S3 E1: How to Increase Income While Working Fewer Hours in Your Business

In this episode, Sophia Hyde reflects on the past year and shares insights on how she managed to grow her business by 46% while working fewer hours. She discusses the importance of self-care, time management principles like the Pareto Principle and Parkinson's Law, and the impact of joy on personal and professional success. Sophia emphasizes the need for radical self-care and respect for one's time, and how these changes contributed to her overall happiness and productivity. She also hints at exciting plans for the upcoming year, including new interviews and content.

Takeaways

• We have the power to choose how our year unfolds.
• Radical self-care is essential for personal growth.
• Business growth can happen with fewer working hours.
• The Pareto Principle helps identify high-impact activities.
• Parkinson's Law can improve time management.
• Prioritizing self-care leads to better energy and productivity.
• Setting boundaries is crucial for respecting your time.
• Joy can be a significant factor in business success.
• Reading for pleasure can enhance overall happiness.
• Surrounding yourself with positivity attracts opportunities.

Chapters

00:00
Welcome to 2025: Setting Intentions

09:49
Parkinson's Law: Time Management Strategies

17:01
Radical Respect for Time: Setting Boundaries

26:44
Looking Ahead: Exciting Plans for 2025

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Have a topic you would love to hear Sophia address on the podcast? Send your ideas to hello@sophiahyde.com 

Transcript

Hi, welcome back. It's 2025. We have such a great year ahead. I do believe that. I really do believe that we get to choose if this year's gonna be one that serves us or not. There's a lot going on in the world. There is a lot that can steal and rob our energy and our attention.

But I am not here to help you solve the world's problems. I'm here to help you create the life that you want to be living and control the things that you can control. And I have not had any episodes for a couple of months. If you listened in October, I dropped, I only dropped two episodes this fall. One was in.

really fun interview with Lexia. I hope that you guys listened to that and enjoyed it because she's amazing and that conversation was so valuable. And I gave an update on my life of like, I released episodes throughout the summer and then just stopped. And so you can go back and listen if you want the nitty gritty details on my life. The bullet points were a health diagnosis.

I was diagnosed with stage four endometriosis and had to really step into some radical self care and change how much time I spent in care of myself. I, we had multiple hurricanes come through our area. My husband spent, 10 weeks in the fall out of the country and I was solo parenting. And also he is my podcast editor and producer. That does play a significant role. And, all of those things impacted my ability to show up here, but.

What I want to talk to you guys about is last year as a whole, dealt really a lot of unexpected curve balls that I didn't know were coming. Everything I just listed to you guys, January of 2024, it was not on the radar. I released my book last December. My thought process was that this year or last year,

Sophia Hyde (02:23.777)
was gonna be focused on promoting my book and doing a whole bunch of publicity around that and pitching myself to get on different podcasts and spreading the word and doing a lot more speaking engagements and just really leaning on that exposure. But all that stuff takes a lot of time and I didn't know that these other things were gonna come to my plate and I just.

gave them the attention that they needed. And I let some of those others, I just reshifted my priorities, my focus, my goals. But what was fascinating was as I've closed out 2024 and I'm looking at what occurred in my business and in my personal life, my business grew by 46%. But I worked fewer hours than I had the last two years before.

I also did a lot more stuff for myself. I increased my self-care, I increased my joy.

I don't think that I, don't remember if I shared with you guys on the previous episode that I followed, I joined a synchronized swimming team and that has been so much fun. So it was really fascinating to me of, wow, I worked less yet my business grew by 46%. And so as we're moving into 2025 and looking at this year ahead.

