[tannerc]

I like Austin Kleon's insights here [1]:

"A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Freedom from financial stress also means freedom in your art. As photographer Bill Cunningham says, 'If you don’t take money, they cant tell you what to do.' Because the real truth is, once you start making money doing what you love, it BECOMES A JOB. And with it comes all the hassle of a job."

It's why I've personally decided to work for someone else full time and then use any time I can get outside my day job to do the things I really enjoy (which are very profitable). The full time job enables me to be more "creatively reckless" in my side projects, which in turn allows me to learn a lot and stretch creative muscles I might not otherwise get "working for the man."

1. From: https://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/69005574484

[kentrado]

I would like to try that approach but I just don't have the energy after working all day to come home and start investing time chasing wildly creative projects.

[spir]

A hundred years ago a wonderful slender book was written, "How To Live On 24 Hours A Day" by Arnold Bennett. He suggests getting up early and doing your passion projects before work.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-24-Hours-Day/dp/1603863680

[ruvis]

But I get up at 4am already

[fouc]

That works well if you don't go to work on your full-time job before 9am

[AwesomeFaic]

I'm trying to do a bit of that, but it's understandably difficult. I have an easy day job time-wise, but even then I feel like I rarely do my best passion project work at home. Lately I'll wake up at 5 and work, go to the office from ~8 to ~4, and then get a couple more hours done at home afterwards.

[originalbryan2]

I keep explaining this to my kids. They are still refusing to let me sleep. Why do they treat me this way?

[q-base]

I would say that this also depends a lot on how draining and intense your day job is. Some jobs require too much of you to be able to do anything once you are done - or do so in periods.

You will probably have to decide what is most important to you. You cannot chase and strive for promotions, extra responsibility etc. on your day job while still wanting to do your own thing in your spare time. Perhaps you need to look for a job that has less pressure and perhaps less pay, but which does not drain you.

I have just had to go through the same realization myself that I cannot chase on both fronts. And my priority is my own projects, so I will have to course correct.

[ss3000]

I would argue that _most_ full time jobs probably require too much of us than we should be willing to accept, regardless of if we have energy left over to do anything else outside of those hours.

40 hours per week is more than half of most people's waking hours. That's a terrifying amount of my life to have to spend on something I don't _absolutely love_ doing, and I sincerely hope I can find a way out of it sooner rather than later.

[steve1977]

What? Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day, your waking hours per week would be around 112.

[timeisfinite]

not counting that 40hrs weeks accounts just for working hours. You should add 1hr per day for lunch or equivalent pause, and often 2hrs\day for commute. You easily end up to 55 hrs that is ~50% of your waking time. You should add all is needed to sustain a full time job that requires you to be conscious of what you're doing, so I'd add some routine habits that make this possible, like maybe time to readapt your consciousness from work environment where you just lived and focused thoughts the last 9 hours, as I feel to need. You sell your life when working full time for someone's(something...maybe) else enrichment. Those 40 hours a one give to someone else are the most profitable hours a one have

[q-base]

I agree and we cannot do anything about the hours apart from perhaps trying to find some part-time job, but that is probably not easy either.

So my point was just to not bet full-on on two horses at one. If your priority really is your side-gig or starting your own business, then do not run too fast in the hamster wheel also. Put yourself in a position where it might not be the most fulfilling work, but it serves the purpose of giving you economic room for pursuing your own business.

[wolfoftheweb]

I agree with you 100% that it's on the individual to find a job which is most suitable for them.

Interestingly, for myself the more intense the day at work is, the more energized I feel when I get home to work on my own passion projects and businesses. Since my role has been relatively autonomous, I'm the one setting the intensity level and if it's a high pressure day it means I bit off more than I bargained for.

To avoid the after-hours productivity slump, I try not to let work get "slow" by taking on new projects, asking other teams what problems they're encountering, and finding new tools to add to my arsenal. That being said, there are still days that seem to crawl by and very little is left to be done. Those are the days that drain me mentally and physically. Some of the people I've worked with have talked about how they spend their workdays pretending to work while actually playing mobile games or whatever and how it makes the day go by faster. I'm genuinely fascinated by what I perceive to be their complacency and lack of ambition.

