It’s tough working at your job for many hours a week and balancing the rest of your free hours dealing with basic life priorities as well as finding time to work on building your new coaching business or other side hustle.

In capitalist society everyone trades time for money with which to buy things from other people. Many look for other ways to enjoy life, seek different challenges, or find other sources of income to suit their needs. Many also look toward a potentially gloomy future of incomes not keeping up with the rising costs of living and wonder about retirement finances. Everyone sits at a different place with different world views in and of life, but almost everyone has hopes, dreams about a different life, wishes, goals … Sometimes those things are tinged with regret about different life choices or paths that could have changed their life’s direction. It’s important to put into perspective that you can never go back, only acknowledge the life and experiences you have had and start taking steps toward the bridge of what you really want to do. Everyone has a passion of some kind underpinning those hopes and dreams if they think hard enough about it.

However, self-doubt is a killer, as is procrastination. It would be hard to think there’s anybody starting a new business or side-hustle who hasn’t thought a combination of:

I have no time, or the experience to do this … It’s too big to do … Why would anyone want to buy from or listen to me? … I’ll just wait until the time is right … I am better off sticking to my current situation.

Many people dream big, but when they start their journey, they look up and see a tough and scary climb up a mountain disappearing into the clouds and the unknown. So, they don’t even take the first step and instead head back to safety: the safety of their current life situation … never knowing if they could have done the thing they wanted to do or not if they’d just started.

It’s not only the journey that seems hard. Time and money are also the enemy.

Every day, we go to work, come home, sometimes work in the evenings or weekends, do chores, attend to family needs, house stuff, groceries etc … and become too exhausted to focus on anything else. And your dreams are just another thing on your plate you need to find time for … You’re being selfish wanting something more or different … Then during the weekend there’s a chance to rest, but there’s still family and household needs, and a bunch of other stuff as well …

Life just becomes a hamster wheel – especially when you’re devoting energy to thinking about a different life and how you can accomplish that on top of all the other demands on your time and energy. But it can be more than that if you choose to change it.

• Most people want to enjoy their life more.
• Most people want extra money or a side-hustle that excites them [and makes money].
• Most people want to spend more time with family, not at work.

It’s fair to say that time is never on your side and there’s never as good a time to do anything as now. But with so much going on it can seem impossible to focus on your dreams and goals alongside work and other demands consuming your time. Yet we all have 24-hours a day, no matter who we are. No one has more time than anyone else. So, it’s up to you to structure and categorize that time as efficiently as possible to create time to work on your new coaching business or other side-hustle.

Here are some ways you can effectively and efficiently carve some time to follow your dreams:

Buy Back Your Time

Buying back your time sounds weird, huh? What this means is working out where you can save or claw-back time into your daily time-bank by doing things a different way. Planning is the ultimate tool here:

Some ideas:

Ferrying Kids to Extra-Curricular Activities

Minimizing running the children around can be a huge drain on time and potentially one area you can carve time out to work on your new business or side-hustle. Look at a roster with other parents at your school or your area for sharing the load of rides to/from school or extra-curricular activities. You could explain you’re setting up a new business and looking to create extra time in your day for it (verbalizing your journey also legitimizes it in your brain, too!). It doesn’t make you a bad parent for not ferrying the kids around for everything. You’ll likely find other parents grateful for the time and fuel saving suggestion even if each of you lives a little distance apart.

Or here’s a novel suggestion: limit extra-curricular activities to one per child per term and no more. They’re not going to be scarred for life because they’re only doing one activity. This could even just be temporarily while you are working on getting things in place to set up your new coaching business or side-hustle. And once you’ve created your dream new business or side-hustle, you’ll have more time to do all those things with your kids, family, and more …

Meal planning

Meal planning is a chore, but it’s even worse if you’re unprepared and wasting unproductive time and energy thinking about what to eat every day or running to the shops (meaning you’re missing out on an opportunity to carve time out to work on your new business or side-hustle). An hour spent making out a rough meal plan made 2 weeks in advance will focus your grocery shopping and save you heaps of wasted time and energy thinking about it every day – which means buying back time to work on your goals, even if only half an hour a day. Once you’ve got a month’s worth of meal planning written up, you’ll be able to recycle it without much fuss (beef nachos or chicken nachos? Flat or shell with slaw?) Planning 2 weeks in advance also means if you get busy or forget, you’ve got some breathing space.

Another idea to carve time out of your day to work on your business or side-hustle is whether your kids are old enough to make dinner on a roster once a week and do the dishes etc. Obviously, this is age appropriate, but even if it’s a crock-pot all-in-one recipe or ready-made sauce over meat and pared with rice or noodles, it’s a start. Crockpots, air-fryers and rice-cookers are great for young adults learning how to make a meal. Eventually they will get the hang of things even if not perfect, and you are teaching them responsibility and life skills at the same time, not to mention carving out that time you’re looking for to work on your new business or side-hustle.

Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping is a huge time drain when you’re trying to carve out time to work on a new business or side-hustle. So, simpyl making changes to how you shop is a great way to buy back your time to work on your new business or side-hustle. Consider whether you should just pay delivery and order your groceries and household basics online vs the unproductive time to go to the store yourself. Also factor in that the small delivery charge is likely saving you not just time, but also saving money not impulse buying that can increase your grocery bills by stealth!

If you have a rough meal plan you will already know what you need each week and therefore what to order.