I thought that the first episode for season three to kick off would be great to talk about some of those misconceptions about time and energy and share with you what I believe were the differentiating factors that allowed my business to expand and my joy and my pleasure while I worked fewer hours. So there's

Sophia Hyde (04:25.761)
I wrote down five notes, five different bullet point things that I believe were the difference makers. One is something called the Pareto principle. So you can look this up. The Pareto principle is this idea that roughly 80 % of consequences come from

20 % of causes. So in other words, smaller percentage of causes have an outsized effect. Think about this, like it's not that different than that saying you've probably heard in a group dynamic where they say 20 % of the people do 80 % of the work. It's kind of that idea, but in your life, the things that you're doing also have that effect. That 80-20 rule that might apply to

some organization that you're part of, it can also apply to your life. I looked at that principle in my own life to determine what delivers the results I want in my life.

that includes not only the growth of my business, right, where leads come from and new clients come from, but also what is helping me achieve the goals for our family, for all the other spokes in my life, my physical health, my friendships, our financial goals, my marriage. What are the things that I am doing that are delivering the biggest impact? And so if 20 %

of the results in my life are coming, or 80 % of the results of things in my life are coming from 20 % of the things that I'm doing, I started narrowing down what I was willing to give my time, energy, and attention to.

Sophia Hyde (06:24.971)
Because I needed to scale back, I had to evaluate what is the highest and best use of my time, energy, and attention. There are things I could have spent more time doing that may or may not have delivered results, but they would not have delivered the results at the same high impact level as other options that I had. And so I think that's the first thing that I did, was I scaled back.

In some practical examples of like what, give me an example, Sophia, what are you talking about here? For me, that's part of why there weren't a lot of podcast episodes dropped. I enjoy this. I really enjoy recording this podcast. I have people who send me text messages or run into me in public or reach out to me through Instagram, you know, and they tell me how much they love listening to this podcast. I love doing it. And I know there are people who love listening to it, but the reality is...

It may be different in the future, but currently it is not a significant income generator. It's not where my business is growing or my leads are coming from. It's just something that I enjoy doing. enjoy, it makes me so happy to share the things that are making a difference in my life and in my client's life and allow other people to get access to those for free. It's part of my contribution. I really enjoy this and I do believe that one day it will be a significant

impact in my business. But currently, mathematically speaking, it's not. And another place that can be a real big time suck is social media. I realized that it takes a lot of effort to create really good content. I even invested a lot of money last year, in the first half of the year. I went through three different administrative, virtual assistants until I found the right person to work with.

and we were working on pumping out content. And it's actually even having someone to help me, it was still a massive chunk of my to-do list for the week to come up with those ideas, conceptualize them, put them to paper, word them in a way so that the podcast episode could tie into the blog, which could tie into the social. And I needed to provide all that content to her in advance, right, so that she could produce the work and...

Sophia Hyde (08:49.94)
it became a huge burden and a huge chunk of my time each week. And again, maybe one day it would deliver a great funnel system and grow my business and produce more leads, but last year that wasn't where the growth was coming from. And so when I needed to scale back, I let go of those things that were a majority of my to-do list with a small impact on my results.

And I've had a few clients come from this way and I've had my list grow, my email list grow a little bit from this podcast, but it's not where the majority comes from. So that's that, that's an example of the Pareto principle. Where is the, where is the highest impact coming from and how can I do more of what delivers high impact and do less of what is not. The next thing that I do believe helped me have the result of making more

my business growing and working less hours, is another principle called Parkinson's Law. So if you haven't heard of Parkinson's Law, it's this idea that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Basically what that means is things will take as long as you allow them to take. So if I give myself an hour to prepare for my podcast, it'll take me an hour to prepare for it. If I give myself three hours, it'll take me three hours. If I give myself 15 minutes, then I'm going to spend 15 minutes preparing. So how long do I want to prepare? How long of how much time do I want to set aside on the calendar? And what I allow is how long it will take. If I have all day to create an email I'm going to spend, I'll spend all day on it.

looking for more graphics, finding better ways to say it, editing it over a million times. I could spend all day on an email or I could say, I've got 20 minutes to push this sucker out. I'm gonna do the best that I can, check in for some typos and we're moving on with our lives. If I give myself 20 minutes, it'll take 20 minutes. It'd probably be shorter. I have blogs and emails in the past that were like 3000 words. I spent massive amounts of time on them. And then I've had other ones that actually the only time it went viral.

