Side projects while working a full time job. Tips and tricks?

I can't see anyone mention what I do (well maybe the comment on timeboxing is similar). But here it is ...

Work early in the morning.

It might not be solution for everyone, but for me it works. I've cut out alcohol, added exercise (in the evenings) and get up at 5am and do 1-3 hours of work before going to my regular Dev job.

Working early in the morning is great. Nobody is up, you can make yourself a cup of coffee or tea, and you know you only have until work starts to get something checked off that todo list.

Oh and seriously—find exercise you enjoy and do it one hour, three times a week. The effect on your sleep will show off in your work.

Then have a damn weekend on the weekend. ;)

Good tips! When working a full-time job in addition to building side-projects, it's all about working smart.

Something that helps me is taking the time 3-4 times a week to go to the gym. Good break from work and helps me stay alert for the rest of the night.

Also, to me, 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep is pretty important. Without enough sleep, productivity and the the quality of my work go down.

All this is to say, stay healthy. It's a marathon not a race.

Here are the rules I set out for myself. They have seriously changed the way I work on my side projects:

• Go to bed early, and wake up early enough to allow for 2-3 hours of side project work before you have to do real job things.
• Don't stress it if you can't work on your side project in the evening. A big portion of the battle is keeping your sanity -- don't stress yourself out needlessly.
• Exercise frequently. For me that usually just means go running for 30 mins. I should lift, but I'm in a bad habit of working instead.

The reason this strategy works for me is because when I wake up my mind is the freshest it will ever be that day. Why would I give my employer my best and freshest mind? That is reserved for ME, and whatever I deem worthy of it. My employer, bless his/her heart, can have the leftovers. This is the #1 reason I am making progress on my side project. Give it a try, and good luck!

My biggest tip is to re-imagine your full time position and move to a part-time job instead.

I changed jobs over a year and a half ago and now work part time at a job that I really enjoy. The 3-day a week job provides a steady paycheck, health insurance, and enough money for me to continue socking at least something away for retirement. I do not plan on leaving, perhaps ever.

The remaining two days I have been working on https://www.wrestlingiq.com/ and http://postcardpanda.com/. Panda is up to about $600 a month in revenue and is set to relaunch as an eco-friendly postcard sending service in October. WrestlingIQ I expect to be my 'serious' Saas business for the next decade of my life.

Having two dedicated days has changed my outlook completely on side projects. Most importantly I'm not burned out, and I'm not burning a hole in my pocket. I get the team aspect from my day job and experience the solo captain viewpoint in my own projects. Win win.

Everyone on IH is absolutely stunning with their creativity - don't let that creativity be limited to your projects; you can engineer your own life to maximize joy too!

I have been working on improving https://bestfoodnearme.com

My best tips are

1. plan everything ahead the night before, also reflect on where you left off at the end of a coding session.
2. exercise and get enough sleep. this has probably been the best thing for me as I get older.
3. do not worry about features that are not being asked for.

I have been running https://www.amqphosting.com, which is a RabbitMQ as a service company, for about 8months now.

And I agree with you on most points. Although I would disagree with you somewhat on the last one. If you are getting a lot of support emails early on, then it may mean that there's something wrong with your service/product. Probably the product isn't intuitive enough for people to use on their own; so you may need to invest on a lot of documentation and other educational materials.
It's also a good idea to turn common questions into a FAQ page.

Some other tips:

• keep to a schedule. I find that if I keep a schedule even if it is 30mins per day then it helps me to keep focused.
• Investing more in marketing activities than dev work. I have developed a number of features that no customer ever ended up using. My marketing activities(usually educational activities like tutorials and answering questions on internet forums), however, even if they haven't led to customers; they have been things that people have gone on to use and so that to me is a better reward than features that arent used.

Hello @PLee,

Customer service is a very time consuming task
I didn't see any FAQ/Help page on your website. Do you have one? If no, maybe you should, it will relieve you from unnecessary questions.

Universal Advice:

1. Read your employment contract. For most engineers in many places, they have really unfair terms in regards to IP on their employment contract. Most employees sign away everything they create, even when:
   a. they work outside of business hours,
   b. they work outside of the office,
   c. they don't use company resources, and
   d. even when it has nothing to do with their employer's current industry.
   Get some free consultation with a lawyer if needed. IANAL

2. Even if you aren't bound to a horrible employment contract, try to work on something that is outside of your employer's industry ie. if you work for Zynga, your side project better not be a video game.

3. Be careful of burnout. If you're working a normal salary developer job, you're not going to last. Both your day job and your side project will suffer; unless you do most of your work on the weekend; which isn't realistic if you have friends and family.

The rest of my advice's usefulness to others is dependent on the project's level of ambition and how flexible people are in terms of their expenses for maintaining their current lifestyle.

If you really believe in your project and for whatever reason you couldn't secure enough funding or income for it but you still need money for rent, then I suggest getting a non-developer full time job; something that is both easy and affords a lot of free time. This is the path that some famous writers took to finish their work. Yes you will take an immediate cash hit ... but you will now have enough energy and time to give to your project. For 30%-60% less pay, you work 90%-75% less hours than a developer working as monthly salaried employee. YMMV

A couple miscellaneous things (I spend my downtime working on Buttondown, a profitable newsletter app):

• Totally agree with your suggestions on a tight scope, instant monetization, and using what you know. (Not that there's anything wrong with exploring new technologies, but that's an experiment and an impulse that is orthogonal to 'building out an actual business'.)
• To contrast your last point slightly, I focused on CS over everything because it built out the muscle memory of helping folks immediately (though learning how to write quick, helpful emails definitely took some time!) . I still get folks who reply to my replies stunned that I responded so quick, which I think is a huge advantage (plus, it massages my ego :))
• Find a sustainable level of work. Working thirty hours a week on a project and burning out after a month means you're going to be less productive than working ten hours a week on a project but sustaining that cadence for a year.
• Health comes before everything. This is good life advice, too, but I've found that when I focus on getting eight hours of rest, working out, eating well, then the time I do spend on Buttondown is filled with clarity and focus.

Schedule a reasonable block of time (1-3 hours) each day to work on your side project. It doesn't have to be for coding, per se, but can also include brainstorming, researching, etc. Main point is to set aside time that is devoted to your side gig. I use google calendar for this, and will include tasks within the calendar event that I want to complete. I also use Trello for including more details and checklists if necessary. Here's what this set up has helped me to produce: picshareparty.com

Something I saw on a similar hackernews thread was to have clear goals in your head so that when you have some spare time you can jump right into it, rather than procrastinating around before.
https://dynalist.io/ is proving a good way to do this - add tasks as they pop in your head then go straight there when its time to work.

Hi @PLee, you should check out this thread on HN super relevant to Collate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15056751

Is your goal to make Collate into your full-time income? How close is it to replacing your income now?

I think if I were you my inclination would be to focus on sales and marketing as much as possible and spend as little time on development work as possible until you get to income replacement.

Use what you know

This is a great point! I will often start-up a side project just to justify learning some new framework, but those projects almost never make it to the finish line. If you're serious about finishing something, you should use familiar tools when possible.

The only thing I'd add to your excellent post is to only indulge in making something you really want to use yourself. Burnout is inevitable, but it's a lot easier to overcome when you view the project from a consumer's standpoint.