Experience is certainly a good teacher I dove head-first into the side hustle hole.
I Followed the Crowd and Added Two Side Hustles to My Main Career: Here Are 3 Lessons I’ve Learned
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake off the thought of another stream of income meandering into my cash pool. The excitement bubbling up within my mind swallowed all the doubts I had. High on excitement and big on promise, I dove head-first into the side hustle hole.
That was in mid-2017 when the spark of the flash lured me to the photo studio. I wanted to be like a colleague who shot weddings every other weekend. He persuaded me I could even divert into architectural photography, which, for a real estate surveyor, was music to my ears.
In 2019, a colleague suggested we co-authored a peer-reviewed article. I didn’t know any better than to offload rounds of rapid-fire follow-up emails to the editorial team. Judging by the echoing silence I got in response, I guess most of them went into the trash folder.
Dejected, I realized I could channel the frustration into writing articles. Between starting a WordPress blog and writing on Medium, the pen is proving to be a powerful weapon, if not quite mightier than the sword just yet.
As the year trudges to the finish line, I sat down to count my blessings and recount the lessons I’ve learned combining two side-hustles with my career in real estate. They were bountiful, thanks. But here are only three.
The more you have on your plate, the more time you can create
When I thought of starting a photography business on the side of my grueling work schedule as an Estates Assistant, part of me wondered whether I would have any time left to brush my teeth.
But the siren call of more money was enough to convince me to at least give photography a shot. Even though I smiled at the first paycheck, my second career threatened to take up too much time if I didn’t zoom in and focus on the fine details of my time allocation.
So I did a time audit. It turned out the mindless scrolling on Twitter and Facebook, and my mini-addiction to watching every WhatsApp status took between two and four hours of my day. I knew if I focused less on my friends’ rants and strangers’ stunts online, I could take back some of those hours.
Adding another side hustle in writing meant I had to keep an even tighter rein on my time. Challenge accepted. Now, outside of my morning routines and breakfast, I try to write about two hours Monday to Wednesday and read for another hour before midday.
My lunch break, mail time, and social media take over until around 3 p.m. A 20–30 minute nap follows. In the evenings, I keep a fluid schedule that mixes taking writing courses, doing research work, and reading articles online with spending time with the family.
I try to schedule photo sessions and property inspections for Fridays, but depending on the clients’ demands, these could fall on any day.
I‘ve scheduled my laundry for Saturdays, mostly while I listen to the Guardian Football Weekly podcast or a few NBA-related pods from ESPN. I am free to go to church and do a whole lot of non-work-related activities on Sundays. But most importantly, I do not starve myself of the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep.
I stay on schedule about 60% of the time, but that’s a decent mark considering the chopping and changing I have had to make as my commitments change.
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