
You Don't Have to Ditch the Day Job - drm237
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2008/sb20080317_710238.htm?chan=smallbiz_smallbiz+index+page_top+small+business+stories
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wallflower
I was reading the article and I realized I'd read the article before..
Congratulations to Tony Wright of RescueTime getting a by-line about building
his sustainable Web business in BW!

I'm curious how BW found him. Does BW read News.YC?
<http://www.aiderss.com/all/www.tonywright.com>

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webwright
Heh-- yaw, it's a reprint. No clue how he found it (mebbe VentureHacks).

Heh-- not sure my business is sustainable yet-- but we're gettin' there.

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tonyvt2005
I've read the article before too, but congrats on getting published in BW!

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brezina
very cool fellas, and it also parlayed into a sweet shout-out for Weebly
founder David Rusenko. YC power!

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martythemaniak
Yeah, but it's hard and can get downright depressing. I am doing this right
now and while I find my project interesting, it sucks most of what little free
time I have without any guarantees of actually producing anything permanent.
The thought of wasting 4-5 months of my life like that scares me.

Not only that, but because you can't devote much time, things tend to progress
somewhat slowly leading to infrequent milestones, further sapping your
motivation.

Anyway, enough with my bellyaching. That's pretty good advice, although I'd
add "frequent releases" to it, even if these releases will be shown to no one
but your cheerleaders. It is both motivating to have something to show others
and also forces you to tie up and finish a ton of small, but important things
which would have otherwise been left in favour of working on the larger
features.

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zealog
"The thought of wasting 4-5 months of my life like that scares me."

I get that. It is incredibly difficult when you look at it like that. I have
personally felt that pain of, "So, who I do I take time from, my wife or my
kids?"

However, in the case you mention, it is only 4 or 5 months of nights and
weekends. What is that, 30 actual days max? Would you trade 30 days of the
thousands and thousands in your life to be able to make something you are
proud of and potentially allow you to spend all of your time doing what you
love? I know I would.

Obviously, thinking like that can lead to a workaholic, Cats in the Cradle
(google it, young'ns) type existence, but with measured use of it and
diligence at maintaining boundaries, I think it is possible.

I remember when I had a friend ask to me run in a 5K. Before that, I wouldn't
run unless being chased, and even then... However, I realized as much as a
pain as it might be, even being slow 5K is about 30 minutes. No matter how
painful, annoying, embarrassing, it is, that's half an hour. 2% of 1 day. I
decided right then that I could do anything for 30 minutes - and did. This is
the same sort of thing.

You can do anything for 4 or 5 months and see what happens. This IS your life,
and it's ending one minute at a time.

</pollyanna boosterism>

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zealog
Great article and lots of good advice.

The one about cheerleaders is important. I'd hemmed and hawed around my idea
for months, but once I started building it, using it myself, and had a few
friends as alpha testers, it became much more exciting to work on because I
was making it for me. I could see the incremental things needing to be done to
improve it as opposed to just a giant mount of unformed and uncompleted toil.

I also like the idea of using wasted time to at least learn something. Of
course, the danger there I face is reading a new blog post that more elegantly
solves a problem than I recently had and wanting to go back and refactor (or
worse, rewrite from scratch). As long as I can keep that in check and moving
forward, it's great advice.

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TrevorJ
Love number six about using down time at work to get smarter about useful
things. The nice thing is that when you are in the media or marketing biz,
there's not much you couldn't make a case for wanting/needing to know for your
day job anyway.

