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Comment by bglazer | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people.

My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs.

At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on this project before I start getting really irritable.

I'm not a terribly skilled web designer so I feel like contract work isn't really a feasible option.

So I'm stuck with a chicken and egg scenario. I could make huge strides on the side project if I got funding to quit my job, but I can't get funding without an already working product.

I've considered quitting my job and diving into it for a few months. I have savings but this seems foolishly risky to me.

Maybe I just need to be more disciplined.

If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice.

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> If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice.

You can't have it all. A wife & kids, a full time job, a social life and an open source hacker reputation. Many of the biggest names in open source have none of those other things.

Then the industry should stop expecting people to have open source hacker reputations in order to be considered "good". I'm glaring at you specifically, "Github-is-your-resume" crowd.

Both of these things are profoundly important points. The first being that you cannot "have it all" and the second that putting the expectation out there that you should be a "rockstar" when it comes to open source code encourages unwise choices.

One of the things I noticed at Sun early on it its life were that there were "types" of folks, people who were so invested in their work lives that they had no family (or in many cases lost their family) and people who balanced out family with work. Folks in the latter camp invariably were less well rewarded than those in the former camp. I found myself slipping into that "work is everything camp" and consciously chose not to go there, knowing it would limit the eventual arc of my career. I have never regretted that choice and am still happily married with kids I know and who know me, long after Sun has faded into history.

It was a tough call to make. I talked it over with my wife (we were thinking about kids but didn't have any yet).

This is the most impactful thing I've ever read on Hacker News. No sarcasm.

You made me stop and consider my own life and what I do with it. I don't have it all -- in fact, I have that "side project" (open source hacker reputation) that's languished for a long time and I've always felt bad about it. But I have a demanding job, a wife (no kids), and my social life and leisure time is very important to me. But now I've, mostly, made peace with that fact.

Doesn't Linus have all of those?

Because he managed to combine the job, open source work, and to a large extent I expect, social life, into the same thing. That's the chicken and egg problem; you can do it once you 'make it', but getting there is tough without significant sacrifice.

He has a fulltime job? AFAIK, he's independently wealthy these days.

He deserves to be (at least as much as Jobs or Gates). A lot of the internet uses his software

Wow. What a great discussion. I'm sad to have missed it.

I have exactly this problem: NOT ENOUGH TIME. Beyond my 40 hr/week programming job, I play or coach football (depending on the season). I'm a hobby artist but I honestly don't do much art anymore due to time constraints. I also joined the competitive Smash scene a while back but realized that I couldn't invest the time it takes to get good.

I completely agree: you can't have it all. You know that college saying: sleep, grade, friends, pick two? Well I chose sleep and grades. (Not to say that I didn't have friends, but I ended up being THAT friend that never really commits to anything. "I'll see if I have time.")

Post-college time is still my greatest struggle. I don't play Smash that much anymore because of time. There a lot of video games that I think, "Man, I could get really good at this game, but I don't have the time for it. Ugh." Right now I'm playing through the Mass Effect series for the second time. ME2 & 3 will probably be the only games I beat in 2015.

I do many of the things mentioned in this thread. Drop off laundry service. I can cook but I've gotten into the terrible habit of eating out. I spend way too much money on food! Most days I'm so mentally drained that I'd honestly rather eat some ramen than plan out a nice meal.

My two best investments in the kitchen are 1) George Foreman Grill, 2) fancy Japanese rice cooker.

I am very much looking forward to medical school this fall where I'll have more flexibility in my schedule.

3 words : "not enough time". Simple & efficient answer, i like it :)

2 kids, 3 freelance gigs (full time at this), a couple startups behind me (1 pivoted away, 1 still running). I would love to get 5 hours for an OSX app I really want to build.

You really do have to shut out the rest of your life if you want to make a serious run at a project. When you are cramming a side project into you life, you really can "work" 80 hour weeks. The irritability you're experiencing will probably just get worse.

I'm just starting to learn to cook. I began riding my bike last year. I'm 34. The grass is always greener of course. But it seems like you are enjoying a lot of the things I wish I had made time for earlier.

Maybe shut out the art project. Turn your code into open source and let that be your art for the next few months.

Thanks. I don't even have kids yet. I'm still ~5 years from having little ones I'd imagine. Both of the people working with me on the project have kids, and I admire them (and you) tremendously for fitting everything in.

Once you have children, everything changes. I went from having 5+ hours of free time each day to -5 hours of free time every day. You have to get super efficient with everything in your life. Cut out the things that aren't the most important things. Kids (especially when they're between 0-7 years old) take up an enormous amount of energy and focus.

You'll learn tricks to improve your performance and squeeze more time into the day. But the biggest thing that's worked most for me is staying up later than I normally would prefer. I get a few extra hours for passion projects and still get everything in the day accomplished that I'm required to accomplish.

It's a tough slog. Immensely rewarding, but tough. Prepare yourself for the change in advance so that you don't go through the massive shock I experienced.

Quite true; and it's oddly frustrating to me to notice how much time the pre-kids version of me wasted.

There should be a way to borrow someone else's kids for 6 months or so, force yourself to carve the waste out of your life... and then wait another decade before having your own kids.

Hah, I would have paid for that service. :)

I have high hopes that the time I'm investing in my kids will not only benefit them, but long term will benefit me as well.

At 5 my oldest son is doing a lot of small chores around the house. He just passed the tipping point of where I can spend less time giving him directions than it would have taken for me to just do the job myself. I see this scaling over time.

A part of the "playing" that I do with him is building and repairing stuff around the home. He loves it. It takes much longer to complete anything that if I was just doing it myself, but I'm doubling up "play" and "chores" so it works out. For things that he can't help with I try to outsource.

I like some of the ideas of past generations who often viewed kids as resources.

I don't mean to offend, but have you considered what your child might think of you when they grow a bit older and find this comment?

