This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome back to the podcast. The podcast is known as Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. We've been going for 2,472 days in a row and I appreciate you tuning in today. This episode features Elliot from La Mesa, California.
He's got a unique work schedule that's all about sprinting and stopping. Okay, so everybody's got their own kind of work schedule situation out there. And a lot of schedules are not nine to five or whatever the hours may be. A lot of them have all sorts of variance and flexibility, sometimes imposed flexibility. So it's not you being flexible, it's your employer being flexible, right?
You know, it's whatever works best for them and you might have to accommodate that. And sometimes, you know, depending on the career or your industry, that's just part of how things work. And so if you're having to accommodate that or at least adjust to it a bit, like how can you grow a business or at least create an additional source of income in the midst of this erratic work season or maybe it's not even a season. Maybe it's just kind of the overall schedule of how it is. So if you've ever had an on-call job or different work hours, maybe something here is helpful for you as well.
Let's look at some potential side hustles that could match a sprint and stop or a stop and sprint work rhythm, intense work and downtime. What do you do in that situation? Detailed question coming up after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hey there, it's Elliot from La Mesa, California. I have a job that requires intense work sprints followed by periods of downtime, like being on call for weeks and then having a week off.
What would be the best type of side hustle that could fit this sort of sprint and stop schedule? I can't do consulting or anything else that requires constant availability or customer service. [Music]
Okay, well, this is an interesting work pattern and it's not totally abnormal. Like it's not strictly common, but there are people out there who have this kind of work schedule. We can describe it as sprint and stop, stop and sprint or just on again, off again.
I know a couple of people who were working in like oil fields in North Dakota or elsewhere actually have a brother-in-law who's doing that. And he actually works two weeks full-time, like every day, 10 hours a day, no days off. And then he has two weeks off, like completely off, right? So if you have a schedule like this, whether you're in the oil fields or something else, you've got limitations around constant availability. You can't do consulting as Elliot mentioned.
You can't do anything that requires like customer service where you have to be answering questions within an hour or something like that, even within a day sometimes. So you have to figure out, okay, what's the model that can work for me? And this is one of your first side hustle decisions. It's one of the first things you think about when you're like, what is my next business gonna be or my first business? So in this case, one option could be e-commerce or an affiliate model where you're doing content marketing, you're building up a website and recommending products.
I just talked about how customer service, you can't be available, but sometimes a lot of things can be automated or semi-automated to where your attention is very minor. Now, when I say that, I just wanna always be clear, there's a lot of work in building it to that point. Like I'm not trying to say this stuff is easy, it's often difficult, but it's worth it. So it's how you design your project that makes a big difference in terms of the operations. So during Elliot's downtime or anybody else in this situation, you can focus on product research, marketing, setting up those automations.
You're in like a work sprint, a work sprint for your side hustle. And then when you're in your day job, you're like, okay, I'm gonna put it on hold basically, and it's gonna run on autopilot or semi-autopilot. You might also look into digital products like creating or selling courses or templates, not courses that you have to teach actively, but ones that people can kind of take on demand. So you build the product once and it can be sold indefinitely requiring only occasional updates. Ultimately, the goal is to find a hustle where you're controlling the workload, it's not controlling you.
So you don't have that pressure of constant availability. And then your challenge is gonna be to make sure that you do use your time well during the times that you are able to devote to it. So you have a couple of different things going on. One is imposed by the environment and the other is just the difficulty of, like the mental difficulty of not working on something for a week or more and then going back to work on it. 'Cause you kind of take, it takes some time to get into the zone of something.
That's why I like making this podcast every day, right? 'Cause I'm in the zone. If I took weeks and weeks off, it would be hard to get back into it. So that's a challenge that you have to work with in addition to the external one as well. But I so admire the decision to move forward even given the constraints.
Elliot, best wishes, cheering you on. Our whole community is cheering you on in fact. And community, listeners, that would be you. Let me know what you're up to, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Gonna be planning some more events this fall as well.
Hopefully we'll get a chance to hang out somewhere. And of course, I look forward to continuing this daily conversation with you. It's always completely free. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
The show is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From The Onward Project.
