Are you creating your business around your life? Or, are you creating your life around your business?

On today’s quick tip episode of Art of Online Business, I want to share a classic replay of an episode from December 2021. In this episode, I dive into how you can make sure that you are planning your business around your life.  A lot of people do the opposite, and I want to help you reverse that.

The importance of creating my life around my business, and the consequences of prioritizing my business over my health and relationships, was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

It’s a lesson I don’t want you to learn the hard way.

I had to go through a serious period of burnout in my business before I realized my priorities needed to change.

From a revenue standpoint, things were going great. Behind the scenes, things were not going well in terms of my health.

I realized I needed to start creating my business around my life. When I made that mindset shift, everything started to change for the better. My physical and mental health and my relationships all improved.

Not only did those things improve, but the health of my business also improved dramatically, because I was prioritizing myself and my personal life first and then the business.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The most important step in getting your priorities right
• How to earn more while working less
• The three things you should be optimizing in your business
• Why the revenue you generate is not tied to the hours you’re working
• How to identify and prioritize your most productive time of day

Links & Resources:

• The Art of Online Business website
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!

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All right. What is up, my friend? Welcome to today’s episode of The Art of Online Business podcast. I’m Rick Moretti. And on today’s quick tip, I wanted to share a classic episode with you here on the show today. And that is this is from December 2021. And the episode is, Are you creating your business around your life? This is something I see that a lot of people and I did early on. And you’re going to hear me talk about this in this episode, but I see a lot of people doing the opposite. They’re creating their life around their business and sort of like the life gets the the gaps, the life, their life gets the leftovers, their family gets their leftovers. And if that’s the case with you, I want to help you reverse that and make sure that you’re creating your business around your life and not the other way around. Again, this was a really, really well received episode when it came out. And being that it’s the beginning of a new year here, I thought this was a really timely opportunity to reshare this classic episode with you. I do mention at the beginning of the episode that my daughter had just turned three. She just turned four. A few weeks ago. I can’t even believe that. So Maya is now four. So that is an update to when I first released this episode in December 21. So without further ado, let’s go talk about are you creating your business around your life, not the other way around.

What’s up, my friends? Welcome back to another quick tip episode here on the show. Hope you do well. Thank you so much for coming to hang out with me today. I want to dive into this concept that I talk about quite a bit here in the show, but I also realized that I never really dove Stove’s at the right word, dove into it before, like taking a full episode to talk about it. And it’s this whole concept of are you creating your business around your life, right? Or are you creating your life around your business? And I want to share my own personal experience with this and why and how I learned this the hard way that I really want to encourage you if you’re not already, to be prioritizing. It sounds funny because you’re like, Well, of course people want to do that, but I see so often the opposite. We want to be creating our business around our life. Our life is our main priority, right? Then it’s about the business. And so we’re going to dive into that here today. And you’ve likely heard right, you’ve likely heard the saying, well, if you have a team or what have you, you likely heard this saying it’s not personal, it’s just business. Well, we’re going to flip that on its head, right? We’re going to say it’s not business, it’s personal, because we’re prioritizing the personal. For those of you who know me and for those of you, we have thousands of new listeners.

And welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure you you’ve hit that subscribe button or follow depending on what podcasting app that you’re listening to or if you’re watching this on YouTube, make sure you hit that subscribe button. And so my family is everything to me the day I’m recording this is early November, tomorrow, and the next two days, we’re taking my daughter to Disneyland. When this episode comes out, she’s just about turning three years old. So this is her first time at Disneyland. And we’re taking a Tuesday and Wednesday to in the middle of the week to take off and go to Disneyland. And we’re surprising her with this trip. And my wife, Amy, is she’s a Disney fanatic. I am not so much a Disney person. However, I’m so excited to be able to experience, you know, Disneyland through the eyes of my three year old daughter, Maya. And so that’s what the priority is for me as I have built and continue to build my business. In January 2022, my business turns eight years old. And early on in my business and I’ve talked about this here in the podcast before, right? I prioritize the business over everything else. I prioritize it over my own mental and physical health, my relationships, my relationship with my wife, Amy, you know, the most important things in life, right? And if I’m being honest, it wasn’t until about four years ago after going through a really serious period of burnout in the business that I became super clear.

