If your new business hasn’t replaced your full-time income yet, the secret to juggling both working and running a business lies in good time and energy management, along with outsourcing of all non-essential functions.
Time and Energy Management
If you’re working from 9:00 to 5:00, that means you still have five hours left to work on your business if you could muster the energy, but with so many others chores, such as grocery shopping and cooking and a social life chances are that working an additional five hours a day is unrealistic.
A much more realistic goal is to aim for working at least two hours a day on your business. The key is consistency rather than long periods of hard work at once. Managing burnout is a key factor to managing your energy. Don’t work so hard that you burn yourself out energetically or emotionally, no matter how excited you feel about your projects at the present moment.
Try experimenting with various time management systems, such as the Pomodoro system or the Getting Things Done (GTD) system. Both of these systems, as well as others, can help you increase your efficiency with the time that you spend on your projects. It can also help you do your full-time work more effectively.
Outsourcing All Non-Essential Functions
In the beginning, unless your business is bringing in a profit, it can be hard to justify spending money on outsourcing tasks that you could do yourself. However, once the business is bringing in revenue, spending it on removing yourself from the equation is often a very good investment.
Since you have such a limited amount of time you can spend on your business, it is crucial that all the time you spend is spent on the highest leverage tasks. In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris advocates outsourcing the checking of email, answering telephone calls, booking flights and almost everything else in your personal life and business life. He does this through hiring a personal assistant in India, which costs approximately $3 an hour.
This leaves you with two hours a day to manage projects, direct key activities and accomplish the tasks that make your business money, rather than menial tasks that could be done by someone else.
In short, the two most important things to running a business while working a full-time job is to learn how to manage your own time and energy so you can work consistently without burning out, along with learning how to unload all the tasks that can be done by someone else.
