Since entrepreneurship can be a risky affair, aspiring entrepreneurs are often advised to keep their day jobs, start slowly and quit regular employment only when their business has taken off to some degree. A sound and sensible approach you might think but this is not as easy at it sounds.

I personally believe that to truly excel in the workplace you have to spend some of your own time (often quite a lot of it) thinking about work - even when you are outside the office. Think back to when you were at your best at work. Chances are that you would spend some time in the evenings, weekends or mornings thinking ahead about things you needed to accomplish at work and how to go about doing so.

Things tend to change once you start working on your start-up. Even if you are more ethical than most, the best you are likely to be able to give is a 100% attention to our day job while at work. Every waking moment in which you are not working your day job, you spend thinking about or working on your idea or business. It consumes you and practically takes over your life. Chances are you even spend your lunch breaks working on it.

The effect of this tends to be that you become less effective at work and switch to a reactive rather than proactive mode. You do the bare minimum that is expected of you and nothing beyond that. In other words you become very average and people, including your boss may start to notice.

So what can you do about this? Well one trick that worked for me was to devote at least one weekend a month to thinking about work stuff - asking myself what the key issues at work were and what I could do not just to resolve those issues but to achieve something remarkable.

One remarkable accomplishment every other month may just mean the difference between getting fired and leaving on your own terms when you are good and ready to take your start-up to the next level. By the way, you may want to check out this interesting story about a guy being sued by his company for the IP rights to his idea because they think he worked on it on the company’s time. Scary stuff!