I hear this a lot…

“I love the idea of that business, Nick, but I haven’t got the time.”

Which I can understand.

Because most people are busy.

REALLY busy.

There are the constant demands of work.… shopping… cooking… cleaning… repairing the house… dealing with relatives… keeping in touch with friends.

You aim to push to get these out of the way so you can sit down to work on a side income or home business project.

But there always seems like there’s one more thing that needs to be done… just so that you can get a clear window to focus properly.

Even then, you get hit with curveballs…

Your pet gets ill… you injure your back… the car won’t start… you get into a fight with your partner… the kids need help… the toilet leaks… your internet goes down… a friend calls you out of the blue for free counselling.

So you temporarily delay the project.

Perhaps for a few days… maybe a few weeks… maybe a few months…

You tell yourself that you’ll get back on it “When things calm down…”

“When I’ve finished everything else…”

“When I’ve got a clear weekend…”

But that clear weekend never arrives, does it?

Or if it does, it’s a rare event! A once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity!

Which isn’t really enough time to plan, launch and run a home business, is it?

So what then?

Do you keep delaying forever?

Do you just give up?

Well, not if you try a different approach.

One where you forget all about ‘free weekends’, ‘clear afternoons’ and ‘dedicated work evenings’.

Instead, you reduce everything down to the tiny window of time it might take to watch Coronation Street.

The Soap Opera Profit Strategy

Let me ask you this…

In any given week, do you watch a soap opera, like Eastenders?

Or do you regularly watch a quiz show like Pointless or The Chase?

Maybe you watch BBC news every day at 6.30.

Or if you’re not a TV viewer, do you listen to any weekly podcasts or radio shows?

If so, then you already block 30 minutes or more of time on a regular basis throughout the week.

Now, imagine if you could switch those for 30 minutes work on a home business project instead.

At first, the length of a soap opera doesn’t seem like a lot of time.

But 30 minutes every weekday is 2.5 hours per week – and that’s with you doing NOTHING at the weekend.

Over four weeks that’s 10 hours.

Add in 30 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays and you’re on 15 hours every month.

Over twelve weeks that’s more than 40 hours.

That’s like getting a whole working week off to concentrate on a business!

It’s easily enough focused time to produce something substantial…. especially when AI can now accelerate research, structuring, drafting and production.

I’m not saying that you should give up watching the news, or abandon your favourite shows if they help relax you at night.

But I’m sure you could find a way to squeeze in half an hour per day, even in a busy week.

You could even set your alarm for 30 minutes earlier each morning and fit it in then.

And as long as you’re consistent, you’ll find that these small regular bursts of effort – while seemingly short – really do build up quickly over time.

As a result, you’ll feel a huge increase in your drive and motivation.

It’s known as the ‘Progress Principle’.

When Small Results Give You Big Rewards

In 2011, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer published research into what makes people feel motivated at work.

They collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 employees in seven different companies.

The participants were involved in projects that required creativity and problem-solving, and some kept these diaries for as long as nine months.

Each day they recorded significant events, setbacks, breakthroughs and their feelings about work.

When Amabile and Kramer analysed the entries, they found that people felt best at work when they had made progress on something important to them.

It didn’t necessarily have to be a huge breakthrough…

Even solving a minor problem, getting a nice bit of feedback, or moving a project a step forward gave them a burst of motivation, mood and engagement.

Conversely, the thing most strongly associated with a BAD day was suffering a setback or feeling that they had lost ground somehow.

In fact, Amabile later explained that the psychological effect of setbacks was two to three times stronger than the positive effect of progress.

So when you find yourself struggling to get a clear weekend, or a free evening, to work on a business…

The psychological impact is really bad for motivation.

Because you’ll feel like you’re failing.

If, on the other hand, you successfully manage 30 minutes in a day… you’ll feel more rewarded, and more compelled to keep going.

You might spend that 30 minutes writing one Facebook advert… taking notes on one YouTube video… contacting one supplier…

It doesn’t matter that it’s only a small step.

You’ve made tangible progress towards a big goal, and that will feel good.

How to Plan Your 30 Minutes

The key is to set a firm, achievable target for your 30 minute time-block.

Don’t just tell yourself, “I’m going to work for half an hour”.

Instead, make a specific plan:

• “At 7.30 tomorrow morning, I’ll sit at the kitchen table and work for 30 minutes on planning the structure of my eBook using AI.”
• “Between 6.30pm and 7pm I’ll brainstorm a title for my Substack newsletter and whittle it down to a shortlist of 5.”
• “At 1.30pm during my lunchbreak, I’ll read as many Amazon reviews as possible of books about productivity, and extract quotes that will help me create a target customer profile for my productivity PDF guide.”

You can even block those 30 minutes of time across a week as a series of progressive steps.

So rather than, “I’ll research a target audience for my digital course idea when I can clear a weekend.”

You instead break it into 5 blocks:

• Monday – 30 minutes: research comments, reviews and replies on Amazon, Reddit and social media.
• Tuesday – 30 minutes: write an email to my friend/customer(s) who fits the profile, with a ‘Surveymonkey’ questionnaire to fill in.
• Wednesday – 30 minutes: use Chat GPT to analyse the target market (behaviour, statistics, trends) and deliver a customer avatar based on my research input.
• Thursday – 30 minutes: interrogate the avatar to create a master list of goals, problems, objections and experiences my customer will have.
• Friday – 30 minutes: Create a positioning document for my digital course, including all the ways it will help the target reader, and all the content features and benefits necessary to achieve that.

As you can see, in the space of five episodes of Emmerdale, you’ve got an entire customer profile and a positioning document for a profitable digital course!

The following week, you could use that to research and plan out the content for your course.

And the week after that, you could structure and research the entirety of module one.

Before you know it, two months will pass and you’ll have the finished thing in draft form, ready to start uploading!

In fact, this kind of 30 minute time blocking is ideal for course creation.

The Perfect 30 Minute Business?

The good thing about a digital course is that you can do the work whenever you have half an hour free.

All the research, planning, writing and video-making can be done anytime, anywhere you have a computer and an internet connection.

AI can do a lot of the legwork for you, very quickly, so you can get a huge amount done in each half-hour segment.

And because the idea of creating a whole course from scratch can be daunting… breaking it down into 30 minute chunks is a great way to steadily build it without the overwhelm.

Even when the course is set up online, you don’t need to be at your computer at any specific time of day.

All the orders come in automatically…

The course content is delivered automatically…

And the payments are processed for you.

So the income is largely passive, meaning that you can still do 30 minute chunks for work each day, just to keep it ticking over and start planning your next product!

If you want to know more about creating a course the easy way… without stress or a huge time requirement… Heloise and I are hosting a Course Creation Masterclass this Wednesday 19 August at 7pm.

It’s FREE to attend and you can register HERE.

It would be great to see you there!