How makers stay productive

As a guy with a full time job I tend to fill in breaks and lunch breaks as working breaks by taking courses in between, reading up, checking stats and planning my next moves. This is not for everyone, my job doesn't require much brain power so I'm not mentally exhausted on my breaks. When I get home I try to spend quality time with my family before and while we eat. After that I usually spend from 1-3 hours researching and working on my computer, or if I can work while I'm watching tv with family it's ok too. My most important thing is that one day of my two days off a week I take it easy, down one or two hours working and then rest with family or friends, catch up, hang with the dog and relax so I can do it again the next week. I've been slowly incorporating this because I've hustled a lot before and slowly alienated myself from others in the process, I don't want to do that, so I try to schedule specific hours where I know I can work uninterrupted while at work or at home but still have time to spend time with others, so everything is very task driven on what I want to accomplish in those hours to grow my side project. Now besides having s full time job I understand that anything can throw you off your rhythm and possibly pausing an entire project or ruin an entire day for me, as it has before and I ended up stalled because on the days I planned to be productive something got in the way, so for me scheduling specific hours works. I try to identify what can I do on my phone, what do I need my computer for, what do I need to prioritize and set my tasks for what I can get done in a couple hours on my breaks at work and what can I do after I spend time with family.

When I was working full time, I found a lot of time during my commute to the office and the lunch break. That was giving me around 2.5h per day to work on my projects or learn new things. I quit my job last year so now that's the only thing I'm working on, however, now I have two projects (QuickTalks.io and theLIFEBOARD) in addition to my personal blog so it's hard to decide which should I focus on. For a while, I was doing two days per project and one day to write articles for my blog but lately, I've been focusing on one project at a time.

One thing that I've been doing for more than four years is to plan my weeks ahead and review them at the end. I used to do that on a whiteboard, then that process became theLIFEBOARD. This process helps me identify which product features or tasks I should work on during the week and at the same time avoid jumping to work on tasks without giving them a proper thought. That way I'm sure I'm working as smart as possible.

Hope that helps ✌️

I have a full-time job and family which take up most of the time of the day. In the evening, I'm usually done. So the only time to work on my side projects is early in the morning. 4 to 5 times a week I get up at 3 to 4 am in the morning to do so. The reason is that I want to start the day with something that is for me personally and that lets me get up more easily. It's the only time of the day where I can let my mind just run and do whatever it feels is the right thing to do (there's literally no distraction from anything :) ). And this feels really good. If I overslept, then I feel like I missed something and my mind is constantly on my side project for the whole day. (Not for everyone I guess, but works for me quite well)