Ask YC: Are you working part-time on your startup/project/idea?

About an hour a day, averaging weekends in with weekdays. I partly became so interested in Rails because I could actually accomplish things noticeably in that amount of time.

I did that for about 9 months before going full-time 6 months ago. I'd usually work on the startup for an hour before work and then 1-2 hours after dinner, so maybe 15-20 hours/week.

I've found that my coding time hasn't really increased much since going full-time, and yet I'm vastly more productive. The limiting factor in startups does not seem to be time: it's attention. Having that extra 8 hrs/day to think about the problem - and more importantly, not having to shift gears and think about my employer's problems - makes all the difference in the world.

I've found it also changes the incentives around development and leads to better development practices. For example, I was much less likely to use frameworks or large libraries when doing this part-time, because I didn't have a solid block of time to thoroughly learn the library. If there was a major problem in the design, I'd be inclined to hack around it rather than tackle it head-on, because I didn't have the necessary brain-cycles to hold the whole problem in my head. I'd often cut the design down to what I knew how to do, rather than the product I'd want to use, because that was all I could handle in blocks of an hour.

I don't think it's really speed that suffers when you work part-time. Rather, it sets a ceiling on the difficulty level of the project you can do. So you're fighting over the same problems as all the other folks who're doing startups part-time, while many of the harder problem lie unsolved.

Straight out of college when I was 23 I was working on a startup idea with a friend. we each had jobs, but they were very different. I was working as a mortgage broker (back then it was a good business) and my friend was working at a restaurant. I would get off work at 5 or so and my co-founder left work at 11-12.

So 4 nights a week we would meet at kinko's at 1am and work until about 4 am together. I would sleep for a few hours early morning and I'd also sleep for a few hours after I got home from work.

We weren't coding, just writing a business plan. We actually won an SBA business plan contest and got a little money to start the company. This was definitely the craziest hours that I've ever worked.

I agree completely with the rails aspect. I've only been using ror for about 3 months and as long as you think of what you want to do in a 'rails' way you get lots done.

In regards to the parent question , when I first start a side project I spend a fair amount of time on it afterwork. But it usually settles to 2-3 nights a week for a couple hours and 9-5 sat.