Balancing a Full-Time Job with a Creative Side Hustle
I’ve had some form of employment since I was 13 years old, when I weaseled my way into a newspaper staff writer job by writing reviews of Avril Lavigne’s first CD and submitting opinion columns about local topics. (The confidence of youth.) It wasn’t long after I got my first writing gig that I found other jobs throughout high school, until I got to the point where I was taking a full load of AP courses, working at the newspaper after theater rehearsals, and working shifts at restaurants and the local movie theater on the weekends. In retrospect, I’m not sure what I was thinking overloading myself with so much… work, but it did set me up for adulthood, where I learned to value the combination of a full-time job with a creative side hustle. Learning to juggle multiple projects carried me through college, grad school, and into my creative career.
The lessons I’ve learned were not always easy to learn. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve burnt out over the past decade and a half, and I finally have a better system for managing the many hats I’ve chosen to wear in my life. I want to share what I’ve learned with you so that you can hopefully avoid some of the mistakes often made by folks like us with similar ambitions.
Disclaimer:
I’ll preface this by noting that I don’t yet have children, although I am planning to start a family, and I believe that caretaking in any form should be taken into consideration when juggling work + creative projects.
I work remotely (from home) and have a job that lets me choose my hours. However, I do work “normal business hours” from about 8 a.m.-5 p.m. every day. Jobs that have unpredictable hours (such as medical professions) may make some of these suggestions harder to apply. I hope that some of these takeaways will be universal, but of course, there’s no advice that will apply to every situation. :)
At present, I work a full-time job (as a content strategist for an investment company) and run my own business (Scribemind), which includes several projects such as my Patreon and the RPG Writer Workshop. On average, I work at least 40 hours a week at my primary job, and then work on Scribemind-related projects after work and on the weekends. Sometimes, this means that I work 60 hour weeks, which can be a lot. But most of the time, I don’t feel overworked, thanks to my tried-and-true systems; I feel happy and fulfilled and eager to do new things!
What is a creative side hustle?
For this article, I’m defining a creative side hustle as any professional, money-earning endeavor you do outside of a full-time job. This may mean that you’re a contract creative, doing projects for others as a contractor; or it may mean that you own your own small business making things or providing a service. Many of you may do both; under Scribemind, I tend to do a mix of projects and consider myself both a business owner and a creative-for-hire.
I use the phrase “side hustle” not because I endorse “hustle culture,” because I certainly don’t, but because that’s a phrase commonly used to describe a “side project.” I value hard work but not at the expense of mental, physical, or emotional health. The whole point of this post is to help you find a healthier balance so that you can be creatively and financially fulfilled in everything you do!
Best Practices
Let your friends and family know about your plans and goals.
It’s much easier to find balance when you let those close to you know what you want to do. My family is very accepting of my side hustle, so when they come visit and I have to work on a draft for a project, they don’t think I’m being a jerk. This doesn’t mean you should be a workaholic and ignore your family for some arbitrary notion of success; it just means you would like to have some dedicated time to work on your creative pursuits. Your friends and family will likely want to support you.
Prioritize ruthlessly.
There are only so many hours in the day, and your full-time job will take up a big chunk of your waking hours. This doesn’t leave that much time for much else. Honestly, I feel like I get through about 40% of Scribemind projects a week; there is always more I wish I could be doing, like posting more on social media, producing more content, starting new endeavors, etc. But as long as the most important tasks get completed, that’s all that matters. I am also selective about the commission work I accept and the time of year I accept it.
Be as organized as possible.
Balancing both a FT job and a side hustle requires wearing many hats. Even if you have a good memory, you have to get into the habit of documenting everything: deadlines, contracts, project scopes, project directives, random ideas that pop into your head, etc. (I use Notion to manage everything in my life.) Spend time developing a system that works for you. Anything you use should make it easy for you to quickly file important things away and access those things if and when you need them.
