 A friend of mine recently asked me how I'm able to get so much done in my free time which is quite limited. I walked through all the techniques that I use to try to get what I'm able to done with that limited free time. So I thought I'd share that with y'all. Also it's Sonic themed. I'm not the biggest Sonic fan but it just really fit what I was going for. So got a lot of Sonic up ahead. So my dream is to earn a living making my own games. That is what I'm working towards. But I have a job, a full time job, that I can't just up and quit. And you'll see on Reddit on r slash gamedev and other places this idea of I just quit my job, I'm living off of my savings, I'm pursuing my dream to make video games. And I totally understand the impulse to make that risky leap of faith and see what happens. But I've got a wife, I've got a baby. My time is super limited and I just can't quit my job. It's not a reality right now. Given various expenses and needing to, you know, provide for my family. It's a real thing. I have these obligations. And I know not everyone will have those obligations but maybe your obligations are different, right? Like maybe you have rent that you need to pay or maybe you have whatever it is, right, that finds you in the situation you're in. And maybe up turning your life isn't an option. So here are some ways that I make the most of my limited time that I thought might help you. So with these constraints that I have, full-time job, a family, a young baby, etc., how can I still pursue my dream? And what does that look like? So I've tried to answer that question. Here's what's been working for me for five months. In the last five months I wrote a book on game programming. I've been making videos every week lately. I've made and released three smaller games and a bunch of prototypes. I've been learning and just, yeah, I feel like in five months I've gotten a lot done. So I thought I'd share that with you all. Here's how I make the most of my limited free time. The first thing is I wake up and I get in about two hours of game time in the morning while my wife and baby are still sleeping. I get up early and I'm so excited to work on things. I get up and I work on it. Some days it's an hour and a half. Some days it's two hours. Other times it's only an hour. You know, you gotta be flexible, but to me that's been a really successful time. I don't love staying up late because then it affects my sleep, but waking up early and getting this thing done that's moving me forward toward my dream has been really successful and I'm really happy with that. And then every Sunday I do a dedicated block of three hours. I've talked with my wife. We've agreed this is protected time that I'm able to work on this. And so every Sunday, no matter what I work on it, if there's some reason that I'm not around on a Sunday then I'll switch it for a different day. But that to me is it's sacred, it's unmovable and it's as if I had a job and I show up and I do my work. Right now it's that time on a Sunday and part of my time on that Sunday is I record a YouTube video and I work on my games. And part of that recording of the YouTube videos is sort of marketing and making, you know, having a community. So that's all really, and I call it creative time, but really it's I'm making games. But sometimes maybe I'll do some other things like drawing or whatever it is. So that's in my calendar. It pops up with a notification. When we plan out our obligations we know that this is not a good time to book things. And sometimes, you know, as with all those you gotta be flexible. I take it as serious as if I was taking college courses. And I was thinking about that as I made this slide and realized maybe some people don't take college courses really seriously. But you know, I think as you get older and you're trying to pursue something you're passionate about, you take it pretty seriously. And if I was paying money to go to college, like in America, you know, you have to pay to go to school. And if I was paying for classes, I would want to take that really seriously. So I treat learning game development as serious as if I were paying for it. You know, I buy resources and books and read and study and practice. And you know, to me it's no different than like if someone had to do homework and had a test coming up and you need to study or whatever it is. You know, I take it, I try to take it as serious as that. And I think that helps me frame it when I, it's not just like I'm tinkering around with this little, you know, fun thing, right? It's like, it's serious and I want to take it serious. I talk to my friends and family about it with my wife and it's not, oh, I'm on the computer, like the perception that they have isn't like, oh, I'm just like playing games, right? Like they know that it's like a creative pursuit that is artistic and technical and challenging and I share my progress with them and I share my progress, you know, publicly on the channel and what I'm learning and struggling with. So I have this accountability, right? If I just did it on my own and just kind of in the quiet, it's a lot easier to cancel it and say, I'm done. Like, no one really knows, no one cares. I'm just going to stop working on my projects. But to me, there's a bit of accountability by sharing it. So I'm glad to share that with people that I care about and that care about me because they're interested. I only work on one project at a time. This is so key, right? I have many projects that I want to do and I keep track of them in a to-do list, but I only work on one at a time. And when I work on a project, I finish it. And maybe the finished project isn't quite the same as I originally envisioned it, but that's part of the creative process is you set out to do something, you learn, you expand the scope or reduce the scope. But I only do one thing at a time. I only have one iron on the fire at a time. And I'm very intentional about that because if I'm trying to do multiple things at a time, especially with such limited free time to work on these things, it doesn't go well. It stresses me out. I can't focus. It's really hard to know what to do next. And then I make a little progress each day on that project. So I have those two-hour chunks. I have Sundays for three hours, right? I do kind of sneak in some time when I can, which helps, you know. I just make a little bit of progress each day. And yeah, I wish I had eight hours, five days a week as a full-time job to work on it. But I don't right now. And that's the reality. So then I go to myself and say, OK, well, let's just keep moving forward each day. And that little bit of progress is