Accidentally in Code

Tag: side projects

  • The Myth of the Intersection of Creativity, Energy, and Time

    The Myth of the Intersection of Creativity, Energy, and Time

    intersection - Plain

    There’s a common myth that makes side projects close to impossible. It’s thinking that side projects can only happen at the intersection of energy, creativity, and time.

    That’s a pretty high bar. That intersection doesn’t come around all that often. For me, it’s usually about day 3 of a 3 day weekend.

    The UK has 8 public holiday days a year… so that’s 8 days a year. Max.

    Say half of these work out, and on each you get 6 hours of solid work done. That’s a whopping… 24 hours a year.

    Don’t get me wrong. These may well be the best 24 hours of the year. But, we have 168 hours every week. What if we could carve out 4 of them, every week?

    Our side projects might start to move a lot faster… or at all.

    Creativity

    This comes down to: pick one thing.

    If you have too few ideas, well, you only need one.

    If you have too many, how do you pick?

    Too Few

    • Jam with a friend!
    • Solve a problem you face yourself.
    • Answer a question: “Is it possible to…?”
    • A university project you wanted to extend?
    • Some feature of a platform you want to explore? (e.g. as an iOS dev I was keen to make something on Android that took advantage of intents).

    Seek our creativity:

    • Solo travel! (my fave)
    • Art galleries (an art gallery in Hong Kong encouraged me to start coding on a side project I’d had in mind for a long time).
    • Science museums.
    • Go somewhere to think: take a long walk, or go swimming (I solve so many problems and have so many ideas in the swimming pool).

    Too Many

    • What is the closest to done? Finish things first.
    • What can you build on later (i.e. projects that will teach you things to know in other, more complicated projects).
    • What has fewer dependencies (e.g. your collaborator has gone AWOL).
    • What will be most useful to learn.
    • What is the best break from your day to day?

    Energy

    Our energy is often sapped by work, especially when our work is not rewarding. We need side projects most when we are close to burn out, but that is often when we have the least energy. Days are often long in the tech industry, and work travel derails personal schedules and habits.

    Remember: Energy is renewable.

    Some ways to renew your energy:

    • Remind yourself what you love.
    • Disconnect from the office over the year (focusing on something else is the best distraction).
    • Small wins create bigger wins.
    • Aim for the next minimum shippable improvement.
    • There’s no need to be secretive.

    Where do You Draw Energy From?

    At one point, I was going home in tears several days a week. There were a lot of things wrong with my job at the time but here were the big two: 1) not shipping (for reasons outside of my control), and 2) not feeling appreciated.

    By focusing on side projects where I had control of the feature set, and the priorities, and all of it, I could decide when to ship. And of course it was a much lower bar, it was “here’s something interesting”, not “here is a new product!”.

    And when I started to put things that I was making, and writing, out into the world, people started to notice, and say nice things to me, and about my work, and I started to get the appreciation that I needed, and feel like I was doing things that were worthwhile.

    When I’ve thought that what I did all day at work was meaningless, creating things that people found useful redressed this balance. And even if I came home in tears, it helped me get up and do it again the following morning. And over time, it helped me gain the confidence to go and find a better place to be. And when I’ve felt like I don’t have much to say about my day-to-day, I have a story to tell about my side projects, and things that I’ve learned, and what I’ve built.

    Time

    Giving up TV

    Everyone is short on time, and the standard advice is “cut out TV”.

    I don’t think this is helpful advice, I think people watch TV because they are too tired to decide what else to do. Because it’s nice to escape. After a long day a great TV series is a way to absorb yourself in someone else’s life, and forget about the things you should be addressing in your own.

    Personally my rule is, TV is OK, but not just TV. I watch most of my TV in the gym, it’s a great way to get enough cardio. Especially with dramas, like Covert Affairs. She’s running… I’m running… there’s shooting.. faster faster!

    Or whilst writing unit tests. I decide what they should be, then fill in the mindless boilerplate (Java has a lot of mindless boilerplate) whilst Keeping Up With the Kardashians plays in the background.

    Because no side project is 100% fun, although I understand my comprehensive unit testing strategy is somewhat aberrational. There will always be some dull, or less demanding tasks. Like setting up your environment, or downloading bits and pieces.

    So “I’m tired, I’m just going to watch some TV” can become “I’m tired, I’m just going to watch some TV and do some [task requiring less concentration]”. And somehow, I’ve caught up with the Kardashians and also made some progress.

    Even if it wasn’t amazing progress, even if it took twice as long because what is she wearing? Progress is progress.

