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Omar Zenhom (1:02)

You really need to dedicate to your side hustle to make it work? Is an hour here or there enough? Do you need to sacrifice every spare moment in your day and week? Today we tackle this question from Perry asking how many hours should I be working on my side hustle? We're going to get into finding the perfect balance so that you can build momentum, stay consistent and make real progress without burning out. Welcome Back to the $100 NBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. Today's Q and A Wednesday and we answer a question from Perry who asks how many hours should I be working on my side hustle? I love this question because it's one of the biggest challenges when you're getting started. I know this because I faced this challenge myself because I was a teacher for 10 years and I was side hustling at the same time trying to make it work. I was trying to figure out what's the right balance between time and effort to make meaningful progress. I don't want to be spending my wheels and wasting my years. My answer? Well, it's quite simple. I'm going to break it down and not only explain how many hours but how to use these hours, how to stay consistent and where you should be doing this work. Let's begin with what I believe is the minimum number of hours you should be dedicating to your side hustle. It's really not worth your time because you're not going to get a lot of traction if you don't do these number of hours at least. And that magic number is 10 hours a week. Why 10 hours? Well, I'm going to explain in detail because I've experimented with all kinds of number of hours. When I was side hustling, I tried six hours, I tried five hours, I tried nine hours. And 10 hours is kind of the cusp. Like when you hit 10 hours, you have enough momentum. Now if you could do more than that, awesome. But 10 hours is asking a lot. But I'm going to show you how you can make it work for you and your schedule. But before I break down the math and the hours and all the details, I wanted to just give a timeout. Why are you doing this? You're starting this side hustle because you want to eventually make this your full time thing, right? You want to change your life, you want to build something for yourself, be your own boss, have that financial freedom. This is worth fighting for, this is worth sacrificing for. Okay? So it's going to be a little challenging at the start getting into this routine, but you're going to love the journey because it's going to be exciting, you're going to grow, you're going to learn, you're going to see results, you're going to start making some money and start seeing some traction. The point I'm making here is, is that might sound like a lot of hours, but it should be easy enough because you're loving what you're doing and you're working towards a goal that you're hungry for. If you have that, this should be easy. Let's start with why 10 hours a week, in my opinion, is the minimum. First reason why I talked about earlier is that momentum matters, okay? Building a business takes traction and 10 hours a week gives you enough time to make consistent progress. Anything less, it's hard to build that momentum. You know, I've tried less hours, I've tried to work smarter, not harder. And I feel like 10 hours a week is the minimum input you need to make to actually get one foot in front of the other and see some results in a reasonable amount of time. Just so we're clear here, this is just the minimum, right? And this is just where you're starting. Because if we're going to be totally honest in order for you to compete with what's out there in the market, you're competing with people that are putting in 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week, right? So you putting in 10 hours should be just the start and it is enough, a good start for you to actually validate your idea, get some sales, work on your business, start growing so you make enough money to start getting closer to to what you're making at your job. Number two, focus over quantity. It's not just any 10 hours. We want those 10 hours to be really laser focused. 10 deep work focused hours is better than 20 distracted ones, ones that you are constantly answering your phone or going to notifications or you know, hopping on research, which is basically wasting and procrastinating time on Google. Laser focused. 10 hours a week is going to get you really far. In my experience, you don't need endless time, you need intentional time. Now that we've established that we're going to dedicate a minimum of 10 hours a week on our side hustle, we're going to talk about how to structure those 10 hours because we want to be as productive as possible and we want to get the most out of those 10 hours. When I was a teacher, I would go to work after work. