How to Find The Time To Start A Business

Ever feel like your to-do list is controlling you instead of the other way around?

Life can feel like an endless list of things to do, always busy, but not sure what you achieved at the end of it. The joys of starting a business alongside everything else life has to throw at us!

My Experience?

I’d tried building a business before, alongside working full time and being a mum, and whilst I certainly didn’t fail at it, a long, unplanned pause from things (more on that another time!) meant that when I started to look at rebuilding my business again, I could see all the ways things could be improved. I knew I wanted to do things differently this time, and I started to look at my days holistically, and how much time everything was taking up.

Unsurprisingly, I found that most of my time was spent ‘busy’ in my home. Now, I’m not saying that that time wasn’t well spent, but the amount of time and, more importantly, brain space, I was spending on things meant that adding anything else it felt like too much. I wanted things to feel easy, not like I was stretched to my limit, so I knew I had to make some changes. 

A New Approach

I’d spent some time trying to think about what this could look like, and how I could streamline things. On reflection, it’s unsurprising that the thing that kickstarted it all for me, was the thing I identified with the most when I heard people complaining about the burden of domestic work; the dreaded laundry pile!

It was day 6 of our clothes dryers STILL be up, full of laundry drying in our spare room and on the landing where I had to play a game of twister around them to move through the house when I realised, this was going to be what broke me if I didn’t make a change. So I start there, and started small, and I want to share with you, here, the small changes I’ve made to free up brain space when it comes to home tasks, so I have the time and the mental energy to put into things I actually want to do.

I promise that by the end of this, you’ll have some clear takeaways that you can try, to help give you more systems in your home, so you can focus on things that are actually fun – for me, that’s building my travel business!

Finding the right tools to support your planning can be a game changer. It’s all well and good reading through this post and thinking, “Yes, I’ll do my laundry every Wednesday” but if you don’t write that down somewhere that will remind you, “it’s Wednesday, time to do your laundry!” then you’re really only getting half the benefit.

The joy of using systems that work for you to support your planning is that it’s out of your head. Have you ever felt, or even been told by someone, to ‘braindump’ everything that’s on your mind and get it on to paper. Then you feel better. It’s the same with planning – you need a place to write down and track all this stuff, so that you never have to think about it.

My Approach

For me, that place is Google calendar.  I created a joint email address for my husband and I, so that we could both share the same calendar, and now our entire lives are in there. We started with our son’s nursery pick ups and drops off – we worked out who could do what on what day each week based on our work commitments, then it went in the calendar. A recurring meeting, every Monday at 4pm for me to collect my son from nursery etc.. That way, I never had to think about it. It was blocked out in my calendar, and it would remind me when I needed to leave to collect him. 

Now, every little task we have to do on a recurring basis lives in this calendar, along with all our activities as a family, and individually. Whenever I make plans to see my friends, for example, it goes straight in the calendar, so the other parent knows they’re on solo parent duty that day/night/weekend, and can plan accordingly.

Find What Works For You

For you, a shared calendar – or just one to yourself – might work too. Or it might be the reminders app on your phone where you can set recurring reminders. Maybe it’s alarms you set with labels for what you need to remember.

Have a think about what would work for you. The goal is to think about something once, and then make technology remember it for you every time. Some examples of things I have on repeat in my calendar so I never have to think about it:

• Laundry days
• What bin goes out each week
• Who’s on nursery pick ups and drop offs
• Reminders to change my toothbrush head

The list can be as long as you need it to be!

The Top 3 Hacks I’ve Implemented To Give Ne More Time and Brain Space

Here are some of the systems that I’ve felt have made the biggest difference to my brain space.

Meal planning

We were ALWAYS the people who would look in the fridge half an hour before tea and wonder, what the hell are we going to eat?! I honestly found it exhausting always feeling like I was on the back foot and not adulting well enough.

Now, I mean plan so that it takes up as little brain space as possible; we use Hello Fresh. 

I get 5 meals delivered every week that feed all 3 of us. My toddler gets served the same things we do (sometimes it might be deconstructed with a bit of extra cheese on the side, but I rarely make him something separate) and I find the fact it reminds me when to check the order so helpful. I just pop onto the app once a week, see what they’ve chosen for us, swap out any meals I don’t fancy and that’s it. Done. 10 mins tops.

That sees us through Monday – Friday when I definitely don’t have the brain power to think about ‘what’s for tea’ after a long day at work. On the weekend, we’ll sometimes get a takeaway, or pick up a pizza or something we really fancy that takes a little longer to cook as we have the time, and Sunday is always a roast.

Simple, a variety of meals in next to no time, and very little brain space. 

If you’d like to try Hello Fresh, you can use my referral link to get yourself a discount. Just click here. Alternatively, follow me and drop me a message on Instagram to get yourself a free week’s worth of food with them!

