Tim Ferriss invented the 4-hour work week in 2007, but in 2025, entrepreneurs work between 40 and 100 hours per week. Getting a new business off the ground can require a serious time commitment, on average, at least 60 hours per week until their business is up and running.
But those of us who work 9-5, we ain’t got time for that noise. In the last post, I introduced you to the concept of building slow and steady, grab your notebook and pen because I am going to show you how you can spend just 10 hours a week on your business and be successful.
Society as a whole has ingrained in us that we must always be working, we must always be productive, taking a day off is taboo in the real world. We live to work, instead of working to live. This leads to burnout out and when people don’t see the pay off from all of the hard work they are putting in fast enough, they quit. Not us though, we are one with the turtle!
This is where a business plan and SMART goals come in. We talked about them in the last post, but as a quick refresher, your business plan should answer the “w” questions, who, what, when, where, why, and how, and your SMART goals should be small, achievable goals that you can review every so often. I recommend every 3 months, so you can give it some time to happen, but not so much time that it becomes a pipe dream. Don’t worry though if you need help here, we will be going in depth in the next post about plans and goals!
To set us off on the right foot once our business plan and SMART goals are set, we need to first figure out our schedules. A lot of advice is to wake up an hour early to “work”, for some people this may be sage advice but for me, eh no. I am not a morning person and I already get up at 6 am to go to my day job, there is no way in hell I am getting up earlier. I know this about myself. If you aren’t sure you could always give it a try for a week and see how you manage.
Get your schedule firmed up. If you know you can’t do mornings and you go to the gym 5 days a week, work around that. As an example, I spend the majority of my 10 hours on my business on the weekends. I work on my ebook, substack, and record reading for the dead writers society books on Saturdays. On Sunday, I plan and write out the next videos and my blog post. I record the long form video on Thursdays and edit on Friday nights. Since I do the weekday gratitude shorts every morning, that takes me about 15 minutes from start to finish every morning. So a little over an hour in total for the entire week.
The rest of the week, I don’t do any actual work. I spend my commute listening to podcasts about personal growth, watching videos on growing my channel, and staying up to date with the news. You can say I got this down to a science.
In your notebook, write down how many hours per day in each week you are willing to spend working on your business. Think about your weekly raid or book club meeting. Think about how exhausted you are coming home from your 9-5 too. If you’re anything like me, you get home and you’re hungry! You spend the next hour cooking dinner, and then once you eat, you shower and you’re ready to go to bed. Where can you slide in an extra hour? I record on Thursday night, so either before I shower or while my hair is drying.
Once your schedule is firm, make a running to-do list. This list should be everything you need or want to do all in one place. I recommend using Google Keep or a similar service to keep it in the cloud so you always have it on hand and can’t lose it. You also want a separate list for “shower ideas”. Or the ideas you come up with randomly when you aren’t focused and you’re not working on your business. Get those on that list as soon as possible, sometimes they are the best ones.
The key here is to fit your business in your life, remember we are working to live, not living to work. It takes about 40 days to create a habit, make your schedule a habit!
The final piece to the puzzle, is mindset. Learning to reframe your negative thoughts into positive ones will drastically change your life and business success. Thomas Edison, you may have heard of him, he said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” If you want to succeed, you will need to change your mindset. Thinking the same thoughts day after day limits your beliefs and stunts your growth as a human. Change that! You can go to the library and get books on personal growth, you can meditate, visualize, and prepare your mind for big changes to come. The Youtube channel has a ton of videos on mindset and growth which gives you actionable steps to change your mindset.
Lets recap
Step 1: Make sure your business plan & SMART goals are in place
Step 2: Make your new schedule a habit
Step 3: Change your mindset
Comment below what you’ve learned and how you will implement this into your life.
As always, thank you for spending your time with me, and if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below
Peace