Ideally he won't think anything of it because I've spent so much time with him we're working side by side building his first business by that point.

I'd be careful, the more expectation you load onto a child, the more they push back in the teen years.

They'll probably thank him for raising him well, and teaching him/her the value of a good work ethic, rather than being spoiled and lazy.

Speaking of side projects and learning to cook, I'm working on a side project that helps people learn to cook. Happy to share if interested.

Does it happen to help with the attitude or process of cooking? It's probably the bachelor mentality in me but I honestly just hate cooking. The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous. However, I do feel like I could eat a little more natural and better if I did cook more.

It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available. Going to the grocery store is then less about "shit, they're out of $ingredient" and more about "wow, the salmon looks really fresh this week". The actual act of cooking is the same--instead of focusing on following and mucking up someone else's recipe, I get to feel creative as I build something based on what sounds interesting. It's kind of like a mini side project.

Alton Brown is probably not an ideal source for recipes for you since he really goes all-out with ingredients and prep, but he's a fun way to learn about the science of cooking. His methods are hacker-ish, and that he doesn't follow same-old-same-old recipes helped me to stop worrying about doing things the "right" way.

That approach sounds like something coming out of experience. I hope to reach that level one day; right now my mind just blocks when it starts thinking about composing ingredients, and I revert back to the two or three recipes I know. I wish I started cooking as a kid, I was less anxious to experiment then.

You can start by putting together a list of ingredients you like. Many of these will be common ingredients for multiple recipes and go together in different ways. Nearly every time I go grocery shopping I get these things because my SO and I like them.

EG: chicken, beef, tomato, onion, peppers, mushroom, cheese, rice, quinoa, pasta, potato, carrot, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, corn, sauce, etc.

Make sure you have a good stock of different spices, salt, and pepper.

Start with something simple like just chicken pasta and each meal add in something from above suited towards your taste. As you run out of ingredients you'll realize you can still make good dishes. If you run out of pasta you can skip it completely or sub it out with quiona.

I often play the "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" game :D

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, the game of "lets see what I can make with what is still in the fridge" sounds totally fun! :D.

Yeah, you were right in the above comment that that ability does come from having some experience. But the "let's see what's in the fridge" game is a great way to get that experience! You'll undoubtedly mess a few things up, but that's just the process of learning.

It's weird... the more I think about it, the more I ask myself - "it's just like programming, another cool skill to master - why I'm so afraid of experimenting?"...

If I could upvote this a thousand times, I would. The problem, however, is that making a mistake in programming is not so painful. Making a mistake in cooking costs money and is often pretty embarrassing. I can easily see why you'd be more afraid of experimenting here.

Agree strongly RE embarrassing part - for now I just gave up on experimenting while cooking for friends; I tried it once, and they laugh at me ever since. Costs is also a factor, but I notice I'm afraid of experimenting even with small dishes and cheap ingredients the fridge is stocked full of.

I'm starting to realize now that it's just a stupid fear I need to overcome. I'm glad this thread forced me to think more about my attitude towards cooking.

Feel free to write to me privately anytime. I'd love for you to try some of the lessons on CookAcademy and let me know if it helps, too. One thing we're trying to reduce that fear of embarrassment is have a sort of automated helper when you're done. You answer questions about what went wrong and we provide feedback for how to improve it the next time. We also track your progress so you can get a good gauge of where you stand. Are either of those things helpful to you?

As a bachelor I do it like every day, two times per day ;)

(Yes, sometimes is a really hard game.)

That's the way I started when I first moved out of home - very simply. I still remember wondering how I should cook a steak; how would I know when it was cooked? How do I know what to heat the pan to? Etc....

To go a bit philosophical, you have to lose the fear of engaging with your food and the cooking process. Don't be scared to play with your food while it's cooking. Smell it often, listen to the noises it makes, don't be worried about moving it around the pan and even take notice of how it moves - is it sticking to the pan? Does it seem a little dry? Does it smell good? Start doing this with the simplest of things - some oil in a pan and a steak or sausages, for example.

Don't worry about following recipes to the exact letter all the time, unless you're doing something like baking where the chemistry is more important to get accurate. If your time isn't exact or the temperature is a little off or you use more than a tablespoon of oil, see what happens. See what happens if you add salt, or if you don't. Observe it while it's happening. Don't be scared to taste something off the pan. If it doesn't taste good, ask yourself why? Then ask yourself how you might fix it.

Once you're not afraid to do that, cooking becomes a lot more fun and intuitive. Then you can follow recipes while engaging with them and the food.

I feel like this is something that many people who hate cooking or who are scared of cooking miss. Cooking shouldn't be a "follow the instructions to the letter otherwise one wrong step and boom!" process. Instead it's a highly interactive, very sensory thing.

I learnt by starting to cook Indian food when I moved here. A lot of Indian food has the same set of spices and similar procedures. Soon I realized that I can experiment with the ingredients and vary the spices to change flavor and it did not have an adverse impact on the final outcome. That caused me to loose the trepidation of experimenting in the kitchen and I do it with all cuisines now. And it has worked out well, cause I generally can manage to put a meal together with whatever is left in the fridge.

Years ago I bought a vegan cookbook, which had week-long recipe plans in it. I'm not vegan, but without the "meat + sauce" or "meat + veg" options the recipes had to be so much more inventive. It gave me some good ideas, a taste for chickpeas, and a willingness to add beans to anything that looks boring.

A flatmate has a book called simply "Saucen" (German for "Sauces") which provides a good basis for many meals.

>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available.

I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/

I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to mention the significant amount to time spent in prepping and later, cleaning up.

That said, I agree that (with a bit of experience) this approach to cooking is a lot more fun. As a comment elsewhere on the page says, cooking for yourself could sometimes be a pain (especially after you get home from work) and thinking of it as a side project really helps.

