How to Start a Side Hustle While Working Full-Time

Hey everybody, Chris Holdheide here with SideHustleAcademy.com. And today, I’m going to be talking about how to start a side business while working a full-time job.

So like a lot of you, you all have a full-time job of some sort, and you want to start a side business. But you might be wondering well how am I going to go about running this side business while I’m doing this full-time job and making both of them work more cohesively together.

So in this video, I’m going to dive into that topic a little deeper and share a few things that I have done over the years to help my business work more smoothly together.

Tip #1 Focus on the Time You Have and Don’t Have

To start, one of the very first things you need to do is get focused on the time you have and the time don’t have with your business.

And to help illustrate that, I’m going to show you a sample Google calendar that I put together just to show you how this might look and why you need to track these things. Now, as you can see here on my Google calendar, you can see that I’ve scheduled a lot of different things.

And that’s the first thing you’re going to want to do when you’re trying to figure out how much time you have for your business.

Well obviously, you might be sleeping between certain hours here. On my schedule, I wake up at 6:00 and then I exercise for a half hour here. And then from basically 6:30 to 7:30, I am working on my side business for just an hour.

And then after that, from 7:30 on, I’m going to work and I work until 5:00, and then I’m spending time with my family after that, from 5:00 to 8:00.

And then I have this open space here, is what I want to talk about here in a second. But then at 10:00, I’m going to work from 10:00 to 11:00 before I go to bed, and work on my side hustle for another hour. So that shows that I would roughly put in two hours per day on my side business.

But what you’ll want to do is track the time you’re spending on your side business, where you’re spending it, and looking at the things that you’re doing.

The last thing you want to do is not know all the time that you’re spending any given day. So to do this, you want to track every single hour of your day for a week, to see where you are spending your time.

Now, as you can tell, I’ve got a few hours here, in-between 8:00 and 10:00 that I’m not really doing anything. And these are the hours where I could be putting more time into my side business.

So how are we going to track this? How are we going to track this? There’s a simple tool that you can use to do that. There’s a free app called Toggl.

If you may or may not have heard of this particular app, but this app will allow you to track what you are doing every minute of the day. So, what you’ll want to do is say, let’s say you’re sleeping, we’ll just type this in here. And then we’ll just hit Start.

Now, there is an app version of this. There are a desktop and an app version of it, so you can do both. So we could type in here, we got sleeping, so we’re doing that. So we did that now. We got that done.

Once we have that track, we’ll type in the next thing. So maybe we’re at work, so we’ll type in “Work.” And then that’ll run all day while we’re at work. And then when we get done at work, maybe we’re going to put down let’s say, “Family time.” And we’re going to run that for a week. So that will run as it goes. And then when we’re done with that, we might put down “Side hustle time.”

So we’re tracking our entire day by doing this with our app. And we can have this app running simultaneously in the background, on our iPhone or whatever type of phone that you have. And you can basically see what you’re doing on a regular day’s time.

So what’s nice about this, once you’re done, you can go in, you can check out this report, and it will show you where, from Monday to Sunday, where you’re spending your time. What are you spending your time on? And you can come down here and see, well these projects I’m spending time on, this is where I’m spending the most time on.

And it’ll give you a sense of where your time is being used well, and where your time isn’t being used and managed so well.

Again, this is a really great way to do that. I recommend doing this as a primary way, just to figure out where you’re spending your time. And then from there, just making an adjustment and making changes as you go, so maybe you find out that I’m really wasting an hour of time between 9:00 and 10:00.

I could be doing something else in that spot, right here. Right here, I could be spending time working on my side business for an extra hour. And that would give me an extra five hours a week let’s say.

So, this is just a simple calendar I put together. You don’t have to do it this way like me. Maybe you only got evenings open, or maybe you only got mornings open to work on your side business. That’s fine, just plan it out that the way that it works best for you.

