A day in the life of running my online business
My focus in 2022 is on content creation.
I am trying to build a huge hub of content where I document all the ways I think about business and all the habits and routines and systems that I have that are helping me to grow my own business.
I am sharing this content for a few reasons:
I want to document what I’m doing and what I’m building as I know I will enjoy looking back on this over time and seeing how I have grown.
I hope that sharing some of the things I’m doing will help other people as well.
So today is a bit more of a selfish post and something I’m documenting for myself as much as for you guys.
Part of what I want to document are random points in time and just have those to look back on.
So on Monday of this week I tracked my full day minute by minute and I’m sharing exactly what I did that day as a typical day in the life of running my 7-figure online business.
Monday 7th March 2022
3.42am
I woke up a little before my 4am alarm this morning. Most mornings I’m awake before my alarm goes off and regularly I wake up exactly at 3.57am, which I always find SO weird that my body knows how to do that!
The first thing I do everything single morning is to reach for my ear pods and phone and turn on a 10 minute meditation on Headspace. As of today I have been doing this for 192 days in a row.
4.00am
After my meditation I get up just before 4am to start my morning routine. Here’s what I do:
come downstairs and get my “downstairs” airpods. Yes, I have upstairs earpods next to my bed and downstairs earpods on my desk as I used to find it so annoying when I didn’t have my earpods in the right place :)
I search YouTube to find something motivational to listen to as I work through my morning routine - this morning I listen to a talk by Alex Hormozi on sales
Head to the kitchen to start boiling water for my tea and go to the toilet (TMI sorry!)
Make a cup of tea
Sit down at my desk and complete my daily journal. I use an app called ‘Day One’ to do this. I’m a very fast typer so I’ve replaced hand writing in a journal with typing in Day One as this works much better for me. I’ve been consistent with writing in my journal for a few months now. Not sure if I like it or not but I do it.
I’m not great at writing about my feelings so instead of doing that I use it as a place to capture ideas and things I’ve been learning - and I find it useful for that purpose.
I have a template I’ve created inside ‘Day One’ and each day I make a few notes under each of the headings. Here’s my template:
Once I complete my journal entry I then spend a few minutes planning my day and looking over my daily tasks, which auto populate within my Notion daily dashboard each morning for me, based on project planning I’ve done for myself in the past.
Here is my to-do list for today:
4.28am
Every morning between 4.30-5.30am I allocate myself time to write my daily blog post so that’s what I move on to next.
I will probably take a little longer with this task today as I’m tracking my day for this post I’m writing here (which will be published later in the week) so need to write that up first, then I’ll move on to today’s blog post topic which is ‘How to get your design work published in the media’
I set my blog post topics in advance so I don’t have to think on the day of writing and normally have some notes in my Notion entry that help me to write the post fairly quickly.
5.30am
On Mondays I have a strength training session at 6am so I head upstairs now to get dressed and ready to go.
6.00-7.00am
Strength training session with my trainer, Miguel, from TRX Group Training.
I have been training with Miguel for about 3 1/2 years now and the progress I’ve made in my health and fitness journey in that time has been a massive influence on my success in business.
I felt good at my training session which I was happy about as I was in hospital a few weeks ago so I’m still building back up again after that. But felt pretty much like my old self today, which was great.
7.00-8.00am
Once I’m home I help my youngest son get ready for school. He doesn’t really need my help - more just my coaxing to keep moving out the door on time :) I do things like check emails or social media at the same time and also have another cup of tea.
8.45am
My eldest son slept through his alarm today and we are doing a bit of ‘tough love’ with him at the moment (he’s nearly 14) where we have decided not to wake him for school if he sleeps in. This is hard for me, but my husband is insisting that it’s important to bootcamp him a bit. I grew up in a household of girls so I’m taking his advice on this one!
He eventually wakes up AFTER he’s meant to be at school and is very angry with us for not waking him (we did warn him we were going to start doing this but I guess he didn’t believe we would!). So that caused a bit of drama with him running around trying to get ready.
9.00-9.30am
The drama with my son threw me off my work plan for the day. I intended to get stuck in to some recording for one of my online courses that I’m updating at the moment but I wasn’t quite in the mood. So I checked my emails and answered my DMs on Instagram instead.
