Making Time for Side Projects

Just make sure you realize that there is a life out there.

You're missing out. How much longer do you have left to live? You need to hang out with your kids and GF. Life is really short.

Isn't this one of the appeals of the "Don't break the chain"/Jerry Seinfeld approach? My working on something each day, even if only for an hour, you keep the mental tasks associated with development in the "front" of you brain.

Likewise using tools like Trello - make simple lists "To do, doing, done", rank them in order, and start working on whatever is at the top of the "to do" list?

One thing that's been useful for me on this topic is to keep a simple dev diary. Mine looks like this: https://github.com/jrheard/voke/blob/master/dev-diary.txt . I use it to get as much project state as possible out of my head and into git.

For "10 minutes figuring out where I was", I can just look at the end of my last diary entry, where I've often left a note like "this is what i'm working on: foo" or "do this next: foo, bar, baz" or "currently stuck on baz". And if I haven't left a note like that, I can usually deduce one by scanning the last few paragraphs of the last day's entry.

For "15 minutes researching how to do that next bit I want", that has to happen no matter what, but I like recording that research in my dev diary so that I can search through it later if I run into the problem again or want to remind myself why I settled on a particular solution - and I find that forcing myself to write down my analysis of this research helps keep me on task during the research process and helps prevent me from getting distracted.

You get the idea. I don't have any written-down rules about how to keep a dev diary, what goes in there and what doesn't, best practices about solving X software engineering problem by implementing certain dev diary techniques - I just have a freeform text file that I write my thoughts into every day when I'm working on my project. It seems to be a useful technique for me, maybe it'd work for you!

I used to do the don't-break-the-chain jerry-seinfeld thing, but I find it too stressful, it starts to really affect my quality of life (and the quality of the work that I do!) when I've got a chain going that's more than a month long. Plus, if the point is to prevent thoughts/state/meta stuff around the program from slipping out of your mind over time, writing it down seems to me like a good (better?) way of solving that problem.

When I find a problem that recurs in my dev diary without me coming up with a solution, or I have an idea that I'm not going to work on now and which I worry will be lost in the folds of my diary, I find an issue tracker like GitHub's (eg https://github.com/jrheard/voke/issues ) helpful.

Agreed. My part-time (personal time) side projects are now focused on feature length screenplays. Those clock in 80 to 120 pages. Not exactly happening in just one sitting. Takes time, planning, and also, like you say, being personally attentive and accountable without too much pressure. My third and most recent is my longest 121 pages, and it took approximately 3 months from sketching out (based on short stories) to final page final period. I can definitely state that there were 2 week stretches where it didn't get touched at all - either due to writer's block about something or 'just not feeling it' but I found my way back time and again and glad to hit the finish line that I'd set for myself.

Also:

- spend less time at work (nobody cares about those stupid TPS reports anyway)

- work smarter, i.e. produce more per unit of work.

- focus only on the stuff that actually matters.

- commit to task. I now set a goal (completing a small task such as fix a bug, implement a feature etc) for everytime I plan to work on my projects. For example next weekend: saturday -> setup webdev environment, sunday -> redesign my personal webpage.