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Take a break from full-time work to complete deep work
There is a way to balance the 9 to 5 with your side hustle and entrepreneurial ventures, but I know there are people who can relate to one of these feelings:
“I’m overwhelmed.”
“I’m super productive, but there’s still not enough time in the day.”
“I’m moving slowly on my goals cause my job takes up too much time.”
Sometimes the responsibilities and time commitment that the 9 to 5 takes away from your day are extreme and can delay our side hustle progress.
As entrepreneurs, we have work, relationships, family, health goals, personal development/reading targets, and obligations outside our side hustle that require a significant amount of time.
I’m not saying achieving your side hustle targets with a full-time gig is impossible. Most of us have and are doing it, but I am saying that it can take an extended amount of time due to time constraints.
What Sabbatical Offer Your Entrepreneur Endeavors
When you take a sabbatical – whether short-term or long-term you dedicate time to focus on your entrepreneurial gigs. Instead of having 4–12 hours a day sucked away from your full-time gig, you can now offer your dream babies the time of their lives.
Maybe you have five courses you want to launch, a book you want to publish, or maybe you have hundreds of business ideas that you want to explore (like me), but you keep running out of time since each idea takes considerable time to explore in full because of time constraints.
When you take a sabbatical, you breathe exponential life into your dreams.
You can dedicate considerable time to these endeavors and work laser-focused and productive sprints (as a product or software development team member would) to tackle goals over a set period.
Example Sprint 1: Develop 5 Courses
Launching a course doesn’t actually take that long. I completed one of my courses in less than a day. You can always edit, refine, and add more content later. The goal is to get the product to market with invaluable information, so consumers can start partaking in your course.
Since a course might take 1–3 days to develop, you might be one of those who desire to launch three or more courses.
Let’s say you have five courses you want to produce because you have several areas of expertise:
Allocate a two-week sprint to complete all five courses’ content. Each course will be allotted two days of development time, equating to one epic.
Each epic could have several user stories:
User Story 1 – Develop outline (roadmap)
User Story 2 – Write content
User Story 3 – Record content (video, audio, or screen shares)
User Story 4 – Edit content
User Story 5 – Deploy (launch your course)
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Since you don’t have a full-time job, you can hunker down for two weeks or ten business days to focus on developing these five courses.
Example Sprint 2: Publish A Book
You probably have a book outline or unfinished manuscript sitting in your laptop files somewhere. This is the time to finish it!
You can allocate 1–4 two-week sprints to finish your manuscript and break out the chapters, book design, and marketing into small chunks of works (i.e., epics, user stories, and tasks) to make the work more digestible and easier to track progress, ensuring a higher success rate for completion.
How Long Should My Sabbatical Last?
This will ultimately depend on two factors:
How big is your emergency fund?
How many goals do you have that are hard to focus on in conjunction with your full-time job?
If you’re fortunate, you will have a large emergency fund stacked away and can take anywhere from six months to a year off from your full-time work.
Depending on how many goals you have, you might need one month or twelve months to get a lot of sh*t done that has not had the time and attention needed while simultaneously holding down your full-time gig.
At the end of your sabbatical, you may find that you don’t have a desire or need to return to traditional full-time work, which is the ultimate goal, right?
This content is for informational purposes only — not professional advice. Consult a qualified professional before making any major decisions.