I am a developer and I have a 40 hr/week job. It is a very good job and I put a lot of effort in it. But I have also my own ideas that I would love to develop, but I am struggling to organize time and material to develop something for me.<p>I read a lot and have a lot of ideas, about little porjects to test new technologies or new patterns, but never find the time.<p>I would love to learn the experience and techniques used by someone who have been able do to something like this
A (the left-brain/logical approach):<p>There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 40 of them (+ 10 hours for inconvenient lunch breaks and commuting) and sleep 56 of them, you have 62 hours left. There you go. Figure out where those 62 hours are and spend them wisely. Organize your schedule so you have enough hours when and where you need them.<p>B (the right-brain/emotional approach):<p>Yes, you have ~62 hours from the above example, but you probably want a social life, need to eat and exercise, and it would certainly lead to burnout if you spent every free moment cramming side projects where you can. Instead of (or in addition to) managing time, manage your mental energy. Find a pace and rhythm that work for you to make regular progress on projects you deem worthwhile.<p>It's very important that you know yourself for this to work. Here's what has worked for me:<p>* Go to the gym on lunch breaks during the week. I reclaim that pesky break in the day, stay healthy, and generally feel refreshed and energized after a visit.<p>* It's cliched, but I don't have a cable subscription. (I spend my time on HN instead, so I suppose it's a wash)<p>* Absolutely make time for guilt-free relaxing. For me relaxing is going on a hike or camping trip, grabbing dinner with friends, or playing an instrument.<p>* Spend time reading. There is a lot of good material on time management or lifestyle design. What's important is that you read and learn to isolate the signal of what matters to you from the noise (and there is a lot of noise).<p>* Live by this mantra, "If it matters to you, then you'll find a way. If it doesn't you'll find an excuse."
Same as for working out or cooking, you can always find time.<p>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.<p>So, to recap:<p>1. Don't drink (or drink in moderation). It leads to late nights, difficult mornings and wasted hours on (often) empty discussions/interactions.<p>2. Go to bed early. Avoid screens in the bedroom (they keep you awake) and work out in the morning (helps to feel tired at the end of the day).<p>3. Wake up early.<p>Where there's a will, there is a way.
I'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:<p>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!<p>It does help if you have some savings as a buffer too!
I'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 found that an emphasis on a clear spec, decoupling, testing, and producing quality code significantly reduce the "spin up" time that gets ever more daunting in an infrequently-visited project.<p>A clear spec means that I know what all has to be programmed. Decoupling my components means that I can make changes to my business-logic/back-end without having to make changes to my display/front-end, as long as the interface remains the same. Testing means that I can make changes without fear that I'm going to unknowingly break existing features. Quality code means that I can more easily understand the code that I've written after an absence. The upshot is that I always feel comfortable making a few quick changes, pushing commits, even after being away from the code for a few days.<p>A few concrete tools for writing quality code: write it to be open sourced, write it to be viewed and collaborated upon; use code quality tests like pylint, jshint, code-climate, whatever is appropriate for your language; display your code quality metric badges in your repo, badges for coverage, built-status, etc.
It definitely is difficult. No doubt about it. Here are few things you need to remember (or things that helped me):<p>1: Break down your ideas into smaller ship-able chunks<p>2: Once you've something presentable, start getting market feedback to see if it would make sense going all in<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
Another question: How do you develop a side project when your employer insists that it owns all intellectual property you produce?<p>Edit: As far as I know this is a very standard clause in tech company employment contracts, and is perhaps the legal default even in the absence of such a clause. For example, see "Employed to invent" under <a href="http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/pre-invention-assignment-agreements.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/pre-invention-assignm...</a> .<p>California is an exception to the above: here employees may retain the rights to IP they create on their own time, not using resources of their employer (including company laptop), and, importantly, not in the same line of business as their employer. In the tech field, the "same line of business" caveat can be killer.
