I worked most nights during the week for a 1-2hrs and every weekend, sometimes spending full days working on the weekends. I found the time when I could and delegated work to my cofounders who did the same. It was just a lot of hard work and extra hours. I sacrificed some social life but still managed to enjoy New York hugely over the past year.
I think people underestimate how much you can get done if you commit to at least 1-2 hours during the week EVERY DAY, and at least another 12-16 hours on the weekend. Working during the week is critical, even if it's difficult, simply because it keeps the momentum going and motivation fresh (in my experience of trying it every other way). It's also a deceptive 30-80% additional capacity than what you have merely working weekends.
Oh and paying attention to what you're doing and how long it took, and making sure not to waste unnecessary time on nice-to-haves or unnecessary research rather than critical functionality. This is particularly important if you're working alone; I find reviewing my source control checkins and my PivotalTracker progress very helpful in this respect.
Then again I ended a great relationship for work so perhaps I'm not the best exemplar of priorities.
Sounds good in practice, but I have a real hard time building anything in 1 hour increments. I need a good 3-4 hours scheduled to make solid progress on any of my side projects. I have a feeling others may have the same problem... and PG described this pretty well in his "makers schedule" essay.
I used to believe that too but while 5 blocks of 1 hour each aren't as efficient as 1 block of 5 hours, it's still better than 0 hours.
Today I've managed to get Hadoop set up in pseudo-distributed mode in 1.5 hours on a fresh VM I just installed, while reading a tutorial in the background waiting for stuff to download and install. Tomorrow I'll think more about how I want to convert my crawler prototype from C# over to Ruby on the cluster and read a bit more about how this all works while I wait for code to compile or packages to run at the day job.
Even the 15min I spend eating while at the client are used to think, read and plan my next step or how I will implement something. Same for the drive to/from work. Yup I talk to myself. There's a lot of time in the day when you're supposedly busy that you can get constructive work done.
In the evening I'll start working on getting my first test job to run. At the end of every day it looks like I've made little progress, but at the end of the week I'm certain to be happy with my progress (something I learned from David Burns' "Feeling Good" is to actually test your hypotheses; if you feel you didn't accomplish much, actually test it by listing what you did and you'll be probably be pleasantly surprised).
Thanks, I appreciate the examples. I think a lot of it comes down to organization -- with some planning I certainly could find smaller items that fit into 1 hour blocks (configuration, writing tests, documentation, etc). Depends on the nature of the project though.
Good point on capturing and reviewing progress. I'm always trying to get better at that.
I think this will depend on what role you play. As someone who's technical, 3-4 hours is the minimum for sure but if you're responsible for business relationships (like making sure you try to sign an artist every day) then 1-2 hours sounds possible.
Reminds me of a saying from my former CEO, "it's not about the time left in the game, but the number of swings at the bat you get."
Yeah, but doing it after you come home tired from a stressful job is not that easy - even if you have the drive, your brain is too tired to think clearly...
yes I feel that alot, as an engineer it's really hard to concentrate on your project after work.. But I realize something for me, maybe it's also for others but if i manage to start it somehow, i can go further more than i expected actually.. hardest thing is for me is beginnig..To figure out beginning I just check my checkouts on plastic source control and realise that we already done alot, is just fix everything and it's your fuel now you can go :)
I am also in finance working full-time. I spend about 2 hours a day working on our payments platform. 6 months ago I cut off my cable and it's amazing how much I'm actually getting done! People who use "lack of time" as an excuse to not get anything done should seriously consider adding up all their idle time, you'll be surprised!
Can you elaborate on the level and detail of planning you had to do to be effective in 1-2 hour chunks?
I think it would be really interesting for the productivity obsessed to maybe even see a mockup of the task lists you would generate to get a sense of how detailed of a list was good.
I use a website/app called Orchestra for my to-do lists. I've seen a lot of people write that to-do lists don't work, but they do for me. Planning out what exactly I needed to get done when I would sit down to work on OKDJ was important for me. I was also very goal oriented. I tackled building the company is phases: assembling the team, building the site, gathering content etc. And I would list out what needed to get done at each of those phases.