Tip #2 Focus On Doing the Most Important Thing First

The next thing you want to focus on is doing the most important things first in the say. So, whatever you’re doing for your side business, you want to make sure you do that right away in your business.

For a lot of people, what they end up doing is they end up checking their email, or their stats, their analytics, and hopping on their PayPal account and checking all these things.

And while those things are important and stuff, but those aren’t the things that are really going to move the needle forward in your business. So, you want to focus on the things that are going to do that for your business.

Question: What is the most important thing you can do during the day?

And that is doing one thing, and that is, what is the most important thing you can do during the day? That is the question you must be asking yourself.

If you are, for example…

• A freelance writer, that’s writing content.

• If you are an affiliate marketer, maybe that’s writing content.

• If you’re a course creator, that is maybe marketing your courses online or creating a new course.

Whatever that most important thing is for that day, that’s what you want to be working on. You don’t want to be checking stats, you don’t want to be checking stats, you don’t want to be checking your email.

You don’t want to be checking your PayPal account. Those things are important but do those at the end of the day.

Make that a goal. Hey, I want to check my email and all that, but I’m going to do the most important thing first, and then I’m going to jump into doing all these other things, like checking my email and stats and stuff.

Those things are important, don’t get me wrong, but focusing on the thing that you can control the most, creating content, freelancing writing, or whatever it is, maybe it’s driving for Uber even. Doing that thing first. That’s the thing that’s moving the needle.

One way you can focus on that one thing, there’s a book I read. It’s a really great book. I read it at least once or twice a year, it’s called The One Thing by Garry Keller and Jay Papasan. Really good book, I recommend reading.

It’s been very helpful, it keeps me focused on doing the one thing and helping me set my goals. It has a really good section on goal-setting.

If you have not read that book, or you haven’t read it in a while, I highly recommend reading that book again. It’s hugely valuable, and it can be hugely valuable in your business.

Tip #3 Do Something Every day

The other thing I also want to talk about is doing something every day. This is hugely important. I know a lot of people say, well, I only work on one day, or I work on the weekends, or one day during the week, or two days during the week.

And while that’s great and everything, that’s really not going to move the needle for you. You need to do something every day in your business, even if it’s five minutes, do it because that will be moving the needle forward in your business, and helping you grow your business as you go. Versus sitting there, not doing anything for that day.

Even when I go on vacation, I usually take my laptop with me and spend a little bit of time. And that might be just reading a book on the topic that I’m trying to learn something about.

Or it could be writing for 10, 15 minutes on a blog post, creating a YouTube video, whatever it is. I’m moving the needle forward by doing something every single day in my business.

Tip #4 Don’t Do Work Stuff During Job Hours

Finally, the last thing that needs to be said here is, don’t do work on your side hustle during job hours.

This is a big no-no, especially if your job is something that might be a competition between what you’re doing, and what your job is doing. So for example, maybe you’re doing some consulting, the job is a consulting job, and you’re doing consulting the same thing, but doing it on the side.

That might not be a very good thing. You’re probably going to get in a little trouble there if they catch on what you’re doing. So I would not do that, especially at work.

But, some things I try to remember is that I just try to focus on, when I’m at work, I focus on work stuff.

I do my work stuff and I do that, and I focus on that. Now, my only exception to it is, as long as it’s okay at your workplace.

To do that is maybe to do some of your side hustle stuff during breaks or your lunch hour, stuff like that. That usually can be a gray area for some businesses. At my job, it’s okay because I own that business, but it’s okay for me to do that.

But make sure, if you’re not sure, go check with your boss and run it by them before you do it. That way, you don’t cause any problems in the future on that. So definitely want to check that.

Wrapping Up…

As I’m wrapping this up, make sure you check out SideHustleAcademy.com. And if you like what you are checking out here, and what you’re getting, make sure you subscribe to me on YouTube.

And check out my videos as we go, because I am adding videos on a regular basis here. So you can check those out.

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Side Note: My article said there were 5 tips but there are only 4 tips given.