There are a few ways . . . typically I'm so excited about a side project I'll skip watching TV and spend an hour or two on it at the end of the night.<p>Time outside the typical 40 hour work week:<p>Getting up an hour or two earlier than usual.<p>Spending an hour or two at the end of the night on it.<p>Same on the weekends, early or late, maybe schedule a 4 hour time on Sat or Sunday afternoon.<p>Those are really the only three areas to find more time with a 40 hour gig.<p>Obviously make your main job your priority. Be careful of any IP clauses in your contract if this is building something you want to profit from.<p>One other possibility, depending on where you work. You could probably use your lunch hour to learn new things, do tutorials. You should probably bring in your own laptop and use your phone's hotspot for this to keep things completely off work hardware/bandwidth.<p>If it's something you enjoy doing it won't feel like work or like you're missing something.<p>Make sure you balance this with spending time with family and friends.<p>I was working full time as an engineer in another field, started doing websites for family and friends, then moved on to developing web applications for clients along with my own side projects during the time slots listed above. It can get tiring along with a 40 hour job. Now I'm consulting full time remote so I work on client work 40 hours a week and use any extra time for my own side projects.<p>The holidays is a good time to kick off a side project as you'll typically be taking vacation days so you'll have some extra time that you would normally spend commuting, eating lunch, working that you can use for a side project.<p>Good luck hacking away on your side projects.
A little at a time.<p>Force yourself to do something every day, even if it's only 15 minutes of work. Write a blog post, research a technology, test some code, etc. Just do <i>something</i> to move your project forward. Progress is made in little steps.<p>As an aside, I've found that with kids, this is the way to get <i>anything</i> done. I just don't have large blocks of time I can spend working on stuff anymore. I've found that although it's inefficient to work in small increments of time, sometimes it's either make zero progress or make a tiny amount of progress.
I'm a junior college student doing some side projects[0] while taking 21 credits, jogging daily, going to mandatory club events, etc. Those except side projects take more than 40 hrs/week so I guess I have even less time for side projects than you.<p>I highly recommend you to read this talk script by Chris Wanstrath[1], one of GitHub's founders. Two of his suggestions:<p>- Turn off (or lower the frequency of) reading news/RSS/Twitter.<p>- Do a bit contribution to side project every day and get a streak. I feel John Resig's GitHub profile illustrates the point best[2].<p>I'm following these two suggestions on and off for a while, but I want to really do them for the whole year 2016.<p>And my suggestion is to go to some hackathons. You'll be amazed at how much you can get done during a weekend without distractions. Plus you meet a lot of awesome people, sharpen your skills and win prizes.<p>[0]: <a href="http://pwu.me/projects/" rel="nofollow">http://pwu.me/projects/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://gist.github.com/defunkt/6443" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/defunkt/6443</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/jeresig" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jeresig</a>
One way (though perhaps not the best and certainly not the only) to look at it is that the forty hour job is a filter. Ideas that don't get worked on are things that deep down don't seem worth working on after hours (never mind quitting the forty hour gig for).<p>Derek Sivers says a bit about the general problem in this recent interview: <a href="http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/14/creativity-and-engineering-with-derek-sivers/" rel="nofollow">http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/14/creativity-an...</a>
The better question might be to ask what are you doing instead and why. It may be that those things are more important to you, or it may be that you are avoiding other issues.<p>For me, the challenge in understanding my own choices, is understanding the root of those choices. It can help if you have a neutral third party to talk to about why you choose to do X rather than Y, but barring that there are other techniques you can use.<p>One is to make an appointment to spend 1 hr a week on some project. When I do this I start with a fresh notebook and pick a time either before I go, or after I get home, from the office to spend on this project. Then when the time comes the first hour is dedicated to writing down in the notebook the goal of what I'm trying to do, why I'm trying to do it, and the things that will have to be true before I can achieve that goal. After an hour I close the notebook and go about my life. The only rule is that during that hour I work on the project and nothing else, and if unavoidedly interrupted I make up the time lost that same day.<p>The things that make that possible are; It is only an hour, same as watching a TV show or reading through the front page, the notebook retains my mental state between sessions so I don't start out wondering what the heck I was doing last week and what needed to be done.<p>I found that for me what I really hated was spending an hour coming up to speed on a project and then only having a few minutes to work on it. Very unproductive and very demotivating. But with a process to stop and restart a project in hand, it takes away the restart lag and so I can be productive nearly right away (perhaps 10 minutes reviewing my closing notes from the previous session). Also if my check list is good then I have a good idea of how close I am to the goal.<p>Time is a finite resource, and learning to budget it will serve you well throughout your career.
