Finding Pockets of Time as a Solopreneur Juggling a Job and Real Life | 127

(Note: This is a formatted and slightly edited, AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through. Please excuse any spelling, grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

   If you ever said, “I just don’t have time to work on my business,” this episode is for you. Chances are there are already pockets of time hiding in your day that you might not be taking advantage of  yet. Let’s change that.

  Are you tired of competing priorities, a messy task list, and constantly feeling behind? Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, and I help overwhelmed solopreneurs embrace faith-led productivity through simple systems for life, home, and business.  So if you’re ready to clarify your priorities, honor your energy, and feel accomplished every single day, welcome to the Cheers to Better Systems podcast. 

Hey, hey, welcome. Whether you’re brand new here or you’ve been hanging out with me for a while, I’m so glad that you’re here.

Today’s episode is for the solopreneur who is also clocking into a day job. Maybe you’re building something on the side and wondering when you’re supposed to find the time to actually work on your business. I hear you, and I want to show you that the time might already exist in your day, just not in the places you’ve been looking.

So today, I’m gonna go through some pockets of time that you might not have considered yet, plus a few ideas for what you can actually do within each one. Before we dive in, I want to make sure that you know about my free workshop, 3 Steps to Say Goodbye to Task Overload. It’s a 60-minute on-demand workshop that helps you clear the mental clutter, see everything on your plate, and figure out exactly what to do first.

And honestly, it pairs really well with today’s episode because once you find the time, you’re gonna wanna make sure that you’re spending it on the right thing. So the link is in the show notes. Go check it out

All right, so before we actually just dive into the episode, I want to mention a caveat because this episode is not going to be one where I’m telling you to go fill in every single gap in your day with something, quote-unquote, what you might consider productive. No. Productivity doesn’t mean to do more.

Go ahead and reference episode 121 for my definition of what productivity actually means. So what I’m going to be sharing are examples to get your brain spinning and to really help you start to see new pockets of time in your days that you might not be taking advantage of if you have the energy and capacity to do so.

So some of these might resonate with you, some of them might not. Maybe it’s just one, maybe it’s none, and that’s okay. But I really just wanna throw this in there before we get into these pockets of time. Please don’t try to fill up every single pocket of time in your day to work on your business.

You can use these pockets of time for literally anything, including working on your business, but also things like self-care, or resting, or taking a nap, or just doing nothing. But intentionally doing nothing, okay? These are pockets of time for you to do something intentional in it, okay, now with that caveat out of the way, let’s get into the different pockets of time.

So the first pocket of time is before the house wakes up, which is probably not a surprise, and one that so many of you might already be doing. So this is that quiet window before the household is up and before your day really gets going. So this doesn’t have to be a dramatic like two hours early before everyone wakes up.

Sometimes even just 20 to 30 minutes before the first person wakes up is enough to count and enough for you to get something done. Like doing a focused work session on writing or planning or doing something that you can do in 20, 30 minutes. You could respond to some emails. You can check in and respond to your clients.

You could review some support tickets. What you do with this time is going to vary depending on how long this window in the morning is, the energy, so how much sleep did you actually get the night before? And a lot of other factors, but we’ll get into that in the next episode. But this is the first pocket of time, and I’m not gonna say too much here because I think it’s, it’s a pretty common one that I believe a lot of people know about.

So now let’s get into a few that you may not have considered. The next pocket of time is your commuting time. So this one might be more of an opportunity than you have realized because the default that most people do, depending on whether you’re the one driving or not, is listening to music or maybe watching something on Netflix.

And there’s nothing wrong with either one of these, okay? But it is worth you asking if maybe you want to consider trying to do something else, especially if you are living in this place where you’re like, “Ugh, I wish I had more time to do XYZ,” so if you’re not driving, if you’re taking something like the public transportation, if you’re carpooling, if you’re being dropped off by somebody, a friend, an Uber, then here’s a couple of things that you could do You could listen to a podcast or a course that you have purchased.

You could catch up on emails or messages. You could work on something that doesn’t need a lot of focus, like scheduling, doing some admin, some quick tasks. So these are some things that you could do if you’re not driving. If you are driving, then it’s a little bit different, and this one’s going to be more for consumption.

