Sometimes, in the process of pursuing your passion, you discover that your day job is taking up chunks of your time, leaving you with little to no time to actually do what you love. If this sounds familiar, know that you’re definitely not alone. However, have you considered that you may be the reason this is happening to you? Regardless of the root cause, there are ways for you to balance both responsibilities without feeling burnt out. To get you started, here are five helpful tips for balancing your day job with your passion.
- Pick the right day job
Choosing a day job can either help you in the pursuit of your passion or hurt you in the long term. A great way for you to balance your day job with your passion is by choosing a job that is in the same industry as your passion. That way, the knowledge you gain from your day job will still be useful as you work on any pet projects. Also, it’ll be a good way to get gainful work experience towards what you want to do in the future.
- Leverage your knowledge
While you’re at your day job, it’s not uncommon to constantly be thinking of what you’d rather be doing. As a result, you may miss out on some really useful information and experience you can gain at work. So, try to change your perspective and while you’re at work focus on soaking up any knowledge you can get from your employer and coworkers. This can actually help you as you move to the next stage I the pursuit of your passion.
You need to keep in mind the fact that when you finally establish your own business, it’s not just going to be about the creative process. You’ll also be in charge of more practical things like your business accounts as well, which you could actually from your day job.
- Set your goals
Planning is always important when balancing two responsibilities. Even more, the fact that you have a limited amount of time to execute version things should spur you to set your goals ahead of time and motivate you to achieve them. Whether it’s writing two blog posts or reading about customer behaviour in your niche market, setting goals can get you in the right mindset to actually work towards them. Since your nights and weekends are your ‘you’ time, so you can use this time to set your goals accordingly so you won’t be distracted at work.
- Create a schedule
Much like your day job, your passion also requires you to work on a schedule. Now returning from a long day at work and settling down to more personal work can seem uninviting. However, it’s one of the sacrifices you have to make you turn your dreams into a reality. When you have a schedule at home for doing your personal work, you can be more productive since you know you’re working in a set time frame.
- Clock out mentally
Sometimes, when working a 9-5, you might find it difficult to mentally clock out even when you’ve left the office. As such, you find yourself responding to work emails and trying to complete little work-related tasks here and there. However, this eats into your personal time and you should be using that to work on your passion. If you don’t mentally check out from work once you’ve physically left, you’ll realize too late down the line that you’ve sacrificed your passion for your day job.
