Time management for hobbies is really hard. In the grand scheme of things, there will always be things that come up: weddings; work; other projects (Oh man I often get distracted by other projects I want to complete). I figured it’s worth sharing some time management skills specifically for long term hobby projects.

1. Know when to sprint, and when to jog

I love thinking in terms of models and there are many different ways to model these two modes of work: working off of passion vs working off of discipline; Right brain/R-mode working vs left brain/L-mode working. No matter what model of “Modes of work” you subscribe to, you’ll need both in order to produce a good project. 

To me sprinting means blocking out 4 hours or a day and ignore all other chores and social activities. Or maybe committing all of your free time to the project for a week. But the idea is not to think about the long term and only focus on the immediate, enjoyable tasks. Set the project as your highest, non-important priority (still spend time with your family and take care of hygiene!). 

Sprinting is good in the following scenarios

• At the beginning of your project. Work as fast as you can to get some working prototype. Game Jams, or taking a day PTO just to marinate in your idea and mess around with what feels fun.
• When you are struck with creative insight. Sometimes you think of a great idea and you need to try it out right away. Practice writing down the idea or if you’re able to, drop whatever you’re doing and start right away!
• When you are working alone or in groups of <=3. If you already have a team, sprinting is actually bad because sprinting is much less consistent. A buddy of mine at work said “It’s better to have a consistent, predictable 1x-er rather than an unstable 10-xer. After working in the industry for 5 years, I agree with him. If you decide to sprint while working on a large team, make sure your communication channels are set up properly so other people know what’s done and what’s not. 

So what’s the opposite of sprinting? It’s jogging. Weirdly enough, 2 hours a week, over 4 weeks is better long term than 8 hours in one day. The key to jogging is building habits, increasing consistency and storing context in your long term memory. Everyone has their own “Optimal working session” where you can get a good amount of work done, but not feel burnt out afterwards (It’s usually between 1-3 hours). 

Jogging is good in the following scenarios

• You have a plan laid out and you just need to actually execute it
• The boring parts of the project (for me it was menus, error handling and tutorials)
• When you have a team of artists, and sound engineers, and you need to let each other know when different parts of the game need to be done.

I’ll tell one example of how even after a year of game deving I still make mistakes between sprinting and jogging. One time I was struck with inspiration on Sunday afternoon and I set aside a big chunk of time to try out my new idea. I got it to work but by the time I finished, I was mentally exhausted and felt I needed to wind down and relax. So I played Factorio until I felt calm and relaxed…  3am. I messed up my sleep schedule and my actual work suffered for the entire week. Mastering sprinting and jogging will help you sustain your side project and have a healthy work-hobby-life balance.

2. For Jogging, Measure inputs, not outputs. For sprinting, don’t measure at all.

For creative works like gamedev, you’ll never actually know how long to spend on a feature. Even professionals in the industry can’t predict the duration of a specific task. For example, I tried to write a gentle bobbing script where my title text would randomly move within a small area. Seemed like a simple task and I thought it would take 2 hours. It ended up taking 8 WHOLE hours! 

When jogging, experiment with your “Optimal working session” and think about it only in terms of how many hours you put in. Thinking about output while jogging will only discourage you if you don’t finish, or cause you to end early and not be as productive (I don’t actually jog in real life but I assume it’s similar. Too fast and you can’t run as far, too slow and you can’t win the race).

Since sprinting is passion based, it’s always fun to see the output so I’d say don’t even bother measure hours when sprinting. Work until you run out of gas or the task is completed. It’s more enjoyable that way (but make sure you have lots of buffer so you don’t fall asleep at 3am on a worknight).

3. Forgive yourself

The last thing I wanted to talk about with respect for time management is to forgive yourself. Things will come up, you are not perfect and there will always be something to learn. One antipattern is “oh I missed my working session last week, I should work double this time to make up for it”. Avoid this as much as possible and just do the one session of work. This will end up with a huge pile of “guilt debt” that makes it even harder to go back to your project. If you end up making up hours, consider it “bonus hours” rather than “debt hours”. Do your best to forgive yourself while maintaining the habits you’ve built up.

These are the top three tips I’ve learned. I’d love to hear some of your time management tips in the comments below!

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