    That One Hour Before Work

    The other advice is to find an hour before work. Definitely regardless of whether it is exercise or a side project, there’s something very powerful of knowing that whatever happens over the course of the rest of the day I have already done something that is just for me.

    However decisions in the morning are really hard. That’s why if you want to work out you’re supposed to pack your gym back the night before. But then you get advice like “write for an hour in the morning” and the first time I tried this I woke up and drew a blank, “write what?”

    Luckily I keep a very detailed task list, which includes blog posts I mean to write. So I just looked at what was at the top of the list, and wrote it. Draft over, I went to work. Then later I edited it and scheduled it.

    I live under the continual delusion that Future-Cate is going to be super-human, and I’m continually proven wrong. I’ve learned that Future-Cate in the morning is going to be a mindless zombie, so if I want her to crank out some of the stuff on my endless todo list, I need to make it really, really easy for her.

    Because future me, past me, and me as I write this, we’re all the same. We all find starting to be the hardest part. And yet in the throes of creativity, I never remember that. I think “what an amazing idea” as I pace up and down the swimming pool. I’m convinced that I will have it fully articulated within 30 minutes of walking in my front door.

    But actually by then I’m asleep and I forgot to hang my swimsuit out to dry, as well.

    You can do a lot with one hour, as long as none of it is spent wondering what to do, or looking for inspiration. Make your creative self put their brilliant ideas on a detailed task list, and your zombie self can probably knock one out before 8am.

    There is No You in Team

    I love being a software engineer. I love making things, big things, as part of a team. I love working with designers, because I appreciate great aesthetics but can’t create them, and I love working with good product managers, who care deeply about and take the time to deeply understand the user so I can trust their judgement and focus on building, coding, testing.

    But my side projects, they are all about me. What I want to make, what I want to learn, what I’m inspired by.

    And so amid decisions I don’t agree with, be they product or engineering, when some guy shoves me out the way to get what he wants, my side projects are this space on the internet, on my computer that is all mine.

    Everything else, it’s just a technique for making progress, and these work! Try them! But really your side project starts in the place where you decide that you want to carve something out that is all for you.

    It might grow, or it might fail. But it’s yours.

    Failing

    I had this idea for a side project, I was sure it was brilliant. Back in 2011. I wanted to be able to visualize a series of photos. I found the perfect layout (the sunflower layout) and then… did nothing with it. Later I returned to it and discovered that extracting the dominant color in an image was much more complicated than I had thought. I learned about different color spaces, the difference between HSB and RBG, and ended making my own image filters. Turned out, the original idea sucked. For starters, it takes forever to run. Secondly, it just doesn’t look as compelling as I thought it would! But making my own image filters became the main project, and later a book chapter.

    In so many ways, this project was a failure. Firstly, it’s kinda ugly. Second, it took nearly 3 years.

    But in other ways, it was a huge success. I applied some stuff that I’d had no need to apply before (the way images are just an array of pixels), and learned things about colour that I hadn’t previously known. And it was a great topic for a book chapter, and of course I’d had that common goal about seeing my name in print.

    It started, on one of those amazing 8 days of the year (although I lived in Ontario, Canada then, so technically it was 9). And really, it was a super fun day. But it ended up where it is because I found ways to carve out some time out of every week, every 168 hours, for the things I wanted to build, and that I wanted to write.

    4 hours a week will get you further than you think.

  • 5 Strategies For Making Progress on Side Projects

    5 Strategies For Making Progress on Side Projects

    cress keyboard
    Credit: Wikipedia

    I get asked on a regular basis how I manage to maintain a blog (and other side projects) on top of my job, especially since I almost never write anything specifically about my job. I actually wish I was better at and more productive on my side-projects, but that might be step zero – to let go of trying to be perfect and just focus on achieving something.

    Schedule

    I don’t have a social media strategy as much as I have a schedule. I use Buffer to schedule interesting articles I find to my Twitter feed to share 3 a day (the limit of 10 on a personal account is sometimes annoying, but I use it as a barrier on batching up too far in advance). This is one of the least important things, and one it is very hard to measure the ROI of, but has the side effect of capturing interesting things I find and making it easier to locate them again. If I’m too busy, the buffer empties out and don’t have anything to share, I don’t really mind. I read a lot, so this will typically sort itself out pretty quickly.

    My blog has the far more important schedule. After about 6 months of posting 3x a week and building up some leeway in posts that are written but haven’t gone out yet, I was able to move to a schedule of Monday: travel and personal, Wednesday: tech-related, alternating general tech and more women-focused ones, Friday: reviews, notes from talks I’ve attended, the odd how-to (like this one). Sundays I post a weekly round up which serves partly as a way to collect all the interesting things I’ve shared on Twitter.