It became abundantly clear that if I wanted to serve people in my business, if I wanted to serve all of you listening to the show here for a very long time in my customers, my members, etc., that my priorities needed to shift. Because what I was doing simply was not sustainable, nor was it making me very happy. Here’s the thing. I was making a lot of money in the business. In the first four years of the business, we hit seven figures. And so from a top line revenue standpoint, the business was extremely successful and healthy from that perspective. Right. But, you know, I call this sort of the iceberg effect, right? You only see what’s going on above the water. You don’t see what’s going on below the water. Well, again, I’ve talked about it before here on the show. There wasn’t a whole lot of good things going on behind the scenes from a health standpoint for me. Right. And so once I realized that, look, this is not and this is my voice talking to myself, right? I was like, look, this is not sustainable. This is not something that I can continue with the way that my priorities were around the business, around the health, around the sustainability of what I had begun to create. Right. And I needed to really remind myself of why I started the business in the first place.

I was in the corporate world for just about 13 years. I was in online marketing and online advertising. For years I was selling online advertising and I wanted to get out of the corporate world. And in not that I remember this specifically, but September 30th, 2012 was was the day I left corporate. And I’ve never looked back since. I’ve never well, I shouldn’t say that I did question it for the first couple of years of my online business, even though it was doing really well. But I needed to remind myself of why I created this business in the first place, and that was to back then it was like, I want to write my own rules. I want to work my own hours. I want to create something that I’m the boss of, right? Like I want to work with people that I want to work with. When I want to work, I basically want to do what I want to do when I want to do it. And I know that so many of you can relate to that rationale for why you started your business and then likely you evolve from a, your wise impact, etc. And that’s the same thing that happened to me. So I need to remind myself of that. And I needed to. I realized that, look, I needed to start creating my business around my life and not the other way around. And I’m going to explain to you here in just a second what exactly that means.

And so what I made that mindset shift. That’s when everything started to change in the shift. My my health improved my both mental health and physical health. My relationships improved because I was prioritizing those things first, and then it was about the business after that. Whereas for so many years it was it was the flip, right? It was business all day, pretty much every day. And then the leftovers, if you will, went to the personal side of business. Right? And you know, you all know the on airplane puts your oxygen mask on first before you do it for somebody else. It’s the same concept. Like you can’t you can’t have your business, you can’t have your life meaning your relationships, etc., and you can’t show up for your audience and the people that you’re wanting to help if you’re not taking care of yourself first. And so when I remind myself of all that and made that shift, everything started to change. Now, it didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t like snap, snap my fingers and like, okay, cool. Everything’s hunky dory again, right? It took time. But soon, not only did those things improved, but the health of my business also dramatically improved because I was prioritizing my cell and my personal life first and then the business. And especially now, things really shifted again three years ago when my daughter was born. Right then it’s like, okay, I want to spend as much time as possible with her. And then the business is what’s focused on next, if you will, are around that.

And I’ve created my schedule around doing just that and I’ll share more about that here in just a second. And so when people join Accelerator, the first thing that I have them do is do a time audit. So if you’ve never done a time audit before, not going to lie, it’s kind of a pain in the butt. However, the results of your time audit hold so much gold because you get to see where your time is being spent. End and how long you’re spending doing said tasks. Right? So basically the time audit is you take 3 to 5 business days. That are normal business, A’s, quote unquote, not things where you’re like doing a launch or doing a special maybe it’s like a batching day or anything like that. Not that sort of not normal business days. And what you do is you start tracking everything you do during the business day. From the time you start in the morning to the time you start in the evening, or if you start late at night, whatever it is, whenever you are working, you are putting down, Oh, I did this task from this time to this time, and it took this is what I did and took me this long. And so you’re just going to make a big list for each day, 3 to 5 days. And I don’t care how you do it, whether it’s on your old school pen and paper, Google, Doc, Evernote, Notion, iPad, whatever it is.

