How I balance my full-time job with a demanding side hustle

Nov 14

I’m a full-time content marketing manager for a startup, and I also juggle several other content strategy clients on the side. Somehow, I still make time to live my actual life.

I’m even surprised I can do it sometimes, honestly.

Here’s how I find balance to have my cake and eat it, too.

Being intentional with my time

You have to manage your time well if you’re going to side hustle, there’s no way around it. You can’t just depend on random spurts of motivation and pockets of time.

Your calendar is going to be your best friend.

I proactively carve out chunks in my day — around my full-time job — to get to my freelance work. Sometimes this means working over my lunch break, waking up early some days, or working later at night or on weekends.

What’s important here is to choose what works for you and put it in your schedule to hold yourself accountable. I will put an actual hold on my calendar to automatically decline new meetings during this work time.

The split that works for me is working on my lunch break most days, working a few hours in the evening 2–3 days, and then having a big productivity session on Saturday where I go to a cute coffee shop and knock out a ton of work at once.

Sometimes, things pop up and will pop up and you’ll have no choice but to work outside of these blocks you set for yourself. In these instances, you may have to say no to social events on weekdays or have to work late into the night or early in the morning. But if you’re really intentional with your time, this should be the exception, not the rule.

A planning system that works

I wouldn’t be a fraction as productive as I am without the systems I have in place.

Digital planner

First things first, I have a planner that helps me to keep everything straight. I love using a digital one on my iPad, but you can go with a physical one if that works best for you.

The purpose of my planner is to keep me organized and balanced on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. At the beginning of each week, I lay out all of the tasks I know are coming up, and anticipate others that may pop up throughout the week — both in my full-time job, my freelance work, and in my personal life.

Doing this at the beginning of the week helps you keep things spread out and avoid overloading yourself any one day.

This is helpful both in not leaving everything until the day it’s due, and in helping you move a little slower on tasks when you have the time. I have a tendency to push way too hard when I don’t need to, so being proactive about spreading out these tasks is a lifesaver in helping me not burn out.

Color coding is super helpful here, too.

I do pink for personal life, purple for work, and blue for anything side hustle-related. This helps me maintain balance.

If I notice way too much purple and blue and almost no pink, it’s an indicator to check to see if I can shift things around to get some stuff for my personal life in there somewhere.

Notion

For long-term projects, like strategizing to grow my business and build my personal brand, I use Notion to keep things organized.

These things are a little too zoomed-out to keep track of in my digital planner, so I keep all of these housed as separate projects in my Notion. On here, I can keep tabs on ongoing tasks, important files, contracts, etc.

While this isn’t as important in the day-to-day, it’s crucial to keep everything organized in one place so that nothing gets lost in the day-to-day chaos.

And many of these things go on my “could-do list.” If you haven’t heard me talk about this low-stress version of a to-do list, read about it here ;)

Giving myself breaks + setting boundaries

We’re all only human, so trying to push against when you’re getting burnt out is never going to work out in your favor. So I try to listen when my brain and body are telling me to take it easy.

Sometimes, the crazy workload that I have is completely self-imposed and arbitrary. Many brand-building tasks and internal business stuff aren’t as urgent as I make them out to be in my head. For example, just because I wrote in my planner that I was going to write a new Medium post today, doesn’t mean that the world will end if I don’t.

And there are some days where I’m just not feeling it. I try to give myself that day to do nothing after my 9–5 and relax.

If I have actual urgent tasks, taking a break for the day may require me to shift around my to-do lists for the week and load myself up on other days. But often, it’s worth it. Being able to approach a bigger to-do list when I’m fresh is always going to feel better than feeling like I’m pushing a heavy rock uphill.

There are days when urgent deadlines mean that I just can’t take a day off. But I still try to find time to take a break when I need it.

This may mean I just take an hour or two to go to a workout class, to walk my dog, to stroll around the park, or to sit on the couch and veg out for a bit. This short break can really help me to push through when my brain feels like it’s hitting a wall.

A great way to start with this is to schedule this downtime. I try to have at least one day a week where I don’t do anything work-related after my 9–5.

If you can schedule this in advance, it’s even better because it’s something you can really look forward to and maybe plan some time to cook a nice meal or hang out with friends.

But if your schedule is a little crazier like mine tends to be, I just add this 1 day a week to my habit tracker to make sure it’s checked off at least once a week.

Staying excited about my work

Having a side hustle is hard work. Sometimes I get frustrated about how much I have to do, and I even get jealous at times that other people have more time to just relax than I do.

But I have to remind myself that this is something I choose to do because I love it and want to create a fulfilling long-term career.

Sometimes all it takes is a reminder to myself that “literally no one is making you do this.” I can stop any time I want, and yet I don’t because I actually love what I do.

Once I remind myself of the reason that I started doing this in the first place — and where I want it to take me in the future — I can let go of the frustration of having so much to do. I get to reframe it as all of these opportunities to do cool shit for cool companies and to build a career doing what I love.

As long as I’m able to still find balance in my real life — and knowing that I won’t be side hustling forever — this realization is often able to give me the kick of motivation I need.

Plus, I get to make little Hannah proud that I literally get paid to write for a living. She would freak out, and that’s all I could ever ask for.

Hannah Lambert