9.30-11am
I decided to reset my mindset by doing a bike ride on my Peloton. If you aren’t sure what a Peloton is then you can find out more about it here.
I am currently doing a challenge for 2022 of working out using my Peloton for 20,000 minutes in the year. So I’ve been using the bike and the other workout classes that come on the app/video screen for around about an hour each day, sometimes longer.
I’ve just passed 4,000 minutes for 2022 at the start of March so I’m so far on track to reach the 20K goal. Yay!
Today here’s what I did with my Peloton app:
40 minute bike ride
10 minutes stretching class
30 minute meditation class
11-11.30am
Go and have a shower and get dressed
11.30-1.30pm
My husband and I decide to go and have lunch out. We don’t have many great cafes where we live so it’s a bit of a drive to get to the one we like (about half hour away) so it takes a few hours to do this outing.
About a year ago my husband left his job and came to work with me in my business. He also has his own side projects and a company he’s building at the same time - so our lives are very flexible and we are both so grateful that we can just randomly decide to spend 2 hours having lunch on a Monday if we want to!
This is one of the greatest perks of building an online business - you are completely free to choose how you spend your time each day!
1.30-4pm
I get back from lunch and realise I have barely done anything on my to-do list for the day, specifically recording Module 3 of my course I’m trying to update so I decide to get some of it recorded before the boys get back from school.
I get through half of the module - 4 lessons - which I record, edit and send for captioning and then upload in to the online portal.
I was happy with this as it means I’m still on track with the project plan I’ve set myself for this.
Running and online business means you have to be extremely self-disciplined. I have no boss, no clients and nobody telling me what to do so I could technically do nothing each day and nobody would say anything. So to keep moving forward you need to be very driven and have lots of goals and projects you are working towards. I luckily work really well like this.
Around 3.30 my husband goes to pick up the boys from school.
4.00-5.00pm
The boys are home now and I make them afternoon tea and get them organised for the afternoon. They are pretty self sufficient and get on with their own thing after school most days - homework, music practice etc. My youngest son has a timetable that he works through each afternoon after school that we set at the beginning of the year together. That way he knows what he should be doing and what he needs to get through before he can move to relaxing/TV time!
I get my daily non-negotiables done for the day. This is a list of tasks that I have agreed with myself that I MUST do every day.
It has my daily admin type tasks and also some lead generation work on there as well.
I normally get this done before my bike ride/Peloton session each day but today was a bit thrown after the issues with my son being late for school so I had to catch up and get those done now.
5.00-6.00pm
I take a bit of a break for an hour before starting dinner - I scroll on social media a bit and I randomly decide to start posting again to my personal brand Instagram account, which I haven’t done for months. So I put a post together and share it. You can see that post here and follow that account if you’re interested.
6.00-7.30pm
I make dinner and get the lunches made for the boys for the next day
Tonight the boys are having a chicken curry with rice and I’m having a chicken salad. We always eat together as a family but I don’t always eat the same food as the boys as I am trying to be quite disciplined with my food at the moment.
Eating together each night is really important - we catch up on the day, have a bit of a laugh and we try and get the boys each night to tell us 3 things they are grateful for each day. This is normally like pulling teeth - but we try!!
Tonight the boys decided to quiz me on how many characters I could name from Star Wars (life as a Mum of boys!). I’ve actually never seen any Star Wars movie in my life but I am proud to say I could name 13 characters without prompting - just from having heard them all talk about it for so many years LOL!!
8.15pm
I always head to bed early as I get up so early in the morning. The boys are normally still up when I go to bed but Paul (my husband) is more of a night owl so he puts them to bed.
I read for about 20 minutes on my kindle - at the moment I’m reading a really trashy book called ‘Rachel’s Holiday’. I always read rubbish fiction type books at this time of night as I would find business books (my preferred reading!) way too stimulating before I sleep.
I’m asleep by about 9pm or so I would say - ready to do it all again tomorrow!
Courses and Templates for Designers and Architects
DO YOU WANT TO….
Improve your professionalism?
Find more clients?
Bring in more revenue?
Create better systems and processes?
Then check out my business courses and templates for designers and architects.
These courses and templates leave you with work done - not just a long list of things you need to do next. We have a really strong focus on taking action and getting things created that improve your business.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy