Today’s blog post is a big one. Mainly because it’s the one topic we are always asked about. If you’re new here, first off, welcome! To bring you up to speed, we both work full-time jobs on top of running our blog and creative business. Since we’ve been doing this for almost 5 years (July), we’d like to think we have things down. But to be honest, life is crazy and we so don’t have it all figured out. Though we try our very best to manage our time to ensure we keep ourselves sane.
When it comes to our schedule, we’re a bit all over the place. Alex works Monday through Friday during the day and Mike works Saturday through Monday nightshift. Whenever we aren’t working those jobs, we are devoting our time to running our business and blog together. We also have to schedule time for friends, family and each other. We’re not going to lie — it can be a bit overwhelming at times. Though we always make it work by staying super organized.
The biggest thing we do is delegate. Since we don’t have weekends together, we aren’t able to dedicate full days to the blog. That’s where assigning each other with certain tasks comes into play. We always sit down at one point during the week (usually Tuesday nights) to go over our content calendar. We create an outline for the blog posts we have coming up and then we assign certain parts to each other — writing, editing, etc. This helps a lot. It prevents either of us from feeling super overwhelmed. We are both sharing the responsibility so it lightens the load. We are also big planners. We write EVERYTHING down. Literally everything. We do love all things digital but there’s just something about putting pen to paper. We rewrite things a lot, too. This keeps us accountable and on track.
Like we said, our schedules are all over the place. Alex works during the weekdays and Mike is on nightshift weekend duty. We both have to remind ourselves that we can’t have the same sleep schedule most nights. Since Mike stays up late Friday nights to prep for the weekend, Alex has to stop himself from staying up late too. As much as we would love to hang out and watch movies together all night we can’t. Alex still has to be productive on the weekends since Mike is busy at the hospital. The same goes for Mike during the week. Alex is busy at work during weekdays and can’t work on anything for the blog so Mike has to take over. This comes back to sharing the responsibility. We are all about teamwork. It makes things so much easier and manageable. Also, we truly love creating so it doesn’t feel like work. It’s a way for us to work together so we call that a win.
To be honest, the main reason we are able to manage our time so well is that we love what we do. Yes, our day jobs can be demanding but knowing that we have something we can create together means the world. We just want to take advantage of all that life has to offer. This past year has really reminded us that life is so damn short. In a blink of an eye, things can change. We want to accomplish as much as we can in life together. We are just so grateful for each new day because it’s another opportunity to achieve anything we put our minds to. That’s what it really comes down to for us. If we really want to make something happen, we will manage our time and make it work. We just don’t make any excuses. Or at least we try not to lol.
It really does make a huge difference when you love what you do. We say this ALL the time and still can’t say it enough — building this community has been the most amazing thing to happen to us. We truly value each and every person who reads our posts and cares about our lives. We consider everyone a friend and the fact that we’ve been given this platform is incredible. That in itself is motivation enough to work hard and create. We wish we could say there is some secret to managing our time but it really comes down to staying organized, sharing the workload, and having a true passion for doing what we do.