I 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.
Small amounts of time, scheduled regularly, add up quickly.<p>A few years ago I spent my lunch hour ~3 days a week or so building up a little app for Mac as well as Windows. 3 hours a week is ~150 hours a year. You'd be surprised how much you can accomplish.<p>The other thing that I think helped was I kept a running list of specific tasks that needed to be accomplished. So instead of spending my hour browsing the web or just doing random stuff, it was an hour of focused time spent towards building the next specific part of the app.
Most of the responses here seem to be from the perspective of people in their twenties without any major commitments other than work, so for the sake of balance I'll throw my two cents in.<p>I'm in my thirties, married with a two year old son, and working 40-50 hour weeks for a startup, and spend all day Saturdays looking after our son so my wife has time to work on her PhD. Between that lot there's not a lot of spare time, but I'm also in the process of starting a side project I hope to grow into a business.<p>Recently I've finally managed to get a bit of momentum behind that. The key was to book a week of holiday from work, with the intention of building an MVP during that time. I didn't quite get to something I feel I could sell in that time, but I did make enough progress that I feel like its worth continuing.<p>The other thing that's working to my advantage is having moved house to be closer to our families. That means I now have 10 hours of train journeys a week over the two days I need to be in the office rather than working from home. Its not an ideal situation to work in, the internet connection is intermittent while traveling through the countryside, and sometimes I'll lose 30-40 minutes waiting for their to be a seat, but it does have the advantage of being a block of time that I can dedicate to it. You can get a surprising amount done in two hours when you focus on it. I'd go so far as to say if you can't make time outside of work, move two hours away from the office, and buy yourself an annual train ticket. Maybe I'll turn it into some sort of coworking movement, bringing together commute hackers.<p>The other key thing has been to try and notice when I'm wasting time, and to back out fast. There's no leeway for yakk shaving away four hours when that's half the time you have to work on something this week. I will say I have mixed success on that front, having recently lost a week to the decision I should stop using Bootstrap. Eventually I killed that branch, and got back to focusing on what matters, but it was super painful.<p>Finally, and the critical thing for me at least, is having a side project you truly care about. If you just feel like you should be working on a side project for appearance sake you'll never find the motivation to stick at it. My Github profile can attest to that, with a steady stream of things I spent a few hours on and then got bored of.<p>I'd love to hear from anyone in a similar situation, and maybe start a mailing list of people who want to support each other. If that's something that interests you, my email address is in my profile.
Dedicate time to doing. I took at least one day that was me time, where I went to Starbucks after work and spent a few hours every week cranking out code. The disconnection from your home life, whether that be your significant other, or the mountain of TODOs around the house helped me to focus massively.<p>Don't beat yourself up over it taking a long time to get something together. Its going to take a lot longer to get a side project off the ground whilst working. I found that the first few weeks were the hardest, mainly because you'll be looking at a project that looks like nothing. As it evolves over time, it'll start to look like <i>something</i> and as such this in itself is motivation to find the time to work on it.<p>Stupid as it sounds. I also didn't buy a domain. You might think that 'oh I have an idea I'll buy a domain and go do it' but the inverse was true for me. The amount of domains I have that I have done nothing with is testament to that. The risk of someone else buying the domain I wanted was motivation, anyway, domains don't matter in the general grand scheme of things. If your product isn't shipped, domains aren't worth shit.<p>Focus on small wins. Create a Trello board with a few columns. TODO, DOING, DONE. Keep the tasks small, and when you have them done, move them over. Whilst not directly an answer on "where to find the time" it will help to keep you motivated to have a big column of "DONE" with stuff in it. Especially when you are going to have nothing visual at the start.<p>I have an extremely understanding partner, but I also set aside time when I put the laptop down. Stupid as it sounds, actually working on a laptop rather than a desktop worked for me as when everyone else was watching tv, I could code, and you can take your work with you so when you have some free time you can work.
