Even if you love your job, you’re bound to come up with brilliant ideas you’d love to work on in your spare time. The problem is balancing those personal projects — the ones that are definitely fun and fascinating, and might even become profitable someday — with the stuff that pays your bills.
If you’re constantly starting new websites, clubs, bands, novels and the like, how do you make sure you have enough time to follow through on them? I might not be the right person to ask, considering how often I put off writing fiction to work on my paying gigs, but I’ll do my best. Here are some tips on how to balance side projects and paid work:
Schedule Project Time
I know this sounds incredibly basic, but a schedule is really important. If you don’t know how much time you can reasonably commit to side projects, it’s that much harder to decide whether it’s ok to drop your paying work for a couple of hours. Just like a flame burns out with no oxygen, a great idea can burn out without dedicated time to work on it.
Don’t Underestimate Your Commitments
If you’re going to commit to a side project, you should realize that you’re probably going to want about twice as much time as you think you need. Since these projects are usually things you really want to be doing, you should just go ahead and double your time estimate before you try to work them into your schedule. Fun and interesting projects inevitably grow in ways you can’t foresee when you’re starting out, and it’s better to leave yourself a cushion in the beginning than find yourself in other time-management jam later.
Collaborate!
Maybe you really don’t have the time for one more side project, no matter how organized you are. But maybe you could, if you had a little help! Finding a partner or a group to share work, responsibility, and costs with might make the difference between building something cool and never starting at all.
Document Your Projects
This one ties in with collaboration in a big way. Document your projects in detail, in case you start and find you no longer have time to finish. That way, you can hand them off to someone else with everything they need to keep going. This might not work so well if we’re talking about a painting or a sculpture, but an app, a website, or a community group can all benefit from great records-keeping.
This is honestly one of the most interesting, most troublesome productivity problems I run into, and I’d like to hear any more ideas you have about allowing side-projects to coexist in a healthy way with the work that pays the rent. Leave a comment!
Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He writes about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also find him on Twitter and at his blog.
Photo Credit — brookpeterson
