| Most of the responses here seem to be from the perspective of people in their twenties without any major commitments other than work, so for the sake of balance I'll throw my two cents in. I'm in my thirties, married with a two year old son, and working 40-50 hour weeks for a startup, and spend all day Saturdays looking after our son so my wife has time to work on her PhD. Between that lot there's not a lot of spare time, but I'm also in the process of starting a side project I hope to grow into a business. Recently I've finally managed to get a bit of momentum behind that. The key was to book a week of holiday from work, with the intention of building an MVP during that time. I didn't quite get to something I feel I could sell in that time, but I did make enough progress that I feel like its worth continuing. The other thing that's working to my advantage is having moved house to be closer to our families. That means I now have 10 hours of train journeys a week over the two days I need to be in the office rather than working from home. Its not an ideal situation to work in, the internet connection is intermittent while traveling through the countryside, and sometimes I'll lose 30-40 minutes waiting for their to be a seat, but it does have the advantage of being a block of time that I can dedicate to it. You can get a surprising amount done in two hours when you focus on it. I'd go so far as to say if you can't make time outside of work, move two hours away from the office, and buy yourself an annual train ticket. Maybe I'll turn it into some sort of coworking movement, bringing together commute hackers. The other key thing has been to try and notice when I'm wasting time, and to back out fast. There's no leeway for yakk shaving away four hours when that's half the time you have to work on something this week. I will say I have mixed success on that front, having recently lost a week to the decision I should stop using Bootstrap. Eventually I killed that branch, and got back to focusing on what matters, but it was super painful. Finally, and the critical thing for me at least, is having a side project you truly care about. If you just feel like you should be working on a side project for appearance sake you'll never find the motivation to stick at it. My Github profile can attest to that, with a steady stream of things I spent a few hours on and then got bored of. I'd love to hear from anyone in a similar situation, and maybe start a mailing list of people who want to support each other. If that's something that interests you, my email address is in my profile. |
What a great idea! I have lots of ideas, even start working on them from time to time, but then always got distracted in one way or another and leave these projects unfinished. Some support and the feeling of responsibility should really help. If you are serious about it, please add me too (my email can be found on profile page).