How do you balance personal projects and a full time job

At the time of this writing I serve as the product manager for the website and ecommerce platform at Mixbook. Additionally I am taking a product design and management course with the University of Berkeley and I'm also preparing for two upcoming speaking engagements.

How do I make time for meaningful progress on tiny products?

Deep Work

About two years ago stumbled upon Cal Newport's Deep Work – a book about building one of the most valuable skills in this distracted world we live in today.

In practice it's the habit of blocking out significant chunks of time, eliminating all distractions and focusing completely on cognitively demanding tasks. Most of us have lost the ability to go very deep, we seem to spend the majority, if not all of our time in shallow work.

Because deep work is so cognitively demanding, most people can only do about four hours of deep work per day. My plan is to start with two hours per day.

My Tactic For Incremental Progress

I've set up two events in my calendar for deep work sessions daily throughout my workweek:

• Deep work session for product work at Mixbook (1 hour)
• Deep work session for Tiny Products  (1 hour)

Here are a few tips that seem to work for me:

• I always do my deep work in the same place, in my caes it is my upstairs office
• I have my deep work sessions early in the day, when I'm at my sharpest
• I use headphones and play the same track on a loop
• I use a kitchen timer that ticks and acts as a trigger for the habit
• Before I start I ask "what is the most valuable work I can do right now to make progress on my goal?"
• I keep a log of my deep work sessions in a small moleskine notebook
• No skipping

This tactic works because it helps me make progress daily without cutting into my full time job. If anything, I am getting better outcomes in both.