🤔How do you keep your side project from taking focus off of your main company?

I think the best mental model to start with is thinking about The Regret Minimization Framework which was coined by Jeff Bezos. He starts by recognizing that every big decision you make in life will involve some sort of give-and-take. We all know this. When making a big decision on whether he should try to start Amazon or start working at a corporation he described these thoughts:

“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.”

So when you think about your side project and how much time you allocate towards it -- I think the question really becomes:

How much time is enough for you to feel confident that in 80 years you'll be able to look back and say you gave it a good enough shot?

If you don't have the time to reach that # today...

Start creating systems within your consulting business to give you the time to do it. That might mean hiring staff, outsourcing manual tasks to others, changing your pricing model or adjusting the way you onboard/serve clients from day one.

This has been something I have been working on the last few years and starting to master.
Running a main startup plus dev agency together worked well, but transitioning agency to a startup studio went backwards when startup joined an accelerator last year.

Key is delegation, resources and focus.

Top priority has to be and remain, top priority. Plan time and everything around that.
Side projects I limit to purely management and supervision, delegating all tasks to people I trust to get them done.

Also important is that on my dev agency turning startup studio, I am fully prepared to hand over control on each project from the start. I don't have time to run everything, I know that. So my sideprojects I am laying the foundations, ready for someone else to take the lead while I keep a good stake.
For some people the opposite may be best, plan to run the side project, in which case, lay foundations for your exit from the old business early on.

Currently on track to have at least 4 new side projects self sufficient, plus 2 ongoing businesses, during 2019.

Discipline will be the key factor. Keep the side project small with minimal features and ask yourself if you will be accomplish it without distracting your main job. Once you think deeper about the idea, would will be assess the time it will take.

Try allocating specific time for the side project so no matter how much work you have with your main job, the time you allocate will not be comprised. For example you could set yourself an hour in the morning and evening to solely work on your side project or the weekends.

You will find alot of Indie Hackers who have main jobs and work on side projects, having a detailed conversation with them will help.

I just read @jorisderuiter post a few hours back. He's a full time freelancer developer and runs a successful side project too. Maybe he'll be able to help.

Create a list of what you should do today and any left over time you can spend how you please?