What do you do when your side job becomes a burden?

If you spend a lot of time online, you may have felt the urge to do a side job at some point. A side business is a venture that you start with the more or less express intention of gaining money, followers, recognition, or fame. You may have considered starting a podcast, blog, YouTube channel, or online store on Etsy. Why not? We live in a content economy where entrepreneurship is prized, and Wix and Squarespace ads keep reminding us that it's easy to build a professional website for any startup.

For those who have embarked on a parallel activity, it is very likely that they will get tired after a short period. You may feel that you can't maintain a certain level of productivity or that your hobby is no longer fun after you make it professional. Whatever the reason, what you do may seem routine.

What do you do when your side job becomes a chore or boring? She can become so cowardly and make ambiguous moves on her return to him that she feels guilty for abandoning him. (Did I do that? Do I now do that to a specific project? Who knows!) You can haunt yourself by asking some expert-approved questions to guide you toward a more sustainable approach.

Ask yourself why did you start your side business?

When I interviewed experts on this topic, I wanted to know what questions people might ask themselves when they feel like their side job is draining their energy, so they know how to move forward. Overall, their answers were similar: "Why did you start this side business in the first place?"

Maybe you started your side business to make money, or because you wanted to ply your trade, or you were passionate about a cause, or because all your friends had side projects and you thought you should, too. By slowing down and revisiting your original goal, you can see what is really going on and look for solutions.

If the original reason you started your side hustle still resonates with you, you might consider re-identifying the issue. Bill Burnett, co-founder and CEO of the Stanford Life Design Lab and co-author of Design Your Life, suggests thinking of your challenge in terms of "grounding issues" and "gravity issues.  Say for example, that you subscribe to a weekly newsletter dedicated to tracking new restaurant openings in your city because you love trying new places and want to share this information with others.  The problem with the anchor here might be the persistent notion that there should be a weekly newsletter  or even the newsletter itself.

"Once you decide there is only one solution to a problem, you lock yourself in," Burnett says. In practice, try to let go of the anchors that you attached to your side business, and then think of other ways to achieve your central goal. What if I sent this newsletter monthly instead of weekly? What if the move took a more exciting form for you, like a TikTok or Instagram account?

On the other hand, severity issues cannot be changed. "It's just a law of nature, and in this case, we'd say it's not a problem, just a circumstance," Burnett explains. The problem of attraction can also arise in a situation where you can make a difference but don't want to. For example, you might stock up on cold drinks and send out a restaurant newsletter every weekend in addition to your regular job—but you may not realize at first how much effort and energy a newsletter requires, and you don't want to sacrifice all your free time in it. (Fatigue is real. ) That's a logical situation to consider. And when you think about solutions, your work respects that constraint.

Wonder why you started your side business? You may also realize that your answer makes you pause. This possibility may be especially true if you started a project by imitating your friends or because you felt some form of peer pressure. "You just have to be true to yourself," Burnett says. "Instead of opening an Etsy site, maybe you need therapy. Why do I care what my friends think of me, and why should I use this metric to measure my success in the world?

Sarah Noble, a life coach who works with creative people, believes that if a project doesn't align with who you are and what you want to offer the world, that's a good reason to abandon it.  Sarah enjoys helping clients who are embarking on a new project create "conditions of satisfaction" which include "ground rules" for letting go. "I don't think we, especially as creators, do everything we can to give up on our projects and move on," Noble says.

Abandon self-bashing, perfectionism and obligatory

As you begin to restructure your side business, you may hear a voice within you that says, "Sure, you could move your weekly newsletter into a monthly newsletter, but you don't have to," and gives you all kinds of reasons. Your project will fail!  You told your subscribers that you would send them every week so you wouldn't keep your promise! Top performers hold senior positions and run blogs with weekly newsletters, so you should do the same!

This is normal, so don't fall into a spiral of self-blame. "I think the biggest problem people have with starting a side business and then starting to work down the road is that there's a lot of self-deprecation and wondering if the problem is them. 

Self-deprecation prevents you from finding a permanent solution to your side business. As Burnett asserts, "Design only really works, right now, where we are today. Instead of focusing on the more ambitious version of your side hustle—which doesn't exist—accept your reality: You've tried one version and it didn't quite work, and now you have valuable information to guide you in your move. before. 

