Kristen 0:00
Hey, hey, if you have ever felt overwhelmed by your business to do list, especially when time is tight, then today’s episode is for you. I’m going to share how you can keep making progress and keep moving your business forward, even if you only have a few hours a day or a few hours a week to work, it’s really all about knowing what to focus on and what you can automate to save yourself a whole lot of time and energy.
Kristen 0:32
This idea actually came from a question I got from a listener. She asked, how to divide up tasks if you only have a few hours to work on your business every day or week. Her big struggle was deciding where to focus between creating, updating and marketing her products.
Kristen 0:51
And honestly, this isn’t just her struggle. It’s something that almost every business owner struggles with, especially when we are balancing other things in life, whether your business is a side hustle and you have a full time job or you’re just trying to balance your business life with your family and you don’t want to feel like you’re glued to your laptop.
Kristen 1:15
So today, let’s talk about how to focus on what matters in each season of your business, and I’ll share some ways to keep things running on autopilot with some automations so you are not constantly hustling.
Kristen 1:31
Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers pay teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you’re in the right place.
Kristen 1:46
Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I’m Kristen Doyle, and I’m here to give you no fluff, tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations, and so much more. Let’s get started y’all.
Kristen 2:13
Before you even start thinking about how to split up your time, let’s break down the main areas to focus on in any business. No matter what business you have, there are three main things that we have to focus on, creating, updating and marketing.
Kristen 2:33
These are the big three that you’ll keep circling back to in some way throughout your business, but not all at once. See businesses run in seasons, and knowing what season you’re in right now can really help you prioritize which parts of the business you should be spending most of your time on.
Kristen 2:52
If you’re just starting out in your business, or you haven’t had your business very long, then you’re probably in a creating season. You need to build out your products, your offers, your services, before you can move into marketing them to your audience.
Kristen 3:12
Once you’ve built those things out and you’ve started selling your products, or you’ve started working with clients, then it’s time to polish up what you have. You might move from the creating season into an updating season, where you are focused on making what you already have even better.
Kristen 3:31
Or maybe you’re ready to grow your audience, then you’re in a marketing season in your business. So let’s go a little bit deeper here. First of all, you need to know which season you’re in in your business, so that you have a clear focus on what you should be working on right now.
Kristen 3:51
Now, as a brand new business owner, you might be in that creating season for a really long time. But once you get a little more established, you might rotate through these seasons every month or every quarter. Think about what you really want to achieve this month, this quarter, or even this year, and then pick one area to lean into for that time frame.
Kristen 4:14
If you’re in growth mode, you’re just getting started, or you’ve moved into a new niche, then you might be working on creating new products, new content or new free resources. You want to spend the bulk of your time there. When you’re in that growth mode, putting the marketing and the updating of other products aside, so that you’re not trying to do everything all at one time.
Kristen 4:38
Maybe you have a full catalog of older products or a lot of older blog posts or other resources that really need some love, as we know over time, things need to get polished up, optimized for better sales and just brought up to date. So if your business has been around longer than it might be time to pump the brakes on creation for a while and polish up, clean up and optimize what you already have.
Kristen 5:07
If that’s you, then focus on a couple of things every week or batch, a bunch of them at once, so you can stay efficient with your updates. When you have products and services and other types of offers you know are converting well, then it’s time to shift gears and put them out there. This means you might be ready to go into a marketing season.
Kristen 5:29
Sometimes this looks like a traditional launch, but it doesn’t have to be. Marketing can mean anything from engaging with your audience on social media to running ads to nurturing your email list. If you’re ready to spend time growing your audience and selling them the products and services you already have that you’ve already optimized, then it’s time to lean into a marketing season.
Kristen 5:55
So now that we’ve talked about the different seasons you might be in as a business owner, let’s talk about making the most of your limited time. If you’ve only got a few hours a week, maybe you have five hours a week to work on your business, then I would say to stick with one main focus for a month or more at a time.
Kristen 6:14
Maybe you spend this month working on updating existing products and offers. Then the next month, maybe you spend just on marketing, scheduling out social media posts or setting up an email sequence, and then you can shift gears to creating or go back to updating.
Kristen 6:34
This way you’re focused for a longer period of time and you’re not constantly switching gears. If you’re working on your business just a few hours a day, you might try batching or time blocking. So maybe, for example, you set yourself a schedule where Mondays are when you focus on content creation, Tuesdays are for marketing. You can go that direction and split it up day by day.
Kristen 6:59
Or what has actually been more effective for me personally, is to break things up into weeks. So maybe the first week of the month is when I am focused on content creation and I am creating all of my blog posts or all of my podcast episodes for the entire month. That way, when the second week rolls around and I’m focused on marketing, I can go ahead and plan out posts, emails, all of those things based on the content that I created the week before.
Kristen 7:28
Keeping tasks grouped together, regardless of whether you’re working several hours each day or you’re only working a few hours each week, can really help you to get in the zone and stay focused instead of bouncing around doing multiple tasks every day. When you work in groups of tasks like that, you can take advantage of batching, which is perfect for content creation, where you sit down and you’re going to knock out multiple blog posts or podcast episodes or emails all in one go.
Kristen 7:59
Once you get in the zone, you can crank that content out faster and faster, and then when you finish, you don’t have to think about it for a while. So that frees you up mentally to take care of other work. One thing that has worked really well for me in seasons where I really did not have big chunks of time to work on my business.