I personally would suggest thinking about the project in your spare time first. I find that it's so much easier to context switch if my objective is only to think about a problem I want to solve. This way I can do this a lot more frequently throughout the week with little to no effort.<p>And only once I've thought enough about it, and am comfortable I have a solid plan and have carved out a precise scope / objective for my coding session, will I open an editor and start coding.<p>The trick I think is once you can visualize exactly what you want to do you can knock it out relatively quickly. I think it can become stressful if you're always sitting down to code in your spare time, when you're not prepared with a specific plan. You can waste a lot of time spinning your wheels when you do that, which in turn can make you feel like you're wasting a lot of time and have nothing to show for it.
In bursts!<p>I try to do something meaningful for my side project about once a week. If it's side-project night, I put my phone on airplane-mode and tell the lady-friend I'm booked up so I can concentrate for a solid ~5 hours without interruptions.<p>Obviously you can't do this super often while balancing the rest of life, but it's reasonable to get it in about once a week.<p>The tricky part is to let ideas for it simmer on the back-burner of your mind, but not to let the flame go out completely. It's nice to walk into your session with a full agenda and a general grasp of how you're going to implement it with caveats in mind, which you can fill in during the downtime of the week. However, it's also easy to completely forget about your project.<p>You can counter that part by getting friends involved!
The theory is simple, practise is difficult. Aim for the absolute most bare bones side project you can, and throw a few weekends (or other time to spare) at it, and get it going. From there, improve when you can. Given time, your dream project emerges.
Stop reading, start doing.<p>Imagine someone asks how do I train to run a marathon?<p>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.<p>There is no substitute for doing, there are no shortcuts, there is no miracle pill (well, ADHD meds may help...)<p>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.<p>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.
I work 40hr/week yet I have plenty of time to work on my stuff. Of course it would be much better if I could fully commit to my project but hey i still need money to sustain myself and need to compromise with reality. Anyway, sometimes when I really get into it I can even work more hours than my day job. In extreme cases, I would leave work at 6pm, get home by 6:30, take a shower and start working at 7pm. Work on my project for 11 hours until 6am, and go to sleep and wake up at 9am to get to work by 10am. I take nap during lunchtime (45 minutes to 1 hour). Of course I can't keep this up forever so I only do this when I am super motivated and can probably do it for a couple of weeks to a month at a time. But even when I'm not in this crazy mode there's plenty of time to work. Just doing half of what I described will give you 5 hours * 5 days = 25 hours per week, plus if you're really committed you can work all weekend 12 hour * 2 = 24 hours (for saturday and sunday), which adds up to around 50 hour/week. "Not having time" just means you're not motivated enough. Before you say "yeah right you can do that because you're some abnormal crazy guy, no sane person can do that and it's not even healthy" I want to tell you that motivation is not something people are born with. Instead of trying to wait till motivation finds you, actually start "doing" something and you will gain momentum and next thing you know you will be super motivated and don't have to worry about these things.
Just pick something you really enjoy and it should be feasible.<p>I started SocketCluster (<a href="http://socketcluster.io/" rel="nofollow">http://socketcluster.io/</a>) on the side about 2 years ago while working 45+ hours a week for a startup.<p>I still spend about 10 to 20 hours a week on it. It's been a great learning experience - The kind of experience that's
impossible to get from just being a full-time developer.
If you be honest, almost every suggestion won't work. When you feel the need to really finish a project, you just cannot hold back and start to code in the night or during your normal work day.<p>What I can suggest (for your sanity and social life):
- Pick the weekends (one or two days) where you code for 5-6 hours.