You can see the link to my site elsewhere, but I'd be happy to help more thoroughly if you're interested. The ability to do this is not a reflection of your ability to think creatively but rather that you need to understand why you're using certain things and what effect they will have on your dish.

3 months isn't a long time.

I think one way to build up intuition is to cook a recipe with a very short list of ingredients multiple times, with small variations (like the size of cutting things up or cooking time or whatever).

One thing Good Eats consistently does is talk about whether an ingredient has a functional purpose in a recipe, and what that purpose is. Other cooking resources do that too, but usually not as well.

This right here is exactly right. If the reasoning is mentioned at all, it's usually incidental and not intentional. When we talk about salt in the seasoning step of our pan-sautéed chicken lesson, we wrote: "Salt "brings out the flavor" in chicken by reducing our perception of bitterness in foods. This, in turn, leads to an increased perception of sweet, sour, and umami (savory) flavors."

This is obviously a rather trivial example, but hopefully you see how generalizing this (and similar nuggets of information) can help.

Is it normal in your country/culture/social group not to have much experience cooking? I had a lot of second-hand experience by the time I was 18 from simply watching my parents or other adults, and sometimes being asked to help.

I have some pretty basic recipes I cook if I'm a bit tired from work, I can make them without really thinking (e.g. diced chicken + green beans & cream + pesto.) Fortunately, the nearest shop is about 2 minutes detour from my route home, so I can wander in and buy the things I'm missing.

Alton Brown is our guiding light for CookAcademy. (Our chef ironically also happened to be on Cutthroat Kitchen!)

Mark Bittman writes about the stages of learning how to cook and you are pretty advanced relative to others. Many of us haven't gotten to the point where we can realistically come up with ideas based on tastes because we don't know how they interact. Generalizing these ideas requires understanding how and why things work, which is exactly why Alton Brown is so useful to so many people. He breaks down the reasoning behind something so that you can generalize it the next time, or in a different dish, or apply a principle to something new altogether.

Exactly! You put that much more eloquently than I could've. I'm glad to hear that you're creating a product that makes that learning philosophy accessible.

As someone who likes to cook but generally doesn't, I feel the problem is how this scales per mouths to feed.

Cooking for 1 or cooking for 5 doesn't involve much increase in the total time (5 sets of eating dishes instead of 1 and slightly larger cookware to clean) and has a slight decrease in price per mouth (buying food items in bulk is cheaper). Now I could cook big meals for just myself to eat 5 times along with buying in bulk, but this means a significant loss in freshness and variety (eating the same meal 5 times a week, 4 of those reheated, and bulk items mean the same core ingredients for multiple weeks). Finally top this off with the notion that more mouths to feed tend to mean more bodies to help cook/clean, and I personally find that this tips the scales to making cooking far less worthwhile when you are doing it by yourself for yourself.

girlfriend and joke how despite being "modern" people we still have pretty traditional division of labor: she cooks, i manage money. it works for us. i agree that it's much better when you have a few people doing the scale-invariant tasks for each other.

This is how I look at it too. The shopping and transport overhead for ingredients, plus the overhead of time paying bills and stocking a kitchen in the first place is nontrivial also. Basically you need 2 people to make it work nicely, unless you're a foodie or are so used to cooking that you enjoy the shop/cart/unpack/retrieve/prepare/cook/clean cycle as meditation. Three or more is better.

You could freeze part of your leftovers or if you have friends/family/neighbors who cook, you could trade leftovers with them. It's still reheated, but at least you get more variety.

> The amount of time (purchase food, prep, cook, clean pots/pans) for a 5 minute meal when I could be, ya know, working on a side project, seems ridiculous.

This. That's the primary reason I keep eating unhealthy. Since I started working, I naturally gravitated toward few dishes that basically make themselves - e.g. french fries, boiled/fried sausage, etc. - basically anything I can drop on the stove and leave unattended for some time. Maybe if I started to seriously learn how to cook I'd start to like it, but for now it's something that I need to do to keep myself able to do other things.

That's a really poor excuse. Healthy meals can be just as hands off as TV dinners and french fries.

1. chicken breast 2. broccoli 3. noodles 4. some sort of oil 5. salt

Put all of the above in a pan, stir it around, cook (covered or uncovered, play with it) for about 7-13 minutes.

Try different mixtures. Try different lengths of time. You don't even have to watch it unless you're concerned that your range might explode or something.

I would strongly recommend slow cookers. You can leave it in the morning and get it in the evening. The recipes are straightforward and require little actual cooking knowledge.

Even better you can easily cook large quantities so you're not even cooking every day.

My healthy favorite is slow-cooked stew combined with rice-cooker brown rice/quinoa - both are set on timers so they finish just before we get home - so no reheating.

I second this advice. A slow cooker is really ideal for your use case and can have some dramatically amazing results.

Still, you can't slow cook something like a pan-sautéed chicken breast. But many people, particularly single people, simply don't want to expend the effort for the reward. I have no problem with that; been there, done that.

Yeah, you can basically throw some pork, spices, and a beer in a slow cooker and come home to awesome pulled pork that you can eat all week.

I make a slow-cooker vegetable soup: low-sodium V8 juice with whatever chopped vegetables and beans I feel like / have on hand, typically kidney beans, carrot, onion, mushroom, bok choy, garlic ...

It takes me about a half-hour to chop up the vegetables, but one round makes a lot of soup.

I used to do the same thing. I think the best way to get out of that cycle is to start trying to cook something good just 1 day per week. The rest of the week can be trash, but just plan 1 good recipe.

In the beginning, making a new dish takes forever and feels really stressful because it's all unfamiliar, but if you do it enough, it becomes something you can do on autopilot with very little thought or planning. Even having just 2 or 3 autopilot recipes that you've perfected logged in your brain somewhere makes such a huge difference. That doesn't mean you have to cook them every night, but you can at least break up the monotony and unhealthiness of your current meal options.

Plus, at least for me, having a meal that is healthy and actually tastes really good makes me so much more productive when I get back to work.

