day job moved to on-call every third week - how do you keep a side project alive on one usable week in three
Day job went from occasionally paged to a formal rotation: one week on, two off. The on-call week is a write-off. I am tired, I cannot start anything that needs more than twenty minutes of head space, and twice now I have been up at 3am. The week after is mostly recovery. Realistically I have one good week in three.
The project is a small tool with 11 paying users. It does not need much, but not much still means someone answers email and ships the occasional fix.
What I cannot work out is the rhythm. A three week cycle means whatever I start in the good week is cold by the time I come back to it. Last cycle I spent the whole Saturday of my good week just remembering how the import job worked.
How do you structure this? Do you plan the dead weeks around low-focus work, or accept they are dead and protect the one week properly?
@gramgrader_gus · 4w ago · 2 replies
Two pagers is the actual problem here. Before anything else, make the project incapable of waking you. Managed database, no cron you wrote that fails silently, no alert routed to your phone, one digest email a day that you read when you feel like it. If the side project can page you during the day job's on-call week you have accepted two rotations, and that is how people quit both.
After that, dead weeks get anything that fits on a phone: support email, docs in a notes app, copy, screenshots, the boring billing chores. Not code. Code needs the good week and all of it. My last three cycles were roughly two hours of admin during on-call, zero in recovery, nine to eleven hours in the good week.
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@leaky_bucket_ed · 4w ago
The reload cost is what kills me, not the hours. I finish every session by writing the exact next command in a WIP file - literally "npm run dev, open /import, the failing case is a file with a BOM". Two minutes at the end, saves an hour at the start.
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