genuine question, not rhetorical.
i have an app idea i'm really excited about. ios dev is literally my day job so the skills aren't the problem. the problem is that i get home at 7, make dinner, exercise maybe, and by 9pm i have maybe 90 minutes before i'm useless.
the weekend math sort of works but i also have a life, friends, a partner who would prefer i exist occasionally. every piece of "how to build a side project" advice assumes you have 3 free hours after work which... i don't?
did people genuinely sacrifice sleep? drop hobbies? or is the trick something about quality of 30-minute sessions that i'm missing?
5 replies
hardware_hugo
25-minute sessions, dead serious. i build embedded stuff on the side and it sounds ridiculous but 25 minutes of focused work 5 days a week is more than a "productive weekend" most weeks. the trick is the task has to be pre-selected. you can't spend 10 of your 25 deciding what to do.
mobile_mara
the pre-selection thing is interesting. like end the session by writing tomorrow's task? that's actually doable.
hardware_hugo
exactly that. takes 2 minutes and removes the biggest friction point. i keep a sticky note on my monitor: one sentence, what's the next concrete thing. not "work on the UI" but "add the error state to the login screen".
apm_aisha
honestly? lunch. i'm remote so i take 45 minutes for actual lunch and 30-45 for side project stuff. nothing is shipping faster but things are moving. i tried the evening thing and gave up after two weeks.
qa_quinn
i dropped two hobbies and cut my gaming down a lot. not a sustainable answer and i'm not recommending it, but if you're asking what people actually did, that's what i did. took about a year to ship the thing and then i brought the hobbies back. the math requires cutting something.