Some of those get easier with practice - after a while you have a fully stocked kitchen, and you will develop a set of favorite recipes that you can just pick up what ingredients you need from memory. In essence, "planning" will become less work.

Doing the dishes remains a huge PITA, though.

There are a few services now that deliver a box of ingredients and recipes for $60 or so a week for three meals. Plated, HelloFresh, BlueApron. They really helped us actually cook more, instead of talking about it. It still takes time (30-40 min per meal) but you do learn cooking techniques and you do eat much healthier. And while it seems expensive, we probably go out one less night a week because of it, saving $60 and coming out even.

The pain of going to buy ingredients is a big one for people. I just can't personally see myself spending that on much ingredient delivery, though my wife does get some things delivered from a CSA.

I think there are two other pains wrapped up in why people buy from these services: meal planning and instruction. Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of thin air. To some degree these services provide some instruction, though I've heard people get instructional benefits from these to varying degrees. Would be curious to see how the instruction has helped you.

The main benefit is that we are cooking new things a lot more often. Three times a week, from scratch. You get pretty good at small dicing onions, I'll tell you that. Before, it was maybe cooking one time a week from a real recipe, plus pizza, pasta, leftovers, restaurants, and take-out.

Josh's wife here. We actually don't get the CSA food delivered...I pick it up. But I feel the same way. We eat a lot more vegetables and fresh food and it forces us to come up with new recipes to use up ingredients. A few weeks ago we got some chayote, which I had never seen in my life, but we ended up making a really good stew with it.

Even though we aren't getting a meal plan and instructions with our box of meat and produce, it still feels like part of the work is done. I see it as a good in-between option: not as expensive as the meal delivery services and not as much work as just planning and shopping for meals from scratch. I can see how it could be overwhelming for beginners, though, if they receive a bunch of ingredients they aren't familiar with.

I think that's where building the intuition and creative-thinking part of cooking becomes important. We're working on balancing this with CookAcademy -- trying to walk users through the cooking process in great detail, without letting them rely on that detail too much. We hope that teaching them the concepts behind what they're doing and encouraging experimentation will help them eventually rely on their senses and experience rather than relying on timers and measuring cups. To me, cooking feels like much less of a chore when you can get to that point.

> Meal planning is hard and it helps to just treat it like picking from a menu than creating a plan out of thin air.

Ding ding ding, this is why I subscribe to emeals, there's so much "science" out there about what a meal should be composed of that I'd much rather not deal with it. It's easier to see 14 dinners and choose 7 rather than scout out recipes on my own (resulting in hours lost per week).

As far as instruction, I prefer having the small set of recipes from the service, because it gives me cooking breadth that I would otherwise have not bothered with. As I start encountering meals with similar preparation again and again, I can afford to see how much I can get away with playing with the recipe.

Yes, though sometimes in non-obvious ways. For example, cleaning a pan after making pan-sautéed chicken is difficult until you realize you can make a pan sauce and get the pan clean at the same time.

Lessons are broken down into the mise en place steps (which makes preparation simpler). We're working on content now to help with simplifying cleaning, though the general mantra is to clean as you go.

Important metrics for us when creating lessons are number of ingredients required and number of dirty dishes that result. We want you to make things that won't fill a sink with dirty dishes and doesn't require a 30-minute, $100 trip to the grocery store. Satisfying all these requirements are hard and I don't think we've nailed it yet, but it's on our mind constantly.

To anyone that doesn't have a modern dishwasher but has the means to get one, do so!!

Seriously. I spent two years in my current place washing dishes by hand; there was an old dishwasher there that was broken and i thought "ah, don't really need it". When I had some flatmates move in we all chipped in and got a new dishwasher and it's seriously one of the best investments you can ever make.

Cleaning dishes for me now means putting dishes on a shelf, throwing in a tablet, closing a door and pressing a button. An hour later when the wash is done I just open the door and at some point when I feel like it, put the dry and clean dishes away. It does a better job than I ever did at a sink.

I've taken the same approach and recently invested the money in a Botvac to hopefully automate another chore that I just hate doing. So far it's been good too (still in the hand-holding stage, figuring out its trouble spots haha).

EDIT: One more appliance I've grown to not live without is my air-fryer. Think of it as an extremely efficient fan-forced oven that's the perfect size for a meal or two at a time. IMHO it's the perfect oven for a single person or a couple without kids.

Cooking is therapeutic :)

Do share! I'm interested.

I replied to myself above with the link.

Since people expressed interest, my side project is https://cookacademy.com

Happy to offer whatever help I can outside of the site, too.

I want to share something here since not having enough time is a theme for me. As the child of immigrants I have a guilt about spending money - overcoming this I'm starting to look as money as a way to buy more time, so I don't feel bad a number of things e.g. getting healthy takeout (I still cook because I like it), having my laundry done for me, even buying software, etc. It's just efficient. I don't know if anyone else struggles with that but I'd like to put that out there. It means I have more time for projects and importantly (because of diminishing returns) more time to relax.

I try to do everything also (to a fault). I'm not first generation, but my wife's family has that mentality very ingrained.

At the moment, I'm lucky enough to have some cash. I can hoard it in the bank, or I can spread it around. You should certainly save and look out for your family. But spending money is part of how capitalism builds a society. Don't feel guilty. Feel good that you can help.

"spending money is part of how capitalism builds a society"

This is a really important point.

I'm currently reading The Rational Optimist (http://www.amazon.com/The-Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolv...) which is about technology, innovation, and economic progress throughout history and one of his major points is that economies progress when people become more reliant on one another so they can focus on their specialty (ex., hire someone to do laundry because your time is most valuable coding). Economies in which people are self-sufficient are by definition less productive and innovative because there's less money flowing around and people are spending less time on the things they are comparatively better at.

It's a slow start but a fantastic read (and a challenging one for a person who likes to be self-sufficient).

