Focus with a Side Hustle?

I've been reading The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan (as mentioned in my previous post) and had read Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden a while back. We discussed my Actionable Book Summary of the latter during the Actionable Book Club session and it got me thinking.

All these great suggestions—to figure out the one next thing most important for your success and focus on only that until you're done—assumes you have one thing you're working on in your life. What if, like me, you have a side hustle or two going on. How do you then decide your one most important thing?

If you have a day job, those hours are obviously devoted to that, but once you're off the clock, you have to decide between the side hustles, family, chores, etc. It gets pretty overwhelming just doing the mental inventory.

Honestly, I don't have the perfect answer yet and am working my way through it. What I find has been helping is keeping the two side hustles top of mind and quickly deciding which has the more urgent task and doing that, then moving on to the next. The trick is to keep out all the other distractions while doing this...and finding enough time to sleep and recharge.

Part of the challenge is that we're all so connected and even though I've learned to turn off notifications and not respond to every e-mail as it comes in (thanks to Rory's book), my after hours are shared by so many obligations, that it is an exercise in discipline.

I have learned to be kinder to myself (most of the time) and just take a few minutes to figure out what I have to do next. I still get overwhelmed and I still stay up too late, but at least I don't feel this is a failure per se and is just part of my present reality and my learning and growth.

Have you learned how to juggle many "one things"? What's your trick?

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Karina is VP of Operations and HR at 24/7 Teach.

A version of this was originally posted on Business Common Sense blog.

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