Ilona Codes
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Do you have any energy and time for your personal goals after a full day of work at your job?
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Latest comments (65)
Most of the time, yes. If you like the project you work on, It makes it easy to have time working on it after you got home.
I am just trying to have at least 1 hour each day and trying to be persistent. I got lots of things to learn and practice and that's my solution for this problem.
Hope my answer helped you!
For me I took about 6 months off of coding outside of work after I got my first developer role. I had been working 12-16 hour days between my job and my internship that once everything settled down to a normal 8 hour day I needed time to recover.
Now I mostly set aside 1/2 nights a week to work on side projects/freelance and spend the rest of my free time with my wife and kids. I have found that doing this helps me maintain a balance and keeps me from hyper-focusing(darn ADHD) on just doing dev work all the time.
I will say though that if you feel that you are tired all the time then look at your sleep/diet/exercise. I used to be tired all the time and found out I had sleep apnea so even thought I was sleeping 7-8 hours a night I was only getting the equivalent of 5 hours. Once I got my CPAP machine and started using it regularly my 8 hours where 8 hours and I feel like an entirely different person.
Hope this helps give some perspective!
As for my personal experience, three main things I'm trying to do;
First, keep your personal goals in smaller pieces as much as possible. Being smaller in size is helping more than being fewer in count. At least you can start even if it's a small step to your goals!
Second, do not let them stay in your mind only. Write them down. Ideas disappear but text stays!
Finally, just track them. When one is down, you feel your motivation is up for one tick!
Depend on that "full day". If it was a day where I left feeling like it was a day well spent – a day full of accomplishments or otherwise seeing efforts pay off – then, yeah, usually have plenty of energy. If was one of those (all too frequent) days where I ask "why do I work for this customer" or "why did I let myself get into this field", then I'm usually too demoralized and energy-sapped to do anything when I come home, let alone pursue personal goals.
A clear ROI (writing an article for a few bucks about technology) or intrinsic feeling of getting better at my craft give me more energy and then I make the time.
If you're cranking through JIRA tickets all day at your day job, I can understand how it would be exhausting to work on personal goals afterward.
I think this is why extrinsic motivation in the form of an extra paycheck exists.
In the case of open source, the intrinsic motivations of perfecting your craft or getting rep points for creating something useful to the community can give a nice boost of energy.
In your case, you're really better off just focusing on your startup and using whatever freelance time you need to keep re-investing into the startup. Most developers only have a full-time job and are not working on a product/service/business that they have a large stake in.
Not only does having personal goals keep you sane at work, it can actually help you with work projects. Once I was working on a html game and had to lay out a bunch of tiles. I discovered that the algorithm for that helped me assist a coworker on a bug he had laying out a list of links.
If I had to answer in one word, No. However this is also super complicated question and highly depends on office hours / setting and responsibilities outside of the office.
As for myself ( < 1 yr full time dev ) at first after office hours I tried to read and watch coding related stuff every day to improve my skills, however then I realised that I was getting super exhausted, so I switched to sports after office hours, which is working better.
However learning part is still important and I am currently struggling with forming new habit to do more coding and learning outside of the office hours. Occasional couple of hours in weekends happen, but I am determined to take steps forward and writing this post is a tiny part of it. I will do my best to be on Yes boat next time this question is answered.
I don't typically have the energy or time for my personal goals after work, but I have a couple of strategies that still allow me to make progress on them:
I make the best of my long commute! Every morning I have about an hour biking & sitting on the bus before I reach the gym for my before-work workout. This gives me a great opportunity to listen to 20-30mins of a podcast (usually an engineering topic) as I bike, and then practice some French via Duolingo or a Netflix show with French audio for the rest of the trip.
Every evening my commute home is about 30 minutes by train, so I take that time to slow down and read a technical book. Sometimes it's an engineering topic and other times I read nonfiction (right now I'm reading Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design").
My manager is extremely pro self-development and goes out of his way to remind me that I can take time out of my day to work on my own goals if they serve to launch me forward in my career. I typically start my work day by reading a couple of French news articles and a couple Dev.to posts before digging into writing code. I also tend to write my own Dev.to posts during the work day as they are often related to whatever I've had on my mind at work that week, and occasionally I'll allocate some time to an online course. I realize not everyone has the freedom to dictate their own day, so I feel very fortunate that I can do this.
Keep up the good job! I identify with you, and is true: staying active gives lots of energy :D