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I wake up at 7am each day, and work on my own stuff until I either ship or it's time for paid work (normally it's two hours).

It was incredibly difficult to get started, but once you persist it becomes an automatic habit. I've written books, shipped several SaaS projects, and blogs in this time over the last few years.

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This approach has helped me, above all, to manage my expectations, which were too high. When it's clear that I only have an hour or two, I rarely start projects or parts of projects that are too big. Instead, I can focus better on the core problems in this short time. I lay down software architecture ideas, boil down problems to core algorithms, implement core functionality, write outlines of blog posts or summaries etc. Most of the time this means I'm 80% done. If the small project still attracts me then I'll automatically continue it the next day and start working on the remaining 20% that take much more time.

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