Right? Or download an app or something like that. It’s tracking the amount of time of what you’re doing, where is your time and energy going, and then also how long things are taking you. Right? Another key thing there that I would add to that exercise that I just sort of snuck it in there is as you are tracking what you are doing and how long each thing is taking, I would put a note on like what your energy level was, right? Maybe it’s like 1 to 3 or something like that that you rate yourself. Because what we’re trying to do is in sort of a side note, is that we are trying to prioritize the highest leverage activities that you, as the CEO of your business, should be focusing on during your highest energy during the day. Right. So for me, it’s early morning when I hit like two or three in the afternoon, I’m starting to my brain starting to decline. And so for for the day, because I’ve started early, I have a three year old daughter and it’s just a long day. You know, those of you with kids and you totally know what I’m talking about while also running a very successful business. Right. And so what I’ve been seeing recently with new accelerators coming in and reviewing their time audit, when we review the time audit, I’m seeing a lot of this. Like I saw one the other day that somebody is working from like 830 in the morning to like 1030 at night straight through Monday through Friday.

And you know, a few breaks here and there during the day. But holy cow, that is not sustainable. And it’s like, well, wait, where is the you know, where is the personal side? Where are you taking care of yourself? Where is the self care, Where’s the family time, where is the whatever? And unfortunately, this is been sort of a common trend that I’ve been seeing recently. And it really drove me to do this episode for you to sort of remind you, if you will, that if we want to be showing up as our best self in our business, we need to be prioritizing what’s most important in our life, in ourselves, in our family, in our relationships. And then the business gets then we schedule the other the business time, and then we can structure our business to support you in this. Right? This is one thing, by the way, that we help you do inside of my accelerator coaching program. This is for accelerators, for online course creators and online coaches who are more established in their business. And so if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, but you’re not quite sure what next steps to take, right? You’re likely feeling overwhelmed in your business. You’re not sure where to go from here, essentially without adding more hours to your day because you’re already working a ton of hours, We help you create more profit, more impact, by the way, for profit because everybody talks about top line revenue, which is all well and good.

We obviously need that. But it’s really about how much of that is actually going in our pocket, how much of that is actually going in the bank. So that’s why the profit is so important, but yet so few people will talk about it. Well, that’s one of the key pillars of accelerators. So it’s more profit, more impact because we are all about helping businesses who want to have a positive impact in the world in whatever way that looks like for you. We help you increase your impact, right? So more profit, more impact with less hustle. And that’s really one thing that we’re talking about here right now is setting our business up, which is all 100% possible to be working no more than 25 hours a week or less, while increasing profit while increasing impact. Right. And I had one person recently say, is that actually possible to be doing that at 25 hours a week or less? I have. A ton of examples that answer that question as a big fat yes. Right. And I am one of those examples. That’s what I do in in my business again, because we are creating our business around our life and not the other way around. And by the way, we do those three things through optimizing your sales and marketing, optimizing your systems and processes and optimizing your mindset.

So this sounds like something that you’d like our help in helping you achieve in your business. Go over to learn more. It’s application only and you can apply at Rick forward slash accelerator. And so if you are feeling this overwhelm, if you are feeling this, yeah, I don’t have enough time for myself or I don’t have I want more time with my family or I want more, more time for my friends in relationships,

whatever it might be. I want to encourage you to kind of stop and ask yourself, why did you start your business? What was the primary reason that you wanted to to do that? And look at how maybe you are prioritizing the business over everything else. And so with that said, I want to share with you some steps that you can be taking to start to do this and start to look at this in your business. And so the first thing that everything starts with and I’ve been talking about it already, here is our mindset, right? I like to say that 80% of the success of our business, right, the whole 80, 20, 80% of the success of our business starts in our mind starts with our mindset. And so the first thing that you need to believe is that, you know, the amount of time that you work is not tied to your revenue potential. Right. This is something that one of our accelerator coaches, Neil Williams, who’s actually a former accelerator now she’s a master life coach and she is our business mindset and productivity coach with an accelerator.