- Do it during your work day. If you want something out of your side project, just don't work hard enough at work so you have ressources left for yourself
- Ask your boss for a 25 hours working week or try to get one day off without salary reductation to see if you be as productive as before. If not, ask for 10% less.<p>Divide your side project in learning and developing.<p>Get a book which you can read during your commune, or even an ebook which you can read during work.And then, at home, take a weekend/one day off/two nights off to develop and code.<p>I also suggest the Lean StartUp method, which is not only helpful for StartUps, but also for side projects. The key is to develop in small iteration to always have a finish product you can test.<p>So, don't do everything, pick one little feature, develop it and see where it goes from there.
I hope your job is easygoing, not stressful, and <= 40h/week. If not, find one that is. Next, wake up early, work for an hour or two before the job, get home at 6 and work until dinner, and after. Work on weekends. But most importantly, find a co-founder/partner to work on your ideas with you. It will keep you going. And make time for relaxation as well, you will need it to keep going.
I work 50+ hours a week already but I still manage to put in three to four hours of side-work every day (on weekdays that's usually 9pm to 1am), in my experience so far:<p>- The less correlated your side-project is to your day job, the better. Brain craves novelty, even after I am completely worn out by day work, by the time I've cycled back home I am ready to go again, but at something completely different.<p>- Move, I commute by bike and I have seen it make a big difference when you're sitting at a screen 14 hours per day.<p>- Make it a routine, at home I have two backpacks always ready, one for work and one for cowork, after dinner I just grab the second one and leave with barely having to think about whether I am staying in or going for another half day of work.<p>- Have a dedicated space, I am lucky to have a 24/7 co-working space literally around the corner from where I live or I would not be able to do this, it really helps your brain to physically switch context depending on what you do.<p>- It goes without saying, but you ought to really love what you are doing in order to forgo almost everything else...
Here's how I'd do it:<p>My basic advice would be "set up a sustainable business that doesn't take up all your time and takes care of your basic income requirements, then develop an idea once you're financially independent enough to do so".<p>Maxing out your time now, while you're working, is the most stressful way to do anything. Developing something based on your own idea is the most risky way of doing anything.<p>Rather that focusing on your own ideas, focus on other people's problems, then figure out how to get paid to solve them.<p>Reduce your bottom line agressively to maximise the chances you can sustain yourself without taking up all your time.<p>Solve problems and get paid to do it, then systemise that and get other people to do the work. Now you have a business that doesn't take up all your time, but which takes care of your basic income requirements.<p>You can choose to spin a product off based on that, ie. by automating that business and selling it as a product, or you could use a product extension of that business to increase revenue, or you could just work on something completely tangential.
Assuming that you have the energy to do coding after work, it seems like this is really a question about time management rather than about motivation.<p>One thing I'm trying right now and that seems like a good first step is to track what you spend time on every day. I'll give you an example. Right now I'm home for Thanksgiving, which is sort of a vacation, but I also want to be productive. Here's what I did today:<p>11:50-12:45 - Wake up, internet<p>12:45-1:00 - Work<p>1:00-8:30 - NFL, hang out with friends<p>8:30-9:00 - Quick work out, shower<p>9:00-10:45 - Dinner + work<p>10:45-11:25 - Break, clean up, shave, wash up<p>11:25-11:50 - Work<p>11:50-12:00 - Pats-Broncos OT<p>12:00-2:00 - Work<p>2:00+ - Relax, sleep<p>I don't know if that was the most helpful example given that I'm on vacation, but whatever. I've found that I spend a lot more time on little things like eating and cleaning than I'd think/hope (I'm a very slow eater).<p>Anyway, I think that having good data on where you spend your time is very useful. Both from a logical planning perspective, and from an emotional/motivational perspective.<p>Prioritization, motivation and efficiency are topics that are too big and too well covered for a comment of mine here to be useful.
I have a full time software engineer job, and I work on a side project which is a HN Android app.<p>If your side project is a freelance one, you're probably in for a tough time, due to external pressure.<p>If your side project is a hobby one, my advice is to start small, and plan subsequent iterations small as well, so you can usually finish in say within a weekend. Anything bigger will make you feel overwhelmed. Also be prepared to sacrifice some personal time for your project, it's a hobby anyway.<p>I'm assuming that your side project has little in common with your main job, otherwise there is no fun in doing it. If that's the case, I find it especially useful if the side project can, in a way, contribute to the main project. E.g. you experiment things you want to learn with side project, and apply it into your main project some time in the future. This way you have a good cycle and motivation to keep innovating/experimenting. Making your code/project public so others can use/contribute is also a good motivation to keep it up.
