For many people, starting a side hustle while working a full-time office job is hard. If you work 40 hours per week and commute 2 hours a day, that is 50 hours per week consumed by your job. Allocating an extra 15 hours of time into a side hustle is doable, but it is challenging to make those hours productive. You must be disciplined to pull it off. In contrast, it is way easier to start a side hustle if you work a remote job from home.
Benefits of starting a side hustle when working from home
When you work from home, you get to evade a lot of inefficiencies that are associated with the corporate world. By removing the BS, you create more health and time. This accelerates your side hustle and you would get to that second stream of income much faster.
1. Less commute
Congrats, given that you work a remote job, you just freed up 10 hours of your week. Many people hope for an extra 10 hours per week to start their side hustle.
Commuting is the largest time sink that we accept as the norm. Besides 5 hours of weekly commute, remember to add in the buffer time when you groom and prepare to head out, queue for food, and socialise a little. That amounts to around 10 hours a week.
That is a lot of “dead” time that you will **never** get back, repeated over many many decades (if you continue working in an office).
Sure, you could try and optimise your commute by listening to podcasts – and you should. But you can never use that time to execute your side hustle. Usually, you are tired by the time you get home.
When I had to return to the office after the pandemic, it felt like an insane thing to do since my colleagues and I work in a knowledge-based field – we can get our jobs done from home just fine. I hated it. Yet, after weeks of adapting to the office environment, my realisation of the insanity started to subside and fade away. I began to adapt to how it just “is”, as if this is how things are supposed to be.
It struck me that most people accept the insane daily commute, not because it makes any sense, but because they are so used to the norm and could not perceive any other way out.
Fortunately, remote work is on the rise in 2022. Avoid repeating the commute. Reclaim at least 10h every week for your side hustle.
2. Less monitoring and more personal space
It is way easier to start a side hustle when no one is monitoring your computer screen. In the office, almost no one ever works the full 8 hour day. Yet, pressing “alt + tab” to maximise time for your side hustle is risky and inconvenient when colleagues and bosses are around.
When it comes to your remote job, scan through Glassdoor reviews and avoid companies that strictly monitor their employees. Move on from companies that have absurd rules, such as requiring employees to inform their bosses before leaving the desk or be on video 24/7. No thanks.
Fun fact: 19% of employees spend an average of 26 minutes per day searching for a new job. The amount of time wasted on job search can be put into a side hustle. If you work remotely, you likely do enjoy the perks of working from home, and are thus less likely to search for another job (unless your company or bosses are unreasonable).
Better still, you can strategically reduce the hours you spend at your job and find more time for your side hustle.
3. Less spending creates more free time
When you work from home, many areas of spending will be reduced by default. Typically, these areas are: commute, social life and entertainment, dining out, and monthly subscriptions such as gym memberships and leisure classes.
Since you work from home, you will be less motivated to participate in such activities that require you to leave the house. Less monetary spending creates more time. When it comes to your side hustle, this means more time can be channelled into it.
4. More physical and emotional energy
Technically just about anyone can spend 15 hours a week on their side hustle outside their job. The difference is that office workers often do not have much energy left at the end of the day.
If you work an office job, you have no control over your external environment. That means your bosses or colleagues can distract you. Besides, you will be sitting in a sedentary position for many hours at a time. That is physically demanding.
After the workday ends, you feel drained, unmotivated, and lethargic. Emotionally, it can be tough to bring yourself to work on your side hustle.
With a remote job, you remove the external BS and increase your odds of actually clocking 15 productive hours on your side hustle.
5. Autonomy to structure your day
At a remote job, you have the flexibility to structure your day and can even decide whether or not to give your company your best hours. Ultimately, you can find the best time of the day to work on your side hustle. Instead of working during 8-11pm with a half awake mind, you could spend certain productive mornings of the week on your
side hustle.
You can even work on your side hustle during time sinking conference calls, or find other ways to multitask, since working from home has made getting things done much easier.
How many hours should you spend on your side hustle?
