A side hustle is an excellent way to improve your income.  However, that word “hustle” implies that it is anything but passive.  While that may be the case when you start, there is a path to passive income from many side hustle jobs.  You need to take advantage of automation and outsourcing.

The Manual Side Hustle

We almost always start with a manual side hustle.  That is the nature of such a venture.  We want to generate revenue quickly and are happy to trade sweat for dollars.  Thus, we jump in and spend little time planning our approach.  This phase is all about the hustle and quick victories.  In fact, we typically start with precisely the opposite mindset from a passive income stream.

Step Away From the Ledge

Once you get things moving in the right direction for a side hustle, it is time to start refining it.  The first step is to completely define the process you go through for your work.  That process can then be reviewed for opportunities to automate actions or outsource some of it.  Even a little success should free up some of your time.  Use those time savings to further review, refine, and automate the process.  There will eventually be a limit, or the work will be completely automated.  In either case, that time saved can be turned into new opportunities.  Better yet, you can use it to build passive income from scratch instead of that hard-working launch.

Better Late Than Never

The best thing about this particular approach is that you can start it anytime.  You can look for opportunities to automate or outsource from the beginning or once you tire of the hustle.  This can also be a cure for burnout as you will have a new point of view about the work once you start the passive process.

Rob Broadhead

Rob is a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Develpreneur. This includes the Building Better Developers podcast. He is also a lifetime learner as a developer, designer, and manager of software solutions. Rob is the founder of RB Consulting and has managed to author a book about his family experiences and a few about becoming a better developer. In his free time, he stays busy raising five children (although they have grown into adults). When he has a chance to breathe, he is on the ice playing hockey to relax or working on his ballroom dance skills.

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