How a Side Hustle Helps With Your Day Job

Is this irony?

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

I spend a decent amount of my work week sitting in dysfunctional meetings. Meetings kind of like this:

• Where someone dominates the room and cannot listen deeply
• Where everyone pretends there’s no elephant in the room
• Where it’s clear the organizer did not plan the agenda ahead of time and just let’s people update willy-nilly as they feel so moved
• Where someone obviously wasn’t paying attention but weighs in with one comment they rehearsed, so they can be on the record as contributing.

In times past, I could not help but feel it was my responsibility to fix this situation. I’d step in with clarifying questions. I would try to translate the vague into something useful. I’d redirect us back to the agenda. I’d reliably be the one to say,

I’m sorry, am I the only one who sees that elephant?

Turns out getting the elephant back to the zoo is a lot of work, and no one wants to do that. Least of all, the few people with the power to make that happen.

It’s also true that the larger the company, the more specialized the roles. I work at one of the very large organizations, which has only grown larger and more complex with each passing year.

The result is that we generalists have been relegated to finer and finer areas of specialization.

What happens when you take a highly capable generalist who loves to think and to do, and give her an incredibly tiny sphere of influence?

She gets frustrated.

Then she either pushes for greater influence, or she finds somewhere else to direct that energy.

I tried that first one and then gave up and started on that second approach.

Once I gave up on advancing up the corporate ladder and started using my untapped brain power for side hustles, my stress level dropped precipitously.

Now, whenever I’m in a frustrating meeting, instead of saying something I’m going to regret I literally open a new browser window and do something useful with my excess energy.

It could be anything, really, as long as it feels useful in a way that further engagement during a dysfunctional meeting never does.

• Some quick social media engagement
• Practice a few headlines for articles
• Restack a Substack note
• Categorize a couple expenses in my bookkeeping app

Here are some things that started to happen once I simply gave up and started down the side hustle road:

I broke free from chronic over-achievement

The first step was deciding I would spend less time on my day job.

I began protecting the 2 hours of my peak deep focus time for my own side hustle projects each morning, which meant my workday shifted to 11am — 6pm.

When I saw no fallout from doing that, I realized I could actually claw out even more time for myself.

That made me zen out

I made time to go to the gym in the middle of the day. My office has a gym in it, so I must assume they expected us to use it. Yet, I was always “too busy.”

Now I’ve hit the gym 3x per week since June, with very few exceptions.

I also took time to meditate more. I started meditating during the work day a couple of times a week.

My reputation at work improved

My reputation as a squeaky wheel diminished and my newfound zen attitude gained me a reputation as a great listener and a great collaborator.

It used to be a regular occurrence that I’d somehow ruffle someone’s feathers because I was trying to forge forward getting stuff done in a culture that prioritizes people’s feelings over actual results.

Without fail, this usually happened right before performance reviews so it was fresh in my manager’s mind.

Now I make less contribution at work and people seem happier with me. Go figure.

My contributions are rarer, and therefore people seem to attach more weight to them.

My sense of self has evolved beyond work

This is healthy. This is right.

My sense of self was so tightly paired with achievements at work (and before that, school) that setbacks would send me into deep pits of anxiety.

I would literally lose sleep at night overthinking some interaction that went poorly, or trying to figure out why someone else was promoted instead of me, or trying to figure out what heroics it would take to pull of the latest ridiculous project I was assigned.

Now my emotional landscape is just wider. Work is part of it, but there’s more other stuff going on.

I can observe it from a distance and understand — more accurate, I believe — that those work things don’t actually correlate to my contributions as directly as I thought. There’s a huge dose of chaos theory thrown in there.

This will serve me well to weather the daily bumps.

It also prepares me well for the future. Will I get laid off? Will I stick around until my early retirement date?

Either way, I’ll be ready.