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Ask HN: How do you make time?

by kfullert on 2/12/14, 10:05 PM with 5 comments

I'm 33, from the UK (around 30-40miles outside of London), married, two children who I'm sole provider for, work full-time (mixture of development, consultancy and support) and kind of at the top of where I can go without involving massive upheaval to progress in my current company (I work full-time from home, however to move into a pure development/consultancy role I'd have to commute 2hrs each way to the office every day of the week, or move closer to the office which isn't where we'd want to live)

I work primarily in .NET/MSSQL during the day (but love Ruby), and by the time everything is done in the evening (dinner, kids to bed etc.) I've not got the desire/motivation to do anything other than some casual gaming.

Is this common, I'd love to work with Ruby/Rails for a startup, but my professional experience is all .NET based, so the salary cut I'd have to take seems to be massive - any tips/pointers as to what/where I should be doing?

  • by avenger123 on 2/12/14, 11:42 PM

    Sometimes we just have to slow down in order to let life catch up for us.

    I think anyone with two or more kids that are still young (let's say less than 7-8 years old) its just too much effort to get stuff going on the side that don't involve your 8 hour work day. Something's got to give if we want to be more than superficially involved with our kids lives when they are young.

    The flexibility you have right now is really not to be taken lightly. You have no commute and you can control your schedule somewhat.

    My recommendation would be to beef up your RoR skills and start applying for remote work that you could do alongside your day job. At some point, with enough experience you should be able to get a full time remote job making what you are now.

    The only way to do that is ruthless time management. This starts with waking up early in the morning - 5 or 5:30 AM and going from there. Weekends would also include waking up this early and getting work done. Your "free" time would essentially be the time with your family. Any other time would involve pursing your goals. So, no TV, no hanging out with buddies unnecessarily.

    All this is hard but that's what we get for wanting to raise a family and make something of ourselves. The light at the end of the tunnel for this is that once your kids are older and much more self sufficient, you can basically be a rocket with your habits and accelerate fast.

  • by glenntnorton on 2/13/14, 6:33 AM

    Our lives sound nearly identical (39/married/3 kids) I've found that finding time gets a little easier the older the kids get. (now ages 8 - 14). When they were younger, it was really tough. Personally, I'd try the commuting before moving. Moving eats up everyone's time.

  • by kfullert on 2/14/14, 3:55 PM

    Thanks for all the comments, regarding why Ruby and not .NET, it purely comes down to the fact that a) I like Ruby as a language (and have been using it for various "toy" projects since probably 2005/2006 time) and b) hosting costs (I already run a few Linux servers and am comfortable running it, whereas the cost to run a Windows server + associated admin time/costs are slightly prohibitive to me at the moment

  • by GFischer on 2/13/14, 7:20 PM

    I'm all for learning new stuff, but since you're already strong in .NET, would ASP.NET MVC 5 + Entity Framework 6 fit you better if you want to do your own startup?

    Or do you want to work for startups in your area, and Ruby is a common requirement in the UK?

    It sounds tough getting some time for yourself in your scenario.

  • by jsnk on 2/12/14, 10:55 PM

    Disclaimer: I am only 26, got no kids. In a long distance relationship, and I spend 1/2 to 1 hour on the phone.

    Some things I found useful are

    - Audiobook during commutes that's usually 2 hours/day.

    - 1 hour a day rule. I try to spend at least 1 hour a day working towards a goal.

    - Cook less. Cooking is usually much healthier, but cooking takes up a lot of time.

    - Use stayfocused chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...). I wasted too much time on Reddit and HN. I give myself an hour on these sites per day.

    As for Rails specific improvements, I think creating your own blogging platform is a good challenge which covers a lot of conventional problems.