As background, this is my first role at an organization I'm not a founder of and I started there three years ago at the age of 27. Starting at age 14 I had my website network which was racking up $500+ a month in server bills, so the entrepreneurial lifestyle (rollercoaster ride) is my definition of normal. As a first-time employee, I've had some embarrassing moments while learning the rules and etiquette which is probably common sense to everyone else.

[tannerc]

I’m writing a book on how I do this! I’ll be sharing here on HN once it’s complete.

But the TL;DR for the chapter on motivation and energy comes down to: work on things that improve your own life, set clear objectives, and work in small chunks. The book itself is being written in 30 minute chunks throughout my week because that’s all the time I can spare.

[bogdanoff_2]

I found that back when I had lots of free time, my style when doing projects was: I start where I left off, I get engrossed and code late into the night, repeat that one or two more days, get bored and "burned out" from the project, don't touch it for a week or so (sometimes I work on some other projects), repeat.

Of course, that's not really sustainable. But 30 minutes does not seem feasible for me.

It's not like you're going for a 30 minute jog where you just run without thinking. Don't you need to take time to "warm up" until the project you're doing starts being fun? And how does stopping just when you start enjoying yourself not kill your motivation? And don't you think about the project throughout your day job (instead of whatever problem you're supposed to be working on)?

[yellow_lead]

Agreed, 30 mins is not enough time to get into "deep work" for programming. At best you could do some business-y tasks.

[Robin_Message]

I reckon TDD would get you at least part of the way there, because it enforces a discipline of making smaller, meaningful changes. Hard to learn though, and some things genuinely do need longer.

[ptah]

on the contrary it can make you more productive. for one it forces you to take a step back regularly instead of blindly going down a potentially wrong path.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

[tannerc]

I’ve found 30 minutes works just fine for programming as well as the more mundane tasks. Primarily because it’s not always 30 minutes, that’s just the minimum I can get away with on a regular cadence.

Then a spare weekend will finally come around and I’ll have made enough progress that I want to spend an hour, or three, on the project.

The purpose is to make progress however you can. This is also why my other points are so important: work on something that will directly benefit you (scratch your own itch) and have a clear objective outlined.

[modo_mario]

In 30 minutes I can pick up where I left off and write most of a blog post so i can definitely see it working for writing or the like but I'm gonna get much less programming done than if I worked continuously for a while.

[akvadrako]

Then don’t work so much. One can live comfortably doing freelance programming for 3 months a year and spending the rest of the time on creative projects.

[chrisco255]

"It becomes a job" doesn't really satisfy me as a description for what occurs when you strike out on your own. Running your own business is much more intense and engaging than having a job. Now, it's important that you see it as multiple jobs, and not just one job. Whatever your day job is you're going to have to wear multiple hats in a startup and it's going to challenge you in different ways than a corporate job will. In a corporate engineering job, it's likely that you're working on a small subset of features of a broader product and of a broader organization. As a founder of a company, you'll be coding, promoting, designing, innovating, QA, customer service, sales, and more.

[aksss]

...bookkeeping, reviewing contracts, managing insurance and licensing requirements, networking, the list goes on. You can farm this stuff out when you get big enough, but in the beginning you need to rapidly learn a lot of business skills that you may have only passively come into contact with prior. You will be better for it, even if you decide to go back to corporate at some point - you'll be relieved you don't have to do all the bootstrapping, but you'll appreciate what really goes into a business operation in a way you never did before.

[zerr]

The key is to have a high-paid part-time job.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

And in what universe would one find such a thing?

[zerr]

Working remotely from a cheap place for clients from expensive places, charging expensive place market rate.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Contract work is not the same as part time work.

[zerr]

It's up to you to skip over clients who demand full-time commitment.

[tonyedgecombe]

Or low outgoings.

[winrid]

Yes, however if you can figure out a project that pays your salary and is low maintenance (very hard) you can have even more time for your art :)