Thanks for the link. I'm putting that one on my list.

I like how you said "most valuable". My time isn't any more valuable then someone else's. I'm just most valuable writing code. Someone is else is most valuable cooking. Others are most valuable curing diseases.

A small tangent, but Michael Pollan's "Cooked" makes a reasonable counter-argument.

By delegating everything that we're not "most valuable" at to others, we potentially end up becoming impotent and un-informed, unable to make intelligent decisions outside our area of expertise. Thus we lose our ability to be good citizens.

He specifically makes the point in the context of cooking, something he argues is so fundamental to our survival that it is a skill all humans should have at least some basic ability to do.

Just a thought. :-)

Edit: you can read some of his argument starting on page 20 of the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Cooked-Natural-Transformation-Michael-...

And reviewed here - http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/24/michael-pollan-cooke...

I agree with that. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to learn to cook. How can I be so bad at something I do multiple times every single day? It makes you think differently.

"A dash of salt, a pad of butter, cook until brown". None of that means anything to me! I've been coding my whole life. How much is a dash? What shade of brown?

Obviously I'm more into baking :)

Dash=1/8 teaspoon Pad=1 teaspoon Brown=It looks tasty enough to eat

I used to get mad about the lack of precision in many recipes, but I worked through it and adopted the "would I eat it" test for doneness.

It's a matter of experience, and you only get that by doing. Having an experienced mentor can help, but is not necessary, only a willingness to experiment.

Now I embrace the imprecision because it enables creativity without fear.

God. I had this uncle wouldn't stop talking about how much his time is "worth" and that he has everything done for him if it could be done for less. Even at 15 I asked him if he couldn't have one his interns hang out with us instead.

I still bill 150+ an hour and change my own oil. Living life means doing mundane things for yourself. I wish lots of those rich people who have valuable time would realize that they shouldn't shit for themselves.

I used to have this problem to a fault. In my case, it wasn't just about money but also about not trusting other people to do work for me. I have managed to get over this, slowly, but I still get some passive-aggressive shit from my mother and sister about having cleaning and landscaping services.

Love this comment. In a similar vein: like everyone else here, I work the typical 9 to 5 then work on side projects nights & weekends. I agree with the spend money approach! Invest in software to become more efficient, save time avoiding manual tasks. I'm eating healthier nowadays, which means time needed to cook. However, I save some time by using InstaCart to deliver groceries to me. That's huge! Last, taking a good hard look at how you spend time is crucial, beginning with TV watching time. You'd be surprised (I was!) at how much you can get done if you simply watch 1 less show per week, for example.

It's funny, but I'm such a stickler when picking out produce, and even meat selection, that I'd have a hard time trusting someone to pick out my apples, etc... How has this worked out for you?

Sorry, missed your comment. Honestly, it's been tough. Oftentimes they claim that they couldn't find something/store was out of it (not sure I buy that!) or the produce they choose isn't the best. You can add notes to each item in the order, so I've been leveraging that to better effect. for example, next to milk, "farthest expiration date please!". You'd think that would be common sense though :)

Please, step into my parlor of unsolicited advice for a moment...

will eventually be an open source project.

Lean Software people are right about one thing — you've gotta get software in front of users as quickly as possible. If the project timeline is "work for 6-8 months, then show people" it's possible you built an amazing thing only you know how to use and nobody else really wants.

Release early, release often.

My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night

The simplest hack here: wake up earlier and use your first (and best) 2-3 productive brain hours on your project then go to work. You'll use your best performance (refreshed, alert, not tired) for your project while still not being fired.

I've considered quitting my job and diving into it for a few months. I have savings but this seems foolishly risky to me.

Yeah, that seldom works. Practical advice is: don't quit a job unless your side project is demanding an increasing amount of time and resources from customers/users (meaning: it's becoming successful). Non-practical advise is: screw work, if you're not happy, save money and do what you want.

If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice.

The world isn't HN. You won't be an overnight success. You will fail. Nobody will use what you make. Or, you could be the next person the media starts comparing others against as a measure of unexpected success: "Is this new kid the next bglazer?"

> If the project timeline is "work for 6-8 months, then show people" it's possible you built an amazing thing only you know how to use and nobody else really wants.

This absolutely terrifies me.

> The simplest hack here: wake up earlier and use your first (and best) 2-3 productive brain hours on your project then go to work. You'll use your best performance (refreshed, alert, not tired) for your project while still not being fired.

I really, really enjoy my sleep :). This is certainly very practical advice, but it requires that I'm disciplined enough to go to sleep earlier the preceding night. That's difficult but certainly possible.

> Non-practical advise is: screw work, if you're not happy, save money and do what you want.

It's incredibly tempting. The problem (that actually isn't a problem) is that I enjoy my full-time work as well.

Thank you for the advice!

> I really, really enjoy my sleep :). This is certainly very practical advice, but it requires that I'm disciplined enough to go to sleep earlier the preceding night. That's difficult but certainly possible.

Then work late and sleep in :-) I can't do a lick of useful work before 10 (which isn't great, since my job starts at 8:30), but I can cram 2-3 hours of good stuff in after my kids go to bed every night. Try different times to see when you're at your best. It's worth it to feel like you're making progress on something awesome.

And I've got to echo seiji - just get your product out there as quickly as you can. Let your coworkers look at it. Send it around. It may be that no-one wants to use it in its present form, but just looking at what you're doing may shake loose ideas and directions for the project that never occurred to you. Getting outsiders looking at your work is the difference between building something neat and building something great.

This is 100% my situation with my side project. Understanding that all of these are approximations for a weekday: 12-9: sleep then get kiddo ready then get me ready. 9-5: job. 5-6: transit (ouch). 6-9: family. 9-11: side project (occasional breaks for other stuff, reading, vegging, etc). 11-12: cooldown (sometimes missed).

