Any Indie hackers working fulltime?
How are you handling the split between supporting your work responsibilities and working on your side hustle? Any suggestions on time and energy management, scheduling and keeping it real?
Cheers!
How are you handling the split between supporting your work responsibilities and working on your side hustle? Any suggestions on time and energy management, scheduling and keeping it real?
Cheers!
Here is my story:
7am - 10am: Side hustle
10am - 7pm: Office
7pm - 11pm: Side hustle
Weekends: Side hustle
Only Alternate Sunday off!
You might get saturated as well. It's okay to have breaks in between. But you have to be disciplined.
Do not take too many breaks else you will lose context and focus.
Maintain an excel of sorts
Date1: Work to be done
Date2: Work to be done
Date3: Testing/bugfix and go live
and so on...
and keep marking them as green once done.
Plan very small sprints and celebrate the small wins to reach a bigger goal!
Doing this for the past 1 year now! Looking forward to being full-time.
I was trying this schedule and it worked for some time but then I gave up.
Need to recover and return to this :)
That's the key! Do not give up.
May be remind yourself about the vision of the product you are trying to make and the end goal you want to achieve. If that doesn't keep you up, nothing will!
yea too easy to get lost in the weeds. Taking some time out to look at the big picture every week (in a structured way) helps. Going to start scheduling this in.
I'm in a slightly different position, in that I have contract work paying the bills instead of a 9-5 job. After some experimentation, I do contract work for a week, and then work on my own projects the next. This allows focused work on each without the time delay between causing you to forget too much (e.g., two weeks on each would be too long).
I find it also helps to have a journal where I write down what I did for the day, what I'm planning to do tomorrow (or next time), and any thoughts on improvements.
Great approach works for me to.
How do you manage to go about finding and getting and scheduling 1 week long contract gigs?
They're not one week long contracting gigs. I just work on them for one week on, one week off. I made it clear up-front that I'd spend 50% of my work time on their stuff, and 50% on my own.
One week on and one week off isn't ideal, but it works okay.
Ahh I see! That takes some understanding on the part of the other party! But fair play if you can get that and it works for you.
Those are some short sprints - if you can make this work then big kudos!
+1 to journalling and taking stock. I dont think people do this enough. It reminds me of the book Progression by Sebastian Marshall and his idea of the 'upstream', where the majority of the good and bad things in your life right now are a result of what you did upstream (in the past) - I think journalling is one of those things that has a positive cumulative effect in that way.
"Those are some short sprints - if you can make this work then big kudos!"
It's a trade-off. I'd rather work in longer sprints. However, I've found that if I increase it to two weeks then the changeover takes longer, because I've forgotten a lot of the details.
Yes, journalling has definitely helped. I wish I'd got into that habit earlier.
This is so challenging!
I found that batching tasks from your side hustle can help, and as much as possible organising for that to occour when you can schedule to do more repetitive/less brain intensive tasks at your primary job.
+1 on the scheduled tasks. Building my third at the moment while working full time. I’ve split out each section/feature of my app and listed out what’s to be done. Using Apple reminders, you can set due dates and group things together so they appear for the next day.
Tried all the note apps, but this is working really nice for me, it feels less overwhelming after my minds fried coding at my main job!
Good call, thanks @Lynds!
I'm working full time on Group Leads: https://groupleads.net
I work full time :)
I do have a full-time job, the pro is it's remote so no travel times.
But also very hard, combining with my fiancé and hobbies!
Also, my product is very early stage and not making money, so a cool "side-project" for now.
The main this for me was, if you don't start now, then when do you start?
Wake up early to work on side hustle before 9am.
The best way. Mind is clear and you are driven to complete small tasks before off to work!