In the past when I’ve worked on side projects it’s been primarily on nights and weekends. Between school and work, I never had time for them during the day and because I’m not much of a morning person, nights and weekends always worked better.

When my son was born about three years ago, a lot of the time that I would have put into side projects went towards trying to be a good dad to him and now also to my daughter. This led to less time during the week because after I would get done with work, I would spend time with them and after they would go to sleep, I wanted to spend time with my wife and relax. I also can’t stay up too late because I needed to get up with the kids in the morning. Similar story on weekends.

This has led to my side projects time dropping from maybe 10-15 hours/week to only 3-4 hours/week for the last several years.

Inspired by my friend and coworker Dave Martin, I’ve started experimenting with waking up early to work on side projects. Not 4am-5am like him (!), but just at 6am. That gives me 1 to 1.5 hours to focus on side projects most days. I take Saturday off and also wind up skipping some other days, but it’s probably doubled the amount of time I put into side projects to around 7-8 hours per week.

To make this work, I’ve also had to adjust my evening routine. Instead of going to bed around 10:30pm, I try to be in bed by around 9:30pm to make sure I get in 8-9 hours. I wind up watching less Netflix, but don’t feel like I’m missing anything important.

And as a side effect, I’ve found that I’m sleeping a lot better now that I’m no longer jumping straight from coding into bed a lot of nights. All too often I’d just lie there for hours waiting for problem solving mode to turn off. Now I read and it makes it much easier to fall asleep.

If you typically work on side projects at night like I did in the past, I encourage you to experiment with waking up and going to bed early for a few weeks to see how it works for you.