She talks about this all the time, right, that the amount of money that you’re able to generate is not tied to the amount of time that you’re working. Right. So that’s first that’s one thing that starts with the mindset is understanding that that’s the case and recognizing it and starting to believe that that that is possible. Which leads me to the second mindset is that the mindset of possibility, right? Opening up the possibility, the belief of possibility that really anything, frankly, is possible for you in your business. I have people in accelerator, for example, who are working 20 hours a week who are doing multiple seven figures because they have built their business around their priorities of time with their family, time for themselves, etc., doing their hobbies, etc., etc.. They have structured their team, they’ve structured their workdays, etc. But you got to believe that whatever you want for your business is is possible, because if you don’t, then you know it’s not going to be possible, frankly, because you’ve got to believe that first. Now then from a tactical said, tactical a tactical tactical standpoint is your scheduling. And what I’m talking about here is how many how many days a week do you want to work? How many hours per day do you want to work? When during the day do you want to work? And I would really encourage you, if at all possible, to find your flow time in the day meeting.

When are you at your highest energy level? When are you when is your brain most turned on to doing the highest leverage activities in your business? Find that time if you don’t already. So for me, again, it’s morning time, early morning time. I love it. I get myself in. That’s when I get way more done in less time because that’s my flow time. That is when my brain is most turned on. And so if you don’t know what that time of day it is, I would encourage you to start to notice. When are you most engaged? When are your when is your brain most turned on during the day? For a lot of people, it is that early morning time, but I’ve heard from other people. It’s like late afternoon for them. I’ve heard others, you know, late at night. I am so not a night person, but whatever works for you, right? And so figuring out how many days a week do you want to work? Do you want to take Fridays off? I have a buddy of mine who has a very successful business who who takes Mondays and Fridays off. He works Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, works about 15, 20 hours, usually like 15 hours a week, although he just moved and child care is different. So I think he’s doing three different, three days differently, but he’s still only working three days a week because that is how he is set up his business.

And then for you, it’s like, okay, what days? And then also what hours? How many hours a day? When do you want to work the hours? Maybe they’re spread out over the day. Maybe you work in different chunks during the day, right? Because that’s what works for you. Cool. And then the next thing after scheduling and you’re figuring out when your flow time is, is you want to schedule in. You’ve heard this before. I know, but it’s so important. It’s something that I wasn’t doing for years is you got to schedule in your calendar for the upcoming week. First, what are your non-negotiables? Right? So that is when you’re scheduling in your workouts or your walks or your time with your family or whatever, coffee with so-and-so, whatever. You’re scheduling those personal and those self-care things first in your calendar, those become your non-negotiables. And then after that, then you start to schedule in your business stuff, prioritizing obviously your highest leverage activities as your as since you’re the CEO, I call these the key three, right? These are the top three, maybe four things that you are responsible for that you’re focusing on as the CEO in your business on a daily, weekly, quarterly, and so on basis and prioritizing those things during your flow time. Right. And so that is just sort of I mean, that’s kind of high level, But I really wanted this to just sort of be a reminder, right? Maybe a kick in the butt, if you will.

Like if you’re prioritizing business over your life, it’s not sustainable. And when you flip that on its head, your business, it sounds counterintuitive, but your business will grow as a result of your doing that. Your business becomes more healthy because you’re becoming healthy first, both mentally, spiritually, physically, etc. and your business is going to improve as a result of those things. So prioritize life first, business second, create your business around your life. All right. I hope you enjoy this classic episode here on the podcast here today. If you’ve not yet left a quick rating review for the show over an Apple podcast, it is a huge help still and it really helps us reach more people with the podcast. It takes like 10 seconds to do so if you’ve not already, it would be a huge help. Thanks so much in advance for doing that. And if anybody that you know needs to hear the message from today’s episode, please consider sharing it. If you’re listening in Apple podcast, just click the three little dots next to the name of the episode. And there’s a share option right there. If you’re listening, like on Spotify, there’s a share button right there on the episode. So thank you in advance. My voice is cooked right now. Thank you in advance for doing those things and super appreciate you as always for tuning in. Until next time, my friend. Be well. I’ll talk to you soon.