How to manage side project with day job ?

The solution is simple, albeit not easy.

Given that there's only 24 hours in a single day and you should never ever (ever!) compromise on: 1) sleep, 2) exercise and 3) family time (if applicable), there are really only two options:

1. Give up your side project (for now) or
2. Spend less time working on your day job

If you're not willing to let the side project go for the time being, you're really only left with option #2. And if cutting down the hours at your day job is not an option, look for a new job with less hours.

Back in the days I was still working on Pagestead as a side project, I was willing to spend max 5 hours per day in my day job. If the contract or managers did not allow for this, I would not take the job, period.

You have a few options:

1. Use weekends for your side project.
2. It sounds like you're working, aside from the normal office hours. You're most likely not getting paid for that so stop doing that and use that time for your side projects?
3. Some people would get up 1 hour earlier during week days but it really depends on how much sleep you need. It's not healthy to compromise on sleep so keep that in mind.

Some thoughts:

1. Lessen work commitment: You need to find a way to lessen your burden at work. Maybe have a conversation with your employer or don't—if that puts your job in jeopardy—but you need to do the bare minimum to keep your employer satisfied so you have the mental capacity and time. Possibly a career risk but entrepreneurship is risky business—welcome to it.
2. Work = Funding startup: Think of your job as funding your startup—it's hard to enjoy what you're doing when you want to work on your thing, but you need to fund it (for you, your family and happiness). Framing my day job in this way has kept me motivated. It's also made me wiser and more frugal with my money so I'm better situated to pursue my business if things take off.
3. Weekends: I work one full eight hour day on weekends. I realize this may be tough with family/kids, but it has been absolutely necessary to give Blurt.app the focus it needs. Also, get out of the house. Find a coffee shop you can post up in for eight hours and have at it.
4. Sleep: Get 8 hours of rest. I know it's tempting to stay up late but you'll ruin yourself and you'll have no mental capacity to be good at any of your roles (employee, founder or father).
5. Involve family: I've involved family so they understand why I'm working so much, why it means so much to me and the potential—though unlikely—upside. This also makes it much more real than a dream and holds you accountable to attaining it.
6. Everyday is one step: When you can't commit full-time, you have to accept that it's going to take a little longer than the individual who has no commitments and is living in a cramped studio apartment with four others in SV. While frustrating, I do find this makes me more efficient with my time and if you stay committed, seeing your progress over time is encouraging.
7. It is difficult: Accept that it's hard. You will be stretched thin. There's only so much time in a day, week, year. I've just had to do my best at any given moment. Having a highly prioritized to-do list has been helpful. "If it were easy, everyone would be doing it," so figure out what works for you to beat the odds.

I believe you are from India.

I am from India and stuck in the same boat, majority of Indians in IT are not valued and are hired just as a laborer, no one really cares what ambitions or life goals you have.
If you are demanding or can't fulfill their needs the way they want, they have 100 other people who need the job and might do it in a cheaper pay.

Also, they will make us work in shift timings in case the client is from US or UK, Australia etc.
I always wonder how many people from these countries agree on working in shift timings.

I am a front end developer.
In my organisation we have to compulsorily give 9 hours to the job.
I spend an additional two hours traveling so in total I give around 11+ hours to the company per day.
I get around 12 to 13 hours for myself.

I leave early and come home exhausted, get a few hours to relax, eat dinner and then quickly go to sleep to get approx 8 hours of sleep.

Due to the responsibilties of my family and the need of making money since I do not have savings, unable to take risks, I feel I am stuck in this never ending cycle.

I am a very ambitious person and like to do good quality work but where I work it's service based where people take don't care about the quality of work.

I do not see my life going anywhere this way.

The only way out I can see is that if I could get some work which would provide a basic income to support my family expenses but not take up my whole day, I would gladly leave my job, later on I would increase my skill set in the time I get and provide value to my customer and also get other freelance work.

I know I kind of grind against the general mantra of not sacrificing sleep, socialization and similar but here it goes.