Sometimes we impose the word “should” on ourselves, while sometimes it can come from people in our lives, including our well-meaning loved ones. Rather than taking another person's "should" at face value, Baumgardner suggests treating it as a nod: "When you hear that word, ask yourself this question: 'You may think so, but...what do I really have to do?'" ?  “”

If a friend tells you that you should invest in your hobby of sewing, for example, think seriously about whether that's something you really want, because even if outside encouragement motivates you to start a business, it probably won't sustain you in life. Long term.  "If that's not your goal, the project won't work," Baumgardner says.

Speaking of "outside recommendation," one of the biggest reasons you feel stuck in a side business—even though it's clearly not for you anymore—is the fear of disappointing your audience or clients.  In the end, these are the people who have given you their time, attention, and money — and who have made the side business what it is today. It's real. But "you have to let it go," says Baumgardner. According to Noble, your audience is not a reference figure in your life (it's not your parents. Again.): “And if they are truly aligned with who you are and the work you do, then they will be compatible with whatever path you take or whatever direction you decide to take your work.”

Treat your side business as an experiment

After identifying your motivations for starting a side business and reframing your challenges, you can enter Experiment Mode, where you test and see the results of project changes. Baumgardner advises opening up during the process: "You may have an idea about it at first, but give yourself the freedom to see what it looks like. Educate yourself constantly by asking questions: How do I like it? How do I use my strengths? Is it fun? Is it challenging? What? you know what?

Depending on the nature of your side business, you may consider changing the pace, duration, theme, or look of your product. If you're struggling on a technical side, skip this challenge and ask someone for help or watch a YouTube tutorial. You may also consider adjusting other aspects of your life to accommodate your side activities. If your side job is a high priority—as a source of income, a passion project, or a tool for career advancement—it might be worth forgoing scrolling TikTok or watching TV to moderate your job at that time.

If appropriate, you can try a specially modified version of your side business. Before Baumgardner launched her blog, which eventually became the basis of her book, she tested it for six months to see what blogging was like by stockpiling posts without posting a word. Prototyping can give you the opportunity to get feedback from friends and family before you launch your product.
There's no perfect time to do this kind of experiment, but you'll want to give yourself plenty of time to review the changes you've already made. It can take eight weeks or even months, but you need to give yourself plenty of time, especially if you're testing a new product. Here's what Baumgardner says about it: "I think if it lasts more than a year, it can be considered an alibi.
In Burnett's experience, that terrible feeling of failing on your first try dissipates once you begin to experiment. In this context, explains the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, who previously worked in product design at Apple, and is an expert in prototyping: “Of course, things went wrong the first few times, and this will be repeated with the fifth, tenth and fifteenth models.” I was at Apple, we designed the first laptop with about 300 prototypes before we worked out that the keyboard had to be on the back and the trackball on the front.”
Your goal is to grow the project and learn from your mistakes until you succeed. For his part, Burnett says, "Don't invent two ways, invent ten, and as soon as you get caught up in thinking the guilt will go away, the word 'should' will go away, and you'll stop comparing. Curiosity "The multiplicity of possibilities that could happen. Looking forward" is seen as powerful, exciting and interesting.

While it's very useful to analyze the motivations behind your side business and consider other versions of it, this kind of experience also requires a fair lack of serious thought—that lack of openness and rigidity that Baumgardner described. “Do it. A thought can take 100 years to come true. Let it be bad,” says Los Angeles-based writer and life coach Sara Campbell.

Accept the ebbs and flows of work

As your goals, needs, commitments, business, and lifestyle evolve, your side business will likely evolve throughout its life cycle. This is what Campbell experienced firsthand with her own blog, which she started after finalizing a startup concept, which was itself a side business: "I think as my blog has grown, I've hit dead ends a few times. 

When her startup collapsed, Campbell fell into a deep depression, and her blog, Tiny Revolutions, became a way to talk about these feelings: "For the first six months I was writing about it to help me recover. That's what I needed to do.  As she began to feel better, this project didn't resonate as well as it used to, and for a while, her blogging became even more distracting. And when COVID-19 hit, Campbell tried to recover by writing once a week on topics like mental health and Buddhism. This is what she has been writing about lately, once a month.

After four years of blogging, Campbell believes her readers can trust her newsletter to show up in their inboxes, though not always on a strictly defined schedule. Since she stopped writing, her readership has doubled every week.

When it comes to side business, Campbell says, there's a certain degree of ups and downs that we have to learn to tolerate — a certain ebb and flow to accept. As she says, "For me, when you feel like you're doing a chore, you have to find a way forward. Like, instead of committing to posting content on Fridays at 8 a.m., reframe your schedule as a journey of curiosity and exploration.