When you are working on hobby projects at home, how do you make yourself productive?
If you have a couple of hours and you want to get stuff done, what do you do to make the best use of that time? And conversely, what wastes time and should you avoid?!
I work more or less the same way at home as I do at work. Usually, I treat the project at home better than at work, because its something I 100% want to do, rather than something I have to do.
I find getting the kids to bed goes a long way in being able to get anything done. :) That being said, I find that after 8pm or so is much easier to get stuff done as the general hubbub of the day is generally done and there are few distractions.
I make sure to do all the boring business analyst and project management stuff I don't have to do at work. I use trac to keep a wiki/ticketing system and I plan milestones for myself. My forcing myself to do the project right and not slack off, I'm more productive in the long run.
For me a lot of it is simply getting my head into the project - I usually enjoy all parts of a given project, but it's easy to procrastinate (web surfing, etc).
So I give myself 1 hour to do whatever I want (primarily checking email and websites that would otherwise distract during coding) and then force myself to read the project documentation or code for 15 minutes and make a plan for what I want to do next in the project - and I write it down in a todo list that's always on screen.
If I decide to stop there and relax some more that's fine, but usually once I make a plan I get interested/excited to work on it, and it doesn't take long to get into the 'zone'.
If I'm not working on it, I'll force myself to do at least 15 minutes of work every hour. It's not efficient, but eventually something catches (usually I have this huge drive to not leave code in a non-working state, so it's not hard) and I get started. Once started I have little interest in the things that were distracting me, but phone calls, emails, IMs etc will pull me away.
So I have to also decide whether I want to eliminate those distractions, or allow them and simply take those breaks. Whether I do that depends on how badly I want to finish a particular aspect of the work...
Since I telecommute full time, my work and home project environment is identical with the exception that at the times I have to work on my pet project the kids are around so Craig's comment is spot on. They are my biggest distraction and I find it much easier to focus once they are in bed.
Specific things I do to focus are:
You worry about being productive on a hobby project? For me it's exactly the opposite: I enjoy my hobby projects so much that they sometimes interfere with my real work. Since the hobby project is purely for fun (and generally smaller-scale that what I do day-to-day), the rewards are much greater and I rarely need to worry about feeling enthused about working on them.
It also helps dramatically if other people are using your code and suggesting new features or finding edge cases you hadn't considered. (Or course, our code is bug-free so there are never bug reports to attend to. Ahem.) Their prodding can get you thinking about your code more often and working on it more quickly than if you were to otherwise come back to to it in your own time ("whenever the opportunity arises").
Just make sure it's something for your use - something you're interested in and can use yourself...
I'm very easily distracted, but I'm also very easily manipulated by goals, so I use RescueTime to track how much time I'm using different types of apps each day. By setting a goal of less than 90 minutes per day of general web use, and more than 4 hours per day of actual development - actually writing code into an editor or IDE - I get a reminder each day of whether I'm really putting in the time on my hobby projects or not.
Give yourself something to work towards, tell yourself you're going to get this feature done by a certain time and reward yourself when you get there.
Set goals
If you don't set goals - you don't know where you're going or what needs to be done.
Capture those goals
I list all my goals as to-dos within Basecamp, then import them into Cashboard to track time and report on them.
I generally create one to-do list per major goal I'm trying to accomplish on a project.
There's a great sense of accomplishment when you can close a to-do list out completely.
Track your time, view the results
Tracking time, and viewing what I spend my time on has helped me stay on task immensely. I even blogged about my experiences tracking time, and why it helps me stay on task.
Stay caffinated
Hit that redbull, and go to town :)
The best thing I can do for myself is to actually step away from the computer, go somewhere quiet, and sit down with a pen and a notebook. In addition, I always carry around a small Moleskine with me to jot down new ideas or thoughts wherever I am.
Getting away from the distraction that is the internet can be the best thing sometimes.
For hobby projects, being programming or not, I find that posting a printed list of them somewhere common and also scheduling time in your week to work on projects helps tremendously.
I am doing my hobby project, on a laptop, on my train ride into work. Since that time would otherwise be wasted, it is, inherently, productive.
Tell friends/collegues what you're working on and when you plan to have it live. Having people ask about your progress is an excellent motivator.
I try to have a concrete list of small, achievable goals that need doing. Sometimes when the problem is too big it seems too daunting to even start tackling.
Finding the energy is often the hardest thing for me. I've found a few things that help:
picking the right time of day and playing to my strengths - I know I'll be more productive by getting up at 6am than by staying up until 11pm
doing five to ten minutes of exercise first (for me it's Dancing Stage Max, but I guess there are other ways!)
Sometimes my main personal project becomes a bit of a grind, and in those moments it can help to just let off some steam working on some small, unrelated projects, or implementing a fun but less important feature just for the sake of getting something done. After that I often find I have renewed enthusiasm for my main project.