Mixing Side-hustle Tasks With Your Daily Job - Overlap Benefits

Time is arguably our most valuable resource.  We can not buy extra time. We can only spend it as wisely as possible.  That means we need to be mindful of the cost of our daily tasks for getting better.  Fortunately, that time is not a loss.  We can plan out our daily steps to improve in ways that allow us to get more done with little or no additional time spent.  One way is mixing side-hustle tasks with your regular job.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone

We have examined how our side-hustle work and a daily job can overlap.  Those tasks we do to improve may help our career while our day job can provide some experience that translates to a side-hustle.  These can even overlap when you focus on mixing side-hustle tasks with your daily job.  Sometimes the overlap will also be a one-to-one mix-in.

Fill Dead Time

The approach for mixing side-hustle tasks with your daily job is through the use of "dead time."  There are things we do each day that require us to wait for a while.  This waiting goes beyond things like waiting in line at a store or restaurant.  We have meetings that start late, downloads, and uploads that need to complete, over even reports to run.  All of these tasks can take minutes or longer and provide opportunities to use that time wisely.  I do not want to imply this sort of micro-filling your time is easy, but it can be done if you plan properly.

The Cost of Switching Gears

The most difficult challenge in mixing side-hustle tasks with your daily job is in finding large enough granules of time.  There is a cost to mentally switch gears even from reviewing reports to reading a blog article.  You probably need at least ten to fifteen-minute blocks of time to be able to fill in some gaps.  The good news is that modern operating systems and tools make it easy to keep something up in the background so you can switch to it quickly.  You can use these little chunks of "free time" to do things ranging from entering your latest expenses to building a new application.  Just make sure you avoid getting carried away.

Episode Challenge: Review your daily tasks and look for opportunities to automate and free up a little more time.

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