So instead of listening to music, you could listen to a podcast or the audio content for learning or research or a course that you took. This is actually what I do the most. When I am driving by myself, I am almost always listening to a podcast or to a course. But when my kids are in the car, then it’s always music.

But if I’m by myself, I am always consuming information. Sometimes it’s related to my business, sometimes it’s about something else, sometimes it’s parenting help because, hello, parenting is hard. Um, so, but I’m using that time to learn, and that is a great use of your time. Um, you could even use it for voice memos and even using something like AI’s mic feature to just brain dump, just to talk things out loud and have those things stored for you somewhere.

So I’m not saying to look at your phone, but you can literally just tap record and then drive off and then just start spilling out, brain dumping, doing whatever you need to do to really help you think out loud for a problem that you might be having or brainstorming your next course or whatever the case is.

So this, again, is more about consuming and thinking rather than doing something. But commute time can be,, another pocket of time.

Another pocket of time is your lunch break. So depending on how long your lunch break is and what else you’re using it for, like, if it’s your social time or your decompression time, then that’s probably more valuable than squeezing in work, okay? But for me, when I had my corporate job, I had an hour.

So I would typically spend the first half actually eating, socializing, whatever, and then I would use the second half of my break for something business related, something super simple that didn’t require a lot of brain str- strategizing, et cetera. So it could be things like creating graphics in Canva or editing a blog post that I had written the night before.

It was super simple things that I could get done in less than 30 minutes. And the key for this one is knowing how long certain tasks actually take you to complete, because that is how you’re going to be able to be realistic with what you can get done in that window of time. And the same is true for a lot of these.

You need to know how long tasks actually take you. Not how long you think they’ll take you, but how long they actually take you to get done, so lunch break is the third one. The fourth one are any waiting periods. So if you’re waiting in the car line to pick up your kids from school, you know, sometimes those car lines get very long, and you might be waiting for, like, 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, depending on how early you get there.

Uh, at doctor’s appointments, sometimes you are waiting in there for an hour. Waiting rooms for literally anything else. Like anywhere where you’re sitting around anyways, most people default to scrolling when you could be intentional with that time instead. But the key for this one specifically is that it needs to be something that you can do on your phone.

So for example, I personally use this time to catch up on emails. Not necessarily business emails, but, like, email newsletters that I’m subscribed to, to see what they have going on, to see what they’re talking about, to stay up-to-date with all of the things. So that’s what I like to do. Sometimes I’ll do light planning.

I’ll brainstorm some ideas via the notes or the voice notes if I can do it very quietly if, you know, I’m in a little literal waiting room or if I’m in, if I’m in my car, then it’s fine. Another time to catch up on course or podcasts, right? I can plug in my headphones, my earbuds, and listen to that.

I can respond to emails. Whatever I can do on my phone that is not taking up too much brain space, is not really doing a lot of heavy thinking and strategizing, then I try not to default to scrolling unless I’ve al- already feel tapped out for the day and that’s all I literally want to do Because again, that’s fine.

These are all examples, not something where you need to fill every single time and moment up in your day with something work-related.

Now, the fifth pocket of time is specifically for parents, and this is your kids’ practices. So when your kid is at a practice or activity and you’re literally just sitting around and waiting, and these are the ones where you don’t have to be present, you don’t have to be watching. For my son, whenever he was in soccer and football, I liked to watch him at practice.

I could help him. I could let him know where I saw that he could have done better or where he did good. So I liked seeing those things. But with my daughter, her waiting room when, in her dance class was very small, and there was rarely ever any chairs. They were mostly taken up by the dancers. So I would end up waiting in my car.

They didn’t really let us watch them anyways. So sometimes I would read a personal development book. Other times, I literally brought my laptop to work in the car. So this one is, this pocket of time is worth considering because if you’re just sitting in your car, again, the default might be to scroll.

