Challenge: 1 deploy a day for the next 21 days
I'm currently trying to build my side hustle into my main business while maintaining a steady income from my day job as a freelance designer.
And even though my side hustle is more important to me, guess which one I treat as the priority? Yeah, the day job. The quick money and the pressure from possibly disappointing a client keeps me stuck in a lane that I really don't want to be in.
How do I get unstuck? Here's what I came up with:
- Stop working my day job. Turning off the spout of money could be a good motivator.
- Raise money. Less scary than Option 1, but also more difficult than it sounds and not exactly my dream.
- Find a way to be significantly more productive while maintaining my day job.
Even though I have enough saved to go with Option 1 for a while, I feel like it would put more stress on my family than I would want to. So Option 3 it shall be.
What does that look like exactly? Here's the plan I put together:
- Track all of my time. Literally everything I do 24 hours a day. I want to be more informed about the decisions I'm making. I currently do not track any of my time.
- Be accountable. My day job works because of the client pressure. I need to replicate this for my side hustle. I'm not sure the best method for this yet but even writing on Indie Hackers seems like a good start.
- There are 21 days left in April. For every day remaining, I am going to deploy new code. I currently deploy code once a month on average so this should seriously get the ball rolling.
That's where I'm at. Overwhelmed but optimistic. Today is Day 1.
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Balancing client work and a side hustle is so tricky. The closest I’ve ever come was when I was working a single part-time contract gig 3 days a week with set hours. That let me keep a steady stream of income without trading 100% of my time. Maybe you could try to focus on just one or two clients? Once you move past one or two, it’s impossible to stay in control.
Solid advice and I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who struggles with this balance. I kinda like your idea of having set hours for contact work as a boundary. 24 hours per week max would be a good balance, and that would also help me determine an hourly rate needed for contract work ($75 an hour).
I love it! Great idea making the goal tangible and not "squishy". You either deploy or you don't, it's binary.
It might help to spend the first day or two setting up some sort of automated CI and deployment. That way you can push your code and not waste time fiddling with a deployment process. And if your test suite is good enough you won't even have to manually test the site once it finishes deploying!
Good luck through April!
Thanks for the tips! Luckily we spent time early on setting up auto-deployment. Huge time savings and highly recommended for others. But our testing is completely lacking. It's still 100% manual. Thanks for reminding me that I can do better in that department.
If you're working in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, or Swift let me know if you need an extra hand! I can help level up your test suite. Either by getting it set up or picking a high-traffic surface area to add coverage.