Starting up a business takes a lot of hard work. You’ll need to spend countless hours of your time creating your website, registering your company, posting on social media, writing quality content, organizing your finances, finding customers, and working on your product or service. It takes a great deal of dedication and patience to see it through, and in the early stages, it will take over your life.
But with such a colossal time commitment, there’s a good chance you’ll have to fit your business around another job. It will take a while before you make serious money from your business venture, so you’ll need a reliable source of income to keep you going. But this raises a serious challenge of time: how can you find the time to set up your business when you spend eight hours a day working for someone else?
It might seem impossible to be an entrepreneur and an employee at the same time, but many people do make it work. You just need to be smart about how you use your time and adopt some clever strategies to be more efficient. To get you started on your business journey, here are four tips for starting a business while employed.
Be organized
Your available time will be limited, so you need to make the best use of it as possible. For this reason, you should plan out your time comprehensively. Create a weekly planning diary as well as a more detailed daily one for specific tasks. Write down exactly what you want to achieve in this time and when you will achieve it during the week. This will keep you focused on the most important task and allow you to be more efficient with your time.
Find a more flexible work arrangement
Can you ask your boss for more flexibility in your work? Perhaps you could work from home a couple of days a week? This will give you a lot more extra time in the day as you can avoid the commute and fit in business tasks more easily around your job. If not, maybe you could find a part-time job that affords you more free time, such as bar work, blogging, or a delivery driver job (https://www.shiply.com/us/delivery-driver-jobs).
Use your breaks
Even when you’re working eight hours a day, you will still have free time to carry out business tasks. Although you shouldn’t anger your current employer by shunning their work for your own, you can still use your lunch break and commute to make important phone calls, send emails, and work on your website. Just make sure you are discreet about it.
Establish boundaries
If your employer clocks on that you are working on your own business, they are likely to monitor your work activity more closely. For this reason, you should never work on your business during work hours and never using work devices. Although your focus might be elsewhere, you still need to work hard for your employer, or you might end up without a job.