Sophia Hyde (11:03.073)
was a blog I spent, I've literally spent about 20 minutes on it. I only had a small amount of time, so I just had to like, just jot the idea and the story down that was right on the tip of my tongue, pumped it out, hit send, moved on, and it went viral. And it's like, I have literally spent days preparing and putting lots of work into some content. And then the content that I just went with my gut and just spoke from the heart and then hit send had the biggest impact. So if we want to overthink something, we can.

And so things take as long as you allow them to take. And that's the Parkinson's law. I, when I apply that to my business, that's also how I was able to grow my business and work fewer hours because I decided how long I was willing to set aside time for a specific task and I fit it in and only the most important things got done. And have I ran out of time? I ran out of time.

It rolled over to the next week, it rolled over to the next day, but I wasn't going to work myself into the ground or get into burnout. This was the time I allotted and so I had to make it work. So if it was really important, I figured out how to make it work in the window that I allowed it to take up in my life.

The third thing that I believe contributed to last year's success is radical self-care. Radical self-care.

Prior to the diagnosis I got last year, I would have told you that my self-care was really high, maybe like a nine out of 10 spoke on my wheel. And it wasn't until I was faced with, you know, being told that there was a bunch of inflammation in my body and having to ask, really ask myself like, how did that get there? Like I have such, I feel like, I felt before that I genuinely believed I had a fantastic work-life balance.

Sophia Hyde (13:01.781)
and took really good care of myself. But I was living the 80-20 lifestyle. And so 20 % of the time I didn't. Like was giving myself lots of grace, lots of pasts, lots of excuses, but I was doing a really good job at 80 % of the time. And I was okay with that. That was enough for me and I was satisfied. This diagnosis led me to be like, no, we're gonna take this radical. We're not gonna do the excuses and the passes. We're going to level up.

And my self-care became to the point that it was uncomfortable. And again, it's been said a million times before, like if you're not feeling uncomfortable, you're probably not growing. And my discomfort was in little things like the pelvic floor therapist takes me because of traffic like an hour to get to. So taking a three hour chunk of my calendar to say, I'm going to give myself time to drive there.

It should only be 30 minutes away. It's because the traffic gets an hour. I have to myself an hour. So it's three hours to drive there, do the appointment, drive home.

and give myself permission to take that time out of my week. That was hard for me. Giving myself time to chop all the ingredients for my salad and say, I'm going to stand here and spend a whole hour of my Sunday night chopping everything that I need to have a healthy lunch for this week. Those kinds of things, I was just wanting to be convenient or bypass. But the radical self-care.

the I am going to prioritize taking care of myself first and make the rest of my life fit around it. It made all the pieces have to shift and move around and look different. But then I felt better and I had more energy. The various things that I teach, right? When you take care of yourself, you're have more energy, you're gonna feel better, produced better results.

Sophia Hyde (15:07.869)
And it's so hard to wrap around this for so many of my clients that it's better to, you know, I could work an eight hour day or I could take an hour to get some great exercise in and increase my energy and maybe do a little bit of some rest and relaxation. So maybe take two hours. So I can add two hours to take care of myself.

with some pleasure, rest, and maybe some movement. And then that eight hour work day, you could probably get done in five. So it's not even like I took two hours for myself and I can still get all done in six. A lot of times the brain, works when it is rested. And when you have exercise to move your body and the chemicals in your brain, they move differently. Like all that stuff has an impact. You can get more done in a smaller amount of time. Now, obviously some industries this doesn't work for, like I have clients that are, I have several clients who are attorneys.

Their paychecks are greatly impacted by billable hours, right? So you might be in industry like that or even with my industry, like if I am working with a client an hour a week or 30 minutes a week, it is still, I'm still going to spend an hour with them or 30 minutes with them. But there are things outside of that where I can increase my efficiency and my productivity. And so if you are in an industry where your time

is impacted by your ability to get projects done and your, whether it's creativity or your brain power, ideation, you can get more done in a smaller amount of time if you're taking care of yourself. Okay, this flows into the fourth thing, which was, again, that word radical, and I'm saying the word radical, the

The sentence is radical respect of my time. But I'm saying like radical changes because to just say I respected my time is like, okay, yeah, you we lived by the favorite week concept and you had boundaries, whatever. The radical saying that in front of the phrase, it demonstrates to you guys, it sends the message that it was radical because it was to the point of discomfort.