I know I'm coming late here, I really hope I'm not too late for you to read this.<p>I have two children - a four month old and a 5 year old. I tried working around the time they were up and I always felt guilty. I also work full time, loose an hour a day commuting (or there abouts), etc. The point I'm making is that I'm lucky to find a few hours free each day as it is.<p>Here's what I'm doing now and it's working well. Mentally, I'm in a good space, not feeling burnt out, feel like I'm seeing the kids enough, etc.<p>* I get up early. I have found going to bed early gives much better sleep. I am naturally an evening person so this was hard but getting up early (around 6am) I've found makes the days feel longer. This negates an anxious behaviour of mine feeling "there isn't enough time to do anything". Sometimes when I get up early I'll do an hour or so of work, othertimes I'll head in to my day job early so I can get out early.<p>* Learn about the pomodoro technique; it's invaluable and you can get a lot done. Break your work into Pomodoro slots (I use 25 minutes) and plan before you start. This way when you have a spare block or so you can just do that.<p>* Try to find 2-3 hours a day uninterrupted to work.<p>* Never forget you need time to yourself to unwind and relax. Make this a priority.<p>* Don't neglect your family. You will be far happier and productive when they're happy, at least that's what I've found.<p>* Never, ever work on weekends. You need time to yourself and do things you want to do.<p>* Get a good nights sleep<p>* Eat healthy. Make sure you get your 5 / 2 a day.<p>* Exercise during lunch. I go for a walk every day and love it.<p>Good luck! You'll get there with perseverance.
Working 1 hour every morning before breakfast worked out well for me. Important things to consider: 1. your life is more important than your side project, so don't prevent yourself from going out at night just to work on your side project, it's ok to skip days. 2. Don't screw around over thinking what you need to implement. Just make a list of small tasks and do them. It's incredible what you can get out of 1 hour with a clear goal and no distraction.<p>Edit: my work week was 60hr per week. There was no chance I could do anything at night as I was completely drained. Weekends were off bound too. I found that when you do as little as 1 hour a day, if you don't believe in the project you'll just drop it. If you really think you can get something out of it, you'll keep going and you'll get to some place good reasonably fast.
Weekends have plenty of time.<p>But any good side hack will just make the time for itself. It's that stuff you can't not do so you stay up slightly late and will be slightly more tired at work but hey, so what, you'll feel so good about it that you can't wait till the work day is over and you can continue again. Then it'll fade away and you'll get more interested in work again until one night you figure out where you left with the side project and hey, there you go again.<p>Personally, I've never been in such a good job that I <i>would always have</i> interesting things to do. So, I've observed that my home-hacking is strictly proportional to the amount of boring stuff at work. I need my dose of programming and if I can't get it at work, I'll get it at home. This kind of takes care of side projects on its own.
I do a lot of side projects. I feel like I am lazy but my friends always ask how I manage to find time for it. Which feels weird because it doesn't feel like a lot of time.<p>Basically, I work 1-2 hours in the mornings, not every day but a few times a week, either after I drop my daughter off at school, or before they wake up. Some nights I work after they go to bed (I am working on a side project right now, it's 10:20pm on a Sunday). Sometimes I stay up late if I can deal with being a little tired the next day. I'd say I get on average about 5 hrs a week out of this. Then, sometimes I carve out weekend days where I get 8-10hrs of work. Other days I'll watch the kids and let my wife go out to a movie or out with her friends to make up for it.<p>Slow and steady progress. Have realistic expectations. Just chip away at it.
