Heya! I’m Dave. I’m a product designer, engineer, PM, and team lead who works at Automattic.
Let’s say you worked on a side project 2 hours every weekday, and took the weekends off. How much could you accomplish?
Well, that’s:
That’s insane. If you were able to stick with a single side project for 5 years, what could you accomplish?
I bet you could change the world… I’m not kidding.
Now go and do it. 🙂
So much! Ive tried this a bit and definitely have workflow blockers to overcome. Some around keeping it at 2 hours (sometimes stopping is hard!), some around sleep (generally fitting those hours in late, its sometimes hard to sleep consistently after the mind is in that zone), and a lot around context switching or my addictive personality with the projects (complex side project problems invading focus during the next work day). I have found moving side project time to Friday night and the weekend can help with a lot of those, but that has its own challenges and distractions with family and other responsibilities as well. Im curious if you have experienced any of this when working on side projects on weekdays?
My oldest daughter is a competitive swimmer. She now swims in the morning before school as well as after school. She’s not old enough to drive yet, so I now have the pleasure of waking up each morning at 4am to drive her to swimming. Most days I’ve been using this time to work on my side project. It wouldn’t work for everyone, but I already have to be up early, so it’s working well for me.
Dave Martin 
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