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What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me, be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.

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What’s up everybody? I’m Shontavia Johnson and I’m here to help you start a business based on the vision you have for your life. So today’s episode is one of my favorites because it is one of the most common questions and common responses I get when I talk to people about starting a business. And basically the goal of this episode is to talk about finding time to start a business when you have no time to start a business and when you’re too busy to do the things you already have to do.

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And this is something that is near and dear to my heart because when I really started to get serious about starting and growing my business, I was married. I had three children, I had a full time job, multiple responsibilities all over the place. I travel a lot. I, just a couple months ago, was in probably five or six different time zones in three weeks. And so, I oftentimes would say I’m too busy to really start a business. I definitely don’t have time to do anything else, let alone start a business. But over time, after, frankly talking to people with a lot more on their plate than me, what I realized is that I, like many people was primarily making excuses — using busy-ness is a cover. I don’t have a lot of the really, really challenging things that some folks deal with like death or abusive relationships or whatever.

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But I definitely spend a lot of time complaining about busy-ness and I certainly in the past have spent an incredible amount of time just complaining about being too busy and finding enough time to do things. And what I frankly came to realize was that I was allowing my immediate circumstance from keeping me from working toward the finding time in my life to do the things I wanted to do. So creating a vision helped actually writing down what I wanted, the vision for my life to look like really actually helped a ton. And then also referring to that often and saying, well, this is what I really want. This is the kind of life I said I wanted to live. How am I actually gonna make it happen? And using “no time” as an excuse, just really was not the right thing for me to think about.

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How to start business when I knew I had no time to do any of that stuff. So what I had been telling myself was I can’t start a business because I don’t have time. I’ve got this husband, I’ve got these three children, one of my three children was really sick for a while and when she was born. But I never really, and all the excuses I made tried to find out where my business, where my time was actually going other than in broad generalities. I knew I didn’t have time because I was always doing stuff. But what was I busy with? Where was my time actually going? And my common response was just life. Life. Life is a bitch. Life is a roller coaster, right? And I was kind of right about that. That, you know, life can be a bitch, life can be a roller coaster. I knew I’d blink in the morning and the next time I realized anything it would be tomorrow.

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But where was my time actually going? And one of the things that I did, and one of the things I suggest to folks who want to start businesses but think they’re too busy, is to start looking, really looking, at where your time is going. And so that’s the suggestion I have today in this episode for you to take a look at where your time is going. And like for me, what I realized was when I said, “Oh no, I definitely can’t do that,” or “I don’t have time to do that.” What I really meant was I don’t want to prioritize that right now. And that’s not necessarily wrong. It is okay to prioritize anything in your life over other things. But just be honest about that and saying, I’m too busy. I don’t have time. When really, you just have other priorities.

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And that is okay and it is nothing to feel bad about. And I think so many people beat themselves up because they think, you know, Oh, just because I’ve got a husband or a wife or whatever, or kids or a dog or a busy travel schedule or sick parents or whatever. They feel bad about having those things to do and not doing or starting a business. But then also even if you spend time starting a business, feeling guilty frankly about spending time starting a business and not doing some of these other things.

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So I can’t answer for you where your time is going, but I do want to help you figure out where for yourself your time is actually going. I mean where is it? There’s like one of my favorite memes is this guy and he’s just asking like where it at?, where is everything? Where is the time actually going?

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So my basic suggestion to you is to spend three days monitoring everything you do and writing it down from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. And if you do this, I think you’ll be really, really surprised about where you’re spending your time. And so people use similar exercises like this for all kinds of things. Where I’ve seen it the most is people who are looking to lose weight. They ask you to monitor the food you’re eating so you can figure out where your calories are coming from and that kind of thing. This exercise is exactly the same thing. You just look like minute to minute write down and keep track of where your time is going. Don’t try to be on your best behavior while you’re doing this. Be honest with yourself so that you can find solutions that work best for your life.

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So do that for three days consistently and maybe it takes more days depending on who you are and what your schedule is. But I think three days is a good middle ground for most people.