An interesting observation.<p>If someone here asked "How do I have time to work 60h a week at my day job, 40h already feels like a lot" - You would get a lot of responses telling you about work life balance, and that 40h is plenty of work - heck in Europe they work 36.<p>On the other hand after coding a full day, most people here suggest going home and coding side projects.<p>I think each person is different, but this is HARD to do. If you are working and thinking real hard at your day job, I don't think you can really go home and do something useful on a side project. I have had periods where I spent 3 weeks going to meetings and writing tech docs - in those it would be easy to go home and code. But if I already put in a solid 40h of code? Forget about it, my brain can only code so much good code a week.
I have been doing this for a couple years now. I am about to make some big changes, as a result of the side work taking off.<p>I work early/late, so that side work wouldn't conflict with my day job. I worked Saturdays.<p>I'm a systems guy, not a dev as much as I <i>really</i> want to be. I'm getting into automation stuff, and learning enough programming to help me be a better sysadmin (Ruby, for Chef).<p>I'm always reading, and working to improve my skills (technical, and otherwise)<p>I took every opportunity to do side work, for some extra money. It's paid off well, and now the scales are tipping to where I've easily replaced my day job income.<p>I have an email address listed in my profile. I'd be happy to talk more, if you're interested.
So what are you doing when not working? Maintaining a house? Watching TV? Stuck in a commute? Taking care of elder parents? Volunteering at the red cross? Raising a family?<p>Give up something you value less than development. Move closer to remove commute. Let someone else volunteer. Give the family involuntary free space.<p>How about: Find or make an alone space. Set aside 12pm to 10pm every Sunday for your project. You disappear from the world, and only do the project. No maintenance/family/commute/charity/TV is allowed to interrupt.<p>This gives you 10 hours per week, or 25% of full time. If you spend half of your working time in unproductive meetings, it's more like 50%.<p>It can be done. Is it what you want to do?
(never only) 40hr/week job (project manager), a wife and a year old child<p>I am just about to launch my second big(ish) side project.<p>When outside my "real job", the priorities are with my child and my wife. So the time for anything else is scarce and the most is done after both of them go to bed.<p>- limit your TV<p>- limit your distractions on the computer (I use RescueTime)<p>- learn to differentiate between motion and action (<a href="http://jamesclear.com/taking-action" rel="nofollow">http://jamesclear.com/taking-action</a>)<p>- automate everything you can<p>- motivation, motivation, motivation (when sitting on the toilet you aren't thinking about your side project, you don't want it bad enough)
Wake up one hour early, and immediately start working on your project. Remove all distraction: don't open email, don't log into social media - just start work on the idea. When you have five minutes left, leave yourself notes on what the next day's work should be.<p>When you devote one solid hour of absolute focus to a project, you get an incredible amount done. When I use this process for side projects, that first hour of side project work is by far the most productive hour of the day.
Maybe a bit late to the party but id recommend reading
How to live life on 24 hours a day by Arnold Bennett (<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274" rel="nofollow">http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2274</a>).<p>It's helped me a lot with the same issue. The main idea is to ensure that you don't overreach but start small and focus on improving or researching one thing at the time and only on weekdays.
I worked on my first app next to a 40hr/week job. It wasn't really hard, since I liked my side project. My schedule from Mo-Fri looked like something like this:<p>7AM: Get up, shower, cook breakfast<p>8AM: Take the bus to work<p>5PM: Come home, buy groceries, cook dinner, etc.<p>7PM: Work on side project<p>1AM: Go to bed<p>This worked well since I lived alone during the week (on the weekends I travelled to my home town and stayed with my girlfriend)<p>I got plenty of stuff done in that year.<p>The most surprising thing was that I wasn't really more productive when I quit my day job.
Projects to test technologies/patterns - try to find ways to incorporate those in your current job so you can do the learning at work.<p>Other side projects - work together with a friend or perhaps hire someone so you can split the workload for something you want to build?<p>Organise your free time in a way you have time for extra projects - ie skip TV, cut down on social media etc. But you have to really love the side project to be able to pull it through
Use 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.<p>So rather than code anything yourself, just give htem requirements that read like a to-do list for yourself, after you've already doen all the theoretical leg-work:<p>#1.1 to-do: when this form is submitted, pop up this confirmation form:<p>#1.1.1 Confirmation asking if user wants to leave page?