After living a high workload life for long enough, it just becomes the norm. I've spent the last 10+ years working an average of 12 hours a day (obviously you sacrifice productivity, but a solid 6 hours at work and 2-3 hours on the side project is really good) and what you learn from that is that tiredness, at least the mental kind is highly subjective and second you learn to manage and value time. Also, TAKE BREAKS chunk up time into high intensity work sprints, take good breaks in between.

My kind of formula is:

• Sleep a little bit less in the grand total (my average is about 7 hours and I pretty much cannot work around that as without it I'm a zombie
• Sacrifice something - you don't have to cut out family, sleep, going out, but you don't have to do it 7 days per week find 1 day where you get YOUR couple of hours to do whatever the hell you want
• Fun is super subjective - I've quit watching TV on a daily basis, my view of fun right now is to do those things occasionally and working on my side project in the new found time.
• Learn to manage time - value other peoples time, make other people value your time. Use time wisely as it is a finite resource, make sure you have a strict yet flexible schedule, plan for the unplanned
• Dont sacrifice it all - this works for a week, but then life gets in the way and you grind to a hard stop, find a good pace ie an hour a day, or something like that, that you can invest into yourself or your project. Other than that spend time with family, going out, watching tv, playing games, going to the cinema
• Automate and simplify stuff - My bills are paid automatically, usual meetings are auto-scheduled, emails are often auto-responded, lights and TV are voice controlled.
  I got a bunch of script on my laptop to set me up for work vs side project in a couple minutes.
  Improve your workflows both at your full-time job and for the side project - CI/CD, tests, orchestration - makes deployments a breeze so I can focus on the real work instead of on constant copying and manual deploying etc. It's mostly a one time investment for a long term benefit. Basically if it's going to repeat more than 1 per month, try to simplify/automate.
• Sometimes its just though - from time to time there will be dry spells where work and life just get in the way and you don't get to spend any time on your project for two weeks - don't get down on this, use this as a motivator so that the next time you get your hands on it, kill it :D

Other than this, I think this is highly individual and people just have to figure out what works for them. It's just a matter of tradeoffs you can make to optimize how you live in general.

TL;DR: Time is expensive, value time. Everything else you will figure out once you start treating it as a resource.

It sounds like you should consider better time management and task prioritisation - first step would be to realise and acknowledge something is not quite right - it is quite obvious from your post.

Although we all sometimes need to work longer hours, making it a daily routine leads nowhere. Imagine for a moment there were 50 hours a day rather than 24. Brilliant, now I'll have time to do everything one might think. Wrong - you'd fill it up with tasks and shortly run out of hours in a day and are back in square one.

Prioritise and limit time you spend at work to the amount you are contracted for. Anything else is a slavery. Once you've done that, you'll find time for your side project since suddenly you'll have 4 or so hours more each day.

Advice for side projects where you have an idea you want to make money of and eventually work on full time but cannot do it before you actually have a product and a couple of paying customers.

The key is prioritization and simplification. That's a general advice for everyone, also people working on their project full time, but there's a key distinction.

When you're just starting out the key is getting your core idea out there so that you can validate it in the wild. That means you should focus on doing only the part that will help you validate your idea. Read the famous post by Paul Graham of doing things that don't scale. You need to get creative and spend time brainstorming.

I just saw this in my Inbox this morning.

https://fizzle.co/sparkline/7-realistic-tactics-building-biz-working-fs277

I won't be repeating what others have already told you - don't do office works in after office hours.

I've been struggling lately to fulfil my never-ending list of todo items - learn a language, work on side project, read up on domain I'm working on, start writing regularly etc. What I have started doing now is to specifically take out time to do something. For example, if I have to work on my side project, then I go to a nearby coffee shop right after office and take out an hour to only work on my side project and nothing else.

Doing things like Sheldon, where he dedicates each day to a specific things, apparently works. I still haven't built this into a habit yet, but it is first step.

I think in most cases it can't be done. You need too much time to make a startup take off and having a full-time job and a family makes it impossible to give it enough dedication.
A common solution to that is to try to do consulting work part-time to pay the bills and have enough time to dedicate to your side project. No solution is easy, though. You're going to be juggling with time, money and uncertainty trade-offs.

Consider going to bed earlier and waking up at 4am.

