Side Hustles: What's It Like Balancing Two Jobs At Once?

The Bottom Line

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Business

4.6 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Side hustlers are seemingly everywhere - some surveys suggest they account for around half of UK workers - and stories of getting rich quick and abandoning the 9-5 are plenty. But the reality for many is much less glamorous: long hours; a precarious balancing act with the day job; and a good chance of failure.

Evan Davis speaks to side hustlers, and their employers, to find out what it’s really like balancing two jobs at once. Plus, why is side hustling so popular anyway? Does it reveal a flourishing entrepreneurial spirit in the UK, particularly among young workers, or is it a symptom of a changing relationship between employer and employee?

Evan is joined by:

Julian Douglas, global CEO, VCCP; Ewen MacPherson, chief people officer, Havas UK; Karen Burke, founder, Go Goosey.

Production team:

Producer: Simon Tulett Researcher: Drew Hyndman Editor: Matt Willis Sound: Nicola Brough and Rod Farquhar Production co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:05.1	Thanks for downloading this episode of the Bottom Line podcast.
0:08.2	It's got lots of extra content we couldn't squeeze into the radio version.
0:12.5	If you like it, you might want to check out the other episodes we've made
0:16.0	on the relationship between our working and personal lives,
0:19.8	like bringing your whole self to work.
0:22.2	That was from January 2024.
0:25.5	Hello, welcome to the programme.
0:27.7	The phrase side hustle, side hustle, as meaning a bit of work on the side, apparently goes back to the
0:33.9	1950s, but it is one of those concepts that perhaps laid low for many decades
0:38.9	and which has now exploded into common parlance. Sometimes the side hustle is a necessity. It's an
0:45.4	extra job because money is tight. Maybe you're trying to save for a house deposit and you have to work
0:50.4	all hours. But for others, it's an entrepreneurial adventure, an aspiration,
0:55.0	particularly among the young, it seems to run a business, to have a project they can call
0:59.1	their own. In the world of marketing on social media, in the world of working from home and
1:05.2	outsource manufacturing, it has become way more possible to get a side hustle going than it used to be.
1:12.3	So we thought we should talk about side hustles, why they've become so popular,
1:16.7	what it really takes to make a success of them,
1:19.6	and whether the other side of the side hustle, the actual day job, inevitably suffers
1:24.0	when the staff are dreaming of making it big elsewhere.
1:27.1	The truth about side hustles. We have three guests to help us. First up is Karen Burke,
1:32.3	living the side hustle dream. Now, don't tell us what your side hustle is, Karen,
	...

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