How to pursue your passion while working full-time job?
The question how to be productive when every minute of the day counts hounted me for a long time. I had to learn the hard way that in order to pursue your dream, you have to give up sleep, movie nights and "me time" multiple times.
I started my coding journey last year, working full time for a Corporation and studying on weekends during my final year at university. This meant literally no free time - at least none that I would like to give up. Starting a new skill that takes a lot of time to learn seemed like the worst idea at the time for my lazy self. With 10 hours of the day busy with job and another 2 or 3 spent on studying I just couldn't see myself doing even one more thing than necessary.
This may sound weird, but looking at me now I couldn't find better time to do it. It seems the absolute lack of time was actually what I needed the most to finally get organised.
Now I would like to share some simple trick that changed the game for me, as I know there are milions of us trying to succeed in many aspects of life at once. Sometimes this is possible and sometimes the only thing to do is to let go of something - here's a few things that may help to avoid the second scenario.
1. Write down your habits - especially unwanted ones
YOLO philisophy is all fun and games, and I would recommend it to everybody from time to time, but mostly this is something that holds us back the most. Telling yourself to go with a flow and see how the day unfolds stops working once you have more on your shoulders than you would like to.
Here's what worked for me the most: observing myslef for a week, noticing where I like to waste my time unconciously for nothing productive and writing every observation at least once a day. Now, I'm not saying one should strive to exclude pleasures from the life completely. This excercise was meant to find the weak points that were not bringing pleasure or rest into the day.
Once my thoughts and observations were written down, I asked myself which things would I like to eliminate. Starting with one thing or one habit a day helped me enormously in the long run and allowed me to focus on programming more and more.
2. Plan ahead
Every Sunday I sit down with my notes or basically any paper at all and write down my daily plans - adding time slots to them when I'm particularly crunched. Once you see your plans on the paper, on your fridge or the bedroom walls, they become real and somehow unaviodable. Telling myself "I'll do it in two hours" just stopped working. It's a simple thing, but the approach can change completely.
I realise there are a lot of people who cannot afford this luxury - children on unpredictable work schedule is not something to ignore. In this case doing long-term plans insetad of the weekly once may be the way forward to start noticing changes.
3. Learn to rest when needed, not when you have to
Like most of us I tend to forget about the whole world while programming. I drive myself to the point when hours pass and I don't even realise - only to find that it's late at night and I'm actually exhausted. In those moments I usually can't look at my code anymore and everything frustrates me.
Pushing yourself to the limits trying to make up for the time lost at work or daily chores can easliy drive you crazy. Not to mention about the constant lack of focus so needed for proper coding.
During there crazy times I force myself to set an alarm every hour to stand from my computer and see the world behind the window for a minute. This small change allowed me to keep my mind fresh and therefore enhance my productivity in the long run.
These simple on paper changes were not easy in real life at all - they required a lot of self-discipline, which is a base ingredient to any success. Whiile I advance my conding skills I realise more and more how much work needs to be done, but now it doesn't break me down. Hopefully my ways will turn out useful for you as well.
Why picture of chickens, you ask? Why not?