I show everyone that shows the slightest interest what I'm doing. I make incremental progress then, as a reward, work hard towards specific milestones on my nights off; my wife and I trade nights where we don't have to be a parent and get to go off and play and I often just go to a coffee shop and work on my side project.

My slow progress can be extremely frustrating but I try to offset that with the gratification when I achieve my milestones. I used to doubt that I could be this disciplined until this particular side project; now it's effortless because I'm doing what I want to do and it makes me happy.

And, ultimately, that's what decided it for me: am I doing what makes me happy? That's motivating for me. Not money, not fame. That's why that 6-9 family time is pretty inviolate and I tend to spend all my time with them on the weekends. Ultimately, my family makes me happier than my side project so they get the majority of my time and thought.

But that side project is always waiting to be worked on. ( =

The idea with getting up earlier is that, assuming you're able to get up to do it, you'll get it in that day. If you leave it for the end of the day, or even after work, you might not. I know I've had many days where I've come home from work completely drained, and can't really get myself to do much more than reheat food for dinner. I'd be willing to wager I'm not alone on this.

Not at all :-) What helps me is having enough variety in what needs to be done - coding, marketing, management, planning - that there's always something I'm not totally burned out on.

I think most people can relate. :)

I grew up with 8AM class throughout my childhood, so waking up at 7AM was a life-long habit when I got to college. And then I dropped it completely — I started sleeping from after 4AM until noon or so whenever I could.

At some point that got balanced out by more 8AM classes (and 5AM coffee shop shifts, but that's another story), but after college I fell into the less-than-ideal pattern again.

What worked in the end was simply setting the alarm clock and getting up, even when that meant I was effectively a zombie for a few consecutive days. At some point my body started giving up and going to bed at 10PM became the norm. These days it's anywhere between 9PM and 11PM on average, with a 6AM alarm clock even on the weekends. I spend my mornings either at the gym or doing something else productive (like side projects). Evenings are reserved for relaxation.

I have started many side-projects but left them half way, because i got bored or something else caught my eye. But with my latest project[0] I am following a simple philosophy by John Resig, "Write code every day"[1]. Even if i write code for 30 mins, it's okay. By following this i am always in touch with the project. It has helped me a lot in being disciplined.

[0]: https://github.com/smurfpandey/mysqlweb

[1]: http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/

I've been in this situation for as long as I can think of. But lately I've found something which is working for the time being.

I don't use my car to commute to office. It takes 25 minutes via public transport (one way), so I use that time and build all the complex logic/data structure/algos in that time for my hobby project.

Cooking doesn't break my mental loop. So I keep thinking & solving things regarding my hobby project while cooking. (I also cook for my office lunch almost daily)

Most of the labour work (putting up CRUD forms or repeatable things, some graphics work etc) I do mostly on weekends when I don't have to use much brain but just keep moving things which are important.

Things are much better now than before. Even still my hobby project is slow moving but I can see it moving further.

Thanks. Unfortunately public transit is non-existent where I live. I'd love to spend my commute time working on the project rather than hoping that a distracted uninsured driver doesn't smash into me.

I do enjoy thinking about the project while cooking.

Good luck on your project!

Obviously moving can be a big deal, but IMO you should seriously consider it. You have a problem with available time, and commuting by car is a massive time sink. It's pretty insane how much "human capacity" is wasted this way!

The grass isn't always that green on the other side. Commuting on the nyc subway is no place to get work done, just as stressful and/or boring as driving, and despite the numerous and comprehensive lines commute times are still as bad as many drives.

My experience is I am more focused while on public transit because I feel a sense of urgency. "I am gonna be interrupted in N mins and I need to finish X". It works sort of like pomodoro technique I guess. Utilizing those time slots is key to achieving side goals (or our real goals?) in a busy life. :-D

Same here. A combination of the urgency and complete disconnect from everything else (no internet, etc).

I find I get some of my most focused, solid work done on the L.

BART never has seats. So I waste about 2 hours a day standing and doing nothing of value :(. Very jealous you get to program then.

I like to fill my commute time listening to technical presentations and interviews. I can't say I've accomplished anything that way. But, it has expanded my awareness of current tech and practices far outside of my 9-5.

Currently listening to: Functional Geekery, Mostly Erlang, the Lean Startup conferences and Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots.

I think people sometimes underestimate the increased efficiency of simply switching from driving to public transit (if you're able to). Even if public transit takes slightly longer, you're winning.

40 minutes on public transit getting working done or 30 min driving, completely wasted time?

The only way to do it is to have a job where you can complete the work in less than 5 hours a day. Preferably one that gives you the freedom to leave early/come in late so long as you're doing well on your work.

No one actually works 8 hours a day and comes home to work 4 hours sustainably. I couldn't see someone doing that for more than two months without getting burned out.

This is very interesting. I'm not sure how my company culture would tolerate my leaving early, but it does seem like the most practical option for actually getting work done.

I feel like I probably have enough autonomy to do this, but it's tricky business.

This has been my problem. I have spent my entire career at government contractors, so I need to record 40 hours of butt-in-seat time every week in order to make the auditors happy, regardless of the actual work done. That makes my days 10 hours from when I walk out the door to when I walk back through it, sometimes less if I spend less than an hour at lunch.

Actually I have been able to do this pretty easily, but its probably because I commute an hour and a half each way to work on a train. So I get 3 hours a day to work on things I want to work on.

I've been doing that for 3+ years now. If you truly enjoy what you are doing in your side project it can work. If not, perhaps you are just doing it for the money?

> My problem is that I have a full time job

The tyranny of the 40+ hour work week. Why is it that so few people are willing and/or able to negotiate working fewer hours in a week, for example 6 hours a day or 4 days in a week?

Is it fear of being fired for making such a request? Are the employers so powerful and the employees in such a weak bargaining position?

Or the fear of having to take a pay cut? Maybe people get used to too expensive life styles instead of keeping living frugally when the money starts rolling in. They're then in the fragile position of not being able to afford a slight reduction in income.

