How do you balance your side project with everything else?
I'm sure this has been asked before, but how do you find a balance between working on your side project and other responsibilities like a full time job, and family.
I never feel like I'm able to devote enough time to my side project, and because of that progress seems slow.
Everything else should be secondary to your side project. Seriously. The "side project" is the only way out of the rat race. It's your main thing. Everything else is your side project.
I commit time every day (no weekends off) to the side project. I can't let a day go by without minimum one hour dedicated to it. Keeps up the momentum.
Hah. Believe me, that is my goal. I do work on it everyday, including weekends and holidays.
I'm assuming you forgot an </s>?
If you're being serious, I can't tell. Honestly.
There's no way I'm putting a side project above my family, or my health. Even if it means an extra few years in the rat race, you never get back those days when your kid is 2 months old.
This is a great response.
It's impossible to balance your side project with a full time job and a family. Believe me I've tried to achieve a "balance" for 3 years to no avail. The effect of chasing after "balance" is you feel guilty all the time no matter what you do: If you work on your side project, you'd feel guilty you're not spending your free time keeping up relationship with friends and family. When you hang out with friends and family, you'd feel guilty not working on your side project. I got in trouble in the past with my day job manager because I was jogging down my ideas for the side project on the company computer and they want you to spend company time only work on company stuff.
Instead of chasing after a "balance", you need to cut out the fat in your life and be very clear to yourself and the people around you what's important to you. Draw up a list of priorities and tell your family, friends, and your boss how important your side project is. When I came to that realization, I went to my boss and told him my plan on quitting my day the job once my side project becomes tangible. I told my friends and family I can't hang out because I need the time to work on my side project, how important it is to me. I once had a lot of different side projects. I put all these other projects on hold so I can work on this main project that I care most about.
The bottomline is there is no silver bullet. You can't have it all. Free yourself from other responsibilities so you can fulfill your most important responsibility. You have limited time everyday so you need to make sacrifices and have those tough conversations with people to explain why you can't hang out with them and what your priorities are.
Well said @xiaoyunyang ! I'm in a very similar boat.
Would love to hear what are you working on?
Sure, I'm working on this: https://angel.co/looseleafapp. It's for people to find projects to work on to build their resume.
That is some very honest feedback. Thank you.
I negotiated for a 20% pay cut to work 4 days a week (32 hours) at my day job. In the US, 30 hours is the cut off for benefits.
I understand that I am fortunate and a lot of companies aren't flexible enough to allow their employees to do this. However, I also think that if you have an understanding manager or if your company really likes you, you might be able to get away with more than you think you can.
Just make sure you are diligent about any IP-owning/moonlighting policies. Pitch them on how working on side projects will force you to learn new skills and make you more valuable to the company. Reassure them that your day job will still be your top priority.
I have a full time job and work on 3 side projects (1st one is MRR $700, I'm trying to monetize the 2nd one and will launch the 3rd in a few days).
I don't have kids but greatly care about the great time I have with my wife. So I mostly work late at night, several times a week for 2 or 3 hours straight). I work maybe 5 or 6 hours on Saturday (my wife works on Saturday).
When I work remotely, I work during lunch break (which is quite long in France). I do have a todo list ful of short, mostly easy steps to complete.
My strategy is trying to work every day, even to complete a trivial step. Usually marketing/communicating fills most of the easy tasks I have in my todo-list. For complex tasks, I'm kind of no-quitter-freak until I solve the problem but I mostly break complex tasks in smaller tasks and it's good enough to solve 99% of the tasks of my projects.
I also try to automate things as often as possible. Automate tasks has a cost, but it's nothing related to the current cost of my time (I'm a freelancer at $750/day) and I value at a higher value my spare time. So automate tasks saves me both time and money in the long run. And I hate repetitive tasks.
I'm of the opinion that you actually can balance all of your obligations in life. For me it worked when I created two things: clear priorities and clear expectations.
Knowing your priorities means always knowing what goes first in your life. For me its family, no hesitation. If I ever have to choose its them first.
Tempering your expectations means knowing that if you choose to do one thing, you will forsake other things. It's difficult to ace relationships, work, side project, health, finances and everything else all at the same time. But you can work with what you have, and realise that balancing all of these things might not make your side project a billion dollar unicorn startup, but you'll have fun exploring a niche and might make some money at the same time. Then, when you know that your idea works, you can scale up and replace your job (if that's what you want).
When put into practice you can accomplish a lot by trimming fat, building automation and working on stuff you can maintain by spending a minimal amount of time. I know I can do roughly 1 hour of work each day - my son wakes up at 5am, then goes back to sleep again, so by waking up with him I can work when he and the wife is asleep. Knowing this I built a project that can gain momentum from these short bursts rather than needing long, focused periods of work.
This probably works best if you're in the find-a-project-phase and adjust your own expectations accordingly. If you want to scale up or is intent on building another kind of project you would need to handle it differently.
Well, it is hard, but not impossible. For example, here is my agenda.
So I have a full-time job (which I adore, and I don't consider it as a job).
Good or bad, on the weekends I usually don't want to meet people different than my family and the closest friends with which I usually go hiking.
The two ways to make more progress are:
Since I'm going to assume you don't have more hours to spend on it, I'll give you a suggestion for #2.
I use Pomodoro timer when I work. For 25 minute increments, I put all distractions away and ONLY work on the task at hand. I don't worry about the outcome but I do focus on effort. That means no checking email, social media, text messages, etc during that session.
And then after that 25 minutes, I take a short break then rinse and repeat.
Give it a try! I'm actually going to launch a 30 day Pomodoro challenge soon on Tribe of Five (www.tribefive.me). Let me know if you want to join.
Cheers,
Jonathan
That's a great idea. I've actually thought about doing that multiple time, but have never pulled the trigger and actually tried it.
Awesome. I'll reach out over email and save you a spot!
In my experience working on a startup on the side for about 2 years now, the best thing I did to increase my productivity was moving to a fully remote position.
The flexibility of being able to set your own hours and not being in an office really made me more effective at balancing all aspects of my life.
That's interesting. I work remotely as well, but haven't been able to really strike that balance.
What does your typical work day look like?
I get to work from about 8-5 on my full-time gig. Then its family stuff until about 9 (when the kids are finally asleep). I usually spend a couple of hours working on my project after that.
Looking back... in retrospect using a more out of the box solution that minimized engineering work (spark/laravel or Rails/BulletTrain) would have really helped with this. So much time spent building SaaS boilerplate was just busy work I didn't actually HAVE to do.
I faced the same problem and started laravel-tenancy.com for that reason. Reducing your time to develop the mvp helps with motivation. In the end it's still a struggle and you have to get through it one way or another.
That's an interesting concept. Sounds great if you're a serial maker.
I am completely guilty of that too. Reducing the engineering work would certainly give me more time to focus on marketing and other necessary aspects.