No B.S Friday: This is how to make progress.
I’ve noticed that there’s something that people often struggle with when they’re making the transition from working 9-5, to setting up their own story.
The transition is difficult. Not many people have the luxury of being able to quit their job before they’ve even started creating their own story – whether that’s becoming a full-time investor, or setting up your own business, or whatever.
It’s a long road – longer than you think. People think, I’ll quit my job now, then start working full-time on my new story, and I can afford to take three months off, so that should be enough time.
It rarely is. And people very quickly run out of cash and runway, and then they’re forced back into the workforce before they’ve really achieved anything.
So unless you can stay solvent without working for 12-18 months, it’s not a path I would recommend.
Typically, I would recommend doing them in parallel.
But obviously that’s easier said than done.
Because now you’re trying to shoe-horn in all the extra things you need to do, in a schedule that’s already a bit tight around the seams.
So first up, sit down with your friends and loved ones, your footy club and the Work Christmas Party Planning Committee, and have a tough conversation. Say, hey, for the next 18-months I’m going to be working on this thing, and I’m not going to be available as much anymore.
But know that I love you, and I will come back to you when I’m done, Work Christmas Party Planning Committee.
Manage those expectations, and clear some room in your calendar.
So that’s one.
But having done that, there’s another challenge that seems to be pretty common.
And that’s because our project planning tends to be pretty task-focused.
So we look at where we want to be in 18 months, figure out all the things we need to do, and from that, create a sequential to-do list.
This is how the work world is organised. We rock up to work, and there’s a list of tasks waiting for us. And we just put our head down and make our way through them.
But this process often falls down when we’re trying to run our own story in parallel to our own story.
Because we’re not being paid to be at our desk or be on the tools.
And so we say, I need to do task X, and I think I have time for that Thursday afternoon. But then Thursday comes and your kid skinned their knee and needs to be patched up and cuddled.
So you think you’ll just do that task Tuesday. But Tuesday comes and there’s a leak in the gutter that needs fixing. So you say you’ll do it this coming Thursday, but then your bestie is in the middle of a break-up and wants someone to join them in ritual alcohol poisoning…
… and so on.
And this can go on for months. I’ve seen it go on for months.
So what I recommend is that after you have mapped out your tasks, have a look at how much time they’re going to take, and then come up with a rough estimate of how much time you need to give it each week.
Don’t be crazy ambitious. If you’re already working 40 hours don’t imagine you’re going to do another 40 hours every week. Maybe it’s something like 6 or 10 hours a week, every week.
And then make that your commitment. Just say that by the end of the week, I promise to do ten hours work on this project.
(In the same way you commit to your boss, by the end of the week I will have done 40-hours work.)
I find it much easier to defend my project’s time in my calendar if I have a quota I have to hit.
So this is the hack. Commit to time, not tasks.
This is how to run a project in parallel to your day job.
JG.