Most advice about building side projects while working full time and raising a child leads to the same prescription: wake up earlier, sleep less, use every empty minute. It sounds disciplined. Real life is less tidy. Some evenings I do not have the energy to open the laptop. On others, after everyone is asleep, two surprisingly good hours appear. My system lives between those two versions of me.
This is not a story about keeping up with everything. I do not. Sometimes I am very disciplined: bounded issue, separate branch, tests, review, done. Sometimes the same issue looks at me for three evenings. This is a note about continuing to build without pretending that only one of those evenings is real.
Energy is the bottleneck, not the calendar
Two free hours on the calendar do not mean I have two clear hours in my head. A difficult architecture decision after a full workday is not the same as cleaning up two small tasks. I learned that late. Forcing difficult work on a tired evening left me both stuck and annoyed with myself.
I find it more realistic to group work by energy:
- High energy: product decisions, architecture, difficult debugging
- Medium energy: a bounded feature, tests, content editing
- Low energy: issue grooming, documentation, small cleanup
This way a low-energy evening is not automatically a wasted evening. Cleaning up two issues can be progress. Knowing where to start tomorrow is better than leaving a refactor open in five files.
The biggest problem is not a shortage of ideas
I do not struggle to find new ideas. The difficult part is limiting active work in progress. Every project requires more than code: domains, dependencies, issues, deployments, security notices, and mental context all need maintenance.
Projects such as qix.gg, Parq, NextREL, LensCareer, Bus Stop Challenger, and this blog are useful learning environments. They cannot all be the active priority at the same time. I need at least three portfolio states:
- Active: A small number of projects receiving regular delivery
- Maintenance: Running projects that receive only necessary care
- Parked: Projects intentionally receiving no current progress
A parked project is not a failed project. It releases mental RAM.
Small closures matter more than big beginnings
Starting is often the most motivating part of a side project. A repository, name, and first screen arrive quickly. Trust in my own process comes from finishing the loop:
- The issue has a bounded scope.
- Work happens on an isolated branch.
- Tests and review complete.
- The change is deployed.
- Production evidence is captured.
- The finished issue closes and attention returns to the backlog.
That list can look too serious for a side project. It sometimes looks that way to me too. It is still lighter than wondering at midnight, “Did I merge that, and which branch is production?” Discipline here is not speed. It is leaving a clean desk for tomorrow.
Do AI agents create more time?
Coding agents make parallel work possible. Research, implementation, tests, and review can be divided. Their output is not free capacity, though. Preparing context, protecting scope, reviewing changes, and rejecting the wrong work still require human attention.
Agents move the bottleneck from typing code toward decisions and review. More agents should not automatically mean more active projects.
Family time is not an empty slot
It is a mistake to treat family time as “time in which a project cannot happen.” That time already belongs to a different priority. A side project is sustainable only when it does not repeatedly borrow from family and recovery.
Sometimes nothing moves for a week. A child, work, home, and plain tiredness can create a more important backlog than mine. I try to judge the system not by that week’s commit count, but by whether I can return without paying a debt of guilt.
Success is no longer finishing every idea. It is keeping my curiosity alive, learning without consuming my family or myself, and occasionally putting a small working thing into the world. Some months are fast and some are slow. The “side” in side project is a boundary, not a flaw.