hey guys
was wondering if any of you had any tips on juggling, study, practice and everything else when you have a full-time job
For me atm I get up around 6 am and work on my web projects before going to work.
After work, I typically go to the gym and then do maybe an hour’s study on javascript after showering and having dinner before having an hour to chill before bed.
My advice is to treat it like a lifestyle change similar to a healthy diet or starting to exercise. Find a sustainable pace and schedule. It’s better to do it three days a week every week than every day for three weeks. I also recommend trying to find time when you can work for a solid couple of hours when you can give it your full focus.
You are gonna be OK!
I made the mistake of basically taking my laptop to bed and coding into the wee hours of the morning ‘just fixing up one more bug’.
Doing that for a year probably aged me 5 years.
Going to bed at a sensible time for you is probably the key to being a good creative thinker, and therefore programmer.
I’d agree with this. Fortunately my job sometimes has down time (I’m in a tutoring lab) but unfortunately lots of it is extremely interruptible … if it’s a solid hour that’s good for me – and then I do best to get away from the computer (worked really well yesterday when I got in an hour end of work day, then on the bike going home figured out two really good ways to streamline things)…
It’s a bit of a juggle ! But I took all morning off and the handyman only needed a little bit of time to scope out the couple of grand I need to spend to fix the bathroom… so I’ve got an hour now to go see if that streamlining worked…
Nice pace! Never skip your gym training.
It depends on what is your goal and in what time period you are willing to achieve it.
Stay with it! I’m in the same boat as you–I work blue-collar, so I study from 4am-7am before work, otherwise I’m too exhausted after I get home.
My advice: If you don’t already, keep a code diary. Log every day’s study/projects on a single page. I use bullet points: a checkmark for my accomplishments; a hypen for mundane notes; and a round bullet for concepts/terms to reflect and review further.
The other great thing about a code diary is it reminds you of how productive you are. When fatigue sets in and you think you haven’t done jack, you can look over just how much you actually did do the past week.
Good luck!
@Clifton893 Wow! This is a terribly good advice!!!
I think you are already doing well. Make sure to pick a schedule that you can sustain. There’s no use getting better at coding if you burn yourself out in the process.
Looks like you’re doing pretty well! I am in the same boat. The best habit for me has been to make sure i get at least 1 hour of uninterrupted work every day. I usually code for more than an hour, but setting a minimum has really helped to keep me motivated and focused.
(I make sure I get 15 minutes in and usually do better … same idea. )
One thing that helped me a lot to do more and to have more self-esteem has been installing a to-do list extension in the IDE (I installed Todo+ on Visual Studio Code).
Now, when I do my projects I break them down in very small taks and I write those tasks in the TODO file.
With it I can focus on a single/few tasks at a time, marking them as “started”, “done” and “cancelled”.
The extension writes down automatically the date and time of when I started/finished the task and how much it took.
That does help me to focus a bit more on what I have to do to finish the project.
Not to mention that seeing all those checked lines makes me feel better at the end of the day 