This also applies to your home. You don’t have to be a super clean person, but I guarantee that keeping your personal space clean and as clutter-free as possible will do wonders for your productivity. Clutter is a burden on our brain and senses — seriously. You don’t have to be uber minimalistic or ascribe to any particular aesthetic, but keeping your environment organized frees up your mind to focus on important, creative things.
You will feel scattered and unproductive if you don’t take the time to learn your processes and systems. This is its own topic so maybe I’ll write a separate post, if that’s of interest! Ultimately, your system just needs to be a way for you to:
Track things
Store things
Remember things
Find things
Prioritize things
Schedule things
Figure out what your time is worth to you.
How much is an hour of your time worth to you? What about a day? A week? A month? If you don’t know the answer to this, it’s a good thing to calculate before you ever embark on a creative side hustle (AND it may help you find a full-time job that values you accordingly).
A traditional business way to calculate this: divide your earnings by the hours you spent to earn it. However, I think it’s important to be a bit more abstract with your calculations, especially if you don’t have any earnings yet because you’re just starting your side hustle. One approach that has worked for me is to evaluate what you make at your full-time job, and determine the percentage you want your side hustle to earn to contribute to your livelihood. For example, my side hustle tends to earn me the equivalent of 30-40% of my full-time salary. If you make $40,000 as a full-time salary, you may set an annual goal to make 10% of that with your side hustle. This means you’d work to earn $4,000 with your side hustle per year, which would make your total income $44,000. From there, break it down further:
How many projects would you have to do to make that goal? (Usually, the fewer, the better.)
What is the price point of each project?
How much time would each project take?
What is the nature of these projects (meaning, are these projects that require your direct time or could they be potentially passive forms of income)?
There is a lot that goes into calculating these metrics, so you don’t have to get THAT complicated. You should also take into account:
Are there resources you’d need to invest in to do these projects?
Would you be sacrificing other opportunities to do a specific project?
Are these projects you’d be excited to work on in your free time?
Depending on your responses, you may set a base hourly rate and then add to it to account for other circumstances.
It’s important to calculate these numbers, otherwise your time and labor just goes into ether. It’s much easier to prioritize when you know, “An hour of my time is worth $35 to me. If I spend 10 hours a week making Instagram posts, am I seeing a return on that investment or is it becoming a waste of time?” Additionally, this practice prevents you from undervaluing yourself.
Schedule time to rest and relax (yes, seriously).
At some point in your creative career, you’ll start meeting your personal metrics of success. This is incredibly motivating, but what also happens is that we raise our ambitions and take on more and more projects without stopping to evaluate the rest of our time. Usually, rest and relaxation are the first things to be tossed out at this point. I can’t stress enough how important these are — not just for your creativity, but for your well-being. The whole point of having a creative side hustle is to pursue something that you truly enjoy, and there’s no point to doing that if you’re running yourself ragged. Burnout among creatives is very real, and it’s not just “feeling tired.” Burning out feels like depression, where you lose interest in things you once love, grow numb to things you once cared about, and feel a fusion of malaise and bleakness that smothers any spark of joy or creativity. I’ve been there more times than I can count, and it takes a while to bounce back. The best way to prevent it is by never burning out in the first place, which IS preventable.
I’ll note that I always get a lot of pushback from my fellow creatives on this point. “But I WANT to write/paint/etc. during my free time. It’s what I like to do, so why can’t I just do it all the time?” Trust me, I get it! I want to work on Scribemind all the time. But everything about leading a creative life is about practice and developing positive habits, and learning how to truly rest and refill your creative well takes practice. And sometimes, I get my best ideas when I’m not sitting at my computer. (Lately my breakthroughs tend to happen when I’m knitting!)
What I recommend is marking off two days a week on your calendar where you don’t have to work on anything. This means that when you’re done with work for the day, you don’t need to work on your creative side hustle. Spend this time doing something fun or restful so that it becomes natural to have that time built-in to your schedule, and not as an afterthought.
This also helps you keep your project scope in check. Don’t commit to new projects if it means you’ll have to infringe upon those two days. You never know when you might need those days to tend to other things or emergencies, and if you’re perpetually overbooked, there is no wiggle room for anything else. This is what leads to burnout and stress.