    The leeway of having at least an extra week’s worth of content is really helpful, and for the last few months this has meant that I can write about pretty much whatever I wanted at any point, and then just slot it in, as it would eventually balance out.

    The schedule is king, not the content. I think producing something on this regular a basis is more important than how good I think any of it actually is. Firstly, because you only get better with practise. Secondly, I am a poor judge of what people will actually relate to – some of my most popular posts I was convinced would have no value to anyone else.

    Lists

    My side project TODO lists is much more fine grained than the TODO list that fits on one postit at work, and includes incredibly minor things, like “change colour of X”, and “add section for Y”. It is also broken down by project. This is because the gaps between things are bigger, and returning to something really easy will get me started, and hopefully moving on to bigger things as I get into it. Also because I have no-one else to catch anything that I miss. If I forget to change the colour of X, no UX designer will ever file a bug against me.

    It doesn’t matter how you do it, but when something isn’t your primary focus, you need a clear record of next steps. The hardest thing is accepting you need to document what is next when you’ve been so absorbed that you are convinced you will remember. You won’t.

    Ship Small and Often

    I think we can be afraid to launch our half-finished thoughts out into the world. But for side projects, I think it’s important to chill out about that and just ship where we are at. If you look through my image filter posts, you can see it building up bit by bit (including failed ideas). My Distractedly Intimate talk (and writing) builds on this and this and this and this.

    Share, and iterate. Let go of perfection. Keep going. If you’ve learned something, or created something (even if it doesn’t have unit tests, or isn’t production ready) put it out there. I believe in execution over ideas, and I think being precious about keeping ideas to yourself in case someone else gets there first is pointless.

    One By One

    This comes back to execution over ideas. I’m not short on ideas, and being “inspired” can be a really effective procrastination technique. I document my ideas, if they are exciting enough that I might want to pursue them later, but stay focused on one project at a time modulo urgency (i.e. I might take some time away from my “main” project to focus on a talk I’m prepping).

    The hardest thing is finishing. Finishing doesn’t even mean launching – it means got what I wanted to out of this project. For my image filter project, I did my experiments and learned what I wanted to but didn’t feel the need to make it into an “app”. I’d achieved my goal, and wanted to focus on something else. So I moved on to other things, but came back to it and turned it into an app when something else came up that built on it – a thing with an external deadline, so it pushed other projects out due to urgency. When that is over, I’ll go back to my next closest-to-finished-thing.

    The point is – it’s hard to do side projects, making it a side project makes it far more possible. Limiting myself to one also means that I define what “finished” is.

    Strategic Saturdays

    It’s really easy for me to write a blog post, at most it will take a couple of hours. 30 minutes before work is will product a first draft at least, or between dinner and the gym in the evening.

    It’s harder to find the time for things like coding, or longer-form writing, things that I feel like I need space in which to complete and focus on them. This is what I describe as “strategic” time. I don’t expect to find this during the week, my goal is to carve out 4 hours of strategic time over the weekend. This should also be a peak working time, which for me is the afternoon. So ideally I’ll do some smaller things or something fun in the morning, hit my stride after an early lunch, and head to the gym in the evening. Or start with a shorter workout, have brunch, and then focus time.

    I call these “Strategic Saturdays” after a course I took in December, because I also sometimes use this for work-work. When I step outside my day-to-day and put together a proposal for something longer term, this is often a small focused 2-4 hour block that I carve out of my weekend. But I’ve found that unlike allowing my day-to-day job to bleed into my weekend, this has a much better ROI.

    I can find one such block in a weekend, and not every weekend. So it’s important to use it well. Really focus on that most important project, whatever it happens to be, and really get in the groove. If I’ve used it well, I can often make incremental progress during the week, but if I’ve used it really well then I don’t need to.

    So What?

    I think side projects are helpful for a number of reasons: raising my profile externally (and sometimes internally), learning things that I’m interested in but not doing day-to-day, managing burnout by spending some time on things that I have more control over.

    They are a luxury. I can make this time because I don’t need to work insane hours at my actual job, and because I have no dependants. So, I don’t subscribe to the idea that everyone should have one or that it’s some kind of measure of anyone’s ability to do a technical job.

    But, I do think if you have something you really want to build, or write about, or both, you can do it without giving up your entire non-work life to it. This is how I manage that. Your results may vary.