It's kind of sad that there is not a lot more individual variation in working hours, when people are simultaneously lamenting their lack of free time.

> Is it fear of being fired for making such a request? Are the employers so powerful and the employees in such a weak bargaining position?

Frankly, yes. I would be literally the only person I know who has such an arrangement.

Have you negotiated reduced hours? If so, I'd be interested in hearing your experience.

> Frankly, yes. I would be literally the only person I know who has such an arrangement.

Yeah, I guess the norm is too strongly ingrained, and employers like to keep it that way. If there was a "free" labour market you'd expect more variation, as it can't be right that the standard amount of working hours are perfect fit for everyone. Ditto with number of vacation days in a year, etc - in an ideal world it would all be negotiated based on individual preference. The status quo causes symptoms such as rush hour traffic, overly expensive flights and hotels as everyone goes on vacation at the same time, and people who are wealthy in monetary terms but starved of leisure time. It seems like this often leads to making up for it through overconsumption - to spend the extra income that the full time worker might not really need to satisfy his basic needs and wants.

Unfortunately I haven't made such attempts, and I'm currently a freelance contractor which already means I have more spare time when I want as I decide myself how many hours I work. I know about ex-colleagues who negotiated a four day working week for a commensurate reduction in salary, though that was in Norway.

I did the quit and focus thing. It ended up working out, but just barely. I was underwater for a while and my marriage about to fall apart.. I'm not sure I'd recommend the same path even though it did have a happy ending (co-founder of a well funded startup, a cash bonus that wiped out my worst debt, and my wife and I are back on good terms).

Wish I had better advice, but it is a hard problem. If you only have 3-5 hours per week, perhaps you should consider going to meetups instead, and networking outside of your existing communities? You might get more results out of that, or find an opportunity you are willing to leave your current job for.

That sounded like your wife was going to leave you because you were underwater doing what you wanted, and she changed her mind because you were solvent again. If that's case, assuming you already knew the kind of person you were married to, the quit-and-focus option was quite a gamble. I'm glad it paid out.

No, that would be an incorrect reference: it wasn’t about money issues at all. Not directly.

You see, when you are bootstrapping your revenue is contingent on making deliverables, getting customers (or in my case, donors), and otherwise doing time consuming work. Once you have depleted your savings and maxed out your credit cards, then you really start to feel the life-or-death, make-it-or-die pressure. At every given moment there is permeating risk that if you don’t push this update, if you don’t win that customer/donor, if you don’t make such a looming deadline, you will fail. And failure means the bank taking your house, losing all credit for 7 years, being unable to put food on the table, living on the street, and—let’s face it—owning up to defeat.

If that weren’t complicated enough, my wife started her second pregnancy at exactly the same time. Every moment that I was asking my wife how her day was, what the doctor had told her, playing with our other toddler, cooking dinner, or generally just being present was progress not being made towards that deadline, that customer, or a completed product.

There’s a pressure and a mentality here not too dissimilar from the gambler that keeps betting double-or-nothing with exponentially increasing risk, chasing the Martingale of success. Before long your entire life is on the table, and you’re rolling the dice. I made it to that point… and then rolled a natural 20. I got lucky. Sure, I “made my own luck” in the sense that a positive outcome was only possible because of all that work I’d put in. But possible does not mean probable, and the upward-trending outcome I am currently enjoying was very, very low probability. I got lucky, and I recognize that.

But a year ago? I was deep in a hole and doubling down, while totally ignoring other responsibilities and being unavailable to my wife, daughter, and newborn child. I was trading time now for an imagined future, at terrible odds. I think it was her who had more reason to wonder what kind of person she was married to, and I am eternally grateful that she stayed long enough to make it through.

We’re now well funded, making waves, and gathering customers. I’m pulling a steady paycheck and have wiped out the worst of my bad debt. I have a good comp plan with not insignificant equity. But with the information available to me at the outset, I don’t think I would make the same decisions again. I certainly wouldn't recommend someone else to do something so foolhardy. Some things are just not worth risking, no matter the reward.

"Or work on an art project"

Well, you might want to ask yourself if this project is really something you want to work on. That is, do you love it? If you'd rather be working on an art project, why not do that?

There's that famous Steve Jobs quote that goes something like, "you only make great things when you love what you do."

I'm in a very similar situation -- got a pretty decent open source project out (a mad 2-week programming project over a Christmas holiday vacation). But I'll be darned if I can find time to work on it now (how does the average person find 5 hours a day to watch tv?)

But here's what I'm starting to do now -- I set an alarm to make sure I remember to leave the office at 4:30 pm, instead of squeezing in that extra bit of work (or slacking off). That gets me a bit of a jump on the evening, instead of leaving work at 6:30 or so. Seems to be helping a bit.

> how does the average person find 5 hours a day to watch tv?

Watching TV is passive, which means you can do it while doing other things. I watch it while cooking, cleaning the house, doing the dishes, and other similar manual and low-cognition activities. In fact, I can't just sit and watch TV for very long.

Sounds like a scheduling issue to me, you either have to go full tit and code for 3-5 hours a night, every night, or you dont see progress.

That is the wrong way to tackle the problem, and you probably know it.

Attempt to set aside 30minutes to an hour a night to work on it, but no more, and you have to stop yourself from working more.

This is the only way I found worked for me. You dont have to set time every day (that part just helped in my case, I need consistency to build a habbit)

I've had a similar issue, and decided to treat it like a hobby - too risky to see as a job, but too interesting to ignore.

If you have a hobby and part of the pleasure of the hobby is the end result, then I'd suggest carving time out daily to work on it like exercise. Even an hour a day and 2 hours on each weekend would triple the time you've put into it to date.

That said, if you enjoy doing other things more, I wouldn't sweat it.

I'm with you on this and will hungrily lap up any advice on the subject.