Answering Your Questions
I asked my Patrons to share their questions with me about work-life-side hustle balance!
Do you prefer to work a full-time job and do creative work on the side? Is this "by design" or would you rather do the creative work full time? If the latter, what barriers do you face to making that a reality?
Yes, I 100% prefer this arrangement and for me it’s the best case scenario. It helps that I enjoy my day job and apply what I learn there to my creative pursuits (and vice versa). My day job is certainly creative (involving writing, editing, marketing strategy, and design), although in different ways than what I do with Scribemind. The differences between my day job and creative side hustle are substantial enough that I don’t get burnt out doing the same thing all day and night. When I was working full-time as a journalist several years ago, I didn’t write much outside of work because I was writing all day long, which meant that many of my personal projects had stalled.
I have had a few opportunities to make the leap to doing my creative side hustles full-time, but have decided against it for the following reasons:
1) Financial stability. When I have a full-time job, I know I have income coming in (and often, but not always, health benefits). Alleviating the stress of making ends meet allows me to be much more creative. I have lived paycheck to paycheck before, and during that time in my life, was not nearly as creative or productive as I was once I secured full-time employment. Plus, financial stability and success helps me invest in my business, like being able to build a custom computer and have a nice office space.
2) I don’t want to hustle 24/7. For about a year after graduating from graduate school, I freelanced full-time — mostly as a contract writer, but also as an educator and curriculum developer. I made a pretty decent go of it, but I had to work so hard constantly to make even a fraction of what I was able to make once I found a FT job. I have more structure with my job and can better plan for vacations/breaks.
Additionally, I maintain my side hustles in the event that something happens to my full-time job — which happened to me a few years ago when I was unexpectedly let go from a job due to budget cuts. My side hustle at the time was mostly research-related, which kept me afloat until I found a new full-time opportunity. I’ll also share that my “side hustles” have almost always gotten me gainful employment. I got my job as a journalist during grad school because, at the time, I was running my own online magazine. That showed what I was capable of doing. I maintain side hustles as portfolio-builders!
It is mutually beneficial to me, personally, to have both a side hustle and a full-time job for these reasons. In general, I never want to be fully dependent on one source of income.
How do you maintain high energy both at your full-time job and at freelance work? It seems like you would need to work extra hard to not burn out—how do you keep double the passion and energy?
This usually comes down to the types of projects I choose to do, so I always try to diversify what I’m working on so that it contrasts with my full-time job. A few months ago, I was hosting webinars a few times a week for my job. I made sure to not book podcast recordings or other front-facing projects for Scribemind during that time. I knew I would have felt burnt out doing too much of that.
Additionally, I try to keep my side hustle flexible. With Scribemind, there are so many things I can work on: blog posts, templates, mentorship sessions, contract work, etc. I know myself well enough at this point to just go with whatever sounds fun to me to work on every day. I keep my project scopes reasonable, ensure my deadlines are specific but not immovable, and establish meaningful metrics for success. If I had to do the same thing every single day for Scribemind — like a long daily email that I’d have to constantly plan for and spend time doing — that would very quickly become more of a chore than a joyful and sustainable creative outlet.
How do you manage when both get busy and you can't take a break like you need to? How can you recover when you literally don't have time? (Ideally you'd never get scheduled this way, but what are tips for when you do?)
I really try hard to stick to my “two-day rule” but sometimes life happens! I’ll cite an example from earlier this year: I got summoned to jury duty right as I was exiting a job and starting another the following week, and had my drafts of Heckna due. I was so stressed, plus the case was a murder trial (!!!) and at times a pretty heart-wrenching one. It’s safe to say that I basically came straight home every day after court and went to bed, exhausted. So sometimes, these situations arise despite our best efforts. One thing I did was ask for an extension for my Heckna draft, which was graciously accepted. I never, ever used to ask for extensions and in retrospect, I don’t know why! When we are doing creative work, we should do it when we’re at our best, and I never want to turn in less-than-stellar work. Plus, my publisher was happy to work with me to set a new deadline.
