Organize Multiple Side Hustles for Extra Money (While Still Remaining Focused)
Keeping your focus is key when it comes to side hustles.
Do you want to learn the secret to keeping your focus even when you have side hustles? Over the years I’ve learned three major things that made the biggest difference in staying organized while also scaling and growing side hustles.
If you’re like me, you hear the word side hustle and cringe—we are already “too busy”, right? But if you are organized, side hustles can be passion projects that produce additional income, and they may even turn into your full-time career, like mine did!
I am Jane Stoller, a life-biz organizer who has found my purpose in decluttering spaces and optimizing business processes. I have written two lifestyle organizing books and spent over 10 years helping businesses gain back time through decluttering. Now, my mission is to help more people get organized so they can enjoy their lives to the fullest without being overwhelmed.
You don’t have to be a finance or accounting genius to start a side hustle, and you can even believe you’re already too busy. Want to start a side hustle to explore your passion but don’t know where to start? You have come to the right place. I have had “side hustles” since the 1980s—before they even had an official title!
Here are my top tips on how to organize your side hustles:
1. Focus on your ‘one thing’
This is step one: focus on your one thing! I know this may seem like it is going against this title, but trust me—you need to do this in order to get extraordinary results in your main business or career. Otherwise, you will fail at everything. Protect this time fiercely and don’t let anything or anyone take away the time you dedicate to this one thing. This idea has immensely helped me. My “one thing” is my 60-week accelerator course to help entrepreneurs organize the back end of their business. But I also do lots of other things! Learn more about how to discover your ‘one thing,’ HERE.
2. GIVE YOURSELF A TIME AUDIT
Next, write down your other side hustles, as well as those you want to do in the future. Next to them, write down how much time you have to devote to them. It may be 30 minutes a day, maybe 3 hours per day. This step is very important. If you are new to time tracking, send me an email and I'll send you my simple tool to get started. When you know where your energy and time is going you can begin to optimize those sessions to be more productive and discover areas you may be wasting precious hours on. Read about defeating procrastination for a solid plan for optimized time management.
3. Systemize the side hustles
If you know me, you know this is what I am going to suggest, no matter what the side hustle is, even if it’s something you’re only doing in your spare time on the weekends… If it’s important to you it deserves a system and a place in your schedule. If it is something you have to attend, like a weekly fitness class you teach, put the invite in your calendar along with the travel and prep time. Don’t forget to schedule in the time you need to work on additional tasks like accounting, finances or admin tasks (such as sending emails or organizing receipts and invoices) for that side hustle. If your side hustle needs a social media account (or several), choose the tools you will use to schedule those.
I really like platforms such as Planoly to stay organized with social media planning.
Whatever you can automate with a system or route, do it. Let your customers and your family know the expectations and the systems you use so they can better understand how it fits with your time availability. Don’t be afraid to communicate your boundaries and explain to those closest to you that spending time on your side hustles is important for your business to grow and you to feel fulfilled in your work life.
Watch the video below to get my top tips to help you achieve laser-focus while balancing different pieces of your business and life. Be sure to watch until the end, where I will be sharing my #1 resource to help the backend of your business run smoothly!