I write code that can't be open sourced for work, but want to contribute to OSS projects. But dammit, at the end of the day or week of coding all the time for my full time job, it is hard as well to sit down in front of the screen again without going mad.

Life, kids, wife, non-coding hobbies, coding hobbies -- whirlwind of competition for my time. Ugh.

I'm in the same boat. All programming effort was for work and no time for side projects. Until recently. I've started making projects open source by default and committing something at least once a day no matter how insignificant. This has kept my motivation going and hard to find an excuse not to fix or add this one little bug or feature. README file clearly states its alpha work in progress so others know what to expect. Something about putting your work out there that makes you want to maintain and improve upon.

Good luck, start small, make a few commits.

Oh, and if not open source software, try getting minimum product out so you can feel that sense of obligation to improve and develop further

I was exactly where you were and it didn't work for me. In my opinion the only way to build something substantial enough that is worth selling is to quit your job. If you put your whole mind to something you can accomplish exponentially more than being scattered about. I think a more realistic approach is to put all of your effort into saving money via a job, and then all of your effort into your own business. Jack of all trades, master of none and all that. Again that's my opinion YMMV. Whatever you are doing make sure you are enjoying it otherwise what's the point?

What I do is to sometimes take a 'sanity day' to sit at home or in a library and get some serious work done. 9-5 (or whatever) just like work. You even get to sleep in instead of commuting. I realize that this is partially because I've been lucky to have jobs where taking one day won't be a vacation/sick-day disaster-overreach.

Wife and 2 kids with full time job here, trying to build a side project currently worth approx $1-2k/month. If you're not prepared to spend the hard hours to build it up, you're not going to succeed. Suck it up if you believe in it. Sorry to be so harsh, but most people don't get fairy tale success stories.

I can completely empathize. I have a family, and so it takes even more effort to create the time and find the space to make things happen.

I just launched a game into the App Store. The journey was incredible, and filled with joy, sweat, and tears.

I've written about what I've gone through. It might be helpful for you. A small caution... these are relatively long posts, but hopefully they are enjoyable, insightful, and personally beneficial for you.

My experiences with what I felt while developing the game:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888070

An older post that I wrote about work, embracing the grind, and driving through.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076143

I wish you every success.

P.S. I figured I should do a TL;DR since those posts are even more epic in length than I realized, so I snagged some salient points:

1. You may look at your project and think, "I'm never going to make it. I'll never finish." Please, I urge you to set these thoughts aside and push through. Think about the analogy of building a wall. A wall is built one brick at a time. Watch a mason build a wall one day. You will observe that he or she lays one brick at a time.

This is how you have to view your project. Sure, it would be amazing to have an entire day, every day to devote to your project. However, the reality is that most of us simply do not have that luxury. So, strive to think of it as a mason: lay one brick at a time, and eventually the wall will be built. Every character that you type into Xcode, Visual Studio, etc. turns into a keyword, a variable name, etc... that subsequently turns into a line. Those lines build up, day by day, and before you know it, you have a program, and you look back and think, "Wow, why did I ever think I could not finish?"

2. You have to fight. This is paramount. I will say it again... you have to fight! What I mean here is fighting by engaging your Will. Engage your will to get up, to get moving. Engage your will to eat right, to exercise and go to bed on time so that you have the energy to get up and bring it.

3. You never know where your work will take you. Do not forget that, you have to dream it first in your mind before you can see it in your life. And to see it in your life, you must work. You may not be able to see things clearly now, but you never know what doors could open for you that you did not even know existed.

4. I find that I read this story at least once a month; it's just incredibly encouraging to me:

http://whatshihsaid.com/2013/02/26/ang-lee-a-never-ending-dr...

Thank you Arjuna! Congratulations on publishing your game.

From your linked post:

> Even the people around you won't understand the mental suffering that you are silently muscling through; you, torn between two worlds as the aforementioned autonomic function pushes and strains you to your personal limits. You measure the day's progress in centimeters rather than meters. You will either summit, or freeze to death on the mountain in your boots; the summit in sight, but just out of reach. Which-ever event happens, you feel alone, either way, because no one is carrying the sheer weight of The Vision than you. It is all you. It has only ever been you. There is no one to save you.

I snapped and yelled at my girlfriend the other day because I felt like she didn't understand the work I was putting into the project and the stress it caused me. That was definitely a low point for me.

Thanks!

I understand. From my experience, the most important items here are:

1. Keep the lines of communication open in your relationship. Sometimes, these feelings and lack-of-understanding that she is expressing may be because you are out of sync with her needs (i.e., she may feel like your work is taking precedence over your relationship and her). I know that finding balance is easier said than done, but, I feel the secret may be in:

2. Strive to carve out time to work in the early-morning or late-evening, whichever works best for your relationship. That way, you can attempt to perform a, "separation of concerns", if you will, in your life. This will serve to reduce the impact of your side project on your relationship. You may find that she is more understanding if you have a set schedule of working that is balanced and low-impact on your quality time together. Plus, with a set-schedule, your focus, stress-levels, and output will be better, because you will be working in a more balanced way.

Hope that helps. I know it's tough for creatives like us to find balance, as we work during the day at the mine, then try to create time for our side projects while juggling exercise, relationships, family, etc.

Are you in a position to negotiate four days/week with your employer?

It can be tough to stay motivated while working alone. If you're happy to share the success with other people you could build it with the help of the assembly.com community.

Well, you can hire someone to work on it for you.

You can upload the project to github and try to get people to help you for free.

Same boat here, IAmA designer, PM if you need anything!

I believe that the solution could be to try to find collaboration in a liquid organization like ttps://assembly.com. I think that it's a good model exchanging labour ( instead of funding ) for shares. I haven't joined any of these projects yet for two reasons: I am not excited by the one already available and was focused until 1 month ago on my new app for iPhone which unluckily is not going well from a sales perspective even if the little feedback from users is positive. Good luck with your venture.

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