I have a job and a small child, so I get roughly 45 minutes after bedtime and maybe two hours on a Saturday. By the time I have opened everything and remembered what I was doing, half of it is gone, and I usually end up reading my own code rather than writing any. Six weeks in and the project is barely further along than it was. Is this just how it is, or am I using the time badly?
Do the maths before you conclude it is not enough. Forty five minutes five nights a week plus two hours on Saturday is a bit over five hours a week, which is more than 250 hours a year. That is not a small amount, and plenty of finished things have been built in less.
The reason it does not feel like progress is that six weeks of small sessions produces something invisible: a bit of structure, some decisions you no longer have to make. Keep a two line log of what you did each session and read it monthly. It stops the feeling that nothing is happening, because you can see that something was.
Batch by type of work. Thinking work, like data model decisions or working out what a screen should do, is terrible in 45 minutes and fine on a Saturday morning. Mechanical work, like writing a form or fixing a known bug, fits a weeknight perfectly.
Spend the Saturday deciding and the weeknights executing. Trying to decide something structural at 9:40pm is how the whole session goes to reading old code.
This is the split that made evenings productive for me. I keep a short queue of mechanical tasks so there is always something I can pick up without thinking, and I only refill the queue at the weekend.
One environment thing: keep the project open. Editor open, terminal in the right directory, browser tab on the right page, all still there from last night. Reopening everything is a small friction that reliably costs me the first ten minutes and occasionally costs me the whole session.
Also worth accepting that some nights will be a write off and that is fine. I aim for four sessions a week and treat five as a good week. Planning for seven guarantees a sense of failure by Wednesday.
@slow_thinker_sam · 3w ago · 3 replies
You are paying a startup cost every night and it is eating a third of your time. Kill that first, before you try to find more hours.
The habit that fixed it for me: stop mid task, deliberately, every session. Not at a clean stopping point, in the middle of something small and obvious, and leave a one line note in a file called
next.mdsaying exactly what the next physical action is. Something like: add the email field to the signup form, file isroutes/signup.jsline 40.The next night you sit down and there is no decision to make. You just do the thing. Ten minutes of the session goes back to you, and more importantly you skip the reading phase where you talk yourself out of starting.
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@notetaking_ivo · 3w ago
The stopping mid task part is genuinely uncomfortable at first and it works. Finishing something cleanly feels satisfying and then you sit down the next day facing a blank decision, which is the hardest possible starting state.
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@scopecreep_sam · 4w ago
I keep the note as a comment marked TODO NEXT at the exact line I stopped on. Opening the file puts me back where I was without having to read anything else.
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