Why work on your side project for 30 minutes a day?
Last week I published a post about my bumpy ride towards regular work on my side projects. It wasn’t pretty, but I’m glad I did. My DK30 challenge ended yesterday. I’m still able to keep up at least one commit a day in my public repositories on Github. I’ve grown to appreciate the green colour on that main page.
All of this took around 18 hours over the past 27 days. Here’s the Toggl report for that time period and work on my scripts for migrating data between Toggl and Google Calendar:
But why would I do that? Those 18 hours would surely be better spent watching the latest season of Rick and Morty or working on my League of Legends ranked ELO rating. Even if you cared about working on your project, why pour some time every day on it if I could get the equal hour count by working over 6 days for 3 hours each. Why do it every day? Well, I’m glad you asked ;)
I found significant benefits of sticking to a daily schedule. I hope it may work for you for the following reasons:
- Spaced repetition is a powerful learning technique
- Your brain likes routine
- Positive feedback loop for motivation
Spaced repetition
Many people recommended this learning technique to me in the past. This is the key concept behind any Flashcard system. I’m sure you’ve come across Spaced repetition many times in the past. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I’ll give you a quick rundown.
It comes down to learning by quizzing yourself in increasing or decreasing time intervals. When you learn something, ask yourself about it tomorrow. If you answer correctly, ask yourself in 4 days. Then in 16 days. If you’re wrong, go back to 4 days. And so on. Once you answer 5 times in a row, you can stop quizzing yourself on that question. All of the numbers in the Spaced repetition system can be adjusted as you see fit, but I hope you get the gist of it.
I found this method best described in Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers book or her free Learning how to learn course on Coursera.
Your brain likes routine
Have you noticed you get hungry around lunchtime if you eat lunch at similar time every day? If you fall asleep around the same time, there is a high probability that you get sleepy at that time. If you check social media or play video games or mobile games at the same time each day, it feels really weird to skip it. If you’ve been doing one thing every single day, you develop a craving for it. At some point your autopilot switches on and it’s becomes difficult not to do something you’re used to. It’s difficult to break bad habits, especially if you’ve developed a strong routine, such as “I smoke a cigarette on my way to work every single day”.
Positive routines are a bit more difficult to develop. Activities like going to the gym or doing hard, focused work never become truly automatic. But if you do these things repeatedly they become easier. Your brain doesn’t really distinguish between positive and negative routines. It is more of a productive sloth. It has to run many processes, but it also loves expending the least amount of effort possible. In simplified terms, it thinks “my host does this one thing repeatedly, so they must care about it. I will find a way for this action to be easier in order to save energy”.
You can use your brain’s affinity for routines to make tough tasks easier. If you repeatedly work on your side project every day for at least 5 minutes, you’ll get much better at putting in the work. And even though it will never become automatic, you’ll find, that sitting down to work on day 29 will be much easier after 28 days.
I don’t think this topic is controversial anymore. I don’t think it requires much of a proof or links to scientific studies. If you need those I can recommend the book How to Be Miserable by Randy J. Paterson or the 6 minute CGP Grey video based on it. There are also many books dealing with the theory of habit building. Probably the most famous of these in the past few years was The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
Positive feedback loop
Working on your project for 3 hours at a time isn’t very difficult if you’re excited about the topic at hand. You’ve just had a truly genius idea and sat right down to implementing it. It feels exhilarating, doesn’t it? Will that feeling last over the next 3 weeks? Will you feel that same level of excitement after 6 months? How about 2 years?
I’ve started many different side projects in the past. Most of them didn’t get out of the planning phase. Out of those that did, only one survived the first 2 weeks of development. I wrote about it last week. The key to this project lasting for as long as it does is consistency. It’s much easier for me to just sit down and work on it now, even if I don’t feel like doing it. I don’t care if it’s just for 5 minutes to tweak some configs or plan out next steps in the Readme file. It’s crucial to do something, anything. And most days, when I sit down for 5 minutes, I end up putting in 30 or even 60 minutes.
My main source of motivation is the fact that I’ve worked for around 50 days already, and I want to keep the pace up. This is the same reason websites like Duolingo use streaks to keep you coming back. Having the streak to maintain creates a positive feedback loop inside my mind which makes me feel that every time I put in the work, it will be easier for me to do it the next day. I love Github’s representation of those streak’s (screenshot above) because even if I skip the day, there will be a lot of green boxes around it., instead of the streak number plummeting down to 0.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits
In summary
Why work on your side project every single day?
I hope that I’ve shown you that doing it daily for 30 minutes (or even less!) improves your learning and information retention thanks to leveraging Spaced repetition. Putting in the work daily can feel easier by using your brain’s fondness for routines. You will feel more motivated to keep at it even after your initial excitement for the project wanes.
These reasons together show that working on your side project every day is an excellent long-term strategy for you and your project. Paired with choosing project with “Winning even if you fail” in mind, you'll learn more and remember it for longer. I highly recommend building up your skillset and side-projects with daily routines in mind.
Hope you enjoyed this post! How would you go about building your side project now?