keep away burnout and stay at your best at all times.
This can be as simple as making short breaks in between your work schedule throughout the day.
Moreover, consider doing regular exercises and mindfulness practices like meditation and yoga.
These can go a long way in helping you stay grounded and energized.
Personally, I start my day with a 10-minute meditation and a quick walk to help clear my head.
Overall, these simple acts of self-care can help make a huge difference in your well-being.
Conclusion
Managing your time effectively when running a side hustle is key to ensuring you don’t affect your job performance or lack time to work on the business.
This guide has just shared valuable tips you can implement today to help you find the balance between your job and side hustle.
Key tips to help you find this balance include having clear goals, knowing which tasks to prioritize, learning to say No, and taking advantage of technology.
Remember to take care of yourself too to ensure your overall well-being. After all, you can’t work on your side project if you’re unwell.
Religiously follow these tips, and you'll find enough time to work on your side business.
And who knows? It may grow to become your primary business!
Do you want to turn your side hustle into a thriving business but don’t have time? At Trend Hijacking, we help you launch and scale your online store quickly.
Whether you’re just getting started or want to take your online business to the next level, our team of experts is ready to guide you every step of the way
Take that step—Book a Call with Us Today to learn how we can help you successfully launch and grow your e-commerce business to six figures!
