4 ms·
> I know this is a side point, but I imagine people might be interested in the challenges of being able to work a second job while not annoying your employer. H
by jmduke 3y ago
> I know this is a side point, but I imagine people might be interested in the challenges of being able to work a second job while not annoying your employer. How did you manage it?
I ran my company (https://buttondown.email/ https://buttondown.email/) as a side project for ~three or so years before taking it full time and it was _similarly_ in a position where I could get paged for downtime or plumbing-related issues. My suggestions:
1. Honestly, choose a project where downtime or operational issues are less prevalent. This is a cop-out answer, but when you're evaluating potential projects it should be top of mind.
2. Be very up-front and honest with yourself and your employer about your commitments and your priorities. My personal rule was to only ever look at Buttondown-related stuff outside of what I considered my "core" working hours unless I was getting paged, and even then responding to pages would wait until my meetings or time-sensitive work was finished.
3. Set a schedule and rely on the schedule. For me this ended up being "side project hours are from 7-9pm M-F and 3-8pm Sat"; at times I wanted to do more and at times I wanted to do less, but the former path leads to burnout and the latter path leads to languishing.
- zeeg 3y agoI wasn't as rigorous about it as you around having a fixed schedule, but I applied similar principles: Avoid doing any work on my side project while at my regular job (unless it was needed by my regular job, e.g. on the open source front), and never let my responsibilities of my regular job slip or become a lesser priority. The real challenge here: running an infrastructure service as a side project is what nightmares are made of.