How to Negotiate Working from Home to Have More Time for Your Side Hustle

Fed up of reading of the benefits of home working when it comes to building a side hustle because you’re stuck in the office every day? Monday to Friday consists of mornings battling the traffic to get to your day job, only to repeat the experience eight hours later to get home. Then it’s cooking dinner, clearing up and tackling the chores. Your side hustle is last in the priority queue and the truth is you’re spending very little time on it during the week.

Maybe you did work at home during the pandemic, as most people were able to do, but now your boss has insisted that you all return to the office where they can see what you’re doing or because you’re part of a team that needs to regularly co-ordinate with each other.

The problems with working at an office every single day of the week are:

• You spend time commuting - This is often dead time. You can listen to podcasts or audiobooks for education and inspiration about your side hustle, but unless you get the bus or the train content creation is difficult. Even if you do take public transport trains and buses are busy noisy places, so it can be difficult to focus.

• Offices aren’t the best place for focused work - most offices are open plan nowadays. Gone are the days of everyone having their own office or sharing with one or two other people. Instead they are large open spaces full of people and full of noise. If your job entails focused work, i.e. thinking or writing, then an open plan office is not the best environment. Unfortunately companies don’t seem to recognise this and you are expected to be productive when others around you are having conversations about what they watched on TV last night or are talking very loudly on the telephone right next to you. The upshot of this is that you are likely to struggle to get the important work done, which means you end up bringing it home. And bringing work home isn’t conducive to a good work-life balance, but more importantly it isn’t conducive to successful side hustle building. If you’re spending your evenings doing work from your day job, then you aren’t spending them on your side hustle.

• You can’t incorporate small household chores into your day as you’re not at home. When you can do this you have less to do around the house when you sign off from work. This helps to keep your evenings free to work on your side hustle.

• You get ill more often - did you ever think of the fact that germs are able to spread more easily in an open plan office? This means that if one person is sick everyone in the office is likely to catch it, including you. If you’ve got a job where no one does your work for you when you’re off then you are going to have to spend extra time afterwards catching up. Again this might mean working evenings and weekends, so less time for your side hustle.

If you currently spend all of your week in an office and ideally you’d like to be at home, at least for some of the week to have more time for your side hustle, then here’s what you need to do…

Firstly, have you even asked the question? Does your manager know that you’d like to work from home? Has there been a discussion either between the two of you or in your team about the possibility of working from home?

If you haven’t yet had that conversation, or if you have and it was a ‘No’, I suggest that you take a look at the policies of your company or organisation before you take the next step. This may not be helpful if you work for a very small firm, but if you’re employed by a large organisation they’re likely to have a policy on this sort of thing. In my experience a lot of managers aren’t that familiar with company policies, so it’s worth checking first before you go to a lot of effort only to find that your manager had to agree as that’s what the organisation’s policy says.

When you’ve done that, depending on what you’ve found out, have a further conversation, or the first conversaation. Even if you haven’t got policy behind you, but  have never spoken to your manager about it, test the waters to see if it’s something that they would consider. What’s the worst that can happen? They’ll say no. But they could say yes and hey presto, it’s sorted.

If it’s not an immediate yes then you’ve got some work to do to persuade them why it’s a good idea, both for you and for them. You may think that it’s not worth the effort, but if you’re serious about finding time for your side hustle then I would urge you to reconsider.

The obvious next step is to write a proposal that outlines your reasons for wanting to work from home, the benefits for the company, and how you plan to manage your responsibilities remotely. It may sound a bit heavy or serious, but I think if you take the time to set out your argument in writing it’s going to be difficult for your boss to ignore you.

Quite a few years ago I applied to work from home. Luckily for me there was just a form I needed to complete so it was fairly straightforward. At that time it wasn’t to  have more time to work on my side hustle. It was because my office was closing and my commute to the new office was over double my current commute. I wish I could tell you that my argument was so good that it was agreed, but sadly it was refused. I can’t even remember the reason now as since then a lot has changed. Fortunately for me the pandemic came along and we all moved to homeworking and haven’t gone back. It’s strange isn’t it how much covid made  us re-evaluate things. Anyway, back to the proposal you’re going to be writing. 

Here’s some points to think about when writing this:

• Your objectives - Explain your motivation for requesting to work from home, such as increased productivity, better focus or improved work-life balance. (It might not be a good idea to tell them about your side hustle, particularly if you’re hoping it’s going to replace your full time job at some point. Unless they already know about it.)

• Benefits to your company or organisation - highlight how your employer can benefit from this arrangement, such as you being more productive.

• Work plan - provide a detailed plan of how you will manage your responsibilities, communicate with your team and ensure that you meet your deadlines.

• Propose trialing this - suggest a trial period to test the remote work arrangement. This can help alleviate any concerns your manager might have and provide an opportunity to demonstrate that you can be just as, if not more, productive while working from home. Decide how you and your boss could measure the success of the trial period.

• Address potential concerns - think of the things your boss is likely to be worried about such as keeping you accountable or your availabilty during the work day. Then reassure your manager about these things. 

• Suggest a hybrid plan - if full-time remote work seems too drastic, propose a hybrid model where you work from home for some of the week and spend the rest of the week in the office. This can be a balance that addresses both your needs and any concerns your boss might have.

• Remember to be flexible - show that you are willing to accept feedback from your boss and properly consider it rather than dismissing it out of hand. Be willing to adjust the arrangement if necessary.

If you are really serious about building a successful side hustle then it’s worth taking some time to go through this process. By presenting a well-thought-out case you can increase the likelihood of your boss considering and approving your request to work from home.

And once you start working from home, even just a couple of days a week, you will be able to spend more time on your side hustle and that’s why you’re here.

For more great ideas on how to find time for your side hustle check out my freebie ‘How to Find Time for a Side Hustle When You Really Don’t Think That You Can’. It has 30 tips and techniques for managing your work and home lives to free up hours in your busy schedule for building a successful side hustle.