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On that fourth day, do the math and figure out where you are spending your time. The first couple times I did really the first time I did this exercise, I couldn’t believe how much time I was spending on…so back then it was like mediatakeout. I was on mediatakeout a lot .com which is a gossip site. I was on Facebook way, way, way too much and I was wasting a lot of time calling myself busy when I really wasn’t busy. I was just, you know, aimlessly scrolling through things.

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So here’s some numbers that you might be surprised about as you’re monitoring your own time and figuring out whether you’re busy for the sake of busy or you know where you are prioritizing things.

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People spend on average 153 minutes on social media every day, 153 minutes. So that is like two and a half hours on social media each day. The average commute in the United States is around 26, 27 minutes. So you’re in the car about an hour each day.

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The average American worker spends 352 minutes with email, replying to email, sending email, work email, personal email, 352 that is almost five hours, is that as my math right is actually six, seven, six, almost seven hours a day on email.

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So you spend a lot of time on a lot of things that are other people’s priorities or aimless scrolling. And there are probably places as you do this exercise, if you’re anywhere near the average where you can find time, find more time to start a business. If one of your challenges is that you do not have time or you say you don’t have time or that you’re busy.

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If you’re anywhere near the average you’re spending seven, eight hours a day just on social media and email alone. And so for me it’s easy to fall back into the trap of like checking my phone randomly, looking at Twitter or scrolling through Twitter. I think I’m doing it for five minutes and then it’s like 60 minutes or 75 minutes or whatever.

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As you do this exercise, as you look through the three days of where you’re spending your time, and again, don’t be on your best behavior. Look for places where you might be able to change some things. I have a couple of examples of places where you can, with the limited time you have, carve out what I suggest is at least two hours and Monday through Friday, weekends depending on how you envision your life to look and whether you want to work on weekends, where you can find time.

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So once you do this exercise, you figure out where your time is going. The next step is to figure out how to get it back.

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So I have a couple of suggestions for you on how to get some of that time back. One of the biggest time drains for me, for example, is social media and email, but social media by far. Aimless scrolling. So one of my first suggestions is no more aimless scrolling. Now, nothing wrong with using social media, I use it all the time. But now a lot of when I’m using social media is more about starting my business and less about just like seeing what’s happening in other people’s lives that I usually don’t even know.

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So the other place you can find where you’re using your time, so I do suggest doing this, the three day exercise, but your phone actually will tell you and it’s a little bit scary actually.

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So whether you have an iOS phone or whether you use Android, both of those systems will show you where you’re actually using your screen time. So like for me, I use an iPhone. I’ll just spend a couple of minutes talking about how you can look at this in your iPhone. If you have an Android, this platform is called Wellbeing. So if you have an Android, go check out Wellbeing. For those of us with Apple phones, if you go to your settings and the battery setting within settings, you’ll see two graphs pop up and it’ll tell you which apps are using the most battery life. And then if you scroll down, it’ll show a list of all of the apps on your phone and how much time you’ve spent on them in the past 24 hours. And then in the past week.

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And one of the things I saw when I did this, the first time I looked at it, I was really surprised, like in 24 hours I had spent maybe seven hours on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram alone. I actually don’t even have the Facebook app, but I was using Safari or some other browser and I was spending probably six or seven hours a day, a full almost work day on social media. And now some of that was for work. And for growing my brand and that kind of thing.

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But that’s a ton of time to spend on social media and on various apps on my phone. So if nothing else, I recommend, hopefully you do that three day exercise. But if nothing else, go look at the apps on your phone and see where you’re actually doing things. And once you do that next step, so you figured out where you’re using a lot of your time, the next step is taking back at least two hours of your day.

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And my opinion is that you owe this to yourself and to the business you want to start. You are giving away so much of your time and we are in a time based economy and attention based economy. You’re giving your attention to someone else right now. If you are doing that, if you are scrolling through, if you are just looking at things online without a real idea about why you’re doing those things.

