How to build a side project when you've already got a full-time job

For about two years I built Novaire Digital in the gaps around a full-time marketing job. An hour before work most mornings, a bit more on a Sunday, and the odd evening when I had anything left in the tank. If you're trying to build a side project while working full time, that's the honest shape of it. Not a heroic sprint, just a slow stack of small sessions, most of them shorter and more tired than you'd like.

I'm not going to pretend I cracked some system. I shipped slower than I wanted, missed my own deadlines constantly, and there was a week in Tokyo where I got sick and didn't open the laptop once. But I kept going long enough to actually release things, and the gap between the projects that survived and the ones that died came down to a few unglamorous habits. Here's what held.

Why most side projects die after the first month

The first week is the easy bit. You're excited, the idea's fresh, you'll happily give up a Saturday to it. The problem is week five, when the novelty's worn off and the job's had a rough Monday and the last thing you want after eight hours at a screen is more screen. That's where most projects quietly stop. Not with a decision to quit, just a few skipped sessions that turn into a month, and then you can't remember where you left the code.

What actually catches people out is that motivation isn't the thing you're short of. Time and energy are, and they're not the same thing. I had whole evenings free that I was far too fried to use. An hour of clear-headed morning was worth three of those. So the real question was never how to stay motivated. It was how to build something with the small amount of decent energy I actually had.

Find the hour you actually have, not the one you wish you had

When I started I told myself I'd work on it after dinner. It almost never happened. By 9pm I'd given my best focus to someone else's priorities all day, and I'd just sit there staring at the editor. The fix was boring. I moved it to the morning. Up at six, an hour before the job started, coffee, no phone, one task. Mornings were the only time my head was quiet and nobody could book a meeting over it.

Mornings won't suit everyone, so don't take the time of day as the lesson. The lesson is to find the slot where your energy and your freedom actually overlap, then defend it like it's a real appointment. For me that was 6 to 7am on weekdays and a slow Sunday morning. Call it eight hours a week. It doesn't sound like much. Over a year it's a real product.

You don't need more hours. You need to spend the good ones on the thing that matters to you, instead of whatever's left at the end of the day.

There's a strange upside to only having an hour. You stop faffing. When the clock's that tight you don't reorganise your folders or read another thread about which framework to use, you just do the one thing in front of you. Some of my most focused work happened in those cramped morning sessions precisely because I couldn't afford to waste them.

Shrink the project until it fits the time you've got

The other reason side projects die is that they're too big for the life they have to fit into. A grand idea needs full days you don't have. So I shrank everything. One app at a time, the smallest version of it that's still worth using, and a hard cut of anything that wasn't the core.

Luna Journal started as a much bigger plan in my head, and I cut it back to one thing: open it, talk, get your words back. No accounts, no social feed, no cloud sync to build and babysit. Part of that was the privacy line I wanted to hold anyway, keeping everything on the device. But honestly, a lot of it was just what one person could finish in the hours going spare. The principle and the constraint pointed the same way, which made the call easy.

• Pick one project and park the rest. A list of five is a list of zero when you've got an hour a day.
• Define the smallest thing you'd actually use yourself, and build only that. The extras can come once it's real.
• Break the work into pieces that fit a single session. "Wire up the record button" beats "build the recording feature".
• Keep a one-line note of where you stopped, so tomorrow's hour starts with doing instead of remembering.

That last one saved me more time than any tool. Picking up a cold codebase at 6am is brutal. A sticky note that said "next: fix the timestamp bug, it's in the recorder file" meant I was working inside two minutes instead of twenty.

Protect the project from the job, and yourself from both

Here's the part the productivity posts skip. Doing this around a full-time job is tiring, and if you're not careful you'll burn it at both ends until something gives. For me it was my health first. I let exercise slide, ate badly, stayed up too late just finishing one more thing, and then in Tokyo I got properly sick and lost a week to lying on the floor of a tiny flat. That week taught me the project isn't separate from the rest of my life. Run yourself down and there's no morning session anyway.

So I started treating sleep and a bit of movement as part of the project, not its competition. A consistent bedtime did more for my output than any app ever has. And I stopped trying to work every single day. Missing a session is fine. Missing a session and then deciding you've fallen off for good, that's the actual risk. One day off is a day off. That's all it has to be.

Keep your momentum somewhere you trust

Small thing that matters more than it should: track your own progress where you can see it. I run my whole life and the studio out of Notion, a plain list of what's next and a log of what I shipped each week. On the weeks where it felt like nothing was happening, scrolling back and seeing nine small things done was often the only proof I was moving at all.

Keep it light, though. The tracking shouldn't turn into its own side project. One list, one habit of writing down what you finished, and the record stays yours to look back on. That's enough to keep you honest about whether you're actually shipping or just busy.

None of this is a hack. Building a side project while working full time is mostly just turning up to a short session, often tired, more days than not, for longer than feels reasonable. The trick is making each session small and protected enough that turning up is easy, and being kind enough to yourself that you're still standing in a year.

I'm still doing it, by the way. Still up early, still shipping slower than I'd like, still the only person who answers the support emails. But Novaire is real now, and it got that way an hour at a time. If you've got a project sitting in a folder you keep meaning to get back to, maybe tomorrow morning's hour is where it starts again. Look after yourself while you build it. Benjamin

Benjamin

Founder & sole developer, Novaire Digital