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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but it's not possible. When you work full time, you have little time left, maybe 4 hours a day. These are not prime working hours, they are leftovers. You make very little progress which discourages you even more. You feel guilty about watching TV. You try to do something on the weekends but let's be real, the five days in between are really going to break your flow.

I feel like the idea of a "side hustle" is selling false hope.

Maybe people call something a "side hustle" just so that they can brush of criticism with "it was just a side hustle".

I've convinced 3 people (2 friends, one person on hacker news) to quit their jobs to work on their ideas, pursue self-study and figure stuff out. They've all been very thankful and the progress on their respective journeys has been much faster.

You can't build something cool without devoting yourself entirely to it.

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I couldn't disagree more. I started two side projects while working a full time job. I also have a family and coach my kids sports team. I enjoyed working on them in the spare time I could find, enjoyed seeing the progress I made (no matter how slow). Because I couldn't dedicate a ton of time working on them, I had plenty of time to -think- about it. Driving, grocery shopping, in the shower... when I did sit down I knew exactly what I needed to do and was very productive.

After a couple of years they both had grown to a point where I was able to comfortably quit my job to pursue them.

Becoming a parent had made me more resourceful too. If I get half an hour to code I'll smash it out like a rabid animal.

That said been doing renovations recently and there is definitely pent up energy for physical work after a day of coding.

Any tips on pulling that off? You make it sound very easy(couple of years seems pretty damn fast to me), so maybe you, like the author, could share what you think led to your success?

One project was pretty lucky; my wife’s employer had a manual process that was very time consuming and inefficient. My wife mentioned it and I told her I could help solve it. It was a huge risk because we had no way to get infront or anyone that could sign off, and being a huge company it would have been a horrible process. I decided to develope a solution first and pitch it. Luckily it worked out for me because they easily could have turned me down and I would have spent months developing it for nothing. However; I enjoyed making it and looked at it as a learning experience so I wasn’t too concerned either way.

Now they pay monthly and it’s been a good recurring source of income for me.

Another project was something I built for myself a few years ago (macvendors.com) and made available. After about 4-5 years traffic picked up and it started to grow. Now I receive about 350 million API request per month and growing. We recently introduced paid plans but the income from them is pretty much irrelevant, under $100/m. The site makes a little bit of ad revenue though which helps.

I second this and also, what is your creative project?

You can make the opposite tradeoff, work on side projects very early (I start working on mine at 4am) and work at normal hours after.

The tradeoff is you might be less enthusiastic at work, but I've not suffered from this yet (big yet, remains to be seen). Also, you need to be more of a lark to do something like this.

I've started doing this, noticed I'm ridiculously more productive in the two hours before work than after.

I disagree. Some days you’ll be beat, sure, and you won’t be able to be creative on those days. But that’s fine, if you accept it.

Other days you’ll get a lot of creativity done in your spare hours, and if your hobby is computer science, then you can certainly get a side project done. Because if you have a few hours to watch Netflix or browse hackernews, then you have a few hours to do other things, and once you get into the habit of having fun with your hobby, it will feel nothing like work.

Granted, that last bit isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it’s probably impossible if you don’t like your side project. Like if your side project is to build x because y will be good for you, then x may not be what you want, and it’s almost impossible to do that then.

Disclaimer, I’m Scandinavian. Our work week is 37 hours. My work week isn’t though, and I still had time to build a password cracker for DES encrypted passwords in c the other day, because it was fun.

Of course, if your goal is to start a business, then it’s perfectly possible that this won’t be fun, and I do agree that it’s often a good idea to give it a shot instead of trying to do it on your spare time. But creative side projects? That’s like going for a run or watching a movie.

I disagree and actively disprove of this. I have four hours at home.

Hour1: Eating / TV / Hanging out with wife

Hour2: Development, studying, cultivating

Hour3: Gym

Hour4: Relax, mental health, maybe some more development

While I agree that my progress is significantly larger on the weekends, the five hours from the weekdays gives me a good amount. Keep in mind too, this is about side projects, creative ideas. Not about "starting a business" or some startup venture

I'm insanely curious how can you spend an hour at gym. Showering alone takes 30 mins. There is also time commuting to and from gym. Do you work out for only 20 mins and is insanely efficient doing this task? Most people work out ~1 to 1.5 hours and combined with inefficiencies, commute and showering it's a 2 hour commitment.

I have a gym in my apartment, so typically a 45min workout and a 15 min shower

30 minute showers are a waste of water. What are you doing in there? It shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes to shower unless you have 6 feet of hair that you have to wash and condition.

a Starting-Strength or Greyskull LP program only takes about 30-45 mins. Faster if you've been doing it for years...

You seem to have zero friends.

Plenty actually, but time is lacking. I wouldn't mind being your friend and talking about if you'd like

OK. I live in Petaluma, CA.