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So where can you find some time: First, no more aimless scrolling, like I said. If you do that based on how much time you’re spending on those apps right now, maybe that’s two hours by itself, but don’t scroll aimlessly anymore. Number two, be consistent as you’re starting your company with your time. Where can you be consistent with two hours, so block out a two hour chunk of time. Look at the vision that you’ve created for your life and your business and start doing that stuff every day at that specific time of day if you can.

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If it’s not every 12 to 2:00 PM or whatever every day, at least be consistent with each day spending two hours working towards your business.

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That might be listening to podcasts like this one. It might be learning something new, getting a new training, taking a new class, watching YouTube videos. It might be any number of different things. It might just be brainstorming, frankly, about what you want your business to look like. If you are not already starting a business what kinds of ideas do you have for starting a business? Maybe start going to workshops in your community or workshops online, but be consistent two hours a day doing something, moving toward your business.

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Number three, you social media productively. So yeah, you social media and it’s okay. Obviously if you want to check out what’s happening with your cousins baby and your ex girlfriend from fourth grade or whatever, but also use social media productively in your business.

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So how could you do that? So right now, if you don’t know anything else about how to start a business, but you have a really good idea, start sharing articles about those ideas. Start talking about your ideas. Start crowdsourcing ideas about how you can move forward if you’re going to be using social media, use it in a productive way for your business. Also learn from others. So the beautiful thing about the internet is there a ton of people out here doing just about everything. So go out, look at other people’s websites, at their social media pages, listen to their podcasts. Go out and meet them in person. That’s a novel concept, right, in 2019 and 2020 … Going and looking at people face to face. But go out and learn from other people and what they are actually doing. But along those same lines, do not compare yourselves to them.

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So it is really hard to look at. Like people who may be five years ahead of you or two or three years ahead of you it’s really easy to look at them and think, “Oh, I’ll never be as good as that. I’ll never be as smart. My website won’t be as nice. My Instagram page won’t be is curated and cultivated beautifully” and blah, blah, blah, but don’t do that. I heard Iyanla Vanzant say once that when you compare yourself to others, you do a disservice to God and I actually, that was poignant for me and it made sense to me. That each of us is put on this planet for our specific purpose and our specific reason. But when we start comparing ourselves to others, we move away from the purpose we were put on this planet for and we start trying to fit ourselves into other people’s molds. And you ain’t got to do any of that. You can be yourself.

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You can learn from folks, but don’t compare yourselves to them. And that’s hard to do. That is, and I know this is hard to do, this is something I still struggle with myelf, especially, you know, people who may have like a million followers on Twitter or Instagram or 500,000 followers on Facebook or whatever. It’s easy to look at those folks and think, “Oh, I won’t have that kind of platform.” But put all that aside. Learn what you can learn from those people so that you can, you know, start to grow your own followings and base. I mean, I do this same kind of thing myself. Learn from others, but don’t compare yourself to others.

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I think if you do those four things, so (1) don’t scroll aimlessly. (2) Use social media productively. (3) Be consistent with what you are doing every day. Those two hours a day hopefully that you can find after doing that three-day exercise and (4) learning from, but not comparing yourself to others.

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You will have, trust me, and amazing the transformation over the next three to six months or so. Because it’ll feel like you’re taking steps forward. And sometimes that’s the hardest part, just like moving forward and moving forward in a way that doesn’t have to be really expensive or complicated, doesn’t have to cost you a ton of time or money but just two hours a day doing something that you really, really believe strongly in–creating a starting point for your business. And you’ll be surprised — you’ll wake up three, six months from now and you’ve got a lot of the things you already need to get started in your business.

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So I hope some of this information was helpful to you is you are thinking about starting a business but worried about where you’re going to find the time to do that. Now energy is another question, but finding the time to do these types of things, to start a business will be critically important in helping you feel like you’re taking the next steps.

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If you’d like more about this, more about finding time when you have no time, more about what it takes to start a business. Please check me out at shontavia.com you can also find me across social media platforms @ShontaviaJEsq. Thanks so much.

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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter. The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship. The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Incorporated original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory and the video is by GVL Media.