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would go to work in my business. I would spend two hours each working in the evening. These were focused, productive blocks of time where I worked on specific tasks that I outlined at the end of last week. So the end of the week I would outline. These are the things I need to cover. These things I need to build, these are things I need to do in order for me to get one step closer to where I need to go in my business. And if you want to know what that one step is very simple, making money, okay? Make enough sales, make enough revenue so that you are landing on your feet when you leave your job. So I really focus on what can I do to build my products and my services, my sales systems, my marketing systems so that I can make those sales so I can make that revenue. So I said 10 hours. Right now we're only at four hours, right? Two hours on Tuesdays, two hours on Thursdays. That's what I did. Now on Saturday, my first day off on the weekend, I spent six hours working on my business. That was two three hour sessions. This gave me a deeper amount of time, a deeper focused session to allow me to get really further in my projects and get ahead. But I did like three hours and had like a two hour lunch break. And walk, maybe a bit of exercise and then another three hours. So that was my 10 hours. Now here's some key tips you want to kind of keep in mind. Keep your work sessions between 90 minutes and, and three hours. No less than 90 minutes, no more than three hours. Because it's very hard for you to be super focused for more than three hours. You're going to have to go to the toilet, right? You're going to have to have a break and you get a drink of water, something, right? And 90 minutes is enough for you to have a long enough time to get something done with some concentration. And less than that, it's not too much time, it's not too much deep work time. That's a sweet spot for productivity without losing focus between 90 minutes and three hours. So you might be saying, Omar, you spent two nights in the week working on your business and then a full day on Saturday on your weekend, on your business. That left just one day a week to rest. The answer is yes, that's the answer. That's what I did. And I did that for a good solid six years. And I was happy. I know that that sounds strange like you're going to have a one day weekend now, but I was working towards my future. I was excited to work on these things, building my businesses, making some money, getting some traction. I saw the light, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I saw the progress and it got me excited and it was play for me. I really enjoyed it because I was building something for myself. In a lot of ways it was an escape from my job and that's how I had fun. And then my one day off, I relaxed and recharged, caught up on household duties, any kind of family obligations, things like that. But the point here is, is that there is sacrifice here. Like I mentioned, this is not going to be no change in your lifestyle. When you're building a business, especially on the side with your job, there is going to be some sacrifice in your recreational time. There's nowhere around it. You just got to just enjoy it and just say, this is my new recreation. Now, how much time, how you use that time, that's one topic, okay? But just as important is where you go to work on your side hustle. The environment plays a huge role on how productive you're going to be in those hours. First thing I want to mention is that do not work on your business, at your job, on company property, or even using company property like the laptop that they give you. Because if you do that Whether you're working at the site or the office or using their equipment, this can be considered their property. Whatever you're building is theirs. And that's just how the law works, is that whatever work you do using company resources is the property of the company. So be very careful. Do not do this and go somewhere else like I did. I went to a distraction free zone, like a coworking space. So I paid for a hot desk, which was around $300 a month at the time, and allowed me to go to a desk that's quiet, that had great Internet, that had good lighting, that had coffee, that had, you know, a good facility where I had a kitchen and a bathroom, all that kind of stuff, right? So go somewhere quiet, distraction free, like a co working space or the public library where you can get to work on your business, use your own computer, your own laptop and go to work. Personally, I avoided working from home because there's just too many distractions there. Even if there's nobody there to distract you like family members, there's just too many temptations. There's food there, there's TV, there's, you know, PlayStation. There's other things that are going to pull you away. And it's good to change your environment when you're working on something new. It's good for you to say, okay, this is the place I get this stuff done. Now if you have a separate home office that's separate from the rest of the house, or, you know, a separate room or garage, maybe you can do this without any distractions. That's up to you. But personally, I like to leave my environment in the beginning because you still don't have that kind of discipline to work on your business. Maybe because you're just getting started. I'm just speaking for myself. When I got started, I didn't have the discipline. I had to learn that over the time and years and working that out on my own. But right now, when you're getting the ball rolling, you want zero ways for you to be distracted. You want to increase the likelihood of success as much as possible. So for me, again, I went to a coworker space on in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Saturday I would go there and work on my business. I had everything I needed to stay on task.