Building a Side Hustle Inside a Full-Time Job
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Bloom's answer to the person who says they are too tired after work is that most people work a small fraction of the hours they think they work. He worked ninety-hour weeks in finance while filling much of that time browsing news sites waiting for work to arrive, an instance of Parkinson's Law. His prescription is to restructure the work day into sixty-minute blocks of true focus separated by walks or improving reading, then use the friction time between tasks rather than adding five hours a night. The side hustle itself should be skill arbitrage: something you are good at that you can sell for more than it costs you in time, ideally something you would enjoy doing, because consistency is what compounds and consistency only comes from enjoyment.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Audit how much you actually work
Separate real productive hours from filler. Nobody focuses for eight hours a day. If you are contracted nine to five, work expands to fill it, which means much of the day was already unwinding in disguise.
Pro tip Bloom only saw the true ratio of work hours to down hours when Covid removed the office and the day became transactional.
- 2
Restructure the day into focus blocks
Work in sixty-minute blocks of genuine focus, then take a walk, relax, or read something that improves you. This makes progress in other arenas possible without extending the day.
- 3
Harvest the friction time
The gaps between tasks are free. Ali drafted videos in Notion while on hold to radiology or waiting for a patient, instead of flicking through Instagram. That downtime exists in almost every job.
Pro tip Keep the drafting tool one click away so the five-minute window is usable before it closes.
- 4
Pick a skill you can sell above its time cost
Identify what you are genuinely good at and find who pays for it. Bloom's example: if you build financial models in finance, startups will pay around ten grand for one, far above your effective hourly rate.
Pro tip Bloom also made money simply connecting startups with financial analysts and clipping a fee.
Watch out Driving for a rideshare or delivery app works but gives you almost no leverage on your time.
- 5
Prefer scalable formats where you can
Services convert time to money at a better rate than hourly work; a course or product you sell online is infinitely scalable. Move along that spectrum as your skill proves out.
- 6
Choose something you would enjoy anyway
Money can create intensity but not consistency. Showing up when you are tired, on a holiday, or after something flops only comes from enjoying the process, so pick accordingly.
Pro tip You often do not know if you enjoy something until you get into the weeds, so experiment quickly and double down on what gives you energy.
- 7
Live frugally and compound the proceeds
In the early years, live within your means, save every month, and put the money into things that compound. Bloom says he knows nobody who regrets doing this and that the maths makes millionaire status by the mid-thirties broadly achievable.
In the wild
Ali is repeatedly asked how he ran a YouTube channel while working sixty-hour weeks as a doctor. His answer is that most days contained pockets of forced downtime: five minutes on hold waiting for radiology, or waiting for a patient to come back from the toilet before taking blood. In those windows he opened Notion on the hospital Windows machine and planned out a video. The alternative use of the same five minutes was scrolling Instagram or Twitter. The channel was built almost entirely out of time that already existed inside the job.
→ A YouTube channel built alongside a demanding clinical job with no added hours at home.
Bloom points to investment banking analysts as a clean case of skill arbitrage. Startups will pay roughly ten thousand dollars for a financial model, and there are many of them looking. An analyst who enjoys model building could work a little on a weekend and make far more than their effective hourly rate at the day job. Bloom himself found startups that needed models and took a fee for connecting them with analysts, which required no modelling at all. His conclusion is that opportunity is not what is lacking; people willing to capitalise on it are.
→ Existing job skills resold at a multiple of the day-job hourly rate, without acquiring anything new.
Common mistakes
Believing you need two hours to unwind
Bloom's view is that you were already unwinding during the work day through browsing and breaks. The tiredness is often a symptom of an unstructured work day rather than genuine depletion.
Choosing a low-leverage side hustle
Rideshare or delivery work trades hours for a fixed rate with no compounding and no scalability. It is real income but it will never get better leverage on your time.
Picking it purely for the money
Money produces intensity but not consistency. If you do not enjoy the process you will stop when it stops paying quickly, which is exactly when the compounding would have started.
From the transcript
“it's called parkinson's law it's like work finds a way to expand to the amount of time allotted for it”
“the best leverage on your time is going to be things that you have a skill at that you can sell to someone for more…”
“opportunity is not what's lacking what's lacking is people that are willing and able to go and capitalize on those opportunities”
From the episode
How I Grew from 0 to 500k Followers In Under 2 Years - Sahil Bloom
Sahil Bloom