How do you build a side hustle while working a full time job?
I swear, I asked (and continue to ask) myself this question every day.
Why?
Because let’s be real – working a full time job and trying to build a side hustle is hard. It’s bloody hard.
After working a full day at a challenging career, you’re going to feel gassed coming home. Then you have to exercise (because health is most important), eat, and you have maybe an hour before you need to get to bed and start the whole day over again.
Trust me, I know from personal experience.
When I worked at HighRadius, I used to have a 45 minute commute ONE WAY to work. I worked in a sales position which required me to call into Europe time zones and U.S. time zones.
In order for me to be successful, I would need to get into the office by 7am to bang out my calls. And I would often be in the office until 6pm waiting for rush hour traffic to die down.
It wouldn’t be until 7:30pm by the time I got home. I had maybe 2 hours before I needed to be in bed getting ready for the next day.
And the worst part was I knew that no matter how good I would do at my sales position, I was still limited to getting paid at most 10% of what I actually produced for the company.
Which meant I had to figure out a way to generate income on the side. There was no way I wanted to live this kind of way for the rest of my life.
This was me, basically every day…
During that period – the only time I had was weekends where I could focus on my side stuff. Needless to say, I didn’t have a very good social life.
Yet…
This was actually the wrong way to think about this problem, and it wasn’t until I learned about the concept of 90 Heroic Minutes that my progress began to explode.
If you’re not familiar, 90 heroic minutes is a concept by Shane Melaugh. The whole idea is simple, which makes it effective.
For just 90 minutes a day, you devote your full undivided attention to the most important task you need to complete to move the needle for your business.
Here’s the most important part: you cannot have any distractions whatsoever. No cell phone on your desk, no access to YouTube or Facebook, nothing at all.
You either do the thing, or you sit there for 90 minutes. That’s it.
Like I said earlier, when I learned this, my progress exploded.
Now before work, I will wake up early and devote 90 minutes per day to the most important thing, my side hustle.
Ironically, it actually makes me better at my day job too. I become vastly more efficient and effective because I know I’ve made progress on my own personal goals, before I even get started with my career.
There’s a lot more to this idea – which is going to get refined over time.
However, it’s important to know this idea has radically changed my life, and I know it can help yours if you feel like you don’t have enough time in the day.
Even Scott Adams woke up early to create Dilbert before heading to his day job at Pacific Bell.
It can be done. You just need to dedicate 90 heroic minutes.
If you’re interested, check out Ikario (which is the brand for all of Shane’s productivity related stuff).