Making Time for Side Projects | Hacker News Reader

Making Time for Side Projects

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129 pointsbgilham43 comments

Regarding accepting meetings, etc. Robert Heinlein has a great quote...

“Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please—this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time—and squawk for more! So learn to say No—and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)”

But the article is about side projects, i.e. projects being done at home or otherwise outside of work. Who the heck struggles with juggling meetings outside of work? Do people have conference rooms in their house or something?

Do you have friends that invite you to things on a regular basis, or groups you belong to that ask you to host or present? It's possible for that to take up all of your spare time if you let it. I kinda did for awhile, I've been trying to reign it in a bit lately.

Volunteer organisations also have regular meetings, and if you're involved with multiple volunteer organisations then it can quickly become a time management issue.

I think the main issue on side projects is managing your own expectations. You have to be realistic and think that as the name implies is something you do on the side and it's not your main priority. So try to work on it as much as you can but don't blame yourself if you can't work on it for a day or a few days. We all have lives and have stuff to do that are more important then side projects otherwise they wouldn't be called that way.

I'm devoting a single our per day on an android app and i'm having a great progress, i'm doing a tiny feature every day. And that's fine, it's done when it's done, i'm the one doing it and managing so there's absolutely no problem.

If you start looking at the side project in a very serious way, you'll end up with guilt , frustration and remorse and that just kills the fun out of it.

That's definitely something to keep in mind. Thanks for the reminder :)

It's so easy to focus on getting shit done, to the exclusion of treating yourself well sometimes. I think I need to plan a follow-up.

How, with just an hour, do you manage to get anything meaningful done?

I've tried that and I have to spend 10 minutes figuring out where I was, 15 minutes researching how to do the next bit that I want (esp. for a project in a new dev environment), 10 minutes upgrading various libraries or other stuff that is needed/needs updating, and then maybe 25 minutes of actual coding. I progresses very slowly.

Maybe my side projects are too ambitious, at least relative to my skill in their respective areas.

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?

I'm doing a blogger client. Is very straight forward to think on how it should work. Day 1 - Implement Google SignIn Day 2 - Implement List Blogs. Etc.

I do research during the day and save important bits on pocket or google keep, so when i have that hour i can be more productive.

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.

That's very similar to what I do. I have a TODO list that includes notes, and big features that I break down into very small tasks. I can get back where I was on a project in just one minute, because the TODO list tells me.

When debugging a difficult issue, I also take notes about my findings, and ideas of directions to investigate next.

I also do something similar with a TODO list however I haven't figured out a good solution to organize it. For example lets say i'm working on feature A and then B. During the developement of A, I find I also need C & D so I add them to the TODO list which now looks like ABCD when the actual development order needs to be ACDB. This cause my TODO list to become quickly out of sync with the order in which things need to be done. With long lists of inter-dependencies, have you found a good method of keeping your TODO list from jumping all over the place?

I reorder the items periodically. When I start my day, I make a plan for what I'd like to achieve, and organize it based on priorities, dependencies, and also what I feel like doing. If I'm tired and can't concentrate well one day, I will take on smaller and easier tasks.

There are some methods to figure out where you were - I will not prescribe one, but a few are; leave work unfinished, manage a trello board with small functional pieces and prioritize the list, write lots of comments, write non-passing tests, etc.

Also, if you're putting in an hour a night, why are you updating packages?

I find that writing myself a note with the next couple of things I need to do or try out (if I'm stuck) really helps.

True, it's more like an hour every few days.

Funny--when you get married, have a child, etc. all of a sudden you learn by necessity how to be productive with a whole bunch of 15-minute timeslots (perforated by feeding, crying, playtime, etc.) instead of a single, peaceful 4-hour session.

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.

The question is how, after working 40+ of the best hours of your life on other things, spending another two hours in traffic and another two hours with your family. Then somehow you need to get out of the tv chair and to your desk and put in another two to four hours of side project work. The question is not about understanding that consuming != producing.

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.

Setting up bitesize tasks is the best way to make progress. Add a new div to my page today, set up a function to handle it tomorrow, clean up a page after, etc.

