While we are still in the first quarter of the year we can look for better ways to work less and making more this year. How do you prioritize this on your entrepreneur journey? Here are a few tips on making that shift from few hours to greater income.
The Benefits of a Work From Home Side Hustle
I’ve written extensively about the benefits of a side hustle and having multiple streams of income. A side hustle, also referred to as a side job or part-time job, is a great way to help you reach your financial goals. Whether you want to save up for a trip to Europe or pay down your student loan debt quicker, a side hustle can be a cornerstone to your success. Have you considered starting your own side hustle? Or perhaps you already have one? There are hundreds of different side hustles out there. Some you can do from the comfort of your own home and others require you to go on site. While some individuals prefer to work their side job from home, others find it more enjoyable to pick up work outside of the home.
The Benefits of Side Hustling From Home
How to Maintain Your Motivation
It’s pretty easy to find the motivation to go to your day job. After all, it’s your main source of income, and for most of us, that alone is motivating enough. When it comes to your side hustle, however, it’s not always as simple to maintain motivation. Yet, in order to reach your side hustle goals motivation is a must.
The Key to Maintaining Motivation
In order to understand how we can maintain motivation it’s helpful to examine the reasons we lose it in the first place.
Setbacks: A setback, regardless of the size, can lead to a decrease in motivation, especially when the setback causes a loss in confidence. When your confidence takes a hit it’s easy to feel like success isn’t possible and not worth trying for. This can lead to decreased motivation and productivity. Even worse it can lead to you even giving up completely.
Lack of Concrete Goals: Motivation can be the fuel that gets you to the finish line, but you can’t get moving until you set a concrete and well defined goal. If you are plugging away at a vague goal or a broad idea of what you think you want, you’ll have a hard time focusing and run the risk of losing motivation.
4 Ways To Overcome Procrastination
We’ve all been there before. We have a certain amount of time to accomplish a specific task, and we find ourselves doing anything but the task at hand. Instead we check our email, scan social media, and chat with our coworkers. As our allotted time ticks down we panic and stress because we’ve given in to procrastination yet again.
It’s normal to procrastinate, some even argue it’s good to delay action until the last minute citing that it actually improves decision making and efficiency. While I agree with those points to a certain extent, I think in most cases procrastination can be dangerous, especially when it comes to your side hustle.
Since a side hustle is work you do in your spare time, it’s incredibly important to stay focused. Your spare time is too valuable to be wasted by procrastinating. In addition, since your side hustle is your own business, you are ultimately responsible for the work. If your work isn’t as high quality because you are in a rush in the final hour, it’s going to reflect poorly on you. It could even cost you future business.
Procrastination and goals don’t often go hand in hand. If you want to accomplish your goals, you will need to be focused and productive. It’s dangerous to procrastinate with new ideas as well. If you don’t take action on your ideas, you run the risk of forgetting about them completely. Worse yet, someone else will have the same idea and beat you to it. Consider these four tips to keep yourself on track and focused.
Eliminate Distractions
The best thing you can to do fend off procrastination is eliminate any potential distractions. Start by taking a few minutes to get prepared. Use the bathroom, refill your drink, and pull out any materials you need to accomplish your work. If you’re in an office shut the door or put ear buds in to send the message you’re not available for interruptions. Close your email and any other applications that aren’t necessary. Put your phone on silent and place it out of view. By eliminating distractions you will find it easier to stay focused while you move from task to task.
Sacrifice Only if You’re Growing
When I see people working late or working overtime I get depressed. It’s one thing if you’re young and you’re full of energy, enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. But it’s another thing when you’re older, overworked and been doing it for 20-30 years. Even though I don’t work more than 40 hours a week at my day job, when I get home I spend at least 2 to 3 hours every single night working on my side hustles. In a way, I’m just like those people at work except I’m working overtime for myself instead of some faceless corporate entity.