huge. And I'm able to have that momentum because I keep track of all of my tasks in a to-do list. So from the most trivial thing, I break it all down, get it out of my head, get it on a to-do list, and work through that to-do list. So I know, OK, here are the steps I need to take. And if I need to cut features or reduce the scope, then I just delete the to-dos and make intentional decisions. And I'm never really lingering or in a period of development where I'm like, I don't know where I'm at. I always know where I'm at, what my next goal is to move the project forward. And because of that one project at a time, limited time I have to work on it, I try to have just ruthless focus, right? Like things that aren't serving me moving forward, I cut them and reduce them. Or don't worry about it. Don't think about it. And I've got to try some things and experiment. But this ruthless focus and being able to say no to ideas or to projects or whatever has been really helpful. I use a methodology called Getting Things Done. There's a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done that explains this outline for how to get all the things in your head into lists and work from those lists so that you can focus on doing the knowledge work that's important rather than organizing yourself. So if you're interested in quote unquote productivity, I would check out Getting Things Done. It's a little businessy, but it's been so helpful in my day job and personal life and really believe in it and like it. I take on appropriate projects for my skill level. I don't start working on an MMO or a huge 3D game or, you know, I'm at the stage where I'm five months into this, you know, this journey. I'm at a hobbyist level. I'm taking on projects appropriate for learning and growing. So, you know, simpler 2D games, games that are more arcadey where the replayability is in just playing the game again and not necessarily like producing a bunch of content for it. And by appropriate projects, you don't want to bite off more than you can chew and you ideally want to work on something that you can start and finish in a few weeks, like in a month. Like my mindset for 2023 is work on projects that take no longer than a month. That way I can really learn a lot of different skills and a lot of different genres of games and, you know, train myself up. Just as if I was training to run a marathon, I wouldn't go and just start running the 26.2 miles at the start, right? You would run shorter distances and build up over time and train. And to me, I'm viewing this year as a training year. And I pick projects that are appropriate for that, whether it's a clone of Snake with hand-drawn graphics or, you know, an action game that's basically a clone of Super Cratebox. Like all of my projects, they're not going to wow anyone, but they're not meant to, right? They're purely for me to learn and share what I learn along the way. Just like if you started learning to play guitar, you wouldn't go and be expected to compose and play a masterpiece right away. You would learn covers of simpler songs, maybe then you'd learn covers of more complex songs, learn chords and notes. And then you could start to string together what you learned to make something original. And what you make that's original will still be in the vein of the music that you love and have previously learned. And I think that same learning approach should apply to game development. And I view making games, which are sort of derisively called clones in the game dev world, I think of them as I'm making covers of my favorite games and, you know, they're all freeware. So it's not like I'm trying to like make a buck or whatever. And so you want to pick projects similarly appropriate. And then when you take on those projects, you got to finish them. That is the like secret skill, right? Is finishing your projects. And that's a skill not a lot of people have, right? You can like make amazing tech demos. But if you're not finishing your projects, it's, you're never going to build those skills. And for me, because I want this to be temporary, right? Like I'm viewing this phase of my life where I'm pretty, you know, I've got my day job, I get family stuff, I work on those games, right? I'm like, my days are pretty full. And I tend to think of it as I'm making a short-term sacrifice that will eventually let me return to what I want my day-to-day life to be like. And some of those short-term sacrifices are like, you know, I'm like a reading way less books than I want to be reading. I'm not really playing many games for leisure. Sometimes I play them and it's like for research or I'll get an hour here and take a break. But like, you know, I'm making sacrifices and how those look for you will be different than the sacrifices I'm making. But if you're doing something in pursuit of your dreams and it means you have to let go of some things, maybe it's like some expenses you have or some things you spend your time on or maybe, you know, whatever it is, it's gonna vary drastically for everyone. But, you know, make those short-term sacrifices but know that they're short-term and that at the end of the tunnel, hopefully, is like for me, like, you know, this being my full-time job or whatever can then recalibrate when the situation changes. But for now, making sacrifices in the short-term for life changes in the long-term. I keep track of my time for all of my game projects which sounds like a real tedious process but I think that as humans, we underestimate how much work it will take to do something. And then once we've done something, we overestimate how much time we spent on it because there's a sort of pride, especially I think in like the American workplace in being like, oh yeah, I spent five years working on this thing or I worked these long hours or whatever and when you track your time, you can tell you know how long it takes to make a game of a certain type or do a feature of a certain type or how much time you're spending on art versus coding and this will vary from project to project and when you work on new projects, there will be features and challenges that you won't really know how long it'll take but you will know roughly, oh okay, here a game of this complexity took me this much time and that's really, really valuable because if you were to start a business, which I treat this, you know, like a business, you would wanna know how much your hourly rate is or how long a project will take you and having some data is better than no data and it won't be bulletproof, it won't be this like, oh yeah, you know exactly how long it'll take but it'll be helpful and here's an example, this