I've heard this called before the "4 hour life", you have 4 hours every day for yourself: https://medium.com/@pskallas/4-hour-life-glossary-4740bca641...

I wouldn’t mind if it was my 4 best hours a day, but it’s the 4 hours after work and dinner when my energy levels allow for a half effort workout and a bit of reading or TV.

One of the best things I did for myself was moving all of that free time to the morning. Now I wake up at 5, have coffee, exercise, play or work on whatever hobby has my attention at the moment, then work all day. I have loads of focus and attention and energy for my fun things.

Evening is pretty much make dinner, eat, relax for a bit and be in bed reading by 8.

This can be a good strategy until you have young kids. After then, they often hear you get up and then seek you out to get help making breakfast or want to sit on your lap.

But otherwise, it prioritises your side project while you're fresh in the morning and puts relaxing (movie/TV/etc) for when you're fading at the end of the day.

A lot depends upon how much sleep your kids need too.

Our first would sleep 12 hours per night. Yay, lots of free time.

Our second sleeps 9 hours per night. Whoops.

That's a good point - I don't have kids and don't have any good advice on how to work around them. :)

I recently found myself in the same position by being in Asia while working for a European company. All my free time is in the morning without having to wake up early (in the dark). I go surfing or swimming/gym and then work 12pm-11pm with some breaks for lunch and dinner. I go to bed straight after working, which means I've stopped drinking. It's made a huge difference to my quality of life and I hope I can keep this up forever. Having to wake up and go straight to work seems like a depressing thought now.

Generally true. The next step of optimization would be automating parts of your job so you can reduce 8 hours of work to like 6 hours of work. Now you have more time for yourself.

Well, unless your job requires you to be present for 8 hours, in which case it's harder to use those 2 new hours.

If presence is all that is required during those 2 hours, there are some useful things you can do: Think. Make plans on paper. Study.

except in practice this never works. you cant automate all tasks, even as a programmer a lot of time is spent architecting or debugging, even requirements gathering in some cases. Those details aside, if you automated hours of your job away youd then be asked to do more work (or if you own the place youd probably want to improve your product more anyway) instead of just sitting around working on your own projects during business hours, which some businesses would fire you for or at least theyd claim your work as their intellectual property.

Even if you don’t go as far as working on side projects at work, automating even 30min-1hr worth of manual tasks can leave you less exhausted when you get home.

You don't have to tell your office every time you automate a task do you?

So you can do 2 more hours of work, you mean?

> you can reduce 8 hours of work to like 6 hours of work.

even if you assume this is possible, why would your boss pay you for the 8 hours when it clearly is possible to only pay 6? You end up back where you're started.

The issue here is that the income you generate from your job is not enough. I dont know what the solution is - but under a capitalist world-view, the only solution is to own more capital, get that capital to produce your income stream (dividends or capital gains or whatever), and thus, give yourself back time.

AKA, this is called retiring, and if you can do it early, you end up with a better life, able to spend your energies on activities you care about (such as making this game).

This doesn't acknowledge weekends, which if you have the same 8 hours sleep and 4 hours "not for yourself", add more than 50% to the time you supposedly have "for yourself". (4×5 + 12×2 vs 4×7.)

Which doesn't necessarily change the point, but I'm not sure what if anything the point is supposed to be, and it seems an important omission.

Don't usually have much extra time on the weekends. Weekends are for making up for a week of the house getting dirty, relatives and friends wanting to meet, extra long walks for the dogs that only got short walks during the week, errands that got put off, some catchup sleep, actually relaxing a bit since there wasn't much during the week, etc.

I might have 2-3 hours each day (of energy and motivation) to work on projects but not 8. Of course I never have 4 hours during the week either, I'm lucky to get 1 in usually.

> relatives and friends wanting to meet

which is why some people who have the discipline and self-control to do a big personal project often have to neglect friends and family - it's a sacrifice.

Sure. I'm not saying I haven't made sacrifices for personal projects before, especially when I was younger, but I'm also not willing to become a total hermit and slave for these projects that are not really going anywhere.

Hell, I'm still waiting on my first board game signed by a publisher four years ago to be manufactured and released, and it sounds like it's still on the backburner at their company (they had a rough two years from the pandemic, I get it). And I've had another game be a finalist in two game design competitions since then and still not find a publisher willing to take a chance on it (several other finalists in the same competitions have). And I've pitched at least a dozen of my other designs to quite a few publishers as well.

Still churning and pitching but after seven years of trying and not getting anywhere, it's rough. I know if I went full time I'd have a lot more success (especially seeing how much success a friend of mine is having in only about 3 years of being full-time at it), but I'm not willing to start working for 30% of my current salary or possibly a lot less just to throw a few more board games into the field that's already supersaturated from the past decade of constant new and quality releases, especially when most publishers are facing an existential threat from the current shipping crisis.

I'm also working on a couple of smaller video games, but there are weeks where it just seems like I'm too busy or tired to spend time on it. And it's hard to go "yes, let's make the sacrifice of not seeing friends and ignoring my family" when I'm really not seeing how I'm going to break through the flood of video games out there either. I'm not an artist, I'm not going to make the next Stardew Valley or Undertale by myself. I'm making games with hexes and arrows in them :) Fun games, and one of them was even a popular free flash game back in the day and also won awards, but most people have probably moved on now and the new generation won't have any nostalgia for it.

Still feel like I need to make it anyway though.

youre not alone. Unless i actively maintain my apartment itll deteriorate over the week (i even meal prep weekends to alleviate some) i do agree with others though. More time spent disengaging from the work your doing may actually net you a positive in the productivity dept

Weekends aren't necessarily free time.

Saturdays and Sundays are chore days, or family days, or simply resting, or ...

About 4h remaining for yourself is still fairly realistic.

I assume that for most people the "not for yourself" time is bigger on the weekends, it is for me and the people around me.

Indeed. In my case, ever since I became a parent, I consider weekends a total write-off.

One simple trick to exit the labor class; investment banking MDs hate him; "how can one man achieve so much?":

Work less, but keep clocking the same amount of hours.

A lot easier to do with WFH, but still achievable if you're in an office cubicle.

Impossible to do if you work a trade/labor-intensive job.

Or open office where everyone can see your triple monitor screen and it’s a company work station so you literally can’t do anything else, can’t even open a personal laptop. Any cellular data reception is very bad.

I worked in an open office for years and never understood how people did things besides work. I tried 100% remote but that got lonely.

Now that I have an office, it's like I'm living a completely different life where there's energy for meaningful activities after work. I get so much more done. The socialization is down from 2019 but there's a feeling to being in a building full of people that's different from being stuck in your house all day.

I can't imagine accepting an open plan office job again, the money would have to be life changing. I suspect cubicles would be fine.

Edit: when I said "did things besides work" I meant "did things outside of work" not "goof off at work"

Just wanted to mention that this is getting harder and harder - companies will just let you use their approved hardwared, full of monitoring software to keep you in line. And it will get much worse, as in Mana by Marshall Brain

That is literally illegal, at least at my job.

In my experience, sacrificing sleep is extremely counter productive. You could probably cut out 1 to 2 hours of work, get 8 hours of sleep a night and be just as effective at your job as you would have been getting 6 hours of sleep a night.

10 hours work 2 hours commute 8 hours sleep 2 hours food and maintenance leaves 2 hours to do all the rest.