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Can you be a part-time entrepreneur?

I’ve been asking myself this for some time. Now, I know people do this, so objectively the answer is simple: yes. People do it all the time, start businesses or companies while they still maintain a full-time job. They have varying degrees of success, but there’s variation in success among businesses that start as a full-time venture, too.

So, the question I should be asking myself is not “can it be done?” Rather, it’s “can I do this?”

Yeah. That’s a good question.

Let’s see. There’s 24 hours in a day, times 7 days in a week makes 168 hours in a week. 40 hours for normal work—let’s be realistic, 45, plus an hour per day commute (I have it easy) makes fifty hours invested in paying the bills.

Speaking of paying bills, I’m sure I spend a few hours each week on those pedestrian tasks like paying bills, grocery shopping, doing laundry… if we’re including shopping, personal hygiene, and chores, let’s call it 8 hours per week (is that too low?).

I eat dinner, so figure an hour a day on average, and about 4 more hours for meals on weekends… so 9 more hours.

Loathe as I am to give up so much time to it, I must sleep. I average 6 hours a night, which works fine, so that’s another 42 hours in a week.

I’m also taking three classes this semester; getting to and from class plus class time will be about 8 hours per week (one class is online), plus I’m guessing about 6-9 hours to studying and homework. (Why so high? Calculus 2 and Software Engineering are two of the three classes). Let’s assume I’m a model student and put in the time, so that’s 17 hours per week to college.

Where are we at? 50 + 8 + 9 + 42 + 17 = 127.

Theoretically, that means I have 41 hours each week that gets nickel and dimed by “other things.” I don’t intend to become a hermit, so I imagine that about 16 hours goes to social situations, be it going out for coffee, meeting friends, etc. I play guitar in front of people about once a month, so I do need to stay in practice, let’s say 2 hours a week.

So, even with a few more hobbies and some social time penciled in, it looks like I should have 23 hours left over each week. That’s enough for a part time job, assuming you could do a part-time job in small increments between everything else you do.

Now, does all this off-the-cuff number crunching actually translate into an answer like, “Yes, I can be a part-time entrepreneur and bootstrap a business in my off-time”? That’s still an open question.

I would say the answer is a tentative “Yes” IFF...

• the numbers used for calculating my time are actually honest and accurate (I think they’re pretty good).
• I can have the discipline to use my extra time for product and/or business development rather than web-surfing, television, or xbox games (etc, etc).
• I have buy-in from my family (in my case, my wife) on my schedule. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to commit large blocks of your time in the week without the understanding and agreement of your family, particularly your spouse.

So, I think it’s doable even for someone with a schedule as full as mine. It will just take a lot of discipline, a lot less time spent doing empty tasks (ie, gaming, random purposeless web-surfing), and some really good time & task management. Probably time to dust off my David Allen books again.