My time just kind of happens

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In preparation for my pat leave, I opened the floor to Superpath community questions (i.e., I outsourced the ideation stage).

Melissa Suzuno asked first, so she gets dibs:

I will freely admit that my time kind of just happens. I spend roughly 40 hours per week on Dock, and 5-10 hours per week on Superpath—depending on the week. And I still manage to have a relationship, friends, hobbies, etc.

I think the answer is less about “how” and more about “why”—you can make time for anything that’s important enough to you.

(Although one logistical reason I’m able to make this work is that my wife and I both work from home, so that saves hours per day on stuff like commuting, meal prep, and doing chores around the house. That alone probably frees up the time for Superpath that lots of folks wouldn’t have.)

Here are a few reasons I’ve been able to make multiple work commitments work that may inspire and/or scare you.

1. Some form of motivation

I don’t think it’s possible to work a lot without a strong why. I’m not an especially hard-working person by nature. But I’m strongly motivated to make money so that I can afford outside-of-work things like owning a home, traveling, having a child, etc.

About 3 months into my first full-time SEO job, I realized I could make a little money on the side writing SEO articles on UpWork. I made $20 per 200-word article about surfing rentals in Turks and Caicos and never looked back from there. It beat the $50/night I was making renting out our second bedroom to strangers on AirBnb.

For the next 8 years, I worked full-time in content marketing plus an extra 10-15 hours of freelance writing/SEO per week—gradually increasing my rates and fun of the work over time.

So part of the “how do you do it all” answer is that I work so much exactly so I can do it all.

2. Getting paid to learn

Not all employers are enthusiastic about side hustles (or at least they weren’t before the era of The Personal Brand), but I’ve always sold my freelancing to full-time employers (and myself) as an education I get paid for.

I can take things I learn from clients and apply them to my full-time gig. For example, I was exposed to my first blog production workflow from brief to outline to draft to revision, etc. as a freelancer. That also taught me a lot about how not to work with freelancers—like giving a single-keyword brief to a writer.

And it works the other way around too. I can suggest things that have worked for me in-house to my freelance clients and there’s credibility behind it.

3. My side hustle energizes me instead of draining me (now)

Unsurprisingly, all that extra work was draining at times. On top of the time commitment, I was using the same parts of my brain for my day job and night job. It was tough to write a 2,000-word blog the morning after writing a 2,000-word blog all night.

Eventually, I found this role managing the Superpath community and writing this newsletter and… oh boy, what a difference.

With Superpath, I’m flexing completely different muscles than in my day job. Instead of writing more and more and more content, I’m doing all kinds of fun things—talking to the smartest people in content marketing every day, hosting virtual events, thinking about how to drive community engagement and grow the business, writing this newsletter as myself (not for a company), and generally just keeping a finger on the pulse of what’s going on in content.

Yes, it’s incredibly fulfilling, but it’s also just different work. I know folks advocate for niching down, but I love variety.

I’ll add that Superpath also scratches my work social itch. I’ve been a marketing team of one at remote companies for years now, so being able to pop over to Slack and chat out a content problem with a fellow marketer is great.

4. Accepting that life happens in seasons

My parents frequently remind me that work and life happens in seasons. You’ll go through periods of working really grueling hours so that you can enjoy the off-time or survive the leaner work times. For many years, I said yes to way more work than I said no to.

Grinding every day is not sustainable forever. Having that perspective has really helped me embrace both the busy times (“It won’t always be like this”) and the fun/quiet times (“Wow, all the work was so worth it!”).

—

So, no big secrets here. It helps to enjoy the work, and even if the work is not enjoyable right now, assume that it will lead to something great down the line.

Melissa did have a second half of her question, which was “how you decide where to invest your attention (e.g. where do you get all the info that helps you stay on top of the latest in content marketing).”

Again, no system here. My quick answer is: gather as many (work) experiences as you can so that you can figure out what’s interesting to you and worth your attention, find other smart people on LinkedIn and Superpath and pay attention to what they’re paying attention to, and subscribe to a bunch of people’s newsletters because I think that’s where all the best content about content happens now.

Okay, that was a long one.

- Eric

p.s. Leila Marie Doty, our new good luck charm, was born at 11:11am on September 21. I love her very much.

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🎙 New episode of Content, Briefly: How to succeed on a 100+ person marketing team

Jimmy has spent most of his career at small, scrappy companies, so it was a big shift when Reforge got acquired by Miro and he landed on a marketing team of 100+ people.

He wrote about it in How to Succeed as a Content Marketer at a Big Company, so Alex, Rachel, and I got together to pick his brain.

Jimmy’s biggest finding so far is that the story about your work matters more than the numbers. He helped an executive at his company achieve a big personal win, and that story spread around Slack like wildfire, earning Jimmy some serious street cred right out of the gate.

This was a really fun conversation where we got into:

We also didn't mention AI once, which might be a Content, Briefly record.

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:

📙 The Reading List

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