Sophia Hyde (17:31.711)
It felt extreme, but I respected my time at a radical level. There was...

not like I didn't I can't think of any time last year and I'm sure if I really sad I'd come up with something but for the most part I can't think of any example where I allowed anyone else's priorities agenda whatever to to creep into my life I'm not saying I never wasted time don't get me wrong I am not

Guys, I have ADHD. There were plenty of sit pits and getting distracted and wasting my time with something that wasn't helpful. So I'm not saying that I had a perfect year with how I managed my time. I always will have room to grow in this area. But I had a radical respect of my time and I didn't allow other people to get, like my boundaries and my walls, they were so high.

But not in an unhealthy way. I still did fun things with friends that I wanted to do. Not that I felt obligated to do. Maybe that's it. I eliminated all of this stuff you have to do out of obligation or the stuff you get shitted on. I did not have the bandwidth for it, so it was all eliminated. And I've gotten better and better over the years at that.

and I've shared about it before on this podcast, but last year it was radical. I said, I had to say no to a lot of people who I even love. Some of my closest friends, let's grab coffee, let's grab lunch. There's not a window. Basically it was like, you gotta come do it with me and my kids. Evening, weekend, come over, hang out. I had friends that just came over to watch. When the new Queer Eye season dropped, I had a friend over and what else did she come over to watch with me?

Sophia Hyde (19:39.086)
I don't remember a few things, but I had a girlfriend who would just come over to my house and watch shows with me after the kids went to bed. I had another girlfriend who came and hung out and let our kids play while she just sat in my kitchen and talked to me while I deep cleaned. Like I'm just cleaning my kitchen and we're chatting. you know, it's not that I didn't allow any time with people that I love. It just, it had to be spent in a way that was gonna feel good to me. Okay. And the last one, number five.

The thing that I did that I genuinely feel had a major impact on why I grew last year was I spent the whole year operating at a much higher level of joy. I do think the two biggest contributing factors to that, one was that the year before was such a deep and heavy personal growth year. I did a lot of healing work around

And I did work with a therapist and I worked with my mentor and coach who does a lot of like hypnotherapy work and trauma brain rewiring stuff. That was the year before, super heavy in the healing work. I didn't, I really, there wasn't very many times that I was like triggered or stressed or spiraling over something somebody else somewhere was doing. Like I healed all that, so.

other people's actions were their actions. I was just not bothered by choices other people were making in their life. Even if they were very adjacent to me. I just, yeah, I just wasn't... So I was not attached to other people's words and choices in lives. So I think that definitely increased my joy. But the other one was, and I don't remember if I shared this with you guys or not, I am going to do a whole episode on it coming up. But last year I developed a habit of reading.

couple of smut books, smut books per week, whether through audio or actually like reading it on my Kindle or my Kindle off of my phone. But I ended up reading a hundred and twelve smut books from February through the end of the year. So in a ten and a half month period of time I read a hundred and twelve books and maybe five of those

Sophia Hyde (22:02.901)
were business or personal growth related, but over a hundred of them were just romance novels and genuinely made my life better. Because life is really hard right now guys, right? There's a lot of really serious stuff happening all around us. You can get sucked into the news. You can get sucked into the negativity. You can get sucked into this stuff that's just really, really, really, really, really, really shitty.

