Finding the Energy to Work on Your Side Hustle | Hacker News Reader

Finding the Energy to Work on Your Side Hustle

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95 pointsjrs23523 comments

I do the opposite, I work on my side project right after I wake up and make my coffee. Then I go to the gym and workout, then head into work. The workout is the perfect reset and I have not really had any issues with my side project taking over my thoughts while doing my full time job.

Completely agree. If your social life can take the hit, waking up as early as possible is probably the way to go. I've never been more productive than the period of my life where I woke up at 4am everyday to hit the gym and work on my side project before work.

What's your wakeup time/bedtime/expected arrival time at work, if you mind me asking? Debating how much time I should budget in the mornings for this.

I wake up at 5:45, work on project from around 6 to 7:15 or so and then hit gym near work and begin work around 9. I am web developer so I still end up beating most of my team into the office most mornings. As far as bedtime goes, I shoot for around 10:30. This lets me spend the evening with my wife so we get our time together.

I cannot get more than 4-5 hours of pure brain work out of my day. Usually, those hours are spent at work, except on weekends. I have no idea how other people do that but if I regularly spend more than 8 hours working per day and then add a few hours of even more programming in the evening, I go insane.

Same here. I just couldn't write software for 8 hours a day and then go home and write software. Now that I'm retired, I've been able to contribute to open source (but at a very leisurely pace).

I regularly feel that way. But when I stop working on side projects, I feel worthless. I'm sure it's not a healthy place to be. I don't see how side projects could get anywhere without a little irrationality - it's inherently unhealthy to take on what amounts to a second job.

I second this although I put gym after work. For me, the time crunch really makes me focus on what's important. Working on something I like early in the morning gives me a boost for the rest of the day. Another tip is trying to take the positive side of a full-time job and seeing it as actually helping me to develop my interviewing skills.

Yes! I did this today =) it's a lot easier for me to switch tasks if I work my side project first thing in the morning, but it takes quite a bit of effort to get going for me as I'm not a morning person.

I've been working on side projects for about 7 years now. All my side projects are open source. I wouldn't advise going into open source to make money but it's a great way to build connections. Considering the failure rate of for-profit side-projects among people I know, I think that maybe open source isn't such a bad idea from a career point of view.

My first open source project was a failure; I worked on it for 3 years for maybe 20 hours per week. At around the same time, a number of hot SV startups started building very similar products 'as a service' - I felt that I could not compete with that kind of VC money so I gave up (I felt that open source did not stand a chance in that industry against the 'as-a-service' model). It was my first project so I wasn't too disappointed; it was mostly a learning experience. It was good to know that I could at least come up with the right ideas but that I had to improve execution. Also, picking an area/industry where open source software can thrive is important. Open source is not easy; it still has to compete with big advertising dollars and VC money.

I've been working on my second open source project for almost 4 years now. It's quite well known in its area (it got traction pretty soon after launch and kept growing steadily).

Looking back, it does feel like I could have spent my time on more lucrative things; but the problem with money is that everyone wants it; so things get very competitive and marketing-oriented. So maybe from a career/networking point of view, my open source work wasn't a bad ROI after all... For a side hustle.

Why don't you try marketing your opensource experience or software? It seems like you have a product that has traction.

I did get some consulting contracts from companies over the past year. Also, very recently, I accepted a sponsorship deal from a very interesting company which is using my project.

I feel that it's just starting to settle into a niche which might have commercial potential but I don't want to rush anything. Commercial stuff is secondary for me.

I think what OP may have been hinting at (although I may be wrong) was a book/course/blog on what it's like working on a OS project and teaching other people how they can do the same while avoiding common mistakes.

No, I wasn't but those are good ideas!

Out of interest, what was your first open source project and what's your current?

First one was a drag-and-drop Content Management System. https://sourceforge.net/projects/jumbo/

I wanted to market it to web design agencies so that they could offer it to their clients and they would pay me a consulting fee to help them set up and build templates for them.

Eventually the area got completely dominated by as-a-service offerings such as Weebly, Yola, Wix and others.

I don't even know if web design agencies (which build static websites) still exist anymore so I think that giving up was a really good decision. If I had gone down that route, I probably would have ended up with a SaaS solution eventually, but I was just too slow.

My current project is http://socketcluster.io/

There might still be a place for what you were working on back then. As a favor to a friend, I recently set them up on Wix for a simple site they wanted to present for their new one-person business. It has been a long time since I've had such a horrendous experience with a product, and all I needed from Wix as an outcome was a one page site that my friend could then manipulate on their own. Nothing worked very well, it wasn't easy to use, few things worked as Wix claimed, there were a lot of limitations on customization below their limited framework (with custom code of most any kind you immediately start to run into problems with Wix).

Somehow Wix is a growing, soon-to-be $400 million sales company worth $3.3 billion.

There's a huge market for destroying these guys with a better product. Google to their AltaVista.

Well it was years ago, so it's old technology now. Also it doesn't matter how bad a product is; if they have a big enough advertising budget, they're impossible to compete with - Nobody will even hear that your product exists and even if they do, they won't trust it.

Who among us have called in sick to the day job just to put in a solid block of daytime hours on a side project? It's happened to me a few times over the years, and I've been 97% guilt-free about it.

I do that regularly, especially when I'm particularly excited about something new. I've woken up in the middle of the night, registered a new domain, and then emailed the office to tell them I'm not coming in that day. More than a few times.

You do what is best for you.

I did it today, fuck it, it's Friday.

I didn't know Ryan Hoover built product hunt as a side hustle. I always thought he worked on it full-time, blogging and sending email newsletters to organically build his audience.

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