Hustle and Grind

I stay pretty busy. Maybe too busy. I have a family, friends, several volunteer organizations, and a lot of projects that I love staying involved with. These things all take up time. And I also run two companies.

One of these companies is a digital marketing company where I'm a W-2 employee, expected (required!) to spend A LOT of time being in one place, the office, trading the traditional hours for dollars in order to do my work. Most entrepreneur-minded people refer to this as "the grind."

I also have "the hustle." My side company, which focuses on customized business development strategy, is built on a system that scales rapidly without my direct involvement. Although it does require time to build and run these systems, it does not require me to trade my time for dollars. In fact, if I compare these two primary income sources by dollars per hour, I make a lot more in the hustle, like 10-20 times more!

My third "job," which is funny to think about as a "job" because I haven't made a penny doing it yet, is writing. Writing for me, at this point where it produces NO MONEY, is a pretty specific trade of hours for word count. When I'm going--actually writing, not editing, planning, plotting, etc.--I can do between 500 to 1,000 words an hour. So, at best, a whole book takes me 5-6 months depending on how much time I can carve out each day.

So, knowing all of that, here's what the typical day has looked like for me for most of 2016:

5am - Run 5k or Workout at home
6am - Work on the Hustle or Write for an hour
7am - Shower, dress, etc. for the Grind
8-6 - Killing it at the Grind for myself and my team
7pm - Family time, dinner, bedtime with the kids
9pm - Work on the Hustle, Write or Read for an hour (or two)
10pm - Crash for 7-ish hours

As I wrote that I realized it is more of an "ideal day" than a "typical day" because, as anyone knows who's running this kind of schedule, no two days are really the same. That schedule's affected by myriad little changes like weather, work trips, increased client load (both from the Hustle and the Grind), my wife and children's plans, evening events, church and club activities... So, yeah, that's the schedule I'm shooting for, but I realize that most days actually vary to quite a degree from what I posted above.

An interesting thing I've learned from about 10 months of running on this schedule is that I sometimes manage just fine with a lot less sleep, say 4-5 hours, and other times I need a lot more, like 9+ hours. I'm curious if other people experience that and if it has something to do with biorhythms or falls into some sort of pattern. It's just strange to me that I feel like I go full speed every day but there are some days where I'm falling asleep at the dinner table and others where I lay in bed from 10 to midnight struggling to fall asleep at all.