And I can only control what I can control. And so while getting ready in the morning, while washing dishes, while laying in my bed at nine o'clock at night, chilling, I would have a fun book just for pleasure in my ears. And it helps to just be some of just rom-coms, you know, but.

it puts you with like, you know, it's all happy endings. Don't we need more happy endings right now? And it made me smile and it made me have warm fuzzies. And it was just, my mind wasn't fixated on all these things that I can't control. And for the 15 years before that, I read a million self-help books and I still love them. Don't get me wrong. I actually, read a couple, multiple books last year that were great for growth. And

I'm glad that I read them. But that used to be all I would read. So basically my thoughts were on my life, events in the world, and constantly trying to learn and grow and improve. I think last year I just said, you know, I think I'm, I think I can, I think I know enough that I can build a successful business and I can have a happy life with my family and my kids and.

I think I've done enough learning and growing and expanding that I can have more time to chill. And I'm not saying that I will not keep growing. Are you guys kidding me right now? Like I'm addicted to growth. That's not going away. I just don't have to be obsessively infatuated with always having to expand all of the time. Like there's a little bit of a chill factor to just say, I'm good.

Sophia Hyde (24:30.498)
let's just read some mindless literature that's gonna make me laugh. And I did, 100 times over. when I make that a bullet point of one of the reasons why I do believe in business group, because I moved through the world lighter. I moved through the world happier. And when there's all of this negativity and really hard shit going on,

I didn't read those books for any personal growth reason. did it to just, and I'll actually, I have a whole episode coming up about why I did it and how it came into my life. So just tune in for that, for more of that, for that information. But I wasn't trying to do it for any growth reasons.

And what happened was I became happier and more relaxed and people are attracted to that. I think it is attractive to be in the presence of somebody who feels light, who feels joyful, who doesn't feel heavy. And I spent like my whole adulthood being told I was like really serious and intense and don't get me wrong guys, I will still go deep if you want to go deep. And I am still a very intense person. Um,

I'm not changing, but it's kind of nice to be the person that's the breath of fresh air in the room after like a whole life of being the person who's like taking this deep. yeah, and so I honestly, I do think it rolled over into part of why my business grew because I think.

people want to be around somebody like that. And so it's easier to attract a new client or for someone to refer you because they'd be like, my God, you're just gonna love being around her. And I wasn't trying to do that when I made the choice to read these books, right? But it was like a byproduct. so those are the five things that I think led to 2024. As I wrap up this episode,

Sophia Hyde (26:44.504)
I just wanna share with you guys that I've got some cool stuff coming. So I have one interview already lined up with this bad ass woman I cannot wait to introduce you guys to. So stay tuned. I'm just, I'm not gonna like announce what it is or about or whatever, but she's so freaking cool. And I'm really excited to introduce you guys to her. So I've got that lined up and then also upcoming.

is a four-part series. I'm going to bring Brandon on, my husband. And we're gonna talk about some of the behind-the-scenes things that I want you guys to hear. You hear from me all the time, but I want you guys to hear from him and his perspective of a lot of the things that have led to.

not just growth, but even things that my clients don't even realize that they're learning from him because all the things that he has taught me that have ended up being the things I teach my clients. And so it's, I think they're going to be fun episodes. have four different topics currently planned and I'll bring him back for more. If, sliding to my DMS, if you have, if listening to them, you think of something else you want to talk to Brandon about, he's cool and chill. He'll come up whenever I ask him to. and.

you guys can continue to get his perspective on anything that you want. And yeah, that's all I have for today. That's all I have. If you have not already, make sure that you've downloaded the app, the Favorite Self app, which has free resources to guide yourself through your favorite wheel assessment or your favorite life wheel assessment, or you can learn about the favorite week concept. There's guided meditations. Lots of great tools are on there.

you. And in addition to that, you can click the link below to buy the Unleash Your Favorite Self book and companion journal that will help you coach yourself. Like a lot of the work that I do with my clients as a life coach, going diving into all 10 spokes, you can learn a lot of those principles and ideas and perspectives and then make those changes yourself. It's really great if you want to DIY your own coaching experience. That's what that book is for.

Sophia Hyde (29:02.445)
And as always, you can, if you do want to talk to me one-on-one and dive into what may be going on in your life, then book a roadmap session and let's do a one-on-one call. That's what I have for you guys this week. I am so excited to continue to journey with you through this year and what is to come and I'll be back next week. Bye.