Exist

Client week: how I keep my day job from taking over my startup

Josh and I have been working part-time ever since we started Exist. We're working our way towards product/market fit without investment, so our day jobs pay the bills and let us work on Exist whenever we can.

It's been a challenge to find a balance between our work and Exist, since we often want to work on Exist more than we have time to, and we sometimes recall fondly the healthy bank accounts we had when we were full-time employees.

My latest approach to keeping these two things in balance is to work week-on, week-off. Every second week I work on Exist, treating it like my full-time job and giving it my full attention. The alternating weeks I do client work and only urgent Exist work, like customer support.

I worried about dedicating such big blocks of time to my freelance work in case I would neglect Exist, or feel like I had. Surprisingly, I've found the opposite: during client weeks I feel more freedom to concentrate on doing good work and hitting my deadlines. And during Exist weeks I can concentrate on doing my job without distractions.

I've stopped trying to fit everything in at the same time, and my brain is thanking me for it.

Client week

During my client weeks I have two main focuses: getting new work completed, and catching up on as much admin as I can.

Admin tasks during client week include pitching topics to my editors, sending invoices, discussing changes to work I've submitted, and setting up new projects and deadlines.

In-between all the admin I work on editing drafts, writing new content, collecting new content ideas, and consulting.

Exist week

My Exist weeks are a mixture of writing new content for the Exist blog or guest posts, sending out newsletters, customer support, and coding our iOS app.

Coding is a good example of the kind of work that's hard to manage when I squeeze in Exist and client work on the same day. I'm so new to iOS development that I need long stretches of time to get even small coding tasks done.

The other great thing about having a full week to focus on Exist is that I can find time for all the "someday" tasks I want to do: things like updating our FAQs, improving our onboarding emails, and reorganising our company reports. I also like to use these weeks to reach out to some of our customers directly to help them get more out of Exist or let them know about new features they've asked us for previously.

Making week on, week off work

Week on, week off is an unusual way to work. It doesn't just fall into place—I have to work hard to keep everything running smoothly.

Here are some of the things I've found super important in keeping this schedule going.

Setting up my week before it starts

I tend to be most productive when I plan the week on Sunday or Monday morning. This also helps me stay on track throughout the week because I know what needs to get done each day.

The first thing I do when planning my week is to plan what content I need to work on, since that's the biggest part of my workweek. I work backwards from my deadlines to plan when to start outlining each piece, when to draft it, and when the editing process needs to be finished so it can be published or submitted to a client.

After content work and actual events are added to my calendar I fill in the gaps with any other tasks I want to get done during the week. Knowing this is all done ahead of time makes me feel confident about starting the week.

Planning a regular schedule

Running a startup and freelance work both come with a lot of uncertainty. I try to mitigate that by sticking to a regular schedule of writing and publishing content for Exist.

Every Exist week I know without fail I need to write two Quantified Self links posts, one guest post, and one post like this one for the Exist blog. I publish the first links post that Tuesday, and publish the second on the Tuesday of client week—having it ready to publish means I take hardly any time or energy away from client week to keep up with that schedule. On Thursdays in Exist weeks I publish my other Exist blog post and send out our newsletter.

Those regular big tasks go into my calendar for every Exist week and I plan everything else around them. That takes some of the uncertainty away, as I already know a lot of what I should expect when an Exist week starts.

With the client work I have that's ongoing, I plan those pieces in a regular schedule as well. As much as possible I avoid surprises in my workweek so I can spend my energy on getting the work itself done, not sorting out my schedule.

Making sure Josh knows what week I'm in

Josh doesn't divide his weeks as strictly as I do, so it's important that he knows when I'm in an Exist week and when I'm not. If he wants me to do something for Exist that's not urgent, knowing that I'm in the middle of a client week means he'll approach me with a suggestion for fitting that task in during my next Exist week rather than expecting me to do it immediately.

This might apply to other family, friends or colleagues, too. If you work from home or with a bigger team, keeping them informed of which context you're working in can make communications and planning a lot smoother.

Sticking to my schedule when planning future work

One of the hardest parts of my week on, week off schedule is sticking to it. It works well when I stick to it strictly but when a client asks for changes during Exist week or I think of a great idea I want to implement in Exist during client week, it's hard to not give in and go off-road briefly. Of course, if I did give in once I'd start doing this all the time and soon my carefully separated weeks would blend together again.

Whenever small tasks pop up I try to add them to task lists for later. My Exist task list has a whole bunch that don't have due dates—I refer to these whenever I have extra time during an Exist week to do non-urgent work. Having a place to dump ideas whenever they come to mind makes it easier for me to get them out of my head and get back to work quickly.

And when I set up new client work I only offer deadlines during client weeks. If my next client week doesn't work for them, I offer the one after that. So far I've been able to keep my Exist weeks off-limits for client work and hopefully I can keep it up.

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This schedule won't work for everyone, but it's really improved my work. I'm able to be more focused, less stressed, and more organised, just by separating my work contexts into big enough chunks that I can get into a flow with each one. The weekend is a perfect point to relax and get ready to switch contexts as the next week starts.

If you try this yourself, remember to keep people you work with in the loop about what you're doing. Stick to your schedule and plan your week before it starts. Hopefully you'll see the same boost in energy and productivity that I have.

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Image credit: Kyle Szegedi