is a little small, sorry, but in the upper left, you'll see that's a spreadsheet, I just keep track of it, that's for Godot types, the Godot prototypes I've been making so each project has a column I keep track of the process, you can see those are marketing day where I made the YouTube video and open sourced it and shared it, I keep track of it, then you'll see in the left how much time lower left I spent on each project and that gives you a sense of like, oh yeah, okay yeah, it took me five hours and I made a shoot them up demo or, oh yeah, I made whatever, you know, these projects and these times and that just helps me calibrate, oh okay, if it took me that long to make this prototype then if I extrapolated out it would take me maybe this long to make a game of this size and that's helpful and then on the bottom right you see this pie chart, this is a breakdown of how much time and hours was spent on each given task in the game destroy all goblins that I made so I spent 38 hours on programming, I use public domain art so I only spent an hour making a few sprites, did a bunch of time, you know, you can see the breakdown of some project management, time spent marketing it, time making the music and sound effects so that but a large majority of it was a programming and I think it's so easy that like certain games will have different needs and that game was arcadey so there wasn't much content that I needed to produce like levels or whatever so anyway, that's really helpful like to know, right? I think that helps me so that's why I do it and it's been helpful. I, this is like, this is outside of the scope of this kind of information but I put it in here because it's kind of the way I'm thinking where it's like if I'm taking this seriously if I'm treating this as a business I can sooner start making games part time like I can dedicate more time to it if my cost of living is lower because then the bar that I need to reach is lower, right? Like if you're living at, let's just use some random numbers, $100,000 a year then as an indie game developer, you need to make $100,000 a year consistently to continue to live that way but if you can reduce your expenses and live at $50,000 a year, that's, you know, an easier bar to reach. It sounds obvious but so then to me it's been like well what can I do to lower my cost of living and that's not really about productivity but it is like how can I get to this dream sooner and pursuing this dream sooner because that's what this is all in service of, right? Like the effective time management and these different approaches. So this is like a whole side quest but yeah, lower on cost of living is something I've been thinking a lot about. Another way to effectively use time is taking a game dev vacation. So if you have a job where you have time off, paid time off or holiday breaks or maybe you're a student and you have time between semesters or summer vacation, use that time to treat it like, oh okay, great, I'm gonna work nine to five and treat this like a job and like kind of trial what it'd be like to be a job and see how much more you get done and see how that feels. And for me, I'm really looking forward to taking some paid time off like a week here or a week there throughout the years and saying, okay, I'm gonna work on this project for a week and like what can I do in 40 hours compared to the like 10 to 15 hours I'm able to do every week in my free time? So that's something that I'm looking forward to trying. I haven't had a chance to yet really. Lastly, or getting close to the end is like just taking care of yourself. If your mental health is suffering, that's gonna impact your ability to focus and get things done. If your physical health isn't well, it's gonna be really hard to focus and get things done. So, you know, going out for walks, eating well, taking care of yourself, you got a part, has that getting enough sleep? To me, it's never about sacrificing sleep or running myself ragged. It shouldn't be like the pursuit of my dream while maybe there are sacrifices, it shouldn't be at the cost of my health because if I'm not healthy, then I won't be able to do this for the decades to come. And that's what I want, right? I don't want to work hard, crash and burn and not be able to sustain myself. So to me, it's this like goal of like intentional sustainability to then be able to make games for decades to come and not just put all my eggs in one basket and make my dream game, but like what does it look like to make 10 games, 15 games, 20 games over the course of my life? You know, just like a novelist may write a dozen plus books in their life. What does it look like for me to make a dozen plus significant games in my life? And how can I think about that for the long term? I think taking care of myself is the cornerstone of that. And if you're familiar with novels or if you're not, that's okay, there's an author named Haruki Murakami and he started writing novels in his free time. He was finding some success, decided to do it full time and he realized he was sitting there so much just writing that he needed to pursue running, to keep himself healthy. And he wrote a whole book about that called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and you know, that sort of thing, right? Where if you have a job to acknowledge work or creativity and you're not active all day, it's really important to then, you know, find a level of activity that works for you and take care of yourself. This is what I have to keep telling myself is to just be patient. To keep at it, be persistent and be patient. I want, you know, I want to do it today, right? And I want to take risks and do full time game dev right now, right? That would nothing really be more happier but it's the reality is I can't and I gotta do the best I can with what I'm able to and I need to be patient and be graceful and just keep at it, right? And that, that's, this video is ultimately I'm just like talking to myself and we'll watch it again to kind of pet me up and motivate me. And hopefully, eventually, it will be my job and we'll see what happens. But I want to manifest it and be positive and bring this into reality through my actions and what I make and sharing it and appreciate the support and the following along. And hopefully this helps you glean a couple things to help with your journey and wherever you're at in it, whether you're just making games for fun as a hobby or you're like hobbyist plus trying to make it happen or out there on your own doing it. And yeah, just a time's limited so you gotta make the most of it. I'm trying my best to do that. All right, thanks a million. See ya, bye.