I wonder how many hours that would have otherwise been productive have been spent reading about productivity.

Thats exactly what i thought when i stopped reading anything like that. Most entrepreneurs will give you huge lists of must reads. I rather code on my projects.

I think most people do that when motivated. It's when you lose your main motivators, or circumstances change, that's when it's helpful to read how others have brought the ship back around.

Kudos to you for having projects that keep you motivated though.

Heh. That's why I called it out in the post too. It's definitely something I've fallen into.

Reading about productivity can be useful, IF you use what you read. Most don't.

If you don't act on what you learn you're just escaping.

I think many many are in a similar boat. I try to tell myself the above and realize that I should spend my "reading" time on things other than "productivity." I.e. planned procrastination isn't a bad thing. Just don't fool yourself that you're being productive.

For me (and I'm guessing a lot of other developers) the hard part is balancing time between side projects and the other passions in life. I love diving in to a new technology and building things when I get home from work, I have seemingly bottomless energy for that. The real hard part is ensuring that you're not neglecting all the other responsibilities in life: partner, kids, friends, chores, etc.

The thing about the software industry is that there is always so much to learn. I always wonder how field leaders manage their personal lives whilst remaining sharp and current on emerging technologies and methodologies. That's the real challenge, staying abreast on the state of the art while not becoming a hermit.

I wonder who can afford to say no every time they are not thinking HELL YEAH !

I think HELL YEAH ! probably twice a year...

I don't totally buy the "Stop doing things you hate" advice. I've learned over the years that anything worth doing is going to walk you through the valley of drudgery at some point. Doing things well always includes aspects that you may not enjoy, but many times it is worth working on it anyway to get to the goal.

I'm on board with all his points except for "Stop doing shit you hate." Lovely idea, but completely unrealistic.

Depends how wealthy you are I guess. If you have a billion dollars, I doubt you need to do ANYTHING you don't like.

As your money scales down, you may have to do a few more things you hate ;)

However I think it might be easier to find joy in things you hate vs just hating them :)

> it might be easier to find joy in things you hate

That is arguably the key to happiness :)

I quit my job, moved to a country where i can life of the money i have and work exclusively on my side projects while outsourcing stuff i dont like.

I mean, its not so far catched if you have no kids & wife.

I love my wife and son a lot more than I hate some of the things I don't like to do.

That doesn't mean I should keep doing things I don't like...

yeah i see that point. I am really glad i realized that i could do that before i had serious stuff going on.

Perhaps. I'm lucky to work a job I love, so I have that privilege.

But there used to be a lot of stuff I hated doing that I've been able to ditch. I probably could have written that point in a more realistic way.

I agree for the most part, you can't just drop everything because you're frustrated. You probably have people depending on you for income, or find moving basically impossible. I will say this though, you really should keep a keen eye out for something better.

I have a cousin who lives in a rough neighborhood. I don't mean scary looking, I mean bullets flying and blood soaked people walking down the street at night (literally saw that the last time I drove out of there). When I was a kid living there, I always thought to myself there's got to be something better and I hated the area. They choose to embrace it. Now, years later, streets are as dangerous as ever. They're still there and I found something a lot better.

I had a few lucky breaks, but I was watching for them and I didn't let it pass me by. My wife did the same, moved to entirely different countries and learned the language there. We treat our jobs the same, when we find it's something we hate, we work toward fixing that. We talk to management about issues that come up. We job search when we have too. We don't give up, we work toward something better.

Neither poor enough nor rich enough not to do what you don't want to do. The curse of "middle class" so to speak.

Taking action is probably the best advice one can get out of that post.

I have a small side project I have been working on over the past couple of years. If I am lucky I get a hour a day Monday to Friday to work on it. You really have to push yourself if you want to make progress on something.

It seems as simple as make time for yourself and your ideas and your actions, then actually use that time with intention and focus.

It's simple, but not necessarily easy.

"...But every second you spend learning about productivity is a second you aren’t, well, being productive..."

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.

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