A better guide would be how to launch a business on a budget of 45 minutes a day. I'm sure that's the bigger challenge for most of us
As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour"
For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the most efficient time chunk anyway, and after that it starts sharply falling (usually there is little difference if I work for 6 or 10 hours straight)
At the beginning I had difficulty getting much done, but by the end it only took me about a minute to get into the zone. I think the other main problem I had (which culminated in me not continuing) is maintaining a regular schedule. 1 pomodoro a day doesn't seem that hard to do, but sustaining the pace over the long term was pretty difficult. I ended up skipping lots of days (sometimes going a week between pomodoros) and finally gave up. One of these days I'll learn how to overcome that problem :-)
My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. Because of this many interesting real world problems never come up. Frequently you can see people using techniques that aren't sustainable, for instance.
In the end, while I did get some value from that, by far the most interesting thing I discovered was that you can write code 1 pomodoro a day! If you take this as being about 1 weeks worth of work, I think my productivity is a bit lower than normal. However, it's not off by that much.
Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)
I would definitely be very interested in this. Seems like a smart way to work remote or on personal projects.
Having it work related would mean that sheduling would be easier. I would try to do that for first half hour of the day. If that really does improve the 'getting into the zone' so much, that would really be awesome.
I 've been a wantrepreneur almost a decade now (although the last couple of years I have almost accepted defeat) and what I have realized is that if you can't find the time then probably outsourcing is the best solution.
That or start small. Really small.
Maybe the problem of finding the right people to outsource to, is actually a business idea? Not like the existing sites like odesk (they are called upwork now?) are providing but something like a curated list of people of various disciplines to outsource to?
This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.
Would love to hear more of your suggestions!
"The first 100 hours: systemd-analyze critical-chain" or something to that effect.
1. Cut your expenses
2. Go to your boss, negotiate working part time
3. Use this time to start your side project
4. Make sure you don't use you company's equipment, make sure you don't work on your project during the time you're supposed to do your regular work.
I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less.
I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because I made it a condition of my employment before I started working. But that was a hard sell too. In particular they wanted to make sure I was not going to be moonlighting with my extra time. I don't agree with that attitude (my personal projects certainly take a lot of time and energy, even though I'm not making any money with them), but that's how the market works, even for a software engineer.
People that go i.e. from intern to full-time often stay at 4h a day, untill they finish school.
On the other hand, I am not sure how well this kind of negotiation will go once I will want to go back to 6 from. 8 h days.
We will see, I definitely plan to do this if we'd have another kid in my family.
In my company, if there is open position, afaik there seem to be two things associated with it, a rack and some budget.
Before I learned this I would often suggest things like "why don't we hire these two students on part time, instead of just one of them full-time", but sometimes it turned out we only have one rack, even if we have enough budget for both of them.
So, that might be why you have to fight so hard for part-time, because the guys hiring you want as much worked-hours as possible for their limited amount of racks?
Still, junior/intern racks seem to be easier to get, so that might be why my company does offer part-times for students. And we have several cs/se university faculties the city, so we would be missing out on really skilled people if we didnt.