The benefit of working a remote job is that you do not need to work the full 40-50 hours in order to complete the key tasks of your day. In fact, the average employee only spends three hours of the workday doing any real work, i.e. performing the primary job tasks that he is hired for.
Thus, track your time – if you spend one week tracking and timing all your work tasks on a productivity app like Toggl or Google calendar, you may be shocked at how many hours worth of work you get done each day. Most likely, you can add an extra 15 hours into your workday. Spend that on your side hustle. Consistently working 15 hours per week on a side hustle when working a full time job is a realistic number that works for a lot of people, especially when they work from home in a remote position.
How should you allocate an extra 15 hours?
Option 1: Spend 2-3 hours on your side hustle every single day. Set up a routine whereby you work at the same time every day.
Option 2: Tweak your work schedule in a way that helps you be the most flexible and productive. For example, you can work 3 hours on a Monday, take Tuesday and Thursday off, then work 3 hours each on Wednesday and Friday, work another 6 hours on Saturday, and take Sunday off.
When you put in those 3 hours on a weekday, you can allocate them to the mornings when you are sharper and most productive, before your concentration levels gradually deplete throughout the day. You can rarely ever be this flexible when you work in the office.
Of course, starting a side hustle from home is not always a bed of roses. You have to be more proactive in managing distractions, interruptions from family members, and stay very disciplined and on top of your game.
What side hustle should you start?
Lastly, I shall briefly address the question on everyone’s mind: How do you decide on a side hustle to start?
View your side hustle as a business that can eventually free you from employment. Instead of selling your time to an employer, this means that you must learn to sell something to a niche market.
Even if you hate the idea of selling, choose something to sell and focus on it. Selling is an integral part of a side hustle.
Even if you have a useful skill, you will still need to make the sale. For instance if you learn a skill such as coding, you only make money by selling your code or your services to someone (such as building a freelance website). If you can convince hair salons, landscapers, small bakeries, and mom-and-pop shops why they need to upgrade their crappy websites to bring in more business… that is where sales matter and you just gained new clients.
Pick one of these things to sell: products, information, or services.
Here is the brief layman explanation on how to find something to sell. Pick one. Sell services based on something that you can help someone with. Find products that are high margin and sell them on existing platforms like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or Shopify. Sell informational content through blogs, podcasts, and videos.
Consider your niche. Who are the people you are selling to?
If you sell to a broad market (e.g. how to lose weight), no one is going to stop and notice you. However, if you instead sell to a niched audience (e.g. teaching Asian women over 60 how to lose weight through yoga), now these people will start noticing you and pay attention.
Another example. If you plan to sell coding services on Fiverr as a nobody, there are a million other freelancers who are willing to code for less money. Yet, if you only sell coding services to family-owned restaurants, that is your market and you can own it.
Last but most importantly, put your energy into one thing. Choose one thing, and stick consistently to it.
When people try to start a side hustle, they usually get tired when they return home from work, and then try to put their energy into 5-10 different ideas and never stick with any. Thus, they never get to a breakthrough on any of their ideas. There is never enough momentum.
Instead, what you should do is to decide on one thing and focus on it for at least 6 months to 2 years (depending on what you are selling), until you start making the money you want (set an income goal to hit). Then, you have the permission to move on to another side hustle. Here are examples on how to get specific on the thing you are working on:
- Focus on selling front-end website coding services to family-owned restaurants, until you hit an income goal of $3K per month
- Focus on selling a specific yoga product to Asian women over the age of 60 looking to lose weight, until you hit an income goal of $5K per month
Working from home can help you accelerate the process of building up a side hustle. You will have so much more time and energy to channel into it.
Summary
If you have struggled to set up a side hustle while working an office job, consider switching to a remote position. That would likely free up an extra 10 hours of your week, but you can free up even more hours by strategically reducing the hours at your job.
Choose your side hustle, be consistent, and put in at least 10-15 productive hours a week while you manage your remote job. It can be done.