Upskilling while Juggling a 9-to-5 Job

Many people find that settling into a traditional 9-to-5 job means they no longer have time to pursue their true passions. Others see their 9-to-5 jobs as a means to an end, while they devote their spare time to developing side hustles and important projects.

Those who look for side hustles outside of their day jobs usually do so because they want to pursue their dreams while still earning a steady income. While that pursuit can be difficult, the dedication and time management required can aid in the development of the skills needed to exercise that control.

Whether your goal is simply to supplement your income or to eventually devote 100 percent of your time to your small business, your 9-to-5 and your side hustle must coexist.

How do you achieve that?

Before diving in, it's critical to confront certain realities. Success is frequently glamorized across multiple social media platforms.

Most people celebrate their victories, and once they have achieved success, their failures or struggles are buried in some way. Which is not a good approach. We should always be celebrating the journey, nurturing struggles, and recognizing success as a result of perseverance.

The bigger picture has always been and will always be the abundance of life wisdom gained when striving for success (whatever success means to you). Perseverance, resilience, problem-solving, foresight, and everything else. It all comes down to your character and how you handle adversity.

Here are a few tips for you to manage it:

Schedule Your Time

Your time will be the most important resource to manage. And you must do so in a realistic manner.

When planning your schedule for your job and online courses, remember to leave time for assignments, tests, and even work tasks. Re-evaluate your schedule regularly to ensure that you're making the best use of your time.

Being ambitious is motivating, but it's also important to stay grounded in reality. When projected timelines do not go as planned, it can start a chain reaction of missed deadlines and add unnecessary stress to your already tight schedule. Planning too far ahead and too many activities can also exhaust you and harm your mental health.

Use scheduling apps that sync multiple calendars, such as Notion and Trello. This way, you have a complete overview of your various schedules and can see what needs to be done ahead of time.

Set Goals

Goals are essential for success. Goals can affect your performance in a variety of ways, including keeping you on track, energizing by challenging you, instilling persistence, and motivating you to use your current understanding or acquire new knowledge to achieve a specific goal.

But, to reap the benefits of goal-setting, you must first set goals that are both achievable and reasonable. If your side hustle is writing, set a daily goal of writing a certain number of words or pages. Set a weekly goal for the number of contacts you want to speak with or the number of products you want to create if you're trying to start a business.

Apps like GoalsOnTrack (which helps you set goals, create an action plan, and track your successes) and Coach.me (which gets the entire community involved to allow others to give you words of encouragement and motivation) are two apps that can help you set and achieve goals.

Eliminate Distractions

"Productivity is about trying to navigate from a huge cluster of possible things to doing a much relatively small number of things each day.," writes Cal Newport, author of Deep Work.

To succeed, you must devote your full attention to your online course and your full-time job. This entails concentrating on your tasks and job without being distracted. Eliminating distractions allows you to accomplish more in the same amount of time. You make better use of your best resources to navigate between learning and work responsibilities.

Set up a separate workstation at home to separate your work and play areas. Turn off social media, email, and other platform notifications.

Take Benefit of Online Learning

There are several reasons why online learning courses are so popular. They can be accessed anywhere and at any time, give you complete control over your learning, and can be completed at your own pace. Take advantage of the features of online learning to make it work for you, from remote learning to flexible lesson scheduling.

Are you a morning person? Before going to work, complete your assignments. Do you have a long commute home? Plan to read on your way home from work.

Set Learning Environment

Your surrounding environment sets the mood for your internal educational environment.

According to psychological studies, the external context in which you conduct your learning influences how you absorb information.

It is important to consider where you will learn and study. Learning is an ongoing process, so taking the time to create an enjoyable learning environment will benefit you more than you realize.

Recreate your workplace environment by doing the following:

Support System

Balancing two jobs correctly still necessitates a dependable support system. If you have children, find a family member or close friend willing to assist you by watching them for several hours once a month. You can use this time to complete important tasks and plan for the coming month.

Find a friend who has a side hustle or join an online community of hustlers to share best practices, lessons learned, and motivational strategies. After all, research shows that collaborating to achieve goals increases your chances of success.

Mastering your 9-to-5 and side hustle is critical to achieving your goals and enjoying your successes. Fortunately, mastery isn't as difficult as it may appear, especially with companies and communities dedicated to assisting side hustlers and small business owners.

Final Thoughts

Learning is a lifelong process. Embracing this philosophy will set you up for success as you develop in-demand skills and gain new knowledge that will help you advance in your career. Balancing your priorities will also position you as a well-adjusted individual, ready to face new challenges.

While we have goals for things we want to accomplish to fulfill our sense of purpose, don't forget that you are human. Being human implies that we must care for ourselves in all aspects, including mental, emotional, physical, and biological health. Prioritize that as well, while attempting to balance the two.