How do you manage job and side projects? | Hacker News Reader

How do you manage job and side projects?

5 pointssunilkumarc6 comments

I have been finding it very difficult to juggle between between my job and my side projects. It's not just side projects. Constantly practicing coding questions is important too If you want to get into a good company.

How do you manage all of these while not missing other important things in life?

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I'm married, but we have no children. We recently moved to a big city, and try to spend time exploring together (we also make monthly trips back home for extended weekends). My commute to work is about 20 minutes, and my job isn't especially demanding compared to other jobs in my country (~45 hours a week). I plan to pitch my side project to my company with the hope that I can work on it full time. I probably spend 8 hours per week on my project on average, and I'm able to make it work through meticulous time management (I have a clear vision for my project and a road map leading up to my pitch). I'm not sure how a person might do this with children, but I suspect it would require sacrificing relationships or sleep or both.

EDIT: Also, choosing a programming language that can let you get off the ground quickly is huge. This is less about the actual ergonomics of the language and more about the tooling. I'm using Go, so I don't have to fight with build, CI, packaging, or deployment scripts, and I also get documentation for free. Further, the standard library suits all of my needs--in particular, great testing, benchmarking, and profiling tooling that's standard across all Go projects. Doing all of this myself would have been prohibitive for my project.

is there some spreadsheet or tool you use to manage time? i only using wunderlist to keep a to-do list and look back at how many items i check per week on it.

I use Trello and Google Calendar. I'm particularly happy with Trello (straightforward, powerful UI and apps for iOS and Android).

this is something that troubles me to, I work a 8 to 6 office job, do some freelance projects and try to draw/create some personal projects and i am constantly feeling like making no-progress.

the first thing i did was realize how much time i actually have every day after regular work. turns out it is a bout 4 productive hours. what i do nowadays is to focus every day on an unique task. (working on a freelance gig, learning to make videogames etc..) but only one thing per day, jumping from one thing to other is what i think makes it hard. so i put aside at least two days a week(8 hours total) to the personal projects and divide the rest among girlfriend/family/entertainment.

having deadlines, meassuring time in a realistic way i guess.

I agree. In my case, I spend around 3-3.5 hours in commute everyday. This is the biggest challenge for me. After I get back home, I feel very tired and don't feel like doing anything.

One more thing I wanted to know is, how often do you guys practice coding competitive Data Structures and Algorithm questions? I feel it is very important to crack interviews these days.

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