Black Enterprise explores the balancing act an entrepreneur must perfect when having a day job, while pursuing additional dreams. The hope is that, here, you may find tangible tips to apply to your own balancing act of working by day while working the dream by night. Strategist and author of 6 Simple Ways to Get Sh*T Done, Kandia Johnson, on how she does it:
Managing Your Evening Routine
While I don’t believe in balance, I do believe in making your life and business work in harmony. With that being said, for the person juggling their day job and a passion project, I highly recommend getting focused, eliminating distractions that keep you from doing what you love, and adopting a system or workflow like the Automate, Delegate & Delete format.
Here are 3 tips:
- Create theme days— Each day I dedicate a topic specifically related to my business. On ‘Sanity Sundays’ — I plan my week ahead on Sunday (usually about 3-4 hours), so I can hit the ground running on Monday. I literally do a brain dump and then prioritize my tasks. This includes scheduling social media posts, adding important tasks as reminders to my calendars (I block out the number of hours required in red so I know it’s a non-negotiable) and I even send a few emails using the Boomerang app (for scheduling emails at a later date and following up) to get the ball rolling on my projects or upcoming strategy sessions with clients.
- Automate, Delegate, and Delete. If your personal attention is not needed, figure out how you can Automate, Delegate and Delete.” It took me awhile to get this, but success can be found in your daily habits. Which routine activities can you complete in a shorter time frame? For instance, using my ‘Write Wednesday’ as a theme day, I can write 6-8 articles in one day which covers my client requirement for 2 weeks. What systems can you use to make your life easier? I love applications such as CoSchedule and Hootsuite for scheduling social media marketing, and Fiverr for finding freelancers for a variety of things such as website migration, logo design, editing, and Google Analytics implementation.
- Reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list — Each day I have a list of 3-6 things that I absolutely must accomplish. The Daily Muse recommends the 1-3-5 rule. Here’s how it works: “On any given day, assume that you can only accomplish one big thing, three medium things, and five small things, and narrow down your to-do list to those nine items.” Although I use a “1-2-3” rule of thumb, I think it’s a great format to follow.