Jun 9
4-Steps Magic Formula to Give You Extra Time to Work on Your Side Hustle/Passion
And how to make the best out of the minimum time
Being productive can be a real pain in your life if you are as lazy as I am. But the question is why do you want to be productive at all? In my opinion, being extremely productive is just a desire and an extra thought to keep your overthinking cycle running, isn’t it?
However, the problem is that 24 hours seem to be too less for us to work on our passion or side hustle along with a full-time job or college, right? Trust me, I get you.
If you are like those who don’t want to work but still want to work but don’t have time yet want to have time then this 4-step formula from the book, ‘Girls Stop Apologizing’ will help you to follow your passion without taking a load on your little shoulders. Are we ready?
1. Track Your Week Like a Detective:
You know how, when you meet a nutritionist for the first time, they ask you to keep a food diary for a week so you know every single thing you consume? This is exactly the same idea. I want you to keep a diary of your time for a week and write down everything that you do in a day. Not just write down what you do but also write down how many hours an activity took. Keep it detailed, right from grocery shopping to watching Netflix, from getting ready for the office to eating dinner, everything.
After a week, analyze your diary and see how many hours are you wasting on activities that are absolutely non-essential and how many hours are you wasting on overthinking about ‘I wish I could have time for my side hustle’
2. Five to Strive:
After analyzing your diary, figure out where you have time to add 5 hours a week to work on your goals. Don’t give me looks! 5 hours might sound like too much but it’s not that much time in a week. It’s less than one hour every day. Adjusting or fixing 5 hours in a week isn’t that tough if you treat it as Five to Strive as a sacred value.
For example, if I say you can meet Taylor Swift next week on Monday at 5 pm, what would be your response? Well, if you are anything like me, you might want to scream and jump in excitement. And if something suddenly comes at 5 on Monday, you will either do it afterward or you will just say, ‘I have a meeting at 5 with Taylor, I am going anyway, it’s something I have wanted forever.
The catch here is ‘if you can ditch Netflix or overthinking or social media scrolling or chit-chat with friends to meet your favorite celebrity, why can’t you sacrifice one hour a day to take one step forward towards your goals?”
Let that sink in.
3. Minimum but Best:
You must be thinking that ‘Renuka, 5 hours a week isn’t enough to work on my goals and that’s the reason I wasn’t starting it in the first place
Trust me, I get you. We want to give our passion or our side hustle all the time we have or at least enough to make it big. Precisely, this is one of the biggest reasons why we end up complaining about not having enough than actually utilizing whatever we have got.
But I want you to understand that even if 5 hours a week are comparatively lesser time yet you can make the most out of it. How?
In order to make the most out of your minimum time, you have to select your best hours aka the time when you feel most energized, excited, and inspired to work. To me, it’s the morning time when it comes to writing. On the other hand, when I want to plan things and be strategic, I feel more inspired at night. Result? Whatever work I have on my plate, I take out time accordingly.
Similarly, you should find out when you work at your best and then take one hour in a day to work on your dreams. If it’s in the morning, wake up 40 minutes early or 30 minutes for that matter. If you feel more energized at night, get back home early, eat your dinner early and spend some time working on your goals.
Remember, minimum but best.
4. Plan Your Schedule Weekly:
Instead of planning your month ahead or not planning things at all, I suggest you plan your week ahead. The reason is that when you plan the whole month before it starts, you might not achieve anything. Sometimes, we sit to plan things out of motivation and end up overstuffing our month. As a result, neither you remember what you wanted to accomplish nor do you feel good about yourself.
When you plan your week ahead, you can schedule time for your passion as per your sacred hours and keep other things that you have to do in a week in mind so that you’re regular work and routinely don’t become a hurdle on your way.
Besides, when you plan a week ahead, you can easily analyze the performance of the past week, what you need to improve, and so on.
Conclusion:
“If you never have what you wanted, you have to do something that you have never done before”
I don’t want to give you a lecture on what you can and cannot do. You are smart and mature enough to know how time is slipping by your hands. The only thing I want you to know is, that you don’t have time but you can make time for things you dream and deserve. Besides, as I said, you have to do something that you never have so if you are ready for that, I can’t see why your dream life wouldn’t keep rushing towards you. They surely will!
