[throwaway1979]

No really ... how do doers do? I got married recently and have a full time job on weekdays. It has been an immense challenge to find time to work on personal projects now that I am no longer single. I've known some weight lifters who wake up early or go to bed very late in order to get in their workouts (I've had some success with this but have gotten overwhelmed after a few days). Any HNers have tips on how to live the hacker life while maintaining marital bliss?

[dyselon]

Just work with her to find time to do what you want. If you lay out some things that are important to you, ask her to give up some weeknights (or whatever it takes for you) with you in the code cave to help you get there, and are prepared to sacrifice the occasional inspired time when stuff that's super important to her comes up, you'll be fine. I mean, she's your wife. She wants to see you accomplish stuff that's important to you, right? Make her a partner in doing that. Like lots of stuff in marriage, its about communication and compromise. Congratulations on the marriage, by the way!

[ChuckMcM]

Does your wife work? Do you have kids? Over the years my wife and I have gone back and forth on time splits. It doesn't help that I happen to be more of a night owl and she is more of an early riser, which means our natural tendencies tend to cut both ends of the day off from interaction.

The best thing that has worked for us is to communicate goals, so if I'm trying to get "X" done we'll work schedules to get time to work on it, and then if she is trying to get "Y" done we'll do the same for her. When we're doing "Z" which is high priority for both of us we we're just splitting up things to work on and doing them and time issues don't seem to pop up.

The key for us is that we're very supportive of each others goals, and when planned together we are both committed to making things successful. Problems arise when one of us goes heads down in some project and shuts the other out, leaving them to keep things going while the other gets their project done. That doesn't feel good to the person shut out. Things get dicey and we've got to recognize that something that should have been 'short and sweet' is taking way more time.

[eat]

Realize you can't have everything...