Laundry

The way that going to put something in the laundry basket and realising it was already overflowing used to send me spiralling about all the ways I was failing at adulting is just BEYOND!

I’ve had to experiment a couple of times with different systems for laundry – throwing on 1 random load a day, trying to get all the baskets emptied in 1 day a week – until I’ve finally found a system that works for me.

I assign a different wash type to every day of the week, and that sits in my calendar with a reminder set to pop up every morning telling us what needs to go in the wash. I load up the wash basket and take it downstairs first thing, it goes on as I’m doing breakfast, comes out during a morning break from work, and is dried and put away by the end of the day. 

Every person in the house has their own wash basket to make things easier, and that basket gets emptied on their assigned day. For us, thats:

• Monday – Jonah’s bedding
• Tuesday – my laundry
• Wednesday – husbands laundry
• Thursday – Jonah’s laundry
• Friday – Bath robes & towels
• Saturday – Bath mats, flannels & hand towels
• Sunday – Our bedding

Now let me caveat that – I work from home full time, so this makes this a LOT easier! But even if you work at an office, you can still tweak this sort of thing to make it work. For example, most washing machines have a delay timer on them. Load it up and night and set the time so it’s finishes when you get up in the morning – hang it out to dry, and then put away when you get home from work.

Or maybe one of the other methods I tried would work for you. Maybe getting all the laundry done on Sunday would work. Let it all dry Sunday & Monday and then it all gets put away Monday night and you’re laundry free for the rest of the week. 

Experiment. But whatever you decide on, get a reminder set, and forget all about it until a reminder pops up to tell you what you need to do.

Business batch work

Setting up and running a business alongside a full time job and being a mother can be tough. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was chasing my tail and always trying to ‘catch up’ with things like social posts and customer quotes.

Batching work has changed everything for me.

Every month, I batch all the content I want to post on social media the next month, rather than trying to find something to post every time I want to post, or when I realise I’ve not even looked at my instagram for a couple of days. 

Because I work full time, I obviously only have evenings and weekends to work on my business. Personally, I have some firm boundaries around this, where I don’t do anything until after Jonah is in bed in the evening. That includes weekends. 

By batching things, it helps me to get all that content done in a few days, schedule it, and forget about it. I aim to have everything completed within the first week of the month, for the following month. The specifics of what I do each day can vary based on what type of content I create, but the way I approach batching the content is:

Task 1 – write all my travel blog posts

Task 2 – decide on all the social media content I will post to promote this blog post, and what other items I want to talk about online

Task 3 – write all my captions for the posts. For me, the captions coming first feels easier and I get inspired by what format to do things in once I know what I want to say.

Task 4 – Create all the visuals for my posts – carousels, reels, photos etc. Gather it all together.

Task 5 – Schedule all the content.

Done. I do all this using Trello, but there are heaps of planning tools out there you could use. Again, you could use your calendar, a google doc, a spreadsheet, whatever works for you. But this way, I have time in the evenings to deal with client quotes and supporting my team.

A system isn’t effective unless it matches your schedule.

There’s no point planning to do something every night Monday to Friday, when you already work long hours, have a long commute and know you’ll just ignore it when that reminder pops up. 

So for all your good intentions, be realistic with the plans you put in place, and know that they’re your plans! You can tweak and change them any time to suit your lifestyle.

Remember, life will life! If you’re anything like me, the minute you miss a day or fall out of sync with a system you’ve built, it’s easy to think you’ve totally failed and want to throw it all out of the window. 

I’ve done a lot of work to be kind to myself here. Things get busy, things fall off, but that’s ok, just pick up wherever you are and start again. You have to have flexibility, life will always fall out of routine so have realistic expectations and don’t let 1 stumble mean you lose momentum.

But the joy of getting off track is that chance it gives you to reflect, and figure out what’s working and what isn’t.

There’s a difference between your laundry being haywire because you’ve been on holiday and have a week’s worth of extra washing to catch up on, and you’re struggling to meet the laundry routine you’ve put in place consistently for weeks on end when you’re in a normal life routine. 

If you find you just can’t keep up with the plans you’ve put in place – change the plan. Maybe a different rhythm would work for you and your life. The key is to find what works for you in your life, not trying to shoehorn what works for someone else into your life.

I hope you’ve found some organisation hacks and tips in there that will work for you to free up time, and brain space, so you can focus on things you love and want to spend your time on. 

Remember, you’re not going to be able to overhaul your life overnight and nail it. Start small – what’s 1 little thing you could try this week to see if it helps. Test out a laundry routine. Get all your recurring tasks into a calendar to remind you to do them. Batch create and schedule 2 social media posts for next week. 

Whatever you try, know that it might not work for you, and that’s ok. The key is to learn why it didn’t work, and adjust to try something new.

Good luck! Let me know how you get on, I’d love to know what you’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t!

Be kind to yourself.

Laura x