I remember before being an entrepreneur, my days were kind of mellow. I say kind of because I still had kids and was pregnant. But the only things that I needed to keep track of were when to wake everyone up to get ready for school and when to pick my kids up from school. That was the ONLY real thing that I needed to schedule. The rest of the day was up to me.

Being an entrepreneur feels like there really is no spare time. I love what I do and can lose hours doing it but if I don’t have a plan going in then I am completely lost that whole time I am working.

THE #1 QUESTION I GET ASKED ALL THE TIME

Over the past few weeks, I have had multiple people (mostly clients) ask me how I do it all. Now I do NOT claim to be able to do it all. There are some days that are better than others. This post should have been done yesterday but I decided that I needed to just watch TV instead. See, I don’t always get things done like I should.

With 3 kids, 2 of them in school full time and 1 home with me full time, my plate is full. I am trying to balance motherhood with being an entrepreneur with being an adult. I must say, adulting is the hardest out of all of those, most days. Something that you hear every adult say when you are little and you just don’t believe them until it is your turn.

So how do I do it all?

I plan my day. There is a way to do this so that you can begin to accomplish more in your day. It doesn’t mean that you will get EVERYTHING done on that day but it means that you are going to be more intentional with your time and as a blogger and an entrepreneur, being intentional with how I spend my time is the main reason that I started doing this.

TIPS TO HELP YOU GET STARTED WITH DAY PLANNING

1| It will take a few days to a week (or maybe more) to figure out how much time things take you. For the first few days, you will need to keep track of everything. How long is it taking you to accomplish what you need to do? Keep track of it all.

This means you will need to have a notebook handy so that you can write absolutely everything down that you do in a day. If you are creating graphics, time yourself for an hour and see how many you can get done in that time frame. Do the same thing with scheduling your posts. (I highly recommend using Later for this.) Time yourself for an hour and see how many posts you can schedule at that time.

These first days are figuring out how long those tasks take you.

2| Don’t just plan for your business tasks. This is super important to remember. You will want to also plan for things that need to get done around the house. I know that I can’t sit in front of a computer for hours on end. So I break up my work times and throw in some cleaning in between them so that I can get up and move.

We are more than just our businesses and our blogs. We have other things to accomplish in a day. For me, I need to schedule time with my daughter. I don’t have a solid 8 hours to work. So I need to ensure that my work schedule works with my daily life and you need to do the same.

3| Add in your appointments and nonnegotiables first. You can plan and structure your day around the things that you can not change. That includes school drop off and school pick up for me. That includes client calls for me. Write it all out on your schedule first.

4| Use coloured highlighters to break up your day. This will make it so that you can look at your calendar and know what you are working on for that time period.

I went through my actual schedule on my blog post, A Day Behind the Blogger.

You can even use coloured Post-It Notes if that is easier. For me, it is easier to use highlighters because I print off my daily schedule. You can grab your own copy of the daily schedule to use at the end of this post.

5| Write your top 3 daily to-do lists the night before. This will help you get organized with what is a priority to get done. I do this for both my home and my business. It keeps me on track and I have a plan even before the day begins.

Budgeting your time is extremely important. Most of my clients started blogging without a business and then a business sprouted from there. Once that happens, you need to know how to control your time and how to use it to your advantage.

It really isn’t about getting everything done. It is about choosing the things that need to get done first and then moving beyond that. This year for me was the year I wanted to really be intentional with everything I did. 2020 decided to play along and shut everything down but that made it harder for me to figure out how to be intentional.

Having a plan takes the chaos out of your day. That doesn’t mean that the plan is always going to work out but it means that you know what you need to do instead of heading into your work time with too much to do and no way to figure out how to do them.

I hope that this 5 step guide helps you. I hope you can begin to put into place a plan that works for you. What do you do to ensure that you are budgeting your time efficiently?

Don’t forget to grab a copy of your daily schedule here. It is 3 pages and has every day of the week plus room for notes.