Hello, my friends! Today, we are going to talk about combining your full-time job with a side project. It doesn't have to be a side business. It can be a hobby, a volunteering project, house renovation, et cetera, something that requires a substantial amount of time on your end and something that you wanted to do for the longest time, but just couldn't find the time to do that.
I'm going to share my experience of how I'm combining my full-time job for building monthly methods. Let's go.
To give you a quick overview of my situation, I have a full-time job as a product manager in a tech company here in Toronto. It is a very demanding job. I have a ton of meetings every single week.
This is not a type of job where I have downtime during the day, where I can spend few hours on my side business. No, my day's fully booked. I'm busy. I don't have time to dedicate to my side business during my work hours. I also have a side passion project called Monthly Methods.
This is the personal productivity method I have created, which is based on agile product development principles used in the most innovative tech companies. In terms of the workload, this is what I have on a weekly basis. Right now, you're listening to the monthly method, podcast episodes.
I released them every week. So, it means that they have to record them every week, edit them and do all the stuff that they need to do so that you have a new podcast episode available on your phones every single Monday.
I also have a corresponding blog where you can find all the show notes for each episode, with all the links. On top of that, I also work with clients one-on-one. I teach them how to apply scrum principles to their personal productivity. Right now, I can't add any more one-on-one clients because I'm working full time. I am working on creating a course that would allow me to teach the monthly method to a larger group of people. So, all in all, on a weekly basis, I have my full-time job. I need to write, record and edit one podcast episode, attend all of my one-on-one coaching sessions with my clients, and ideally make some progress in creating the monthly method course.
Here are some of the things that prove to work really well for me.
Before you jump into committing to your side project, I think it's really important to get very disciplined in your full-time job. You need to clear out time outside your nine to five. But what I keep seeing is that people allow their full-time job to expand into all the hours of their day into their weekends, their evenings, mornings, et cetera. And So, I think in today's episode, I want to focus entirely on this piece. Ruthlessly, limit your work hours to nine to five making sure of that. If please your full-time job is contained within nine to five, it doesn't spread into other time blocks of your day.
So I knew from the very beginning that if I wanted to build Monthly Method, if I wanted to be consistent, I couldn't allow my full-time job to spread into all hours of my day. I can't afford to be checking my work emails at 8:00 PM. I can't afford to respond to slack messages first thing in the morning, because my goal is to build Monthly Method.
I need these hours and this focus for the Monthly Method. This means that I have to be very disciplined about sticking to my nine-to-five schedule. And so, when I realized that I decided to analyze all my previous experience and experience with people around me, to figure out what are some of the main causes of people working 24/7?
What are some of the things that prevent people to actually stop working at 5:00 PM?
I found two main reasons. The first one is not having enough time to do deep-focused work because all your hours from nine to five are booked with meetings. This is highly relevant for any type of manager. And product managers, the role I'm in, suffer from this a lot.
Basically, you have a bunch of meetings back to back all day long, and you don't have enough time to actually process this meeting, create documents, action points, et cetera. Basically, do the quiet focused work that moves the needle forward. In addition to that, you have a bunch of slack messages and emails to respond to in between your meetings.
Instead of actually taking a pause processing what you just heard in the meeting, you start responding to your slack messages and emails. Your hours between nine to five are very reactive. So, there's not a single moment where you can pause, think and be proactive instead of reactive.
This is cause number one. Very relevant, very prevalent nowadays, especially with people working remotely. Your day is just booked with Zoom meetings.
Number two. There is no clear shut-off for routine. People bring their laptops home. Now, especially with the pandemic and people working from home, it is even more problematic.
You don't know when your workday ends. If we compare it to even 20 years ago, people couldn't bring their work home. Even if you worked on the computer, your work computer stayed in the office, you couldn't bring it home.
Now. It's very different. You have a work email and slack on your smartphone. Your work laptop is just sitting there right across from you on a dining table. And It's not clear when you're supposed to finish working. And on top of that, you keep getting emails from your manager at 10:00 PM, because see, point number one, this is the only time they can actually process what just happened during the day and send out action points, et cetera.
You might be getting emails from your manager at 10:00 PM, and now you feel pressured to be working at 10:00 PM as well because your manager works at 10:00 PM. In this kind of sense, the standard across the board. So it's yeah, it's this vicious cycle, not pretty or healthy.
These were the two main reasons I saw why people were working beyond their nine to five. I knew that I would face the same issue. So I had to find a way to deal with these obstacles and here's how I've done it.
So, let's look at the first reason, and that is being booked with meetings all day long.
This was actually not that hard to address this issue. What I did, I just booked my mornings off in my calendar for focused work.
I have two daily stand-ups that start at 11:00 AM. So, I just booked a meeting in my calendar that lasts from nine to eleven. I called it focused work. Now, when people are trying to book a meeting with me, they see that they have a meeting during this time and in our company, our calendars are open, so they can actually see that it's not a real meeting.
It's more like a time block for focused work. And I'm yet to see a person who would book a meeting with me during this time. They just find the time in the afternoon and it works. Right now, if you look at my work calendar, you'll see a time block called focused work on my calendar Monday to Friday, 9 to 11:00 AM. I just do all my focused work during these two hours. I find it a perfect amount of time to get my thoughts together, to write down the plan, to maybe have some work done that I was supposed to do yesterday from all the meetings that they had in the afternoon.
Good solution highly recommend. In my previous job, I did something similar where I protected my mornings from meetings. In my previous job, I didn't have a lot of meetings, but I just knew that I have the freshest mental capacity in the mornings. So, if I had to work on some documentation, creating standard operational procedures, doing deep thought work, I knew that I better do it in the morning.
