Come on, you know you’ve googled that before.
I have.
I’ve got a great personal example for you from the last two weeks. Adding it all up, I’m guessing I spent 50+ hours working on rebuilding and relaunching my wife’s photography website from scratch. I mean COMPLETE redesign.
I’m not a wordpress or web developer, so I cheated a little and used a template and a bunch of plugins, but still, 50+ hours, in one week, on top of doing the work in my OWN business. To give you an idea, we launched two episodes of Zion Politics, I spent all day today filming, and spent the last two days at a conference for 8 hours each day.
I’m getting a little tired just thinking about it. I also spent 3 hours at the gym, 3 hours at church, 3 hours working on a gospel doctrine lesson, a ton of time with my boys, went to a CD release show for a local band last week, and spent half of last Saturday working in the garden.
So, how’d I fit in an EXTRA 50 hours?
- Get Up Early
- Stay Up Late
- Use Every Available Moment
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
Get Up Early
These are all pretty self explanatory, so I’ll try to be brief. I already get up at 5-5:30 every morning depending on my sleep cycle. However, for this week I decided to trade some time writing in my journal and doing scripture study for working on the site. The bulk of last week was setting up the new theme, adding in all of the content, and making sure everything worked, as well as launching and promoting a giveaway using the incredibly awesome Kingsumo Giveaways plugin.
In the course of the week we added over 100 new people to the email list, AS I WAS STILL BUILDING THE SITE. Pretty rad.
Stay Up Late
As Gary Vaynerchuk would say, if you have time to watch Breaking Bad or Stranger Things on Netflix, you’re not hustling. As much as I believe him, Breaking Bad is, like, really good guys. Like, really good.
Plus, it’s market research. (Cough…)
But when you’re hustling, you realize that all of that can go away and you still live to see another day! My wife and I both love to wind down at the end of the day watching shows on the ipad, but that doesn’t help our businesses grow. So, an hour or two each night starts to add up. Use it.
Use Every Available Moment
When I was exporting an edit and had 15 minutes to kill, I’d knock out another page or check off another to-do in basecamp. Again, it adds up. I’d work through lunch, sometimes skipping a meal completely, and I’d work while the kids were napping, and I’d work during the day while filming today. That’s how I took this picture from OUTSIDE the room we were filming in.
The reality is, hustle doesn’t happen after a certain amount of time or reaching a quota of any measure. It’s more a mind set. It’s the defining aspect of your work ethic.
If you’re really trying to reach a goal, whether out of desperation, or fear, or a deadline, using every single minute to move things forward and accomplish what you’ve set out to do is what hustle looks like.
We’re off to a good start with my wife’s site. Next week we launch a new Facebook ad campaign which will start driving (hopefully) tons of qualified, excited people to reach out and hire her. If not, we’ll keep hustling till we find something else that works.
During his keynote, Gary Vaynerchuk really called people on their BS. He wasn’t taking it. It kinda stung, even though he wasn’t talking directly to me. It’s how I felt when I wrote my thoughts about Drinking the Kool-Aid.
You might be really good at looking like you’re hustling. But are you really?