Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

It`s not easy to pull a nine-to-fiver and then work on your own business... or muster strength to pursue your own business ideas.
One thing I did recently... and it sounds counter-intuitive... is to move closer to my work. It`s cut down on the commute time by an easy hour a day... plus I have lunch time. In total, it`s ten hours a week extra for personal business.
And, that`s not including the time my wife and I burned up running back and forth to town for groceries and other errands.
It hasn`t been easy. But I can see some improvements.
So. How do you guys do it? What are some strategies to help you keep your hands on the cube farm plow while you till your own 40 acres?

With an earlier business of mine, I worked all they wanted Monday-Friday, but nothing on the weekends ... weekends I taught classes and worked up my client base for the day in which I was going to launch my own business!

I`m lucky (finally.)  I absolutely love my day job.  It took me over twenty years of layoffs, buyouts, firings, and bad bosses before I figured out enough about -me- to let me "love the one I`m with."  But I also got a good boss who also has a good boss, and they both are willing to let me run into the darkness for them and make the mistakes they don`t want to make.  (It`s that entrepreneurship bug we here seem to share.)

However, now it`s hard to stay passionate about the stuff I want to be passionate about, and thus hard to stay motivated to work on the emerging side gig.

Strategies?  Less commute time is a good one.  In your case, it might be good management practice to convince your wife to get groceries without you every other time.  Two things that have helped me a lot at work are

(1) make a list of all of the things your boss does that are good or effective or admirable, even if you don`t like them.  Try to figure out what motivates her to have those traits, and relate to them instead of all the crap she has to throw at you because her boss makes her.

(2) find something that more or less relates to what you`re doing, but that you don`t already know.  Learn all you can about it, learn how to do it, and then apply it to what you`re doing now.  You will be effective and exceed your cow-orkers and bosses expectations.  You`ll be less bored too.

Stick with it!  Day jobs pay the bills.  Your new business will create jobs that pay someone else`s bills.  :-)



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Richard Johnson
New Ideas for a New World

That`s great advice. I live close to my day job (only 1.5 miles away) and it is *hugely* advantageous to my entrepreneurial work. I wouldn`t have time to do my side business if I were sitting in traffic 3 hours a day, which is not unheard of here in Atlanta.

I found that going down to a p/t job and building my biz on the side helped. I worked f/t before and worked on it and when I was ready, the drop in corporate hours helped:)

Are we interested only in plowing strategies, or are we interested in escaping the farm strategies? I`m not too good with plowing strategies.

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Team: Leadership Development Service Provider
"If you`re going the opposite direction of everyone else, keep going." - Sam Walton
"If you know how much you make per hour, you don`t make much." - Orrin Woodward