Curious about what other people do to maintain the energy (and money) to work on side projects after work. What's your side project working schedule like?
An omnipresent underlying sense of anxiety and rage caused by something or other in my past that is useful for work but not useful for building relationships!
Michael Jordan was great at doing this. His hall of fame speech is filled w/ anecdotes about him turning slights into motivation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLzBMGXfK4c
My strategy is just to push myself to get _something_ done, even when I don't want to. So, the other night I wrote an SQL query. It was probably 20 mins of work, but it brought me closer to finishing the project. Other days, I'll end up "feeling it" and putting in several hours on a project. So, small increments plus the occasional big push.
true. my whole side project output yesterday was a shell script that monitors if another process is running and lights an led on the raspi if yes :P
40 min work. But one step closer to the goal
1. If it's to learn more, I would instead suggest focusing on learning on the job. It's more realistic, you can get more resources, etc.. E.g. I've found learning new programming languages much easier at work than in my spare time: https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/09/09/learn-a-new-programm...
2. If you want to create a side business, I've done some combination of working half an hour each morning and increasing my personal time by negotiating a part-time job. An interview with someone who has negotiated shorter workweek at many companies: https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer...
I have an hour commute to my real job, so I use that to hack on my side project before and after work.
Setting small goals has always helped me keep up the energy to move it forward. When you're working in really small time chunks, it's important to make sure you have something achievable to accomplish. You're not going to be able to do things like "finish the sign up flow" in one night, but you can do things like "finish the authByPassword() method" and still be moving forward.
As for the money aspect of it, that's simple, just don't spend any. Bootstrapping is all about doing more with less, so don't spend anything until you absolutely have to. When you do finally start writing checks, make sure you're spending on things that will have the highest impact.
I work from home which gives me about 30-60 mins extra compared to those that commute. Often I’ll work a bit in the morning. Then at night once my 7mo old goes to bed I work for another 1-2 hours before sleeping. I leave all my editor and terminal windows open so I can quickly switch back to my side project as needed during lunch or while other software is building or off the clock.
I always make sure to workout, sleep plenty and eat right which tremendously helps my mental fatigue. Also I quit my high stress job and work for a company with much more relaxed work environment so my daytime work is fun and doesn’t burn me out.
But I agree, it’s not easy balancing life, family, passions, future aspirations. It’s like a wheel you’re trying to keep balanced and round and things will always give and take.
Regarding energy, I do what I can when I can, and I don't stress about things taking a long time.
Regarding money, I don't spend any. Between free services, free/promotional tiers of paid services, and open source tools, there's rarely a need to spend anything until your project is generating cold hard cash.
- Working on side projects that have less overlap with work and scratch technical and creative itches that aren't a part of my day job.
- Getting in the habit of sitting down to do some small task every day. Some days that turns into a multi-hour super-productive hack fest, sometimes it's writing a piece of copy and that's it. Now that I'm in that habit, I put in a really productive session about 2x per week on average, but I try to not care about that statistic.
- Setting easily achievable goals every week, and trying to consistently surpass them (examples: add an 'about' section, write a query)
- Getting serious about working out and eating mostly right fixed the afternoon doldrums for me. I normally do weights and cardio in the morning before work and a jog/yoga/swimming after.
I don't usually go home. I stay in the office and use a separate laptop or go to a coffee shop. I know if I go home I'm just going to sleep immediately. Then Ig et up in the middle of the night and get more tired.
(I also wrote a book with more stories and advice, with a whole chapter on negotiating part time work based on my experience and that of others: https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/)
Work on things you enjoy/want/need and don't feel like you have put any more effort into it than you find rewarding (from whatever metric matters to you: fun, money, etc.) It is a side-project after all and not your main gig.
If you're feeling too exhausted/no time/other is getting in your way, identify what exactly the issue is:
- is it other personal stuff/hobbies? (ask yourself why your side projects rate below these... are you willing to re-prioritize?)