I found that after work and rarely did the things I cared about or the things that mattered (other than spending time with my family). So I resorted to waking up 30 minutes earlier to add something to my morning. First it was exercise. Then it was a quiet time. Then it was a side project. That's how I ended up at 4am.

The great thing about uber-early mornings is no one is up asking you for your time. No one at work is going to be frustrated that you weren't working at 4am. You're starting mentally fresh instead of being worn out from the day. Assuming you're going to bed early, you can still get the same amount of sleep as if you were sleeping 10:30-7.

Use the power of compound interest. On your constraints, I would break the project into 20 minutes tasks TOPS. You have to work only this 20 min to complete this task the best you can. And that's it. Don't try to get more out of the day. After finished, choose the next 20 min task for tomorrow. This will help you to FOCUS on what is really important, and the compound effect of accomplishments will surprise you in some months. Make it a habit, 20 minutes daily with undivided attention on your side-project.

I have similar situation here. Trying to bootstrap a side project with fulltime day work. You could think about getting less demand day job or switch to freelance on your own if possible.

Having clear separation between work time and family time is important. I know it's hard in reality.

Mate, burning your midnight oil is the answer. And it's really really really hard I would say. Another option if you already have some revenue is freelancing. That could shift your working hours and honestly give you some space for the side project during the day.

Even though I have no children I have a similar situation. I decided to reduce my sleep hours, I usually go to sleep at 1 am and wake up at 7.
I know it’s probably not the healtiest solution, but I’d rather be 10 years from know without regrets that I spent my time sleeping rather than making stuff I love.
Moreover it’s just a matter of habit, I reduced my sleeping time by 1h and now I can’t see the difference, my body just got used to that.
Obviously it happens that some nights I’m too tired and I do nothing, but usually I can work up until 1 am for 2/3 days out of 5 (working days).
In the weekends I usually try to dedicate at least a full working day (8h) split onto the 2 days.
Just don’t take time from your family, that’s the most important thing.

It's always hard to manage side-projects with a full-time job because not only they don't give you a lot of free time left, they also drain your energy quite a bit. It's not impossible though. I think in your case you should address the hours you're spending on your day job. It seems you're working more than the usual full-time hours and you must find a solution there.

Can you write some documentation that your colleagues can use rather than bother you all the time asking for help? Or maybe you can teach them to solve their own problems somehow? Have a think, maybe there's something you can come up with to help you decrease the hours you're spending at the office. Good luck!

Get a 5 days a week job and start working on weekends. That seems like the only solution for now.

Even if you spend 2 full days a week on your side project, that should be sufficient to take your project to a good level in a matter of an year or two.

Also, see if you can outsource someone with your non-core part of your side project. It will have 2 advantages. 1: Your side project will mover forward. 2: Once you start spending money on your project, you'll have more commitment towards it.

Think about it.

Do you think, outsourcing some work on your side project or collaborating with someone could be an option to explore?

This is how I manage -
https://twitter.com/keyul/status/975991245779615744

You can manage according to yourself. May be 1 hour in weekdays and 3-4 hours in weekend.

I don't have children yet, but still...

I started waking up 6am and after short exercises I just start working on tasks, till around 7:30, when my wife wakes up and it's time for breakfast.

I also do lots of minor tasks on the go, from my phone - assigning and planning tasks, answering questions from mentors and collegues in Basecamp, going through E-Mail and Intercom etc. You'd be surprised how much can be done from the phone. Back in 2014 I worte the whole book just on my smartphone (https://mkdev.me/en/book).

If I have enough cycles, I can also work for couple of hours in the evening, though as I try to go to sleep latest 10:30pm and I normally prioritize private life over work in the evenings, this rarely happens.

Then again, I do lots of work on my project on the weekend, mostly in early hours. I keep my schedule and wake up at 6am even on weekend, so I have like another 2-3-4 hours of productive work before other activities begin.

Ah and I never take work from primary project (I'm a freelance consultant, so not calling it a "job") to off-work hours. This is very important for me. I have 40 hours a week for primary project, if I can not be productive during these 40 hours, then I can not fix it by working 50 hours on same project. So I always have a hard cut at 6pm, after which I almost never do anything related to primary project. I better think how to do better next day.

Hope it helps.

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