I’ve read so many articles about how to start. Even about bootstrapping while you still have your day job. But none of them provided me with basic information - where the f*ck should I get the time to code this great thing? These are things we tried or we are still doing.

First things first

Startup source code is the first thing I see in the morning. There is nothing else for me. This works great.

6-10-6

This works best for me so far. What does it mean? I wake up at 6AM and work on the startup code until 10AM. Then I switch to daily job. Ok, that’s 4+8=12 hours. In the evening I play with my son, we make dinner, bath and put him to bed. I found out that I am not so productive in the evenings/nights so I am trying to get rid of night coding (not really successfully). Also my wife does not enjoy evenings when I am starring at the screen, I can understand that :-) 6-10-6 works great for me.

One commit per day

We tried that and it didn’t work. I thought that if you will force yourself to commit something every day (including weekends), even small thing like reformatting, documentation, anything, you will make project one step closer to the finish. We even wanted to pay penalty for every day of braking this rule. But there are days when you just can’t work and even if you can, you don’t have always everything ready for commit. Didn’t work for us.

Quit your daily job

Easy, you’re going to have a lot of time :-) I was thinking about it, but recently I read several advices not to do so. It would require to borrow some money (for 1 year?), feels quite risky. But no risk, no reward?

Please share your tricks to keep things going.