- is it family? (unless you have buy-in/support from them, you may be screwed esp. if you have a S.O./kids... sorry)
- is it the day job? (ask yourself if its really work maxing you out or pressure you're putting on yourself. If it's truly external pressure from work, devote all of your free time to getting the hell out of there ASAP: life's too short)
- etc. etc.
The bottom line is to figure out where your time/energy is going. Assuming that the side-project is something you want to do, it should not be too difficult to find at least some time for it or understand exactly why you're not making progress.
Having covered all that, here's what I'm thinking might be going on from the way you phrased the question: do you really want to do the side-project(s) or do you just feel like you should because it seems like everyone else has theirs? If that's the case, you really shouldn't be bothering with a side-project... it's not for everyone.
Morning side-project hacking here too, even though I'm not a morning person. 5am your brain is fresh from sleep, there is no social obligations, no phone calls to answer, and you have a time limit for motivation so often plan your projects better.
The way I see it, when I have some free time I have some choice in which ways to spend it. If I spend it doing some things, I end up with something to show for it, something I can look at later or point to and say "I did that." Other ways leave me with almost nothing. And I just get bothered by that. Now, it's important to note that I am very broad in my sense of 'something to show for it.' Being well-read, having a wide experience with cinema, etc are things that I credit as artifacts worth accumulating. So most of my time gets split between learning and building things (software, mostly, as that's where my talents lie).
I take the opposite approach. It's NOT good to work on side projects after work. That's reserved for the weekends.
Spend your after noons doing other stuff. Excercise, other hobbies, talking with ppl at a bar, etc.
I tried doing it nights and weekends for 3.5 years and with a young family, I made advances in my skills but never produced anything meaningful. I'm working with someone else now to create a product and so I took a week of annual leave to try out what it was like doing my own thing full-time and vlogged about it.
Buy a PS4 and put it next to your PC. At least to me, playing video games give me some energy and some escape after work. After that, I tackle small 30 minute tasks. Don't take side-projects too seriously!
The key to keeping up motivation is some sort of success or reason to think you'll be successful. In the beginning, us entrepreneurs are filled with confidence (or dillusions depending on how you look at it). It's this confidence that keeps you going. But, as reality sets in and no one uses your app, you begin to realize it's not going to work.
I guess thats why they always recommend release soemthing early , so you can get some small measure of success: at least get some positive feedback to validate your idea.
Sheer force of will. After working at a computer all day, sitting at a computer and working late into the night is the last thing I want to do. Thinking of the alternative, which is spending my life working for someone else, is my main motivator. I can't see myself doing that forever, and I know things won't change unless I put in the work. So I do my day job from 9 - 5, hang out with the family from 6 - 9, then work until 2am.
I'm also a morning person, sometimes I devote my morning time to side projects first. And I leave my actual work to the later part of the day.
But if I need to work on my sides during the evening, one trick I found is making my room extremely bright, making me think that it was still daytime. I also force myself to be away from my bed. As soon as I lay down, there is no way I can get up and be productive.
A hack I found that's useful for me is to keep a daily log. I list down what I have achieved in a day no matter how small they may be, e.g adding contents to company wiki, clearing a jira ticket, reading an interesting article, etc. I keep the log in a simple text file for each day, in a repo on github. I always find the urge to add something to this log whenever I get back home.
Don't try to do anything meaningful if you have less than 2 hours in a sitting to devote to your project. Block off a 4-hour window every weekend, and take a day off once per month where you put in a full day.
I find trying to work on projects after work just leads to a bunch of time wasted context switching, and 'not unwinding' can be seriously bad for your mental health.
I have felt whenever i had to push myself for the side project it always failed. The drive for me came from inside because the road ahead is long. Also waking up early helped alot
Either that, or it's just mentally exhausting to be productive for a full day. It might not be that the job is bad, but rather that the amount of energy for certain kinds focus and tasks is limited.
In that case, if the desire to do side projects is great enough, I suppose the correct solution would be to try going for a somewhat shorter work week.
I think I have reached a critical point in my career where I have to choose whether I work to live or live to work. I prefer the prior, so I will be going that route.
I'll be resigning on Wednesday.