Today’s Must Have Tool for Side Hustle Consistency
Struggling to be consistent on social media when it comes to building your side hustle? Forgetting to follow up on sales calls regularly? Aren’t hopping on Facebook and chatting with your ideal audience? You need to create a habit tracker.
So what’s a habit tracker? It’s a tool used to monitor and record the progress of daily habits or goals. By visually tracking your actions over time, it helps reinforce positive behaviours and identify patterns that may need adjustment. Habit trackers come in various guises, such as apps, bullet journals, or simple checklists, and are particularly effective for building new habits or breaking old ones.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of habit trackers for your side hustle and then I’ll tell you how you can easily knock one up for yourself.
The Benefits
Consistency – Using a habit tracker in your side hustle prompts you to do the tasks that are going to move you forward, on a regular basis. Need a reminder to post on Facebook stories? Make that one of your daily habits.
Motivation - Seeing your progress visually can boost motivation, encouraging you to keep going, even when it's hard. As the ticks build up over the days and weeks you’re not going to want to break that chain by missing a day.
Time Management - It serves as a reminder of your side hustle priorities. You don’t have to spending time deciding whether to post on stories or not. You’ve already decided it’s something you want or need to do and that’s why it’s on your tracker. You just need to do it and tick it off!
By creating a daily routine through small habits you will achieve great progress in your side hustle over time. As self-help author Robert Collier once stated, “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”
How to Create a Habit Tracker
I've been developing my own habit tracker to keep on top of some of the tasks that I have in my side hustle. Previously I didn't think about creating habit trackers for this situation. I’d heard of them when building a morning routine or developing an exercise regime, but not in the context of building a business. But if you’re struggling with being consistent I think they’re invaluable.
Let’s look at the structure of a basic habit tracker. In essence it's a table with the date down one side and the activity that you want to track along the other side. For each day when you do that activity, you put a tick in the relevant box. You can see an example in the picture below.
Now how can this help you when building your side hustle? Well for me, I've developed habit trackers for posting on Instagram stories (If you don’t follow me over on Instagram, why not? Here's the link www.instagram.com/timecoachsam). You'll see that I‘m rather intermittent on stories and I wanted to get better, so I decided to create a habit tracker which would help me monitor my progress. This also prompted me to post on stories because some days I just forgot about it. We all have busy lives and sometimes and Instagram is not necessarily top of my list when it comes to what I'm doing.
So you need to spend some time thinking about what you want to do more often in your side hustle. My advice is to build up slowly. Don’t put twenty tasks on your habit tracker at the beginning. Start small with just a couple of habits and when you’ve nailed those then add others. If you overwhelm yourself you’ll end up doing nothing.
When it comes to creating the tracker you can do it in a notebook or bullet journal or create a document in Word. It doesn’t have to be complicated, so keep it simple. The important thing is not how it looks, but whether you’re actually using it to be more consistent in your side hustle.
I’d love to hear in the comments what habits you want to build in your side hustle.
If you’d like more help with finding time for your side hustle don’t forget to grab your copy of my free resource ‘Easy Ways to Make Time for a Side Hustle’.