Early in my career, the title of this post would have been rather unrelated as I spent a large chunk of my time beating the rest of the rats in the so called “rate race.”

I work hard at absorbing as much information as possible and applying my self in order to get ahead of the other rats. Except I imagined my self as a super rate with a red cape.

Six years into my young career, I started to realize that I was limited on how much I could possibly earn in any given year. Essentially I was relying on a solid performance review, and even then at the very best I would get a 3-5% raise. I wanted more though. I knew I had more in me to offer than what I was doing in my day to day job.

Repeating my job several times over from project to project, even in several different variations, made me quicker, more efficient and more skilled at my specific trade, but didn’t necessarily make me a more diverse and rounded business person.  I can imagine this is true for many companies, positions and professions.

I wanted to grow professionally, and financially. I eventually came to the realization that I could only grow so much, and that my growth was directly related to someone’s view of me. I knew for sure that I wasn’t born to be limited by someone else, and I knew I wanted to do something about it as well.

I realized that I had to find other ways to take my skill set to the next level professionally and financially.

It’s easy to say that you would spend an extra hour on your day job to increase your chances of getting a promotion but what are you going to do with this hour?

Instead I stuck with the same rationale, and decided to apply an hour(s) to building a side income.

What would you do with an extra hour?

I’m curious to know what you’d do with an extra hour. What steps would you take to free up an hour in your schedule or do you even need to take any step? How are you going to separate your self from those time-wasters in your day to day encounters?

Here’s what I did with an extra hour!

I decided not to invest anymore time at my day job, and that I’d only put in my hours per day. Now that I had extra time in my day, I worked on creating what now is a successful commercial cleaning business and a pretty successful personal finance blog.

Now, almost two year later with Finance Fox and almost three full years at building up Father & Son Cleaning Services, I’m proud to say that all the time invested was well worth it and then some.

The key is non-conformity!

This is that you need to measure work in output and not hours. Anyone can spend all day in front of their PC. What does this mean though? It’s not about time, it’s about output and what you actually produce.

Rather than just using an extra hour to work, you want to maximize that hour or hours on your side business by creating some value. 

Answering emails or doing research would not be considered as creating value in my books, but for example if you are:

• Writing blog posts
• Searching for new business
• Arranging advertising
• Working on a product or service

These are just some of the examples how you can create value in your business. I’ll use my self as an example; in 2011 I increased my income 23% from the previous year. This was done through the combination of my blog business and commercial cleaning business.

I’m hoping to increase my income this year at least another 15% this year, and thus far I can say that I’m on pace for that. Do I work a lot? Absolutely, at least 60 hours per week. However, I enjoy what I do every minute that I do it.

Final Thoughts

In the end, it’s not how many extra hours you are able to find in your week to work on your side projects, it is what you do with them . Try to outsource all admin work and focus on value creating activities.

At the end of the day, it is you who best knows the boundaries of your company and profession, what you can or cannot do within, how far you can go, what would it take and how long it would take.  Given your knowledge and understanding of your own situation, complimented by the fact that learning curves and professional growth come with inherent limitations, which course of action do you take?

Readers, would you rather invest an extra hour in your profession or into starting a successful side business?

Eddie