After rereading my comment I would like to clarify that it was not intended as an insult but rather an observation that time for friends was not on your list. Several recent studies have linked maintaining friendships with long-term health and happiness.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in...

http://time.com/collection/guide-to-happiness/4809325/friend...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285502780_Friendshi...

No worries :) I didn't list weekends as they are not apart of my schedule. As much as I find routines to be beneficial to me, I am not a robot and enjoy my social times and lettings things happen as they go. Also the majority of my "free hour" during the weekdays is often goofing off with my friends online. It is also worth noting that my wife is my best friend as well

I'm in New York, if you ever in my neck of the woods send me a message, I'll buy you a beer

Awesome. Used to live in Washington Heights. Same goes if you're in Petaluma.

do your wife and you work different schedules? You only spend 1 hour a weekday with your wife? and spend more time working on the weekend?

We go to the gym together and spend a lot of time in hour 4 together. The first hour is just exclusively for us. Often she will visit me while I am coding and I (typically) don't mind :)

Per weekend day, I normally find four~five hours of development time and the rest I typically spend with her.

It's also worth noting that this schedule isn't law, there are days were I don't develop or go to the gym to hang out with my wife more

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is busy doing it."

I'm afraid Kurt Gödel did not receive this note.

Maybe in your experience. personally, I've not found it to be too frustrating to maintain a side hobby/business doing and selling woodworking items.

Potentially, if you view "full time" as being 10+ hours/day, then yeah, it would be hard, but, if you can manage 8/day on work +2 per day for commute/errands and 1 for relaxing, you still have 13 hours left. I like to sleep 8 hours/day, so, 5 total that can be allocated to hobbies/side projects. even if you lose 2 more hours to inefficiencies/task switching losses, then you still can spend 3 hours on the project, and if you do that with dedication it works pretty well.

I take it you don't have a family? Because I don't see any time carved out for spending quality time with a partner and kids (if you had one or more).

I'm not entirely sure why the person you replied to got down-voted so heavily. Yes, it's possible to do stuff on the side, but it is exhausting and hard, especially if you are juggling a full-time job and family life.

As a husband and dad to two, there is a lot less free time available on any given day to pursue side projects and hobbies. I prioritize time with my family, and I prioritize time to take care of my health (work out), and that leaves very little time to devote to hobbies. Even with an understanding spouse who is okay with me spending my nights after the kids go to bed on study/hobbies, I get 1-2 hours on weeknights at best. I still build things, learn things and tackle new things, but it is hard, and it can be very exhausting if you try to sustain it over long periods of time.

But I like my job, my co-workers, and I like where I am at life, so I have no complaints. If I wanted to switch careers or build something substantial on the side, I would definitely recommend doing what the OP suggested, even though it seems riskier and harder.

I have a wife, no kids. My wife and I will go to the gym together, eat dinner together, and spend time together, but her work and mine have different schedules so I am done much earlier than her each day. (I usually start at 5-6am and finish at 2-3 since I am in CA, but work mostly with ET and IST)

Do you cook for yourself? Cooking is one of my biggest time sinks. It takes me like 45 minutes to whip up some eggs and pack a lunch for the morning. Dinner is around double that between cooking the dish, eating it, and cleaning.

What is your commute like? I can bike to work in 15 mins but now its too cold and icy for that, and it takes 45 minutes to drive through rush hour and park (and I'm bent over with the parking pass situation near work). Lately, I've been using the bus, which is hundreds of dollars cheaper than maintaining the parking pass, but no faster. Somehow, I live only 1.5 miles away.

Yes, I cook for myself, and for my wife. I don’t have a commute (or more properly, I work from home, or fly somewhere to do on site work with clients). My wife does commute so I do all our cooking.

I keep the time down with a combo of simple meals, batch prep, and Costco.

Have you considered meal prep? The majority of cooking work is duplicated across meals so if you can batch it up on the weekend it saves a lot of time during the week.

Pity about the snow. 1.5 miles takes about half an hour to walk.

This works well if you are in your early 20s or otherwise have no real obligations, but otherwise it becomes very untenable unless you are ruthless about carving out that time, and the other people in your life are accepting of that prioritization.

The best I can do is try to carve out a couple of hours late at night or early in the morning, when everyone else is asleep. But you end up robbing Peter (sleep, chores, exercise, cooking, time with loved ones) to pay Paul.

Not quite sure why you're being downvoted even if people have different views it situations.

For me side projects are generally just too large and all consuming to run alongside my contracting. I've had the odd smaller project but that's the exception rather than the rule.

Maybe things are different for people working on different types of side projects or who don't have the three kids I do, but I can empathize with the feeling that it's impossible.

Maybe you mean "not likely", because "not possible" is objectively false.

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