>I've been considering the 10p bedtime/5a wake up so I can do side projects in the morning, but this still only adds 1.5 hours of time for a total of 3 hours a day.

Do it.

3 hours per day, 5 days a week for an entire year is 720 hours. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And it's not like you need to always do it. Try it out, see if it is for you, worst case you cross the idea off your list.

My only important personal goal this year is to spend 500 hours working on personal goals. Pretty conservative pace (1 hour on 4 weekdays and 6 hours on the weekend), but sticking to anything consistently for an entire year would be a huge personal achievement.

This is awesome. A lot can be accomplished with 500 hours and yes, perhaps the best achievement is sticking to that goal consistently.

Irony of ironies, I'm actually coming to understand the importance of having "tickets", a backlog, and revisiting progress on a bi-weekly basis (sprints)

On the flipside, the single best thing you can do for your mental health and quality of life is to get more sleep.

Yes, exactly. Life is a marathon and if you put in consistent effort you'll make it to the "finish line". Perhaps slower than some others who had more time to move more quickly or with significant breaks, but you’ll get there.

Maybe a polarizing opinion, but if you put yourself in a box that “doesn’t have enough time” just because you have a commute, are a parent, [insert other excuse here], then it’s the equivalent of sitting at the start line and watching everyone, even the walkers, tread ahead. It's okay if that's what you want, but it is a choice.

Well said, live is a marathon not a sprint.

That's pretty much how my schedule works out too. The only thing is, by the time I get my kids to bed around 9 or so, I'm so exhausted, mentally and physically, that investing time in my side business is just not gonna happen.

I would guess in an average week, I have about 5 quality hours where I do not have an obligation to someone or something else and am able to spend it as I see fit.

That's pretty close to my routine as well, and by the end of the day I was a lot of the time too tired to put much (if any) effort into my side project.

As a New Years Resolution, I've been getting up at 5:30 each morning to get 1.5 hours to do my own thing in the mornings, and so far it's been going well. I would still like more time, but constantly getting small amounts done is a great motivator.

I also start a new job in a few weeks that is 4 days a week so I can spend a full day each week on my project. I'll take a small financial hit, but I'm hoping that will be enough to get something worth shipping out the door. If it all goes up in flames, I can always go back to full time without having risked too much.

Thats a more realistic breakdown. So thinking out loud, this means that maybe one needs to think and figure out the "what to do" ahead of time, while during other mundane activities, to the point of very clear tasks. And then do the tasks during the 1.5 "me" time.

Just a suggestion. It has worked for me before, but I am with you in general. Most days in the 1.5 hr "me" time that I have, Netflix/Hulu on the couch/chair with an IPA sounds pretty great at that point :)

I have a very similar schedule. I use 5am to 630pm to work on my side project. Sure, I only get 1.5 hours a day but it works for me, and over the past 4 years I've made enough progress to keep me happy. My primary motivator is the joy of working on my own idea, but hope to launch this in the next 2 years. (I'm working on an app.)

This is my schedule exactly. Cutting coffee made it so much easier to just crash out at 10, which shifts “me” time to the morning when I’m more in the mood to be productive.

Outsource some of the work you do while you work and commute. Say, outsource 3-4 hours a day, pick up 1-2 hours as you can. Then your project moves 4-6 hrs a day. I do this, using my income for someone else to build by muse.

That's what I do as well. My most productive hours are in the morning, so that's why I give them to my personal-job rather than my professional-job.