I love this advice Sebastian. This is why I read your blog. I was in a similar position, although my day job was demanding, I was able to spend 1-2 hours a day working on my side project while at work using a variety of slightly evil techniques. I had a 2 hour commute, so I would listen to business podcasts on SEO and stuff like that while driving. When I got home I'd do a very quick run, like 10-15 minutes max to jump start my system, then I'd eat really healthy while I hustled. Fruit, veggies, hard boiled eggs, and canned tuna. At the time I didn't have a laundry machine so I started paying to get it done. Finally, I made it clear to my friends that I wasn't going to hang out, like ever. This was hard to do, in my case it was made easier by the fact that I was starting a business with one of my best friends (very tricky thing to do).

Sebastian's advice to attack debt and bank cash is spot on. I did the exact same.

This was 3 years ago. Last month my business brought in 90K.

Still hustlin!

Good luck man....

Oh... sleep.... 12:30AM--6:13.

It's seared in to my head.

I'm never going back :)

Very good advice and pretty much on target with what I'm currently trying to do. I'd like to argue that video game playing or TV watching isn't "worthless" if it's something that relaxes you in such a way that you're able to be more productive after say, 30 minutes of headshots in Call of Duty. Sometimes that downtime is needed. Everything in moderation. I tend to play goal-based games as it is (RPGs) because I find GTD principles can be applied to those, and if you feel like you're achieving goals while relaxing, it becomes even more rewarding. Crazy, I know, but true.

Thanks Dan. Love the quick exercise + good meal to get going... I always got a good boost out of strong coffee + quick exercise session to freshen up the mind up for work... haven't been doing that lately, I should start again.

2 hour commute? Man, that's madness... congrats on getting started from there, that's a hardcore schedule. Much admiration from me, cheers for the great comment here.

Good point. I'll actually play video games with other people if I go to someone's house and they have a game system... play a shooter or XBox Kinect or Wii or something.

Playing games yourself can be okay too, if it relaxes you and you don't go overboard... I was never really good at playing an engrossing game for only a bit of time. Also another downside is it can eat away at your thought cycles - if you're playing a promising game of Civ IV, but you end your session right after all your neighbors declare war on you... you're going to wind up thinking about it and burning thought cycles on it. There's no way around it - your mind will want to work on it. So that's a downside, but good points if you're able to stick with moderation and it relaxes/recharges you. Cheers for commenting.

Great post Sebastian. I'm going through this now and it is a grueling slog at times. Probably the hardest part is admitting to yourself you can't do everything: some realize this while starting a side business, others after getting promoted to a management position, and others when they have their first child.

One solution is to align your side business with your regular job: for example, if your side project requires a lot of copywriting, find a way to make this part of your responsibilities at your day job. This allows you to use the training from your job to help your project, and the practice from your project to help your job. Not sure if this applies to an engineer but it seems to work with marketing positions.

Good observations Steven. Yeah, only 24 hours, so there's always some opportunity cost.

> One solution is to align your side business with your regular job: for example, if your side project requires a lot of copywriting, find a way to make this part of your responsibilities at your day job. This allows you to use the training from your job to help your project, and the practice from your project to help your job. Not sure if this applies to an engineer but it seems to work with marketing positions.

Really good insight there. Cheers for the good comment Steven.

@Dan: I've tried your advice about going for a quick run right when you get home: that really relieves from the day stress and kind of "reset" your physical/mental energy level.
And do you also incorporate meat on your food regimen?

@Frank: The thing is, I used to be some kind of hardcore player. I loved playing Starcraft or Counterstrike for hours and hours... So even if playing is really fun to me, I feel that I'm not gonna be able to contain the time I spend playing to an acceptable level... So just like TV, I took the easy solution and completely gave up on that (well, except when I'm dragged to an arcade room). It is a bit painful sometimes (especially when my colleagues are talking to me about their epic StarCraft games and trying to make me install the game), but so rewarding since I've got so much more time now!

@Steven: Good point, but yeah, it does not apply to a calculation engineer unless you want to start an engineering consulting business (or create your own structural analysis code...). To succeed, I think you need 20+ years of experience in the field and an insane passion for the technical stuff. That is not my case...

Hey M, Sebastian,

I'm in the same boat, I spent part of last year setting up my startup while working full time, but recently switched to consulting. Consulting has its advantages, first and foremost you can pick clients that are in the same problem space and second you get to work from home every now and then which can help saving time. That said while it has advantages it can also be a lot more draining than a full time jobs, think for example of all the time you need to spend networking to get work.

On top of all the great recommendations that have been offered so far I'd like to add "learn to let go". As an engineer I found that as a category we crave details and to know everything is humanly possible about the subject we're working on. This just isn't gonna fly if you want to start a business and have 2hrs/day. And based on what you wrote it sounds like you've already optimized your routine to a point where there isn't much more to squeeze. This was my situation 8 months ago and if I understood you right, you are asking the same thing I was: how can I get more time to work on this? In my experience that was the wrong question to ask and things started to get better for me when I began to ask: am I making the most of the time I get?. When I went to answer that question what I found is that my desire for details meant spending weeks on a single aspect of the problem making overall very little progress. This resulted in a big poster hanging by my desk that reads: does this move my business forward? Now every time I begin working on something I ask myself some variation of that question. Do I need this piece of knowledge now? Do I need to work this out now? In the first 2 months it was as amazing as hard to let go of the many things I had put on my todo list that actually I didn't need to do for the time being.

That said, one thing you might try is to sleep less, of course within reason, nobody works well when tired. I'm a big fan of sleep hacks and I've had a reasonable amount of success with a bunch of them. As others suggested waking up early and taking the first part of the day for yourself is a great way of putting more energies into your project. I used to sleep between 7 and 8 hrs/night and I'm now down to 5.30 and feel even better than I used to. The key is in the quality of your sleep and to ease gradually into that regime. I believe you can get an extra hr back out of it. Feel free to get in touch if you wanna chat about that.

Hope this helps,

Spike @spikelab