There's 168 hours in a week. Get up earlier. Stay up later. Sleep less. Put in time on weekends.
Sleeping less is not really a sustainable or good idea. Nobody's productive or happy if they're sleep deprived.
Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#22I've found having a third space is useful. You have your home and your office, find a third that you can fit easily into your daily routine, and spend 1-2 hours there when you can. My train home goes past a library that's open late, so a couple of times a week I'll go there after work with a laptop.
I've felt this need for a third place very strongly lately. My office is in my house, and I work from home, but I'm such a homebody that I'm thinking about converting my garage into an electronics workshop and darkroom.
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#23I'm going to assume you don't have a whole bunch of children, an underwater mortgage, or massive amounts of debt to service — or some other very compelling reason the following advice isn't going to be practical for you. But if you can swing it, it's vastly more fun and productive than some of the other suggestions:
Start freelancing, quit your job, and move to a cheaper country where you can survive on something like 22 hours of billable work a month (+ business development). Then spend the rest of your time working on your stuff, or whatever you want to do! No sleep deprivation is required, you can still have a life, and you don't need to rigidly structure your time. It's a decent way to keep stress levels down too which yields more productivity!
It does help if you have some savings as a buffer too!
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#24Same as for working out or cooking, you can always find time. I cut alcohol years ago and tend to go to bed at reasonable hours: the feeling of waking up at 5:30, getting a good workout and two to three hours of work before you even start to get ready for the office is pretty empowering. It feels like you already had a day worth of productivity in. So, to recap: 1. Don't drink (or drink in moderation). It leads to la…
Just curious, what time do you go to sleep to get up at 5:30? Do you get around 8 hours? I'm guessing at least a little bit less.
The secret to getting up early and it not feeling like torture is going to bed early. I'm getting sleepy around 9pm, and am in bed between 9 and 9.30pm. Depending on my need for sleep I naturally wake up between 5 and 5.30am. Melatonin has initially helped me get to bed early, now it happens naturally.
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#25Same as for working out or cooking, you can always find time. I cut alcohol years ago and tend to go to bed at reasonable hours: the feeling of waking up at 5:30, getting a good workout and two to three hours of work before you even start to get ready for the office is pretty empowering. It feels like you already had a day worth of productivity in. So, to recap: 1. Don't drink (or drink in moderation). It leads to la…
Just curious, what time do you go to sleep to get up at 5:30? Do you get around 8 hours? I'm guessing at least a little bit less.
Well, kinda depends. Right now, because of some crazy traveling between DC and China, I've managed to mess up my sleeping schedule a bit.
Usually, 10:30 or 11:00 (PM), especially in the summer. I also found out that I sleep in two chunks when I'm on a proper schedule. I first thought I had a problem until I read about segmented sleep [1].
It seems that there is evidence that before the industrial revolution (and ubiquitous artificial lighting), people would simply wake up in the middle of the night, read, eat or be intimate for 30 minutes and then go back to sleep.
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#26Same as for working out or cooking, you can always find time. I cut alcohol years ago and tend to go to bed at reasonable hours: the feeling of waking up at 5:30, getting a good workout and two to three hours of work before you even start to get ready for the office is pretty empowering. It feels like you already had a day worth of productivity in. So, to recap: 1. Don't drink (or drink in moderation). It leads to la…
Regarding your second (sub) point about screens, I've found that f.lux and redshift (on linux) have been a huge help for me being able to get to sleep quickly after an evening of side-projects and homework.
I've used f.lux for a while but I tend to simply not have my laptop in my bedroom anymore. I get bored more quickly to read stuff on my phone or tablet, and tend to simply go to sleep instead (as opposed to a laptop where I multi-task, chat with folks and open a gazillion browser tabs).
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#27Use your paycheck to directly pay a braindead coder with zero creativity or ambition who does nothing more than meet requirements, like you're fucking dictating to them. for added oomph they can be in a low-income country, but people with no creativity or initiative or ability to translate requirements into code aren't worth much anywhere. So rather than code anything yourself, just give htem requirements that read l…
Ya, but you could do that little bit of stuff in less time then it took to write up the spec, put up the work, sift through potential contractors and ensure what you got met your needs (going back to step 2 when it didn't). Plus you would know how it fit together since you wrote it so it would be somewhat easy to alter/reuse.
As far as side projects, 40 hours a week to work isn't that much. I usually work 50+ and have most of my work life. Lots of people work even more. If you did this you would have at least ten hours a week to work on a side project. Incidentally, I still have spare time. To do things like post this comment. What are you doing with your spare time? Video games? Movies? Facebook? Might be worth looking at. Life is short and you don't get time back.
Start small. Do a little project. Something that takes 8 or 10 hours. Then, with that under your belt tackle something bigger.
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#28It definitely is difficult. No doubt about it. Here are few things you need to remember (or things that helped me):
1: Break down your ideas into smaller ship-able chunks
2: Once you've something presentable, start getting market feedback to see if it would make sense going all in
3: If you don't see much interest, don't give up hope, sometimes it is better communication sometimes pivoting required. This is where you'd decide where you'd like to go. I found reddit to be tremendously helpful in getting feedback.
4: This probably is special case for me but I was giving up on software and getting little depressed / overwhelmed with my current stage in life. I like to do artsy stuff once in a while and so I started getsatvik.com, no-one has bought anything yet but this helps me learn marketing, copywriting and understanding how to sell. So think what you'd like to do as a hobby maybe combining that with your ideas could keep you going.
5: I find teaching people is also a great motivator. I now run a regular meetup in my city, learn some new concepts every month, teach them to other people. I don't get paid for any of this but helps to keep me sane.
6: Sometimes having virtual buddies also help. I now have a 'friend' on reddit who helps me with quick feedback / writing critique (as English isn't my first language) and I help him with doing some programming / teaching.
7: Nothing new or revolutionary here but sometimes connecting with like-minded individuals and organizing an accountability group also helps. If you'd like to connect, I'm happy to be your virtual-buddy!
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#29I don't think anyone has said this yet: Use your lack of time as a motivator to distill your side project down to the simplest thing that could possibly work (MVP). This is your opportunity to get really good at that. If you can't test out an idea in a weekend, you need more practice at this not more time.
Re: Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?
#30Stop reading, start doing.
Imagine someone asks how do I train to run a marathon?
Start by running 1 minute a day and add a minute every few days, after 2-3 years you'll be running long enough to run a marathon.
There is no substitute for doing, there are no shortcuts, there is no miracle pill (well, ADHD meds may help...)
You must actively decide that your sideprojects are more important than whatever else you are doing, speaking of which now that my two kids are asleep, and my fiance is reading, it's time for me to stop commenting on HN and start working on my side project.
Time is not something that is lost or found, you have a fixed finite amount of it, and it is continually decreasing the only thing you can do is choose what you do with it.