What if you could start a project by committing just 25 minutes per day?
You can. I’m going to show you how. In the past, I’ve talked about the backstory for Sustainability Entrepreneur in detail, but what you didn’t know is that I set that project up by giving just 25 minutes a day of my time to push it forward incrementally.
Why only 25 minutes? Well, that’s because I have my primary business, Warp It, which is a proven model with a large impact and it’s where I get my income, support my family, and I have a loyal team of staff.
Warp It is where most of my impact comes from, it still needs to grow and attract new customers and continue to serve the existing customers. Warp It is my main focus for the last seven years and it is my main ROI (investment of energy and time) , but…
I used to be be inundated by my ideas! In fact, when I started Warp It and was setting it up, for the first few years I was generating so many ideas that I had to mentally suppress them and train myself to be good, at one thing. Delivering Warp It.
Rather than suppressing ideas to focus on Warp It, about a year ago I started let my normal influx of ideas blossom. So many ideas, too many ideas, ideas coming all times of the day and night, and whilst 99% were non-starters, 1% actually appeared to be pretty good. This 1 % of the ideas I was having , were viable business ideas and some of them might even be able to outgrow the impact of Warp It if enough attention was paid to them.
The climate emergency changed everything
A lot of my ideas relate to sustainability and changing the world for the better, they always have. Then, in January 2019, the climate emergency really hit home, and I felt that the good ideas I’d been forcing out of my mind might be better off being shared. So, I started giving myself just 25 minutes per day to test out and deliver my new ideas.
The first was a project called Sustainability Entrepreneur. It wasn’t a flop, but it didn’t get the engagement that it and I needed to push forward with it, so now it’s on the back-burner. It was my first experiment, so I wasn’t disheartened, I simply decided to use my time elsewhere. I’m not done with Sustainability Entrepreneur, it still has a future.
Whilst setting up Sustainability Entrepreneur, the data I was receiving actually drove me towards another idea, Sustainability Mentors. Fortunately, this time I did get the immediate traction that I was after, so I’ve been giving 25 minutes a day for the last few months. There was only one weekend where I put in a few solid hours, but overall it’s been 25 minutes a day.
25 minutes are all I need… and are budgeted
I’m forced to use my 25 minutes very wisely to move things forward. That is all I want to risk. It means I work on one thing or process and don’t dabble between things. If I can do one thing solidly and apply my energy properly for 25 minutes, I can achieve a lot! If I know I have one task to do, my subconscious mind is preparing for that task before I get started, and as I’m doing it, it helps propel me along. My subconscious mind can also order the importance of the tasks that need doing and choose the one that has the most impact on Sustainability Mentors as a whole.
It won’t be 25 minutes forever…
At this early stage, 25 minutes a day is enough, but at some point, I’m going to scale that up. To help me move things forward, I’ve been working on an advisory board and I’m going to be sending out information about that very soon. We’ve got all of the advisors involved and we are getting ready to tell people what is coming next.
I want to employ people who can drive a bigger impact, and that means implementing a business model around this service. To introduce a business model, we need to offer value, and that means making a service that is relevant, useful, and in demand for our users.
Creating value for you
As part of our value offering, we are going to build a ‘start your own side project in 25 minutes a day’ course, and offer it for free in this blog. If that sounds useful to you, and you want to start your own side project using my framework, keep following this blog and comment below!
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