Is your side hustle interfering with your day job?
There are two ways to save more money: spend less, or earn more. There are a bunch of great posts out there on how to earn extra money, in addition to what you bring in at your regular job. Looking for ways to make income on the side can be a great way to help you diversify your income sources, and to occupy your free time with an income-producing activity, rather than with high-cost hobbies.
- See Frugal Dad's post on Why Everybody Needs a Side Hustle
- Read this motivating guest post from My Journey to Millions on getting started with earning income on the side.
Believe me, I'm a serial hobbyist, and any hobby has the potential to be incredibly expensive once you get absorbed in it.
- This post from Get Rich Slowly gives some tips on how to make money from your hobby
The problem is, making money from your hobby almost always requires a bigger time commitment than you are currently making to the hobby. For example, I like knitting, and spend quite a bit of money on different yarns and patterns. However, in order to make much money from knitting, I would have to sit down and knit every night, instead of a couple of times a month.
Could you be spending that time improving your performance at your day job?
If you are just starting out in a fast-paced career, spending that extra time becoming the best employee at your new job could easily reap larger monetary benefits than any side income you earn. If you have free time when you want to be productive, spending more time reading industry-specific news, teaching yourself more advanced skills, or simply getting more work done could help you get raises and promotions much faster.
The guy moving fastest through the ranks at my current firm is not spending his evenings figuring out how to make $100/month from a blog. He is spending all of his work effort on his current career.
Is your side income intended to replace your pay check?
If I focused on making money from blogging, or from selling crafts on Etsy, I could probably make a few thousand a year. Making enough to replace even my starting salary (plus cover the extra taxes that come from self employment) is highly unlikely.
However, if I had a plan to launch a blogging empire that could surpass my earning potential in my current career, then focusing all of my extra attention on my entrepreneurial endeavor would be far more worth it.
When is pursuing side income a good idea?
If you are in a stable job, but with no room for advancement, it will be more efficient for you to work 9-5 at your day job, and devote your extra hours to developing side income. If you are starting out in a career where the top performers can expect a rapid promotion, then it may be more efficient for you to focus on your career first. (Especially because at very competitive companies, low or average performers may find themselves out of a job completely.)
OR If you run out of "mental energy" to put into your day job, but find that you have plenty of mental energy, or even feel more energized, from your hobby, like many of us bloggers have found, then trying to get some money out of that hobby may be a smart idea. This is generally my view regarding my blog.
If you're going to do it anyway, you may as well make money
I like writing. I like my blog, and sometimes I write some paid articles for Associated Content too (Yahoo! Contributors Network now.) I have a couple of ad blocks, and make an effort to find additional readers, so that stuff I have already written has a better chance of earning me a few dollars later.
My blogging isn't going to make me thousands, or even hundreds of dollars a month anytime soon, but I figure if I can get $50/month, it'll be an extra $50 in my savings account that I would not have if I spent my evenings watching TV instead.
What do you think? Do you think that focusing on side income can jeopardize your career, or do you think a really motivated person could do it all?
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July 20th, 2011 - 13:20
Excellent points in this post! Doing pretty much exactly what you said as far as putting the time in, becoming the best and moving ahead in your day job is what I did and it paid off well for me.
July 20th, 2011 - 14:10
I think especially at the beginning of a career, this is an important point to consider. Plus, after more years of experience, you may have many more opportunities to set up a side business because of that experience.
July 20th, 2011 - 15:27
Any business that you are trying to get started requires much work in the beginning to get it off the ground. That effort has to affect your main career in some way. Balancing the two is bit tricky in the beginning. It can be almost like satisfying two bosses at once.
July 20th, 2011 - 23:12
You make some wonderful points here. I would suspect most people would do better to focus on a career to make themselves more valuable at work. I doubt that blogging would be able to replace the income for most.
July 21st, 2011 - 08:31
With organization and discipline, one can perform at a high level at work while still hustling on the side. Let’s take the case of blogging, one can spend his or her weekends writing all the posts that will be published in the subsequent week as opposed to spending every evening trying to write a blog post for the following day. By opting to do the former, one can spend his or her week nights developing his or her new professional skills.
July 22nd, 2011 - 09:34
If you work ’til 9pm and work on Saturdays, you don’t have much time on the weeknights for developing professional skills if you spend your free time on Sunday writing posts. And also, there is more to blogging than just sticking posts up – a big part is commenting on other peoples blogs and responding to comments on your own posts.
I do think you’re right – you can definitely do both if you plan it right, but it’ll be harder to really generate much traffic for your blog, at least at first.
July 24th, 2011 - 18:44
Generating traffic to a blog is more a function of the frequency with which one writes about things that Internet users are routinely searching for.
July 23rd, 2011 - 11:22
Great post. I like the end: if you do it anyway, you might as well do money. My post is half academic, half personal. There seems to be some weird morals among academics regarding putting Adsense in your blog. I blog for fun, and because it helps me clear out my ideas. If in the meantime I get 10 bucks a month, then great. I don’t mind too much about the aesthetics, and I know that the people that come to read my blog do it for the content (which is not only academic). At the same time, when I go up for tenure, I plan to read carefully my entries, because it will make writing my teaching essay easier. The only thing I am worried about is that I like blogging too much that it might distract me from my real job. I will find the balance at some point.
July 23rd, 2011 - 18:25
Yeah I noticed that from the response to the Grumpy Rumblings post about whether they should monetize. I think the academic world has too many people who’ve read research on how ads affect you, while the rest of us think that we can ignore them
I think your blog will be a great way to jog your memory for what to write about. I always find it hard to keep a journal going, but blogging makes me feel much more accountable for posting regularly. It’s also a good way to practice writing in general, especially for me because I’m in a job that doesn’t require much writing.
July 25th, 2011 - 16:54
Hi Kellen, I used to work for (and escaped from) the Big 4 too!!!
To answer your question, I think a really motivated person can easily do it all. Not only that, but sometimes your side work actually helps with your day job. Personally I’ve learned a lot about social media, SEO, and web analytics in my “hobby hours” that I’ve applied to my day job.