Day in the Life Vlog: Balancing Entrepreneurship and My Full-Time Job

Balancing Entrepreneurship and My Full-Time Job is A LOT. Here is a typical day in my life as a small business owner and an associate product marketing manager in tech. I usually start my day by writing out my to-do's on my desk whiteboard. Then, I tackle my morning routine which includes caring for my dog, Louie, eating breakfast, and working out. Afterward, I get my small business to-do's like checking my inbox, my ads manager, and providing feedback to my team out of the way before I start work for my full-time job. My full-time marketing job is currently working from home and includes taking meetings and finishing tasks my manager and I set for the week. In the evenings, I usually get more work done including meeting with my digital content assistant. Delegating tasks is the real secret to balancing it all - business, career, and life!

Hey guys, it's Joi here, and welcome to another day in the life vlog. Today I'm focused on preparing for my Monday meeting with my assistant. We meet every Monday to plan out our goals for the week. But I also have other things to do. I work full-time and marketing for a tech company for those of you that are new here. And I run two businesses, one being my natural hair brand, Joiful Bee, and the second being my media company, where I create content and work with brands on partnerships. So I'm usually pretty busy on the day-to-day. If you're interested in seeing how I handle working full time and being a business owner, make sure you subscribe to this channel and turn on the notification bell. With that being said, let's get into my to-do's for the day.

Okay, so every morning, I pick out what I need to do for the day. But since t's a Monday, I'm going to read out what I have to do for the week and the day. So for the day, I usually put upwards of five action items. I always do my morning routine, so that doesn't count as one. I have Google action items and a whole separate to-do list that I keep for my assistant. I need to approve her social posts, I need to email Facebook to troubleshoot, and I need to do the Joiful Bee stories. Also, film this vlog. Now that we have the list let's get into what else I have to do this week. This is usually a super long list.

I put this list on my whiteboard. If you're interested in getting a desk whiteboard, I will link some below so that you can check it out and buy them on Amazon. So go to the links in the description box to get a desk whiteboard. I use this every day. And you're going to be seeing me plan out my day and week in all of my vlogs. Now that I have my to-do list written for the day, I need to tackle my A.M. routine.

I did cycling one day, and my butt hurt so bad, so I went on Amazon and got these cycling shorts with the patterning in the back. I'll have a link down below. I bought two pairs, and they're great. I may buy some more, so I don't have to do laundry as much, but they are affordable, and my butt doesn't hurt after doing my Peloton workout anymore. So here is my outfit of the day. I just got out of the shower. I'm wearing my USC hoodie, Calvin Klein biker shorts, and then my super comfortable Ugg slippers. I like to stay comfortable because I'm at my desk all day, and the only time I go outside is when I walk my dog. So, I'm going to finish up my smoothie, and we're going to get into this work.

Now that I'm done with my morning routine, it's time to do a few of my business to-do.'s I do these every morning, and those include checking my inbox and going into the ads manager to record my business performance from the last day. I do this for my business Joiful Bee because that company I'm dependent on daily sales. Also, see if there are any customer questions and emails and also check the ads manager.

I just got finished with all of my business to-do's for my morning routine. Last week was a very good week for Joiful Bee. And now I have one more action item for the morning before transitioning into my work from my full-time job. And that is doing a little bit of prep for my assistant. As I said, we meet today. So I wanted to do a couple of things, like looking at the social posts she is doing for Joiful Bee. My assistant's name is Aralyn. She's my digital content assistant. And right now, she's working on April posts for the Joiful Bee Instagram account. So I'm going to look at the pitches she has on our spreadsheet and give her my feedback. Once she has my feedback and those pitches are approved, she makes the post using Canva.

So I'm going to show you guys a little more of an up-close of what our pitch document looks like, so you guys can better understand how we work together. So this is our social plan trix. And this is where she pitches me ideas for the Instagram account. She has some guidelines to stick to whether she's posting a video or photo, like if it's going to be a graphic or product photo, or you know, model photo. She also lists any assets that she's going to use in the social posts. I love using the Google suite for all these things because it's easy to click and get a quick preview of what she's linking to. Then what I need to look at is her descriptions of what it's going to look like and the captions that she thinks she's going to write for the post. We already did April 1 through 15th. That's this yellow row where I gave my feedback. So I'm going to finish this really quick and then I will be ready to start my work for my other job. Okay, so I just put in all the feedback for the social post, which is awesome because Aralyn will be creating all the posts for April this week. So she has all the feedback she needs. And Wednesday, we're going to go over the finished posts and captions for final approval. So that's kind of how we work together on social posts. One of the last things I had to do was email the shipping labels to my fulfillment team to ship out kits. We ship out kits every day, so I just sent over 60 labels for them to print out and start working on the orders for today.

So now that that is all done, it is time to get into my nine to five work. It's on my to-do list as Google AI's for action items. But on my corporate laptop, I keep a whole separate to-do list of things I need to do for work. And my work hours are usually 10 to 6ish, but it varies. But we're just going to call it my nine to five, so you can distinguish what I'm doing work for that versus work for my business. I have a pretty busy week. I am getting a little bit more responsibility on my team with social media. So I need to schedule many meetings to learn more about what I'm going to be doing today and for the rest of the week.

Now, most of the stuff that I do for work, I'm not going to disclose. I'll be kind of lightly explaining what I do. Just be aware that I can't tell you everything that I do for work, but I'll try to tell you guys as much as I can. This is when I switch out my laptops to stay focused on one thing at a time. This laptop has a smaller screen, so sometimes I'll connect it to the monitor. Halfway through this, I'm probably going to eat some lunch and finish up for the nine to five.

Okay, so I am almost done with my to-do's for the day. I wanted to give you guys some of the best practices to make work from home productive. One is keeping my desk set up ergonomic. I have a chair that I love and a standing desk to keep myself comfortable. And also, I like to keep a running checklist of everything I need to do. So whenever I have meetings, I add to that checklist, and I check them off throughout the week. The checklist is really for the week because I think I meet with my manager about once or twice a week. So once we meet, I go over what I did and what still has to get done. I recommend keeping your work and your side hustles or business separate. Figure out ways you can separate your business from your nine to five. Now I'm going to get ready to care for my dog. We usually go out for a walk then he eats dinner. And then I start making dinner for myself and my boyfriend.

Okay, so I am back from walking Louis, and I am about to start my meeting with my assistant. We meet every Monday for about an hour, and we also meet Wednesdays for one to two hours depending on what needs to get done. We meet on Zoom, and I always prep slides for us to go through during the meeting. I prepped the slides yesterday, so I don't need to do that. And today, we're just going to be going over our second-quarter goals. So Q2 is April, May, June. And we're going to be going over what our goals are and the new things she'll be working on as well as things she's already done that she'll continue to do. She currently works for about 20 hours a week, and I've been getting her more hours. But I think that having someone to outsource things to is super important as a small business owner. That's 20 hours a week that I can pay someone to do, and I don't have to have on my plate. It would be impossible for me to get that much work done because I already worked about 40-60 hours a week. That's between my full-time job and my work for my businesses because I work through the weekends. With that being said, I'm going to log into the meeting. I think I'm going to add a clip or two of us in the meeting.

So I just finished up my meeting, and here's what I got done today. I got done with everything except one thing, which is good. And I am going to do the same thing tomorrow. So I'm going to cook some dinner, and that will be my day in life.