Читать книгу Side Hustles For Dummies - Alan R. Simon - Страница 43

Some side hustles have fairly rigid schedules. Jack can’t just decide on the fly what days of the week or time of the day he’ll teach his community college classes next semester. Cindy’s day job limits her to weekends for her bartending gigs.

Other side hustles give you far more flexibility, at least when it comes to when you’ll record videos, or pack and ship orders for your online boutique, or spend many hours handcrafting jewelry.

You need to match up any calendar and clock constraints from your day job, or your life in general, with whatever is required for a specific side hustle. Look at more than just specific time blocks that you are and aren’t available, though. Also look at the amount of time you need to spend on your side hustle, as well as the “cadence” of tasks that you may need to do on a regular basis.

Max, Mark, and Miguel all plan to create online videos that they’ll then monetize for their respective side hustles. Miguel decides to do a new bartending-related video every week. Mark, however, figures that a new small business accounting video every two weeks is enough for his intended audience and fits better with his available time to record, edit, and polish the videos before uploading and publishing them. Max, on the other hand, settles on a far more fluid schedule for his “monetizing himself” videos. Some weeks, he’ll do two or three videos, and then he may pause for a couple of weeks until he does another two or three.

If your side hustle will involve regularly creating content — videos, a podcast, blog posts, and so on — make sure that your overall schedule gives you enough time to create your content every week, or every two weeks, or whatever interval you’ve settled on. If your schedule isn’t that flexible, or if your day job is one of those where you may unexpectedly need to jump on a plane on short notice, you should probably steer clear of a side hustle where you can’t meet your commitments to produce content, or fill customers’ orders, or otherwise treat your side-hustle business like, well, like a real business.

You also need to be honest with yourself about how your energy level aligns with the time you’ve set aside for your side hustle. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I would typically have two or even three active book projects at various stages at any given point. Because I was spending most of my time traveling, I allocated every hotel night to writing — at least on paper. But you know what? Sometimes, after a really long and stressful day, I would go back to my hotel after dinner, sit down at the desk, open my laptop, and not be able to string together two coherent sentences.

Give yourself at least a little bit of cushion in your overall schedule when it comes to scheduling your side-hustle work. Don’t think to yourself, “Every single night I will …” or “I’ll spend 12 hours every weekend doing… .” You will have days or evenings when you just won’t have the energy, so be careful when you’re planning your side hustle to take this reality into consideration.