Sometimes we have to just give ourselves a break and take one day at a time. Creatives like us are always thinking about the future and the next step, but occasionally, we have to center ourselves and bring us back to the present. I heard a good phrase recently: “Be where your feet are.”
Additionally, there is a good metaphor about juggling balls of glass and balls of rubber. Knowing which of your responsibilities won’t break if dropped is an important part of having a side hustle. Sometimes the rubber balls fall and it’s not the end of the world. We’re all only human!
How do you combat mentally feeling constantly beholden to others? If your on and off hours are spent working, what are your best tips for doing both well while still establishing that boundary?
Reprioritizing my creative output become a huge focus for me this year. I realized that, although I love to write, having so many deadlines for publishers was draining me. For quite a few years, my side hustle consisted of writing and research contract work (much of which was ttRPG work), which meant that I had a ton of deadlines for others all the time. I’m not joking when I say that I probably had some sort of deadline every two or three weeks for the past two years. While the income was nice and the work was fun, I was working around the clock and constantly pushing my own projects off. In January, I decided to pivot my focus. What had become both more fulfilling and financially sustainable was the RPG Writer Workshop, so I wanted to find more ways to bring in income without having to be beholden to others for projects. Essentially, I wanted to do less creative output for others and more resource development for my communities, where I’d have more freedom to set deadlines that actually work with my schedule.
I am also building up some systems that will hopefully lead to passive income in 2021. So, that’s a long way of saying… I have worked to become less beholden to others and choose those types of projects very selectively. I now prioritize my own plans and ideas, which has been so much more fun and prosperous. And it’s not the end of the world if I have to adjust a project timeline when my day job gets busy (which it frequently is!). Don’t be afraid to pivot; focus on something else within your skillset!
How do you stay productive for so many hours per day? What keeps your focus high?
This really comes down to having a process that I’ve honed over the past decade. I set routines and stick to them closely. There’s no shortcut to this — it’s just something you have to commit to developing for yourself. I prioritize organization and personal project management. I try very hard to not start new projects before I have finished others. I try to not even TALK about ideas until they are actually on my to-do list and in-progress, because once I say something aloud, it becomes a commitment. I also DON’T work all night and all day on the weekends. I cut myself off a few hours before I go to bed and I make time on the weekends for leisure. When I used to work at all hours, I never had a chance to recover mentally and felt constantly fatigued.
Sometimes the creative side hustle can feel like a second full-time job. What are ways that you balance that, especially in relation to making sure that you're "paying yourself" for your time invested in the side projects.
I think knowing what your time is worth to you is a vital step. Once I figured that out, I curated my time much differently. I try to be really honest with myself about the projects I actually want to do, the projects that set my soul on fire AND result in a decent ROI. I run through the time/money/resources calculations before accepting or starting a new project just to make sure the numbers work.
Do you feel like you have to sacrifice things to do what you do?
Absolutely. I could certainly have a lot more “free time” if I wanted to, but I know that I would just be thinking about the creative projects I want to do. Ultimately, I am excited to get up in the morning because of the great creative endeavors in my life. They give me purpose. I will say that I often prioritize creativity over socialization or other hobbies. I don’t play new video games very often; not because I don’t enjoy them, but because I’d rather use my time elsewhere. I’d rather spend a Friday night designing new pages in Notion instead of going out — which makes me sound boring, but hey, it’s the truth! Learning and self-improvement are very important to me, and my side hustle is more than just my job — Scribemind is a huge part of my identity beyond any financial benefits it offers me.
But the sacrifice goes both ways. I know that when I do start a family, that will require another reprioritization. But I am ruthless in my pursuit of having a good life that works for me, so I feel that becoming flexible will hopefully serve me well. If we learned anything this year, it’s that life doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes it’s hard, but making our creativity a guiding light in our lives is always a good thing. :)