Why Goals are Not Enough When It Comes to Finding Time for Your Side Hustle
New Year’s Resolutions
I’m writing this at the beginning of January, a time when many of us have made New Year’s Resolutions. Whilst the common ones are usually about eating better, drinking less and doing more exercise, resolutions can also be about your side hustle and the goals you want to achieve over the coming year. If you’re like me you probably find making goals exciting. Dreaming about how successful you’re going to be; the money you’re going to make in your side hustle. It’s an opportunity to imagine how life could be different; to let your imagination run wild.
If this is something that you’ve already done, congratulations. That’s a good first step to finding more time for your side hustle, but only the first step. You can’t just leave it there.
Why Goals are Not Enough
Having goals is great and without goals you won’t know where you’re going. Basically you’d be on a journey without a destination, but on their own they aren’t enough. Compare it to going on a hiking holiday; just planning where you want to get to eventually won’t actually get you there. You need to plan out the journey. How are you going to get from where you are now to where you want to end up? And if you only have two weeks off work, you’re going to have to working out how many miles to walk each day. For example, you’re going to have to practise the habit of walking ten miles a day if you want to cover 140 miles in a fortnight.
And that’s the key that’s missing for a lot of people when it comes to achieving their goals, they don’t implement the daily habits that are going to get them there. An example is trying to lose weight. It’s no good making the goal to lose two stone then living on cake and biscuits for the next six months. You need to practise the habit of healthy eating on a regular basis. Small steps every day or at least several times a week.
So let’s go back to those side hustle goals. First of all, hopefully they’re the SMART goals that show you really mean business. I expect you know what SMART stands for, but here’s a little reminder:
S - specific, M - measureable, A - achievable, R - relevant, T - time-bound. In summary, they can’t be vague and including numbers is good e.g. you are going to make x number of sales by June 2025; and it’s not a silly number that you’re never going to achieve. Personally, I like good, better, best when it comes to numbers. Even if I don’t hit the ‘best’ I still feel like I’ve won if I get ‘good’ or ‘better’.
The Importance of Habits
Now take a look at those goals and think about the habits that you need to implement every day or every week to achieve them. Me for example, I want to publish 26 blog posts in 2025, so I need to implement the habit of writing one post a fortnight. I also send a link to each blog post to my email subscribers, so the other habit is to write that email. Even before I start writing the post I also need to get into the habit of spending time thinking about good topics that will interest aspiring side hustlers.
Once I’ve got a list of all of the tasks or habits I need to do regularly I put them on repeat in my calendar. This keeps me on track and makes sure I don’t miss a post. It helps me to be consistent and make sure that my audience is regularly receiving new content from me. If you want some help to be consistent I wrote a blog post about this recently. You can read it here.
There’s lots of help out there about building habits. Here are links to podcasts featuring James Clear talking about his book ‘Atomic Habits’, and my favourite BJ Fogg talking about ‘Tiny Habits’. Take a listen for some help with building your habits.
When it comes to finding time for those new side hustle habits you may also need to work to reduce or eliminate those habits that you no longer want to feature in your life e.g. watching four hours of TV a day or scrolling Instagram every time you’re bored.
My recommendation here would be to take small steps rather than try to go cold turkey. Saying that you’ll never watch a silly dog video on Instagram again isn’t going to last long. Letting yourself do that for just ten minutes a day as opposed to thirty is something you’re more likely to stick to.
So, to summarise, if you haven’t made any goals for your side hustle, why not? Decide on your destination for 2025 and then once you’ve done that, spend some time thinking about what new habits you need to cultivate to get to your end goal.
Finally, if overtime is stopping you from working on your side hustle, then take a look at my course, where you’ll learn how to stop working overtime and start finding time for your side hustle. Just click here to learn more.