How to Make Time for Your Side Hustle:
Personal Projects Edition

Calling all weekend warriors! It can be tough to make time for your side hustle, like starting a new business or pursuing ambitious fitness endeavors. When compared to the rest of your grand life goals, side personal projects can easily be pushed aside and left for dead.

Yep, this is my brand new house!

Two days ago my wife Tessa and I closed on our first house! I took that picture above an hour after closing and I spent the next hour running through the halls of Home Depot imagining all of the amazing projects we were about to start.

Between this blog, my podcast, my other new podcast, coaching, product development, and writing my new book I have been able to squeeze in just enough time for negotiating real estate contracts and family meetings to bring this house project to life.

With a busy life it’s not always obvious how you can pull this off, but the answers are always there. Sometimes you just have to dig a little.

Hobbies and High-Achievers

For high-achievers, productivity junkies, or ambitious Type-As, it may seem like an impossible feat to make time for hobbies, side projects, or non-urgent and fun tasks.

In fact, most of the time those projects only happen when someone (cough, your spouse, cough) forces you to stop working and start dreaming. Making time for that family camping trip, the weekly foreign language tutor, or the new home-buying extravaganza can seem trivial when compared with your high-brow 25-year plans.

The funny thing is that hobbies are an essential part of life. Fun shouldn’t be reserved for a random happy-hour or a once-a-month trip to the park.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily call buying a house a hobby, but it does fall into the category of the non-urgent projects that can easily be postponed for yet another year.

We all have these projects in our lives. If you’re anything like me, you have a closet somewhere in your house that is calling your name. Buried deep in that closet is a dusty instrument you haven’t picked up in years, a photo album you promised you would update, or (like in my case) a pile of projects that all started small and quickly died.

These hobbies just need a little love, respect, and admiration — a simple spot on our busy weekly calendar that keeps the dream alive.

And yes, in our busy lives making time for a hobby can be a fantasy as big as climbing Mt. Everest. Choosing to be a high-achiever inevitably leads to a collection of dusty side projects buried deep in our own chaos.

Now is a great time to dig out those hobbies, dust them off, and remember what it’s like to have a little fun while getting things done.

(You like that last rhyming line? Thought so.)

The 5 AM Hobby

As much as I love to preach that your most important projects should be reserved for your morning routine, that time during the day when your brain is most alert and your energy is off the charts, I will make an important exception.

Let’s imagine you have totally embraced The 5 AM Miracle and you are spending your precious morning hours on one of your life’s grandest goals.

You spend an hour every morning before work ticking away at this project, striving forward one day at a time, staying on track to finishing this goal sooner than you ever imagined possible.

But, you have a problem. Many years ago you were the best drummer in your high school band. You were an awesome drummer and you loved to play your prized instrument. Over the years you gave up drumming for more practical pursuits.

You graduated from school, got a job in the real world, and haven’t touched your drum sticks since. Now, even though you have been making unbelievable progress on your grand goal, you can’t help but think about those dusty drums.

So, you decide to play for just one hour a week. Instead of plugging away on your main project, you devote one hour on Friday mornings to banging away on your dreams (er, drums).

One hour a week is all you give yourself, but oh, what a grand hour it is! Imagine how good it feels to let yourself off the hook for just an hour. No more. No less. One full hour of drumming to your heart’s content.

Your 5 AM Hobby is now a staple in your weekly schedule. You look forward to drumming every Friday and it even makes you focus more than ever throughout the rest of the week because you know you have that hour waiting for you.

Your new 5 AM Hobby is also your new stress reliever and it’s your ticket to staying committed to your other goals at the same time.

We all need a break to do what excites us and it’s even more amazing if we can devote some of our best energy to those side-tracked personal projects.

What’s Your Biggest (and Most Neglected) Personal Project?

I’d love to hear what you have buried in your dusty closet. What project were you imagining working on as I described this weekly drum session?

More Pics of the New Place

And just for kicks, here are some pictures of my house. The last picture is Tessa and I sharing some champagne in martini glasses that were left over from the previous owners.

I thought it was a nice touch.

Next Week

Next week on the blog I will be sharing my takeaways from a productivity live event I attended here in Nashville.