"Not that work, the other work. No the OTHER work"
People often ask how I make my living off an app which is not turning a large profit yet. The answer is... I don't. The quote above is something I end up having to say quite a bit since, in addition to my work with Stanga Games on Football Underworld, I have a full time job and freelance web development. Whenever people ask what I'm up to of a Sunday afternoon I immediately turn them down because I have a meeting. "A meeting? On a Sunday?" is usually the response - it needs clarifying that it's not my full time position I'm attending the meeting for.
So for those of you that are disbelieving of the above mathematics, yes, I have 3 jobs and there's a couple of others in the company who work or have worked on FU around other responsibilities. I joined the company just after graduating from university so I managed to escape having a clash between work and final exams, but Ant started during uni and as such had to deal with both education and work simultaneously - he's since referred to it as being "kind of a bitch". Something that, working in other jobs at the same time, I can truly understand. Gozza was another one doing the exact same thing I am, and from what I heard from him he was often getting over tired whenever he'd had a busy day as he always had more to do - again, something I can truly understand.
The biggest problem I've found about doing so much work is time management. Without getting preachy, you underestimate how little time you have in a week until you start working multiple jobs. To put it into perspective, in a single week I'd have an evening playing darts in the local league, another evening practicing with my band, then the rest of the weeknights and weekend days would all be dedicated to working on Football Underworld. Free time starts to become a thing of the past and I often found that one night out could dent productivity for a good 24 hours, which is a sizeable % when you consider the hours in the week not spent at the office or sleeping. To begin with, this was a huge problem and I found myself often not managing to keep up with the workload I was given, so I had to make a change.
Over time I started cutting more things out of my weekly routine, or at least regulating them so that the only nights I used for other things were the same nights as darts and band practice, when the night was a write-off anyway. However, this was still not quite enough to find enough hours in the week, so I eventually cut my sleep to a maximum of 6 hours per night. To begin with, this can be a painful thing (especially for someone who's just graduated uni and would spend more time sleeping than actually attending lectures) but over time the body adjusts and it actually becomes quite a productive solution (disclaimer: I am not advocating under-sleeping, but am suggesting not over-sleeping).
So how is it looking now? Well these days if I had to give advice it would be to keep a mental to-do list of all your jobs combined. Order that list by date due and press on asap. The worst feeling is deadline day for one job and having to work at double-speed because you've been pre-occupied with other jobs!
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