I also use the time-blocking approach for important projects. For example, right now I am responsible for rolling outa new scanning app to all our warehouses across North America. This involves creating training materials writing down SOP's, communicating with all the parties from engineers to business.
I know that I don't have enough time during my focused work to time-block to address all of these tasks. So I time-block an hour every single day for the next two weeks for this project. For every time block, I have a clear definition of done. So for example, on Tuesday, I might have a time block for this particular project. And the notes, I have a definition of done that says create a training document for all the Ops coordinators to follow. I know that by the end of this time block, by the end of this hour, this is the document that they need to have ready.
Another way I deal with the problem of excessive meetings is, I make sure that I run them well. I think I can do an entire podcast episode on how to run effective meetings, but for now, I just want to say one word, and this is Agenda.
If the meeting has no clear agenda, it shouldn't be on your calendar. Plus, I find that my meetings always end earlier when they have a clear agenda for the meeting and they communicate it well ahead of time, everyone is happy because they have some time back. So, highly recommend writing down an agenda before you send that calendar invite.
Now, let's look at the second issue of you're full-time job spreading in until all the hours of the day. Our brain craves consistency and routines.
And knowing that I decided that I need to have a clear routine around my nine to five especially around the 5:00 PM part making sure that the work ends at around five.
Right now, we are allowed to go back to the office. So, what they do is, I prefer to leave my work computer in the office. I know sounds scandalous. To be honest, it was quite uncomfortable at first. I'm not gonna lie, but it works really well. When I was working from home, what they did instead is I would leave my work laptop in another room so that they don't see it after five.
And Another thing that they've started doing recently that they find works incredibly well is going to the gym right after work. I signed up for F45 near my office and I love F45. If you always find yourself being bored during fitness classes, definitely check it out.
It's so much fun and that never repeats itself. So, highly recommend it. My F45 has a class at 5:15 PM. This is perfect. It means that I need to leave work no later than 5:00 PM. I tried to go to their classes four days a week, and this is what allows my brain to release all the work-related thoughts and worries, and not bring them home. I find what happens is that if you leave work at 5:00 PM and just go home right away, there's this mental residue that you bring home because you keep thinking about all the work stuff.
They found that I would always be stressed out or overwhelmed. So, never in a good mood when I came home but this particular hack that I've accidentally discovered really helps me to forget about work because basically, you're focusing on surviving during your F-45 workout. It's challenging. It's hard. It keeps your heart rate up. You can really think about work and do F-45 at the same time. It makes it so helpful and so amazing at making sure that work stays at work.
And they think at the end of the class, you are so happy that you've survived. That all that worrying about work seems so small and irrelevant, and you just go home a bit tired. Physically tired, a bit exhausted, but mentally clear. I find it really helpful because that allows you to have a restful evening to focus on your family, to do the activities that you want to do, maybe to focus on your side project. But most importantly, this allows you to keep your work and all of the work-related thoughts between nine to five.
If you want to learn more tips on how to optimize your nine to five schedule, how to make sure that you're very productive during your eight hours, that you get more done in eight hours than other people doing 12, 14 hours a day, I wrote a guest post article on rize.io. I will leave the link in the show notes. It has my story, all the other tips that I have, and also it has all the email templates I would send to people and It goes into detail on how you can set boundaries, how you can batch things together. I think it's one of the best articles I wrote. So, definitely check it out. If you're working crazy hours right now, and you would like to cut them and just work from nine to five, I have a bunch of tips there on how to do that.
I think it's time to conclude this episode. What I wanted to highlight in today's episode is this: If you want to start building something on aside, be it the business, a hobby, a creative project, you need to become very disciplined and efficient at your full-time job to make sure that your full-time job doesn't spill over into other times of your day. This is step one. This is the foundation, and this is what I wanted to focus in today's episode. Once, you rearrange your work life, where you can do your work in eight hours a day or less, Monday to Friday, then you can add a side project to the mix.
You can't really be consistent at your side project when you work crazy hours at your full-time job. So, I don't want you to fool yourself here.
And then In addition to that, once you're disciplined with your full-time job, you can be disciplined with your side project as well. If there is no structure to your nine to five, how are you going to bring structure and consistency to your side project? It doesn't work like that.
Before you, you start new things, before you jump into a new adventure, make sure that you have enough time in your life. The best way to do that is to get very disciplined in your full-time job and make sure that you're very effective during your nine to five so that you don't have to bring your work into other hours of the day.
Okay. So the tips they've shared with you today, you can start implementing them next week.
Maybe, start with blocking off some time on your calendar for focused work so people can't book meetings during the time and be really focused during those hours. Don't spend time on Instagram. Do some meaningful work and you'll be surprised how much you can get done if you're not interrupted by email, meetings, slack messages.
The good news here is that once you are disciplined and structured with your nine to five, It means that you've built the productivity habits that will skyrocket your chances of success in your side project. You can apply the same habits of time-blocking, prioritizing, effective meetings, routine building to your side project.
Don't think that you are not moving forward when you're getting organized and disciplined in your nine to five. No, you are because you're building all these amazing habits, structures and routines that will set you up for success in your side project. Okay. So, this was part, one of how to build your side project when you have a full-time job. The message here is get really disciplined and organized in your full-time job before you commit to something else. In the next part, I'll share what you can do once you've passed the first step.
Okay. Have a good week everyone.
Till next Monday. Bye
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