Kristen 8:18
Maybe it was while I was teaching full time and working my business as a side hustle, where, while my kids were really young and I only had short windows of time when they could play on their own, so I could work, one thing that really worked well for me then is having a list of tasks I had mine in my phone broken out by amounts of time, things that I knew kind of always needed to be done, but broken out by amounts of time.
Kristen 8:44
And I broke them down as small as like, 10 minute tasks, 30 minute task, hour long tasks. And then obviously things that are bigger and take longer than that, but having that list of short tasks handy that I could grab and look at really helped a lot.
Kristen 9:00
Because then when I was sitting in a doctor’s office, in a waiting room for something, or standing in line somewhere, waiting in the car to pick my kids up from school, and I know I have 15 or 20 minutes before I’m gonna be driving and actually getting the kids, those were always times where I could grab my phone, Take a peek at my list and pick out something that I could get done in whatever amount of time I thought I had available right then.
Kristen 9:27
And that really helped me to keep from wasting time feeling like I just didn’t know what to do, or forgetting that there are things I can do for my business that only take five or 10 minutes.
Kristen 9:40
Now, one thing that can be a game changer for you, especially if you’re in a season of creating or updating, but you know you need to be doing marketing at the same time, is to embrace some evergreen marketing. You can take some pressure off by setting things up to run on their own, so you are not always in marketing mode at the same time that you’re trying to be in creation mode or updating mode.
Kristen 10:09
One of my favorite strategies that I’ve been doing recently is setting up longer email sequences. So instead of sitting down to write a new email to my list every single week, I have three months worth of emails that automatically send out to new subscribers on the schedule that I set up and each month focuses around a certain topic.
Kristen 10:31
Even though some parts of my business are very seasonal, and I need to be sending out emails at specific times for that, the bulk of my content really can go out any time of year, so I can schedule out months of emails at a time and just push my audience through those different sequences so I stay connected with them without having to write those emails every single week. And then I can always pause those sequences when I do need to send out seasonal emails for specific things.
Kristen 11:01
Let’s talk about social media too, because there are a lot of ways to automate social media. Apps like Smarter Queue, which I use make it really easy to put your social media content on autopilot. You can set up a rotation of posts, pull from posts that have performed really well in the past, and schedule them to go out on a rotation, so that you don’t have to go in and continue posting them live.
Kristen 11:28
They recycle those posts so that you stay visible, and it frees up your time for other things. If you’re finding that your social media doesn’t really drive sales of your products or services, but it is important for visibility, then something like this can really take that off your plate, but keep you visible, putting some evergreen systems in place as many places as you can really, can help you stay present. Stay in front of your audience without having to be online, creating new things for them constantly.
Kristen 12:00
And once you get these in place, you’ll have a lot more space to focus on other parts of your business or just take a breather without losing momentum. They do take a little bit of time to set up, especially if you are having to write all of the emails. Trust me, I’ve been there, but it is so worth it in the long run, when you realize that you have three months or six months of not having to worry about email marketing at all, unless it’s time to send out time sensitive seasonal emails.
Kristen 12:32
As a business owner running two totally separate businesses and also trying to balance work with family time, I have used a lot of these strategies myself when I realized that while my social media is important for my secondary business, the one that kind of runs itself on autopilot, I realized my social media really was important for me to stay visible and just connected to people in my audience, but it wasn’t driving sales.
Kristen 13:02
It was just creating that, know, like and trust factor. And yes, that is vital. It is very important, but that means I don’t have to be posting product links and seasonal kinds of resources on my social media for that business. So I leaned in to scheduling my content out through SmarterCue, letting it recycle on autopilot, and it keeps that part of my business going, even though I hardly ever touch it.
Kristen 13:33
And last but absolutely not least, here is your reminder that the less time you have to work on your business, the more important boundaries are. The goal isn’t for you to have to work constantly, but to work smarter. So make sure that you are focusing on high impact activities, those things that really move the needle in your business, which probably isn’t scrolling social media and interacting with other business owners like yourself, automating everything that you can and giving yourself permission to take breaks when you need to.
Kristen 14:10
All of those things are going to help you avoid burnout and keep your business running smoothly. But it does require you to put some boundaries in place and to stick to them. So if you said that Monday is content creation day, then don’t even open your email or your social media apps to get distracted by those things on content creation day.
Kristen 14:34
Make sure that you are putting boundaries in place so that you can stay focused and keep your business moving smoothly, no matter how many hours or how few hours you have to work on it.
Kristen 14:47
All right, let’s do a quick recap. First things, first, know what season you’re in in your business right now, and really lean into that season, whether it’s creating, updating or marketing. Second, use time blocking and batching to group tasks depending on how much time you have available and how you work best. Group your tasks together so you avoid having to switch gears mentally and bouncing around from task to task.
Kristen 15:15
And finally, set up evergreen or automated systems like email sequences and social media automations to keep things going even when you’re not actively working on those parts of your business. Keep in mind, it is really not about how many hours you work. It’s about how you use those hours, whether you’ve got a couple of hours a day or a few hours a week, or you’re working all day long, boundaries, knowing what to work on when, and staying focused really are the key to making the most of your time in your business.
Kristen 15:52
Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. I hope these tips give you some ideas on how you can manage your time better and help you feel less pressured to do everything all at once. Keep in mind, the magic is in knowing what to focus on in this season of your business, and then setting yourself up so that things can keep moving, even if you do have to take a little break or cut down the time you’re able to work right now.
Kristen 16:19
If you enjoyed this episode, or if you have a question of your own, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a DM on Instagram at kristendoyle.co and maybe your question will be the next topic we dive into here on the show. Talk to you soon.