#1.1.1.1 if user clicks yes, redirect them to the link clicked
#1.1.1.2 if user clicks no, keep them on page.<p>#1.1.2 Form submission: when user submits form, run valdation<p>#1.1.2.1 if the name is not betwene 2 and 30 characters show an error "Name must be between 2 and 30 characters"<p>#1.1.2.2 if the email address is not in the format (one or more characters or numbers) @-sign (one or more characters or numbers) and contain at least one period after hte @-sign, then error message reads "Please input a valid email address."<p>and so on and so forth. stuff that makes your eye water regarding how incredibly, uselessly boring it is, like you're an executive and can't even tell your business manager to accept a bid, you must fucking dictate the letter itself.<p>However, as incredibly annoying as this process is, it takes you approximately half an hour to do a day's worth of work with it. You can review progress every day in half an hour over breakfast.<p>So, there is your answer regarding how to build a side project while you're working full-time: manage dirt-cheap disposible developers on Odesk or Elance who get off on adding absolutely zero benefit whatsoever of any kind to a project, besides doing exactly what they are told in painstaking detail.<p>This is being made from a throwaway because I haven't heard this idea expressed and people might not realize that this is the answer. As for my tone/style, I think it's completely wrong for any developer to agree to be in such a role, and the REAL correct solution would be to manage a creative, contributing developer who gets equity in the result and has more free time than you. But what do I know.
Stop.
Watching.
TV.<p>Or, at the very least, prune it back to one or two current shows you follow. TV is by far the most significant time sink in most people's lives.
I tend to work on my side projects for fun whenever I feel like it. Fortunately I'm really into my side project, so when I come home I often feel like doing some work on it no matter how tired I am after my day job. I don't really have dedicated times for it and do as much as I feel like or have time for that day, whether it's 10 minutes or 2 hours.
Start small, work up to bigger projects. By small, I mean 300-1kloc. Or whatever you can bang out in a single sitting. It needs to be cool enough that you feel motivated to finish it too.<p>Accept that you can probably only get ~8-12hrs of good work on side projects done a week (except when you're really inspired, or when you can spend a weekend on it).
Waking up early helps. Also, I've picked up on this small but very effective time saver - always leaving the computer in exact same state from where to continue the next day. This really helps me jump right into context when I leave something in between and open it the next day. I always hibernate, never shutdown my computer !
I think that if you love something you will find time to spend. I have a 40hr/week full time job (i am not a developer) but development is my hobby and i start my challenge to take the chance and find a job as a developer. You also need a lot of support if you have family. I am blessed because my wife give me a lot.
When I am done working on something, I jot down what I got done and any notes to help me get started quickly next time. This lets me juggle multiple things a little easier.<p>I actually created an iOS app this summer to handle this. <a href="http://getbalanceapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://getbalanceapp.com</a>
A masochist approach: I live in a Paris suburb and have a full time job in Paris. I use my 3 hours of daily train home<>work travel for side projects (web dev & co). There you have it: move further away from your job and take the train (away enough to take a non crowded train and not the subway :-)
I couldn't do it. I live with my girlfriend and at the time when I had 40hr/week job it was just terrible to work on a side project.<p>I was feeling tired and/or guilty in the same time. Then I decided to find a part-time job and finally became a freelancer. Much better on that matter.
Post some contact information and I'll be happy to discuss in more detail. Meanwhile, do you have family or anything else that takes up time outside of your 40 hours? If not, you should easily be able to find 16 hours on the weekends by "working" a 7 day week.
A masochist approach: I live in the subdurbs of Paris and have a full time job in Paris. I use my 3 hours of daily train for side projects (web & co). There you have it: move away and take the train (away enough to take the train not the subway :-)
The real question is what you are doing the rest of the time you are not at work. If you have a family, that might take up another 32 hours a week. If you sleep 8 hours, there goes another 56 hours. Hmmm, you still have 40 hours left...
At my previous work place I managed to reduce my work to part time so I worked 60% there, that meant I had 40% time to develop my own company.<p>Search for Einstein and the patent office for someone for an idea that you can copy.