When I launched my business in 2016, I knew it would be hard to balance it alongside a full-time job. I almost didn’t bother because of that; I was a recruiter back then. Compared to other positions I’ve held—present one included—my job wasn’t nearly as demanding, and my schedule was relatively set.
Today, I work for a small startup software company. I have a ton more responsibility, I work much longer hours, rarely take a lunch break, and I know that my free moments during the day can be easily snatched up if someone is lucky enough to catch me! I find myself calling upon the skills I learned in previous roles.
Whether you plan to drop the side hustle or the day job, at some point you’ll be figuring out how to be your best at both. Here are the five tips I found most useful when balancing my day job with my side business.
1. Set Clear Boundaries
Decide what days and times you’ll work on your side hustle. I found that when I was unorganized I worked on my business every day after work, which left no time for hobbies, time with my family, or just time alone. I was much more productive, relaxed, and happy when I picked “office hours.”
2. Invest in Tools
Designating days to work on my business doesn’t consist entirely of client work. It’s time composed of research, outreach, and of course designing social media assets and strategies.
Learning to use tools like Canva; researching sites for free graphics, email templates, and stock photos—all of this has been essential to managing any sort of schedule between my coaching business and my day job.
3. Automate, Automate, Automate
A valuable lesson I’ve learned in tech and witnessed in action—when you can automate a function, do it. Hootsuite, as well as the scheduling apps built into Facebook and Mailchimp, to name a few, have been instrumental to my time management.
I use the free versions of many of them, but if you come across paid tools or features that are right for you, I encourage anyone to invest money when they can.
4. Stay Organized
Be organized down to a tee. I used to say “On Saturday’s I’ll blog. Now I say “On Saturday, I’ll write blog posts from 9am to 11am. From 11am to 1pm I’ll create Instagram posts for the week. And 3:30pm to 5pm I’ll prepare notes and next steps for my client.”
I practice this at work too, creating time slots within time slots means I don’t waste any time transitioning from one activity to the next. If you want to be a little less obsessive, a good old to-do list works too. Be your own manager, and provide yourself some direction.
5. Take a Break
I love what I do. So I never want to stop. And for a while before I set boundaries and automated many of my tasks, I didn’t stop. Theoretically, I was happy and excited to put in the hours, but I was tired and irritated at my day job and barely spent time with my girlfriend and our adorable dog.
I struggle with whether work-life balance was a real thing we could achieve—or if it was something we should even want. (All good things in moderation—but what’s moderate for one thing may not be moderate for the other.)
I can, however, attest to the fact that when you don’t take a break to be alone, to relax, to nurture yourself, then other aspects of your life will suffer, and you won’t be successful at your day job, your side business, or anything in between.
No one is perfect; sometimes the video doesn’t get filmed, your Instagram story is never told, and the newsletter doesn’t get sent out. We’re all human, and if you’re a one woman-team, you can’t expect to hit the mark every single time.
So don’t hold yourself up to unrealistic expectations. If you can’t update your blog weekly, do it every other week, and make it twice as good. Acknowledge your wins, study your losses, and redefine your strategy to set yourself up for success.
You can do it. I believe in you.
Cairo Amani is a non-technical tech professional living in NYC. With a career spanning sales, customer success, recruitment, and operations, Cairo has been super privileged to work at awesome startup companies with amazing products and missions. She’s obsessed with changing the way “work” works by helping women hack the system and break down the walls that hold them back.