Done For You Meal-Kits

Meal-kits can be a great way to buy back or create time to work on your new coaching business or side-hustle. Meal kits are healthy, fresh, cost-effective, and convenient for everyone from busy families to couples to singles. There’s no point devoting time to your new business or side-hustle if that means a diet of junk-food and fizzy containing little nutritional value, that kind of diet will only negatively impact your energy levels and have the opposite effect to what you’re trying to achieve! The idea of meal-kits is to swap time and energy thinking about the chore of dinner each night – deciding what to cook, how long it’s going to take, time buying groceries, etc – with healthy, nutritious, pre-organized meals. Some companies offer ingredients to put a meal together, and others are heat & eat. Both have their place depending on your preference and situation. Meal kits can also curb that impulse buying we talked about earlier (which also means saving money), as well as encouraging any young adults in your family to have a go at cooking and building their life skills too.

Waking Up Earlier

Waking up earlier is perhaps one of the most effective ways to carve more time out of your day to work on your new business or side-hustle.

When you wake up early, you are refreshed and have the luxury of deciding how to spend that time effectively. This doesn’t mean sacrificing sleep, you should still be aiming for 7-8 hours of sleep every night, and nor does it mean exhausting yourself by piling on responsibilities and obligations by getting up at 4 or 5am. Don’t sacrifice sleep just for the sake of waking up early because some guru suggests it’s a good idea: if you want to wake up early, you have to go to bed early. A few weeks of changing your schedule to go to bed earlier means you will wake up earlier for sure!

If you decide waking up earlier will work for you, be careful not to get caught in the trap of reaching for your phone or doom scrolling on social media or news sites. The ONLY reason you should be planning to get up earlier than usual is to carve out time to work on your new business or side hustle and check off some priorities for that, not for other reasons.

I would add here that waking up earlier and making decisions about how and when to use the extra time will depend on your particular life situation. Ideally you want to utilize the extra time and make it work for you: if starting your day earlier means you can then carve out time at night to work on your new business or side hustle, then do that. If you don’t have energy or capacity at night, then utilize the morning.

Here are some ways you can use this precious time:

• Start writing up blog posts or ideas for different posts as drafts, learning what software tools in your business, making YouTube videos, start new ad campaigns, etc.
• Invest on your personal development such as time management techniques, improving motivation or procrastination-avoidance techniques, investigate and learn to use online software tools like WordPress, Canva, Amazon, and so on, taking an online course, reading books.
• Complete as many chores or tasks as you can in normal time so you don’t steal from the extra time you have carved out to focus on what you want to be doing: the objective is to use the extra time to work on what you want to be doing, not extending your day doing otherlife stuff.

Use Your Weekends Wisely

Whenever starting a new life journey or embarking on something new like a new business or side hustle, study, etc, sacrifices have to be made or you’ll just roll along in life and never get started. Most sacrifices ultimately help you in the long run but one sacrifice that should be made when trying to find more time is to:

Work on the weekend.

Before you throw your hands up in horror, just keep reading: working on the weekend could mean two things.

Let’s say you want to start building your new business or side-hustle, but you’ve realized you either don’t have enough time during the week, or it’s not enough time – even after analyzing time-drains and making life-changes. Well, if you really care about your dreams and want to do something about it, there’s nothing else for it but to reserve some time on the weekends to focus on your goals.

It is not suggested that you spend all your weekend on your new coaching business or other side-hustle unless you either want to, or you have no other commitments. You don’t want to end up with burnout getting your business off the ground either. But what you could do is allocate a few weekend hours or even a day working on your new business or side-hustle on the basis that allocating some time is better than no time (which means you will inevitably not reach your goal if you don’t consistently work towards it).

Consistency is the key to achieving any life goal or venture. You should be able to efficiently reserve some time on the weekends that allows you to fulfill family priorities, work on building your new coaching business or side-hustle, and chill.

Planning To Become More Productive and Efficient

Our lives are often so busy and consumed by just getting through each and every day intact. Very few people think about things like coming up with a plan or some sort of organization to their lives.

By coming up with a plan or a way to keep your life organized, you put less stress on yourself and your loved ones, and are able to accomplish a lot more things since you know how to efficiently complete your goals. Think about it like a strategic business plan, but for your life.

There are so many ways to become more productive such as:

• Waking up earlier to have more time to complete the things you want to get done.
• Using a calendar and time-blocking to allocate different portions of your day to different priorities.
• Using the Pomodoro Technique.
• Working from a to-do or task list that you have to get done before the end of the day.
• Putting away your phone in a different room or location so you don’t get distracted.
• Limiting the use of social media and other distractions so you have maximum focus on the task at hand.
• Planning for the next day the day before.
• Planning daily chores in advance so you’re not wasting time and energy thinking about them later.

By consistently implementing a combination of these suggestions you can dramatically increase your efficiency, productivity and time availability throughout the day. You will feel and be more in control of your day and your life and feel energized by the thought of working on those things you really want to do.

Key Takeaways

Simply put, time isn’t always on our side but we get to decide how to use it. We can never get back time from yesterday or the day before, or even this morning. Once it’s past, it’s gone forever.

Almost everyone has goals or dreams they want to achieve yet find themselves crunched for time.

It’s a good thing to relax regularly and recharge, but if you keep finding yourself spending your precious time with instant gratification (social media/news/online shopping), going out or entertaining a lot, and satisfying yourself for the short-term, then you’re not prioritizing yourself and your goals and dreams. Almost everyone has goals or dreams they want to achieve yet find themselves crunched for time. No one can make the changes but you. Slow and steady consistency is the key.