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This is just going to be a very quick post whereby I briefly outline my 2 step process for escaping the 9-to5 with minimal financial risk and uncertainty.
I’ve mentioned before that the thing that used to be a great big hang up for me when I was attempting to freelance or work on my online business was that i’d always be worrying about money and couldn’t focus my attention fully on working on developing either one without feeling worried or stressed out.
Because of this, I decided that I would get a full-time job and work on freelancing and online business in my free time instead.
This didn’t pan out so well either because I soon found that with my full-time 9-to-5 job, I no longer had any time left in my day.
Eventually I realized that the only way I was going to be able to make this work was if I was able to earn a stable income and also have enough time during the week to work on my personal projects, namely developing my online business/ service.
Step 1: Base Income – Telecommuting or Part-Time Work
I decided that I needed a base income, an income that was going to be enough to support me (to pay all my bills and necessities) without taking up my entire week.
This meant taking on a job that would only take up no more than 30 hours or 4 days of my work week.
I also had another criteria that I wanted the job to be related to the degree that I had studied in university.
The reason for this is because I wanted to cover all my bases and didn’t want to have “Worked as a cashier in McDonalds for a year” on my resume if I found that a year later for some reason I needed or wanted to get into a professional job relating to my field.
Alright, so now I had my criteria for a base income job:
- A job that took less than 4 days or 30 hours a week to perform
- A job that was related to my degree so that it would help supplement my resume ( i worry about such things, so sue me)
The job that I ultimately got was a job as a Technical Writer in an Engineering Design Company. They didn’t let me work part time, so after a few months of working for them in the office, I got myself (with some luck) a full-time telecommuting agreement with them.
If you want to learn more about the process on how I did that, read my posts relating to the 6 Steps To Negotiating a Flexible Work Arrangement.
Step 2: Future Primary Income – Freelancing or Online Business
Once I got out of the office, I streamlined my work so that I had at least Friday off every week to focus on developing my future primary income.
The first thing I decided to do was to get some decent coaching and advice from people who I knew had already achieved the success that I was aiming for.
Ultimately I decided that I would focus the full efforts of my free time on developing an online business as I was still earning a full-time salary and didn’t need to supplement my income with freelance work.
The Reason I Do Things This Way
I cannot emphasize how important it has been for me to have this extra time to work on developing my future primary income.
Being able to focus an entire work day (minimum) and not attempting to squeeze time from personal time after work does wonders for reducing the stress levels and ensuring I don’t sacrifice time with my friends and partner.
I do believe it is possible to work on developing your online business or service income while having a 9-to-5 job, though I really dislike the idea of multi-tasking and avoid it whenever possible.
The reason for this because I find that multi-tasking not only slows me down, it degrades the quality of my work (due to having to constantly split my attention) and causes me to be less productive overall, which in itself defeats the purpose of multi-tasking in the first place.
Also, the ability to spend an extended amount of time focusing on solving a single problem shouldn’t be undermined.
Being able to do this has helped me bust through learning curves and focus all my energy on finding solutions for frustrating problems.
I outline in greater detail the entire process above in my free mini-course “the office escape blueprint”, so if you want to learn more about it feel free to check it out.
I don’t believe this process is for everyone, but if you don’t have an existing office escape plan and feel like this is a path that would fit well with your needs well, then go for it.
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