This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
I want to give a shout out to all the teachers out there. We often hear from teachers who are side hustling either out of necessity or just because they're really good at time management and keeping up with different projects and such multitasking or maybe it's not multitasking but moving from project to project and task to task. They also have some time off typically, some extended breaks in the spring and fall, of course the summer time period for lots of teachers, it tends to vary but we've got lots of teachers out there, that's the point and today we're going to hear from a teacher who is trying to side hustle or actually he has a side hustle already to be clear but he's trying to kind of juggle the multiple commitments, finding balance, alignment, integration and such. So this is a very common problem for anyone, not just teachers but anybody out there who's trying to do more than one job effectively, more than one job or business or income generating project. And we're all about that, we're all about helping you do that in a way that is best suitable and best aligned for you.
So this is Side Hustle School, my name is Chris Guillebeau, how to balance teaching and side hustling is today's listener question, you're going to hear that question in detail in just 30 seconds and then of course my answer is well. Hello Chris, I'm Mark from San Francisco, I'm a full-time teacher and I run a small tutoring business on the side. I discovered your podcast last year and it's been a fantastic resource, however I'm struggling to balance both commitments especially during the school year. What strategies can I use to manage my time more effectively and avoid burnout? I want to continue helping my students while maintaining my own well-being.
Your advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all the inspiration and practical tips. Hey Mark, I get it, thanks for reaching out and thanks for the kind words about the show. As I mentioned, there are a lot of teachers who are doing something like this, some kind of side hustle and one recommendation that I have off the top is okay, Mark here, his side hustle is pretty similar to his day job. He's doing tutoring on the side, he is a teacher for his day job.
Now in some ways that makes perfect sense, right, because he's good at that and perhaps he has like a natural base of clients as well but in other ways it's kind of hard to always do the same kind of thing and that can be a recipe for burnout like teaching during the day, tutoring at night, tutoring is great during the summer, tutoring is great for some intensive periods, maybe when students are preparing for standardized tests but I think generally it's better to plan for side hustles that are a little bit different than what you do during the day. So creating products can be a better focus because it's not a service-based intensive time commitment, it's something you can work on when you have more time and then stop working or at least pause and just do customer service during those busy times for your job. So it doesn't have to be a product of course, it could be affiliate income, it could be some kind of content project, a blog, YouTube channel, a podcast and all these categories have different considerations but if you just think what can I choose that's not going to be time intensive throughout the year because you're going to have different ideas, gravitate towards those ideas that are not time intensive throughout the year and that's going to help you a lot. So we've had Sarah, high school teacher, she also runs a successful arts and craft shop. She's doing really, really well making tens of thousands of dollars a year in her side hustle.
She uses a color-coded calendar to differentiate between teaching duties, shop management and personal time and so visual aids can help and then of course I'm a big fan of the Pomodoro technique. If you've only got an hour a day to spend on your side hustle, make sure you've got that planned out, sit down with a timer, work during that time and then go off and do other things. It's really important to look after yourself so that you can in fact build for the future and you don't get burned out on your day job or your side hustle and that both of these things are meaningful to you for as long as you want them to be and of course then you can make other choices from there. Mark, wishing you the best of luck and the best of action. Of course, listeners, I always hope that you find the show inspirational and also go on to take action about your own side hustles, your own businesses, whatever you're up to.
If you have a question, let me know how I can help, sidehustleschool.com, new episodes every day, always completely free. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. from the Onward Project.