Sometimes I use it for something else, like calling up my sister or calling up a friend and catching up. It doesn’t always have to be business related, but again, it’s another pocket of time where you could if you wanted to. And for this one, the good thing is it doesn’t necessarily have to be just on your phone because if you do take your laptop, then you just turn on the hotspot, and you can do basically anything as if you were at home,

and also, the length of the practice or class also matters because the, what you can get done in 30 minutes looks very different than, if it was an hour, an hour and a half practice or more. So reading a book, strategizing, planning, deeper focus work because, maybe you’re in the car by yourself.

So these are all examples of tasks that you could do in the car while you’re waiting around for your kids’ practices

 And lastly, the final pocket of time is whenever you’re doing some mindless tasks . So this is the part where multitasking comes into play. It is not good to multitask a lot of other things, but this is one of those examples where I’m, I love to multitask in this, these examples. So when I’m folding laundry, when I’m washing dishes, when I’m cooking, these are all tasks that don’t require a lot of mental energy from me,

they’re kind of just like I’m a robot. I’m a robot folding the laundry and doing the dishes. So this one, again, is another one similar to when you’re commuting and you’re driving, where you’re not trying to get business work done, but it’s more about learning and consuming while your hands are busy doing what they need to do.

So listening to a podcast, uh, working your way through a course, m- maybe even creating some audio content that you’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve heard, I haven’t personally done this, but I have heard other creators where they’re like literally recording on their Slack or something on their phone, and then they publish it to their podcast, or they publish it to their audience.

So that is something that you can con- consider doing as well. So whenever you’re doing these mindless tasks, definitely try to see if it’s a moment where you could do some learning and consuming. And then of course, everyone’s day is going to look so different. And like I mentioned earlier at the beginning of this episode, not all of these will apply to you, and that’s fine.

My goal with this episode is to h- was to help you really to start to look at your day with a fresh eyes, fresh perspective, to really start to notice those little pockets of time that you might not be intentional with. Those pockets of time when you’re defaulting to doing something when you could be like, “You know what?

I don’t want to scroll social media right now. I should probably listen to a podcast,” maybe you’re doing this, you’re listening to this podcast while you’re doing one of these things, and you’re already doing it, so I just really want you to use these as examples. Again, I’m gonna remind you , do not feel like you need to plug in work and task and things to do into every single one of these pockets of times.

These are examples. Go through them, figure out which one is something that calls out to you, and then that is what you do. That is how you fit it into your schedule, your life, and that is how you start to, use a little bit of the to- these pockets of time in your life more intentionally. So in the epi- the next episode, we’re going to cover…

Now, in the next episode, we’re gonna cover a little bit more caveats, a little bit more of once you have found the pockets of time that you want to do, a little bit more things to keep in minds, shall we say. So that is gonna be coming in the next episode. But for right now, if you are someone who wants help figuring out what actually fits your life and your schedule, then I have a coaching container coming up where we can work on this together.

The details are not ready quite yet, but they will be coming in soon, so be sure to keep a, an eye on the show notes to see when this new coaching is available to help you. But for right now, you’re starting to see where pockets of time could have been hiding, and the next step from there is knowing what to actually do with it.

So that’s exactly what my free workshop is all about. It’s just under 60 minutes. It’s under demand. It’s free, and it’s going to help you clear the mental clutter and figure out what to actually focus on first. So be sure to check that out. The link is in the show notes. All right, friend, today we talked about those six pockets of time you might not be taking advantage of yet.

The six are: before the house wakes up, your commute, your lunch break, waiting periods, kids’ practices, and mindless tasks. Remember, these are examples, not a to-do list. Pick what works for your life and leave the rest. All right. That’s a wrap on today’s episode. I hope that this got your brain spinning and that you’re able to see your day a little bit differently.

If you found this helpful, make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode where we’re going to talk about what to keep in mind when you start using these pockets of time, because there are some things I really, really want you to know before you go all in. All right. I’ll see you in the next episode.

If this episode inspired you, challenged you, or gave you a fresh perspective, I want to encourage you to take one small action today. And if you want to go deeper and connect with other solopreneurs on a similar journey, come hang out with us inside of our free community. It’s where we keep the conversation going. And be sure to follow the podcast so you don’t miss what’s next. Talk soon, and cheers to more peace, faithful steps, and steady progress, one system at a time.