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How to find time to build your software ideas

• 4 min read •
#productivity #side-projects #lifestyle

I work 60+ hours a week as a software developer for a US startup, need to take care of my body physically by hitting the gym and also keep a happy marriage, I was thinking the only way to work on my ideas was to sacrifice my sleep.

Because if you read Tech Twitter, you’d think building a solo project requires waking up at 4:00 AM, drinking a green smoothie, and doing three hours of deep work before the sun comes up.

My Monday to Friday usually looks like this:

  • 6:30 AM: Wake up, grab the phone, doomscroll TikTok or Instagram Reels.
  • 7:20 AM: MacBook on. Slack open. Send the written dev standup.
  • 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM: Deep work. Heads-down programming, writing software, reviewing requirements, planning features, and syncing with the team.
  • 4:30 PM: Hit the gym to add some heavy movement and fix the physical toll of sitting all day for years.
  • 7:30 PM: Brain completely fried, but still find some active brain cells to deliver more work for the startup I work at or by default, play some video games for an hour.
  • 9:00 PM: Spend time with my wife and go to sleep at around 11:00 PM.

My weekends are not too different, between errands, groceries, car wash, shaving, have a date with my wife; the few hours I have left I just want to play some games.

Still I wanted to start building, but excuses like are easy to come by. “There is no time”. “I’m too tired”. “I don’t even know if this side project is worth it”. “I have a deadline on my job so I have to work”.

I want to think that choosing to play a game or watch a movie at this point isn’t a lack of discipline, It’s just exhaustion.

But I know that building my online presence and my AstroJS blog is how I’ll progress, it’s my way to put myself out there, and eventually make bigger life moves. So I had to stop looking for free time and start stealing it to be able to create this blog, in order to do that, I had to start making my own time.

The Trade-Offs

I don’t magically create more hours in the day. I just sacrifice my comforts. On Sundays, I usually want to sink 3 to 4 hours into gaming. Now, I force myself to cut it to 2 hours. I skip the 30-minute morning TikTok scroll. I force myself to put the phone down at night when I absolutely do not want to be productive, and I open my MacBook instead.

Working in the Margins

You have to find the weird gaps in your week. Sometimes that means bringing my MacBook to the car wash on a Saturday morning and working while I wait. Sometimes it means packing my laptop when I visit my hometown for the weekend just to squeeze out one or two hours of progress when I initially planned to spend time with the family.

No Project Management

I don’t use a Notion sprint board or an issue tracker to manage my side project because when I tried to, I got stuck in analysis paralysis, overthinking everything, trying to find the perfect time to start.

It sounds cliche but you just have to do it, start, what I did to progress on my personal site was just ran the project and started tweaking things as I found issues or improvements to make, added the essentials like analytics, improved performance, and stopped overthinking it.

Clocking Out

I had to start setting boundaries on my relationship with my job and try (partially) to reclaim some hours, so instead of coming back after the gym to continue working on my job, I worked on this blog.

There is always an excuse. I’m not failing from a lack of time. I am just choosing exactly what to sacrifice to make the time I do have count.

I wish I could say I build this blog in a few days; but it took me months to do it, and even then it’s fairly minimalistic, but it’s a start, and I want to think that is what count.