How to find the time to launch your digital product

How to find the time to launch your digital product. This is probably the most common reason that I hear from my students as to why they haven't yet created or launched their digital product. So I'm going to give you a little bit of real talk and I'm also going to give you some practical tips on how you can find the time to launch your digital product.

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Making the time to launch your digital product: 3 questions to ask yourself

So let's start with the real talk. A little bit of tough love because as you know, I am big on tough love.

You have to create the time

Firstly, I just want to say the time is never going to magically show up in your business. You have to make the time to create your digital product. Otherwise it's never going to happen. The thing is, we find the time for the things that we prioritize. If we want to prioritize watching The Bachelor or Married at First Sight, then we will schedule around that, right? We will, I don't know, make sure that all of our work is done so that we can log off and be in front of the TV in time to watch The Bachelor or that dinner has already been cooked and it has been cleaned up and everything so we can watch it by that time.

 

Make it a priority

It's kind of the same way with your digital product. You have to prioritize it. And if you're finding that you are consistently not being able to find the time to create and launch your digital product, then maybe it's not a priority for you right now. And that's fine. If you want to keep running your business as is and you're happy with how things are right now, that's totally fine. There's no judgment there. You don't have to have a digital product just because I am constantly raving about how good they are and just because you might feel like everyone else around you has them. You don't have to as long as you are happy with the way that things are right now. If you're not happy with the way that things are, then something will need to change, right?

And if you're constantly finding that you don't have the time for it right now, then you need to change something and maybe you need to reassess what you're prioritizing over and above creating your digital product because excuses won't change things. We can complain and say, “Well, I don't have the time to do it,” but at some point we have to take ownership and be honest with ourselves and say, “Well, do I really not have the time or am I just choosing to prioritize other things over and above the hard stuff?” Because creating a digital product is… Yeah, it is the hard stuff. It does require a bit more brainpower than watching an episode of The Bachelor.

So it is being real with yourself. Like, what am I prioritizing here? And what do I need to prioritize to get to where I want to be with my business, with my life? I know that I do have a lot more time than most of you because I don't have kids and because I have fired all of my clients. So I purely just create and launch digital products. That is my business. And obviously, I have the podcast and I'm on Instagram and all of that stuff, but the core of my business is creating and launching digital products.

So I know for you, it's probably really easy to say, “Well, Steph, of course you can say it's about prioritizing the time. You have a lot more time.” And I will accept that. Yes, I do have a lot more time now because I set aside that time to create and launch my digital products in the first place. When I created my first online course, I was still working in a job. I was working three days a week and I was running a marketing consultancy with retainer clients on the side and I was living overseas. So I did have a fair bit going on.

And as a result, what I did was I decided, okay, I'm going to stop prioritizing brunches with friends and all the other activities I would do on the weekend, and I spent every weekend for months working on creating and launching my course instead of doing the fun stuff that I really wanted to say yes to in the moment, but that I knew wasn't going to get me to the business that I wanted in the end. So I made that course my priority, and that is how it eventually fell into place. Eventually, piece by piece, it fell into place.

 

So now that we've gone through the real talk, let's do some practical tips on how to find the time.

1. Where is my time going?

So firstly, ask yourself, where is your time going? Track your time. Be meticulous with tracking your time for a week because it might feel like you're just spending five minutes on Instagram here and there, but maybe over the course of a day, you're spending two, three hours. Can you imagine if you set aside two or three hours to work on your digital product instead of being on Instagram? And automatically, I can hear some of you thinking, “Oh, but I need to be on Instagram to grow my business.” No, you don't. Okay, yes, you do need to show up and maybe do some stories and share some content, that kind of stuff, but you can do that in 10 minutes a day, right?

I'm a big fan of batching. So writing your Instagram posts and scheduling them in one hit rather than logging on, going to upload a post, getting distracted, looking through about 10 people's stories, then finally hitting publish, then getting distracted again and next thing you know you've wasted an hour. So it's all of the little bits and pieces like that that really add up. So track your time. And then when you go through your week of time tracking, ask yourself, for each section or each task that you've spent time on, ask yourself, do I want to keep prioritizing this thing over and above creating my digital product? And if the answer is yes, then that's cool. Keep doing that. If the answer is no, then you know that something needs to change there.

 

2. Delegation

The second thing, can I delegate things that take too much time? So for example, bookkeeping. I am really good at bookkeeping in my business, right? I used to be an accountant. I can bookkeep better than most bookkeepers can because I understand the tax implications and all of that, but I delegated that about a year ago because it was just taking way too much time. So just because you can do something and because maybe you're really good at something doesn't mean you should be doing it, okay? Likewise, with things in your household like daily tasks like cleaners. Cleaning your house. If you can get a cleaner in, it's actually one of the cheaper things to outsource. My cleaner costs about half the price of any of the other contractors in my business that I contract out to. So for me, if I can get my cleaners in for four hours a fortnight, that is saving me an extra two hours in my week.

So think about the things that you could delegate. Maybe it's not delegating it to another person. Maybe it's delegating your weeknight dinners to something like HelloFresh or Marley Spoon or like the meal prep kits, you know what I mean? Maybe you could get your kids to even create the dinners from those things. So get creative about all of the things that you could delegate or outsource in your life and in your business.

 

3. Can I block out time and make this a priority?

And then the third thing to consider is can I block out time in my calendar and make this a priority? So can you say every morning for an hour, before you even check your inbox, know that that first hour of your day is blocked out in your calendar and that is time to work on your digital product. If you leave it till the end of your day, you're probably going to find that your to-do list runs over and you don't quite get everything done and you'll end up bumping that appointment that you have to work on your digital product.

But if you can do it first thing in the morning, and bonus points, if you have a friend who wants to launch a digital product as well, maybe even do a virtual Zoom co-working date. You both jump on Zoom and work together for an hour three times a week or something. And then that way you won't keep putting it off, okay? It's very easy to put off the little flexible things on our to-do list, the things that aren't important or urgent or a priority. But they actually are important. Creating a digital product is important. You won't see the payoff now, but you'll see the payoff once you launch it.

So I hope that really helps with finding the time and prioritizing creating a digital product. I know it feels like it's going to take a lot of time, especially when you haven't started, it can feel like there's just so much to do, but once you start to take action, you'll find that it gets a lot easier and you'll find that just lots of small action and it'll be done, right?

 

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