How do you balance work with indiehacking?

Hey @mr_mischief, just one caution for you. A PhD is a serious time commitment. In my experience, a PhD ate up most of my time, and I struggled with work-life balance with that alone. Trying to throw more work on top with entrepreneurship may not be the best idea right now. I worry about you burning out. Please also be aware that there are university policies regarding school resources, classwork, research, and ownership that mean they may have a claim on your original idea and future revenue. My honest advice, remember to focus on finishing your PhD.

Yes, there are two parts to this problem I think:

1. Finding time to work on your side project. This is HARD. For many years I'd work full-time during the day (8-10 hours), then come home for family time for 2-3 hours, then work at night on the side project for another 2-4 hours. It's a recipe for burnout if you're not careful.

2. Legal questions: make sure you read your employment contract CAREFULLY. You should read every contract you sign carefully, of course 😅. IP assignment and non-compete clauses vary, some of them are reasonable for both parties, some are awful and the company owns everything you do (even on your own time). If you want to avoid getting lawyers involved, make sure you have clarity here before you get too far down the building path.

Here's a bit from my experience. It was tough, especially since a software engineer job was pretty demanding. It was hard to maintain a side-project and job that required 45-50 hrs in a week. At certain points having to work 70-80 hrs a week, I eventually got burnt out. So it never quite worked out doing a side project. Now I'm not saying this is the same for everyone. Some people can work nights and weekends. Didn't quite work out for me though.

After some time, I was able to negotiate a part-time contract job for a while and then made the switch to full-time this year to work on my ideas. Now I know there's plenty of risk making this move but after careful consideration, I made the jump. I don't see myself working for someone, so making the jump to become a full-time indie dev was an easy decision.

It's still uncertain how it'll go for me, but I'm betting on myself, my idea, and my determination to make it work.

For me the switching cost is very high so I do my best not to change projects often. As my working hour are flexible my strategy is to work up a buffer so I can set aside full days for my side projects, ideally connected to the weekend.

Yeah this is a tough one ... basically you have to give up all your free time and whenever you are not doing your day job, you are doing your side project! If you have family/ kids then forget about the weekends b/c that is off limits. Oh, and you have get comfortable with sleeping 4/5 hrs most...meaning you will need to get up pretty early to get some work done. Anyways, those are my 2cents =)

Apologies if this sounded too grim .. those are the facts.. something has got to give!

For me the best time was always a hour in the mornings before work. The fact that I work from home means that I could do that instead of the commute that had so conveniently fallen away when changing jobs

Personally, I find shifting focus between my day job and my side project to be pretty difficult on a day to day basis, so I restrict most all of my side project to the weekends. It's not ideal, and it certainly means it takes longer to get to a launch point, but I respect my day job enough to not be willing to jeopardize it by shifting focus back and forth.

I'm sure some people can put in a couple hours in the evening on their side gig, but I tend to be both a bit of a workaholic and also easily distracted so I almost never just do a regular straight 8 hour day for my primary job...hence the decision.