I’ll be honest, I have a very chill day job. That’s probably part of the reason why I can work another few hours when I get home. There aren’t many high paying jobs where you can come in late, leave early and play basketball at lunch but that’s exactly what I do. And even though that may seem like a good thing, I have to constantly remind myself of my ultimate goal. Working for myself and owning my own business(es) is something I want sooner rather than later. But when you’re fortunate enough to have a job you enjoy it’s easy to get complacent.
Hobby & Business Collide
When I first started working online, it was more of a hobby than anything else. I liked personal finance so I started writing about it. It wasn’t until I started making some decent money that I began to treat it like a business. Now everything I do online is a business to me: my websites, my freelance writing, etc. Even though I still enjoy the writing, I’ve taken a much more proactive approach when it comes to advertising, internet marketing and basically just figuring out how to make money from sitting on my couch. [Read more…]
Are you Afraid to Take a Vacation?
Newport Beach Sunset
I came up with a lot of article ideas on my last vacation to Hawaii. There was something about the crisp Hawaiian air that inspired me to write and I actually spent most mornings working out on the lanai. But after that, I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted. The ironic part about the whole trip was that I almost didn’t even take it. Since I just started a new job, I wasn’t sure if it would be a good idea to take 3 days of vacation within the first three months of being hired. Even though my new job was very slow right before the holidays and there were lots of people with nothing to do, I still felt a little guilty asking for 3 days off.
I only get 2 weeks of vacation every year at my new job but they did front me the first week right when I started. The decision to go on this trip was actually made a lot easier since almost everything I booked was non-refundable. I’m not sure what I would have done if my boss told me I couldn’t go. Either way, he seemed to be ok with it so I didn’t have a problem taking the time off. [Read more…]
Finding a Job That Allows You to be Mobile
Sunrise in Poipu at the Grand Hyatt Kauai
My recent vacation to Hawaii reinforced two things: I love to travel and I really enjoy what I do working online. 90% of my 5 day trip was spent doing normal Hawaii stuff: hiking, visiting local landmarks and relaxing. But the other 10% of the time, I was busy responding to comments on my blog, dealing with advertisers and working on new articles.
Most mornings I would wake up around 7 am as the sun was rising(seen above) and lay in bed checking e-mails until I was ready to bust out my computer and get some real work done on our ocean view lanai(free upgrade of course!). Accompanying me on this journey was my cup of coffee and light breakfast(usually fruit and/or pastries). I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty awesome office to work out of for 5 days and it barely felt like work when I was working. [Read more…]
How Efficient Are You at Work?
For those of you who don’t know, I recently had the pleasure of testing out the four hour work day. Although my experiment only lasted a few months, it gave me great insight into what it would be like if I was working for myself full time. And by full time, of course I really mean only four hours a day 😉
But now that I’m back working 8 hours a day at a real job I’ve started thinking a lot about efficiency and what it means to be an efficient worker. One of the big reasons why I don’t like 9-5 office type jobs is because of the amount of time wasted. Would you be surprised to learn that at my last day job there were literally days where I went in and didn’t do one ounce of work? I’m sure there are some people that go into work and work their ass of for 8-10 hours a day and take lunch at their desks but I’m certainly not friends with any of them. [Read more…]
Working From Home Can Get Lonely
I learned a lot during my three months working at home. And although I talk about the benefits a lot, there are definitely some drawbacks to the four hour work day that you should be aware of. There’s obviously more risk to starting your own business and that can put a lot of pressure on you. If you have a bad month or sales are down, your income will suffer and you might not have enough money to eat. It’s also hard to get self-motivated sometimes since there’s no one forcing you to be in by 9 am and work 10 hour days.
The nice part about a day job is that there will always be a paycheck there waiting for you at the end of each pay period. It doesn’t matter how your company fared or how you performed, you’re still going to get paid at the end of the day. But while I was working at home I also started to miss all of the relationships I had made working in an office environment. Sure you have the “Is it Friday Yet?” Guy and various other office characters but I made some good life long friends at my last company. [Read more…]